“Lord Reardon’s a good lad,” Mrs. Felders said, rhythmically kneading a pale mass of dough. “Bit too much like his father, though, meaning no disrespect.” She punched the dough with a floury fist, and I concluded that disrespect was only the start of her vexation with Lord Valloise.
“The earl is much consumed with natural science, as I recall.” I made that observation around a mouthful of ginger biscuit.
“He’s much consumed with anything that lets him abandon the countess to her friends and dodge…” Another smack. Gentleman Jackson should set his hopefuls to kneading dough if they aspired to join the Fancy.
“Dodge the creditors?” I suggested.
“The talk.” She formed the dough into an oval and draped a damp linen towel over it. “The talk, about the money, about Lady Clarissa, about the countess, about topics decent folk ought not to waste their time on. More tea?”
“Please. If you haven’t written the recipe down, I wish you would and share it with His Grace’s cook.”
Mrs. Felders, who had gone completely gray since last I’d seen her, still moved with brisk dispatch. She washed her hands at the copper sink and dried them with a towel that might at one time have been part of a tablecloth.
“The recipe is Mrs. Gwinnett’s, my lord. She starts making it up for the servants’ hall as soon as the mint gets going. A dash of honey, spent tea leaves, and a pinch of salt, with a few other spices. Not fit for a duke, but the stable lads prefer it to ale in summer.”
She topped up my tankard, poured more for herself, and slid onto the bench across from me at the kitchen table.
“Heat is bound to break tonight,” she said. “My hip is talking to me. Nobody warns you that old age turns you into a weather vane.”
“You are ready to retire?”
She sipped her drink. “Who’d cook for the house, my lord? More honey? I don’t care for too much in my meadow tea, but Lady Clarissa has a sweet tooth, poor thing. She never complains about a cold collation for supper, though I’d best not forget the pudding. The viscount is worse—he’ll put honey in his coffee—while Lady Susan turns up her nose at sweets, but adores a dark porter. The earl would eat steak at every meal, while the countess would survive on porridge. Oh, the Quality.”
I pushed the plate of ginger biscuits to her side of the table. “What does Mrs. Gwinnett say about our tastes over at Caldicott Hall?”
Mrs. Felders took her time choosing a biscuit. “Says you need to put some meat on your bones, my boy, but you eat like a bird. His Grace is finicky. She tries the fanciest French recipes, the most complicated sauces, and he sends half of it right back to the kitchen, though always with his compliments. If he truly relished his cook’s efforts, he’d clean his plate.”
How many times had I shown up on the Valmond House kitchen steps as a boy, my knee scraped, my elbow bruised, my rambles along the creek having left me famished? Mrs. Felders had known what to do with a hungry, thirsty, happily bedraggled lad.
“May I tell you a secret?”
“You’ve always told me your secrets, Master Julian.”
“His Grace prefers plain fare, such as you probably put out for the servants’ hall. A plate of cheese toast would leave him in raptures. He’d eat every bite of steak and potatoes provided he could pour his gravy on the spuds.”
She smiled. “Caldicotts are good size. They need hearty meals. I’ve told Emily Gwinnett as much, but she says he’s a dook, you know? Dooks must eat fancy. Lord Reardon liked to eat fancy, too, poor bugger.”
“Where do you think he’s gone off to? I’ve asked the whole staff for their thoughts on the matter.”
She chose another biscuit. “Hard to say. With Lady Clarissa, I could venture a few guesses if she turned up missing. Her old governess, some cousins up north, a great-aunt, but Reardon never had time for the family connections, and he has no brothers. A solitary lad. No wonder he took to drawing pictures and rambling with the dog. Dog is getting on, though, and Reardon’s not a boy.”
“Touchstone is biding with us at the Hall for now. He’s well looked after.”
Mrs. Felders pushed the biscuits back over to me. “Lord Reardon needs to grow up. He tried running away from home as a lad. Never worked. His pa didn’t notice he were missing, and his ma said meals were quieter without him. He mighta been floating facedown in the quarry pond, and that was all she had to say.”
“You think he’s having a tantrum?”
She nodded, and a look came into her eye that suggested she wasn’t above turning a full-grown viscount over her knee.
“How was he supposed to grow up, my lord? If his pa were elderly, we’d call him vague. But there’s another word for it when you’re rich and titled… Serry-ball? Serry-something.”
