Page 36 of A Waltz on the Wild Side (The Wild Wynchesters #6)
Viv had never in her life felt weak at the sight of blood… until her mother was killed in front of her. The renewed panic and terror caused by the sight of her cousin’s coerced thumbprint cut her off at the knees.
Jacob wrapped his free arm about her waist to give her strength. “Philippa, where’s Tommy?”
“On the Badcock case.” Philippa’s face was pale.
“As soon as she’s back home, we need her on this. Graham, summon the others. Chloe and Faircliffe might be at home preparing remarks for tonight’s parliamentary session—”
“No, they’re out handling the Sadler affair.
I just rang for—” Graham sprinted over to meet the liveried footman just entering the room.
“Norbert, wonderful. Please go to this address posthaste, and don’t return without the duke and duchess.
Let them know it is an emergency. Send someone else to fetch Stephen and Elizabeth. There’s no time to waste.”
The footman’s eyes widened, but he hurried off to do as asked without hesitation or question.
Marjorie reached for Adrian’s hand. “I can’t believe Quentin’s disappearance and the Horace hoax are the same case.”
“ Why are they the same case?” Philippa said in bafflement. “Nobody has been Horace since Tommy was courting me, years ago. Even the dullest of villains cannot possibly have mistaken Quentin for her.”
“Who is Horace?” Viv asked. “How could Quentin be confused with someone who doesn’t exist?”
Jacob explained, “Before our adoptive father, Baron Vanderbean, passed away, he created a fictitious heir called Horace Wynchester, who has now become the current Baron Vanderbean. Or would be, if there was one.” He dropped to his knees before the unlit fireplace. “I’ll find the original letter.”
“Wait… Horace Wynchester is Baron Vanderbean?” Viv repeated in horror. “Then how didn’t you know Quentin had been kidnapped? We’ve been wasting time following other cases while my adolescent cousin—”
“Wasting time!” Marjorie threw her hands up. “Every case is a priority, and there are more of them than there are of us. Even a middling effort to juggle all the open threads simultaneously is unsustainable—”
“Mixed metaphor,” murmured Philippa. “But accurate.”
“You know what isn’t accurate?” Viv drew a folded letter from her bodice with shaking fingers. “Your false claim that Quentin was safe .”
“When Graham’s informant interviewed Newt—” Jacob began.
“Why didn’t Graham go himself?” Viv demanded.
“Because he’s assigned to fifty other cases! Why didn’t you go yourself, Miss I-Can-Deduce-the-Truth-in-One-Glance?”
Viv’s teeth clicked shut. She’d almost snapped that she would have gone if she’d known the address, but there was no doubt the Wynchesters would have escorted her straight to Newt’s door if she’d bothered to ask where he lived.
Jacob was right. If Viv’s great talent was her ability to see right through people, then the only explanation for her oversight was that she subconsciously couldn’t handle the possibility of Quentin’s blithe assurances of his safety being horribly wrong .
With him gone, Viv had been sliding close to a state of debilitating panic. She’d really, really needed it to be true that Quentin was all right.
That was her excuse. But what was theirs?
“You never told me Baron Vanderbean had been kidnapped!”
“Why would we?” Marjorie said, baffled. “There is no Baron Vanderbean.”
“The rest of the world doesn’t know that. That’s what makes it a good disguise. I told you, Quentin sometimes used that identity.”
“You didn’t tell me that,” Jacob burst out. “Pertinent information I could have used from the first day!”
“I did tell you,” she protested. “I said he was dressed as a baron earlier in the day, though his friends assured me that mission had ended. I didn’t know the ruse was relevant, but you …”
Jacob made a pained expression and scrubbed his face with his hand.
Viv poked his chest. “We had an entire conversation about Quentin’s disguises, and how his secret society longs to be exactly like all of you.
A club whose members you exhaustively interviewed.
The same day I came for help, those lads must have given you every detail of the Baron Vanderbean mission and more.
You lot would’ve known Baron Vanderbean was Horace Wynchester! ”
“We… didn’t actually… interview his friends that day.” Graham didn’t meet her eyes. “I do recall you mentioning the clothing he’d been wearing the day of his disappearance—”
“She did,” said Marjorie. “I included the blue frock coat and waistcoat in my sketch. Vivian said Quentin thought it made him look Balcovian, though his clothing didn’t once make me think of Baron Vanderbean. Tommy never wore anything like that when she was pretending to be Horace, either.”
Viv nodded. “That’s essentially what Kuni said, when I mentioned Quentin’s antics to her, too. Graham, you were right there when we discussed this! Your wife said a real Balcovian baron would wear pink.”
