by Amanda Scott
“You’re daft,” said Sir Richard Vyne, a taller, leaner man whose generally glum expression frequently led others to think him ill-tempered even when he was in excellent humor. “A pony says it ain’t poachers at all, Mongrel, but merely farmers shooting at rabbits.”
“Done,” said Dawlish, taking not the least exception to the odd nickname for the simple reason that he had been saddled with it since his school days. His most famous relative being a duke, his chums had first called him Pedigree Dawlish, then Pedigree Dogless, but the name had soon afterward been shortened to its present form, and he had long since stopped protesting. He held out his right hand now to clinch the wager with a handshake, then grinned at the silent gentleman. “You want a piece of this action, Ned? Poachers or farmers?”
Edward, ninth Baron Crawley, taller and broader of shoulder than either of the other two, but of sterner countenance and a leaner, lankier build than even Sir Richard, had paid little heed to the first shots, and none to his companions’ conversation, but the second set of shots captured his attention. He drew rein, frowning as he struggled to concentrate through the merciless pounding in his head. Just then another shot rang out, followed by the unmistakable sound of a horse’s scream.
“Good God!” Crawley looked at his companions, his head feeling instantly clearer, his dark brown eyes becoming more sharply focused. “The York Mail passes through here about this time each morning. Do you suppose it might—”
“Come on,” Sir Richard shouted, giving spur to his mount.
Crawley followed with Dawlish, who called out anxiously, “I’ve not so much as a pistol by me, Ned, and the Royal Mail is always well-guarded. If they have been attacked—” With a grim look, Crawley drew a horse pistol from his saddle holster, whereupon Dawlish, a smile lighting his cherubic face, cried, “We shall do now. At them, lads!”
The lane ended at the highroad, and the scene that greeted them when they emerged from the woods might have daunted three lesser men. A heavily laden mail coach, its identity printed in gold lettering around the royal crest on its door panels, was drawn up at the side of the road. Two armed villains held the guards and driver, as well as the several passengers, at gunpoint while two others were busily emptying the contents of several mail pouches onto the road.
The sudden eruption of three horsemen from the woods at the side of the road startled the robbers, who turned as one to deal with them, giving one of the guards who thought more quickly than his compatriot the opportunity to snatch up his blunderbuss. When one of the mounted villains fired his pistol, Crawley fired back, and saw his man tumble from his saddle. When the second armed man fell almost in the same moment to a blast from the guard’s weapon, the remaining villains threw down their weapons and raised their hands.
Ignoring cries of gratitude mingled with exclamations of outrage from the passengers and guards, Crawley guided his mount toward the man he had shot. “Damn,” he muttered, looking down at the lifeless figure.
“What is it, Crawler?” Sir Richard demanded, reining his horse nearer. “Someone you know?”
“No, of course not, but I didn’t mean to kill the fellow, only to wing him. My aim was all over the shop, Dickon. Really, I must stop drinking so much. Throws my aim right out.”
The guard who had fired the blunderbuss said, “Don’t you never mind about him, my lord. That villain meant to kill you right enough. And us, too, I reckon. He ain’t no loss.”
Vyne looked down at the corpse, his gray eyes narrowing. “Are you sure he’s dead?”
Swinging his right leg over the saddle bow, Crawley slid to the ground and moved to have a closer look.
“Have a care,” Vyne growled. “Knew a fellow once who got himself killed through thinking a wild boar he’d shot was dead when it wasn’t. Turned on him and ripped his gullet out when he bent down like that to see if it was finished.”
Crawley saw blood oozing through the fallen man’s jacket. There was no sign of life. A breeze stirred, sending a bit of paper skittering along the road, followed by another. Without thinking, Crawley put his foot on one just as a female passenger shrieked, “The mail! The wind is blowing the letters away!”
The mailbags the robbers had ripped open had spilled most of their contents onto the road and a capricious wind was scattering letters hither and yon. One of the guards ran after two letters that blew into the woods, and several of the passengers chased others along the road and plucked still others from the nearby hedgerows.
The second guard ignored the commotion, keeping his blunderbuss firmly trained upon the other two robbers, while one of the passengers bound their hands behind their backs with cords from the remaining pouches.
