Page 14 of A Gentleman of Sinister Schemes (The Lord Julian Mysteries #8)

Chapter Fourteen

Supper was a tense affair, the Dandridge gift for pleasant conversation taxed to the utmost. Lady Ophelia probed delicately regarding the reticence of the village women, Lady Dalhousie sniffed and pushed her food about on her plate, and Lady Albert tossed out the occasional barb toward me, the marchioness, and even Dalhousie.

The marquess was uncharacteristically silent, and even Susanna seemed to have run out of cheerful small talk. Hyperia had remarked on the weather, the prospect of Easter bonnets on display at divine services, and the pleasure of lengthening hours of sunshine. When those gambits failed to engender much conversation, Perry busied herself with her ham and potatoes.

We’d made it as far as the sweet, a vanilla mousse topped with raspberry sauce, when the first mortar shell exploded across the table.

I greeted the opening barrage with a mixture of relief and disappointment.

“Tamerlane is likely even now planning more sabotage,” Lady Dalhousie muttered, taking a martial grip of her dessert spoon. “Why he was left in Town unsupervised when we know what mischief he is capable of defies all understanding.”

“The real question,” Lady Albert countered, “is why you are left unsupervised, my lady. You would do anything to see my son’s good name blighted.”

Dalhousie looked not to his mother or Lady Albert, but to me.

“Bickering will solve nothing,” I said. “Either Lady Dalhousie or Tamerlane could have arranged for that fire to be set, though I doubt either of them was involved.”

“Enlighten us as to your reasoning,” Lady Ophelia said. “Please.”

“To make that fire happen from a distance would require colluding with the criminal element local to Town. Neither Tam nor the marchioness would risk the dodgy loyalties of such an accomplice. Her ladyship is too much of a snob, and Tamerlane is too aware that any such arrangement would set him up to be blackmailed for the rest of his life. Conspiracy to commit arson is a hanging felony, after all.”

“Now we discuss capital crimes at table,” the marchioness said, jabbing her spoon into her mousse. “See what a refining influence Lord Julian has on otherwise decent company.”

By all the gracious cherubim, she was firing at random. “You raised the topic of arson at the town house, madam. The rest of us were struggling along with Easter bonnets and daffodils.”

“Then who set that fire?” Dalhousie asked. “Why set it at all if the purpose was simply to make my quarters uninhabitable for a few weeks?”

“Whom do you plan to court when you arrive in Town?” Hyperia asked, holding a spoonful of mousse before her. “Somebody wants you kept in the shires, my lord. If that party is a rival for a particular heiress or diamond, they have motive and means where all your troubles are concerned.”

I gazed across the table with something like awe. Hyperia had, in the space of one question, changed the topic, posited a credible if far-fetched new theory to explain the whole situation, and opened up all manner of new possibilities regarding a potential villain.

Or villainess.

“In the alternative,” I said, “a young lady who has set her sights on the Dalhousie coronet might rather keep the marquess from Mayfair now, the better to charm him at some house party later in the year. So who are your candidates for the next Marchioness of Dalhousie, my lord?”

Dalhousie pushed his serving of mousse aside. “One does not discuss such a matter at table.”

“Lady Venus Twillinger would do,” the marchioness said earnestly. “I’ve spoken to you of her many times, Dalhousie. Decent settlements, papa is a marquess, brothers sound enough, and they’re good Dorset stock. The family seat is a mere day’s travel from here. Lady Annamarie DeHaven is similarly situated, and her father is a duke. Her maternal side boasts an earldom, and while she’s a bit hard of hearing, she has a fine disposition and is one of eleven, nine of whom are boys.”

Susanna was staring hard at her lap, though whether she was hiding laughter or horror I could not tell.

“Lady Harmony Weltzer is only an earl’s daughter,” the marchioness went on a little desperately, “but quite well dowered and very graceful on the dance floor. She is said to be accomplished at the pianoforte, and she has six brothers.”

