“She’s quite handsome,” Miss Hennessey said. “Though I don’t see much of a likeness to you.”
Implying exactly what? “I take after my late father,” Jack said, pocketing the miniature and taking over the reins. That maneuver necessitated a brush of his gloves against Miss Hennessey’s, after which, she again retreated several inches.
“I bathed last night,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Slide any farther to the left, and you’ll fall from the cart, Miss Hennessey. If we’re to share a household, see each other at meals, and otherwise cohabit at Teak House, you’ll have to deal with a certain proximity to my person.”
While Jack would have to deal with proximity to hers. Today she wore a brown velvet day dress with a cloak of black wool. Tooling along in the cart, even a mild day felt nippy, and the fresh air had tinged Miss Hennessey’s cheeks not with roses, but with… passion flowers of the soft, creamy pink Jack had often admired in India.
Madeline Hennessey was attractive, which was a pity. Mama did not easily tolerate pretty young women in her ambit.
An oncoming gig distracted Jack from his gloomy musings. When the other driver pulled up, Jack did likewise, so the occupants of the two vehicles were facing each other at a conversational distance.
“Mr. McArdle, good day.”
“Sir Jack, Miss… Hennessey?” Hector McArdle’s rising inflection suggested he’d taken note of Miss Hennessey’s fetching ensemble, and possibly her passion flower complexion too.
Randy old goat.
“Mr. McArdle,” Miss Hennessey replied, offering McArdle a pretty smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “How fare you?”
“Well, you might ask, miss, and well I found our magistrate. I was on my way to see you, sir, and my business was not entirely social.”
Of course not. Jack’s neighbors invited him to their gatherings when they needed a bachelor to make up the numbers—another duty he’d inherited from Belmont—and they called on him only rarely, thank heavens, unless they had matters of a legal nature to discuss.
“If Miss Hennessey can spare a moment,” Jack said, “I’ll happily listen to your concerns now.” Happily being gentlemanly hyperbole. McArdle was the local coal merchant, and had a successful businessman’s gift for jovial inanities.
“I can walk the rest of the way,” Miss Hennessey offered, gathering her skirts as if to climb down.
“No need for that, miss,” McArdle said. “Mrs. McArdle brought the matter to my notice, and if she mentions it to her quilting friends, it will soon be all over the shire.”
“Say on, Mr. McArdle,” Jack said, “and I will offer whatever assistance I can.”
McArdle glanced about, as if highwaymen were lurking behind the hedges, hoping to hear word of buried treasure.
“The entire neighborhood relies on me to keep them in coal,” McArdle said, as if this state of affairs were an eleemosynary undertaking on his part. “I am conscientious about my duties, and always keep plenty of coal in my yard. Winter weather will pounce upon us any day, and nobody in this shire will suffer the cold because Hector McArdle let his inventory run low.”
“We are all grateful for your sound business practices,” Jack said, because McArdle clearly expected praise for maintaining a supply of the only product he sold.
Miss Hennessey admired the surrounding landscape. Beauregard swished his tail. Jack mentally cursed Axel Belmont for stepping down as magistrate, and Squire Rutland—the only other candidate for the magistrate’s job—for removing permanently to the coast.
“Somebody has helped himself to my coal,” McArdle said. “Waltzed right up to my loading shed, and scooped up the loose bits left over from the week’s work.”
Loose bits, given McArdle’s notions of tidiness about his yard, probably amounted to several hundred pounds of coal from the loading shed alone. But for the efforts of an enterprising thief, that coal would have sat about until it became too damp and disintegrated to properly burn.
“I’ll come by and have a look as soon as Miss Hennessey’s effects have been unloaded at Teak House.”
McArdle’s pale blue eyes darted from Jack to the woman sitting silently at his side.
The quilting gatherings had nothing on the darts teams for spreading gossip. “Miss Hennessey will bide at Teak House in the capacity of companion to my mother, who should arrive from London forthwith.”
“Your mother, you say?”
