Chapter 15

“Babs was the peacemaker,” John Tait said. “The sister who never made a fuss and often poured oil on troubled waters. She flattered her elders, cosseted Ardath, was the prop and stay of her mama. Then she quietly stole a march on the lot of them, marrying an actual baronet.”

We met on neutral ground at the Bamford coaching inn, the same establishment where Evelyn had begun her flight from her marital difficulties.

“Lady Peele asked after you,” I replied as a serving maid brought us two tankards of ale. The day was cool and breezy, but I was glad for the wind if it dried out the roads more quickly.

“Babs is a decent sort,” Tait said, blowing foam onto the floorboards before sipping his drink. “She sends me a note at the end of the year. Just a few lines to let me know of births, illnesses, and how Sir Tristan fares. He’s a capital fellow. Could have been a considerable soldier-statesman, but does the jolly squire instead. They have two sons and three daughters.”

A wistful observation. “Would Evelyn have sought refuge with Lady Peele?”

We occupied the snug, which sat at the far end of a polished oak bar at a slight distance from the rest of the common. The bartender was wiping glasses at the other end, and the midmorning hour found the room otherwise deserted.

“Babs might have taken in Evvie for a time, of course. She is nonetheless the most distant of the siblings and in some ways the most socially visible. Sir Tristan is well-liked, very much the squire. He and Babs do the village fete, the hunt meets, the Sunday suppers, and so forth. I can’t see Babs stuffing Evelyn into a broom closet for five years.”

I couldn’t see Evelyn Tait contenting herself with a clandestine existence, based on what I’d read in her diaries.

“Lady Peele is also worried for her sister,” I said, letting my ale settle rather than disrespect the flooring. “I explained the situation to her as best I knew it. Evelyn made a first stop in London to liquidate jewels, then a departure from Town to no fixed address. Her coin is running out, and Margery and Ardath have attempted to befuddle me. Lady Peele considered my recitation credible.”

I was still haunted by the sense of having missed something, something that in hindsight would mock me for its obviousness. I was sure that were I conferring regularly with Hyperia, a woman of surpassing acumen, the puzzle would be solved.

She’d been quiet the whole way down from London, and by the time we’d reached the Hall last evening, she’d been sleeping at my side. She’d not come down to breakfast, so I’d explained the debacle in London to Arthur and Lady Ophelia and made arrangements to meet Tait.

I wanted to quit the investigation, my first failure on home territory—not my first failure on a mission, by any means. The knowledge that Evelyn Tait, a woman alone, might be facing penury and all the hazards attendant thereto prevented me from deserting the regiment.

“Does her ladyship share your concerns regarding Margery and Ardath?” Tait asked, downing more of his ale.

“Yes, though she wasn’t quite willing to accuse her sisters of murder. She implied they might have blackmailed Evelyn, demanding coin in exchange for silence regarding Evelyn’s whereabouts.”

“Now you think they’ve lost her too?”

“As best I can puzzle it out, Evelyn had no choice but to run. If she could no longer pay Margery and Ardath hush money, and she didn’t want to reunite with you, then she was bound to leave whatever safe haven she’d found.”

“Where is that doting sea captain when my wife needs a refuge?” Tait muttered. “Where am I? I never thought Evvie hated me. I thought all couples quarreled, and I wasn’t the worst husband, and she wasn’t a perfect wife, and we’d sort it out… Why not communicate with me somehow? Get the business dealt with and move on?”

“Perhaps Evelyn fears you will do her a mischief if she returns?” A plausible theory because it explained her continued absence. Many an itinerant shearing crew walked from York to London or London to Cornwall over the course of a season. From Sussex to Berkshire, if that’s where Evelyn had bided, would have been a few hard days on foot for a fit woman, less than a day by public coach.

Why hadn’t Evelyn returned to Tait’s household, the one place where she was legally entitled to room, board, and at least a grudging welcome? That question struck me as one I should have considered earlier and at length.

“We are back to the possibility that Evelyn cannot come home,” Tait said. “At some point since selling the last of the pearls, she met with foul play or misfortune and left no means by which anybody would know to notify me.”

“Or notify her sisters or her dear friend Lina Hanscomb.”

We sipped our ale in silence as a London stage clattered into the yard, disgorged one passenger, changed teams, and trotted off again.

Tait shifted a curtain partly blocking the window. “That’s not… no. For a moment, I thought Mrs. Ingersoll just got off that stage. I’m not sleeping well. The mind plays tricks.”

