Chapter Nine
“I need some air.” Clarissa was on her feet and wrestling with the window sash in the next instant. “I am weary to death of this wretched weather, and the noise, and the smell. Reardon breathes his paints and turpentine as if they bear the scent of Elysium, but they give me the worst head.”
She struggled to raise the sash, though humidity or disuse was defeating her efforts.
I joined her at the window. “Allow me.”
She stepped back as if I’d brandished a knife, and I soon had both windows open. The breeze that came in was hot and smelled vaguely of the stable, and the whole business had likely been meant as a distraction.
Clarissa regarded me as if I, too, were some malodorous artifact from the muck pit. “You should leave, Julian. You are making outlandish accusations. I know you are concerned for the boy, but you insult me, and I cannot overlook that.”
“If Harry trifled with you, then I offer the insult to my brother. Were he alive, I’d offer him a sound thrashing as well.” I’d likely have to wait until Arthur had served Harry a proper drubbing first. “Whatever missteps you’ve made, I have made worse . I have no interest whatsoever in judging you, and your confidences are safe with me.”
She rubbed her arms as if she were chilled in the midst of the oppressive afternoon. “I want you to go, but you won’t leave, will you?”
She and I had already had one surprisingly frank discussion, wherein I had become acquainted with the extent of the family’s financial woes and her efforts to solve them.
“You can tell me anything, Clarissa. You know I am no gossip.”
Her ladyship rested her forehead against the raised window. “Don’t you dare pity me, Julian.”
Pride, the last weapon against despair. “Wouldn’t dream of it. Let’s finish our drinks, shall we?”
She straightened to fire off a glower. “Don’t cosset me either.”
“Perhaps that leaves listening to you?”
She subsided into her wing chair. “I suppose it does, at that. You cannot tell anybody. Not Waltham, not Hyperia West, and certainly not Lady Ophelia.”
“Lady Ophelia has likely already pieced together any evidence for herself, and she can be the soul of discretion.” Also a nattering featherbrain, to appearances.
Clarissa poured herself more meadow tea. “One would not think it, to watch her flitting about.”
“Precisely the effect Lady Ophelia intends. She’s been playing Society for fools for decades and deceiving me for much of that time as well. I’ve regarded her as a harmless, aging flirt, but she has a will of iron and a capacity for logic as incisive as it is well hidden.”
“You admire her.”
“I admire you as well.” I’d said as much, when it had become clear that Clarissa had stood between her family and ruin, as she all the while pretended to absorb herself with the latest fashions. “Who was he, Clarissa?”
“Not even you need to know that, Julian. Another officer on leave. He’d come home in the autumn to recuperate from a wound, and I was… smitten. He knew Harry and apparently knew Harry’s interest in me was tactical rather than romantic. He consoled me, I confided in him, we talked and talked and talked… Nobody had ever listened to me before. Not truly. I had turned down three suitors by then, and people thought it was because none of them was rich enough or titled enough. That was part of it, but so was… Those strutting peacocks talked at me, Julian. Not with me.
“A girl spends years being lectured in the schoolroom,” she went on, “then it’s deportment instructors and drawing masters, finishing governesses, and piano instructors… Nobody ever listens to her, and then she’s to marry a man who continues the tradition.”
Lady Ophelia would have been nodding vigorously at those sentiments, and Hyperia would have let silence portend her agreement as well.
“Your swain did more than listen, my lady.”
“All I knew was that he was special, and he was mine, and he was going back to that infernal war. We took risks, but, Julian, I would take them all over again, given the chance.”
I was pleased for her that she’d admit as much. “No regrets?”
“Not a one. Because he’d left the fighting before the army went into winter quarters, he felt he ought to return to Portugal immediately after the New Year. I didn’t realize I was in difficulties until Harry asked me about it.”
“Harry knew the extent of your involvement with this other fellow?”
“He guessed, though we were very discreet. I began to have to use the necessary with unusual frequency. Harry noticed that and noticed that food had stopped agreeing with me. I thought I was upset to think of my love gone away to war, but Harry recognized the symptoms.”
Because he’d observed them before? I considered myself fairly well informed regarding female biology—sisters would inflict that education on a fellow—but that business about having to use the necessary more often… I’d not come across that previously.
“What did Harry do when he learned of your situation?”
“He did not offer to marry me, if that’s what you’re thinking. He was kind, practical, and ultimately self-interested, of course. His first concern was to ensure nobody thought the child was his. He offered to pay for me to visit a midwife, but not for the purposes of midwifery.”
“To get rid of the baby.”