“Cerebral,” I said, tapping my forehead. “Building castles in Spain.” Though I’d seen many Spanish castles, and they were far more substantial edifices than Valloise was capable of concocting even mentally.
“Aye, castles in Spain. A useless example for a boy who’s supposed to put right decades of neglect on the estate and eventually vote in the Lords. No uncles to step in, unless you count Squire Huber, but Reardon has little patience with that one. Says he’s stuck in the past. Well, Reardon is stuck in the clouds.”
She drained her tankard. “Reardon needed somebody to show him how to go on, and Lady Clarissa tries, but she has troubles of her own.”
“What about you? Any troubles these days?” I’d tried for a light note, but Mrs. Felders turned a tired gaze on me.
“We manage well enough here in the country. The home farm, the spice garden, the kitchen garden, the hives… They are all adequate to feed the household. In London, I can’t fill the larders as easily. So much must be bought because we are just a bit too far from the estate. The earl’s credit in Town is used up, and I ought not to be telling you this.”
No, she shouldn’t, but in the past, she’d certainly guarded my confidences. “When Lady Clarissa travels to Town, she’ll do so as Lady Ophelia’s guest. Mrs. Aimes is leaving for Town tonight in the Caldicott traveling coach, which is sizable. She’ll be in London by morning, and you can send along enough provisions to tide her over for a week or so. I’ll give her sufficient coin to keep her in butter and eggs.”
I made that offer not for Enola Aimes’s sake—she would land on her slippered feet—but because Mrs. Felders would fret otherwise. She had worried about me in my misspent youth, and I had taken her welcome and good cheer for granted time after time.
I rose, though I, too, was feeling stiff in the hips and knees. “I’m off to chase down our runaway.”
She gestured with a biscuit. “Godspeed, lad. You’ll need it.”
Through a long, hot, dusty afternoon and into the evening, Atlas and I tracked Lord Reardon along the King’s highway. A series of inquiries informed me that he had traveled south, then angled west, changing horses every ten miles or so.
He had eschewed traveling by public coach or post, suggesting he was still attempting a measure of stealth, and his destination was apparently Portsmouth rather than Brighton.
Bad news, that.
Brighton was a still-fashionable seaside haunt of the idle and titled, while Portsmouth bustled with maritime trade. Reardon might well be paying a call on his old tutor, and he might thereafter take a permanent leave from his homeland.
I arrived at the market town of Arundel as the last of the light was fading from the sky. The last of my energies had faded some five miles up the road. I had nonetheless walked Atlas the final leg of our journey. Like many steeds with Iberian blood, he tolerated the dry heat of Spain well. We’d been traveling through the worst of England’s humid summer weather, a different and more taxing proposition for man and beast.
The inn, smack along the High Street, boasted the usual archway into a square courtyard, though for the moment, the courtyard was quiet. Arundel Castle, traditional seat of the Dukes of Norfolk, loomed up on its hill in dour granite splendor. The place had taken various drubbings during Cromwell’s rise to power, and the late duke—The Drunken Duke to his familiars, number eleven by more formal reckoning—had spent considerable time and money on repairs.
Reardon had probably longed to sketch that stony pile. The place gave me the collywobbles. Too much misery and murder associated with the average castle, and Arundel was no exception.
To my weary delight, I learned from the hostlers that a man answering to Reardon’s description had turned in a hired hack two days earlier and decamped from the inn on foot. I decided to celebrate by taking a room, ordering a bath, and consuming a plate of ham-and-cheddar sandwiches.
My quarters were at the back of the inn—quieter—and had a small balcony overlooking the working end of the stable yard. Fragrant, and not with the refreshing tang of the ocean. The River Arun had another dozen miles to go before finding the sea.
I similarly had a mental distance to travel before I found slumber. I made a pallet on my balcony and slept as I often had on campaign, half sitting up, my back propped against the inn’s venerable stone wall.
In the distance, lightning flashed, and I even heard a faint rumble of thunder, but no rain fell.
What the hell was Reardon up to? Lying low for a time in preparation for his great exhibition? Why not inform his sister of those plans? Bolting for the Continent ahead of angry creditors? Again, that scheme could and should have been shared with her ladyship.