“Are you and the widow no longer cordial?”

He finished his drink and did not call for another. “I was a bit unforthcoming with her originally, but she wasn’t precisely forthcoming with me. I thought surely a widow with a small child would be receptive to a gentleman’s sincere interest, and she appeared to be, up to a point. When I did explain my situation to her, she wanted no part of a man who lied about his marital status by omission.”

That turn of events had apparently flummoxed Tait, so much so that he imposed the rest of his confession on me as well.

“I would have told her about Evvie,” he said, “before matters progressed much further. She informed me that matters would never progress at all as long as honesty figured so poorly in my dealings with women. Damned if she wasn’t as good with a scold as Evvie was, and even that… My lord, I am a sad case these days.”

“You should have confided in her.” Hyperia’s protracted silence mocked me bitterly for that hypocrisy.

“Yes, I should have, but I didn’t. This sadder and wiser business hasn’t much to recommend it, you know. I like Mrs. Ingersoll, my lord, purely like her as I haven’t liked a woman since I courted Evvie. She doesn’t suffer fools, and she’d give her life for that little girl.”

I offered the only advice I could. “Apologize. Don’t pretty it up. Don’t make excuses. Apologize and tell her it won’t happen again, and then don’t lie to her again.”

“She’s not about to walk home from services with me when I’m married to another.”

A sad case indeed. “Tait, you are not apologizing to advance your chances of getting under the lady’s skirts. You apologize because you have wronged her, and honor demands you acknowledge the harm you’ve done.”

“Apologize.” He tasted the word and found it off, apparently. “Evvie and I were awful at apologizing. We’d fume for days, sleeping on opposite edges of the same bed, waking up all tangled together, and then recalling we were at war… It should have been amusing. Then she demanded her own apartment.”

Amusing, were it not so sad. So lonely and stupid and preventable. “I want to confer with my godmother regarding a few possibilities, Tait, but I am otherwise at point non plus. I am sorry to have disappointed you.”

I was sorrier to have failed Evelyn Tait. She deserved at least the security of a separation agreement or the freedom of an annulment.

“You’re giving up?”

“What else would you have me do?”

He rose, and I got to my feet as well. “Reread Evelyn’s diaries, for one thing. I’m too… too involved to read them as anything other than the memoirs of my embittered wife, but you might see something you missed the first time. You’ve met the sisters, talked to Lina and the jewelers. Evelyn was smart enough to put things in code, you know. She made all manner of funny marks on the calendar in the library, and I had no idea what she was keeping track of. Candles, possibly, half days, poor-box donations, all of the above.”

“And you didn’t ask her?”

“She ran the household, my lord, and ran it well. I ran the estate, and she left me to it, for the most part. We’d chat about whether to switch half days for the footmen or leave a field in clover for another year, but our responsibilities were in different spheres.”

And children, even one child, would have been a common sphere. “Send the diaries over, and I’ll give them a closer reading. I would also like to discuss the whole business with Hyperia West, who is once again a guest at the Hall.”

Tait winced. “You promised you wouldn’t air my linen with Miss West.”

I moved my half-finished pint across the table, out of dashing-in-Tait’s-face range. “I am asking to be released from that promise. Pride cost you your wife once, and now, the same pride might cost you a chance to regain that wife if I cannot confer openly with Miss West. She knows the worst about me, Tait. She knows which of the rumors about my actions in uniform are true, which are baseless slander, which fall somewhere in between. She will not judge you or Evelyn for being human, and Miss West might claim the perspective that solves the riddle of Evelyn’s whereabouts.”

Hyperia was a true friend, in other words, and whether she and I ever married, I wanted no more of this weight that my obligations to Tait—and to my pride—had placed on that precious friendship.

“Tell her the worst, then,” Tait said. “Show her the diaries if you must. Soon, there won’t be a woman in Sussex willing to speak to me. I do believe you’ve made matters worse rather than better, my lord.”

He put an ironic emphasis on the honorific, though he was entitled to his pique. I had made matters worse for him. He was held in contempt by Margery and Ardath, pitied by Lady Peele, and thanks to my inquiries, he’d landed in Mrs. Ingersoll’s bad books as well. All of that might come under the heading of Tait’s just deserts.

My real concern was that I had made life worse for Evelyn, whose situation was undoubtedly more precarious. Perhaps it was a mercy that no children were involved.

“If I have made matters worse,” I said, “I apologize for that. You have the consolation now, though, of having searched thoroughly for your wife. That can only aid any petition you eventually make to the courts.”

