Page 16 of A Gentleman of Sinister Schemes (The Lord Julian Mysteries #8)

Chapter Sixteen

I greeted the most joyous day of the Christian liturgical year with profound despair. The ladies had to a woman taken trays in their rooms for breakfast. Dalhousie, after offering me a terse good morning, had enjoyed his eggs and toast from behind the ramparts of the financial pages.

A bit of chat wouldn’t have gone amiss, but the marquess was intent on banishing me from conversation even before banishing me from his acres.

To blazes with him, and I wished him the joy of his bachelorhood. Susanna would not harm a hair on his head, not on purpose. Hale, whole, and unmarried, he was her ticket to years and years of quiet dominance over the Dalhousie household.

While I had all but lost the woman who mattered most to me in the whole world.

“That’s the herb lady,” Atticus said, falling in step beside me in the churchyard. “Mrs. Wachter, with the purple reticule and purple ribbon on her bonnet.”

Why would I…? Oh right. “My thanks. You can take Atlas back to the Manor. I’ll walk.”

“Ride him back to the Manor? Myself?”

How well I knew that combination of glee and dread. Every boy wanted to ride like a Corinthian, but getting there took courage.

“He likes you. You have done your maiden voyage under supervision, and he knows where his bucket of oats awaits him. If you get lost, give him his head and keep him to the trot. He’ll get you home.” God knew, the horse’s sense of direction had been the lone safeguard between me and disaster often enough.

The distance back to the Manor by the lanes was perhaps a mile and a half. Atticus, I was sure, would ride halfway across Spain, through the Pyrenees, and off into darkest Peru before trotting into the stable yard.

“We’ll send out a searching party if you come a cropper,” I said, untying Atlas’s reins from the back of the Dalhousie carriage. “Do try to stay aboard, though. Nobody wants to spend Easter poking about the hedges, looking for an unseated jockey.”

“And I don’t want to miss the feast,” Atticus said as I adjusted the stirrups to fit his shorter legs and took the girth up two holes.

“No galloping, and canter only on flat, dry stretches of road. If Atlas tries to scamper off, you rein him in immediately. Otherwise, he learns that he can pull naughty tricks.”

“Right. Pull his head to my knee and make the poor blighter walk.”

Given his size, Atticus wasn’t capable of pulling a horse’s head to his knee, but one imparted the theory in aid of future skills.

“Up you go.” I tossed him into the saddle, though he wasn’t as toss-able as he’d been even a few months earlier. Good food, adequate rest, and time were working magic on his frame, and as quickly as he was gaining height, he was also putting on weight and muscle.

“C’mon, horse,” he said, nudging Atlas onto the lane before the church. “Get us home.” They left at a sedate walk—the beast had been standing for more than an hour, and Atticus knew better than to demand brisk activity immediately—and I watched them go with another increment of despair.

That dear, maddening, brave, and loyal boy would one day leave me. My stalwart steed would die. I could not bear either thought in my present frame of mind.

You might leave them first. Stop wallowing. The voice in my head was Harry’s. He should have been alive to enjoy this sunny spring morning, though to be honest, the day wasn’t as mild as it looked. The breeze was nippy. The sunshine watery. Mud puddles on the shady side of the churchyard had sported needles of ice before the service had begun.

“Mrs. Wachter.” I approached the lady, bowed, and tried for a genial smile. “Lord Julian Caldicott at your service. I do apologize for introducing myself, but I understand you are the herbalist in these surrounds. Might I put a few questions to you?”

Like any medical professional, she had an instinct for patient privacy. She was a woman who had likely been pretty since earliest childhood, with large brown eyes, flawless skin, and a kind smile. She would be pretty into old age, and strangers would doubtless be accosting her for medical advice then too.

“My lord, good morning. I met your young lady when she was out with Miss Susanna. One understands good wishes are in order.”

One wanted to crawl in a hole and whimper. “We are engaged to be married, and that is cause for rejoicing. I suppose you heard about my recent bout of dyspepsia?” I offered my arm as I posed the question, and being nobody’s fool, Mrs. Wachter allowed me to escort her to the edge of the nearby green.

