Page 20 of A Gentleman in Possession of Secrets (The Lord Julian Mysteries #10)
Chapter Nine
“Mrs. Witherspoon was critical of Viscountess Standish,” I said, passing MacNamara a brandy.
I indulged in a cool glass of meadow tea, the hour not yet late enough for the decanter to have any appeal.
“The widow is very fond of Hannah, but hasn’t seen or heard from your intended for three weeks.
The last letter was a routine lament about the viscountess’s sour nature and Lady Dewar’s increasing frailty. ”
“You read it?” MacNamara sipped his drink. His foot was propped on the estate office hassock. A sluggish afternoon breeze riffled his hair. He appeared tired and worried. If I’d been confined to quarters while somebody else tried to locate a missing Hyperia, I would have looked far worse.
“I read the letter. I detected no hidden codes or warnings of impending disaster.” The meadow tea was a tonic to the body and soul, and I silently vowed that Mrs. G must write her recipe down for our London cook.
“What did you think of Dabney Witherspoon?”
MacNamara expected me to say that she was pretty, and she was. Very. “She’s angry and grieving. She risked the rest of her life for true love, and even ten thousand acres and the tacit remorse of her family aren’t comfort against her loss.”
“I am not sure what killed her husband. Some sort of wasting disease, I gather. Andrew was big, bluff, and merry. He lacked polish but was nobody’s fool. A husband worth missing.”
I settled into the second wing chair. “Don’t brood. Hannah is doubtless missing you. Mrs. Witherspoon claims the viscountess threatened Hannah with banishment.”
“Banishment for walking out with me?”
“I wasn’t given specifics. I suspect banishment was the threat of first resort for any transgression, from whistling to bookishness to laughing out loud on the Sabbath.” I’d seen Dabney Witherspoon smile, I’d not heard her laugh, but a part of me had wanted to provoke her to mirth.
She would not have appreciated the effort, not when anger was her most reliable prop and stay. Laughter had a way of getting under grief and lifting it into mere sadness.
“Then we take a closer look at the viscountess,” MacNamara said. “Did you learn anything else of significance?”
I could not tell the captain, but I’d learned that my manly humors were more in evidence than they’d been of late.
I’d left my animal spirits somewhere on the battlefield at Waterloo, and while I could appreciate the ladies in an abstract sense, and I delighted in affection shared with Hyperia, real desire had gone absent without leave.
True, I was engaged to marry Hyperia, but she was unwilling to have children. The situation had had a sad sort of symmetry. One party unwilling to risk intimacies, the other unable though longing for offspring. A workable match, if not exactly blissful in every particular.
A crooked pot needs a crooked lid, and what marriage was blissful in every particular?
As distant thunder rumbled in the south, I realized that Dabney Witherspoon had tempted me. Not in any alarming way, but in the sense that I’d noticed her as a man notices a woman, and I’d liked what I’d seen, felt, and sensed.
“Caldicott, you look to be staring into a particularly puzzling set of tea leaves.”
Trying to decode a dispatch not meant for my eyes, perhaps. “Strother Stadler deserves a closer look too. Mrs. Witherspoon claims he’s in dun territory and he left Town with creditors nipping at his heels.”
MacNamara finished his brandy. “Ah, youth. I suspect Hannah’s pin money disappeared into Strother’s pockets. She never said as much, but she also never went up to Town to shop for bonnets, never ordered bolts of velvet for a new fancy evening gown. She purchased books or nothing at all.”
I pulled my focus away from the conundrum of the angry widow and my wayward manly humors.
“How did Hannah afford to stock an entire library with books, MacNamara? Bound volumes do not come cheap.”
He considered his empty glass. “For Christmas tokens and birthday gifts, she always and only asked for books. She raided the family library—all without permission—and she is a careful manager of her funds.” Clearly, MacNamara’s answer didn’t satisfy him any more than it satisfied me.
“Your Hannah bought books by the dozen, and she spared her brother the occasional coin, too, according to Mrs. Witherspoon. The family has doubtless allowed Hannah a mere pittance for her own use. That is careful management, indeed.”
“You are thinking Hannah raided the family hoard of gold somehow?”
Hannah was intelligent, had every right to resent her family, and would have been expected to forgo a dowry if she intended to marry the captain.
She might well have raided the family coffers on the sly. The ramifications of that possibility wanted pondering at length.
