Chapter 2

“My lord, do come in!” Tait greeted me as if we’d matriculated in the same public school form and shared memories of the same boyish pranks. “I’ve been anticipating your call.”

We shook hands—a presumption on Tait’s part, a ploy on mine. If I was to find answers for Tait, I needed to earn his trust, lest my time be wasted.

“Shall we do the tea tray, indulge in a tot, or get down to business?” Tait asked, ushering me into a dim foyer notable for its wooden herringbone parquet floor. Old-fashioned and durable, but in need of some polish.

“Lemonade or cider wouldn’t go amiss, once I’ve had the use of a washstand,” I said. “If you’d rather speak out of doors, I’d enjoy a ramble in the garden.” That ramble would take us a sufficient distance to ensure privacy.

Tait bellowed for a footman, ordered a tray of lemonade and biscuits by the sundial, and escorted me through a country manor midway between prosperity and poverty. I washed my hands in a breakfast parlor that boasted a table too large for a household of one, though the windows were sparkling and the sideboard recently polished. The house was generally free of cobwebs, stains, and dust, but the hall runners were thin, only half the sconces had lamps, and the art on the walls was a collection of bucolic mediocrities.

“I haven’t done much with the garden since Evvie left,” Tait said, leading me onto a wide flagstone terrace at the back of the house. “I still don’t know how to talk about her departure. Did she leave? Was she kidnapped? Did she come to grief at the hands of highwaymen? Did she succumb to food poisoning at some coaching inn between here and London, her valuables ransacked by the innkeeper? England is not what it once was, with tens of thousands of soldiers home, all looking for work or looking for trouble.”

His point, while mildly insulting, was valid, more so because all of those former farm boys, apprentices, and drovers had grown comfortable with firearms, inebriation, and violence while taking the king’s shilling. Wellington had referred to his army as infamous for good reasons.

We jaunted down the steps into a garden fading toward autumn. “We can take comfort,” I said, “from the fact that those soldiers were still on the Continent at the time of your wife’s disappearance, and highwaymen have become rare.”

“True enough, but I don’t know what became of Evelyn, my lord. The not knowing eats at me like a malaise of the soul. Did I inspire my spouse to take her own life? Is she kicking her heels as some alderman’s ostensible wife, heedless of my torment or even gratified by the thought of it? Sometimes I think I’ll go mad with wondering. Other times, I can pretend the whole business is behind me.”

Tait’s lament struck a reluctant chord with me. I was not entirely certain what had led to my brother Harry’s death and less certain still what role I had played—if any—in his demise. I had followed him from camp one night, thinking to safeguard him on whatever mischief he was about. To my shock, he’d been waylaid by a party of French officers, and he’d surrendered without a fight, perhaps because he’d sensed my presence and thought to protect me. I’d presented myself to his captors as well, thinking that Harry and I stood a better chance of escaping together than Harry did alone.

I’d had no opportunity to ask Harry why he’d left camp against standing orders, though he most assuredly had. Harry was dead, I had endured torments in captivity that haunted me still, and this enigma in my recent past no doubt fueled my interest in solving other people’s mysteries.

“You manage,” I said to my host. “Good days and bad days, sometimes terrible days and worse nights. Life goes on, and marriage, while important, does not encompass all that gives life meaning.”

“You describe me as a cross between a career infantryman and a youngish spinster.”

Touché, did he but know it. “We are all soldiering on as best we can, Tait.”

A housekeeper in a mobcap and half apron descended into the garden, laid a tray on a small weathered table near the sundial, curtseyed, and withdrew. She was doubtless doing the footman’s job, the better to get a gawk at the titled caller. She was younger than most housekeepers and pretty in a sturdy, freckled way. Something about the lone glance she’d sent Tait stirred questions in my mind.

Because the garden was sunny, I donned a pair of my blue-tinted eyeglasses.

“Hyperia likes your spectacles,” Tait said, settling on a wooden bench beside the table. “She says they give you a scholarly air.”

“They protect my eyesight.” I sat about two feet from my host, the bench warm at my back. “Tell me about the last time you saw your wife.”

Tait handed me over a glass of lemonade and took one for himself. “The fourth of October, five years past. The anniversary is at hand, and that always makes me melancholy.”

