Page 2 of A Gentleman in Possession of Secrets (The Lord Julian Mysteries #10)

Cuirassiers were heavily armored cavalrymen. Death on big, fit warhorses. MacNamara had faced them, as had I. One could not forget the experience, even if one wished to.

I did not wish to take on this investigation, which surprised me.

I wanted to enjoy the bucolic splendor of Caldicott Hall as spring eased into summer.

Haying was a fortnight or so away, and the crop was coming along nicely.

My boyhood memories of haying were sweet, while in other regards, I associated warmer weather—campaign season—with hell on earth.

I wanted the security and comfort of Caldicott Hall, wanted to compose long, sentimental letters to my intended and to pop up to Town for a day here and there and treat myself to her company for a stroll in the park.

I longed to dote, to court, to drift for a time. Needed to.

“Say you’ll look into this, please, Caldicott. The Stadlers can’t ignore you the way they try to ignore me.”

I knew the family in passing. Viscount Standish was about twenty years my senior.

The heir was my junior by several years, and like me, he had a plentitude of older sisters.

The viscountess and my mother were cordial, as one must be in the country with any family of note within ten leagues of one’s home.

“Lady Standish might not receive me, MacNamara. You’ve doubtless heard the talk.”

“Bother the talk. You survived captivity. Your brother, God rest his soul, did not, and neither did many others. Are you responsible for every life the French took? I think not. The war is over, and the Stadlers won’t snub the son of a duke.”

I was, in point of fact, not only the son of a duke, but also my older brother Arthur’s heir. The present Duke of Waltham was touring the South of France in the company of his great friend Osgood Banter. I wished them the joy of their travels and hoped to never again set foot in France myself.

“Very well, the Stadlers will be at home to me, but if Miss Stadler has played you false or fallen into a fit of melancholia, they aren’t likely to share such a confidence with me.”

MacNamara limped away from the sideboard to face me.

“That’s the thing about you, though. You’d go for a little hack through the Spanish countryside, your spyglass hidden away in your boot.

A week later, you’d toddle back into camp, in want of some rations and a bath.

You’d have the location of every French unit in the vicinity, its strength in men, cannon, and horses, and a good estimate of its rations.

And you’d come by this intelligence without asking any questions of anybody.

It’s no wonder the French wanted you buttoned up in some dank, musty prison. You likely gave Old Boney nightmares.”

“You flatter me.” A reconnaissance officer had little value if he could not draw accurate conclusions from his observations.

“Some, perhaps. I would dance with the devil if he could assure me that Hannah is well and happy—if I could dance at all.”

MacNamara could no longer dance. He could no longer march. He could, though, ask for reinforcements when the battle was turning against him, and I mightily respected him for that.

“I’ll call on the Stadlers later this week.”

“Tomorrow, man. Hannah has been gone three days, that I know of. If she’s been carted off to one of those private asylums, that could be three days in hell.”

Another thought worthy of nightmares. “Tomorrow, then, and you will bide here at the Hall until I have something to report.”

“Will I truly?”

“You can hardly put weight on that foot, MacNamara, and you turned down good brandy because you need all your wits about you to stay ahead of the pain. I’m sending Mrs. Gwinnett to you. Our cook knows every remedy in the herbal, and she is no stranger to grumpy men. You cross her at your peril.”

Most soldiers were adept at following orders, though I was taking a risk telling Captain James MacNamara what to do. He had a temper to go with his Scottish charm.

“Your cook sounds like my Hannah. Do we dress for dinner?”

His Hannah, though he was not yet engaged to the lady. “We do not. Country hours. To bed by ten of the clock usually. I’ll see you at supper. Borrow any book in the library for as long as you please.”

I left MacNamara pretending to peruse the biographies, though I knew for a certainty that the instant I was out of sight, he would be back in the chair, his foot once again propped on a pillow, the brandy gone in a trice.

