Page 1 of A Gentleman in Possession of Secrets (The Lord Julian Mysteries #10)

Chapter One

“If I might speak very bluntly, Lord Julian, Miss Stadler’s family tolerates me.

” Captain James MacNamara limped the length of the library as he spoke, then did a teetering about-face under the previous duchess’s portrait.

“They are never overtly rude, but I’m too old, too poor, too damaged, too Scottish…

They acknowledge my acquaintance, even as they also constantly allude to my deficiencies. ”

I wanted desperately to invite my guest to sit. When last I’d known him, Captain MacNamara had been hale and whole, one of the best artillery officers in Wellington’s army. In the nearly two years since Waterloo, he’d aged considerably.

His once-jaunty swagger had become a halting, bobbing walk. His left hand was missing the smallest finger. His temples showed flax among the russet of his hair, though he could not yet be five-and-thirty years old.

His gaze was a testament to chronic pain, not all of it physical. I refused to add to the indignities he’d suffered by treating him as an invalid.

“I gather Miss Stadler doesn’t share her family’s opinion of you?” I asked.

“Miss Stadler finds me acceptable.” MacNamara addressed the duchess in her gilt frame.

“To be honest, she might well find me acceptable simply to twit her family, but I flatter myself the lady enjoys my company. We are by no means formally engaged, but she has given me leave to ask permission to court her. If we were to plight our troth, I’m sure she’d make me work for it, effort I am more than willing to put in. ”

MacNamara was far from handsome. His features were rugged—craggy, some might say—and his nose was an aquiline blade.

He was nearly as tall as I was—six foot, two inches—and his Scottish burr gave his speech a growling quality.

His rare smiles were angelic, and his ferocity in battle had been demonic.

He would make a loyal, protective, and doting husband, but he was not a typical suitor for a viscount’s daughter. I doubted he was poor, but he was undeniably Scottish, definitely the worse for his military adventures, and no stripling.

“Might we sit, MacNamara? The steward got hold of me yesterday morning and did not grant my parole until nigh midnight.” Hours in the saddle, a dozen tenant calls, acres of newly planted land inspected.

I no longer enjoyed the stamina I’d developed in Spain, but then, I was no longer fighting a shooting war.

“I can sit for a time,” MacNamara said, “then I must move, then I must sit again. My gouty auld uncles find me hilarious. I’m suffering just deserts for my incorrigible youth, according to them.”

MacNamara lowered himself into a wing chair, his knee able to bend only slightly, which necessitated a perch on the edge of his seat.

I shoved a hassock before him. “My eyes cannot tolerate bright sunshine. I wear blue spectacles out of doors.”

“That powder wagon outside Madrid, wasn’t it?

A grand display and a very great noise.” He smiled, propped up his foot, and sighed.

“I don’t miss it, not in the least, but also, I wouldn’t want to have missed it.

The Scots, Welsh, and Irish proved themselves over and over in battle, and I don’t care what the great man himself says, Wellington was not born on English soil. ”

Wellington was Irish by birth and ancestry, but when questioned regarding his nationality, his response had famously been that being born in a stable did not make one a horse.

“About Miss Stadler? You fear she’s in danger?”

MacNamara extracted a pillow from the corner of the chair and stuffed it under his foot. “Yes, damn the notion, I fear she’s in danger. Perhaps not bodily danger, despite being taken from her home against her will.”

“How do you reach that conclusion?” The library chairs were seductively comfortable, the morning sunny and just edging toward warm. A soft, grass-scented breeze wafted through the open windows, and sleep tugged at my mind.

Typical of me lately, to toss and turn the night away, then long to nap when the sun was finally up and about his rounds.

“I could say lover’s intuition inspires my worries, my lord, which you might dismiss as so much foolishness, but hear me out.

I am in the habit of exchanging notes with Miss Stadler.

Nothing sentimental. She is a bluestocking, reads voraciously, and we have a sort of competition.

She’ll quote some old Roman, and I’m to tell her who, then it’s my turn.

Or she finds a quote and can’t unearth the source and challenges me to solve the riddle by Friday. All very harmless and silly.”

Not silly. Sweet and surprisingly literary. “I did not know you were much of a scholar.”

“I’m Scottish, my lord. We read the way you English drink ale. Besides, sitting about waiting for my wounds to heal, I had few consolations besides books.”

