“I never appreciated,” I said, “how vexing being a duke must be.” I tore the piece of toast in two and passed half to Arthur. “Mind if I have a seat?”
He gestured languidly to the opposite bench in the duchess’s gazebo. Papa had built it for her to celebrate their tenth anniversary, or to placate her for ten years of his nonsense. The view was lovely—the Hall on its stately rise, the hill behind it, dense woods flanking the vista, and summer verdure adorning the land.
How many times had I prayed for just one more glimpse of my home? And my prayers had been answered, a steadying thought.
We ate our toast in silence. I did not know how to pose the questions I needed to ask, and Arthur probably wanted time to fashion his answers. I’d found him in the first place I’d looked for him, to all appearances merely taking his ease on the padded benches and enjoying the relative cool of the morning air.
He dusted his hands together, crossed his legs, and rested his arm along the railing while he munched his toast. A relaxed posture, though I wasn’t deceived. Arthur was braced for battle, and that broke my heart.
“Why does Huber hate you?”
Arthur’s lips quirked. “As obvious as all that?”
“He is choleric by nature and hates easily—the Americans, inebriates, beggars, women who know how to enjoy themselves, and radicals for starts. His antipathy toward you is personal.”
“Huber… has his reasons.”
“Did you trifle with Eunice?” I could not imagine Arthur trifling with anybody, for any reason. He wasn’t a trifling sort, but Huber was as angry as a man who’d failed to protect his daughter.
Arthur closed his eyes and tipped his head back. “My dear Julian, I would not know how to trifle with Eunice.”
Whatever did that mean? I thought back to my conversation with Huber earlier in the week. What had he said? The Caldicott men disdain marriage in the general case.
At the time, I’d thought he was digging at me for breaking off an understanding with Hyperia.
That comment could also have been aimed at Harry, who’d—to appearances at least and perhaps in reality—toyed with Clarissa’s affections.
But Arthur wasn’t married either, and securing the succession was his first, last, and primary duty.
“You would not lead Eunice to develop expectations,” I said carefully, “because that would be dishonorable. A duke isn’t about to marry a squire’s daughter.”
He sat forward and scrubbed his hands over his face, then rested his elbows on his knees and stared at my boots. Arthur was in great good health as far as I knew. He was in the prime of life and well aware of his responsibilities.
“In point of fact, I could marry Eunice. Society would pretend to be aghast, but nothing in law prevents it. You are right, though, that such a union would be dishonorable.”
We were dancing around some truth, some revelation that eluded me. “Arthur, what the hell are you saying?” Or not saying.
“Such a union,” he went on, “would be unfair to Eunice. Unfair to any woman, for that matter. I am not… I cannot… I do not fancy women.”
This claim contradicted my experience of Arthur. He was a sought-after escort, the dinner guest every woman wanted to be seated next to. A young lady who turned down the room with him was sure to take, and a woman he refused to acknowledge became a social outcast—not that he’d wreak that fate on the undeserving.
“You like women. You like Hyperia.”
He looked up at me. “Rather a lot. You should marry her, Julian. She’s up to your weight.”
“I am not up to hers. Left my manly humors in France, or Belgium, or some-damned-where.”
Arthur considered me for an uncomfortable moment. “In the King’s English, Julian. What’s wrong with you, in addition to white hair, wrecked eyes, and a dodgy memory?”
I could huff and sniff and inform His Grace that I was not the fellow who’d been threatened with charges of dereliction of duty, I was the fellow doing the interrogating, but sooner or later, Arthur and I needed to have this talk.
“I cannot… function. With women.”
“Could you ever?”
What sort of question was that? “Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty, I functioned unceasingly. Soldiering reduced my opportunities, but not my abilities.”
“Then captivity is to blame?” The question was clinical in its detachment.
“I hope so, and I hope to recover, but I could not ask Hyperia to wed a eunuch, could I?”
Arthur rose, hands in his pockets, and leaned on the doorjamb. “Our situation is hilarious, viewed from a certain perspective.”
“Then why is nobody laughing?” Why did I instead feel an increasing sense of foreboding? With his back to me, silhouetted against the painfully bright morning sunshine, Arthur looked sad and alone, if not tragic.
“We will be laughing. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.”
