My next stop was Valmond House, because in all my haring about, I had yet to interview the staff regarding the viscount’s possible whereabouts. Servants keep their employers under surveillance of necessity, and somebody might have seen or overheard something of significance without realizing it.
I found the Valmond family seat in an uproar, and the day was growing far too hot for such nonsense.
“Mrs. Aimes is leaving,” Blaylock told me as he took my hat and spurs. “Piking off, abandoning a sinking ship, according to the kitchen, and the kitchen is usually right.”
The kitchen, meaning Mrs. Felders, upon whom I’d yet to call. I started up the curving main staircase, Blaylock trotting at my side. “Where is Mrs. Aimes now?”
“Packing. Lady Clarissa forbade the maids to assist her. Odds favor her ladyship forbidding the stable from bringing the coach around, but the lads might do it anyway just to give us some peace.”
We gained the first floor, and Blaylock gestured to the corridor on the right.
I struck out in that direction. “And where is Lady Clarissa?”
“Gone to ground. Slipped out the door when she finished ringing a peal over Mrs. Aimes’s head—through a closed door—and Mrs. Aimes was giving as good as she got. I’m sorry, my lord. I could not exactly march after her ladyship.”
“No, you could not. Mrs. Aimes won’t be leaving just yet. Blaylock, when was the last time you were paid?”
He didn’t hesitate, which was more disloyalty and bad form. Good form had never kept a fellow in comfortable boots, though.
“Wages were regular until this week, my lord. The first of the month came and went, and no pay packets. We’re still getting our beer and candles, but her ladyship says Lord Reardon handled the ledgers, and she has no idea how to go on with them.”
That might just possibly be true. “Tell the staff not to worry. I am more than competent to make entries in a wage book, and I’ll see to it before the day is over. Summon a groom to the kitchen, because I’ll need to send a message to Caldicott Hall to explain why I’m tarrying here.” And to get Arthur to open his safe and make me a small loan.
The relief in Blaylock’s eyes was pathetic. “I’ll fetch a groom straightaway, my lord. This is Mrs. Aimes’s apartment.”
“Thank you. If I don’t come down within the hour, best go at the door with an ax. Away with you to set the kitchen straight.”
“Aye, sir.” He scampered off, an enlisted man only too happy to take orders.
I rapped on the door. “Mrs. Aimes, Lord Julian Caldicott has come to call, and I’m on the king’s business, so you’d best admit me. Lady Clarissa is taking a constitutional by the lake, if I’m not mistaken.”
The door whooshed open. “Sulking and pouting, no doubt. The Valmond offspring excel at sulking and pouting, with the exception of poor Susan. Do come in.”
She was in an old high-waisted morning gown, the sort of dress worn when no company was expected and last night’s entertainments had run too late.
“Why now?” I asked, surveying an open trunk half full of dresses, shawls, slippers, and gloves. “Why leave now?”
“The better question is why stay as long as I have? Do sit down. I’d ring for a tray, but the servants are likely following my example and gathering up their effects.”
Her cheeks were flushed with heat or ire or both. She subsided onto a chaise, and I took a wing chair. Her sitting room was pretty—blue, gold, and cream appointments, a pleasant prospect of the lake beneath her balcony—but the rug was worn, and the curtains were faded to periwinkle, while the sofa was still azure.
“Have you any idea,” Mrs. Aimes said, patting at her forehead with a handkerchief, “any notion whatsoever, how exhausting it is living in this house? Reardon up at all hours, coming and going with that wretched dog. Clarissa fuming at every meal, when she deigns to come to the table at all. My sister is unwell—seriously, perhaps mortally, unwell—and I’m supposed to bide here, playing lady-in-waiting to those scheming brats. I’m sick of it.”
She appeared in roaring good health to me and giving Clarissa a run for her money in the dramatics department.
I tugged the bell-pull twice and resumed my seat. “The staff isn’t going anywhere, though, I grant you, Reardon is absent without leave.”
