I held the thorny little rose in my hand and let the bleak thoughts wash over me, not particularly caring if they pooled in my mind or ebbed away as they had on previous occasions. I needed to find some water for the rose, and from some corner of the darkness trying to engulf me, I heard Harry telling me that if I sought to end my life, I’d have to get off the damned bench, find a gun—I had none in my possession—and get someplace where the mess wouldn’t be any bother to others.
I had gained my feet when I heard the doors between the house and conservatory open. Towering greenery obscured my view of the intruders, but I’d know Cleary’s voice anywhere.
“Let’s find you a bench, shall we, my dear?” He spoke as the doting nephew, all hearty good cheer.
“You are always so thoughtful, Mendy. Where would I be without you?” Maria was on another outing apparently, this time with a proper escort. “Do you suppose they’re still serving breakfast? I might like to sit with the other guests for a change.”
Mendel laughed gently. “Dearest Aunt, we had breakfast not an hour past. Let’s have a seat, shall we?”
Maria had not been at breakfast. I could be a complete amnesiac and still trust that fact.
“But, Mendy, I’m peckish. All this fresh country air has put an appetite on me.”
“You cannot possibly be peckish, pet. You did justice to a plate of eggs and some excellent ham before no less audience than Sir Pericles and Lady Ophelia. Have you directed Mrs. Waldrup to start packing your things?”
Was Cleary intending to depart? And what the hell did he mean when he referred to Maria sharing a meal with Sir Pericles and Lady Ophelia?
“But, Mendy, we just got here. I vow we haven’t been here a sennight yet, and no house party lasts a mere few days. In my day, we’d keep company in the summer for weeks at a time and even longer if the gents removed to the grouse moors.”
Maria’s voice held a pleading note beneath her bewilderment. Why has the world stopped making sense?
“The time does fly when we’re enjoying ourselves, doesn’t it?” Mendel replied, which was no sort of answer to the questions Maria had indirectly posed. “I do think this outing has done you good. You’ve had a chance to catch up with a few old friends, pay a few calls. That was the point, wouldn’t you agree?”
A thorn bit my finger. I opened my fist and tried to open my mind. How well I knew that pleasant, patient, humoring tone. Knew the feeling when questions went unanswered and a conversation leaped from topic to topic without a thread of continuity. I knew that smothering, helpless despair when reality refused to behave as reality was supposed to.
I had tried, in my dark cell, to mark time by the meal schedule, but in hindsight, I suspected Girard had purposely overfed me when he wasn’t underfeeding me. Meals had been too far apart or too close together, then the pleasantly polite French commandant had dismissed the evidence of my own body.
You English have such appetites!
You are not hungry for our fine French potatoes and ham?
Have some more wine. A second glass never hurt anybody.
Though it had likely been my fourth or fifth glass.
“Mendy, do you think I might bide with Lady Ophelia for a time? She and I have hardly had a moment together, and I did so look forward to renewing our acquaintance.”
Mendel sighed so gustily the leaves of the lemon tree should have quivered. “Ophelia told you just the other day that she’s off to Edinburgh next. Says the summer’s heat isn’t as bad up north. Were you thinking of accompanying her all the way to Scotland? I’d miss you terribly, and Mrs. Waldrup might not be up for the journey.”
Ophelia had no plans to visit Scotland, and Mrs. Waldrup was hale enough to bustle the length of the Camino de Santiago without a single faltering step.
I listened to another quarter hour of Mendel’s caricature of devotion. He exuded long-suffering good humor, even as he twisted Maria’s reasoning powers before her eyes. She trusted him, she had nobody to gainsay him, and she was apparently dosed with some patent remedy masquerading as raspberry cordial frequently enough that her mind could gain no traction against him.
All the while I eavesdropped, memories of France bombarded me. Girard had spoken to me thus, when I’d been so far beyond exhaustion, into the closer reaches of madness, and he had presented himself as the voice of honest compassion. I had lost a brother, I was disgraced—la guerre est si injuste!—I was famished and parched and without a friend in the world… and Girard had sated me with lies and manipulation.
The enormity of his evil—and his genius—sank into my awareness like moonlight filling the landscape. A vague memory surfaced of Girard asking me about a British defeat in Spain in which I’d supposedly taken part. He’d inquired after meals I’d enjoyed that I’d forgotten I’d consumed. He’d exchanged a laugh with the guards over my fine singing voice when I’d had no recollection of regaling anybody with a recital.
He’d been slowly, gently, inexorably driving me mad… And, for a time, he’d succeeded.
