Page 11 of The Wordsworth Key (Regency Secrets #3)

Chapter Six

St Cuthbert’s Church, Levens Estate

T he late Viscount Sandys lay in state in St Cuthbert’s church.

The medieval walls, Tudor stained-glass windows, the Sandys banners to past lords and ladies marching along the pillars: all impressed on the younger son mourning his father that they were part of a tradition that would go on long after the son himself ceased to breathe. Was that a comfort or a burden?

The locals had been trickling in to pay their respects before the funeral on the morrow, but for that afternoon, Jacob had the chancel to himself.

He suspected the vicar, a new man that Jacob did not know well but who had been appointed by his father a year ago, had put the word out that he was to be given privacy.

He’d been sitting here for an hour, trying to come to grips with his loss. His meditations had been disturbed by a butterfly that fluttered against a high window, searching in vain for a way out. The battering wings sounded loud in the quietness– such a tiny thing to make so much noise.

Jacob got up from the family pew and went to the bier to look one last time at his father’s face before the coffin was closed.

He had a great depth of love for his sire, but now it seemed separate, frozen like a lake in winter.

He couldn’t chip through to reach the love and maybe, if he did, he would fall into an overwhelming onrush of emotion.

The ice might be an armour of protection to help him cope with his loss.

He shouldn’t try to crack it until he was ready– until he was back with Dora.

Yes, that would be the right time.

He allowed himself to look at his father analytically, for that too was part of his character, an aspect his father had encouraged.

A disciple of the Enlightenment, the viscount had liked men to be logical.

It wasn’t true that those who passed away looked like they were sleeping, not to a doctor who had seen more than his share of death.

They had no lift and fall of the ribcage to animate them, and their colour took on a greyish hue that was the opposite of lifelike.

Jacob could give the medical explanation for these appearances, but the plain truth was the essence of his father had fled.

‘ No motion has he now, no force; he neither hears nor sees, rolled round in earth’s diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees ,’ he murmured, appropriating one of Wordsworth’s Lucy poems for his father.

The man that lay there had given him and his siblings life, passing on the torch to the next generation, and it was the child’s duty, if life were kind, to see the parent on his way.

‘Thank you.’ He kissed his fingertips and pressed them to his father’s lips. ‘I’ll miss you.’

He heard a scuff on the stone floor behind him. Turning, he saw Evelina standing just within the entrance, a dark silhouette in her mourning clothes and poke bonnet. He beckoned her closer.

‘Come. You’re not disturbing me.’

She walked to him with her usual determined step, heels clicking. ‘You should’ve been there.’

‘I know. I explained?—’

She waved that away. ‘I’m not blaming you.

Arthur is going to be unbearable as viscount, isn’t he?

So obsessed with the family honour and propriety!

I’m relieved I’m escaping to be Lady Driffield.

’ She slipped her arm through his, her hand with its engagement ring starkly white on his black sleeve. ‘You always were his favourite.’

‘Father’s?’ Jacob couldn’t have been more surprised.

Many of his interactions with his father had been about how Jacob had disappointed him, or how if only Jacob settled down in a decent profession with an heiress as a wife, he could salvage something from the wreckage of his bad choices.

‘I thought I brought him nothing but pain.’

She snorted. ‘Don’t think you were the only one Father made to feel a failure.

He dismissed my composing; he told me to concentrate on the marriage mart.

It took me four seasons to land Lord Driffield.

Papa managed a faint “well done” in our last interview after Driffield asked him for my hand.

I imagine poor Felicity feels somewhat similarly.

Did you see how she glowed when Diana offered her a crumb of praise? ’

Had their father starved them of his approbation to such a damaging extent?

‘That’s sad.’

‘Isn’t it? I’ve been thinking a lot about it since he died and decided it’s because he was raised by a harsh father.’

‘Grandfather was terrifying,’ agreed Jacob.

She cocked her head. ‘I don’t remember him.’

‘He wasn’t one to notice infants.’

‘Raised liked that, I believe Papa felt we were in danger of being immodest and prideful if he admitted what he liked about us. That didn’t stop him singing your praises in absentia.

’ Her voice took on the gruff tone of their father.

‘ Jacob makes his own way, don’t you know.

Jacob is brave, facing the enemy in war, not hiding behind his privilege.

Jacob is the most intelligent of my children, sharp as a scalpel . ’

‘He never said anything like that to me!’

‘Of course not. I’m not surprised Arthur did what he did, not sending for you when he could’ve done so. He might not be conscious of his deeper motives, but I suspect he might be wielding some petty revenge against the golden boy.’

Jacob had been thinking his own bitter thoughts; it was helpful to hear someone else give voice to similar suspicions. He no longer felt so alone. ‘I thought I was the black sheep?’

Evelina shrugged. ‘Somehow in this family you can be both– a golden black sheep. Hurrah for the Sandys!’ She squeezed his arm.

‘But never forget that Papa did love us in his own way– and you especially. He wasn’t a bad father, just one who made a muddle when all he meant to do was keep us straight. ’

Moved by her words, Jacob hugged her to his side. ‘When did you get to be so wise, little one?’

She chuckled. ‘As soon as you left home. Then I had less competition.’

* * *

Much to his sister’s amusement, Jacob insisted on climbing on a pew as Evelina kept watch in order that he could rescue the red admiral butterfly, and then they walked home together, arriving shortly before the dinner bell.

With a kiss to his cheek, his sister dashed upstairs to dress, but Jacob followed more slowly, thinking about the odd configuration in his family that had stopped him knowing Evelina and Felicity so well as his brothers.

There was a ten-year gap between the surviving boys and the girls.