The sun was stronger, away from the shade and granite edifice of the church, and the distance allowed me to take in the tableau of the churchyard after Easter services. People stood in small groups, a more colorful palette than would have been in evidence in the previous weeks. Lenten grays and browns had been exchanged for spring green and lavender, and bonnets were awash in new trimmings.

Hyperia in that moment stood apart, apparently content to survey the passing scene. She was so damned lovely, and so damned alone. I was no prize, but surely I was better than spinsterhood and solitude?

“What were your symptoms, my lord?” Mrs. Wachter asked gently.

I enumerated the indignities and left off the sheer terror that had filled me. Dysentery and its dread accomplices had killed as many soldiers as the French ever did, and had our regiment not fallen under the care of a particularly ferocious and knowledgeable medical volunteer—French himself, of all things—I might well have died in a noisome infirmary.

“That could have been food poisoning,” she said, brows knit. “I am inclined to think not, though, because nobody else fell ill with the same symptoms, not even belowstairs.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Miss Susanna has made it plain to the housekeeper that I am to be sent for at the first sign of illness among the staff. We have only dear Dr. Mattingly otherwise, and he is the old-fashioned sort. Strong spirits and bloodletting are his preferred remedies. If it’s good enough for the Regent himself… and so forth.”

“Strong spirits are still beyond me,” I said. “The malady affected bowels and belly both, the headache was ghastly, and yet, I was able to eat a few bites within hours.”

“Ah.” Her brows unknit. “Did you also have a foul taste in your mouth?”

“Exceedingly. Like brass and dirt with notes of sulfur.”

“You were dosed with a combination of remedies and at little risk of lasting harm. An emetic and a purge are almost never administered at the same time, though, unless the patient has already been poisoned. It’s a harrowing practice, usually reserved for emergencies.” She went off on a flight of Latin names and speculation involving weeds, flowers, bark, and heaven knew what else.

“Are the symptoms I described to you consistent with those experienced by Lord Dalhousie on the occasion of his bout of food poisoning?”

“Yes and no. Food poisoning usually follows a progression. Not all sufferers are fortunate enough to start with upheaval in the belly, though some do, and the bowels are involved only as the situation progresses, along with sweating, tremors, weakness, and vertigo.”

Her litany had me feeling queasy all over again. “Was the marquess dosed with a combination of remedies, as I was, or did he truly come across some tainted food?” At a family meal where nobody else fell ill.

“Miss Susanna and I weren’t sure. She asked me to support the food poisoning version of events, so I have, but the progression of symptoms, and their variety and number, weighed equally in either direction.”

Mrs. Wachter looked at me steadily while dancing around that diplomatic mud puddle. She’d kept her word to Miss Susanna and all but assured me that the same hand had precipitated both my malady and the marquess’s.

“Who has sufficient knowledge to deal in the concoction that I was served?”

She waved to some other ladies across the lane. “Anybody can read a pamphlet, my lord, and heaven knows reading a few pamphlets turns most of us into experts these days. Mrs. Northby is very competent with herbs. You could walk into her herbal, pluck a few clearly labeled tinctures from the shelves, and send the whole household to the privies for the afternoon. The same could probably be said for the vicarage, where we keep extra stores for families who can’t afford their own medicinals. The innkeeper’s wife keeps a good supply on hand, travel being notorious for precipitating illness.”

The vicar had not poisoned me, and I had yet to meet the innkeeper’s wife. Mrs. Northby’s stores might have been raided, but there again, Susanna had means, motive, and opportunity.

“Thank you, Mrs. Wachter. You have been most informative.”

“Drink good quantities of watered cider,” she said. “The treatment you endured deprives the body of fluids, and replenishing them can take days. Avoid tea or coffee, avoid wine and spirits.”

“Meadow tea?”

“A very good choice, if you stick to the mints and chamomile. Ginger and lemon are your friends. Nothing exotic. Another two or three days, and you’ll be right as a trivet.”