The melancholy might fade to introspection in time. “Did you part in anger?”

He sipped his drink and looked all brooding and handsome even while engaged in that mundane undertaking. “Has Hyperia been telling tales out of school?”

“She respects your confidences. My questions are my own. If Evelyn is alive and well, then she is apparently choosing not to communicate with you, choosing to remain at a distance while she holds your future hostage. Those are not the behaviors of a happy wife.”

“Your thoughts echo my own, closely followed by, ‘And is she justified in her anger?’ Was I that bad of a husband? I loved her, I never laid a hand on her, I thought she loved me…”

I waited. Tait had philosophized and regretted and speculated, but he was taking his jolly time getting down to a recitation of relevant facts.

“We quarreled,” he said. “All couples do, though some manage their skirmishes mostly in private and in civil tones. Evvie and I were loud. We were young, and the lack of children became a sore point after a couple of years. We both wanted children, and providence thwarted our wishes. This has an insalubrious effect on marital relations.”

I let that understatement pass unremarked. My manly humors had suffered some sort of casualty during my time in uniform and had yet—thus far—to reassert themselves.

“Was the last quarrel the worst?”

Tait smiled ruefully at his drink. “It is now, of course. At the time, it was just another row. I’d tracked mud onto the carpets in the formal parlor. This misdemeanor is committed by every rural husband whose abode boasts such a parlor, but I’d given offense once too often. I was a disrespectful lout. She rued the day she’d accepted my suit.”

I sipped my lemonade, which was good. Cool, neither too tart nor too sweet. “And you returned fire?”

“Don’t we always when the ladies take us to task? She was a nag who cared more for a spot on the carpet than she did for her own husband, and the only people to see our formal parlor were her gossiping friends and the vicar’s sermonizing wife. Their opinions of my manners meant less than nothing to me, et cetera and so forth. I rued the day I’d offered for her hand, and that was her opening to storm off, stage left. Cue ominous violin tremolo. Within the hour, she’d summoned the coach to take her the five miles to Bamford. Several coaching routes converge there, and I haven’t been able to trace her movements from that point forward.”

His circumstances resonated too well with my own. I’d trailed Harry into the night half on a lark, thinking to catch him out in a tryst or hoping to eavesdrop on a meeting with one of his myriad informants. Nothing about the night marked it as the start of a tragedy, much less a harbinger of ignominious death.

“Your wife did not leave you over one spot of mud on the carpet, Tait.”

And I had not trailed Harry strictly on a lark. My motivations had included overweening curiosity, boredom, genuine fraternal concern—and sibling rivalry.

“Oh, we had our differences, my lord. I was not strictly faithful. She flirted to annoy me. I suspect the final blow was that October the fourth was our wedding anniversary, and I had forgotten the significance of the date. Evvie set great store by such dates. She always made a fuss over holidays, birthdays, that sort of thing.”

And now every holiday and birthday was a reminder of Evvie’s departure. “You sent inquiries when she didn’t come home?”

“A few, but ours was the typical polite-society courtship. I went up to London in search of a wife. I’d done my bit at university, the land was prospering at the time, and my mother was appealing to my conscience. She longed for grandchildren. According to her, had my father been alive, he’d have counseled me to take a bride. I had means, land, looks—according to my mother. I was remiss for remaining a bachelor. You know how the ladies go on.”

I didn’t, quite. As the second spare in a ducal family, I’d not faced the pressure to marry that my older brothers had, though I faced it now. The Waltham ducal succession rested on my tired shoulders, and I keenly felt the burden.

“You and Evelyn met in Town?”

“In spring, when all is gaiety and fashion. The Season is a handful of weeks, really, and at first you are agog at the splendor. Up every morning to see and be seen on the bridle paths, socializing by the hour at the tailor’s, the bootmaker’s, the clubs. Dancing until the small hours, then pretending to cut a dash at the gaming hells. I had never been so exhausted in all my born days, and I am a countryman in my prime, my lord.”

My older brothers had made sure that I knew my way about the clubs and hells. My social standing alone had guaranteed me entrée into the ballrooms. For a gentry bachelor in search of a bride, Town had likely been a more daunting proposition.

“You hadn’t spent much time in London previously?”

