Page 7 of A Gentleman of Dubious Reputation (The Lord Julian Mysteries #2)

Chapter Seven

“Let’s walk the lane, shall we?” I asked, looping Atlas’s reins around a hitching rack in the shade of a towering maple.

“Not the lane.” Eunice sent a grimace in the direction of the manor house. “Papa can see much of it from his study. That’s partly why he lurks in there so much. On the alert for callers—he is so lonely—not that we have many. Come.”

She led me around the side of the barn to what was likely the groom’s favorite loafing bench, out of sight of the house, facing east and thus in shade during the warmest hours of the day.

“Lord Reardon has gone missing, hasn’t he?” she asked, collapsing onto the bench with a decided lack of grace. “I knew he was planning something stupid.”

“His lordship did not come home last night.” I perched about a foot away from her. “Lady Clarissa is worried.”

“For herself, of course. Without the viscount to toady to her, Lady Clarissa will have to rely exclusively on Mrs. Aimes, won’t she?”

Another member of the Committee to Consign Lady Clarissa to Perdition. I hadn’t exactly been a founding member, but my own shabby opinion of Clarissa bothered me increasingly.

“If you know something, Miss Eunice, something that would help me find his lordship or give up the search as unnecessary, please don’t keep me in suspense.”

“I know Reardon loathed the notion of this grand exhibition. That was all Clarissa’s idea.”

For a man reluctant to show off his work, Reardon had certainly waxed enthusiastic to Hyperia and me. “The proceeds will finance a journey to Rome, I’m told. One admires a young man attempting to support himself with his abilities.”

Eunice gave me a scowl very like her father’s. “Do you support yourself with your abilities, my lord?”

“Fair point.” Though in the military I had subsisted on my officer’s pay, and I now lived on investments initiated with an inheritance from my grandmama’s side of the family. “You are saying Reardon resented this exhibition?”

Eunice scuffed her slipper against the bare dirt. “Real acclaim comes from recognition by the Royal Academy. Everybody knows that. Reardon submitted a few works to them last year, and they passed on every one. The Hundred Days were ongoing when the committee made its selections, and smiling portraits were all the crack.”

The Hundred Days being the months following Napoleon’s escape from Elba, when all the world had been dreading the battles necessary to send the demon back into exile—and rightly so. One out of four soldiers at Waterloo had not come home, or had not come home whole and healthy. Tens of thousands had been maimed or killed in a day, and the entire Continent had lost sons, husbands, and fathers overnight.

“Did the viscount take you into his confidence, miss?” Or had his lordship sketched for Eunice the portrait of his situation most likely to gain her sympathy? Oppressed by his sister, determined to make his own way in the world (until he inherited the title, of course), suffering for his art…?

She stared at her hands, a lady’s graceful, pale appendages. Clean nails, a thin gold bracelet winking at her wrist.

“Lord Reardon and I are close,” she said. “I esteem his lordship greatly and believe my sentiments are reciprocated. I know he has his diversions—we are not engaged, and he’s a vigorous young man—but…”

I wanted to be anywhere rather than on that bench, listening to a young woman make excuses for the bounder who’d treated her trust lightly and then disappeared.

“But you hoped,” I said. “Hoped that, in time, those sentiments might blossom into a commitment and a shared future.”

She curled her hands into fists. “Lord Reardon hoped too. He told me as much, and that is why you must find him.”

I would locate his lordship so that I, perhaps aided by Huber and Mrs. Probinger, could administer a sound thrashing to him.

“Miss Eunice, please do not take offense at my next question: Were you intimate with the viscount?”

She sat up straight. “That can have no bearing on where he might be at the present moment. None whatsoever. He’s taken a fall, run afoul of brigands, crossed paths with highwaymen, or worse.”

Highwaymen on the farm lanes of Sussex. Making off with his lordship’s rickety easel and dented flask. Oh, of course. “Are you carrying his child?”

She popped off the bench and marched a dozen paces away, keeping her back to me. I followed, though I remained out of slapping range.

“I am not suggesting his lordship would evade his responsibilities, miss, but if somebody disapproved of a match between his lordship and you, then spiriting Reardon off to Paris might give him time to reconsider his options.”

“Reardon will not reconsider,” Eunice said, rounding on me, “but he doesn’t know… That is, I didn’t have a chance to inform him… and it’s too soon to tell anyway.” Her shoulders slumped, and she took to blinking hard at something over my left shoulder. “It was only a couple of times. Well, three, or four. Reardon said we mustn’t indulge again until he gets his situation sorted out.”