Cleary was bent on the same course with his aunt, though his objective wasn’t anything so noble as the defeat of a wartime enemy. I’d sort through my options where Cleary was concerned later. My present challenge was to absorb what I’d deduced regarding my imprisonment.
I kept my appointment with Atlas and laid the pink rose on the rim of the water trough, stem trailing in the water. Rain was inevitable—the sky had become, if anything, more threatening—and that suited my mood.
After the requisite walk and trot, I let Atlas have his head, and he thundered along the river at a joyous, blistering gallop. Despite the burdens I carried, despite everything, I delighted in the exertion and the glory of his sheer animal power.
This was yet mine to enjoy, as was much else.
The first drops of a cool, misty rain fell as I patted Atlas’s sweaty neck and turned him for home. The rain showed no inclination to turn violent, and I’d spent many an hour in a damp saddle. I considered again the conversation I’d overheard in the conservatory, as well as the nagging feeling that I’d missed something important about the whole business.
We came within sight of Makepeace sitting on its bucolic rise, and a low rumble of thunder sounded off to the south. The Channel was making this weather, as the Channel made much of Kent’s weather.
I hadn’t seen the flash of lightning, but I’d felt it in my mind.
Girard had lied about so much and lied so very, very well. I had been meant to think he’d extracted some vital facts from me in a conversation I could not recall—facts that had led to avoidable British deaths.
For the first time, I entertained the serious hope that no such conversation had ever occurred.
You are human, non, my lord? And I am very good at what I do. So a little detail slips here and there. Greater men than you have been slipping details to me for years. This is war. Have some more wine.
I swung down from the saddle, in no hurry to reach our destination. The possibility that my memory had not suffered further deterioration held up no matter how I changed the angle of my inquiry. Girard had had other prisoners—he was a dark legend for his interrogation skills—and why not attribute to me—a mere courtesy lord—a treasonous slip that might, in fact, have belonged to the Duke of Mercia, a celebrated war hero?
Or to my own brother?
My theory had the feeling of rightness, of being not merely plausible, but impregnable from any angle. Girard was, after all, a British peer, and he’d well know the benefit of sparing a duke public humiliation. For all any of us knew, I would not have survived to tell any different tale than the one that suited Girard’s purposes, and I and my good name would have been lamentable casualties of war.
I had not committed treason. Not inadvertently, not under the torments Girard had devised, not when half mad or in the midst of a memory lapse. The military, public opinion, and even Girard himself would never exonerate me of the charge, but I finally knew myself to be innocent.
I walked beneath the trees, my soul washed clean by the soft, summer rain, Atlas plodding placidly beside me. We reached a high border of wet, glossy rhododendrons. I led Atlas into their sheltering depths, leaned against his sturdy neck, and went completely to pieces for the first time since returning to the green and pleasant land of my birth.
By the time I returned from my ride, the ripples on the Longacre house party pond were already gliding outward. The groom Chubb took Atlas from me and gave me the sort of dolorous, respectful glance usually reserved for men who’d volunteered to participate in a forlorn hope.
“We’ll rub him down proper, my lord, though it looks as if you’ve troubled to cool him out.”
“Thoroughly. An old campaigner like Atlas isn’t bothered by a little rain and mud.” And neither am I.
“Some are like that—go better on a muddy track. We’ll coddle him a bit just the same.”
My stock in the stable had risen apparently, but then, Mendel Cleary was not well liked among the staff, and for all Chubb knew, I was soon to face my Maker.
My boots squished with every step, and my clothing was sodden, so I entered the house using the same conservatory door from which I’d exited nearly two hours earlier. Once again, I was cast into the role of eavesdropper.
“Miss Belvoir is a lady’s maid,” Canning said, exasperation threading his words. “She’s not a tavern doxy. If you’d ever set foot beyond the village green, you’d know the difference.”
“You’re jealous, is all. The ladies know that fire on the roof means plenty of flames in the furnace even if I am just a footman.”
I could not see Canny’s conversation partner, but fire on the roof implicated Taylor, the red-haired footman, who had apparently been indiscreet with Miss Belvoir.
“Save your damned flames for when nobody’s looking, for God’s sake. If you care for the lady, then you protect her good name. Her post is all Miss Belvoir has, and Maybelle or her ladyship could sack her without a character for merely holding your hand. For that matter, they’d sack you for the same offense.”
“You think you know everything just because you took the king’s shilling and have bided in London. You don’t know shite.”
I expected fisticuffs to ensue, which would put me in the delicate posture of having to decide whether to let these two go at it or intervene.