Eluding marriage to Eunice Huber?
Many a fellow had been enticed into taking the king’s shilling by recruiting sergeants who disparaged wives and mothers. How dare those infernal women chain a man to domestic drudgery when he ought to be seeing the world and enjoying the sanguinary adventures all braw, bonnie laddies delighted in?
The recruiters had been sirens of death, but they’d also known how to present knavery toward family in an honorable light. Reardon was young, indulged, and sooner or later, he’d be burdened by the realities of the Valloise title.
Perhaps he’d heard those siren songs and was eluding domesticity without benefit of donning a uniform.
When the first streaks of dawn arrived, I was stiff, hungry, and no closer to understanding my quarry’s motivation, but with luck, I’d soon catch up to him, and he could answer my questions in person.
Though when had luck ever taken the side of Lord Julian Caldicott for long?
Frenchmen were no oddity in Southern England. Napoleon had disdained prisoner exchanges—why pay to send able-bodied enemy soldiers home to rearm against him when he could instead reduce an opponent’s numbers by essentially starving his captives?—and thus English parole towns, garrisons, and merchant communities had absorbed some hundred thousand Frenchmen in the course of the wars.
The Revolution had previously sent forty thousand French émigrés to London alone, while others in great numbers had found refuge with English cousins or in less expensive British surrounds.
Traffault or his brother would not be a rarity in a town the size of Arundel, but Reardon himself had given me an advantage.
“Have you seen this fellow?” I asked the inn’s proprietress. She put me in mind of the castle: stolid, gray, weathered, and built to withstand the ages. “I am in search of a drawing master for my sister and hoping he might take her on.”
She studied the sketch briefly. Prominent nose, thinning hair, a twinkle in the eyes of an otherwise stern countenance.
“Don’t know him, but if he’s local, he’ll not take his usual pint with us. Try the smaller inns, or…” She studied me, probably looking for signs that I owed allegiance to the Board of Revenue or some other government-imposed nuisance. “We have a teahouse now. I hear they’re catching on in London. Don’t see why a goodwife can’t take tea in my ladies’ parlor, but who am I to question fashion? The women at their tea might know the local drawing masters. Betty!” she barked at a girl of perhaps ten years skulking in the direction of the kitchen door behind the common’s bar. “The sun’s up, and the front steps haven’t been scrubbed.”
“Aye, ma’am. I’m doing it now, ma’am.” Betty bobbed a curtsey and ducked out the front door.
“A teahouse, you say?” I infused my voice with wonder at this bit of market-town sophistication. “I’ve never heard the like. Where would this teahouse be?”
She tucked an errant graying curl under her mobcap. “You walk along the High until you reach the river. Turn left, and it’ll be a few doors down. Might not be open at this hour. We serve good China black in the common, fresh leaves for every pot.”
“And I have enjoyed that tea myself this very morning.” Not the strongest brew I’d encountered. “I’ll nonetheless look in at this tea establishment. Do the Frenchmen in these parts favor any particular pub or tavern?”
“That lot.” Her features lost their air of harried hospitality. “Killed my sister’s boy.”
“The man I’m looking for had the good sense to flee his homeland before the Corsican monster came to power. He would condole you on your loss and likely deserve your sympathy for his many bereavements.”
As close as I could come to telling her that the war was over, and many a French mother had lost every son, nephew, brother, and grandson she had. My hostess’s grief was real and bitter, and who was I to scold her out of it when my own brother’s death haunted me?
“Frenchies around here stick to theirselves,” she said. “And well they should. If you’re looking for one of them, you’re asking the wrong lady.”
She bustled off, nose in the air, and I counted the conversation useful. Émigrés had an established neighborhood in Arundel, something I hadn’t known before, and if Reardon had any sense—an open question—he’d try to secret himself among them.
I collected my saddlebags and my horse and was on the point of tightening Atlas’s girth when I noticed the girl Betty hard at work on the front steps.
“Good morning, Miss Betty.”
She dimpled at my use of the honorific. “G’day, sir. That’s a fine horse. He’s not one of ours.”
“His name is Atlas, and he’s all mine. Might you answer a question for me about how to find my way in your fair town?”
“Aye. I know where everything is. Hard to get lost in Arundel, because you see the castle from almost anywhere. You don’t look lost.”