He hadn’t always been the youngest son. There had been little John who had died of scarlet fever at four, and a still-born daughter called Tabitha.

Both were buried in the same church where their father would be put to rest. He wondered if his interest in medicine had begun then.

He could remember with knife-sharp clarity his bewilderment that his playmate, John, had been there one day and in a crypt the next.

He’d been puzzled by the difference between life and death and anxious to know if there had been anything he could have done to rescue his brother from that brink.

As for the household, Evelina’s safe arrival had been a huge relief, a new start in the nursery, though Jacob was already at school when that happened.

His mother had been brave to keep trying.

It was amazing that women consented to take the risk upon themselves, he thought grimly.

Not that they always had a choice, of course, but he selfishly hoped Dora wouldn’t become with child– at least not for a long while.

He wished his sister too had some years free of childbearing after her wedding, and the best doctors when she did.

Perhaps he should have a word with her about preventatives and bodily rhythms before she married?

He didn’t think their mother would want to broach such an intimate subject, but it was a travesty that many married women of the upper classes were kept so ignorant of life and death matters.

How many of them might look forward to longer and fitter lives if they could space out their pregnancies to suit their health?

He was tying his cravat when a footman knocked on the door.

‘This came for you, sir.’ He held out a tray on which sat a letter with a London postmark.

‘Thank you.’ Jacob secured the neckerchief with a tie pin and took the letter.

He recognised Alex Smith’s handwriting. Alex had left the army under a cloud after he was revealed to have entrusted secret military plans to the wrong people in the Hellfire Club.

He was lucky to escape without a court martial.

Believing he deserved a second chance, Dora and Jacob had taken him on and he was proving a valuable asset.

‘Do you wish me to send up Mr Abbey?’ That was his eldest brother’s valet. Jacob had always disliked the man for his fussy ways.

‘No, thank you. Tell me, what do you think of this knot?’

Surprised to be asked, the footman smiled in delight before schooling his features. ‘Is that a mail coach knot?’

‘Correct.’

‘It looks very well, sir.’

‘Your name?’

‘Tom Moor, sir.’

‘Well, Tom, I’ll ring for you if I need assistance. If that is agreeable to you?’

‘Oh, yes, sir!’

Pleased to have cheered at least one person’s day in this household, Jacob dismissed him and turned to his letter.

Alex had sent a report of the last week’s dealings at their agency, the letter having followed Jacob from Kendal where he’d left word for correspondence to go to Levens.

The spice case had been settled– the cargo theft traced to a customs officer whose brother was a chef in a London hotel.

Both brothers had been detained. Alex went on to report the activities of the other three employees.

Goliath Renfrew, known as Ren, a performer in the midget line, and Susan Napper, an actress in her mature years, had found a runaway son in a gambling hell but not before he’d run up an eye-watering debt.

He had been turned back over to his furious papa.

As a minor, it was unlikely the debts were legal, but the issue of honour might see the family settling them in any case.

Hugo Ingles, another of their actor recruits, his speciality being the rotund characters such as Falstaff and Sir Toby, was still watching a young wife suspected of adultery but, so far, she had only shown a fascination with her modiste.

Unless that was an amorous liaison of the sapphic kind, that suspicious elderly husband was likely to find his answer delivered in a new wardrobe for the lady and a bill for him.

The last paragraph raised a case of quite a different sort. The family of a Cockermouth magistrate found murdered at Billingsgate had asked them to investigate the perverse circumstances as the Bow Street Runners were falling back on the ‘wrong place at the wrong time’ explanation. Alex wrote:

I was called to the scene by a friend in the River Police.

Sir Richard Leyburn had no known reason for being at the fish market that night.

His wife said he had gone to his club in St James.

She had been at a society event with her daughter and returned late.

She retired to her own bedroom without calling in on her husband, assuming he would be asleep, so she was unaware that he was missing until the runners arrived at her door.

The manner of his death is bizarre– first struck down from behind, strangled, then the curved part of a shepherd’s crook rammed into his throat.

As a final flourish, he was dumped into the river but fastened to the bank by a rope.

One concludes from that that the murderer intended for him to be found, but not immediately.

Likely he wanted to escape under the cover of darkness but expected dawn would bring his crime to light.

It sounds to me like the act of a person with a deep personal grudge, but someone that Leyburn might know well enough to meet in such a strange venue.

Alternatively, perhaps there is something symbolic about the crook and it was the act of a political extremist that attacked him for what he was– a magistrate– rather than who he was in private life.

Even though it is August, and most cabinet ministers have retired to the country, I can report that anti-government sentiment in Town is still running high in radical circles, enflamed rather than sobered by the assassination of Perceval.

I have told Lady Leyburn that I will do my best to find the killer, but I thought that you, being in the region, might be able to discover if he had any enemies in Cockermouth who conceivably followed him to London.

Cockermouth was fifty miles from Levens, thought Jacob, folding the letter.

It lay the other end of the Lakes and would take the best part of a day to ride there.

Still, it was true he and Dora were better placed to ask questions than Alex.

He would write to say that they would do what they could to aid the investigation.

A shepherd’s crook, though. What a strange object to take to a fish market.

A common enough implement in rural areas, you would turn heads parading through London with one unless you were driving sheep to Smithfield.

Someone somewhere would’ve noticed. If he were in town, that would be the thread he would start pulling. Should he instruct Alex to do so?

The dinner bell rang downstairs.

He shook his head at himself. Alex was no fool. He would think of this himself. If this agency was going to work, Jacob and Dora needed to trust their people and not try to manage their every move.

Tucking the letter into his travelling bags, he turned to go down to dinner.

But he might in his next missive ask, oh so casually, if anything came of the crook angle. Yes, that would be reasonable.