October 7th, 1808
London
Tom climbed the steps to Lucas’s rooms. It was darker than it had been last night, the moon obscured by clouds.
This time, when he knocked on the door, it opened.
“Master Tom?” The manservant’s expression transformed to one of delight. “You’re back!”
“Hello, Smollet. Lucas in?”
“He’s dining with Mr. Howick tonight, sir. He’ll be so sorry to have missed you. Are you in town long?”
“A few weeks,” Tom said, and then hesitated. “I came round last night. Didn’t Lucas tell you?”
“No. Oh— The port wine on the mantelpiece!”
“Best Portuguese.”
“I wondered where it had come from. No, sir, he didn’t mention your visit.”
“He was rather castaway.”
Smollet grimaced fleetingly.
Tom looked at the man—stocky and blunt-faced, in his early forties. He’d been with Lucas since Lucas had left the nursery. “May I have a word with you?”
“With me?” Smollet’s eyebrows lifted fractionally. “Of course, sir. Come in.”
Tom stepped inside. He removed his hat and gloves, gave Smollet his greatcoat, and walked through into the sitting room. Candles glowed in the sconces and a fire burned briskly in the grate.
He glanced at the bedroom door. It was closed.
Tom sat in the armchair Lucas had slouched in last night. A book sat on the table alongside, a ribbon neatly marking Lucas’s place.
Smollet came to stand before him. “Sir?”
Tom nodded at the second armchair. “Have a seat, man.”
Smollet obeyed. “Sir?” he asked again.
“Tell me how Lucas is.”
“He’s very well, sir.”
“No.” Tom waved this answer aside. “How is he? Truthfully.”
Smollet hesitated, and then said, “Better than he was.”
Tom eyed the man. Smollet was the perfect gentleman’s gentleman. Efficient, discreet, sober—and loyal. That was the rub: Smollet’s loyalty. He wouldn’t gossip about the man he’d dressed since childhood. “Lucas was so drunk last night he couldn’t stand up.” He wrestled with his own loyalty, and then said, “He’d been crying.”
Smollet gave another fleeting grimace, and looked away.
“For God’s sake, man. This isn’t tattlemongering! I need to know how he is so I can help him.”
Smollet glanced back at him.
“You said he’s better now than he was, so tell me: how was he?”
Smollet pressed his lips together, as if holding words back, and then sighed. “He’s been pretty bad, Master Tom.”
“How bad?”
Smollet looked down at his hands. He smoothed one cuff, then the other. “He’s never been a gabster. Not like Miss Julia.”
Tom waited.
Smollet sighed again and looked up, meeting his eyes. “He stopped talking after she died. He’d answer if you spoke to him, but otherwise . . . He’d go days without saying a word.”
“I saw him in June,” Tom said, disturbed. A few hours only, snatched before embarking for Portugal. “He was talking then.”
“In public, yes,” Smollet said, and lapsed into silence again. But it wasn’t the silence of a man who’d said all he wanted to say. The manservant’s lips were compressed, his brow faintly knotted, his hands gripped together in his lap.
Wrestling with his loyalty, Tom diagnosed. “Lucas stopped talking,” he prompted. “What else?”
Smollet’s lips pressed more tightly together, and then he said, “Laudanum.”
“Laudanum?”
“We was down in Cornwall—that estate he inherited last year . . .”
Tom nodded encouragingly. “I know of it. Pendarve.”
“He wasn’t sleeping more’n an hour or two a night, and he was getting worn to the bone, and he started taking laudanum and I thought it was a good thing—because at least it helped him sleep!—but then he started taking more, and he got so he was like a sleepwalker and . . . I didn’t know what to do.”
Tom listened with alarm. “Is he taking that much laudanum now?” Had Lucas’s confusion last night been due to more than just cognac?
“No, sir.” Smollet hesitated, and then said, “I threw it all out.”
Tom lifted his eyebrows. “Threw it out?”
Smollet nodded. “Master Lucas was . . . not pleased.”
Tom sat back in the armchair and eyed Smollet with respect. “I imagine he wasn’t.”
“He turned me off.”
Tom blinked. Lucas was as devoted to Smollet as Smollet was to him. “He what?”
“I told him as how Miss Julia didn’t hold with laudanum, and how she’d be regular worried if she were alive and could see what he was at, and he threw a boot at me and damned me to perdition and turned me off. But an hour later he begged my pardon, and told me I had the right of it, and that he’d be obliged if I would stay after all. You know how he is, Master Tom. He don’t stay angry for long, and he always begs one’s pardon.”
Tom did know. “When was this?”
“Last winter.”
“And there’s been no more laudanum since then?”
“No more laudanum, but . . . he started dipping pretty heavily.”
Tom remembered Lucas last night: too drunk to stand, let alone walk.
“It came about over several weeks. I wasn’t worried at first, but then it grew so much that I was worried, but there weren’t a thing I could say to stop him. Miss Julia didn’t have nothing against a drop of wine.”
“His family—”
“We was at Pendarve, sir. Weren’t no one to notice if he got castaway every night—and no one but me to care about it.”
“Every night?” Tom said, perturbed. Lucas had never been a heavy drinker.
“Used to be. But I packed him into a post-chaise one night when he were too drunk to notice, and took him back to Whiteoaks.”
Tom was surprised into a crack of laughter. “How did he take that?”
Smollet smiled ruefully. “I think he would have turned me off again if he hadn’t been feeling so poorly.”
Tom shook his head, chuckling, and then sobered. “Did it work? Going home?”
“Yes, sir. We stayed for all of April and May, and he didn’t get castaway once, and he hasn’t since . . . excepting last night, which isn’t to be wondered at, seeing as how it were their birthday.”
“No,” Tom said. “Not to be wondered at.”
They were both silent. Tom wondered if Smollet was thinking of Julia, too, thinking of how close she and Lucas had been.
A coal shifted in the grate. Tom gave himself a mental shake. “So that’s how he’s been . . . how is he now?”
Smollet frowned, and pursed his lips, as if deliberating what to say.
“Don’t dress it up in clean linen.”
Smollet met his eyes and said bluntly, “He put off his blacks and he started talking more, and he looks like he’s over it, but you know him as well as I do, Master Tom, and you’ll see for yourself pretty quick that it’s all a sham.”
“How much of a sham?”
“He still has days where he don’t speak at all. And days where he don’t want to leave his bedchamber.”
Tom’s throat tightened. He looked away, at the fire.
“Miss Julia’s been dead more’n a year, but I think he still misses her every minute of every day, and even if he don’t take the laudanum anymore or drink himself under the table every night, I think he wants to.”
Tom glanced back at the manservant.
“But he won’t talk about it, so I’m only guessing.” Smollet gave a helpless shrug.
Smollet was no fool; his guess would be a good one.
Tom blew out a breath. “I didn’t realize it was so bad.”
Smollet didn’t respond to this statement of the obvious; instead he said, “How long are you here for?”
“I don’t know. No one knows when the inquiry will start, let alone how long it’ll go on for.” Tom scrubbed a hand through his hair. “I’ll see if I can get some leave.”
He saw relief on Smollet’s face. “That would be good, Master Tom. If you could. He misses you, though he’d never say it.”
He did say it yesterday. Tom remembered Lucas sagging against him in the bedroom doorway, a warm, heavy weight. He remembered Lucas’s huff of laughter, his sigh, his words: I’ve missed you.
And he remembered Lucas naked and aroused on the bed.
Tom cleared his throat. “He didn’t mention my visit last night?”
“No, sir. I doubt he remembers. He had a devil of a head this morning.”
Was it a good thing Lucas didn’t remember what had happened? Or not?