“And my brother, Jeremy. Will you excuse us, McArdle? The sooner we’re on our way, the sooner I can inspect the scene of the crime.”
Jack nodded, his hands being on the reins, and gave Beauregard the office to walk on. The cart was soon bouncing along, while McArdle sped off in the opposite direction.
“Such are the criminal activities flung at the king’s tireless man,” Jack said. “But you know that, having dwelled at Candlewick.” She’d been in service at Candlewick, not quite the same thing.
“Mr. Belmont was only a substitute magistrate,” Miss Hennessey said, “and for the most part, the little crimes and pranks he investigated gave him a reason to leave the property and socialize, such as he’s able to socialize.”
“Do I hear a criticism of the venerable Axel Belmont, Miss Hennessey? I thought he walked on water in the eyes of his staff and family.” Jack esteemed Belmont greatly as well—the man had prodigious common sense and was honorable to his bones.
“Many a country squire grows lonely tending his acres, Sir John Dewey Fanning.”
Belmont was more interested in tending to his roses—and his wife, from what Jack had seen. “My friends call me Jack, or Sir Jack.” He hadn’t been called plain Jack since he’d left India.
Miss Hennessey maintained a pointed silence.
“So what do you think happened to McArdle’s coal?” Jack asked a quarter mile later.
“Somebody took it.”
“Which somebody?”
Miss Hennessey twitched at her skirts. “Somebody who did not want to freeze to death this winter.”
Oh, she’d get along with Mama famously. “You don’t think it was taken to be sold?”
“If the missing coal was the orts and leavings strewn about the loading shed, then it’s not good enough quality to sell, and the thief isn’t very good at stealing. Selling a quantity of stolen coal quietly would take some doing in a place where gossip moves on the slightest breeze.”
This was why Jack didn’t shove the magistrate’s job off on some other unsuspecting fool: He liked puzzles, whether they dealt with how to get supplies to a garrison on the other side of a flooded river, or how to find the culprit who’d stolen Nancy Yoder’s fancy tablecloth from the honeysuckle hedge outside her laundry.
“Why do you say the culprit was stupid?” Given the current state of England’s criminal laws, any thief was either stupid, desperate, or perilously prone to adventure. In the not too distant past, mere children had been hung for stealing a spoon.
“The thief was not stupid,” Miss Hennessey said, “but inept. He or she took both the lowest-quality coal and possibly the only coal McArdle would notice was missing.”
She was… right. The coal yard was an enormous dirty expanse, with great black heaps enclosed by a single fence. Much of the coal was under tin roofs, none of it particularly secured. McArdle would not have noticed a few hundred pounds missing from among tons and tons of inventory.
His wife, however, had noticed that somebody had essentially tidied up one corner of the coal yard.
“The thief wasn’t lacking in sense,” Jack said, mentally moving facts and suppositions around. “He took only as much as he could make off with in an hour or two, and he chose a time when nobody would notice his activities.” The days were at their shortest, Christmas having just passed, and that meant long evenings when most were snug in their beds.
“To somebody with a family to keep warm,” Miss Hennessey said, “that two hours of larceny might make a very great differenc
e.”
Jack turned the cart up the lane to Teak House. “If I catch that person, he’ll be in a very great deal of trouble.” Though McArdle would not have sold the stray bits and piles of coal littering his loading shed. Civil damages would be difficult to prove as a result. “McArdle will be wringing his hands over what amounts to coal dust for the next six months.”
He’d also be strutting around the Wet Weasel every Friday night, asking Jack when the thief would be brought to justice.
“Tell McArdle to get a dog,” Miss Hennessey said. “Even a friendly dog will set up a racket if a stranger comes on the premises. The cost of a large dog and the expense of feeding it will likely exceed the value of the stolen coal over the dog’s lifetime, but McArdle can well afford the expense. He cannot afford for a more ambitious thief to take advantage of his sloppy business practices.”