Tait put on his top hat and produced riding gloves from a pocket. “The only real comfort I have these days is looking after my patch of ground. I do that well. Even Evvie would concede that I am a conscientious and competent farmer. To my acres, I shall return, the same acres I should probably never have left.”

“Apologize to Mrs. Ingersoll,” I called as Tait stalked away, “and send me those diaries.”

He waved a hand without turning. I resumed my seat, and while I finished my ale—the summer ale would soon be done for the year—I composed an apology to Hyperia. No prettying up the truth, no making excuses, and it was a damned uncomfortable exercise.

Only as I was back in the saddle and cantering in the direction of the Hall, harvest in progress all around me, did I realize there was one more place to look for Evelyn Tait, a place that should have been obvious to me from the start of the whole inquiry.

* * *

“If you can spare me the better part of a day,” I said, “I’d like your company on an excursion over to Chiddingstone.” I’d found Hyperia in the ladies’ parlor, which had been the solar of the medieval keep predating modern incarnations of the Hall.

Afternoon sun flooded the room, hence I wore my blue spectacles. Atticus, perched at Hyperia’s side, regarded me with open resentment.

“Whyn’t you go to Kent on your own, guv? It’s not that far.”

“You’ve been studying maps, my boy?”

His expression turned guarded. “Aye. Leander has a map in the schoolroom with all the counties on it, and London and the ports. France is down in the corner, across the Channel. Scotland sits up top. Wales is over there.” He gestured to the left, which also happened to be the west.

“Where is Africa?”

He looked confused, then grinned. “Thataway.” He pointed out the window, which was south.

“Correct. No reconnaissance officer lasted a fortnight in Spain without a good sense of direction, and you have one. Now be off with you and let John Coachman know that if the weather is fair tomorrow, I’d like to nose about Chiddingstone.”

Atticus bounced to his feet and charged toward the door, then stopped halfway across the room. “Miss Hyperia, may I be excused?”

She bestowed on him a smile of such warmth and approval, I was jealous of my tiger. “You may, and we will resume our studies on your next idle afternoon. Take Aesop with you, and you can ask me the hard words later.”

He took the book and assayed a bow. “I don’t find as many hard words as I used to, do I?”

“Barely any,” Hyperia said, beaming at him. “You’ll be reading Shakespeare next.”

“Hear that, guv? I’m learning me letters.”

“Then we’ll soon have to start you on French. Vite, vite, à l’écurie avec toi!”

“Quick, quick,” Hyperia translated, “to the stable with you!”

“Miss Hyperia knows everything.” Atticus whipped open the door. “I’m off, vite, vite!”

I took the place beside Hyperia that Atticus had vacated. “That child does everything vite, vite. Where does he get his energy?”

“From Cook’s abundant victuals, from a night spent safely in a warm bed, from the affection and regard of those around him. Leander thinks Atticus is the pinnacle of boyish achievement.”

“Leander is my next stop, but I wanted to talk to you first.” I was in fact dreading our discussion and sought to have it behind me. “How are you?”

She eyed the door, which Atticus had left open. “Too relieved for words. This drafty old Hall feels more like home than the town house where I was born. When did my brother become a fool?”

“I have been a fool, too, Hyperia, so I can’t judge Healy too harshly, but I am wroth with him for involving you in his difficulties.”

She rose, closed the door, and returned to my side. “Jules, you cannot endlessly flagellate yourself over Harry’s death. He chose to leave camp without explaining himself to you, and he had to know you’d be concerned. You went on reconnaissance, just as he would have in your shoes.”

“Possibly not—Harry tried not to hover over his little brother—but my conduct on that occasion is not what bothers me now.” A silver lining, that. I was finding more and better things to fret over, finally.

“You never took drunken offense to a passing remark,” Hyperia said, “then refused an honorable apology and shot to kill. I know you didn’t.”

I wanted to take her hand, to say my piece while we were wrapped in each other’s arms, my face pressed to her shoulder. Instead, I stood.

“I have wronged you, Hyperia West, and I am here to apologize for the hurt I’ve done you. John Tait’s privacy is not more important to me than your counsel and friendship. To imply that conferring with you would in any way compromise Tait’s dignity or my honor was ridiculous.”

She rose and faced the windows, which looked out over the gardens. The flower beds were growing bedraggled, with a few chrysanthemums trying to keep up appearances, despite some borders having already been trimmed back to winter height and others gone weedy. Yellow leaves spattered the walkways and floated in the pools of the tiered fountain.