She worried a nail. “I know. I warned Clarissa he’d slip the leash. He’s not as experienced as other fellows his age. No public school scrapping, no wild oats at university, no sobering realities seen in uniform. I don’t blame him for the present situation.”
“You blame Clarissa?”
“She’s the older sibling. She pushed him and pushed him. All he wanted to do was paint.”
I, for one, was done blaming Clarissa. “All he did was paint, and wander the countryside sketching, and frolic with unsuspecting women who ended up becoming scandal fodder in his sketchbooks. Now an entire exhibition has been planned for his benefit, and he’s betrayed Clarissa’s trust. Yet, somehow, Clarissa is to blame?”
“The exhibition was her idea.”
Blaylock arrived bearing a tray of what smelled like meadow tea—mint and chamomile—accompanied by a small pot of honey and some ginger biscuits.
“All quiet belowstairs?” I asked as he set the tray on the table beside my wing chair.
“Calming down. Groom awaits your orders, my lord.”
I withdrew my ever-present pencil and paper and scribbled a few words in French. “For His Grace.” I folded the note and printed His Grace of Waltham on the outside. “No need to gallop, but to be delivered directly.”
“Very good, sir.” Blaylock took the note, bowed, and withdrew.
I considered Mrs. Aimes, who still claimed a full complement of beauty, albeit of the mature variety. “Where will you go?” I passed her a cool glass and took a sip from my own.
Heaven. Absolute heaven. If there was a God, and He failed to reward Mrs. Felders for her skill with mere meadow tea, I’d have stern words with Him, assuming Saint Peter admitted me to the celestial realm.
“Where will I go?”
“Yes, when you storm off in high dudgeon from perfectly acceptable accommodations, where will you go?”
“Town, I suppose. Or perhaps I will make an extended visit to Lady Ophelia? She’s always amenable to good company in the summer months.”
“Lady Ophelia bides at the Hall for now, and I doubt we’ll dislodge her in the immediate future. You are leaving in a panic, Mrs. Aimes. Why?”
She rose and went out to the balcony, the French doors having been left ajar. I followed, glass in hand. I had no intention of letting my interrogation drop. Her decision to leave formed another link in a chain of developments that made no sense.
She was a poor relation, a paid companion, something of that nature. If she’d had other options, they wouldn’t compare to a berth at Valmond House.
“Clarissa really has lost track of her brother,” Mrs. Aimes said. “She hasn’t a clue where he is. He never arrived in Town, and Clarissa says you yourself brought her that news.”
“I did, though for all I know, Reardon is kicking his heels in Mayfair as we speak.”
She slanted a look at me. “Or he’s on the way to Paris.”
“I doubt that. He has little French and less coin, according to some. Where will you go, Enola?”
She tried for heroic silence, and when I did not fill it with apologies and explanations and other placatory offerings, she began to cry. I took her glass from her, passed her a handkerchief, and waited for the storm—or performance—to pass.
“I never meant for any of this to happen,” she said. “I never meant…” She heaved a martyred sigh. “It was idle talk. That horrid Squire Huber said something about a man only receiving the respect he’s due on the day of his funeral. Reardon took up the chorus, about an artist’s works gaining value only upon his death. Clarissa got that look in her eye…”
“And you encouraged her?”
“I didn’t think she was serious!”
“You knew they were desperate, but now that the plan you all but dared them to attempt is coming unraveled, you are deserting the ranks.”
She sniffed, squared her shoulders, and gazed mournfully at the lake. “The plan might have worked.”
“Had not Reardon, in true Reardon fashion, gone off and done as he pleased, leaving the ladies to mop up the mess. You will leave today.”
“I ought to stay. My departure will fuel talk.”
And that had bothered her not at all a quarter of an hour ago, when she could lay the whole commotion at Clarissa’s feet.
“You will go to Town and take a hand in preparations for the exhibition so that Clarissa can bide here in peace while I hunt down her brother. You will call on everybody you know who has ever bought a piece of art and on anybody else who is still in Town, and you will gush about Reardon’s talent.”
“I leave the gushing to Clarissa.”