From “The Aeneid.” Someday it will be pleasant to remember even these things, perhaps. More often rendered as: We will look back on this and smile, though Aeneas and his men had endured a bloody lot of wrath of Olympus, violence, and misfortune before landing on Rome’s shores.
“Arthur, what judgment of the gods are you enduring?” I rose as well, because if Arthur tried to march off on some press-of-business errand, I would tackle him to the ground, ducal dignity be damned.
He faced me. “That you have to hear this from me is a backhanded comfort. I prefer men, Julian. If you’d like to decamp for Town, I will understand, but I ask that you exercise discretion on my behalf. A felony conviction will see the title attainted, and that… I’d rather avoid that.”
A thousand memories assailed me at once, of Arthur bringing a dance partner back to her chaperone and the lady casting a longing, resigned look at his retreating back.
Arthur keeping his distance from all the venues where social barriers slipped—the hunt field, the clubs of St. James’s, Tattersalls—and rusticating with a vengeance that left the matchmakers weeping.
Arthur holding our sister Ginny’s newborn, his expression both awed and hopeless.
“You prefer men. Entirely? You can’t even… for a wedding night?”
“Not even for a wedding night, Julian. Others have broader tastes in partners, but…” He shook his head. “I could not do it.” He’d apparently tried, and what a curious undertaking that must have been.
“Well, if you cannot marry, and I cannot,”—I waved a hand in a manner intended to allude to procreation—“and Harry is dead, then who the hell is left to see to the succession?”
“I confess to tendencies that most regard as depraved, and all you’re worried about is the succession?”
“What am I supposed to worry about? The fact that I am now the spare was all that stopped me from indulging in a bit of mortal self-injury, if you take my meaning. I failed to rescue Harry from the French. I believed for a time that I might have committed treason into the bargain. What right did I have to draw breath?” I’d begun to pace the confines of the gazebo, my boots drumming on the floorboards.
“I’ll tell you what right,” I went on. “I was the lone spare. I could take up Harry’s responsibility in that regard. I am at least legally a legitimate son of the old duke, and thus I had redeeming value. One day, I hoped to be able to fulfill that office, but I could not ask or expect Hyperia to wait for that fine day—or night, as it were—and then you announce that you’re of as little use as I am, and that…”
“Yes?” Arthur loaded a wagonful of caution into one word.
I studied him, my only extant brother, the fellow who’d taught me how to tie my shoes and explained to me that women cried sometimes because men were too weak to admit their feelings, so the ladies did the hard, courageous work of honest emotion for us.
I was still puzzling over that bit of fraternal wisdom.
“Your news comes as a bit of a relief,” I said, “now that I study on the matter. My perfect brother acquires a smidgeon of humanity. Something needs doing that neither one of us is up to. Who would have thought? The succession doesn’t matter to me, but to be of use to my family… I want to be of use, Your Grace. I need to be of use.”
“Arthur will do.”
He sounded as if he were conferring a knighthood on me, but I knew better. He’d feared my judgment as badly as I’d feared his. The day when I’d find that amusing was far off indeed.
I tossed myself back on the bench, mind awhirl. “Sit your ducal ass down, Arthur, and finish whatever revelations you have to share. I am under the dread assumption that I’ll be traveling back to Surrey, and in this heat.”
“I haven’t any more revelations. You’ll keep this to yourself?”
I glowered at him, but my remonstration died unspoken. My brother had put his life in my hands—the same hands that had been unable to save Harry—and the question was appropriate.
“I will keep this to myself, though Hyperia is wickedly observant, also utterly trustworthy.”
“She seems to like me. One isn’t certain whether to be flattered or alarmed.”
“Both.”
The ensuing silence was different. In the past five minutes, our world had changed, and while the shift meant we both had adjusting to do, the change was also an improvement.
“Tell me about Lord Reardon,” I said. “Were you to meet him on your morning rambles?”
“I was. He doubtless wanted to harangue me about my portrait, and I was willing to hear him out—again—and yet, he never showed up.”
“He wanted to include your portrait in the exhibition?”
“Nearly begged me to allow it, but I refused. Family pictures are not for public display. I was firm on that point.”
