Page 24 of The Wordsworth Key (Regency Secrets #3)

The boats started their search in the dripping grey dawn.

Spiders’ webs sagged on the wild rose bushes and the grass bent under the weight of the dew.

Mist rose from the ground, making the lake murky but leaving the hilltops clear.

The volunteers pushed their little vessels off the beach, wading in the water until it grew deep enough not to ground when the passengers got in.

They started in a line from Elter Holme, sounding the water with long poles.

Every available boat was deployed. News had spread quickly about the disaster and Barton’s friends had rushed to offer their assistance.

Jacob had manoeuvred matters so that he could share a boat with Moss.

The mysterious man from the Alien Office demonstrated that he was adept at the oars.

With his dark looks and flashing black eyes, body hunched over the oars in the mist, it would be easy to picture him as a debonair smuggler or pirate in another setting.

He was certainly more useful than Knotte who was moping on the shore where the clothes had been left, and Wright who had already lost a grappling hook in the water and was now being assisted to retrieve it.

Fletcher, Langhorne and Crawford were out in another boat but appeared to be spending more time going in circles than searching.

Jacob lifted the pole from his latest sounding. The water ran down his sleeve to his elbow. The tactile memory reminded him of punting in Cambridge many years ago, a golden day on the River Cam so different from this grim one.

‘Did you know Barton from college?’ he asked the oarsman.

‘Not me, doctor. That’s Langhorne and Knotte. The rest of us became friends later.’

‘Take her out another two yards.’ Jacob pushed down with the pole, half fearing, half hoping to meet with an obstruction. ‘How well do you know Mr Barton?’

‘A recent acquaintance. He’s a capital fellow.’ That sounded like the stock praise a man would give a gentleman about whom he thought very little. ‘You?’

‘We have mutual friends in the Wordsworths.’

‘You’ve been away, I hear.’

Moss had been checking up on him, had he?

‘That’s correct.’

‘You were in Bedlam when Sir Fletcher Vane was killed.’

Cards were being laid on the table. ‘Unwillingly, yes, I was. Did you know him?’

‘I used to work under him. A great man.’

Was he? Jacob had heartily to despise the Illuminati leader. Was Moss one of his followers? If so, he’d bear close watching. ‘You were a friend of Vane’s?’

‘No!’ Moss laughed at the thought. It sounded genuine. ‘Sir Fletcher Vane being friends with the likes of me? My origins are far too humble for that. I’m from Newcastle. My people are mining engineers.’

‘It’s a long way from London. How did you get to work for the government?’

‘Usual way.’

‘Meaning?’

‘I was in the navy. Someone spotted my potential. They recommended me.’

Jacob’s attention was taken from this very interesting line of conversation by feeling something under his pole. ‘I think…’ He stirred it and it broke apart. Nothing but waterweed. ‘False alarm.’

‘Want to move on?’

‘Yes, another two yards.’ He lowered the pole.

‘Who are you investigating, Dr Sandys?’ The question was abrupt when it came, so much so that he almost dropped his pole.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I know what you and Miss Fitz-Pennington do. Why is it that so many people end up dead around you?’

No point denying it when they advertised their services discreetly in London. ‘I think you have that wrong. The deaths prompt our investigation, not the other way round.’

‘Is that true?’ Moss gestured to the pole Jacob was using to probe. ‘Barton was alive the day before yesterday, he met Miss Fitz-Pennington and now he’s dead.’

‘We don’t know that.’

‘Splitting hairs. We all think he’s dead– and you came to us asking about him yesterday afternoon.’

‘We weren’t investigating him, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Ah. Then who are you investigating?’

‘Who are you?’

Moss pressed his lips together.

‘I thought so,’ said Jacob. ‘You’ve been sent here by your political masters.’

‘That is information for those who need to know it– and you aren’t on the list.’

‘But that doesn’t stop me wondering. The Lakes are not near any strategic sites of importance.

There are no military encampments or ports of note.

So that leaves people. You can’t be interested in the literary gentlemen of this area, surely?

They may write political tracts for the public, but they are hardly incendiary in tone. ’

‘They were in the past.’

‘True.’ Jacob remembered Wordsworth joking about him and Coleridge being pursued around the Quantocks years ago by a man who overheard them talking about Spy Nosey– or Spinoza– the joke implying that the authorities were getting their garters in a knot over nothing.

And yet.

And yet, the lost poem charted a period when Wordsworth was a revolutionary and some of his friends and acquaintances had been tried for treason.

