Taking possession of Charlotte’s arm, Robert marched her briskly forward. “Why not?” he said, and his voice was as cold as the slush seeping through Charlotte’s slippers. “It’s no more than he has done to others.”
Numb with cold and confusion, Charlotte darted a glance up at him. “What—” she began, but Lieutenant Fluellen intervened as smoothly as though it had been planned, saying soothingly, “He’s on consecrated ground, at least.”
As though to underline his point, incense seeped through the gaps in the boards on the church windows, redolent of ancient mysteries.
There was something oddly familiar about the smell of the smoke coming from the church. Frankincense? It did smell a bit like incense, but there was a sickly sweetness beneath the exotic herbs that was nothing like the smell of Sunday mornings.
“Wait.” Charlotte tugged against Robert’s arm. “I’ve smelled that smoke before.”
Robert stretched an arm across her back, marching her forward. There was nothing the least bit personal about the touch. His arm felt like an iron bar across her back. “I sincerely doubt it.”
“On the King,” Charlotte clarified, scurrying to keep up with him and trying to sniff the air at the same time.
“You can hardly mean to suggest that the King is an opium eater,” Robert said shortly, picking up his pace.
“Is that what that was?”
“Part of it.” Robert hoisted her into the carriage so energetically that Charlotte went careening straight to the far side of the seat. “I suspect there’s some belladonna in there, too.”
Charlotte sank back into her nest of lap rugs, which were, alas, now as cold as she was. “That would explain so much.”
“What would?” asked Lieutenant Fluellen, settling down across from her. Henrietta climbed in after him, with Miles attached to her other side like a very large cushion.
“Opium,” provided Charlotte as Robert took the only remaining seat, the one next to her. She wondered if Henrietta had done that by design, but there was no way of asking. “It seems that’s what I smelled on the King the other day.”
“You think the King is smoking opium?” said Lieutenant Fluellen curiously. “I find that hard to imagine.”
“Not of his own accord,” explained Charlotte. “I believe Dr. Simmons gave it to him.”
Robert looked to Henrietta rather than Charlotte. “Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? Who is Dr. Simmons?”
Charlotte and Henrietta exchanged a long look.
“That’s what we’ve been trying to find out,” explained Henrietta. “A man calling himself Dr. Simmons has been treating the King for, er—”
“A return of his old complaint,” Charlotte put in.
“You mean he’s gone around the bend,” translated Miles. “Again.”
“Something like that,” agreed his wife, snuggling into the crook of his arm. “The Queen asked Charlotte to have a word with Dr. Simmons about the King’s condition, so we both went to seek him out. That’s how we discovered that Dr. Simmons wasn’t Dr. Simmons.”
“You’re saying there’s a real Dr. Simmons?” Miles tried to look down at Henrietta and went cross-eyed.
“Yes. And he wasn’t the man lying in that churchyard.” Henrietta shuddered, partly for dramatic effect, partly from cold. Miles gave her a comforting squeeze.
Charlotte wouldn’t have minded a comforting squeeze, but there didn’t seem much chance of one, not even of the cousinly sort. Robert maintained a grasp on the side of her pelisse much as a parent might hold on to a small child. It was about as comforting as a cod-liver oil.
Lieutenant Fluellen, who was, Charlotte had always maintained, a Very Nice Man, leaned forwards to pat her hand. “Not a pleasant sight, was he?” he said sympathetically.
“The man you knew as Dr. Simmons was in reality Mr. Arthur Wrothan,” Robert blurted out so loudly that Charlotte’s ears rang with it.
“He’s the chap we were pursuing,” put in Lieutenant Fluellen helpfully, smiling beatifically at Robert over her head. He clearly had found something terribly amusing. Whatever it was, Robert didn’t share the joke. He had gone as stiff and cold as an iceberg. A very icy iceberg.
“But who was he? Aside from impersonating Dr. Simmons, that is.” Lady Henrietta tilted her head up at her husband. “And how did you get involved?”
“War Office,” Miles declared proudly.
Henrietta wrinkled her nose. “They’ve let you loose again?”