“Time to brush off your dusty skills, then. The exhibition is going forward, and it’s in your interests to ensure it’s a success. The Valmonds are your regiment, and their honor is at stake. Do your best for their sake, or find yourself drummed out of the corps.”
She took the glass I’d been holding, downed a few swallows, and poured the rest out over a bed of roses two stories beneath us—for which she should have been court-martialed, if she wasn’t already facing a dishonorable discharge.
“My good name is all I have left,” she said. “I cannot afford to be associated with scandal, and the Valmonds are several kinds of scandal waiting to happen. I’ve even considered…”
What would a last resort, an otherwise unbearable option, be to her? “Huber?”
She nodded. “He’s proposed to every widow in the shire and attempted his flirtations with me in the churchyard. Not what I had planned, but then, he won’t live forever.”
He’d proposed and been serially refused, apparently. What would that do to a man’s self-respect? To his temper?
“For the present, you will go to London. The Caldicott traveling coach will be available for your journey, and I suggest you leave tonight to spare the horses the heat.”
I was presuming on Arthur’s resources, but solving this whole muddle was to his benefit. Then too, he was a duke, not simply another country squire placidly awaiting the year’s harvest. He was supposed to be generous and gracious and all that noble twaddle.
“Town will be wretched,” Mrs. Aimes said. “Hotter than perdition and twice as malodorous.”
Not as hot as Spain in summer, not as wretched as a forced march in ill-fitting boots. “Where is Reardon, Mrs. Aimes? This whole scheme might just work if I can locate the missing viscount.”
Her smile was bitter. “If I knew where he was, if I knew that his remains were not washing out to sea, I might be less upset. Reardon’s nerves are delicate. You know how artists are. Painting for three days straight, then sleeping for a week. His days and nights reversed. All his geese are swans one day, and the next… he is covered in despair.”
“But then he’d take his dog and sketchbook and go rambling”—or get free of this house of woe—“and his geese turned back into swans.”
“I will go to London and ensure all is in readiness for the exhibition, but I would rather take a packet to Calais.”
“You can take that packet after the exhibition, and Reardon might join you, assuming he hasn’t quit the country already.”
I left her on the balcony, trying to look stoic and mostly looking tired. Something Lady Ophelia had said propelled me down the footmen’s stairs in search of Blaylock.
The staff knew everything, according to Lady Ophelia, and she had a point. Reardon might not have confided in anybody, but any arrangements—to bide with a friend, head to Scotland, or take a packet—would have been made and confirmed by post. The boot-boy typically retrieved the post from the inn, and while he was unlikely to be literate, the footman who took the day’s post up to the library or foyer probably would be.
The maid who’d taken outgoing letters belowstairs might well have been literate too. Somebody in the household had to have picked up a whiff of intrigue, even if they’d done so unaware.
My immediate and increasingly pressing challenge was to figure out who that person was and to shake every pertinent detail loose from their memory.
I questioned everybody from Blaylock to the aging butler to the chirrupy little boot-boy. They all claimed to know nothing, to have seen absolutely nothing, and to have heard less than absolutely nothing that would shed light on Lord Reardon’s present whereabouts.
I had resigned myself to a chat with the proprietor of our posting inn when I recalled that I’d yet to quiz Clarissa on the same topic. She had professed ignorance the previous day, but she might well have some insight unbeknownst even to her.
The head stable lad told me that her ladyship had stalked off toward the lake more than an hour earlier, and I might try my luck taking the same trail. I donned my tinted spectacles and idly tracked her—she was moving at a good clip, considering she wore heeled slippers—until her steps slowed as she neared the water.
The path was overgrown. At one point, I had to hop over a fallen tree, and at another, the shore had subsided, leaving the trail crumbling three feet above murky water. Neglect on every hand, and I hadn’t begun to see it until I’d lost my memory.
The Almighty enjoyed a robust sense of irony.
I came upon Clarissa on the porch of the Valmond fishing cottage, a small stone structure going mossy along its northern exposure. The building itself was still upright, but the padlock on the door showed signs of rust.