She nodded. “The notion horrified me. By this point, the baby’s father was at sea, time was of the essence, and I regarded the decision as one I had to make on my own. I hoped to marry him, but he hadn’t been willing to bind me to a soldier’s uncertain prospects, and I understood that too.”
I myself had used that logic with Hyperia, and for less than noble reasons. “Then you did not accept Harry’s offer?”
“To his credit, he did not harangue me. Just put the option before me, noted the risks attendant to any path I chose—risks to my life—and said he wished his friend had exercised more restraint.”
“Then Harry scarpered hotfoot back to Spain himself, so you had not even Harry’s dubious friendship to lean on?”
“Something else sent him back to Spain, Julian. He did not scarper. Harry always spoke glowingly of a soldier’s life, but I know now he was painting a fiction of bonhomie and silly pranks in camp. Cricket matches and impromptu hunts, regimental balls… He was lying, because it was easier on him to deceive those here in London than to let them in on the truth of his life at war. Easier on him and much easier on them.”
I understood that too. “We colluded in a polite lie most of the time. Nobody back home wanted those in uniform to know how difficult things had become in Britain either. You nevertheless had a child to think of.”
“I did. Harry returned to his regiment on short notice. He paid me in coin, Julian. Cold, hard coins that have no provenance and involve no signatures or bank transactions. He left me a hundred pounds. I’d never seen half that much in my life, and to have my own money… You cannot know what that meant.”
What I knew was that Harry, having failed to exercise restraint himself, would take every possible measure to ensure Clarissa’s problems did not become his problem. Had her situation been laid at his feet, he would have been expected to marry her, assuming the baby’s father wasn’t on hand to offer for Clarissa himself.
“You made arrangements for the child?”
“I missed the Season that year. Everybody thought I was pining for Harry, or—if they were less charitable—sparing my family the expense of yet another Town whirl after spending the winter in London. I went up north, and bided with relatives. Cousins on my mother’s side. I had a daughter, Julian.”
She smiled, a wistful expression very different from any I’d seen from her previously. Luminous, sweet, fierce… joyous .
“I have a daughter,” she said more softly. “I named her Atalanta. She is magnificent. A complete hoyden. I live for the Glorious Twelfth. When all of polite society is off to the grouse moors and house parties, I spend two months with my daughter. She thinks I’m her godmother, her mother’s cousin, but someday…”
Atalanta was a notably ferocious Greek heroine. “This is why you haven’t married?”
“One reason. Grief was another. My beloved fell at Albuera. He had a letter from me before he died—his commanding officer returned the epistle to me. My darling knew I would not be left entirely alone should the worst occur, and I hope that gave him joy. Then too, my family was already in serious financial difficulties. It’s one thing to marry a penniless earl’s daughter and acquire some titled cachet—half the bankers in London wanted to match me with their sons—but quite another to accept that I’d bring the risk of scandal to the union as well.”
Clarissa would not try to hide a daughter from her prospective husband. “Does Reardon know?”
“He probably suspects. I went north in late spring of 1811 to see cousins I barely knew. I was gone for nearly a year, and I return annually. Reardon doesn’t ask, and I’m not about to burden my brother with my secrets.”
I thought of Arthur and Harry, both muddling along with responsibilities they’d kept to themselves. “Reardon might surprise you. He’s young, but not a complete gudgeon. You won’t tell me who the father was?”
“He was from good family, good enough that they might… interfere, and while I trust you, what you do not know you cannot inadvertently acknowledge. I might tell Reardon. Maybe. Eventually.”
And maybe not. “Think of it this way, then: Reardon is the girl’s uncle, and he’s in line for a title. If anything happens to you, she will need her titled uncle’s influence and support.”
“Nothing will happen to me.”
Said every soldier ever to take the king’s shilling. I patted her hand. “Appoint me as Atalanta’s honorary uncle, then. Let your cousins know my direction and that you have taken me into your confidence. I am not exactly good ton myself, but I have some means, and I’m still, for the most part, received.”
She blinked, she looked away, she clutched at the arms of her chair. “You mean that. You honestly…”
Oh drat and perdition. I passed her my handkerchief. “I am very likely Leander’s uncle in truth, but the boy has been left to the tender mercies of fate for five years. A mother figure of some sort dying of consumption, a putative mother who sees him only as a means of extorting coin from a duke, his true mother possibly from the servant ranks and choosing her good name over his safety… I didn’t even know I had a nephew, and Harry, serving in time of war, didn’t see fit to confide in me . Children deserve better from us, so yes, I mean what I say about your daughter.”