Such was her confidence in her own prognostication that I should have believed her, but as long as I was in Hyperia’s bad books, I would never be truly right.

I rode back to the Manor on the box with the coachman, a blessedly taciturn fellow. The thought of the holiday feast left me nigh bilious, but then I spotted Atticus and Atlas, trotting happily one field away along the bridle path parallel to the road.

He had a fine seat, that boy, and Atlas was enjoying the outing as well. I was pleased for them both, in the corner of my mind still functioning despite my own misery and despair.

If only regaining Hyperia’s favor was as simple a task as putting an eager boy on a willing horse and turning them loose on a chilly spring morning.

I nibbled at the Easter banquet, though to my abused palate, the ham was too salty, the potatoes needed more butter, and the Italian cream cake—I tried one bite—failed to impress. I took no wine with the meal, instead asking the footman for a pitcher of mint tea, which did not arrive at the table until the cream cake was already served.

Had the marquess’s displeasure with me become common knowledge belowstairs, or was the kitchen simply too busy with a major meal to accommodate an unusual request?

All around me, chat escalated to chatter. Lady Albert criticized half the parasols and bonnets on display in the churchyard. Susanna gently changed the subject to the bravery of the tulips pushing into bud among the daffodils.

The marchioness favored quoting Vicar’s sermon, which had emphasized the need for a thread of solemnity in all the most meaningful celebrations, for life on this earth was fleeting, et cetera and so forth. Hadn’t I told her much the same thing? Life was short. Don’t waste it on pride and appearances…

Hyperia was quiet, Lady Ophelia full of sly asides mostly for the benefit of the marquess. Tam arrived in the middle of the meal, much to the delight of the company, despite the fact that he’d traveled on the Sabbath to rejoin his family.

The marchioness predictably chided him for that, while everybody else was too pleased to see him to bother with high stickling. A visual exchange transpired between Dalhousie and Tamerlane once a place had been laid for the prodigal between Hyperia and Susanna.

Those glances were easy to translate: Talk later.

I dealt with my own postponed conversation by offering to escort Susanna to the parlor for the ladies’ session with the teapot. She accepted with good grace. Rather than accompany her directly to the family parlor, I steered her into the same alcove she’d once occupied with the marquess. She tolerated that detour with her usual good cheer as well.

“If I might be blunt,” I said, “I will ask you to attend my words closely. I do not mean to give offense. I mean to share my observations, which are as follows: You had the means to effect every bit of mischief the marquess and I have endured. You had opportunity in each case. You are the de facto lady of the manor, though you are so clever about it that neither Lady Albert nor the marchioness realizes what you’re about. I have called all of these factors to the marquess’s attention.”

She put a hand on my arm, concern in her eyes. “Lord Julian, are you well?”

“I am recovering. Dalhousie has turfed me out, effective the day after tomorrow, because I brought the foregoing to his attention. If I thought you wished him real harm, I’d never allow him to drum me out of the regiment. As it is, I will be pleased to leave the lot of you to your silly intrigues, but should any harm befall Dalhousie in future, I will speak up loudly regarding my suspicions.”

She was a talented actress, a skill that had been critical to her successes thus far. Her concern deepened to confusion then to dawning indignation. She snatched her hand from my sleeve.

“You accuse me of trying to harm Gordon?” She’d hit just the right note, halfway between disbelief and ire.

“I make no accusations. I make observations. Given enough time, others—the marchioness, Lady Albert—might make the same observations. In each instance where the marquess, his possessions, or his property has come to grief—or where I have come to grief in his stead—you have had the ability and knowledge needed to cause the trouble. As a result, the marquess has not gone to Town to take a bride, and he has informed his mother that he will not make the journey this year.

“He remains a bachelor,” I went on with quiet emphasis. “You remain on your shadow throne here at the Manor. I am assured by knowledgeable sources that many women would go to great lengths to preserve such a reign.”

A lesser woman would have begged me to understand, to keep silent, to please not damn her without all the facts.