“You might want to oil that lock,” I said, taking the place on the bench beside her, facing the water. “Wouldn’t want to have to get the blacksmith out over a lot of old reels and nets.”
“I put the best of the tackle into the gamekeeper’s hands and sold the rest. We keep the cottage locked so nobody will know it’s empty.”
“Do you still have a gamekeeper?”
We were in shade, surrounded by woods, the bright expanse of the lake before us. The scene should have been restful, but I sensed from Clarissa an overwhelming weight of sadness.
“We pensioned the gamekeeper and could not afford to hire a replacement. Old Demming keeps an eye on the woods and waterways out of pity. Somebody has to catch an occasional rabbit or pheasant, else the staff would starve. His Grace overlooks the fact that we haven’t taken out a proper shooting certificate for Old Demming for at least three years.”
Without cosmetics, silks, and an elaborate coiffure, Clarissa looked like what she was: a weary woman past the dewy years and managing a load of regret. She was also quite pretty, with classic features, good bones, and a fine figure.
Former officers sometimes referred to having had a good war. They had come home with every limb intact, having known great adventure and seen much of the world.
Lady Clarissa Valmond was having a bad war, and I knew how that felt. I knew as well the gnawing ache of a sibling gone missing, though in my wildest imaginings I would never have thought to have so much in common with her ladyship.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” She’d gathered up a pile of clover flowers in her lap and was fashioning them into a chain. “The part I did not anticipate at all?”
“Tell me.” Though I could guess.
“They all hate me. I have done everything I can think of to keep scandal from my family’s door. I have pawned my jewels to buy Reardon his pigments, swanned about with Lord Harry, made a halfhearted try for you, and now my forlorn hope is to besiege His Grace. My lady’s maid hates me because she didn’t get my castoff gowns—when I had castoff gowns. I instead sold them on Rosemary Lane.”
She paused to thread another flower onto her chain. “The staff thinks I’m frivolous, vain, demanding, and arrogant. All I do is sit about with my needlepoint, harangue Reardon, and make calls. I’m useless in their eyes.”
I scooped up some of the hoard in her lap and started my own chain. “And all the needlework,” I said, “is to retrim your hems and cuffs so nobody will recognize you in last year’s fashions. You are embellishing the bodices on the wardrobe from the year before that and doing the best you can with bonnets from the last century. Most of your work is, in fact, done on Lady Susan’s frocks so she won’t worry quite as much over her appearance as she approaches her come out.”
“If she even makes a come out. I’ve tried not to let her know how bad things are, but Susan isn’t stupid.” Clarissa’s hands stilled. “Neither am I, despite appearances to the contrary. I am tired of the disrespect, the sniffy looks from people whose every coin has come from the Valmond family coffers. In the village, I am all but a laughingstock. Our neighbors have one question for me: ‘So when will your parents be home, my lady?’ Mama and Papa cannot come home. They will risk much biding in London, and Mama is so ill…”
Her burden was not merely sadness, then, but rather, despair. “I find the pity worse,” I said, ruining my second blossom and tossing it over the railing into the water. “The looks that say, ‘Poor fellow, made such a hash of his military career. Claims he was trying to rescue his brother, but could very well have betrayed his rank. Pistol shot to the head might be the kindest thing. It really might.’”
The current took my clover flower and drew it under.
“Why didn’t you? Why not just give up?”
“His Grace forbade it?”
She smiled. “The real answer, Julian. Why not let the despair win? Valmond House has been losing ground for decades. Papa is no sort of manager, and the past twenty years have been challenging even for the lucky and clever among the landed classes. I’m an empty-headed, scheming spinster. Why did I think I could even try to bring the situation right?”
And I was an extra spare with a poor memory, weak eyes, and an endless store of nightmares. But right now, Clarissa didn’t care about any of that, and neither did I. The lady was having a low moment, and I was uniquely capable of offering her comfort.
A day for surprises indeed.
“You have gone to these heroic lengths,” I said, “because you have honor, and you are not what village gossip makes you out to be. Because you are tenacious and resourceful and determined, and your objective is worthy. The regiment is depending on you, and you are not the first to face a want of coin.”