And Arthur could be more fixed in his opinions than any cathedral was fixed on its foundations. “Reardon must have mentioned to Huber that he meant to brace you again. This meeting had to be quite early.”
“I never saw him, I tell you. I waited by the quarry at the appointed hour for naught. No Lord Reardon, no slobbering hound, no meeting. I’m inclined to let him remain disappeared, Julian.”
As was I. “We can’t allow that.”
Arthur shoved to his feet. “For Miss Eunice’s sake?”
“Arthur, you were to meet Reardon by the quarry.” I followed him down the gazebo steps. “For all Huber knows, that meeting took place after Reardon stopped by the squire’s house. Hence Huber’s accusation that you were the last to see Reardon alive.”
“But I wasn’t. I never saw him at all that day.”
“I know that, and you know that, but Huber insists otherwise. Huber wants you disgraced, and if he involves the county authorities…”
Arthur set off for the stable. “I cannot have that lot mucking about in my business, Julian. I sent Wellington’s best reconnaissance officer to track Lord Reardon down, and you did, and there’s an end to Huber’s nonsense.”
“I was not Wellington’s best reconnaissance officer.”
“Harry’s letters claimed you were. You had the facility with languages, the quick thinking, the sense of the land, the tracking skills… You were the best. So I sent the best, and Huber is an ass.”
“That ass apparently suspects you of the proclivities that could see you hanged. Did he see something untoward? Has he any proof?”
Arthur slowed his pace. “He has no proof. Nobody has proof. Huber believes any man who hasn’t yet lived his three score and ten should be preoccupied with rutting and procreation. That I am not married rouses his suspicions, and his own venal imagination does the rest.”
“Venal imaginations abound, Arthur. I used to have one myself. You might be inclined to let sleeping viscounts lie, but Huber’s threats mean Lord Reardon cannot remain least in sight.”
Arthur waved a hand. “His threats are ridiculous. I’m not simply a peer, I’m a duke. Nobody prosecutes dukes for anything. If we aren’t immune by law—and most of the time, we are—we’re immune by custom.”
The urge to tackle him assailed me again. “You are not immune to scandal, you dolt. Huber would allege that Reardon was trying to blackmail you, that you concealed relevant evidence from me because you didn’t want me to find Reardon. That you were pressuring Reardon into an untoward relationship. He can paint you in a very suspicious light, and believe me, the court of public opinion never offers exoneration to the innocent.”
Arthur had marched us to the stable yard, though the morning was growing too hot for an enjoyable hack.
“You were convicted in that court?” he asked.
“Of treason, fratricide, dishonor… I did not betray my country, and that knowledge consoles me mightily, but my assumed disgrace is another reason why I will not yoke Hyperia’s name to mine.”
“Does she know that?”
“I have no secrets from her.”
“That should tell you something.” Arthur strolled off into the blessed shadows of the barn. “Find Reardon, then, and let’s hope to God he’s still extant to be found.”
He disappeared into a saddle room, and I let him make his dignified retreat. For Lady Clarissa’s sake, for Eunice Huber’s sake, and now for the sake of my brother, I had best find the missing viscount.
And soon.
“I thought you should have these.” I passed Mrs. Probinger three of Lord Reardon’s sketchbooks. We were once again enjoying her back terrace at midmorning, the creek burbling along at the foot of the garden, the maples keeping us in shade.
She opened the volume, then closed it quickly. “Thank you. May I ask…?”
“I had occasion to look through every volume of sketches the missing viscount kept in his studio. Those were the only ones I found with likenesses of you. He drew Eunice Huber in the same style, and I will return those drawings to her when the occasion permits.”
Only as I’d ridden Atlas through the lime alley had it occurred to me that Huber might know or suspect Reardon had used Eunice as a model. If so, then the squire had indeed been a father sorely affronted. I’d collected all of the relevant volumes on yesterday’s sortie to Valmond House, and I had them with me now.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Probinger said again, setting the sketchbooks aside. “I don’t know whether to burn them or keep them for a time when I’ll be more flattered by those drawings than infuriated.”
“Lord Reardon was an utter dolt for immortalizing you in the altogether without your permission.”
She took a sip from a sweating glass of lavender lemonade. “Will you venture a but for the sake of male pride?”
