by Devilish
If he was the villain, he was good. Very good.
Three other men stepped forward to attest to the truth about the card game—that young Georgie Ufton had played, and lost. These were local men, and not happy to be telling their incriminating tale, though two of them he judged to be lazy troublemakers. Could one of them be a hired liar? And yet they all told the same tale.
Georgie and his father had turned pale, for this hung together well, and horse stealing was a hanging matter. Rothgar had no doubt that in the end he could save the young man from the worst of his folly, if even only by force of rank. He wanted more, however. He wanted one of D’Eon’s men wriggling on a hook.
When the magistrates had questioned the witnesses, Georgie was given the chance to speak.
“I didn’t do it, good sirs,” he protested. “I lost the money, yes, which was stupid, but I didn’t steal the horse. This Stringle asked me to take the horse to Cobcott as part of the debt.”
Sir Hadley addressed the room. “Did anyone else hear about this?”
Silence.
“We were in the stables, sir,” Georgie said.
“In the stables? But Mr. Grigson said that you begged for time to pay, and Mr. Stringle refused on the basis that he must travel on to the next town. You then left, promising to return soon with the money. Mr. Stringle was never in the stables.”
“Yes, he was,” Georgie protested.
The magistrate turned to the group of men who’d testified, but they all agreed that Stringle had remained at the table.
Rothgar watched the interplay, and made up his mind. It had to be Stringle, and it was time to take a hand. “With your permission, Sir Hadley.”
“Honored, my lord!” said the magistrate, looking smugly certain of the case.
Rothgar looked at Stringle, and saw the little shift in the eyes when the man recognized possible danger. Rothgar almost smiled. It was pleasant to have his suspicions confirmed. Now to hook the man.
He turned to Georgie. “Mr. Ufton, when you went to the stables, was your horse ready?”
Georgie frowned at that. “How could it be, my lord? I hadn’t ordered it.”
“So you saddled it yourself?”
“Yes, my lord. There was no one there just then.”
“That wouldn’t have taken long, though.”
“No, my lord, though someone had moved the blanket and tossed it with some others, so I had to find it.”
“And how ready were you when Mr. Stringle found you?”
“I was just about to mount, my lord.”
Rothgar nodded and turned to the honest witnesses.
“Gentlemen, if you would be so kind, perhaps we can go over the last part of the incident again. You were all playing at cards?”
One of the younger men said nervously, “Nat and me were, milord.” He indicated the man by his side. “The others were just watching.”
“And how much did you lose?”
“A few shillings, milord. The play ran pretty even. Or I wouldn’t have stayed in. I know my limit.”
Rothgar asked the other man and received a similar answer. “Play didn’t seem even for young Mr. Ufton, did it?” he observed. “Was he wild in his play?”
“A little, milord,” said the first man. “But just sunk in bad luck.”
Rothgar turned to gaze at Stringle. “Very persistent bad luck.”
A murmur went through the room at the implication that the play hadn’t been entirely fair. He saw Stringle’s eyes shift. He was the stranger here, and it wouldn’t go well with him if he was thought to be a cheat. The first prick of the hook.
Rothgar turned back to the witnesses. “Now, when Mr. Ufton left the table, Mr. Stringle stayed behind, yes?”
They chorused agreement.
“For how long?”
That brought an attack of puzzlement, and the five men looked at each other.
“He stayed a while,” said one.
“Still there later when my daughter came to find me. Waiting for Mr. Ufton.”
“Didn’t move, milord.”
“What was he drinking?” Rothgar asked.
“Ale, milord.”
“How many pints, would you say?”
Again they looked at each other as if shared wisdom might be better, but then one of the men who’d watched the game said, “At least three pints, milord. And I see where you’re heading. Stap me, if he didn’t go to take a leak now and then.”
“Did he do so after Mr. Ufton left?”
“I think he did, milord. Just for a moment.”
Slowly, the other men nodded and agreed.
“And he went out of sight.”
“Oh aye, milord,” said one of the card players. “Mistress Wilkins don’t have pissing in the tavern.”
Rothgar turned back to Stringle, suppressing a contented smile. “Do you dispute this, sir?”
“No, milord,” the man said stoically. He was good. “I went outside to relieve myself a time or two, but not to the stables.”
“But out of sight.”
“I’m a decent man, milord,” Stringle said, meeting his eyes.
Rothgar quirked a brow at him, and turned to the magistrates. “I submit to you, sirs, that it was possible for Mr. Stringle to have spoken to Mr. Ufton in the stables.”
“But Georgie Ufton made off with the horse, my lord,” Sir Hadley protested.
“Thinking that was what Mr. Stringle wanted. After all, when stopped, he hadn’t sold it.”
Sir Hadley leaned back, looking sour. “If Georgie Ufton is honest, then Stringle is a perjurer, and I’ll see him hang for it!”
“I’ve told nothing but the truth,” stated Stringle, but when Rothgar turned to him he saw both anger and fear. On the hook. Now, would he come smoothly to the net?
“Perhaps,” he offered, “it was a simple misunderstanding, Mr. Stringle. Perhaps you might have said something to make Mr. Ufton think you wanted him to deliver that horse?”