Tait set aside his glass and stretched out his legs to cross them at the ankle. “Papa took me up to London a few times, but tagging after him at Tatts or going for an ice at Gunter’s doesn’t really show a boy much of Town life. Then Papa fell ill, and off to university I did go.”

For three years of scholarship, inebriation, and—for the most part—sexual frustration. “Was Eveyln in her first Season when you met?” I finished my drink and poured myself another, because Tait’s recitation was only getting started, and the sun was gaining strength.

“She was in her only Season. Evvie is one of four daughters. The family had the means to give each young lady one Season, or so the parents decided. Evvie was well dowered, and I suspect the single Season edict was to inspire seriousness of purpose, lest a younger sister’s prospects wane while an elder sibling enjoyed a third or fourth turn around the ballrooms. Evvie was the second oldest and intent on seizing the day.”

Among the aristocracy, the rules about sisters marrying in birth order tended to be honored in the breach, while gentry and cits intent on ascending were less flexible.

“Evvie seized you?”

Tait uncrossed his ankles and crossed his arms. “April turns into May, and the matchmaking becomes desperate. You realize you have a fortnight, a month, six weeks at the most to find gold, or you’ll return to the shires without a wife. Evvie was so frank and good-natured about it all, and to be honest, she flattered me. She struck me as a woman of substance who knew what she wanted. She wore too much jewelry for such a young lady, though the pieces were always good quality and would have raised no comment on a married woman.

“Evelyn wore heeled slippers,” he went on more softly, “despite being quite tall, and she wore bold fragrances—muguet or Parisian blends rather than the usual orange blossoms or attar of roses. I was a veritable bumpkin with the usual struggling acres, by London standards, and yet, Evelyn always saved a dance for me. I screwed up my courage, had the requisite discussion with her mama, and the rest was pretty much a blur of longing gazes, furtive caresses, and stolen kisses.”

Evvie, in other words, hadn’t been foolish or besotted enough to allow Tait any anticipation of the vows.

“You tell me this,” I said, “to explain why you were at a loss when it came time to search for your wife?”

“I was at a loss and equal parts furious and humiliated. I had no idea to whom she might have gone, other than to her sisters, and they claimed ignorance. I tried the only governess I’d heard her mention—but that was a finishing governess rather than a family retainer. Evvie had the two years at finishing academy required by holy writ, but I could not bring myself to write to the headmistress.”

In Tait’s shoes, I might have been similarly reticent. I’d tell myself each day that Evvie could already be on her way home, and each night, I’d promise myself that tomorrow, I’d send a note to the headmistress…

While the trail grew colder and more overgrown.

“Write to the headmistress now,” I said. “That your wife left you has long since made the rounds of the gossips. Some might conclude you and she have simply decided to live apart, and thus they don’t think it odd that they spotted Evelyn taking the waters, or coming out of a Paris hat shop. Can you ask the sisters for the names of former housekeepers, governesses, and close friends?”

Tait sat up, no longer the young gentleman at his leisure. “I was hoping you’d check those traplines.”

“Those ladies are your family.”

Tait poured himself a half glass of lemonade. “They have more or less closed ranks against me. They claim I was a bit too flirtatious with the youngest sister—she’s since married, of course—and the eldest sister held the misunderstanding against me, and then Evvie ran off. The sisters and I can be civil, but I am no longer part of their circle.”

“Tait, please tell me you did not compromise the youngest daughter.”

He shook his head. “Hanged for a sheep, and all that. Ardath was something of a featherbrain. Most of the time she was jolly, as Evvie had once been jolly, but I never crossed the most important lines.”

I wanted to smack him on the back of the head. He’d apparently crossed other lines, lines that could just as easily have seen Miss Ardath cast from Society’s favor. A brotherly kiss that did not land on her forehead, an embrace that lasted longer than a friendly squeeze.

“You were trying to make Evvie jealous?” I could come up with no other halfway credible excuse.

“Tit for tat. Evvie was a flirt, I became a flirt, and sometimes more than a flirt, and by the time she left, we were both convinced that we’d been victimized by a cruel and unfeeling spouse who did not deserve our loyalty. Children would have helped, even one child, but that consolation was denied us.”

I sipped my second drink, repositioning my mental artillery and arranging infantry and cavalry in light of the discussion. My job was not to judge two young people who’d made a hash of their marriage—what did I know of those challenges?—but rather to find the missing party.