High praise, and the perspective of a natural scout. “I’m not lost, but I’m trying to find a friend. He’s French, has lived in these surrounds with his brother for several years. Their name is Traffault.”
“Miss-shure Truffles,” she said, beaming at me. “They live down along the river. You walk the path on the bank toward the sea—other side, not this side—and come to a thatched cottage with roses growing all the way to the second floor. Not much more than a quarter hour. They might still be blooming. Mr. Truffle is very merry, and he always says, ‘Bon-jure, ma pettee,’ to me. He drew a picture of me once, but Ma’am tossed it into the fire. Said I wasn’t to get vain notions or speak to Mr. Truffles, but I can’t help it if he speaks to me, can I?”
“You certainly cannot. I will give your regards to Mr. Truffles. Please accept a token of my thanks for your assistance.” I passed her tuppence. Her eyes got round, and she looked to be winding up for a grand oratory of thanks when I bowed and departed.
Children were often the best informants. Of necessity, they kept a close eye on the larger, more powerful creatures in their environment, while adults barely noticed juvenile surveillance.
Atlas and I ambled along the river as the heat began to build again, and I considered what would happen if Reardon wasn’t to be found keeping company with the Traffaults. If he’d traveled on to Portsmouth, he could already have boarded a packet or, worse, a merchantman.
Eunice Huber might well be ruined. The squire would make endless trouble for Arthur. Clarissa would be left to handle an exhibition with no artist to show off. The Valmond parents would come to London, in plain view of their creditors, with no promised artist genius on hand to right the family finances.
And Wellington’s best intelligence officer would once again be covered in disgrace.
I didn’t care for that notion or for the rest of the misery that would result from Reardon’s elopement.
I dismounted at the designated cottage, a tidy edifice that looked to be of about twelve rooms, not counting the half-sunken basement. The roses were still blooming, and they imparted a lovely fragrance to the sunny yard. I loosened Atlas’s girth and took off his bridle—even twenty minutes at grass would do him some good—and rapped on the front door.
“Un moment, s’il vous plaît! Un moment!” The voice was French and female and rang with the light, crisp precision of a Parisian accent.
When the dark-haired housekeeper opened the door—no mobcap and no smile either—I announced myself in French.
“Lord Julian Caldicott, at your service. My apologies for calling at such an early hour, but I come on a matter of some urgency. Is Monsieur Jean Traffault in?”
Bill collectors did not, in the typical case, knock on front doors, and my French was that of a native speaker. Those two facts probably accounted for the lady stepping back and gesturing me into a spotless foyer.
“Monsieur Jean is in,” she said in her native tongue, “but the light today demands painting. He won’t be on hand for long. He’ll be off along the river. Sunshine and water, flowers, big white sky. He cannot resist these. Have you a card?”
I passed over one somewhat the worse for my travels.
“Come to the parlor, please, my lord. I will make you some tea, and if your horse eats my flowers, I will put him in the stewpot.”
“Atlas will be more than content to trim your grass.”
She showed me to a room filled with morning light, so I kept my tinted spectacles upon my nose. The décor was reminiscent of the farmhouses of Provence, with sturdy furniture, a sizable hearth, and a gleaming polished oak mantel. The emphasis was on comfort and durability rather than fussy excesses of style.
The space appealed to me far more than the elegant parlors of Caldicott Hall. This sitting room was a useful part of a home rather than a testament to titled ostentation. When the housekeeper brought me a tray—hot tea, freshly baked croissants with jam and clotted cream—I expressed enthusiastic appreciation and fell to.
After twenty minutes had gone by, and my host was still not in evidence, I abandoned my third cup of tea and went scouting.
Across the entry hallway was a combination office and family parlor. The desk near the mullioned window was modest in size, tidily organized, and had been recently dusted. The sofa looked comfortable if a bit faded—the fate of most furniture in sunny rooms—and the carpet similarly showed signs of wear.
Nothing about the room suggested recent occupation, but a glance at the desk blotter gave me encouragement. Amid flower doodles and fanciful Latin calligraphy, somebody had started a sketch of Clarissa Valmond.
“You passed this way,” I said, “and I am on your trail.”