Miles’s last foray into espionage had not exactly been an unqualified success. While Miles had many virtues, subtlety wasn’t one of them. It wasn’t exactly Henrietta’s strong suit, either, but Charlotte would never offend her friend by telling her that.
“Ouch!” Miles clapped a hand somewhere in the vicinity of his heart. “That hurts.”
“Not as much as a knife in the ribs,” said Robert acerbically. “We can weep over your wounds later. Once we’ve sorted out this tangle.”
Henrietta beamed at him. “I knew I liked you.”
“Who was Mr. Wrothan?” Charlotte demanded hastily before Henrietta could say something embarrassing. Like proposing on Charlotte’s behalf.
“Other than a scoundrel?” Robert settled back against the seat, releasing his grip on Charlotte’s pelisse. “Wrothan was a first lieutenant in the Seventy-fourth Foot. I have reason to believe that he augmented his income by selling secrets to the Mahratta in India.”
“And the French,” put in Miles, not to be left out.
“And the French,” agreed Robert. “Although what he was selling to them remains unclear.”
“Is that why you came back to England?” asked Charlotte, twisting in her seat to see him more clearly. “To pursue Mr. Wrothan?”
“Yes,” Robert said shortly, and left it at that. The stony set of his profile did not invite further questions.
Charlotte frowned down at her gloved hands as the past rearranged itself yet again like a mosaic that had been misassembled. He hadn’t come home, then, to take up the ducal mantle and settle comfortably into the peaceful flow of life at Girdings. He hadn’t come home to come home at all.
And she—she didn’t really have much of a role at all, did she, in this new, larger tale of betrayal and retribution? It was very lowering to be not just a side character, but a minor side character, little more than a footnote in someone else’s story.
Fortunately, no one else seemed to notice her abstraction. Henrietta, comfortably ensconced at the center of her own narrative, was busily trying to align this new information. “So,” she said, “your Mr. Wrothan pretended to be the King’s doctor and insinuated himself into the King’s household in order to glean secrets to sell to the French.”
“Lucky for him that the King should go batty again,” commented Miles comfortably.
Charlotte lifted her head. “Unless it wasn’t luck,” she said. She might be a side character, but there was no need to be an entirely insignificant one.
For the first time that horrible night, Robert looked directly at her. “The opium,” he said.
Their eyes locked in a moment of complete mutual comprehension.
“Would you mind explaining for the rest of us?” demanded Miles.
“If someone were to drug the King with opium,” Charlotte said, not altogether coherently, “they might be able to simulate something akin to madness. Everyone at Court is so afraid of another bout that the least little aberration in behavior would be taken as a recurrence of his old illness.”
“And he would be treated accordingly.” Robert’s words fell into the fraught silence like footsteps in a graveyard.
“A doctor would be called in,” confirmed Charlotte. “And not Dr. Willis. The King has expressly stated that he will not allow himself to be treated by Dr. Willis ever again, and the Dukes of Kent and Cumberland have expressed their resolves to bar any attempt by Dr. Willis to enter against their father’s wishes.”
“Meaning,” translated Robert deli
cately, “that a new doctor would have to be appointed. Someone unknown.”
Henrietta’s almond eyes had gone nearly as round as Charlotte’s. “That would explain Dr. Simmons. Once in the King’s apartments, he could steal all the secrets he liked.”
For a moment, there was complete silence in the carriage as they all sat staring at one another, speechless at the sheer audacity of the scheme.
“Good God,” breathed Miles.
“Not God,” said Charlotte. “The Prince of Wales. He has the power to appoint the King’s physicians in these . . . well, these interludes. And the Prince of Wales is friends with Sir Francis Medmenham.”
“Who knew Wrothan,” Robert finished grimly. “As you’ve now witnessed for yourself, Medmenham maintains a . . . secret society of sorts.” He looked at her as though daring her to elaborate on his description. “Wrothan was a member.”
“A secret society?” echoed Henrietta.
“Hellfire Club,” elaborated Miles.
That explained the monks’ habits and the bizarre ritual. “Then the only question,” said Charlotte, “is whether Medmenham deliberately sent Wrothan to impersonate Simmons or whether Wrothan heard through Medmenham that a new physician was being appointed and interjected himself.”