Oh, ye gods and stupid young men. “Nothing I know of his lordship or the Valmonds suggests that he’d willingly shirk his duty to you. But he’s gone absent without leave, and that is cause for concern.”

Or had he removed to Rome early, as Huber had put it, the better to avoid fatherhood? Eunice might not be sure of her condition, but Reardon, an artist with an acute eye for detail, might have noted changes in his lover’s body.

His current lover’s body, the rutting clodpate.

Or had Clarissa press-ganged him onto a packet bound for Calais, then sounded the alarm in the fashion of skilled pickpockets everywhere, crying, “Thief,” at the top of her lungs while her own pockets were full of guilt? Reardon was supposed to marry money, and Eunice Huber, lovely as she was, did not qualify as an heiress.

Clarissa had at least one motive for seeing Reardon whisked into the figurative wings.

Eunice sent her next glower in the general direction of Valmond House. “Reardon said just yesterday morning that I wasn’t to worry. He said the whole situation would come right if I could be patient.”

Were those the general platitudes a young fool offered the woman he’d put at risk of ruin, or had Reardon been speaking of a specific scheme? What if he’d meant that his will provided for Eunice, and his mortal remains were at that moment floating about in the Stygian depths of the quarry pond?

What if Huber, disgusted with Reardon’s faithless rutting, had given him a push into the Great Beyond?

“Did Reardon mention how long you’d have to be patient, miss?”

She shook her head. “A little while longer, something like that, but I might not have a little while, my lord. Papa is all bluster and noise, though when it comes to his family, nothing escapes his notice. Mrs. Wingate has mentioned herbs, but I’d never want to do anything to harm my baby.”

Her baby might someday be Earl of Valloise—if he wasn’t the cause of his mother’s permanent exile among Welsh cousins.

“Did Reardon have any enemies that you know of? Anybody who’d delight to see his life made difficult? A jealous fellow artist? Somebody with a grudge against aristocratic heirs? A supposed friend with a glint of avarice in his eye?”

“You think Reardon might have been kidnapped ?” She seized on this possibility with far too much enthusiasm. “He is an only son. His parents dote on him, and they would pay any sum to see him safely returned to Valmond House.”

“Kidnapping is unlikely. I ask for the sake of thoroughness.”

“Lord Reardon isn’t lost,” Miss Eunice said with far more conviction than she’d mentioned roving highwaymen. “He knows this neighborhood better than anybody does. Knows every lane, bridle path, game trail, and ford. Knows where the foxes dig their dens and where the bluebells first bloom.”

“My hope,” I said, “is that he’s turned an ankle or dislocated a knee. That can happen to the most sure-footed among us. He’ll come limping up the carriageway, or bouncing home in some farmer’s cart before nightfall, his hound and his knapsack beside him.”

Eunice was back to scowling at me. “I’ve remembered something.”

Not the scent of Mrs. Probinger’s perfume lingering about his lordship’s person, please. “And?”

“It’s about his knapsack. Lord Reardon has a system. His sketchbook slides into this pocket, pencil case into that one. Canteen here, sandwiches there. An old saddle blanket rolled up atop the lot, for sitting on boulders and such. He has an ingenious portable easel, too, and the legs fit into a cylinder that he straps to the bottom of the knapsack.”

Get to the point. “Something was different about his knapsack?”

“The whole thing looked fuller to me than usual—more bulges and whatnot—and the easel cylinder was missing.”

“Perhaps he hadn’t planned to use his easel.”

“He always took it with him, my lord. That contraption was as much a part of his rambles as Touchstone panting at his side.”

“Touchstone is the hound?” Also a Shakespearean fool.

“Lord Reardon loves that smelly old dog.” Mis Eunice punctuated her sentiment with a sniff. “Clarissa can’t stand the beast, which I’m sure only endears Touchstone to his owner all the more.”

The more people I spoke with, the more my picture of life at Valmond House shifted. Something was seriously amiss between brother and sister, and I hadn’t picked up a whiff of it when I’d taken tea with them.

Perhaps Hyperia had some insights to offer.

“I will find his lordship if he wants to be found,” I said, risking a pat to Miss Eunice’s shoulder. “And believe this if you believe nothing else: Your father loves you. He would never blame you for the ill-timed enthusiasm of a smitten young man.”

“Thank you, my lord.”