I abandoned the front rooms and worked my way back toward the inevitable kitchen stairs. I was halfway down to the lower reaches when through the window on the landing, Atlas alerted me to activity in the yard. He’d grazed around to the side of the house, munching industriously on the lush grass, but he ceased his depredations to lift his head and prick his ears in the direction of the back garden.
“No, you don’t,” I muttered, bolting down the steps, through a tidy, spacious kitchen, and into an equally tidy garden. A man was easing through the back gate, not tall enough to be Reardon, but a knapsack such as Reardon favored hanging off one shoulder.
“Monsieur Traffault, I will give chase if necessary.”
He paused, turned toward me, and let the gate swing closed behind him. “My lord, good morning.”
“Good day to you as well.” I’d hailed him in French. He had spoken English to me in return, so I kept to that language. I wasn’t here to antagonize him, and I could state my business as easily in English as French. “Might you spare me a moment before you go off on your day’s rambles?”
Before he scarpered on me.
“A moment, yes, of course.” He approached me, wreathed in geniality, so I prepared to reciprocate with my cheery Englishman impersonation.
“Good sketching hereabouts, I presume?”
“There is always good sketching, my lord. One must have the eyes to see it.” Traffault was spare and jaunty. He wore a battered hat at a rakish angle, and his angular countenance beamed universal benevolence. He would have been a ray of sunshine at Valmond House, and his praise would have drawn a younger Reardon like a lodestone.
“Was it you who taught Lord Reardon to find his subjects in nature?”
“His lordship finds peace in nature.” Traffault’s English was charmingly accented, but precise and correct. “His art wanders many landscapes, while his feet take him to fresh air and pleasant breezes. I am sorry to say you have just missed him. He caught a ride to Portsmouth with my brother not an hour ago.”
Bloody hell. Bloody bedamned hell. “Where is he bound?”
“America. He has wonderful eyes to see, but his ear for French is another matter, and English is not widely spoken in the realms he’d find most interesting on the Continent. I am sorry, my lord. He was determined to go, and Lord Reardon cannot be reasoned with when he makes up his mind.”
Before I galloped for Portsmouth, I wanted the answer to at least one question. “Lord Reardon left without any word to his sister, who has gone to the trouble to organize a London exhibition that opens in a week’s time. He made it appear as if he’d had a fatal accident, abandoned his dog, and otherwise behaved in a troubling fashion. If he wanted to go to America, why not simply bid the family farewell and go? Why this drama?”
Traffault ambled over to a round wrought-iron table in the shade of a cherry tree heavy with ripening fruit. He slung his knapsack into a chair and gestured for me to have a seat. Breakfast dishes still littered the table, coffee cups, a basket of croissants with evidence of the trimmings the housekeeper had offered me—empty jampot, half-empty cream boat. An empty honeypot also graced the table, one subject to the inspection of an enterprising fly.
A pair of robins flitted about in the cherry tree, doubtless making designs on the crumbs littering the flagstones.
Every particle of my being bellowed at me to hurry, to leap onto my charger and catch Reardon before he took ship. Reason, however, argued that Atlas had both speed and stamina, and two more minutes wasn’t likely to make all the difference.
“Lord Reardon is a good fellow,” Traffault said, taking a seat opposite me, “a talented fellow, but an unhappy fellow.”
“One has heard this. No brothers, no friends, no funds for the usual social diversions enjoyed by young male aristos. A sister with managing tendencies, a distracted father, an ailing mother—a dying mother who will grieve sorely over her son’s abandonment.”
Traffault winced. “I did not know the countess was truly ill.”
“Dying, apparently, and Reardon might be unhappy, but to turn his back on his own mother, he must be miserable indeed. He might also be abandoning the mother of his firstborn child—a child who will be illegitimate—to say nothing of the debts Reardon is leaving his family to resolve.”
“You do not come to collect these debts, my lord?”
“I come because his sister fears him dead, and I’d like to correct her misapprehension.”
Traffault picked up a mug that held a few swallows of cold coffee, swished the contents about, then set the drink down untasted.
“Then you must retrieve my young friend from his travels. I did not know of these circumstances you describe, not the countess’s illness, not the baby. The debts are old news. Reardon said only that he’s bored, frustrated, and wasting what few years of freedom he has left. Young men are barely rational on a good day, though, I myself was the soul of good sense at his age.”
A disarming smile accompanied that gentle self-derision.