She needn’t have bothered. I was no one to judge anybody. Susanna lacked great beauty, a vast fortune, and noble birth. She’d been shunted aside by Society and told to content herself with good works and humble service. Heaven forbid anybody should notice a spare, aging female cluttering up the assembly rooms.

Susanna had fashioned a better fate for herself and done what was necessary to safeguard her future. The result was a household running more smoothly than it would have otherwise, a neighborhood and a large estate running more smoothly.

Until recently.

“My lord, you have apparently mistaken the matter.” She spoke slowly and evenly, as if to a dimwit. “I would never allow harm to come to the marquess, never. He has been so kind, so generous, and tolerant, of me and my family. You cannot know how absurd your conclusions are.”

“Dalhousie had stronger language for me than that, you’ll be pleased to know. The marquess told me to pack my bags before I’d even completed my recitation. You and he are both warned, and what you do with the knowledge is your business. I’ll leave you to find your way to the family parlor.”

“You poured this spite into Gordon’s ear?”

I was abruptly tired, thirsty, and so homesick I ached with it. “I shared my observations with him, as I have shared them with you. He all but begged me to upend my life to sort out his situation here. I have done as he asked to the best of my ability.”

Into the bargain, I’d inadvertently offended my beloved, possibly past all bearing, and some of that frustration leaked into the rest of my diatribe.

“You and Dalhousie may assure each other that I have, indeed, lost what few wits I ever possessed—Society was right about me all along. If you please to go about discreetly assassinating what remains of my character, I will not be surprised. I could have done without the bellyache, though. You frightened my poor tiger witless, and the boy has been through enough.”

“I’ll send Miss West to you, my lord. Clearly, you are suffering some sort of megrim or a relapse of yesterday’s fits, or—”

“I do not have fits, and Miss West’s kind offices will not be necessary. I have nothing more to say.”

Susanna spared me one more annoyed, puzzled perusal, then ducked out of the alcove, leaving me face-to-face with Hyperia herself, who had likely heard at least the last, indignant pronouncement.

My intended shook her head when I would have launched into explanations. Hyperia then followed Susanna down the corridor and left me in the chilly alcove, sick with regret and unable to do a thing to put right what I had just put even more impossibly wrong.

By Monday afternoon, I was all but pacing the metes and bounds of my sitting room, ready to kick any random chair. Lady Ophelia found me in this state, upon which she was sure to comment.

“Where’s your shadow?” she asked, closing the door behind her.

“Atticus has taken Atlas for a hack in the company of the head groom. My skills as a riding instructor are no longer needed.” Surplus to requirements, again.

“Sit down, sir. Your unseemly pacing will give me a megrim.” Lady Ophelia took one wing chair. I tossed myself into the other.

“I gather your ladyship finds my theories outlandish?”

“Not outlandish enough to dismiss them out of hand. Susanna will be deposed when Dalhousie takes a bride, no question about that. She is clever, determined, and in her way, formidable.”

Much like Hyperia, who shared with Susanna an ability to keep her strengths from notice. “Thank you for that much.” Atticus in a towering pout could not have sounded more aggrieved than I did.

“Julian, whatever is going on here, you are no longer welcome. We are no longer welcome. For the sake of your pride, please resign yourself to a dignified exit tomorrow. Dalhousie will attempt to be cordial, and you must humor him.”

“I would like to humor him to the tune of best out of three falls.”

She arranged the elegant drape of her skirts. “I am torn between rejoicing to see you displaying some temper and dismay over the nature of your anger. You were incapable of anger when you came home from Waterloo. All the wrongs you had suffered, all the harm done to you, and you could muster no outrage. That worried me terribly.”

My apathy should have worried me , but at the time, I’d been so depleted, so far gone into melancholy… “A rough patch, I agree, and I am sorry you were given cause to fret over me. I will fret over Dalhousie, and that annoys me. I’ve put him wise to Susanna’s machinations, and his response is to question my sanity. Susanna took the same tack.”