Between the club members swearing Quentin’s mission was long over, and the costume itself being laughably inaccurate, Viv had no reason to think anyone believed her young cousin to be a baron.
If only she’d known about the kidnapping!
“None of us were thinking about the hoax,” said Adrian. “We’d already dismissed it as nonsense well before we met you. We were juggling so many real cases, there was no room left in our brains for extraneous details.”
Viv’s volume rose. “Extraneous?”
Even if they at first believed the kidnapping letter was a hoax, one of the Wynchesters should have connected the two together.
Her voice shook with fury. “You all knew Quentin had been pretending to be your imaginary brother! I also mentioned his disguise to Tommy and Philippa when we were talking about costumes. I reminded them my cousin often dressed like a Wynchester, and said to go ask Graham for the particulars. Although Quentin’s club members are too loyal to him to tell me anything, they wouldn’t hesitate to give the mighty Wynchesters every detail of Quentin’s mission.
Where he went, what he was wearing, what he was trying to accomplish… ”
Jacob and Graham exchanged stricken expressions. Viv’s heart stopped. “You didn’t ask his friends for the information I didn’t have about the mission Quentin had been undertaking before he disappeared?”
“We didn’t interview them at all,” Graham mumbled. “You had already done so, and seemed to think no one but Newt had any notion of where Quentin might be—”
“Didn’t interview them?” she spluttered in disbelief.
“We didn’t have time! I sent informants to watch their houses and report back on any activity, but the only bodies I could spare for that were children too young to be conducting interviews. As soon as we clear a few more cases, I planned to send a more experienced team…”
Viv was going to burst into tears. Or go on a murderous rampage. Or shatter into a million heartsick pieces.
Jacob reached for her hand.
She jerked out of reach. “Don’t touch me. I want nothing to do with any of you, except for you to finally take Quentin’s disappearance seriously. Find him. Please.”
“We will,” said Jacob.
She no longer believed him. He’d promised her before. “I should never have trusted you to follow through. I would have dragged your entire family by the ear to each of those lads’ houses if it had occurred to me for one second that you wouldn’t interview the best witnesses we have.”
If the Wynchesters had interviewed the club members as promised, the entire secret society would have stationed itself in the siblings’ sitting room to aid in the hunt for Quentin-as-Horace. There wouldn’t be a bloody fingerprint on a ransom note.
“Don’t panic,” said Marjorie. “We have clues. The latest letter, for one. Blast, I wish I’d seen who brought it. Did you get a good look at the messenger?”
Jacob shook his head. “I’m so sorry. I wasn’t paying any attention to… If I’d known the kidnapping wasn’t a hoax, I would have been on the watch for further missives.”
Graham winced in agreement. “We could have stationed someone to follow that footman back to his employer. Vivian, we’re all sorry. We all deeply regret our lack of adequate resources, and can assure you that from this moment—”
“Five foot eleven,” she blurted.
He blinked at her. “What?”
“The messenger. White, freckled, large mole on his right cheek, light brown hair, dark brown eyes,” she rattled off.
“Thirteen stone, give or take half a pound. Gap-toothed. Left-handed. Slightly myopic. Old cricket injury in his knee. Not an employee of the post office. Livery in shades of mustard and brown. White wig in need of fresh curls.”
“Got it.” Marjorie grabbed her sketchbook and pencils. Her drawing came to life as Viv recounted as many details as she could recall.
“With luck, the kidnapper used his own man, or at least a traceable messenger service,” said Philippa.
“Old cricket injury in his knee?” Adrian repeated. “How the devil can you know—”
“Parse the magic later,” interrupted Graham as he scribbled notes. “What about you, Jacob? What did you see?”
“Average… footman?” Jacob guessed. “Honestly, I scarcely glanced his way. I was helping Vivian down from my horse because we’d ridden in together—”
“I heard two horses,” Graham said. “The other one belonged to the messenger?”
Jacob’s face cleared. “Cleveland Bay. Older stallion, with a primarily reddish-brown coat. Black lower legs, mane, and tail. Sixteen hands high, fourteen hundred pounds. Early signs of arthritis in his hind legs. Likely a retired coach horse.”
“Hackney carriage?” Graham asked.
Jacob shook his head. “Too expensive for ordinary hackney drivers, and too big and slow for fashionable bucks racing light phaetons. Think stage-coaches, Royal Mail, and the wealthiest families who can afford fine horses for their coach-and-four.”
“I’ll sketch the horse, too,” said Marjorie.
“I’ll make copies of everything,” said Adrian.
Graham nodded. “I’ll distribute these throughout London as fast as you can make them.”