“Your ladyship,” Dalhousie began. “Mama—”

“Her father is merely a viscount,” the marchioness barreled on, “but Miss Honoraria Venable is exceedingly handsome and will inherit a fortune. Only three brothers, though her father was one of five sons. She is said not to put on airs, which is always a fine—”

“Mama, for the love of all that is dignified, stop . I will make my own choice in my own time, and while your comments are appreciated, the matter is one for me and me alone—”

“My comments? My comments ? Sir, I’ll have you know I have spent years—far, far too many years —gathering this information and choosing these possibilities. I have bored myself to tears collecting the gossip at a hundred at-homes. I have danced with gouty generals and lost hands of whist to prattling aunties. The lengths I have gone to on your behalf would make a more dutiful son—”

“Excuse me,” I said, rising. “The exertions of the day seem to be catching up with me. Dalhousie, I can join you for a quick brandy in the library, but thereafter, I must seek an ignominiously early bedtime. Ladies, I bid you good night.”

Hyperia’s gaze hid a touch of humor. Lady Ophelia was cooly approving. Miss Susanna was engaged in a thorough examination of her mousse, and Lady Albert looked intrigued. Gentlemen did not plead fatigue. Gentlemen did not flee to the library following supper.

Gentlemen also did not sit by and idly watch as a peer of the realm was reduced by his very own mother to the status of stud colt on the auction block.

“Brandy would suit.” The marquess rose as well, and so did his mama.

“Scurry away, will you? I point out again, Dalhousie, that Lord Julian Caldicott has been a bad influence. You refuse to do your duty by the title. You will cling to this enclosure scheme no matter what it costs us in terms of standing with our neighbors. You will make a laughingstock of my efforts to find you a suitable bride, and he ,”—she gave a haughty lift of her chin in my direction—“abets you at every turn. I demand that you send him back to from whence he came.”

Lady Ophelia abruptly rose. “I have a headache, Dahlia Dandridge, and you had best acquire one, too, in the next thirty seconds, lest I tell you what I really think of women who parade around in stolen coronets and then presume to insult their more honorable betters. Ladies, gentlemen, good evening. I will see myself upstairs.”

She swept out on a tide of feminine dignity, off doubtless to draft a report to my mother. Lady Dalhousie tried for comparable bravado with her own departure, but one insulted a ducal heir repeatedly at peril to one’s social future. If Lady Dalhousie’s cause was seeing her son well matched, she’d just crossed the line that might ensure Dalhousie was forced to offer for the vicar’s tittering pride and joy.

Susanna stood. “I’d best go to her.” She’d made a statement that was nonetheless a question.

Dalhousie shook his head. “Let her consider the consequences of her actions for once. Lord Julian, shall we to the library? Ladies, you will excuse us, and my apologies for Mama’s difficult mood. She is frustrated with me, and for good reason. We must accord her some latitude. Please do enjoy the mousse. It’s quite good.”

He had not tasted his. I snatched up my spoon and barely touched serving and again bowed good evening to the women.

Dalhousie ambled along the corridor to the library. The house was cold, but lacked the frigidity of deepest winter. In the library, fire screens kept one end of the room almost comfortable and afforded a sense of privacy as well.

“She’s growing worse,” Dalhousie said, going straight to the sideboard. “You mustn’t blame her. Before you came upon us earlier, I’d told her I did not see how I could conduct any sort of courtship under the present circumstances. When I reached the part about skipping the Season altogether this year, she flew into a rage—for her.”

“A vast silence,” I hazarded, “followed by comments such as ‘do as you think best,’ laced with scorn and mortal affront? No brandy for me.” I took a spoonful of sweet, rich vanilla mousse.

Dalhousie tossed back one drink and poured himself another. “Something like that. References to my late father’s legacy reverting to the crown—what little Tam would leave unplundered—and the Dalhousie name living on as the butt of very bad jokes. She has it in her head that because she stole Papa from Lady Albert, she will be punished by an absence of grandchildren.”

Dalhousie had not worked that out for himself. “Is that Susanna’s reasoning?”

“The theory fits the facts, does it not?” He prowled to the grouping at the warmer end of the room, took one wing chair, and gestured me into the other. “Mama is wearing me out, my lord, but I honestly do not see myself succeeding at any courtship when I have no suitable London quarters, somebody for whatever reasons wants me dwelling at the Manor, and every lady Mama finds acceptable seems not to have a brain in her head.”

He finished half his brandy and eyed the fire. “I apologize. I ought not to be insulting the ladies. They likely think I am an arrogant prig, and sometimes I am.”