Clarissa dabbed at her eyes. “You can’t tell anybody, Julian. Maybe when she’s older, and she can bide with me from time to time, but not now. She wouldn’t understand, and I can’t… The Valmonds are still in difficulties, and Society grows more narrow-minded by the year.”
In the general case, secrets made me uncomfortable. The French had damn near killed me, not in honorable conflict on a battlefield, but in a dank, malodorous prison, because I’d carried secrets. Harry had likely died guarding secrets, and then too, something in me rebelled at the notion that a child should have to be a secret.
“My lady, you must know that your movements have likely been noted. Unless you were in the habit of visiting these cousins in childhood, somebody will suspect.” Lady Ophelia, for one. My mother might as well. The Duchess of Ambrose also struck me as shrewd enough to see the evidence and draw accurate conclusions. Hyperia’s insights were often astonishingly astute.
“I can bear up under the weight of suspicions, Julian, but not scandal. Please, no more of that, after all I’ve been through.”
Drat the woman, she looked ready to cry. “You have my word that I will do nothing to encourage gossip about your situation. Are you still intent on leaving Town?”
She folded my handkerchief into eighths. “You are poking old hornets’ nests, asking all these questions. If you are asking about Harry, that will bring to mind that Harry was keeping company with me, and then you will add this child, Leander, into the ducal household. What does he look like?”
“He looks like a small boy. Darkish hair, a bit elfin or stubborn around the chin. Blue eyes. Not a biddable child, but not a brat.”
“ I have dark hair and blue eyes. My chin is adorably well defined. I am not particularly biddable.”
That chin had acquired the slightest pugnacious angle. “Harry had dark hair and blue eyes too, my lady.”
Clarissa’s momentary bout of sentiment had passed, and I faced a seasoned negotiator, a woman worried about her reputation, and a mother concerned for her child.
I had negotiated with bandits, Spanish mules, and, on two occasions, with Wellington himself. “You don’t want to be seen fleeing Town without an escort, my lady. Bide here awhile longer, and I’m sure I can prevail on Lady Ophelia to accompany you back to Sussex.”
“I wasn’t planning on going to Sussex.” She worried a nail. “Can you keep your distance, Julian? Don’t call on me, don’t take supper with Reardon in the clubs, don’t drop by when Banter is sitting for his portrait?”
“I can keep my distance.” I would rather keep my distance. I had too much else to do, and Clarissa’s situation was delicate. “If you recall anything that might illuminate Leander’s particulars, Lady Ophelia or Miss West can reliably and discreetly convey to me what cannot be put in writing.”
“Very well, I’ll bide in London awhile longer. Nothing will stop me from going north with the grouse exodus, though. Nothing on earth.”
“I understand.” I bowed over her hand and took my leave, trying to convince myself the interview had been a success. I had eliminated one person from consideration as Leander’s mother, and that was progress.
I had also, however, learned that Harry’s tidy little account book was at least in part a work of fiction, and that was not progress at all.
“Both children might be Harry’s.” Arthur offered that observation as we rode side by side down one of Hyde Park’s secluded bridle paths. “He was damnably exuberant with the ladies.”
The same notion had occurred to me, despite Clarissa’s teary tale about a love lost on the battlefield. Clarissa was a skilled actress, but why lie about a connection that could only benefit her daughter, albeit discreetly?
Arthur’s mood had reverted to the staid, taciturn older brother I’d known for most of my life. He and I had saddled up for a dawn hack as Osgood Banter had rolled out of Town to make a final inspection of the Osgood family seat in Sussex.
Their farewell in the mews had been short, perfunctory, and nonetheless hard to watch. How many such partings had they made, hands in plain sight at all times, lest somebody be watching from a nearby window?
“Harry was a flirt,” I said, “but he was mindful of disease.” Not mindful enough, in my opinion.
“Julian, what aren’t you telling me?”
My horse, Atlas, enjoyed these dawn patrols, mostly because he knew they included a hearty gallop, and I wanted dearly to set my heels to his sides and send him thundering forward.
“Harry took a pragmatic view of his duties in Spain and Portugal.”
“Spying is a dirty job,” Arthur said. “A gentleman does not lurk behind hedges and so forth, but victory can depend on such underhandedness. I’ve made no apologies for the capacity in which you and Harry served.”
Intelligence officers, scouts, reconnaissance officers. Polite fictions for the nasty business of cheating at war, in the opinion of many.
“I preferred to work in the countryside,” I said, “and Harry could do that, too, but he wasn’t as fit for the purpose as I was.”
Arthur’s mount, a great dark beast named Beowulf who turned into a shameless puppy if his neck was scratched just so, pretended to shy at a green maple leaf twirling down from above.
