Page 153 of The Ladies Least Likely
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
T he unrest was growing. Ren sensed it as he made his way along High Street, the main thoroughfare of Shepton Mallet and the ancient heart of the town.
At the intersection of London Street, the main road that crossed High Street, the commerce was not the usual tone of busy wayfarers bringing goods from Charlton to be sent up to Bowlish, where the grand houses of wealthy clothiers were rising along the quiet banks of the River Sheppey.
There was a furtive tone to the huddled discussions held outside the shops and between waggoners and carters in the street, and the conversations that were not furtive were loud and vehement.
Every so often a group of men in the drabs and leathers of laborers marched up High Street toward Bunker’s Hill, where Ren gathered that some assembly of the outraged was taking place.
The men bore no weapons that he could see, nor did they carry their workman’s tools, but angry men needed no other weapon than their feet and fists.
Restlessness ran high, and the slightest spark could tip volatile tempers toward violence.
Ren hoped the feverish air to the village would not upset Harriette’s mother’s funeral procession. Harriette didn’t need that, on top of everything else.
His throat tightened at the thought of Harriette, and a burning coal lodged in his chest. She’d been so stunned to find Ivy Cottage in mourning; she truly had not acknowledged the possibility that illness could carry her mother off.
Ren knew how easy it was to deny the incomprehensible, to avoid looking the unfathomable in the eye.
His own mother, the Countess of Renwick, refused to acknowledge that the face paint her daughter wore—the paint she, the countess, had put on her practically from birth—could be poisoning her.
She came up with every other excuse. Amalie had delicate sensibilities.
The move from the quiet environs of Bolton to the bustle and smoke of London had upset her frail constitution.
She was sickly to begin with, formed wrong in the womb—only look how she had turned out, missing part of an arm—and no better could be expected of her.
It had been Harriette—practical, sensible, determined Harriette—who had listened to Amalie, investigated her complaint, and devised a solution.
In a matter of days, she had put her finger on what had been ailing his sister for years.
And she had stepped in to fix it with no accusation, no tears or histrionics, simply a clear jar of paint that contained no known toxins, and the promise to make and send more when she could.
Even though her marriage would take her away from England. From London. From him.
He owed Harriette Smythe his life. She had saved him, knowingly or not, the summer she rose like a small avenging angel from the banks of the River Sheppey and fired her slingshot at the village boys menacing him.
She had saved him from despair, the deadliest of ancient sins.
She had kept him from hating himself to the point of self-destruction; instead, she gave him hope that at some point in his life, certain rare and wonderful people would see him as a person and not a cripple.
She had tended his wounds when his tutor beat him and weaved him worlds of magic and fey things, where transformation was possible, where suffering was rewarded, where strange marks were the sign of divine favor rather than holy wrath.
She had saved him again when he returned to London, afraid he would be devoured by his father’s world.
Harriette with her secondhand gowns, too-big shoes, and cheerful unconventionality had pulled him out of the stifling air of the haut ton and made him see its absurdities.
In composing those sketches she had given him permission to unleash something wild in himself, parts that did not wish to be tamed by tradition and expectation and the centuries-old burden of a noble name and estate.
In painting him as a man in his prime, strong, splendid, even beautiful, she had given him a vision of himself that he could believe in. A vision that would be his center and his root of sanity when the rest of the world tried to define him on its terms.
She had saved him, and then she had saved his sister.
That had moved her place in his heart to somewhere deeper.
No longer was she simply the fantasy he’d nurtured all those years away—the fantasy, first, of a companion who accepted him utterly, who snorted at his jokes and shared her thoughts with him.
After that had followed the fantasy, as he matured, of a woman his match sexually, who responded to him with passion and welcome.
Then Harriette Smythe had tumbled through his window in a crimson gown and the magnificent flesh, with those magnificent breasts, and he would have promised her anything, done anything she asked, to keep her interest. It was abject and unmanly, perhaps, but it was the truth.