“Go easy on the spirits, Dalhousie. You will say something you truly regret, in company where an apology will not set the matter right. Your mother is concerned that you… cannot have children.”

He peered at me by the flickering firelight and gestured with one hand. “Cannot?”

I finished my mousse and wished I could ask for seconds. “She thinks you are attracted exclusively to other men, and thus she is haunted by all manner of potential for scandal. A wife—any wife—would scotch the worst of the talk.” Not all of it, of course. Arthur’s devoted partner, Osgood Banter, had a lovely son to whom Banter was an excellent father figure.

Only as Lady Dalhousie had desperately enumerated her list of possible brides had the source of her panic come clear to me.

“Mama thinks me… unnatural? Oh, that is rich. That is… of all the ironies, of all the celestial jokes in poor taste. I like some men, I like some women, but when it comes to desire , I am as prosaically inclined as any son of Albion is supposed to be. Mama has yielded to dire fancies once too often, but I fear you have put your finger on some of the explanation for her ridiculous zeal.”

What I observed between Arthur and Banter was far more natural than many a contrived Society union.

“You made your mother a promise, Dalhousie. Said you would take a bride this year, and that means going up to Town and doing the pretty.”

“No, it does not. When Town empties out, as it will in a few short weeks, the house parties begin, then the shooting parties, and finally a few intrepid souls will host holiday parties. Mama won’t see it like that. It’s Mayfair or be damned, to her. She will have her enclosure, won’t she? One marquess tucked behind the walls of the breeding shed of her choice. My head is pounding.”

Dalhousie was in the philosophical phase of inchoate inebriation, and that suited my purposes well enough for the present.

“I have begun reviewing your ledgers and correspondence, something I should have undertaken sooner.”

“You’re reading my mail? How boring for you. The ledgers are a little livelier, thanks to Mama’s occasional flights of decoration. Her sitting room is inviolable, but the rest of the house is subject to regular refurbishment. If I marry, the whole lot will be done all over again to my bride’s taste. The merchants will sing odes to my marchioness.”

If he married, not when . I beheld a man still fighting his fate—or his dear mama. “Lay off the brandy, my lord. You’ve told your mother you are declining to spend the Season in Town, and there’s an end to it. Let that be known, back away from your enclosure project, and your enemy might well withdraw to winter quarters as well.”

Or spring quarters.

“You should withdraw,” Dalhousie said, taking his empty glass to the sideboard. “If I capitulate to Mama to the extent of sending you on your way, she will do me the courtesy of a temporary cease-fire. I might have to permit her a house party here this summer. One shudders. Heiresses popping out of linen closets and originals dragging me into the bushes. Tam will find it hilarious.”

Tam, as the marquess’s heir, would find himself dragged into a few hedges, too, if he wasn’t careful.

“I have not identified the author of your trouble,” I said, “and I am reluctant to leave without concluding that mission.” Reluctant, but I could not insist on Dalhousie’s hospitality indefinitely. “I don’t believe anybody is trying to kill you at present.”

But had they been prior to my arrival? I could not speak as confidently to that question, which raised the specter of worse trouble following my departure.

“I am off to commune further with your stewards’ reports,” I said. “You should seek your bed, Dalhousie. Her ladyship will appear at the breakfast table, ready to renew her siege, and you must be on your mettle if the walls of your familial authority are to withstand her sappers and artillery.”

“The walls of my bachelorhood, you mean. What say you bide here for another week, Caldicott? Mama will like that you’ve set a date for your departure, and you can occupy yourself in some quiet corner with the ledgers. Tam will be back from Town by then, and he has always been one to guard my back.”

Tam, in the opinion of the marchioness, had with lethal intent shot at that same back.

“I will consider your suggestion,” I replied, though, in fact, Dalhousie had proffered a polite order to vacate, “and consult with the ladies. One does not surprise them with short notice of a change of venue.”

Dalhousie would not argue with that point, not when he could instead pour himself a third brandy. He needed a wife, the poor sod. A lady to listen to his troubles and entrust her own to him in return. A friend, lover, and fellow conspirator against life’s many vicissitudes.

Why the hell hadn’t he found himself a marchioness years ago?

