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 gather Miss Stadler doesn’t share her family’s opinion of you?” 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.
“Miss Stadler finds me acceptable,” MacNamara said, addressing 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 does enjoy my company. We are by no means formally engaged, but she has given me leave to ask for 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 am—six foot and 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 way.
“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.”
“Why?” 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.
“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 leg to heal, I hadn’t many other 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 for me 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.”
Good heavens. The matter had just become a great deal more complicated…
“Your expression is priceless, Caldicott. As if you’ve just walked into Almack’s in 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, MacNamara 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 heart God ever bestowed on a mortal soul. 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 were 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 your for 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.”
Cuirassiers were heavy, armored cavalrymen. Death on big, fit horses. 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 twenty miles 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 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 was 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 four days. If she’s been carted off to one of those private asylums, that could be four 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 housekeeper knows every remedy in the herbal and she is no stranger to grumpy men. Your 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.
“She sounds like Hannah, and I do enjoy a woman who knows her own mind. Do we dress for dinner?”
“We do not. Country hours, to bed by ten of the clock. I’ll see you at supper. Borrow any book in the library for as long as you please.”
I left him pretending to peruse the biographies, though I knew for a certainty that the instant I was out of sight, MacNamara would be back in the chair, his foot once again propped on a pillow, the brandy gone in a trice.