Crawley, glancing at the driver to make certain he was attending to his nervous horses, saw yet another letter come to rest between the left wheeler’s rear hooves. The animal moved just then, putting one large hoof down on the letter. Grimacing, Crawley moved to rescue it. Smacking the horse’s flank, he reached down and picked up the letter when the animal shifted its weight again.
He could not make out the direction, although it had been written in an elegant copperplate hand. The frank was illegible, too, but that was no fault of the horse.
“What’s that, Ned?” Dawlish demanded.
“Just another letter,” Crawley said, turning it over, “but this one won’t be delivered, I fear. Impossible to read the direction, thanks to old Dobbin, there, and of course the frank can’t be deciphered either.”
“Franked, is it,” Dawlish said, peering down at the missive and paying no heed to Crawley’s last comment. “Nobility then. One would think that when a chap’s had a decent education, he’d learn to write his name clearly on the corner of an envelope so others might decipher it. Hope the letter ain’t too important.”
The seal, a plain gold wafer, had been broken. Glancing at Dawlish, Crawley unfolded the single sheet and looked at the salutation and signature. “To Aunt Augusta from someone named Felicity,” he said. “No help there.”
“You might as well chuck it into the woods then,” Dawlish said. “Some bird will appreciate having an extra bit of paper for its nest. Here, what are you doing? You mustn’t read that! It ain’t at all the thing to be reading a lady’s private letter.”
Crawley paid him no heed. He was reading what little he could make out in hopes of learning more about the sender or the intended recipient. He was curious, incorrigibly so, as Dawlish roundly informed him.
After a moment’s reading, Crawley laughed and said, “Dickon, by all that’s holy, here’s a commission for you! And she’s a beauty, by the sound of it. Oh, but wait—beautiful and well-dowered! Damned if I won’t cut you out of this one, my friend. Now, whom can I cajole into presenting me to this tempting bird as the greatest amongst the new portrait artists? No, you don’t,” he added, jerking the letter away when Vyne, riding nearer, reached down to snatch it from him.
Dawlish, watching them, chuckled. “Shame on you both. Ned, you have come to a pretty pass indeed when you must take advantage of reading a gentlewoman’s letter to try to recoup your losses. What does she write?”
Crawley grinned at him. “You don’t expect me to read it to you right here in the highroad! That would be bad manners. Moreover, we must see to tidying up this mess first.”
Little of their help was required, however, for the two guards assured them that they would deliver the live highwaymen to the constable in Stamford, and one of the male passengers volunteered to remain with the dead ones until a wagon could be sent back to fetch them.
“Not meaning to travel beyond Stamford, m’self,” he said when one of the other passengers protested that the coach could not be expected to wait for him. He added placidly, “Just see that my trunk is let down at the inn.”
Matters were soon thus arranged and after another round of thanks from driver and guards for the timely intervention, the three friends were left to continue their morning ride.
Crawley’s head was clearer, a
nd feeling more cheerful, he thought a little more about the letter in his pocket.
Vyne said nothing, but Dawlish, who had been watching him narrowly, barely waited until they had returned to the quiet lane before demanding to know more about the letter.
“You oughtn’t to have taken it away, Ned,” he said. “I am persuaded that that must be some sort of desperate offense—tampering with his majesty’s mail.”
“Nonsense,” Vyne interjected. “He said no one could make out the direction, so what harm can there be? He is keeping it only from those scavenging birds you mentioned, and they can find some other scrap for their damned nests.”
“But there were some interesting bits of information, were there not?” Dawlish declared.
Crawley smiled lazily at him.
“Come now, tell us!”
“Perhaps there were, Mongrel, but as you so rightly pointed out before, a gentleman does not read a lady’s letter—at least, not aloud to all and sundry.”
“Well, I like that! Listen to him, Dickon, pretending all at once that he’s got scruples. Have you ever abducted anyone, Dickon? Have I? No, we have not. Has Ned? Aha! There you are. Scruples indeed!”