On that idle question, I made for the door, only to be greeted by Susanna, clad in a shawl and night-robe, in the corridor.

“One wants a book of soothing prose before bedtime,” she said, smiling self-consciously. She was covered from neck to ankles, but I was not family, and she was a lady. “The soothing-er the better after that performance at supper.”

“Dalhousie is still brooding. Perhaps you can encourage him to brood his way up to bed. He’ll have a very sore head in the morning at the rate he’s going.”

“Oh dear. Gordie hasn’t Tam’s tolerance for spirits. Lady Dalhousie would drive a saint to drink, though. Forget I said that.”

She dipped a curtsey, which in her night-robe came across as both an effective bit of propriety and a trifle humorous. I bowed in the same ambiguous manner.

“What are you two conspiring about?” Dalhousie called from the sideboard. “Suze, you must light me to my room, lest I take a notion to enlist in the Royal Navy. Join me in a nightcap?”

I left them to the brandy and brooding and made my way to the study. I built up the fire only to realize even before I took the chair behind Dalhousie’s desk that I had reached the end of my tether. I could stare intently at ledgers for the next two hours, but I would see nothing and absorb even less.

Dalhousie was kicking me out. The whole semi-tipsy performance in the library might well have been his elaborate version of commanding me to leave. Sideways, pleasant, unconfrontational, and somewhat ignorable, but not entirely so.

I was being drummed out of the regiment for dereliction of duty and had only seven days to see the verdict overturned. Not at all how I’d envisioned my Hampshire project concluding.

I longed to return to the Hall, but on my terms and with answers in hand to all pertinent questions regarding the troubles at Dalhousie Manor.

“Dalhousie stood up with the DeHaven diamond at least three times last year,” Lady Ophelia said as we stepped out onto the back terrace. “No waltzes, but it was her first Season. The Venable heiress was wafting about Paris over the winter and crossed paths with Dalhousie there any number of times. She’s facing her third Season, but not for want of offers. She’s said to have attracted the notice of some German princeling who owns two castles.”

The morning sun was nigh blinding, at least to my weakened eyes. I unfolded my blue-tinted spectacles and donned them, though too late to spare myself an initial stab of agony echoed by a hint of queasiness.

Hyperia and her ladyship waited while I put on my eyeglasses. “And Lady Venus?” I asked.

“Out of action last year because her mother stuck her spoon in the wall, poor lady. Consumption. Saw her youngest daughter launched the previous year, expired, and in so doing, increased that daughter’s already hefty settlements.”

We struck out across the terrace, bound for the crushed-shell walkways of the garden below.

“What do you ladies suggest in terms of further initiatives? I cannot very well go to Town and inquire of these women if they’ve been trying to nobble their bachelor of choice. I honestly find that notion far-fetched.” Keep Dalhousie in the shires, and… what? Waylay him on some dawn hack and spirit him off to Scotland for a wedding over the anvil? Wait to bag him like an oversized grouse at a shooting party?

I was growing fanciful in my frustration, also slightly bilious. Too much time spent with accounts, receipts, and unanswered questions.

“I agree,” Hyperia said, slipping her hand around my arm. “The notion of a young lady wreaking havoc on Dalhousie’s courtship itinerary is far-fetched, but some baron’s second son knocking Dalhousie out of the running is more credible. All of the women Lady Dalhousie mentioned have enormous settlements.”

“How do you know that?” Society was nosy, of course, but Hyperia was certain of her facts.

“I do not have enormous settlements, and thus the younger, wealthier women have all been cordial to me. I barely know Lady Annamarie, but one hears things in the retiring room.”

Did they envy Hyperia now because she was engaged to a ducal heir, or pity her because that heir was my dodgy and disgraced self? I wanted to put the question to her, but felt I hadn’t the right. He who longed to leave Spain in the past and all that.

“Who is Dalhousie’s competition among the bachelors?” I asked as we passed a bed of daffodils making a cheerful splash against cold, damp ground. “Who must marry one of those ladies come fire, flood, or furious creditors?”

“Half the bachelors in Mayfair will be panting after the women on the marchioness’s list,” Lady Ophelia opined as she descended into the garden, “and most of those fellows won’t even be fortune hunters.”