He stayed true to the cause of the French Revolution long after others had abandoned it.

His autobiographical poem recalled– and Jacob thought this could be no invention– how he sat the only dissenter in a church service, unable to welcome British victories when war broke out in 1793.

His views would have seen him executed if he’d published them then.

‘You can’t think Mr Wordsworth guilty of anything like that now?’

‘I never said we were interested in the older generation.’

‘But the younger generation? You mean those attracted to the leaders of the nineties?’

Moss said nothing, which Jacob took as agreement. ‘There has to be more than a vague suspicion to bring you here.’

Moss dipped the oars and shifted the boat another two yards further from the shore and said: ‘Would the murder of a magistrate from Cockermouth be sufficient cause?’

* * *

The search continued until midday and then was given up for the time being.

‘It’s a grisly fact but decomposition means the body will rise to the surface in its own time,’ said Jacob, over a pint and luncheon with Barton’s friends at the Red Lion.

With a grimace, Knotte pushed his plate away.

‘If it’s there,’ added Moss, chewing his bread and ham with the appetite of a man who missed breakfast.

‘Do you think he ran away?’ asked Wright, grasping at the glimmer of hope.

‘It’s possible. Is he in debt? Does he have a guilty conscience about something?’ asked Moss. ‘Had he been dabbling in any dangerous behaviour?’

Jacob let the government agent do his work. He’d not mentioned to Moss that his business had been engaged by Sir Richard Leyburn’s family to investigate that death, not sure yet if he trusted Moss. Like the man said, the ‘need to know’ rule was not lightly broken.

‘Behaviour? Like what?’ asked Langhorne aggressively.

‘I don’t know, unsavoury associates, maybe?’ mused Moss.

‘Other than us?’ sneered Langhorne. ‘No. And if you knew the first thing about Barton, you’d know he wasn’t the sort to cut and run.’

‘I don’t know him– that’s the problem. I’m only asking what others are thinking.’ Moss glanced over at Jacob. ‘I meant no offence.’

‘Was he a ladies’ man?’ asked Jacob.

Langhorne snorted. ‘No!’

‘I ask because I’ve heard cases where the locals will run off a visitor when they think he’s been too familiar with a girl from the vale.’

‘You mean like they did to Hazlitt?’ said Knotte.

That had been exactly what Jacob was thinking.

‘The writer?’ asked Langhorne, frowning. ‘When was this?’

‘When I was a boy, almost ten years ago,’ said Knotte, eyes brightening as his knowledge was called upon.

He’d been saying how useless he felt when his services weren’t required in the search of the lake.

‘He was staying with Mr Coleridge– I think he was sketching the poets or something of the like. The local story is that he assaulted a girl– shamed her in public– and was driven out by her angry friends and relatives. Hazlitt said it was all a misunderstanding.’

Inside Jacob’s mind, he could hear Dora saying, ‘He would claim that, wouldn’t he?’

‘Wordsworth and Coleridge tried to dampen down the tale so the rumours didn’t follow him to London,’ continued Knotte, ‘but he’s no hero in these parts, I can tell you.’

‘Then I’ll say that you can put that theory away.’ Langhorne mopped up his fried egg with a crust of bread. ‘Barton is– was– God, it’s so difficult to talk about him when we don’t know what’s happened! In any case, he’s not interested in the ladies and never has been.’

Message received, thought Jacob. That left the possibility that one of these men might be closer to Barton than the others. Jealousy was a very good motive for Dora’s foul play theory. Disappointed love, that would not be socially recognised, would be another, if he ended his life by his own hand.

‘Well, I for one am not going to think he is dead until we know for certain,’ said Knotte, glaring at Langhorne.

The others muttered their agreement without a great deal of conviction.

* * *

It was only on the ride back to his cottage, his brothers trotting ahead side by side, him trailing behind, that Jacob returned to the idea that one of that circle might be a traitor to his country.

Moss had seemed to barely have noticed the missing man, but that could be the misdirect of an experienced spy.

Perhaps Moss had stolen the poem, thinking he might find something incriminating in Barton’s correspondence?

Something had happened the night before to tip Barton off to Moss’s purpose in the area and either he killed himself, or staged his suicide, because he felt the hunt closing in?

Avoiding a charge of treason during a time of war was ample motive for taking such a dramatic step.

The penalty was still to be hanged, drawn and quartered.

That scenario made Barton the troublemaker, the one whose writings the government would fear.

Three things were clear. They needed to find out more about their vanished client, what if any connection there was to the Leyburn case, and where on earth the poem had got to.