“Is there a point to these reminiscences, Julian?”
“Harry’s best efforts were deployed in the cities and towns, in the garrisons, and even the larger villages. He was charming and inspired people to confide in him, while I was observant.”
Arthur halted his horse, made the beast execute a foot-perfect rein-back, then allowed Beowulf to proceed. Not a scold, but a subtle reminder that a gentleman maintains his dignity in public.
“Harry was an accomplished flirt,” Arthur said, patting his horse. “You agree with me. Both children might be his.”
Bollocks and botheration. “Harry was willing to fuck in the line of duty. Got a certain satisfaction out of it, even. Liked the notion of literally and figuratively rogering the enemy.”
“Distasteful.” Three syllables imbued with a dukedom full of disgust.
“His behavior in this regard was utterly baffling to me. He gave no credence to the notion that if he’d shed his breeches for king and country, then his partner might well be slipping free of her chemise for the sake of la République . Or for the sake of keeping a roof over her head. Every gate out of a citadel is a potential point of entry for the enemy to breach that same fortress. That’s obvious to any boy who plays with toy soldiers.”
“You and he argued about this?”
“We argued about nearly every aspect of our role and mostly agreed to disagree. When the generals needed a lady charmed or compromised, Harry often obliged.” Not always. Some women even Harry would not deceive, but I’d never been able to find a pattern to his choices, other than an unwillingness to despoil innocents.
“And thus we circle back to my conjecture,” Arthur said. “Both children could be Harry’s offspring.”
“Clarissa spun a lovely tale about a fallen soldier, but I know the Valmonds have ties to France. They might still own land in France. I cannot rule out that Harry stayed close to Clarissa for reasons of state.”
“Would he have ruined her for reasons of state?”
“He could have, but he did not. He gave her a large sum of money and kept his mouth shut, because ruining her would have been akin to befouling his own complicated, half-dishonorable nest. Nonetheless, his little arrangement with her curtailed her movements in Society.”
The day was lovely. Overnight, the humidity had fled, and the air had cleared. London, for once, sparkled in the early morning sunshine, or this little corner of it did. I was loath to continue discussing Harry’s sordid past, but I’d awoken with yesterday’s developments much on my mind.
“Approaching poverty curtailed her movements,” Arthur said, tipping his hat to a pair of ladies on matching chestnut mares. “I find that explanation to be the most credible. We have ties to France, cousins in France, land in France, when the French are inclined to recognize our title. Banter thinks I should have a look at the acres in Provence.”
“Go in the spring. The season starts early that far south, and the beauty of those landscapes will stay with you for the rest of your life.”
“I forget you were there.”
“When I finally stumbled out of the mountains, I landed in Provence, and the warmth alone… Something about that region insists on peace, insists on calm and good cheer. The sunshine perhaps, or the spices. In summer, the air is redolent of lavender, rosemary, sage… good aromas. I ranged eastward, supposedly looking for a British unit traveling north, but mostly I was…”
“Recuperating?”
How to describe the transition from living like a wild beast to once again acquiring human tendencies? “Making a start on healing.” Putting off my return to military rank, with all the questions and the killing attendant thereto.
Atlas rooted gently at the reins. Time to gallop, please?
I patted his neck. Soon, my friend. I promise, soon .
“What turned your thoughts in the direction of Harry’s past?” Arthur asked.
“The money. Reconnaissance officers learned, almost by default, to watch who has money, who needs money. Who has bought a new coach despite a universally bad harvest? Whose womenfolk are accepting fewer and fewer invitations, despite an army of fancy servants still in livery? Harry paid Clarissa one hundred pounds in coin, Your Grace. Coin of the realm. Not a note of hand, bearer bond, jewels… and yet, I found no trace of that sum in his account book.”
“Coin is discreet,” Arthur said. “The aristocracy pretends actual money doesn’t exist, but we value at least that aspect of it.”
As did pickpockets, extortionists, and assorted other rogues. “Spying can be lucrative.”
“We progress from the distasteful to the treasonous?”
“Not necessarily. If a fellow knew the British were advancing through a certain valley in a month’s time, he could secure ownership of cattle in the valley at a reasonable price, then demand twice that sum from the quartermasters a fortnight later. The business required intermediaries, good luck, stout nerves, and so forth, but I know of at least one instance where Harry turned a profit based on what he’d seen on reconnaissance.”
And I’d ripped up at him for that. Allowing personal motives to displace a focus on orders struck me as a slippery slope ending in a deep and fetid ditch.
“That’s not treason?” Arthur asked.