“A dog. I should tell McArdle to get a dog?” Jack brought the cart to a halt in the stable yard, but made no move to climb down. He would never have thought to suggest McArdle purchase a dog.
“My Aunt Theodosia’s bitch whelped almost two months ago,” Miss Hennessey said. “Mastiff-collie crosses from the looks of them. Enormous creatures, but quite friendly. Your mother might fancy one.”
Mama would never be caught with anything less than a purebred, though Jack had always liked dogs.
“I’ll consider it.” He set the brake and leaped to the ground, then came around to assist the lady from her perch.
The instant Miss Hennessey’s feet touched solid earth, she stepped back, her gaze fixed over Jack’s shoulder in the direction of the manor house.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing is wrong. I believe your mother has arrived.”
Jack turned to find no less than his porter and three footmen unloading a sizeable baggage coach under the manor’s porte-cochère.
“Something is, indeed, quite wrong. Mama wasn’t supposed to be here for another three days at least.”
Chapter Three
* * *
“You are fretting,” Axel Belmont said. He stood in the doorway to the nursery, a fundamentally shy man with hidden stores of perception and consideration Abigail was still learning to appreciate.
“Come in, husband. His Highness is almost asleep.”
They had a pair of nursery maids, but neither Abigail nor her husband believed in turning their children over to paid help for the entirety of their infancy. The baby was tiny, having come a few weeks early by Abigail’s calculations. What he lacked in size, he made up for in vigor.
“The hour is not late, and yet I am almost asleep,” Axel said, settling into the reading chair near the hearth. “How you manage, when your sleep is interrupted at all hours by our son, I do not know.” He got up to toss a log onto the fire, for in the nursery, wood was burned. “Jack and Madeline will be fine.”
Axel was worried, in other words. “You will miss her,” Abigail said. “I do too, already.”
Axel had lost his first wife years ago; Abigail’s first husband was also deceased. This marriage, the second for them both, was characterized by an intimacy of the heart as well as of the body. Nonetheless, Axel’s children from his first marriage were a pair of high-spirited university boys, and the infant was male as well.
For Abigail, Madeline Hennessey had been good, female company.
“I do miss her,” Axel said, “and yes, if you’re wondering, Madeline was a pleasure to behold when mourning finally eased its grip on me, but she knew better than to take advantage.”
“Then I am in her debt even more than I knew,” Abigail said, “because she was your friend, whether or not you recognized her as such. Would you like to hold the baby?”
Axel took the sleepy bundle and cradled the child against his chest. “Jack still hasn’t come right.”
Because Axel’s passion—after his wife and family—was botany, he was prone to observation. Because he was ferociously intelligent, he ruminated on his observations.
“He might never,” Abigail said, gently. “We don’t know the whole of what transpired in India, but he did ask for our help, and that’s… that’s unprecedented. He seems to like being magistrate.”
Axel nuzzled the baby’s crown. “Like is… a euphemism. It’s a duty, and any former soldier rises to duty like a healthy vine climbs to the sun. Duty makes a cold bedfellow.”
“I never considered marrying him,” Abigail said, for she could sense the question lurking at the periphery of this discussion. “I enjoyed his company when he came to call at Stoneleigh Manor, but I enjoyed passing the time of day when Mr. McArdle brought a load of coal. I was that isolated. Has that child fallen asleep?”
“Yes.”
They sat for a long moment before a peacefully crackling fire.
“Tuesday,” Axel said. “Assuming the mild weather continues, I’ll pay a call on Sir Jack on Tuesday.”
“Madeline will need time to reconnoiter, and neither one of them will want us hovering. Friday, I think. They really are well-suited.”
Abigail could trust Axel to reconnoiter on her behalf.
“They don’t know they’re well-suited,” Axel replied, “and they’ll fight any inclination toward each other’s company. Madeline will tell herself that Sir John Dewey Fanning is above her touch, and Jack will tell himself that a gentleman does not importune the help. I must have been daft to suggest this scheme.”
Abagail had been the one to put forth particulars. “What do we know of Madeline’s upbringing?”