“Not exactly the only question,” put in Lieutenant Fluellen equably. “For the sake of argument, let’s say the King was being drugged with opium before they called for a doctor. How did they get it to him in the first place?”
Charlotte remembered that first night, Lord Henry Innes standing irritable and anxious at the door of the King’s bedchamber. “Henry Innes is a member of Medmenham’s secret society, isn’t he?” she asked, looking to Robert.
He confirmed her hunch with a distant nod.
Charlotte soldiered on. “Lord Henry was in attendance on the King. If someone—like your Wrothan—were to give Lord Henry something and tell him it was a nerve tonic or a cure for stomach upsets—” From the expressions of the others, Charlotte could see they understood. She hurried on. “I saw the King the night he was first taken ill, before the doctor was called. He didn’t act quite as he was reported to in his other illnesses. Rather than being hurried and agitated, there was something almost . . . dreamy. His eyes didn’t seem to want to focus quite properly.”
Lieutenant Fluellen looked at Robert. “Sounds like opium to me.”
“But why”—Miles leaned forwards, bracing his hands on his knees—“would your Frenchie kill Wrothan? Wrothan was his entrée into the palace.”
“Unless,” suggested Charlotte wildly, “he had another false Dr. Simmons lined up. There might be a whole regiment of them. A monstrous regiment of Dr. Simmonses.”
“Or,” countered Robert in a voice that effectively quelled Charlotte’s desire to giggle, “he had already extracted what he wanted. I overheard the two of them talking tonight. Wrothan was bragging that he had removed something from the palace.”
“Did he say what?” asked Henrietta.
Robert held up both hands in a gesture of defeat. “He compared it all to a game of cards. He kept talking about having the King in his hand.”
Charlotte remembered the King as she had seen him: entirely helpless, strapped into a straight waistcoat, denied the use of his limbs, weak and wasted.
“What else did he say?” Charlotte asked urgently, shoving her lap rugs out of the way.
Robert smiled grimly. “Wrothan was waxing poetic today. When the Frenchman asked his price, he demanded a king’s ransom. I imagine Wrothan thought he would get more if he left it to the imagination.”
“Turn the carriage around,” Charlotte said breathlessly.
“What?” said Miles.
“Please.” Reaching out, Charlotte caught at his arm. “Tell your coachman to go to the Queen’s House. As fast as he can.”
“Isn’t it a bit late to go calling at the Palace?” said Miles cautiously, in the sort of tone one uses with small children and excitable maiden aunts.
Looking around the circle of faces in the carriage, Charlotte encountered identical stares of incomprehension. Didn’t even one of them see what she saw? Perhaps it was because they hadn’t been there. Or perhaps it was because they didn’t read as many novels. On the face of it, she realized, it did sound absurd, but she couldn’t think of a better explanation for the events of the evening. And if she was right . . .
Charlotte squashed her hair back behind her ears with both hands and stared imploringly at her companions. “Don’t you see? They can only have been talking about the King. Not a king, the King.”
As they all stared at her uncomprehendingly, the level of her voice rose. “If the false doctor was planted by the French spy to secure something that the doctor then ran off with to hold it for ransom—not just any ransom,” Charlotte continued relentlessly. “A king’s ransom.”
“No,” said Robert flatly. “No. It can’t be.”
“What else can it be?” Charlotte twisted the lap rug so hard that it nearly ripped in two. “Your Mr. Wrothan has kidnapped the King!”
Chapter Twenty-Four
“We don’t know that,” said Robert forcefully, when the furor had died down enough for him to make himself heard. “We don’t know anything of the kind.”
Charlotte’s small hands were clasped as if in prayer. “What else is there in the Palace worth stealing?”
“Aside from state papers, priceless art, a king’s ransom in silver and jewels . . .”
Charlotte waved all that aside. “Why else drug the King into a state of insensibility?”
“I can think of a number of reasons,” said Robert grimly. “You can have your pick. There’s simple theft, the Prince of Wales’s reversionary interest, or an attempt to sow discord by our friends across the Channel.”
“Any of those might have been the original plan. But,” Charlotte took a very deep breath, “what if your friend decided to take it a step further?”