Canny drew a long, audible breath in through his nose. “I know what it’s like to make a rolling calamity of my life. To trust to fate, the wrong people, and my own ingenuity at the exact worst moment. If you and Miss Belvoir are to have a future, then you plan carefully, save every penny, and hope that you can train to be a house steward, because as sure as God made sheep, it is holy writ that footmen and lady’s maids do not marry.”
Canny delivered his homily wearily, as if the rolling calamity were still in progress.
Puzzling, that. He was a decorated veteran of the wars, and he kept his commendation hidden away. The sharpshooters were entitled, if anybody was, to tell tales of their acumen and bravery. Canny hadn’t brought up the war once. I’d had to drag his past from him, and he’d parted with only essential facts.
I wasn’t the only man on the premises with serious personal regrets.
“She loves me,” Taylor retorted. “She loves me, and we’re going to France, where we can live for a song.”
“Sait-elle parler française?”
Can she speak French? And the question had been rendered with a creditable accent.
“Damn you, Canning. You think you know everything.” Footsteps, and then the door to the house closed none too gently.
Another audible inhale and then a muttered, “Bloody hell.”
I stepped forth from behind the potted lemons. “Try having a word with the lady. They are usually more sensible than we are.”
Canning frowned, no pretensions to deference in his expression. “Sense was in short supply at breakfast, my lord, and you’ve apparently chosen not to gallop for Town.”
“Have you joined the committee counseling me to depart?”
He scrubbed a hand over his face and gazed off in the direction of Taylor’s retreat. In profile and without the footman’s manufactured good cheer, Canning was an attractive man of an altogether more formidable sort. Why was Miss Belvoir mucking about with a randy redhead when Canning was on hand to disport with?
The question answered itself in the next instant: because Canny would not encourage the connection. Just as he was hiding his commendation, he was hiding much else. The longer I studied him—the soldier’s bearing, the lean height, the proud features—the more certain I became of my conclusions.
“If you must meet Cleary over pistols or swords,” he said, “then it’s worth your life to be careful. He manipulated you into this duel, and he does not play fair.”
“You refer to his cheating at cards?”
“He doesn’t cheat, but he can keep count of the cards in his head.” Canning tapped a blond temple. “Cleary has an abacus up here, apparently, though that doesn’t help him balance his ledgers. Thinks he’s special, does Spendy-Mendy. Mind your back with him, my lord. He’ll claim his foot slipped, and he never meant to fillet you, that the gun’s mechanism misfired, that he misheard the count. He is no gentleman.”
And you are no footman. “I appreciate the warning. I don’t suppose you’ll be minding the sideboard at luncheon?”
“I will, for my sins. The younger lads prefer to do the stepping and fetching at supper.”
Footmen serving supper would be more visible to the guests, more likely to make a friendly impression when bringing an extra serving of buttered peas or topping up a chaperone’s wine.
“Then I will see you at lunch. We’re dining in the gallery again?”
“Aye, and I’d best get back to the kitchen before Cook murders our Atticus.” He withdrew into the house, leaving me the privacy of my thoughts. He’d forgotten to bow in parting, more proof that Canning was not to his livery born.
I was peeling my wet shirt over my head, absently enjoying the invective Atticus aimed at gents who disrespected good boots, when a detail from the conversation in the conservatory came back to me. I sat on the bed, my wet shirt in my hands, felled not by possibility this time, but by certainty.
As a reconnaissance officer, I had had many agendas. What stores were available locally with which to provision the army? Wellington had very strict policies against pillaging, unlike the French, but he would barter with and buy from civilian sources on occasion.
I was also to look for the best path across a given valley or plateau, one that would afford the men shade and cover, but allow the column to stay together and set a good pace as well.
The cardinal question, though, was always, always, What are the French up to now?
Where are they going? What strategy will they employ to get there? What are their vulnerabilities and strengths? How can we make life harder for them with the least difficulty for us?
One of my commanding officers had begun every interview with a single question: Tell me how to win the war, Caldicott, or how to win our little part of it for today.
With my shirt dripping onto the worn carpet, and Atticus waxing profane in the depths of the wardrobe, I saw how I could win my little part of today’s war. Victory was a matter of paying attention to details and dealing with facts in the right order.
I was damned good at both, and to blazes with pistols and swords.
The gallery had been arranged as if for a whist tournament, with small tables scattered about the room, and all the fires lit in deference to the dreary weather. The sideboards were set up as buffet stations—soup and bread here, sandwiches there, sweets at the far end of the room. Taylor manned a punchbowl, while Canny guarded the tureen.