“Honor.” She all but sneered the word. “Honor doesn’t pay the trades.”
I looped an arm around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze. “We’ll find him.” What I meant was that I would find his lordship, and when I did, I might thrash him silly. “Reardon can’t have gone far on his limited means, and Mrs. Aimes tells me he has next to no friends.”
Clarissa rested her head on my shoulder for a moment, then sat up straight. “Reardon is ashamed. He should have fought, he should have made his obeisance to the Royal Academy, he should have insisted at least on attending university, though I can’t see that three years of drunkenness and debauchery are any sort of accomplishment.
“He is so talented,” she went on more softly. “He has so much ability. Landscapes, portraits, miniatures, even caricatures.” She wound her clover chain around her forearm. “He got paid for doing some botanical illustrations, and I vow he didn’t know whether to rejoice over the coin, or despair because he’d accepted it. He used to do caricatures in the posting inns—penny portraits—but only because Sir Thomas Lawrence got his start in a similar fashion. Reardon signed the caricatures with his old drawing master’s initials. He had the idea to copy our collection in the gallery, but said he wouldn’t turn himself into a forger outright. Hence no signatures.”
“Then Reardon has glimmers of your resourcefulness.”
“And enough pride to nearly smother them. His sole gift, he said, was his art. So I talked him into this exhibition, and now I wish I hadn’t.”
We worked at our little flower craft for a few quiet moments while the water lapped at the bank, and I searched our conversation for any useful insights.
“Where are the posting inns Reardon graced with his sketching?”
“Not the Brighton-to-London route. Too close to home and too much chance he might be recognized. He favored the roads leading to Portsmouth. More likely to be commercial traffic or gentry. Come back to the house with me. I have a few of his old caricatures. You’d hardly know it’s the same artist who did such glorious battle scenes.”
Hellishly glorious. I collected my floral chain and considered the immense trust Clarissa had placed in me, though I’d all but scorned her when I’d arrived at Caldicott Hall. In my last conversation with Arthur, I’d explained to him that being the spare had given me hope that I might one day serve a purpose.
Clarissa deserved some hope too. I wound my floral chain into a circle and draped it over her hair, like the Queen of the May’s crown.
“You will not give in to despair, my lady, because I admire you. I admire your courage and your cool head under fire. You would have made a fine officer, and I know of no higher compliment.”
She looked confused, and then her chin began to tremble. My handkerchief was no longer pristine, but I ought not to have underestimated her ladyship.
Her dignity reasserted itself, like an infantry unit forming square despite casualties. “Thank you, my lord. I admire you as well.”
A fine officer indeed, capable of aiming return fire so it counted. We left the woods at a leisurely stroll, though when Valmond House came into view, Clarissa quickened her pace.
“Do you know what clover symbolizes, my lord?”
Happy cows? “Haven’t a clue.”
“Clover wards off evil hexes. It symbolizes luck and good fortune.”
“And becomes you wonderfully.”
“Does it? Does it really?” She bestowed a smile on me I hadn’t seen from her before, one that cast all her previous posturing and flirtation into the shade. Those company smiles were brilliant, as exploding artillery could be visually dazzling. This smile, this warmth in her eyes and benevolence in her expression, was purely enchanting. “Thank you, my lord.”
She wore her crown into the house and led me straight to the viscount’s studio, where she rummaged for a bit.
“Here,” she said. “Reardon did these for practice, or so he claimed, but he loved poking artistic fun at a sitter.”
He’d immortalized Clarissa with a haughty nose, tiny ears, massive ringlets, and ample feminine endowments. The next image was the Earl of Valloise, as mostly seen through the quizzing glass his lordship held up to his nose. Twigs and leaves adorned his lordship’s hair, which stuck out at ridiculous angles. Valloise to the life.
I peered at the bottom right corner. “JT?”
“Jean Traffault. An émigré drawing master hired for his command of Continental technique. Reardon and Monsieur were as thick as thieves. Traffault was the only tutor who ever had anything good to say about Reardon. Then one day, he claimed Reardon had learned all he had to teach him and left.”