He hadn’t hesitated to manufacture an excuse to come with her to Shepton Mallet and spin out the time with her as long as possible.
He was very afraid he might helplessly book travel to Prussia and follow her when her cousin came to take her away.
He seemed unable to resist the dictates of this simple, clear imperative that burned away everything else before it.
He loved Harriette Smythe. He wanted to be with Harriette Smythe.
And if he could not be with her, as her chosen companion, then he would be as near as possible in the world to where she was, and count himself happy to be so.
He loved her, and now her world had been overturned, gutted of the one thing that had been her reference point and the one constant in her life.
She was orphaned; she was not who she had always thought she was; and in a few short months, perhaps weeks, she would belong to a man she didn’t know, who would have complete control over her duchy, her person, her future, her life.
Her expression in the parlor where her mother was laid out had carried shades of a woman at sea, unable to believe she could be drowning but about to go under for the last time.
If only there were something he could do. Anything.
These thoughts raced through him with many of the same sensations he’d experienced when Dottore Scarpa operated on his leg: like he’d been cut open and things inside were being moved about to unaccustomed places. The pain was enough to make him wonder if he were about to pass out.
“So, from the best we can ascertain, my steward here left town possibly as much as a month ago, apparently taking the money for the household accounts, and possibly many of the household g-goods along with him,” Ren said.
He was pleased with how easily the words came out with a little care and foresight, especially as he was furious.
He sat in a tiny, uncomfortable chair in the office of his solicitor, Mssr. Golledge, which was an equally tiny room tucked above a haberdasher’s shop just off High Street across from the Shambles and the Market Cross.
It was Mssr. Golledge’s politely worded letter that had given Ren the excuse to visit to Shepton Mallet and sort his business affairs out in person.
The smaller man cleared his throat. He was roughly the size of a sparrow, his tidy suit the size of a child’s, his wig rather too large for his oval head, and a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles perched on his nose. Ren felt like an oversized lummox, filling the room.
“I cannot be precise about what he may or may not have taken,” Mssr. Golledge said in his thin, reedy voice.
“But it appears that he stopped authorizing payments on household accounts in the middle of June, and he has not been available since then to deal with any business pertaining to the Manor, including, ahem, some necessary repairs.”
Ren clamped his lips together. He’d approached the Manor earlier to find the front door locked.
So was the side gate set into the infamous Blinder Wall that his grandfather had erected to keep his neighbors and the prying eyes of the town from surveying his property and making judgments about his use of it.
With no porter to let him in, no steward to provide passage, and no key of his own, Ren had come to throw himself on the mercy of Mssr. Golledge.
“But you say de-deliveries have continued. Who paid for them?”
“The manager of your cloth factory covered those payments, your lordship, at the request of your housekeeper, Mrs. Oram. But when he refused to pay Mrs. Oram’s salary, that, I believe, is when Mrs. Oram departed the household.
Since then, it appears there has been no coming or going from the house.
Not that anyone can, er, really say, given the nature of the—ahem—decorative wall. ”
Decorative. That was rich. His maternal grandfather had been a notoriously difficult man, the miserly kind who would squeeze blood from a stone if he could.
He had built his fortune by forcing fugitive artisans from Belgium and Huguenot silk makers, forced out of Catholic France, to make gorgeous fabrics for a pittance of wages, then collected enormous profits on their sale because English law protected English-made silks through enormous taxes on imports.
Styling himself William Cotterell, Esq., he had gained large enough influence, and a large enough dowry for his eldest daughter, to attract the eye of an earl’s heir, and after that his arrogance was unlimited.
Constance Cotterell, Countess of Renwick, had returned to Shepton Mallet precisely once after she had been married from the Manor House, and that was to tell her detested son that he might finally go to school.
“Where might I find Mrs. Oram, do you suppose?” Ren asked with a heavy sigh, taking up his cane. More walking, and his leg was still stiff from the days of travel. But he was not yet reduced to hiring a chair.