“I don’t understand.” Atticus, my tiger, peered out the coach window at the verdant countryside. “He’s sweet on her, and she’s sweet on him, but he lost her? Is she playing hide-and-seek, like?”

Atticus occupied that age hovering below the onset of adolescence, when some of childhood’s innocence yet lingered, but would soon be gone forever.

I’d found him in service at a country manor in Kent and offered him a post as a stable boy, tiger, and general factotum.

He was loyal, observant, an asset in an investigation, and too bright to be wasting his days polishing boots.

He was also frequently stubborn, impudent, and too independent for his own good.

The boy had made respectable inroads on literacy, and he was a natural in the saddle, but a reluctant scholar otherwise. He adored Hyperia, who doted on him, and a recent outing to a race meeting had left him in a horse-mad phase that could last the rest of his life.

“Miss Stadler’s family might have suggested she’d benefit from a change of air.

” That observation came from my mother, Dorothea, Her Grace of Waltham, serenely ensconced beside me on the forward-facing seat.

“They might have suggested rather forcefully that the young lady pay a call on distant relatives.”

Atticus was in awe of Her Grace, as was I at times. She, having worn the Caldicott tiara for decades, regarded his adulation with gracious good cheer.

“They’d haul her away,” Atticus asked, “like press-gangs and highwaymen? Or you mean she’s sentenced to the chapel for a week?”

Mama’s perfectly matched brows drew down. “Sentenced to the chapel?”

“In the parish house, if you was bad, you had to sit in the chapel. Place was colder than a well-digger’s—”

I winced. “Language, young man.”

“—boots. Dark and spooky, and there was graves under the flagstones. You could hear the souls of the damned moaning when the wind was up, at least that’s what headmaster told us.”

The little scamp liked using the word damned , if his grin was any indication.

“Fortunately,” Her Grace said, “you no longer reside in such surrounds. The Caldicott family chapel is a cheerful place, though it can be chilly in winter. Julian, you mustn’t frown so.”

“Your face will get stuck like that,” Atticus added helpfully.

My mother sent me a half-exasperated, half-smirking glance. Were Atticus any older, he would not ride inside in company with Her Grace. But the day would be long—a good thirty miles of travel—and sending the boy up to the box for the whole distance might result in John Coachman giving notice.

Then too, Atticus was my eyes and ears belowstairs, and I had yet to give him his orders.

“The young lady’s name is Hannah Stadler,” I said.

“She’s been missing in action for several days, as far as Captain MacNamara knows.

She was in roaring good health when last he saw her.

She did not mention upcoming travel and has ceased a regular, informal correspondence without notice or explanation.

She might well have sent him a note explaining a pressing need to admire ocean vistas, but if so, that one note went astray. ”

“What’s she look like?” Atticus asked.

Well, blast the luck. “I don’t know, other than she’s robust, tallish, vigorous, and… That’s all I know.”

“Miss Hannah Stadler is a brunette,” my mother said.

“Has sky-blue eyes that are often obscured by spectacles. Wears her hair in a plain chignon, has a heavy tread for a lady, and can ride in the first flight all day. She is the fourth daughter, the only one yet unmarried. Her memory is prodigious, and she is an outspoken advocate for reform. She believes more women should have the vote, for example.”

Atticus’s mouth formed into an O. “I guess the guv gets it from you, ma’am.”

Her Grace smoothed her skirts. “I beg your pardon?”

Atticus should not be addressing the duchess at all, and his observation seemed to have rattled her nigh impregnable serenity.

“The guv sees all the details, don’t forget nothin’—except when he forgets everything—and makes a picture where the rest of us see only lines and shadows.

He’ll find the lady, but first he’ll get all remote and think-y, and then he’ll go grouchy and hare about, mutterin’ and annoyin’ folk.

Miss West will have to sort him out a time or two, or Lady Ophelia will, and then it all comes right just when you think the guv has bit off more’n he can chew.