“We should look at the misters and Honorables,” Hyperia said. “The courtesy lords, heirs, and peers would see themselves as Dalhousie’s equals.”

“Earls and below deserve a closer look,” Lady Ophelia countered. “They are not Dalhousie’s equal, and few of them can match his wealth.”

I let the ladies discuss bachelors of sufficient desperation, standing, and guile to merit suspicion, but I feared that Hyperia’s theory of a jealous rival suitor had little to recommend it. True, Dalhousie had only recently declared his intention to take a bride, and matchmaking in Mayfair was a blood sport, or the nearest thing to it.

But the logistics of pinning Dalhousie down at his family seat, wrecking his personal quarters in Town, tampering with a saddle… too complicated, too much the work of a familial intimate. And that business with the tainted dessert, too risky on the one hand—dosing poison was notoriously inexact—and too expert, in that it required knowing the specific organization of evening meals under another man’s roof and his favorite sweet.

Hyperia led me down the side of the garden that faced east, where the sun had been warming the garden wall for several hours.

“Jules, how are you faring with the marquess’s ledgers and letters?”

I’d spent the previous four hours in that purgatory, which might explain my increasingly unhappy digestion.

“The ledgers are spotless and current almost to the hour. Nothing out of the ordinary that I can see. If somebody entered the purchase of a new chandelier in the ledger, then a receipt for that item is to be found in a file arranged by date. Tidy to a fault.”

“One’s books cannot be tidy to a fault.” Lady Ophelia brushed a gloved hand over a patch of sheltered rosemary, the scent striking me as acrid rather than pleasing. “Unless one is embezzling?”

“Are we back to Tam in the dock?” Hyperia asked, moving us along to a patch of daffodils. “He’s been fiddling the books somehow, or having a steward fiddle them, and any solicitors examining books prior to marital-settlement negotiations will find the fiddling?”

She plucked a yellow bloom and affixed it to my lapel. The scent of the daffodil should have been soothing, but the fragrance did not appeal. Too cloying, too heavy.

“Embezzlement is another hanging felony,” Lady Ophelia noted. “Julian, dear, are you well? You look like you’ve just caught wind of rotten meat.”

“If there’s an embezzler in this house,” I said, ignoring Godmama’s question, “Dalhousie would not bring criminal charges. Not against Tam, not for dipping an occasional hand into the family till. Dalhousie cannot embezzle from himself, so let’s set aside…”

I sank onto a cold, hard stone bench, my guts abruptly turning traitor on me. Breakfast had been merely buttered toast. I’d had no appetite for more, and the toast had not sat well. I’d attributed my initial lack of appetite to frustration, but frustration did not incline a man to cast up his accounts.

“Ladies, if you will excuse me. I need some privacy.”

“You need a physician,” Lady Ophelia said, putting the back of her bare hand to my forehead. “No fever, but you are pale, my lord.”

“Come,” Hyperia said, taking Lady Ophelia firmly by the arm. “Julian has said he needs privacy. We have been given our marching orders.”

Hyperia apparently grasped what I truly needed, and while a footman’s assistance might soon be involved, some mandatory indelicacy had become imperative. When the ladies had regained the back terrace, I ducked behind the nearest Greek statue, stuck a finger down my throat, and left the paltry remains of my breakfast in the dirt at Apollo’s feet. I used my boot to cover the mess and felt marginally better.

Only marginally. I managed to get myself to the house, where I accepted the aid of a footman when faced with the main staircase.

“Lady Ophelia and Miss West are solely to be trusted to oversee preparation and delivery of any rations from the kitchen,” I said as the door to my apartment loomed miles and leagues away down the corridor. “Atticus will attend me.”

“The lad is in the servants’ hall, milord. I’ll send him up straightaway. Got into some bad eggs, did you?”

“That must be it, but let’s not worry Cook or the rest of the household over a passing bellyache.”

He nodded worriedly, and that told me if nothing else had that my symptoms mirrored the marquess’s bout with poison. Whatever Dalhousie had consumed hadn’t killed him, but he’d taken the poison on top of a full stomach and eaten only a small portion of the tainted item.

I had eaten every bite of my toast on an empty stomach and, worse, swilled an entire pot of unpleasantly strong tea. Bloody hell.