“I will venture a speculation. Had he attended the Royal Academy or been financed well enough to bide in Town, he’d have had access to life-model classes and the accompanying instruction. No artist considers his education complete without a course in nudes.”
She ran her finger around the edge of the glass. “Reardon talked about Town as a Promised Land, the place where all dreams come true and art is valued appropriately. He was an earl’s heir, he belonged in Town, and if Lady Clarissa hadn’t clung to his arm so relentlessly, he might have gone.”
I liked Mrs. Probinger, and more to the point, I trusted her. She had the courage to dance near the edge of the conduct Society tolerated from widows, and she made no apologies for asserting her freedom.
“I doubt Lord Reardon’s rusticating was purely for the sake of Clarissa’s vanity. She is an earl’s daughter. She belonged in Town, too, if that’s where she chose to be.”
“Then why…?” Mrs. Probinger set down her glass. “They could go anywhere they pleased—Paris, Lisbon, Edinburgh, and yet, the Valmond offspring are nearly fixtures in the neighborhood in recent years. I’m told Lady Clarissa was fond of your late brother, but other than that… Do you suspect something unnatural between them?”
Merciful intercessors. “Military life exposed you to rather a lot, didn’t it?”
A robin lighted about two yards from Mrs. Probinger’s feet. She broke up a piece of shortbread and tossed the crumbs to her avian caller.
“My husband was no saint, but he wasn’t a prude. He suspected a pair of his cousins… Everybody hoped they’d outgrow their inordinate fondness for one another. I haven’t kept up with that side of the family.”
A day for learning more than I wanted to know, apparently. “I don’t suspect any unnatural connection between Lady Clarissa and her brother. I suspect a far more mundane source of scandal stalks them.”
Mrs. Probinger took about two seconds to come up with the solution. “Debt? The house is going a bit seedy around the edges, isn’t it? I assumed that was a result of the earl and his countess being so often from home, but perhaps they are from home of necessity. And there’s Reardon, who longs for Town life, Lady Clarissa, who rejected three proposals in her first Season… I concluded she was fussy, but now… I suppose even then she needed a rich cit looking for any titled wife, not an heir looking for fat settlements?”
Another robin joined the first, and the shortbread was soon gobbled up.
“I missed that telling bit of history, but otherwise, I note the same symptoms you do. The land is tired, the house is fading, the regular trips to Town have stopped, and the lord and lady never seem to be in residence. I’m told the countess is also in poor health, and in our enlightened times, medical care can be a very expensive proposition.”
“I am a very bad person, but on many occasions, I’ve given thanks that my husband didn’t linger. He’d have hated being an invalid.”
“As would I.” As had I. “Do as you wish with the sketchbooks. Nobody saw me take them.” I’d secreted them in Reardon’s knapsack, along with the volume that immortalized Eunice’s abundant charms. Excellent art, and prime evidence of both arrogance and stupidity on Reardon’s part.
“Why would he leave such indiscreet work where anybody could find it?” Mrs. Probinger asked as the robins flitted away.
“Two reasons,” I said, finishing my lemonade. “First, his studio was sacrosanct. Not even his sister intruded there lightly. He assumed nobody would see those sketches. Second, I hope his casual attitude toward the privacy those works should have enjoyed means he expects to be home again soon.”
That insight had also occurred to me in the depths of the lime alley, a slender and much-needed reed of support for the notion that Reardon was having a tantrum rather than decomposing on the banks of a Surrey river.
“Then he’s alive and well? I’ve heard all manner of conflicting speculation. Mrs. Heller came by after breakfast and said we’re to fear the worst.”
“She wanted to see your reaction to that news?”
“The doctor’s wife is not so petty. She wanted to warn me, but said that’s only servants’ gossip at this point. The news is that Reardon shot himself at some inn in Surrey.”
“Not quite.” I acquainted her with what I’d found at The King’s Man. “But we have no body, and Clarissa confirms that Reardon had planned to stage a mysterious disappearance shortly before the exhibition.” Clarissa had done the planning, but her stock was already low enough in the village.
“Have some more lemonade, my lord. Your day will likely be long, hot, and frustrating. I gather whatever scheme Lady Clarissa hatched, Reardon’s disappearance wasn’t supposed to be this mysterious?”