Vyne was smiling now, too, the expression doing nothing more for his gloomy features than to make him look rather sleepy. “I did hear about an abduction, Mongrel, but as I recall the matter, it was thwarted before Welwyn. That hardly counts, though it might serve to warn the next heiress Crawler makes up to. Did I hear you mention a dowry, old friend, and a commission?”
Crawley was remembering the so-called abduction, the willing victim of which was now safely married to one of his best friends and living on family estates in Ireland. But Vyne’s comment reminded him of his present woes, the same woes he had tried unsuccessfully to drown in several bottles of good port the night before. He glanced at Sir Richard. “The words ‘and so well-dowered as she is’ fairly leapt off the page at me,” he said with a wry twist of his mouth.
“But you did say my name was mentioned, did you not?” Vyne murmured gently.
Amused, Crawley said, “Did I? My wretched memory. I fear I cannot at all recall having—”
Dawlish exclaimed, “Now, dash it all, Ned, you said you would tell us the whole when everything was tidied up, so cut line, I say. If you know who wrote that letter, courtesy demands that you return it to her, and that is all there is about it.”
“Just what I thought myself,” Crawley replied. “But there is no legible direction, you will remember. You’d think the fool woman might have written ‘We remove to Blank House, Grosvenor Square, on the eighteenth instant.’ But she writes only ‘We remove to London’ on that date. Utterly unhelpful.”
Vyne said, “You might consider my feelings, dear friend. If you annoy me now, I shan’t tell you about my new commissions.”
“That likelihood also occurred to me,” Crawley admitted, “but before sharing this letter, I propose another wager. Did I not win the last one, by the bye? It was not poachers or farmers, after all—”
“Or anything you suggested,” Dawlish pointed out.
“Rubbish, I said it was the York Mail, and so it was.”
“He did,” Vyne agreed.
Dawlish glared at the artist. “That is a mere quibble, Dickon, and you know it.”
“It is plain fact,” Vyne said. “Truth is truth.”
Crawley chuckled. “Don’t look so glum, Mongrel. Think how good you will feel, knowing I can pay a few of my debts.”
“I thought you had matters well in hand again,” Dawlish said. “Didn’t Thorne pay everyone off for you before he went to Ireland?”
“He did,” Crawley agreed, “but I must repay him one of these fine days, you know, and in the meantime, Quarter Day has a way of coming round before one has recovered from the last one. And then that bleater Dacres seems reluctant to come up to scratch. I have explained to Belinda the necessity for acquiring a husband with forty thousand or so per annum, but she just sits and stares out the window, or sighs when I mention his name. Damned foolishness! Be a good deal easier, I expect, to find myself an heiress. That is much the simplest way to save my groats.” He patted the pocket into which he had put the letter. “I believe I shall soon be off to London to seek my fortune.”
Vyne grimaced. “To masquerade as a portrait painter?”
Crawley grinned at him. “Can’t be too difficult. One has only to be surly of manner and gruff of voice, spatter paint liberally about one’s person, and tell everyone who wishes to gaze upon one’s work that it is not yet fit to be seen. By the time she realizes I am no genius, I shall have flushed her from her covert and cajoled her neatly into the parson’s mousetrap. In point of fact, Dickon, my friend, I sketch quite well enough to compete with you, and have done since our school days.”
Vyne shrugged. “Perhaps.”
Dawlish laughed. “The only time you don’t tell the truth, Dickon, is when you speak of your work. I suppose next you will say that the king and queen would see no difference between one of Ned’s spatters and that delightful painting you did of the Princess Amelia last year. Or that Lady Sefton would be as pleased by the result if he, not you, had painted her children. You are the rage, man, and well do you know it. No schoolboy sketches of Ned’s would ever be mistaken for a true Vyne.”
Amused, Crawley said, “I wouldn’t expect to fool their majesties or Lady Sefton, just one young heiress long enough to make her fall in love with me. Do you think I cannot do it?”
“Not,” Dawlish retorted, “if you mean to behave like Dickon does, all surly and rude. And he’s got such a reputation for it that if you mean to impersonate him, you cannot then decide all at once to be charming and ... and whatever else you mean to be to seduce this unknown beauty.”