A true teacher, then. “Where did Traffault go?”
Clarissa looked about the studio as if the answer might be on the silk-hung walls. “Not Chichester, but that direction. Arundel, maybe? I recall Reardon going to visit Traffault and coming home with sketches of the River Arun. Ancient bridges, peaceful water, green meadows. Traffault had a brother in that vicinity, but I don’t know what became of him. Let’s leave this place, if you don’t mind.”
She escorted me from the studio. and because she seemed to have a destination in mind, I tagged along without comment. We ended up on the west terrace, and the transition from the shadowed house to midday sunshine had me reaching for my specs.
“I don’t believe Reardon spent much time sketching the house,” Clarissa said, gaze on the overgrazed park. “He’s missed wage day. I hadn’t planned for that.”
“I’ll tend to the wage book. You shouldn’t have to do every blessed thing yourself.”
She continued down the steps to the base of the slightly uneven terrace and stared up at the family edifice. “Reardon did the actual paying. I scrounged about for coin, but Mama’s pin money only goes so far. I don’t know how Reardon managed to make up the difference. I didn’t ask how.”
“Today, you will allow me to see to the pay packets, my lady. Oh, and I directed Mrs. Aimes on to Town to oversee preparations for the exhibit. She will depart at sunset. If Reardon is at the town house, she will send word.”
Clarissa sat on the uneven, sun-warmed steps. “Enola was in high dudgeon this morning. Ready to jump ship and swim to any available port. I don’t blame her, but she thought the whole notion of sending Reardon into hiding would make for splendid gossip.”
“Well, no,” I said, passing Clarissa my flask. “That was all your idea, and you couldn’t be talked out of it.”
She opened the flask, sniffed, and took a few swallows of Mrs. Felders’s meadow tea. “Of course it was, and let me guess, the exhibition itself was solely her brilliant notion. I ought not to sit out here in the sun.”
“You ought, for once, to do as you damned well please. I’m off to bring the wage book up to date.”
She passed back the flask. “Thank you, Julian. Thank you, whether you ever find my addlepated brother or not.”
“I will find him.” I bowed over her hand and trotted up the steps, prepared to dole out the requisite pence and quid.
I had value as the Caldicott spare, but perhaps that was not the limit of my usefulness. Clarissa had needed a friend, and I had obliged.
And that felt… odd, but good.
Very good, in fact.
When I opened the library door, I found Hyperia passing a few coins to the boot-boy, traditionally the last of the staff to be paid.
“Jules.” She rose and smiled.
Seldom had I beheld a more welcome sight. The urge to hug her came over me, unexpected and disconcerting. “I expected Arthur to raid the strongbox, not send me the crack troops.”
“I’ve handled wage day before. Lady Ophelia is taking tea with Lady Susan, who is worried about her siblings. I am worried about you.”
“Because?”
She fisted her hands on her hips, putting me in mind of Atticus. “All this bright sunshine, and you racketing about with only your spectacles to protect your eyes. The miserable heat has to be wearing on you, and you are not exactly in the pink. Haring up to Surrey and back, marching about in the woods… When was the last time you ate?”
“Breakfast.” A dim memory, blighted by Huber’s histrionics.
She was moving toward the bell-pull when I stepped in front of her. “No need. I will take myself to the kitchen, where I am overdue for a chat with Mrs. Felders. Thank you very much for coming, and please extend my thanks to Lady Ophelia as well.”
“You’re truly managing? You’d tell me if you needed to rest?”
One did not dissemble with Miss Hyperia West. “I would tell you. I’d never admit it to Arthur, but I’d tell you, and perhaps mutter something to Atlas about needing a nap. As it happens, I’m off to the Hall next, where I will collect my saddlebags and set out for the coast.”
“You know where Reardon is?”
“I know of one place where he might always be welcome, and so I will look for him there.”
“Away with you, then, but,”—she shook a minatory finger at me—“mind you don’t overdo.”
I saluted, turned on my heel, and headed for the stairs.