“I need a list, Tait, of your flirts and especially your more-than-flirts. Leave nobody off. Not the scullery maid at the posting inn, not the second parlor maid you had to pay off after only a summer.” Nor the pretty, youngish housekeeper with the longing glances.

“Those people won’t know where Evelyn is, assuming my wife is yet alive.”

“They might well have facilitated her exit, heard her plans, or arranged to have her done away with. I will call upon her sisters to learn what I can of Evelyn’s side of the equation.”

Tait’s handsome countenance took on a sullen cast. “I hate that you must pry into my affairs, and yet, that’s what I’ve asked you to do.”

I wasn’t much looking forward to the exercise myself. “Then dismiss me from the ranks, Tait. I follow your orders in this undertaking. If you want your lady wife found, I will march out smartly. If you want to continue on in the same ignorance you have enjoyed for five years, then say so now. Harvest is upon us, and I can make myself useful elsewhere.”

More accurately, I could lounge about at the Hall, counting the days until Arthur’s departure and playing Vikings with little Leander in the nursery. Harry had always preferred Vikings to Highlanders or explorers. I had recently taken on managing the household correspondence, as much for something to do as to prepare for Arthur’s absence.

“Commence searching,” Tait said. “I will send a note to the oldest sister, Mrs. Margery Semple. She bides about ten miles to the west, not that far from Caldicott Hall.”

The name was unfamiliar to me, but then, I hadn’t been home much in recent years. “Tell her to expect me tomorrow at midmorning. I can see myself out.” I finished my drink and rose. “Is there anything else you think I should know?”

Tait stood as well. He lacked about an inch of my six-foot-two-inch height, but he was a fine specimen. His flirtatious overtures had likely been well received in many quarters and bitterly resented in others.

“I’m sure I’ll think of something—a thousand things—just as soon as you trot down the drive, my lord, but at present, no. I’ve revealed the unhappy nature of my union, my part in creating the misery, and my desire to see Evelyn found or properly laid to rest. I’m not sure what else there is to tell.”

He could tell me which shops she’d patronized in Town, with whom she’d corresponded, whether the same housekeeper still served the Tait domicile… I had much ground to cover, but I sensed that I’d reached the limit of Tait’s willingness to talk, for now.

“You have lied by omission,” I said, surveying the tired garden. “I understand that, because your pride is involved. You well know which fellows you suspect of making a cuckold of you, which fellows listened too sympathetically to Evelyn’s woes in the very churchyard.

“I will be back,” I went on, “and I will compare what you tell me about those fellows with what the sisters have to say. I will traverse the terrain of your marriage over and over, focusing first on this bit of gossip, then on that odd silence, until I know your past better than you do. Understand that now, Tait, and either support my endeavors or end the search before it begins.”

He studied the sundial, a venerable relic defaced by the passing of some disrespectful bird. A wife would have seen the sundial regularly scrubbed, the herbaceous borders trimmed, the gravel walks raked. A wife would have done a tidier job of mending the seam of Tait’s morning coat, and a wife would have ensured that the kitchen had put at least a pot of violets on the drinks tray.

Tait seemed to mentally inventory all those touches missing from his life before making his decision.

“Do your worst, my lord, or your best. If you cannot find Evelyn, then I must wait years for the courts to free me from her ghost, and I will bankrupt myself in the process. Hyperia is right that you are my best option, though admittedly, one I embrace with reluctance.”

As noble speeches went, that one was at least brief. “I will return tomorrow afternoon, after having called on Mrs. Semple.”

I bowed my farewell and left him in a brown study by the sundial. My ride home was taken up with the question of timing. Why start the search for Evelyn now? Tait’s feelings for his wife were clearly mixed, while she might despise the ground he strutted upon—assuming she was alive.

And I had not been strictly forthcoming with Tait either.

He’d said he’d never raised a hand to his wife. Many husbands bragged of the same accomplishment, as if having the self-restraint of a seven-year-old at choir practice was somehow indicative of great forbearance. Tait might well have taken a riding crop to his wife, or otherwise given her reason to fear him.

If Evelyn had been unsafe in her marriage, then, should I find her, I would keep her whereabouts from Tait, no matter how many speeches he made or husbandly regrets he expressed.