I rose, went to the sideboard, and poured two servings of brandy. MacNamara had been too intent on his narrative when he’d arrived to tolerate the courtesies, so I saw to them now.

“To your health.”

“And yours, my lord.” He saluted with his drink but did not rise, so I resumed my seat.

“Miss Stadler stopped corresponding with you?” I asked.

“Can’t really call it a correspondence. More of an exchange of dispatches.

She left her notes for me in my fishing cottage.

I put mine in her belvedere at the bottom of the steps.

She’d warned me that she had a particularly challenging quote to share with her next epistle, but that epistle was never left for me. ”

An oversight, possibly. “What else?”

“When I called at Pleasant View to inquire regarding my next assignment, Miss Stadler wasn’t on hand to receive me.

I asked after her, and the viscountess told me Hannah was suffering a megrim.

Hannah—Miss Stadler—does not believe in allowing a megrim to lay her low.

She regards activity and fresh air as the best tonics. ”

I thought of my sisters and their many megrims. “Might she have been suffering the female complaint?”

“No.”

Everlasting Powers. The matter had just become a great deal more complicated…

“Your expression is priceless, Caldicott. As if you’ve just blundered into Almack’s wearing riding attire and are only now realizing your error.

Miss Stadler had just got over the female complaint.

She is vociferous—to me—about the injustice and indignity of it all, the inconvenience which a fair-minded Deity ought not to visit on only half of His creatures.

She is vociferous about a lot of things. ”

And clearly, the captain esteemed her for being so forthright.

“MacNamara, at the risk of being called out, might the lady have simply tired of your company?”

“Aye. She tires of me from time to time, and it’s off to London to pillage the Bloomsbury bookshops, though perhaps she’s in truth flirting with the Mayfair gallants.

When travel is in the offing, she tells me her plans, brings me back a few tomes, and onward we march.

We are honest with each other, my lord, and beyond that… ”

He took a sip of his brandy, made a face, and set the drink aside. “Too fine for me.”

“Beyond that…?”

“To meet her, you’d think Hannah was an antidote.

She can be brusque. Her sense of humor is unique.

She’s not dainty, and she doesn’t suffer fools.

But that woman has the kindest, fiercest heart God ever bestowed on a mortal soul.

She cannot abide dissembling. Hannah might tell me to my face that I’ve grown boring or that she prefers a husband who can dance under the stars, but she would not leave me to fret and worry any more than you’d simply disappear from Miss West’s life. ”

Hyperia West, the light of my existence, the beacon illuminating my days, the lady to whom I had pledged my future, dodgy though my prospects were in some regards.

“Could an explanatory note from Miss Stadler have gone astray?”

“She did not entrust our notes to anybody else. Neither did I. Gave me motivation to walk at least as far as the fishing cottage or the belvedere.”

MacNamara got to his feet, which involved taking his foot off the hassock, moving to the edge of his seat, angling his body, getting his good foot under him, and pushing himself upright. Only then did he put weight on the bad foot, and in a tentative fashion.

“What’s the problem with your paw?” I asked, rising. One soldier could ask that of another.

“Shrapnel, as best the surgeon could tell. I stood too close to where a cannonball landed. Missing some toes, but he saved the foot. Got what he could, but I was bleeding all over creation, and cauterizing this and that became more pressing than extracting little bits of metal. He said some would work their way out, or they might kill me eventually, especially if the little bits are made of lead.”

“You should see a Scottish physician.”

“I should. I will, but finding Hannah is more important. I have done what I could to locate her, though the mission wants two sound feet, for starters. Hannah’s family has gone so far as to suggest she’s taking the waters, as if she’s some beldame in need of the cure.

When I press for her location, I’m told she’s off to the spa towns. ”

Of which there were many. “You’re worried.”

He kept a hand resting on the back of the chair.

“Would I be here, asking for your help, if I wasn’t half out of my wits, Caldicott?

I would rather face Napoleon’s damned cuirassiers than think that Hannah has come to harm and I’ve failed her.

She doesn’t have to marry me, God knows, but to think that she’s kicking her heels in Paris because her family objects to me, or that she’s been bundled off to some convent in Dublin…

I slept well the night before battle compared to how I’ve been sleeping lately. ”