“When Viscount Reardon left you, which direction did he go?”

“Into the woods. He loved the woods, loved the birdsong and wild flowers and all the varieties of light.”

The Semple farm lay adjacent to those woods. Huber probably hadn’t misdirected me.

“Then I shall follow him into the woods, though I’d ask you to send a groom to Caldicott Hall. Please let my brother know that I’ll likely be out quite late and might camp in the countryside tonight, the better to get an early start tomorrow.”

“Of course, my lord, and thank you for your efforts.”

I bowed my farewell and collected my horse. As Atlas ambled in the direction of the trees, I thought back to all the sketchbooks I’d perused. For a man who professed to love the woods, Lord Reardon had not immortalized any sylvan scenes in his notebooks.

But then, many a wayward fellow delighted in the woods because they were an excellent place to hide.

I lost the light, but I did not lose Viscount Reardon. To my surprise, the crushed undergrowth and bent bracken suggested he’d bedded down for a nap within earshot of the creek. His hound had reposed beside him, and based on the depressions in the soil, they’d whiled away much of the day in slumber.

That puzzled me. Clarissa had said that Reardon had gone short of sleep the night previous to his wanderings. Why not remain at home, lounging about in robe and slippers, swilling chilled hock on a shady balcony?

I considered that question while I watered Atlas at the millpond. Reardon’s perambulations had traveled a wide circle, and he’d probably stopped beside the pond to allow the hound a drink. The spot was peaceful, save for the occasional burst of cheering from the posting inn a quarter mile up the road on the village green.

Other than the darts-night revelers, the evening was quiet. The plop of a frog hopping into the water, an owl hooting a warning to any who’d encroach on her territory, the inevitable chorus of crickets. To any former soldier, those sounds were the music of safety and a good night’s sleep.

Had Lord Reardon heard them as such?

Atlas lifted his head, chin dripping, just before a quavery voice called, “Who goes there?”

“Lord Julian,” I called back. “Good evening, Mr. Sawyer.” I put the hour at nigh ten o’clock. Past Old Man Sawyer’s bedtime, surely.

“Ah, the young master come home from the wars. Out for a moonlit ride, are ye?” Mr. Sawyer shuffled forward on the path that circled the pond. “Too hot to stay indoors on such a night.”

“I’m trying to locate Lord Reardon,” I said. “He left Valmond House yesterday morning and hasn’t come home.” I stopped myself before asking if Mr. Sawyer had seen his lordship.

Sawyer was blind, or as good as, though he navigated familiar surrounds with ease. The loss of sight had been gradual, and I’d never heard him grumble or complain about it. He carried a walking stick to Sunday services, but made no other concession to his disability.

“That one…” Sawyer took off a battered cap and slapped it against his skinny thigh. “He was here last evening, standing right in the very spot you occupy. You can hear that dog o’ his panting a mile off.”

Sawyer had heard the dog, while I would likely not have noticed that panting at all. “How do you know it was Lord Reardon and not, say, Squire Huber on the lookout for poachers?”

“Firstly, your exalted brother don’t mind an occasional hare ending up in a local goodwife’s stewpot, so nobody need venture onto Huber’s land in a lean week. Secondly, Huber don’t wear that prissy Hung-a-ree water. Thirdly, his lordship talks to that dog like it was his drinking companion, which it prob’ly is, given that most canines will accept a bowl of ale, though it does ’em no good.”

“Is there a fourthly?”

“Aye.” Sawyer beamed at me. “The young viscount swims like an otter and had hisself a dip in the pond before moonrise. He’s been swimming about this pond since he were a tadpole, and I know the commotion he makes. Took hisself a bath, using good lavender soap to get clean.”

Sawyer owned the water mill, there being some sort of kinship between sawmill families and grain mill families. His sons and grandsons ran the facility now, but the old man was still the authority of last resort. He could tell by the feel and scent of a handful of grain if it was ready for milling. The sound of the beaters working the threshing floor revealed more secrets to him, and he could divine exactly how long milled flour would last before turning.

I’d forgotten about Old Man Sawyer’s blindness, and he might have forgotten about it too.

“Did Viscount Reardon know you observed him?”

“Nah. Nobody sees the blind man, Master Julian. I know where the shadows fall, and I keep to ’em. The viscount waited in the trees until a good hour after the birds stopped singing, and that would be as dark as it gets this time of year before moonrise.”