“When men talk about honor,” Hyperia said, “they usually mean pride. True honor goes about its business without making speeches or taking umbrage over a hand of whist.”

Hyperia was lumping me in with her brother, and she wasn’t wrong.

I moved to her side. “I was jealous of Tait. You and he were on the best of terms, and you pled his case for him. He has a place in your heart, clearly.” More than that, I would not say.

Hyperia crossed her arms. “If you turn up dunderheaded over every male who has a place in my heart, then you should be jealous of Atticus, Banter, Leander, Arthur, and Atlas, for starts.”

“I am, a little.”

“Jules, be serious.”

I hadn’t been teasing. “I am seriously sorry that I promised Tait you would have no part in this investigation. Not only was that an insult to you, it was a disservice to Tait himself. He has released me from that promise, hence my request that you join me on tomorrow’s outing.”

“What’s in Chiddingstone?”

“Evelyn’s farm.”

“Do you expect to find her there?”

The subject had changed, for which I was grateful. My apology had not, however, been accepted.

“No, or not really, but it will soon belong to her. If she can make her money last until her twenty-eighth birthday, then she becomes a landowner, likely through trusts and remainders and other legal machinations. The income from the farm is hers, and I can’t see Tait interfering with that.” He would have a right to that money, too, of course, a reminder of just how absolute a husband’s dominion over his wife could be.

“Evelyn has needed a safe haven, and you suspect the farm might be it?”

“I have no idea what to expect, Perry, but I haven’t seen the farm, and I am at dead ends in all directions. If you don’t want to come with me, I understand. Having shoved you out of this inquiry, I admit you are entitled to leave me to it. Please tell me that my apology has nonetheless been accepted.”

“You are apologizing for keeping the investigation to yourself?”

Though Hyperia sounded merely curious, I knew myself to be on boggy ground. She’d come with me to the Hall of necessity. That I could be a friend to her when she faced daunting exigencies sat on one side of our ledger book, rendered in black ink. I had still given offense by excluding her from Tait’s situation, which sat on the other side in bold red ink.

“I am apologizing,” I said, “for allowing anything—Tait’s privacy, my own pride, notions of gentlemanly discretion, anything—to come between us. That business about, ‘I could not love thee, dear, so much/Loved I not honor more,’ is fine for doomed poets and hotheaded soldiers, but I have faced doom, Hyperia, on the battlefield and off. I would rather have been solely responsible for the defeat at Waterloo than lose your respect and trust.”

I hadn’t planned those words, but I meant them.

“What’s that from?” she asked, “that bit about ‘loved I not honor more’?”

“Richard Lovelace, ‘To Lucasta, Going to the Wars.’ I fancy his ‘To Althea, from Prison’ more, though his loyalty to Charles I ruined him in the eyes of others.” Lovelace’s poetry had consoled me deeply when I’d been locked in a French dungeon. Ruin in the eyes of others had never dissuaded that old fellow from the loyalties he’d held dear. He’d written his truth in those verses. He hadn’t merely penned a Cavalier’s gallant tripe.

“What’s the one you prefer? ‘To Althea’?”

“Lovelace was jailed for loyalty to his sovereign, and it was not his first incarceration. He used the time as a sort of monastic retreat, and he wraps up with this verse:

Stone Walls do not a Prison make,

Nor Iron bars a Cage;

Minds innocent and quiet take

That for an Hermitage.

If I have freedom in my Love,

And in my soul am free,

Angels alone that soar above,

Enjoy such Liberty.

“Oh, Jules.” Hyperia sank onto her bench. “You know all about stone walls and iron bars. I hate that.”

“I hated it, too, at the time.” I sat beside her, not sure where the discussion had taken us. “I hated myself for landing in such a place, against orders, with nothing to show for my folly save a guilty conscience and a wrecked mind.” And a dead brother—mustn’t leave that off the list. “I sometimes think that if I could just see Harry’s grave, I could put the whole business to rest with him, except he was likely buried in the French equivalent of a potter’s field, if not heaved over the parapets for the crows.”

“Don’t think like that. Harry is soaring with the angels, and they are buxom and friendly angels too.”

We sat quietly for a time. I was vaguely bothered by a need to get to the nursery, but more aware that I’d not mended my fences very well with Hyperia. What had prison poetry to do with anything? What good was an apology without better behavior going forward?

“In future, my dear Perry, should more investigations come my way, I will refuse the task if consultation with you is not an assumed part of my services.” That felt right. A castle of certainty I could defend zealously.