“It’s not selling secrets. The generals turned a blind eye. Otherwise, they’d have had a lot fewer competent spies. They even exploited the whole business. I was once sent thirty miles outside camp to discreetly buy cattle, supposedly in anticipation of a British advance in that direction.”
“Meanwhile, your superior officers moved their troops along an entirely different route. The French were deceived, and some deserving farmer had a cozy winter.”
“Precisely.”
We rounded another bend, and again Atlas inquired as to when we’d be about the proper business of a morning hack. The path was straight enough, but another rider was ambling toward us a good thirty yards off.
Not yet. Soon.
“What does any of this have to do with Harry’s progeny?” Arthur asked.
“Harry had to have kept another set of books,” I said. “The hundred pounds to Clarissa, and other payments made to her, came from nowhere. Harry accounted for his officer’s pay in the records we have, but his schemes in Spain were apparently going into a different account or some hoard of coins we know nothing about. Clarissa’s arrangement reminded me that Harry had his little side projects, and they are not accounted for in his ledgers.”
“Buried treasure. Who else but Harry would have left behind buried treasure? And you are right. He was a Caldicott. He would have kept some record somewhere, though might that record not be in Spain?”
“He paid Clarissa in London and offered to cover other expenses for her as well.”
Arthur glanced up the path, but the other rider was still fifteen yards off. “He wouldn’t have told you, because you would have sermonized at him, but he should have told me. Lady Clarissa was a damsel in distress, and Harry had to return to Spain. He should have put me wise to the matter. That he didn’t suggests he was confident the child could not be his.”
I assessed that reasoning and, to my relief, found it sound. “Papa told Harry you were unlikely to marry. A twenty-first birthday gift of an unwelcome truth, apparently.”
“I told Harry long before that. Felt I owed him honesty. Quaint notion, given all you’ve disclosed about his activities in Spain.”
That was Arthur being flustered. He’d known that Harry and I had served in an unconventional capacity, but not exactly how unconventional. How ungentlemanly.
The lone rider advanced toward us, and a shivery feeling came over me before I could make out his features in the shadow of his hat brim.
Not this again. “You see him?” I asked Arthur quietly. “He goes by St. Clair now.”
“We have not been introduced.”
“Would you like to be?” St. Clair had been the last person to see Harry alive, as far as I knew. Arthur had mentioned previously bringing Harry’s remains home for a proper burial, and that meant somebody would have to ask St. Clair where those remains had been interred.
I would rather not be that somebody.
“Get it over with,” Arthur muttered. “He will vote his seat one of these days, and public rudeness is denied me by my station.” His tone said that private rudeness was another matter entirely.
I angled Atlas slightly across the path. St. Clair took the hint and drew his horse to a halt.
He even nodded cordially. “Lord Julian, good day.” He did not so much as look at Arthur, which was both shrewd and polite of him.
“St. Clair, an introduction is in order. Waltham, may I make known to you the right honorable Lord St. Clair. My lord, I present to you His Grace, the Duke of Waltham.”
Arthur’s civility toward Harry’s murderer should have knocked St. Clair off his damned horse. Yes, there had been a war on, which was all that allowed St. Clair to continue drawing breath.
After an instant’s pause, St. Clair executed a mounted bow, removing his hat completely. “Your Grace.” He held the posture for a moment, then straightened and placed his hat back on his head. His behavior was correct and—drat the man—seemed sincerely humble.
Arthur nodded curtly and nudged Beowulf forward.
I had to wait for a moment for Beowulf to pass St. Clair’s horse, and I used that time to study St. Clair. He wasn’t sleeping well, and despite his military bearing and exquisite manners, the encounter had unnerved him. The evidence was in his eyes, usually so bleak and unreadable.
I should have been cheered to see my enemy out of sorts, but the business had unnerved me as well. I caught up to Arthur, who’d kept Beowulf to the walk.
“He’s just a man,” Arthur said. “I want him to be a leering, sniveling rat, a reeking pile of walking excrement, but he’s just a man, and apparently not a very happy one.”
“Likely doomed, despite some sort of order from on high that he’s to be allowed to live out his days in peace.”
Arthur glanced over his shoulder, though St. Clair was already lost to sight. “Let’s get in a gallop before the sun rises any higher, shall we? And don’t let me win. Make Bey work for his oats for a change.”
Atlas won by a length, and I hoped Arthur hadn’t let us win. When we gave our noble steeds a loose rein and turned them in the direction of the park gates, I saw St. Clair on a slight rise. He had dismounted, and made a lonely figure in the morning light.
I hoped—in vain—that I’d seen the last of him.