Crawley had been watching Vyne and, seeing his lips tighten ominously, knew their bantering had gone far enough. The artist’s temper was none too predictable at the best of times, but when there were definite storm warnings, it behooved one to heed them. Sighing, he said, “I don’t suppose for a moment that Dickon would allow me to impersonate him, so I shall just have to set up as his competitor. That cannot be too difficult, after all. I shall simply tell some duchess that I wouldn’t sully my brush with the colors necessary to do justice to her complexion, and every wealthy woman in London will come begging me to paint her picture instead.”
He was glad to see Vyne’s eyes, which had resembled two bits of flint, begin to twinkle. The artist said, “It is odd how that came about, all because I refused to cater to a woman’s vanity.”
Crawley shook his head. “It wasn’t that. It was because, when she said you had made her figure much rounder than it was, you replied that, had that been the case, anyone viewing the portrait would mistake the subject for a whale instead of merely for a sow about to give birth. She might well have murdered you on the spot, and you know it, had her husband not chanced to come in just then and exclaim over the way you had given life to her image in a way no other artist ever had succeeded in doing. He was delighted with the result, and told everyone he had found a painter who was less concerned with his subjects’ vanity than with making them spring to life on the canvas. It was that observation—and, admittedly, a bit of talent—that made you what you are today. I need not impersonate you at all. Just tell people that you know of another painter as rude as you are yourself. Then when I choose to be charming to the heiress, she will think that she alone has tamed me. What do you say?”
“I say that you had better go soak your head, Crawler.”
There was more good-natured bantering, but they soon reached the well-tended stables and turned their horses over to the grooms. Despite Crawley’s reputation for carelessness, he took excellent care of his horses.
The house, built of golden brick on a sloping hillside, was not so well cared for, but the air of general shabbiness did nothing to detract from its comfort. Crawley’s father had engaged Robert Adam, the great architect of his day, to refurbish an older ho
use; however, as often occurred with great houses, though the plans had been magnificent, they were never completely carried out. Still, in the end, much was improved, but the best of Longworth was that visitors always felt instantly at home there. One knew that one could put up one’s feet or lounge in one’s chair and that Amelia, Lady Crawley, would say not one word unless it was to offer one another cushion. Crawley’s dogs roamed freely in the house, their desires catered to by everyone except his sister Belinda’s three cats, who expressed sibilant disapproval whenever one of them ventured too near.
When they returned to the house, Crawley left his two friends to their own devices, for each had interests to occupy him. Vyne had taken over a small parlor where the light, he said, was excellent for his daubing, and had set up an easel there. What he was painting no one knew, for not even Belinda had the temerity to defy his orders and sneak a look when he left the room, but whatever it was, it drew him now to his work.
Dawlish repaired to the library to read the morning papers, delivered to Longworth only a day later than they might be read in London, and Crawley went to his dressing room, where he took the letter from his pocket and read it again.
The handwriting was the same elegant copperplate as in the direction, but the writing was so small that anyone with vision less acute than Crawley’s would need a magnifying glass to read it. The correspondent did not cross and recross her lines as did so many others, in order to save the expense of a second sheet, but had clearly planned her letter carefully, for the last line was as neatly written as the first and as evenly spaced as all the others, not scrunched in as if the writer had suddenly realized she was about to come to the end of her paper.
Not a young woman, he decided. Most likely a middle-aged or even an elderly one. He had purposely not discussed the letter any further with his friends. There was something about it that had struck him, something aside from the intriguing description of the young lady with the dowry.
He found himself pondering its contents while he changed his clothes. He had thought he discerned quiet desperation in its tone, and despite the careful writing, one sentence stood out from the rest. She wrote that she was often at her wits’ end but assured her aunt that solutions to each of her problems generally presented themselves before she was tempted to seek solace in a bottle or a watery grave. Since such bits of the letter as he could make out seemed to enumerate trials and tribulations of a large and demanding family as well as the writer’s acceptance of responsibility for coping with all of them (the very thought of which appalled his lordship), the mention of a watery grave sent chills up his spine. He hoped she was being melodramatic or making a poor attempt at humor, but decided that, whatever her mood, the remark was a lapse by one unaccustomed to expressing her deeper feelings in her correspondence.