“You abandoned your country and your family to take up a life among the heathen English. You’d have been about Reardon’s age at the time?”
“Oui, and as it turned out, I made the right decision. I would have been, as the English say, cannon fodder for l’empereur had I survived the Terror. I would do the same thing again, given the chance. Do not let me keep you, my lord. Portsmouth is forty miles of hard riding, and the day promises to be hot.”
I rose—the day was already hot—and offered my hand. “My thanks for your honesty, and I hope you will consider attending the exhibition. The family has no choice but to go forward with it, though without the artist on hand, success is unlikely.”
He shook briefly and offered a bow as well. “Safe travels, my lord, and perhaps we will meet again under happier circumstances, though I cannot manage a journey to London by next week. I will see you off.”
I whistled for Atlas, who ambled up to the low wall running along the south side of the garden. He chewed a mouthful of long grass and gave me the sort of look that suggested I was in his bad books for interrupting a fine meal.
“Take some sustenance,” Traffault said, folding a pair of croissants into a linen napkin. “Not much, but Celeste’s offerings are the best you will sample in England. I will see you to your horse.”
I wanted to grab my gracious host—who’d been slinking through the gate five minutes previously—and shake him for form’s sake.
Something about the whole encounter was off. Why leave me to feast in solitude in the front parlor for twenty minutes? To give Reardon a head start, of course. Why had Traffault attempted to hare off twenty minutes after my arrival? Why not decamp the instant Celeste warned him of my presence?
Why two coffee cups on the table? Perhaps Celeste had been enjoying the morning air with Traffault before my arrival, but Celeste struck me as the sort who’d take dirty dishes into the house with her, not leave them to tempt the birds and bugs.
I untied Atlas’s bridle from the saddlebag fastenings, while my mind continued to gnaw on fare that was going down uncomfortably.
“Best of luck, my lord,” Traffault said, switching back to French. “Avoid the Black Swan if you’re changing horses. They overcharge, and their livestock is not always sound. Two miles on, The Happy Hare is a better choice.”
Le Lièvre Heureux. Why speak French to me now?
Why two coffee cups on the table?
I finished buckling Atlas’s bridle, took up his girth, and tucked the croissants into a saddlebag. The same mental chorus that had been roaring at me to jump in the saddle was now urging caution.
“I greeted you in French.”
“Good French. Excellent French,” he said, twinkling jovially. “A story there, I suspect.”
“A French grandmother who would only allow émigrés to staff my father’s nursery. You declined to reply in French, and you reminded me that Reardon has a poor grasp of that language.”
The warmth in Traffault’s blue eyes acquired a shade of calculation. “I am in England, I speak English. Most people do not hold my nationality against me, but one does not antagonize…”
I waited for him to realize the futility of that argument. “When we got out of earshot of the house, you switched immediately to French. Reardon puts honey in his coffee if no sugar is available. It’s his sweet tooth that emptied that honeypot and consumed all the jam. You realized you’d picked up his cup rather than your own and set it down untasted.”
I loosened the girth I’d just taken up. “I have no authority to detain Lord Reardon, but I refuse to leave without getting some answers from him.” I tied up Atlas’s reins and signaled that he could go back to trimming the grass. Grazing in his bridle was bad form. Letting lush grass go to waste was a mortal sin.
“My young guest is determined to leave, my lord,” Traffault said. “Desperate to leave. I tell him that Lady Clarissa will not content herself with that bit of foolishness up in Surrey. He has no head for guile, I tell you, no head for anything but art.”
“Art, romping, and self-preservation. I will await Reardon in the garden, if you’d please let him know he has a caller.”
“He knows,” Traffault said, stalking back through the gate. “I will send him to you. He knows, and he refuses to return to Valmond House. When you arrived, I made one last attempt to reason with him, but I am done trying to change his mind.” My host stomped away into the house, muttering about “these ridiculous English,” and “Why did nobody listen?” and “A perfectly lovely day must be wasted.” Et cetera and so forth.
I took a seat in the shade and pondered a stubborn question: What force had compelled Reardon to surrender every pretense of honor for the sake of this disgraceful, disorderly retreat? He was betraying his mother, his sister, his sweetheart, and his standing as a gentleman, and yet, he was apparently determined on this badly bungled exit.