She poured me half a glass from the pitcher.
“Precisely. Her ladyship claims, and I believe her, that Reardon has forgotten his lines. We know not why he’s writing himself a new script, and we don’t know where he’s biding.”
“I’m to rack my brain for possibilities?”
“Any suggestions will be helpful. The exhibition grows closer by the day.” To say nothing of the tempest Huber’s unchecked bloviations could cause for Arthur.
Mrs. Probinger rose, produced a small pair of secateurs from a pocket, and began trimming a rose vine twining through a trellis on the far end of the terrace.
“I think best when I’m gardening,” she said, “but all Reardon ever talked about was his art. In Paris, this wonder is to be seen. In Rome, that. Vienna, Prague… He longed to see the splendors of the ancient world, to expand his artistic horizons and shake the dust of Sussex from his feet.”
Bad news. Potentially awful news for Clarissa, Eunice, and Arthur. “Did he mention any destination more often than the others?”
“Rome, because it was cheap and full of ex-patriot aristocrats as well as artists. One could learn to paint frescoes in Italy and bring that lucrative expertise back to England, but I doubt he went there.”
“Why?”
Snip, snip, snip. “He doesn’t speak the language. He has schoolboy Latin and a few phrases of polite French, but Reardon was educated at home. He didn’t go up to university. He was spared public school. His tutors were never very impressed with him, save when it came to his art, or so he told me.”
I was struck by the difference between poverty for the poor, which was resulting in increasingly crowded and dangerous urban slums, and poverty for the peerage, which had all but isolated Lord Reardon from his natural sources of friendship.
Two different kinds of misery, both awful in their way.
“Did he mention any friends or fellow artists whose company he enjoyed?”
“Hold these, please.” She held out the secateurs to me. While I obliged, she threaded a vine through the outermost lattice of the trellis. “I cannot recall Reardon ever mentioning friends, drinking companions, fellows from the club. He was doubtless eligible for membership in his father’s clubs, but if a man cannot afford to buy his colors, he’s not likely to waste coin on memberships for form’s sake. I’ll have those back.”
I passed over the shears, and she snipped a trailing piece of greenery and tossed it into the lavender border.
“That makes sense.” I’d never attributed Reardon’s failure to serve in the military to financial barriers, but those were many and steep. An officer was hard-pressed to live on his pay, and to gain his post, he had to buy the commission, then outfit himself from hats to horses and maintain his whole kit on campaign. The quartermasters were technically there for resupply purposes, but the needs of the enlisted men came first.
And rightly so.
“He had to be lonely,” Mrs. Probinger said. “You will think me daft, but I swear, most men expect swiving to do the work of friendship, when it rarely can.”
What a delight she was. “Did Huber hold those expectations?”
A few more snips before she answered. “The squire meant to present me with an honorable offer of marriage, I’m sure, and he’d be a good provider.”
“But?”
“But he is a lonely, bitter man, and I don’t need his coin badly enough to take on the challenge of being his wife. Thank God and my father’s solicitors.” Mrs. Probinger snipped off a pink bloom and threaded it through my lapel. “I wish I could tell you where Reardon is, but I cannot. He was sick to death of Sussex, and yet, other than cousins somewhere up north, I don’t know who’d put him up for an extended stay.”
“You have been helpful nonetheless.”
She gave me an unreadable, very female look. “Finish your lemonade, my lord.”
I did—lovely, refreshing potation—and I took my leave, because Mrs. Probinger had been right—my day was bound to be long, hot, and frustrating.
And yet, I’d spoken honestly too: She’d been helpful. Had my manly humors been present at full strength, I’d doubtless have been speculating about her other partners. My gaze would have lingered where a gentleman does not look, and my appraisal of her would have been clouded with…
Call it masculine appreciation, but the honest term would be casual lust. Even loyalty to Hyperia would not have completely cured me of speculations and imaginings. But captivity had quieted those longings, in all but a theoretical sense. Instead, I could appreciate Mrs. Probinger for the shrewd, practical, honest, and pretty person she was.
Prior to my ordeal in France, I feared my assessment might have begun and ended with pretty. Manly humors would have rendered me blind in a sense. A surprising insight, but given how the morning had begun, perhaps this was the day for surprising insights too.