How did Sawyer know where shadows fell? What phase the moon was in? Memory, perhaps, or some instinct honed in absolute darkness. That same degree of darkness, part of my captivity by the French, had driven me half mad.

“Finding him has become urgent.” For Eunice’s sake, if not for Clarissa’s.

“Then look ye to London, sir.”

“He went north when he left here?”

“He went no farther than the gates of this fine establishment, whereupon he did flag down the king’s mail. Ye cannot get a sizable dog onto the roof of a public coach without somebody resorting to profanity, and the hound was none too pleased either. Lord Reardon has gone up to Town, or at least traveled in that direction.”

Good news—Reardon’s mortal remains weren’t floating about in the quarry pond—and bad news. The British coaching system was the envy of all of Europe. From our corner of Sussex, Lord Reardon could be halfway to Scotland by now.

“Do you think anybody saw him board the stage?”

“He tarried here, before and after he used this pond as his personal bathing tub. Then he waited at the gate, had hisself a piss and a tot of brandy while he loitered, and yes, I can smell the difference. He didn’t want nobody to see him sneaking off after dark, that’s for sure, and it’s a safe bet he got what he wanted. Darkness sends most folk indoors, but it’s all the same to me.”

What an expansive view Sawyer took of his situation. “Your keen attention has saved me a lot of pointless bother, sir, though if you don’t mind, I’d like to bide here for a while and consider these developments.”

“That’s a new mill wheel your brother had built for us, and it turns so sweetly because your grandpa took a hand in fashioning a proper millrace. Thanks to him, we could switch from an undershot to an overshot wheel. The old duke said that would more than double the power, and he were right. You bide as long as you like, Master Julian.”

“Thank you.” I turned to my horse and loosened the girth.

“Heard you had a hard time of it with them Frenchies,” Sawyer said.

“Lord Harry had a worse time yet.”

“Lord Harry was allus tryin’ to charm his way outta corners when he shouldn’t oughta been in them corners in the first place. Not sayin’ he got what he deserved, but way I heard it, you went after him when he was bent on some foolishness.”

“Who told you that?”

“Never you mind who told me that or where I happened to overhear it when somebody thought I was napping. I known you and your brother, man and boy. Lord Harry were bullheaded. He were a lord, so we’re supposed to say he had determination. He were stubborn, and he’d fib his way out o’ a birching if he could, while you…”

What an extraordinary—and not entirely inaccurate—exegesis on my brother’s character. “While I?”

“We’re glad you’re home, and the duke is the gladdest of all. Don’t let him make you think otherwise. Sweet dreams.”

“Same to you.”

He shuffled away into the darkness, not so much as a fern bobbing in his wake.

I made a dry camp, using my saddle as a pillow and the saddle blanket for my pallet. The necessities I’d collected from Caldicott Hall hours ago included a few toiletries, clean socks, and underlinen. I tended to my ablutions as best I could and settled down to the lullaby of Atlas munching grass nearby.

The day had been a complete and exhausting waste in one sense. Lord Reardon had led me a dance, past women he’d treated ill, a potential father-in-law whose compassion for a peer’s heir was exhausted, through secluded woods, and thence to a deliberately furtive leave-taking.

Had I questioned Mr. Sawyer first, I’d have learned what I needed to know without exhausting myself in the miserable heat. I would not, though, have learned that Mrs. Probinger was furious with Lord Reardon. He’d turned a discreet romp into a means of ruining the lady’s good name. Eunice Huber might well be furious with his lordship as well—he’d done a few anatomical studies of her too—or she might simply fear her own reputation if he’d done a bunk.

Squire Huber, by contrast, had posited the notion that Reardon had decamped for his own good reasons—sibling pique, artistic pride, fear of matrimonial limitations. All plausible, and avoiding confrontation was consistent with what I knew of Reardon’s personality.

As these thoughts circled in my mind, lightning flickered overhead, though rain posed little threat now. The stage coaches followed predictable routes, and in the morning, my tracking would take on a different and less interesting nature.

I’d need to stop by Caldicott Hall and Valmond House before trailing Lord Reardon in the direction of London, and that brought another thought into my weary mind: I was hardly in fighting shape, but I was regaining some of the fitness I’d had on campaign. The day had left me exhausted, nonetheless.

Lord Reardon had walked a distance that I’d covered mostly on horseback, and he’d finished his day with a hearty swim.

That was not the behavior of a man with weak lungs. Clarissa was propagating a falsehood about her brother’s health, and that begged the question: What else was she lying about?