“He wasn’t my friend.” Robert wasn’t sure why he felt the need to specify that, but he did. “He was never my friend.”
“Your enemy, then. Suppose your enemy double-crossed his conspirator and, finding himself in a position to do so, made off with the King. It needn’t have been a well-thought-out plan,” she added, as an afterthought. “He might simply have seen the opportunity and seized it.”
“Like a boy with a plate of unguarded jam tarts?” Robert saw the quick flash of recognition before Charlotte’s eyes dropped again.
“Rather larger, but otherwise the same idea,” acknowledged Charlotte, not quite meeting his eyes. “He saw his opportunity and seized it.”
It would be like Wrothan to snatch up whatever fell conveniently into his path, whether it belonged to him or not, but Robert had difficulties with the logistics of it. One didn’t just walk off with a monarch.
“It’s one thing to seize a jam tart and quite another thing to seize a King,” Robert pressed. “As you said, the King is larger. And, one would presume, would be more likely to protest at being carried off.”
“You have to admit that he has a point,” said Miles, who had been watching the exchange like a spectator at a sporting match. “My pudding seldom protests. People do.”
“Not if they’re bound and drugged. The people, I mean, not the puddings.” Charlotte cast an imploring glance around the carriage. “None of you saw the King I did. Anyone could have walked in, tossed him over his shoulder, and walked out with him.”
“With the King,” Robert said incredulously. “Aren’t there guards? Attendants? Something?”
Charlotte shook her head. “The King prides himself on not surrounding himself with guards. He says he doesn’t like to be separated from his subjects. As for attendants, as soon as he fell ill, all his pages were dismissed. His most loyal gentlemen of the bedchamber were barred from him. The Queen, too,” she added. “We were told it was all by his own orders.”
Miles pounded with one large fist on the hatch leading to the box.
<
br /> “The Queen’s House,” he instructed the coachman. Looking sheepish, he said, “I suppose it doesn’t hurt to check. Just to set Charlotte’s mind at ease.”
“Charlotte is all appreciation,” murmured Charlotte, although she looked anything but at ease. Her hands were clasped so tightly in her lap that it was a wonder they didn’t crack. She looked, Robert thought, like the more fragile sort of porcelain shepherdess, in danger of shattering at a careless touch.
“How do you intend to get in?” asked Robert brusquely as the carriage drew up by St. James’s Park. He knew he was being surly, but he couldn’t seem to help it. Too much had happened, and none of it the way he had planned it. Wrothan was meant to be dead by his sword, not by an assassin’s knife. And Charlotte . . . Charlotte was meant to be safe at home not tracking murderers by moonlight. “I imagine one can’t just stroll in to the King’s apartments.”
“One can, actually,” Charlotte said demurely. “If one knows how to go about it.”
“Lead the way, O Captain, my Captain,” signaled Miles, with an extravagant salute.
And she did. It was Charlotte who took the lead, Charlotte who guided them through the snow and the slush, down a long avenue shaded by lime trees to a square courtyard. They passed a dry fountain, the stone statues around its edge huddling in on themselves against the cold. Locating an entrance half obscured in the shrubbery, Charlotte guided them downstairs, through a warren of subterranean rooms that smelled pungently of glue and leather.
“This is the King’s personal bindery,” Charlotte explained in a whisper. “It connects to the library.”
“Rather careless of him, isn’t it?” asked Robert, thinking of sentries and pickets and the hosts of armed guards attendant on Eastern potentates.
Charlotte shook her head, looking very serious. “It was quite intentional. He wanted his library to be available to scholars at all times, without their having to go through the Palace. Dr. Johnson used to study here,” she said proudly.
She led the way up a narrow flight of stairs to the center of a vast wing that seemed entirely made up, as far as Robert could tell, of rooms filled with books, levels upon levels upon levels of books of all shapes, colors, and sizes. It made the library at Dovedale House look positively puny by comparison. Charlotte, however, appeared to know exactly where she was going. Ignoring an octagonal room with a soaring ceiling that looked more like an observatory than a library, she shepherded her flock into a rectangular room with a square desk that itself appeared to be constructed largely from books.
Pink Carnation 05 - The Temptation of the Night Jasmine Page 32