“Shall we send for the quack, milord?” the footman asked. “Mrs. Wachter would be faster, and she knows her remedies back to the Flood.”

“Neither, but for God’s sake, please fetch the boy.”

The footman left me at my apartment door, which I managed to pass through and closed behind me before collapsing into the nearest wing chair. My belly was empty but threatening to heave anyway. My head pounded, my skin felt both hot and clammy, and my bowels were threatening to join the riot.

I pulled off my boots, got myself into silk pajama trousers and a dressing gown, and prepared to endure the siege to end all sieges. Dysentery hadn’t killed me, despite making a good try. A thorough purging wasn’t about to succeed where the unacknowledged scourge of Wellington’s army had failed.

Atticus arrived. I gave him orders to admit no one under any circumstances and embarked on a course of suffering fit to torment the damned. Three hours later, every window of my apartment was open, the fires were roaring, and the enemy was in retreat.

“Stop fretting,” I said to Atticus from the depths of a chair by the hearth. “I’ll live.”

“I might not. You were sicker than any dog I’ve seen.”

Dry heaves, the shakes, the mother of all headaches, a rotten taste in my mouth that yet lingered… I twitched at the blanket covering my legs, and a thought occurred to me.

“You ate some of my toast this morning, Atticus. Did you have any of my tea?”

The boy had the grace to look self-conscious. “Took my tea from Lady Ophelia’s leftovers. She has chocolate in the morning, but the kitchen sends her up a whole pot of tea anyway. Likes it strong, and so do I.”

“Who knows that you snitch from her tray?”

“Nobody. I don’t snitch from yours neither. You order me not to let good food go to waste.”

The sass was reassuring, suggesting that Atticus wasn’t as worried about me as he had been, and thus I need not be as worried about him.

“My question is investigative in nature, young man. A dose of poison that I could shake off might be enough to put period to your earthly adventure. Any servant carrying a tray back down to the kitchen can be expected to not let good food go to waste. Was poisoning you an acceptable risk to my enemy, or were you preserved from harm through happenstance?”

Atticus closed the sitting room windows and remained gazing out at the garden’s afternoon shadows.

“You always send your teapot back empty,” he said. “Down the lot, or as near as. That I’ve had a cuppa from the pot likely wouldn’t occur to anybody. They aren’t high sticklers here, but they watch their steps, especially with the ladyships.”

Poison was usually considered a woman’s weapon. Had I said that myself, or was I repeating one of Hyperia’s observations?

“I need to sleep.” I folded up the blanket and rose more steadily than I had for the past three hours. “I also need to consume a substantial quantity of clear liquid. Please let the kitchen know that Miss West has ordered a pot of green tea with some more ginger biscuits, then bring the tray here.”

The ginger biscuits I’d already consumed had quelled the riot more effectively than any tisane could have. Miraculous inventions, ginger biscuits.

“Aye, guv. I think one of them simmering lavender sachets might be in order too.”

The boy sought to drive the last of the foul miasma from the rooms. “A sound notion for once I’ve quit the apartment. Let the ladies know that enemy forces have been routed and remind the kitchen that Miss West takes her tea with cream—not milk—and honey. I intend to be back on my feet by supper.”

“Dicked in the nob, but then, poison can do that too.” Atticus decamped, and I was left a short period of privacy to make my way to the bedroom. I left the windows open—Dalhousie burned coal, and the coal smoke offended my heightened senses—ran the warmer over the sheets, and tucked myself up against the pillows of my bed.

I slept in the usual fashion—half upright—for the sake of my nascent recovery and also because I was as inclined to do some pondering between catnaps.

I would puzzle over who had poisoned my morning teapot later, though Lady Dalhousie was the most likely suspect. She wanted me gone and had no idea that Dalhousie had already scheduled my congé. As the literal lady of the manor, she should know her way around the herbal, and fashioning an effective purge was a simple enough challenge.

My thoughts drifted to the Dalhousie ledgers. They balanced to the penny. They were astonishingly current. Seed, plow blades, lengths of iron for shoeing the horses, barrels by the dozen for the estate ale, fresh linens, boot black, and much more was all tidily cataloged, and yet… something wasn’t right.

I could find nothing wrong, but something was most definitely amiss with Dalhousie’s books. Would I need to bet my life to figure out exactly what?