Ophelia spotted me as soon as I entered the room, as did my host, who delivered a convincing cut sublime by riveting his attention to an unimpressive landscape he’d likely seen a thousand times before. Sir Thomas went for the cut infernal, studying his watch at length, rather than so much as glancing my way.
Cleary tried for a cut direct, glowering at me, then pointedly looking away, but not before I’d winked at him.
“Are you daft?” Ophelia muttered. “You don’t wink at your potential murderer.”
“I am not daft, though thank you for the vote of confidence.”
“You went riding in the rain, Julian,” she wailed softly. “Your health is unreliable, and you go out in the dirtiest weather and trot about in the mud. Are you hoping to die of a lung fever before Cleary’s bullet carries you off?”
Her ladyship was trying for vinegar and starch, but her eyes held worry. She cared for me in her way, and she probably even meant well—most of the time.
“I needed to think without interruptions. I’ve chosen my weapon.”
I had kept my voice down, but such was the heightened awareness of the company that Osgood Banter looked my way. Brimstock lifted his glass in my direction, and Maybelle nodded to me from across the room.
“Did I hear aright?” Cleary asked from a good ten feet away. “What’s it to be, pistols or swords?” He had to be truly desperate to ask that question publicly. Dueling was frowned upon, stupid, and illegal.
“I was having a private conversation with my godmother, Cleary.”
“You excel at private maneuvers. I still think you tried to abscond with Miss Longacre.”
“No,” said Maybelle evenly, “he did not.”
Another question answered. Hyperia entered the room from the door at the far end and, oblivious to the turbulence in the air, smiled at me before the whole assemblage.
My second had arrived. I smiled back and faced my foe. “You continue to insult me in public, Cleary, to taunt me and to comport yourself as no gentleman should. Either apologize to Lord and Lady Longacre for your asininities or leave.”
“Oh no, no, no,” Cleary responded with great good cheer. “You are the blight on the guest list, sir—not that you were ever on the guest list—and you will take yourself back to London or to the pit itself, but I’m not going anywhere.”
The room fell silent, while Hyperia settled herself into a comfortable armchair with a good view of the combatants. She arranged her skirts and turned limpid green eyes on me. Such calm, such confidence in those eyes.
Such faith in me.
“Very well,” I said, “but only because you are determined on this drama, Cleary. The choice of weapons is mine, and I choose words.”
I’d surprised him. First touch to Lord Julian.
“Have you lost what feeble wits you yet possess?” Cleary drawled.
A fast recovery. “I sometimes do lose my wits—we all do, come to that—but then I find them, and I am in possession of them now.” Most of them, anyway. “I have chosen words as my weapon, and before these good witnesses, we will duel with words until truth vanquishes all challengers.”
Lord Longacre bestirred himself to leave off appreciating the art. “We are trying to enjoy a pleasant social gathering here. Must you two carry on so?”
Lady Longacre looked torn between the hope that we would carry on a great deal more and the wish that this was anybody else’s house party.
“Oh, we must,” Cleary said. “We truly must. Here’s a truth for you, my friends. This so-called gentleman carries a card about in his pocket, reminding him that he has lapses of memory and forgets everything including his own direction. Now he wants you to take his half-witted word over the word of a gentleman.”
Hyperia helped herself to a petit four from the dish on the table next to her chair. “Lord Julian has lapses of memory, true, but they are lapses. His recollection is soon restored, while honor, once departed, is gone for good. I’d like to hear what Lord Julian has to say.”
“As would I,” Maybelle said.
“I’m curious as well,” Miss Ellison said, her shiner being mostly obscured with discreet cosmetics.
“Then say on,” Lady Ophelia added. “But mind you both, I’m getting peckish, and I do not favor cold soup on a rainy day.”
I spared a glance at Canny, who was at parade attention, ladle in hand. He looked tired but resolute, as any soldier would in the midst of a forced march. He gave the slightest nod, and I had the permission I needed to finish what Cleary had started.
“Mendel Cleary travels with a very large amount of money,” I began, “though the funds aren’t his. The bearer notes are drawn on Miss Maria Cleary’s bank. My guess is, that money was to be offered as ransom funds to appease the villain who meant to abduct Miss Longacre.”
Maybelle had the grace to blush, and the heightened color was quite becoming.
Hyperia caught on in the next moment. “But that means…” She stared hard at Maybelle. “You recognized him and tried to throw us off the scent. Why?”