“You are doubly insulted, then. Dalhousie scoffed at your keen insight and scoffed at you personally.”

I bestirred myself to inspect her ladyship and found no smugness in her expression. “Perceptive of you, Godmama. If they had simply dismantled my conclusions with contravening facts, if they had posited alternative explanations or produced alibis for Susanna… but instead they attacked me . While that underscores the accuracy of my deductions, it also gives offense.”

“Touches a nerve. I’m the same way when anybody criticizes me as a grandmother or parent. Very sensitive about my flaws, defensive even.”

Godmama exuding gracious regret bothered me sufficiently that I shifted the topic. “Disprove my theory, Godmama. If Susanna did not orchestrate this whole production for the sake of her personal ambitions, then what is going on here?”

I raised the question in part to avoid discussions of touched nerves, sensitivities, and shortcomings, but also because in the normal course, Hyperia would have challenged my conclusions and tested all the counterarguments with me. We excelled at that sort of adversarial cooperation, and I usually delighted in it.

“The London fire puzzles me,” Lady Ophelia said, shifting in her chair.

I passed her a pillow, which she stuffed behind her back. “Puzzles you how?”

“How did Susanna bring that about, Julian? She’s the hand silently guiding the staff here, but I doubt she enjoys the same status in Town. She’s not there nearly as much as the marchioness is. Short of a besotted footman, I don’t see how she could have brought about the actual deed.”

“Might Tam have aided her?” I asked.

“He is fond of Susanna, true, but I suspect he is loyal to Dalhousie first, to the extent he bothers with quaint notions like loyalty. Arson is in some regards taken more seriously than murder. One might land an unfortunate blow in the course of a heated moment and thus take a life. A jury would likely sentence such a one to transportation. Setting a fire, by contrast, takes premeditation and the willingness to devastate an entire city.”

In the privacy of my thoughts, I admitted that Susanna, while determined, had no cause for desperation of that magnitude.

“Tam,” I said, “might have assured her the whole matter could be safely managed, which it was.” Even I was growing weary of pointing fingers at Tam, though.

“What does Tamerlane gain from conspiring to commit arson, Julian? If I were a betting woman, I’d say he truly does not want to become the marquess, nor would he like visiting that fate on his son. He has means, a place of his own, and private pursuits, however frivolous.”

My ire was dissipating, in part because Godmama had put her finger on the disrespect fueling my anger. I’d accomplished my assigned mission, despite more than a few challenges. My thanks was a dishonorable discharge and a rift with Hyperia.

“When I was ill the other day,” I said, “was Susanna at all concerned?”

“She was out making calls with Lady Albert for most of Saturday afternoon. Word of your suffering took time to filter up from the servants’ hall, but I wouldn’t say anybody found the situation unduly alarming—anybody save myself, Hyperia, and the boy. You should not have served Atticus such a fright, Julian.”

“I should not have been poisoned.” Though the poisoning suggested I had been poking too near the truth, which should have bolstered my confidence in Susanna’s culpability.

“Given the harrowing events of your past, young man, that poison could have had a much more dire effect on your constitution than it had on Dalhousie’s. You are lucky to be alive, and that’s another reason why I find it hard to suspect Susanna, or Susanna alone, of wreaking all this havoc. Sooner or later, Dalhousie will marry, and for that matter, Susanna herself is hardly ancient, destitute, and hideous. Why settle for unacknowledged contributions here with a pair of bickering besoms when she might be some younger son’s doted-upon wife?”

Exactly the sort of point Hyperia would have raised that I could not have come up with in a thousand years of pondering and ruminating.

“She’s liked and respected here,” I murmured. “You’re suggesting she could be loved and respected in her own household.” Was there a greater prize in all of life? “Godmama, you cast doubt on my theories despite yourself.” Doubt on the strength of the motive involved, and upon that nail, I hung my whole kit bag of evidence.

“Good,” she said, patting my knee. “I have distracted you from your injured dignity. Now I will distract you further by very nearly violating a confidence.”