“I don’t recollect it, my lord.” But then the man added, “It’s possible, I suppose. Those three pints of ale weren’t the only ones.”
Sir Hadley glared. “Then I’ll have you whipped for a drunken reprobate!”
Rothgar turned the full power of his authority on the man. “Wiser, perhaps, to let it pass, Sir Hadley, don’t you think?”
After a frustrated moment, Sir Hadley pounded his gavel. “Not guilty. Next!”
Rothgar let Sir George wring his hand, then left him to deal with his son. He turned to see the accuser struggling away through a hostile crowd.
He caught up. “Mr. Stringle.”
The man turned. “You’ve got your young friend off, my lord. Are you after me now?”
Rothgar took his arm. “I merely mean to see you safe to your horses.” Though scowling, the crowd fell back, leaving a path clear to the door.
Stringle’s arm was stiff in his grasp, but he walked to the door and through it. “What now, my lord?” he asked, hard-eyed.
Rothgar let him go. “I just saved your neck.”
The man stayed silent.
“I know the man you work for—rather unpatriotic, wouldn’t you say?—and I suspect that this plot was aimed largely at me.”
Stringle flinched, but didn’t admit guilt. Yes, he was good. Rothgar wouldn’t mind employing him if the man knew who was master.
“You could be of use to me, Mr. Stringle. There is a lady in London, living at the queen’s court. The Countess of Arradale. I am particularly concerned that nothing happens to distress or inconvenience her.”
The man looked genuinely startled. “What would I have to do with a lady of the queen’s court, my lord?”
“Perhaps nothing. If you were to go to London, however, and put yourself at the disposal of the gentleman who hired you, you might be surprised.”
“I’m a country horse trader, my lord. What would I do in London?”
“Oblige me.”
The man paled at the tone. “I could ju
st disappear.”
“You would find it very hard to go beyond my reach.”
The man’s eyes met his resentfully. “I go to London and hang around a certain man’s house, and let you know if anything turns up about the lady. Then what? When am I free? My trade is horses, my lord, and I’d rather stick to it.”
“Wiser to have done so all along, wouldn’t you say? When Lady Arradale returns to her lands in the north, you may leave London. In the meantime, if you hear anything about her, or any plans concerning her, send a message to me at Malloren House. I am also very interested in the activities of a Frenchman called de Couriac. You will be well paid, and I will do you no harm if you serve me well.” He left the alternative unspoken but clear.
After a moment, the man nodded. “I’ll do your will, my lord.”
“I thought you might,” said Rothgar, and watched as he strode off.
Chapter 23
Rothgar arrived back in London the next day with only enough time for the tedious preparations for court. After the levee the king summoned him as usual to review recent events, and to debate again the fate of Dunkirk. It became dismayingly hard not to snap at him.
He escaped at four. Since the king was returning for dinner with the queen, it was out of the question to visit the Queen’s House. Besides, he told himself firmly as he returned home, he would have the opportunity this evening to make sure Lady Arradale was well and safe. That was soon enough.
Once out of court clothes he went to his office to methodically work through the stacks of work awaiting him. His mind tried to wander, but he kept it to the tasks before him. All these documents represented people and issues needing his attention.
Most were administrative papers to do with his estates and business affairs. He knew Grainger, Carruthers, and other employees would have gone through them carefully, but he read each one as was his practice before signing it.
There were also letters and reports connected to the many charitable matters he supported, and the usual solicitations from artists and publishers. An agent reported the finding of some jewels perhaps belonging to King Alfred, and another a portrait of an ancestor he’d been trying to add to the family collection.
He was tempted to put aside a dauntingly thick report on some land he had acquired in the colonies, but he knew where his weak-willed mind wished to go so he pinned it to trade.
Eventually, however, all was done and he looked at his empty desk with some grievance. Hard work had provided the closest thing to peace he’d experienced in days. He looked ironically at the sketch of himself on the study wall, the one done in preparation for his stern portrait.
Where was that confident, invulnerable man?
He rose abruptly and sought distraction elsewhere—in the room where Jean Joseph Merlin and an assistant were working on the drummer boy.
“When will it be mended?” he asked, wincing to see the figure stripped of clothes, with many of its pieces spread around on white cloths.
The young man looked up, but with a hint of impatience. “Within days, my lord,” he said with an accent. He was Flemish by birth. “As you said, the damage is not great, but it has stood idle so long that I wish to check all the parts. There was rust,” he added, with the hint of a shudder.
“No other breakage?”
“No, my lord.” Merlin relented and walked over to the heart of the machine. “It is a masterpiece. Vaucanson, for sure, and of a complexity I’ve rarely seen. The subtlety of movement—”
“You operated it?” Rothgar asked sharply.
“Of course not, my lord. I can read cogs and levers as Mr. Haydn reads music.”
“My apologies.” Rothgar couldn’t help but touch the lad’s lifelike head, stroking the subtly colored skin.
“Wax,” Merlin said. “Again, a masterpiece. One could think he would breathe. In fact … it could be done with the addition of bellows. I have heard of one that actually plays a flute.”