She curled her arm through mine. “What does that mean, Jules?”

“I delight in solving these puzzles—once they are solved. I haven’t found Evelyn Tait yet, but I mean to continue trying. When I came across that wretched missing hound, when I discovered the particulars of Leander’s situation… I felt useful and challenged and alive. But when I have wronged you, I am unbearably ashamed. Going forward, I choose you over any other inducement. If I hadn’t kept you at a distance, you might have refused Healy’s summons, and that whole donnybrook in London could have been avoided.”

“Put off perhaps, not avoided. Bell Montefort had found a pigeon he could pluck endlessly. Sooner or later, Healy would have helped himself to my settlements.”

Well, yes. “Am I forgiven, Perry?”

She sighed and leaned against my arm. “It hurt, Jules, to think you’d keep me out of an inquiry I could possibly help with. It hurt more than it should have. When a woman has a household to run, she justifies her existence. I have no household, no children—by my own choice, let it be said—and I have enjoyed whatever minor role I’ve had in your investigations. I hadn’t realized how much.”

“Your role is far from trivial. You might not spend as much time in the saddle as I do, but you are with me every mile. You are the commanding officer who expects my safe return, the authority for whom I draft mental dispatches that make sense of what I find in the field.”

“You will be asked to undertake more investigations, Jules, whether or not you find Evvie Tait. You are gaining a quiet reputation for managing the impossible.”

“Have I managed an adequate apology, Perry?”

She sat up. “Yes. Yes, you have, and I have an apology of my own.”

“Whatever for?”

“I never thanked you for your proposal.”

She’d never seriously considered my proposal. “The offer remains open and has nothing to do with your idiot brother or your settlements. I want you to have the protection of my name, such as it is, and in all my inadequacy and shortcomings, I love you madly.”

“Your sentiments are returned, Julian—in all my inadequacy and shortcomings—but there’s a bit more to a marital pact than an enduring friendship, isn’t there?”

What was she wittering on about? “An enduring friendship is no small boon, Hyperia.”

“It’s not, of course, but in your case, there’s the title and the entailed properties, and… Jules, I love teaching Atticus to read. He’s so eager and funny and serious about it. So dear. Leander is stealing my heart one bowl of porridge at a time. He likes cinnamon on his. I missed them both when I was in Town.”

Did you miss me?“I am responsible for both boys, Perry. Nobody will snatch them away from you.” Though Millicent could, in theory, snatch Leander away if she pleased to.

Hyperia leaned against me as if weary. “What I’m saying is that there’s more to motherhood than giving birth.”

Oh. Oh. “Much more, one hopes, and all of it less painful than the actual parturition. Some of it positively joyful.”

“I thank you for your proposal, Jules, and for your apology.”

“Are they both accepted?” I managed to sound fairly calm when I put that question to her.

“Of course not. No woman wants to accept a proposal offered strictly to avoid disaster. That’s not a sound basis for a marriage. As for that other, apology accepted. Off to the nursery with you, Julian, or Leander will sack Paris in your absence.”

My commanding officer had dismissed me with further orders. I kissed her cheek, bowed, and withdrew, my heart curiously light. I wasn’t foolish enough to think that all was well, the status quo ante restored, no harm done. I had hurt my beloved’s feelings and made only a start on repairing the damage.

She had refused my proposal of marriage for good reasons—the moment had been all wrong. There would be other, better moments, though. Much better moments. I would make sure of it.

Leander and I sacked Paris loudly, then we besieged Amiens and blockaded Marseille. The boy had a positive genius for military strategy, a talent he’d no doubt inherited from his father. By the time we returned to a hero’s welcome in London, nurse was eyeing the clock.

“Uncle Julian, will you teach me how to write my name?”

A delaying tactic, of course. I had been a boy once. I knew exactly what the proper response was.

“If tomorrow morning, Nurse tells me your evening went well and that you scampered off to sleep with nary a peep of protest, then after you’ve broken your fast, I will show you how to write your name.”

Leander saluted with his left hand. “Nary a peeper of protest, Uncle Julian. My name starts with L, like linnet and lace.”

“Good to know. Until tomorrow, General Leander.”

I left the nursery in good spirits, though tired. I returned to my rooms to change for supper and found Evelyn Tait’s diaries sitting on my vanity. When the dressing bell rang, I was once again engrossed in young love’s early raptures, and this time, Evelyn’s panegyrics to her devoted spouse struck me as sweet and sad rather than silly.