He does that too. Don’t have no sense, sometimes, and don’t you be glarin’ at me, guv, because I’m an honest boy speaking the honest truth. ”

A loquacious boy. One in need of a reprimand, though I would not injure his puerile dignity with a set-down before the duchess.

“I could not have said it better myself,” the duchess murmured. “Julian, do you recall the Stadler heir? He was some years behind you, and he did not serve in uniform for the obvious reason.”

Not only was the Honorable Mr. Strother Stadler his papa’s heir, he was the sole scion of the house. That he remained unmarried several years into his majority was a testament to gross negligence on the part of the matchmakers, or incorrigible bachelor tendencies in the young man.

“Mr. Stadler and I have met, of course, years ago. Doubtless at some hunt meet or neighborhood gathering. He’s tall, brown-haired, and I seem to recall him being of a self-important nature, but perhaps that’s a phase most young men go through.”

Atticus snorted.

“Have you something to say,” I asked, “or have you taken to indulging in gratuitous rude noises?”

“I believe,” said the duchess, “that Atticus remarks on present company’s propensity for self-importance. You do become very focused on your investigations, my lord.”

Atticus silently mouthed the new word: pro-pen-si-ty .

The boy had a propensity for collecting big words as crows collected shiny objects. “A capacity to remain focused on a goal increased the odds of my survival in Spain. My apologies if either of you find my company objectionable as a result.”

The duchess’s expression smoothed into her characteristic calm dignity. Atticus resumed gawking out the window.

Bad of me. The search for Miss Stadler wasn’t even properly under way, and I was already out of sorts.

“Apologies all around. I have no excuse for ill humor. We don’t even know yet that the young lady is truly missing.”

The duchess and the boy both sent me glances that suggested more might be said at a later time.

I hadn’t noticed any resemblance between them previously.

She was a statuesque redhead of mature years and aristocratic provenance.

He was a skinny, dark-haired lad of low pedigree and limited accomplishments.

They both, though, regarded me with fleeting worry, and over a single grouchy remark. Perhaps I wasn’t the only party made fretful when an investigation began.

“You have the book?” I asked.

Her Grace patted a quilted reticule. “I chose an unbound copy of Mr. Douglas’s Eneados, a translation of the Aeneid into Middle Scots. Hannah would already have Dryden’s version.”

“That manuscript has to be quite valuable.”

“It’s a copy, Julian. You and Harry were doubtless set to replicating great swaths of wisdom as punishment for your various boyish transgressions.

Arthur might have made this copy simply out of boredom on a summer holiday.

The hand looks to be his. The Stadlers are Scottish on the dam side, though you will never hear a hint of a burr in the viscountess’s diction. ”

My mother had chosen shrewdly, in other words. The pretext for the call was to pass along to a bluestocking a tome Miss Stadler would delight in. Exactly the sort of generosity characteristic of my mother. Thoughtful, personal, and unfussy.

“We’re here,” Atticus said. “Captain MacNamara said to look for brick gateposts with rearing horses atop.”

The coach slowed to take the turn, and we passed through a tidy park—too tidy.

Somebody had landscaped the trees and pastures into submission, an expensive hobby wealthy families had fallen prey to in the last century.

No towering sentinel oaks punctuated the horizons, no tangles of bracken sheltered in the dip and swell of the terrain.

The carefully proportioned ornamental lake lay precisely where such a feature was expected to be.

Wooly white lambs grazed beside their mamas, not a black sheep to be seen.

When I’d rambled about the wilds of Spain, a verdant, tamed English expanse such as this would have figured in my dreams as the definition of rural beauty. For reasons I could not determine, the precisely placed spinneys and smoothly curving lane bothered me now.

If the landscape itself could be manipulated into a symmetric set piece for the Stadlers’ convenience, how much more likely was it that our call would amount to a day wasted for the sake of tea and cakes served with liberal helpings of useless platitudes?