“No.” The notion of this child taking its first breath was appalling. “Leave that to God.”
“As you wish, my lord.”
“Is there any way I can help?”
“If you are willing to clean and polish, my lord.”
It was a familiar arrangement when Merlin was here, and Rothgar could steal the time. There were any number of other things he should be doing, but he sat at a table and began to clean the complex pieces of metal. Almost immediately, his tension eased.
Perhaps it was a flaw to find clockwork mechanisms so soothing, but if so, it was one he permitted himself. If he gave up court he might study the subject further, and perhaps become able to read cogs and levers like music.
He smiled at the thought of himself as an eccentric, living in comfortable robes, and shuffling around Rothgar Abbey fiddling with clocks.
Alone.
It was not particularly amusing, after all.
“Now the war is over,” he said after a while, “perhaps you would like to visit Monsieur Vaucanson in France.”
Merlin looked up, eyes bright. “I would indeed, my lord.”
“I will arrange it. He has also done a great deal of work on industrial machinery.”
Merlin grinned. “Never fear, my lord. Any machine enthralls me, and I will report back on everything.”
Rothgar smiled and returned to his task.
As he polished a piece with fine grit, he glanced at the child’s head. He rose and carefully moved the head so it was looking directly at him, then sat again to his work. Merlin and his assistant glanced over, but without particular curiosity.
The head was astonishingly realistic, and on top of the rods of the mechanism, it looked disturbingly like the victim of an execution exposed on a pike.
Alas, poor Yorick, Rothgar mused, thinking of Hamlet with the skull. This was no skull, however, or rotting head. This was a clever child with a hint of willfulness and mischief in the curving lips and large, adventurous eyes.
This was the young Diana.
Rescued and about to be made whole again.
Life, however, was not a machine to be cleaned of rust and fixed so it ran to order once more.
The adult Diana could be rescued from an unwanted marriage, but he doubted she could be made whole again. If she returned home unwed, she would be shackled by awareness of the king’s suspicious watchfulness.
Then there was the other thing. Their foolhardy night at the White Goose. In bringing her to life in that bed he had created a break in her, and not in her nonexistent hymen. By any normal standard, after taking a lady’s virginity a gentleman was honor bound to marry her, but it was even more unfair to introduce a virgin to pleasure and abandon her.
Would Diana live in chastity for the rest of her life? Or would she marry out of desperation? Or, even worse, would she become the sort of woman who took lovers carelessly whenever she felt the need?
Of course she’d challenged his resolve not to marry. She needed marriage now to be whole.
So tempting to save her. To follow the path of conventional honor to the place he longed to be. Had that lurked in his mind in the White Goose, leading to that weak folly?
Intolerable if true.
He gathered willpower and pushed aside temptation again. What he wanted, what she wanted, must not, should not, be.
The child’s clear eyes challenged him as hers had challenged him yesterday. With a Malloren, are not all things possible?
“No.”
When the two men looked at him, he realized he had spoken aloud. Talking to himself? Wasn’t that a true sign of madness?
As the men returned to work, Rothgar looked back at the child, quirking a brow as if they shared a secret. It almost seemed as if the child’s smile deepened. Ah, to have a son like this, to share innocent secrets with.
I am your son. If you have courage to find me.
He looked away then, down, to the complex curve of metal in his oil-stained fingers. Not Diana, but a child of theirs, and now it too challenged him f
or its very existence.
Was his denial courage?
Or despicable weakness?
Folly again, but it was as if the child were lost, wandering the same bleak road that he wandered through life, crying for someone to find him and care for him, someone to take him home.
He could not bear to leave a child crying—
A knock on the door broke him out of these Gothick thoughts. Carruthers came in. “Your pardon, my lord, but some messages came which you might think important.”
Rothgar rose, both relieved to escape, and reluctant to abandon the child here in the hands of strangers.
He made a sudden resolution, and put it into silent words, looking into the drummer boy’s eyes. I promise you this, at least. If Diana is with child, I will marry her. No child of mine will ever cry alone.
He picked up a spare cloth and wrapped it around the exposed mechanism beneath the child’s head, like a blanket.
“Dust,” he said blandly to Merlin and the others, and left the room.
The messages were indeed important, especially the copy of the one from D’Eon to Paris complaining that de Couriac was mad and uncontrollable. D’Eon asked urgently that the man be recalled to France before he created more mayhem.
As he’d thought, de Couriac was D’Eon’s man, but one known to the official powers in Paris, not to the secret ones run by de Broglie. It was also clear that the attack on the road had not been D’Eon’s plan.
This all made de Couriac dangerous, but also useful if he could be found.
It was intriguingly unclear whether D’Eon knew where the man was now or not. If de Couriac was serving the official French powers, he might have sought refuge in the embassy, and D’Eon might not feel able to dispose of him himself.
Stringle might turn out to be very useful indeed.
He dressed in finery again, for this afternoon was the day for his own levee, when all gentlemen who wished could come to his house to speak to him. He chose black to suit his mood, but richly decorated with jewel-like flowers. In powdered wig and glittered orders, he entered his reception room and indicated that the doors of the house be set open.