I dragged my focus away from the possibility that I’d leaped to a conclusion justified by the facts, but not by the motives involved.

“You have my entire attention, Godmama.”

“Matters between you and Hyperia are troubled.”

“We are engaged. That remains untroubled, to the best of my knowledge.”

Her ladyship rose and took the seat at the table by the window. “Young people can be so dramatic. When Hyperia pretends to read, she forgets to turn pages. She stares at nothing for twenty minutes, then reaches for the bell-pull even as an untouched tea tray sits before her. When I catch her in her distraction, she pretends she was merely stretching, then she finally turns a page.”

Oh, my poor beloved. “I disappointed Hyperia when I did not summon her to tend me in my illness. She says I do not trust her. Trust comes into it, I grant you, but my dignity deserves some consideration as well.”

“Have you told her that?”

“We are in neutral corners for the nonce. She has assured me we will depart from the Manor with every semblance of civility.” And then—heaven help me—would the gloves come off? Would her engagement ring come off?

I recalled all the times Hyperia had asked me what I was thinking, to prod me to share observations and opinions on the present situation. I considered her insights and instincts vital to any investigation, but what partner had to constantly importune her supposed equal to simply confer with her?

Her ladyship tapped a nail on the table. “You confirm my decision to raise old news.”

Oh glory, not the past again. Not personal history and demons and regrets. Please not that, not now.

Though deflecting Lady Ophelia from a fixed objective was nigh impossible. “Say on, Godmama.”

“Do you recall when I dragooned you into escorting me to the Makepeace house party all those months ago?”

She’d stormed into my gloomy town house like the wrath of Athena and demanded that I brave bright sunshine, Society’s sneers, and England’s dubious roads to accompany her into the Kentish countryside.

“I recall the occasion, not exactly fondly.”

“Did it occur to you, Julian, that I have been traveling about unescorted for more than half my life?”

What was she getting at? “You made a case for demanding my services. I am a gentleman, and I executed the duties assigned adequately.” I’d also stayed on at the house party long enough to untangle a serious plot to defraud one of Lady Ophelia’s widowed friends—and to defame my hapless self into the bargain, when my reputation was already in tatters.

“Julian, I well knew the state you were in. Your housekeeper kept me informed, and I passed along relevant summaries to Arthur. We feared for you, and—”

“And that justified invading my privacy?” Any fellow raised with a nosy older brother and a gaggle of enterprising sisters learned to value his privacy dearly, but my inquiry barely qualified as indignant.

They’d been right to be worried about me. I had been waiting for death and calling days of unending despair and ennui a gradual recovery in case anybody asked—which they hadn’t bothered to do.

“You were press-ganged into putting in an appearance at the Makepeace house party because Hyperia demanded it of me. She could not intrude on your privacy when you were determined to keep the shades down and the knocker buried in the garden, but she knew she could drag you into the figurative light by appealing to your honorable nature.”

Perry had insisted that I bide for a few days at Makepeace so as not to appear to shun her, my former almost-intended. The ploy had worked. I’d become entangled in the ongoing intrigue and been unwilling to leave until I’d found the culprit responsible.

“Why tell me this now?” That Hyperia had resorted to subterfuge to aid me all those months ago… that she’d had to resort to subterfuge served to lower my already abysmal mood.

“Doubt that the stars are made of fire, you dunderhead, but never doubt that Hyperia West loves you. Make it possible for her to preserve her dignity in your present battle of hearts, or you shall regret the consequences for the rest of your life. So will she, and you do not want that on your conscience, young man. Trust me, you do not.”

Godmama rose, bent to kiss my cheek, and left me sitting thunderstruck in my wing chair. She’d hit my self-respect broadside and knocked me into a useful shift in perspective. My difficulty with Hyperia was a puzzle to solve, and I excelled at solving puzzles. Convince Perry that I loved her and respected her, guard her dignity as fiercely as I guarded my own, and build a foundation for mutual trust.

I remained in that chair, staring at nothing in the grand tradition and contemplating not despair, not defeat, not even pride, but rather, hope.