“I am thinking,” I said, “that Strother will be out when I call on him tomorrow, so I’d best show up at Pleasant View early.” Another protracted horseback jaunt, unless I took the coach and asked Hyperia to join me.
But the exchange I hoped to have with Strother was not one he’d want any lady to hear.
“Why will Strother bestir himself to avoid you?”
“Mrs. Witherspoon claims he’s not as upright as he appears to be.
He not only racks up the usual debts when in Town, he comports himself irresponsibly.
He comes back to the shires to avoid his duns.
” I considered telling MacNamara about Strother’s grossly improper advance toward Mrs. Witherspoon when she was yet in first mourning, but I kept my own counsel.
Telling MacNamara of the incident might burden the captain with the decision of whether to share the information with Hannah. I had only Mrs. Witherspoon’s word for the matter, and Strother might have been bungling an infatuation rather than intending any insult.
Might have been, but I did not believe so. Mrs. Witherspoon held Strother in contempt, and that sort of disdain was usually earned.
“You aren’t disclosing all you learned,” MacNamara said. “You did this with the generals too. If a family of Rom were camping in some valley, you’d warn them to move on and forget to mention their presence at headquarters.”
“I neither admit nor deny the charge.” MacNamara could know of that incident only if Harry had tattled on me, because I had mentioned it to no one other than him.
“I am honestly confounded. We’re told the viscountess wanted Hannah out from under Pleasant View’s roof, but marriage to you was not seen as a solution in that regard.
We can only speculate as to why a mother would turn on her sole remaining unmarried daughter in such a fashion. ”
I rose stiffly. Beowulf was a magnificent steed, and he had magnificently powerful gaits.
“We are also told,” I went on, “that Strother is fond of Hannah, but we find out that he might have owed her a small fortune. That he might owe any number of parties small and large fortunes, so where does that leave him when it comes to stealing from the family coffers? Where does the viscount fit in all this as paterfamilias, and what does Lady Dewar know that we do not?”
MacNamara sat forward and put his head in his hands.
“I just want Hannah found, safe and sound, none the worse for her ordeal. She doesn’t have to marry me.
I don’t care if she spent the whole pile of gold on Gothic novels.
I don’t care if she staged the entire business. I just need to know that she’s well.”
A suitor worth missing—and marrying. “I hope to have more answers for you tomorrow,” I said, taking our empty glasses to the sideboard. “Are you using the comfrey poultices?”
“I am. I will be fussed to death if I neglect them. Your ladies are fierce, Caldicott.”
“That they are, by both breeding and necessity. I am off in search of Miss West and will see you at supper. Don’t get up.”
I left the captain staring out the open window, the sultry breeze bringing another rumble of thunder.
I needed to make my report to Hyperia, but when I found her in the conservatory, she was not alone.
“Godmama,” I said, enfolding Lady Ophelia in a hug. “You are a dear and welcome sight. I assume you bring news from Town, and I have the day’s report to offer in return. Perry, budge over.”
Her ladyship felt frail to me, but then, she’d always been slender. The slenderness in my arms leaned not toward the grace of the sylph, but rather, toward the insubstantial frame of an elderly woman.
My imagination was growing as morose as the rest of me. In all other regards, Lady Ophelia was her usual self—softly redolent of gardenias, attired in the first stare of understated fashion, and blue eyes snapping with mischief and intelligence.
My beloved budged over, I joined her on the settee, and Lady Ophelia made a great production over stirring honey into her tea. Godmama also looked tired to me, but then, the Town whirl did that to people. Mixed up days and nights, until rest became a succession of unsatisfying naps.
Godmama was a veteran of that battlefield, though. She knew how to manage her time and energy. She was aging well, but she was aging.
A sad thought.
She sipped her tea with regal leisure. “You asked me to locate Sylvester Downing, heir to the Muldoon viscountcy. I am loath to report that he appears to have also gone missing. What on earth do we make of this development?”
“They ran off together?” Hyperia suggested. “The captain will be devastated if that’s the case.”
“When did Downing leave Town?” I asked, freshening the ladies’ cups of tea and pouring one for myself.
We were enjoying the slightly close and humid surrounds of the conservatory, which this time of year should have been an airy, fragrant retreat.
The primary scent on the breeze was aged manure, faint but distinctive, and an overcast sky resulted in a pervasive gloom.