Rather than put the lady in Cleary’s crosshairs, I answered. “Because if Maybelle had been kidnapped, she would have been ruined, and ruined ladies are all but impossible to marry off. Her lot at Makepeace in that case would have become unbearable. A clever woman—and Miss Longacre is very clever—might well have used the knowledge of Cleary’s felonious scheme to inveigle him into marriage on her terms, a white marriage with a huge widow’s portion would have been my guess.”
Brimstock was not half so handsome when his mouth was hanging open. He shut it with a snap. “How did you know it was Cleary?”
Maybelle tapped her midriff. “Mr. Cleary’s watch chain is ridiculously long. Between the moonlight and the torches around the summer cottage, I saw that chain quite plainly.”
And Cleary, perhaps suspecting her game, had found an excuse to stop wearing the watch.
“Was it to be marriage on your terms, Maybelle?” I asked.
Cleary tried to affect polite boredom, while Amethyst and Mozart looked to be making a whispered wager over by the ancestral portraits.
“I hadn’t made up my mind,” Maybelle said. “A man who will scheme like that and then bungle the business… I would have kept him as a last resort.”
“This is ridiculous,” Cleary snapped. “Every fellow here wears his watch on a chain, and they all look the same by moonlight. Aunt Maria is eccentric and prefers to keep a fair amount of cash with her. She always has.”
“Your plan,” I said, “was to abduct Miss Longacre, then save the day by offering to prevail on Aunt Maria to provide the ransom in cash—or perhaps you’d present that money as your own. In any case, you would have been paying yourself with Maria’s money. If you were truly ambitious—and you are—you would also have graciously offered to marry the ruined Miss Longacre and doubtless have demanded generous settlements to compensate you for taking pity on her.”
Lady Longacre subsided into a reading chair. “Is this true?”
“He’s daft, I tell you,” Cleary retorted. “Mad as a hatter, forgets his natal day and family name. The money is Maria’s, and this conversation has descended into farce.”
“Then you don’t have a healing bruise on the arch of your foot?” I asked. “Perhaps you’d like to prove that you don’t?”
“I admit nothing.” Cleary might be able to bluff his way past speculation and hearsay, but not physical evidence. A slight shift in his posture, a flicker of fear in the depths of his blue eyes were all the confession I needed.
“Then keep your powder dry, as it were, for now. Instead, might you explain why you brought no valet, no footmen of your own, no personal servants save for what amounts to a man-of-all-work, who’s mostly biding in the stable?”
“Why duplicate staff when Aunt Maria must bring her retainers? I sought to ease the burden for my hostess by keeping our party smaller.”
“Then you turned around and demanded Canny’s services,” Lady Longacre said. “One finds the contradiction puzzling.”
Hyperia held the dish of petits fours out to me, and I took a sweet purely because she’d offered it.
“I’m not puzzled,” I said. “Cleary wanted privacy when he attended his aunt. I’m fanatical about my privacy, too, for different reasons. Poor Maria has more patent remedies on her vanity than Wellington has honors in the whole of Apsley House, and her companion, a dear lady, is entirely cowed by Mendel’s constant threats to give her the sack.”
I approached Cleary as I munched on my treat—raspberry, of all the ironies. “When you shoo Mrs. Waldrup off, you spin a tale of confusion and falsehoods around your aunt such that she has no idea what day it is, whether she’s had anything to eat since waking, or what county she bides in.
In short, you torture her.”
Canny winced. Lady Ophelia looked to be eyeing the breakables.
“These are the mendacious imaginings of an ailing mind,” Cleary said. “I refuse to answer them.”
Ophelia stalked to my side. “Then you won’t object when I take Maria back to Sussex with me, will you? You will not mind in the least when my solicitors have a look at her ledgers. You will smile and nod and be relieved to have the doddering old dear off your hands, won’t you?”
Sir Pericles was looking thunderous, and not at me, for once.
Cleary nodded at Ophelia. “Of course Aunt Maria is welcome to visit her friends, but I warn you, she is growing forgetful. Any disruption in routine only makes her worse, and she relies on those patent remedies. She would not be dissuaded from attending this house party, and I hadn’t the heart to put my foot down, more fool I.”
He was not a fool—Maria relied on those damned remedies to the point of addiction, and by his design—but he had miscalculated. Even Napoleon, one of the greatest military minds of all time, had eventually miscalculated.
“You could not risk letting Maria out of your sight,” I said. “But you hadn’t counted on running into your own brother here at Makepeace, had you?”
A stillness came over the room, and Cleary looked to be calculating the distance to the door.
“Do go on,” Lady Longacre. “I know my guest list, and Mendel and Maria are the only Clearys here.”
“Of course you know your guest list, my lady. But do you know your footmen?”