The baby sighed, as if the last vestige of consciousness had finally slipped from his grasp.
“She joined this household as a scullery maid and was soon Cook’s right hand. From there, Mrs. Turnbull took over, and when Caroline fell ill, Madeline stepped in to make decisions I was too… I could not make. I’ve always had the sense my dear Hennessey was not what she seemed, though.”
And for Axel Belmont, observations had to add up to conclusions.
“In what regard?”
“The yeomanry are not given to great height,” Axel said. “A specimen deprived of good soil, adequate water, and sunlight is usually a runty individual, whether in the greenhouse or the cottage. Madeline’s aunts are both in penurious circumstances, and yet they are robust women.”
“Sometimes, adversity strengthens us.” Axel’s love had strengthened Abigail, and she hoped she’d done as much for him.
“Madeline knows French, though she never speaks it.”
“How would a scullery maid learn French? Unless in a former post, her employers spoke it at home?”
“I don’t know. I caught her dusting a Latin grammar one day too, and her expression was rapt and… homesick, is the only way I can describe it.”
Abigail rose and took the baby from her husband. “Where we come from matters not half so much as who we are today and where we’d like to go. I’d like to go down to dinner with my husband.” In truth, Abigail would rather have gone straight to bed, but the body needed sustenance.
They hadn’t yet resumed relations after the birth of the baby, and the lack made Abigail desperate for her husband’s affection. This was his third child. He knew the parental terrain and had a confidence about his parenting Abigail lacked.
Axel accompanied Abigail to the next room, where a nursery maid dozed in a rocker by the fire.
“Evening, ma’am, sir,” the maid said, pushing to her feet. She glanced at the ormolu clock on the mantel, for Madeline had established the notion that the nursery should, within reason, run on a schedule. “The baby’s asleep?”
“For now,” Abigail said, passing the child into the nursemaid’s arms. “I’ll stop back before retiring.”
Axel held the door and took Abigail’s hand when they’d gained the corridor. “You’d never let the child out of your sight if you had your way.”
For two weeks after giving birth, Abigail hadn’t let the baby out of her sight, and Axel had barely let Abigail out of his.
Nor could Abigail grasp what it must be like for a woman to come of age in service, doing hard physical work every day and having no dream of a home and family of her own.
“Cease fretting,” Axel said, as they descended the stairs. “I’ll go visiting on Thursday.”
“Thursday will suit.”
“Thursday it is. Madeline will have either slain the gallant knight by then, or become smitten. I’m thinking she’ll start with putting out his lights.”
* * *
“You waited dinner for me,” Sir Jack said.
He ought to be Sir John, but the less formal name suited his energy and lack of pretensions. He was as dignified as a man of his means should be, but he wasn’t… he wasn’t a prig. Madeline had been curiously relieved to learn that his staff doted on him, and was fiercely loyal too.
She’d also been relieved that Mrs. Fanning had sent her luggage on ahead—a warning shot fired across the bow of the Teak House domestic frigate. When the lady herself would arrive was anybody’s guess.
“The kitchen waited dinner on you,” Madeline said, keeping to her place at the table. “A curry is easy to keep hot. How did you leave Mr. McArdle?”
“Ready to accept ownership of a dog,” Sir Jack replied, peering at the offerings on the sideboard. “Was it also the staff’s decision that you should sit at my right hand, rather than four yards away?”
Madeline had moved her place setting after the footman had withdrawn. “This end of the room is warmer, owing to the fireplace behind you.”
“I watched my parents dine at a distance from each other for years. Struck me as lonely, when they spent other years separated by oceans and continents. Shall I serve for you?”
The habit of the household was to put the serving dishes on the sideboard, so Sir Jack could take as much or as little as he pleased, buffet style. This approach was unusual and informal, but the food was kept hot in chafing dishes, and nobody was made to stand about in livery waiting on a man detained by missing coal or a loose ram.
Jack (The Jaded Gentlemen Book 4) Page 4