by Лорен Уиллиг
Whirling around to face off French spies, treacherous Englishmen, and drunken monks of any nationality, Robert himself facing a medium-size female in an expensive silk cloak lined with swansdown.
“Um, Charlotte? Oh, hello, Dovedale.” Lady Henrietta Dorrington flashed him a winning smile while Robert attempted to realign his jaw with the rest of his face. “I do hate to interrupt, but there is something you ought to see.”
Charlotte had brought a friend? Robert bypassed guilt and went straight to anger.
“Does either of you realize that this is not Almack’s Assembly Rooms?” Robert gritted out.
“Of course,” said Charlotte, as if Robert were the one being silly. “There’s no ratafia.”
Robert found himself entirely incapable of speech.
Now he understood why their early ancestors had expressed themselves entirely in grunts. No other noise could quite encapsulate his current level of shock, anger, and general disbelief. Anger surged to the fore, trumping shock, when Charlotte, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he had just rescued her from the proverbial fate worse than death, blithely turned to her friend, dismissing him entirely.
“Did you find the doctor?” Charlotte asked eagerly.
The who?
“I’m afraid so.” Lady Henrietta’s face was as grim as it could get. Swinging her lantern, she gestured, not towards the street but towards the back of the church, where pitted gravestones clustered close together in the lee of the drooping eaves. “Follow me.”
With mud slurping around his boots, Robert followed. His only other choice was to fling Charlotte back over his shoulder and bear her bodily forth into the street. It was an attractive option, but not one that Charlotte was likely to approve.
Did it matter what she approved anymore?
“Who,” Robert demanded tersely, “is the doctor?”
“This is,” said Lady Henrietta soberly, pointing to the gap between two tombstones. She lifted the shutter of her lantern, and what Robert had perceived as merely a fallen log took on a hideous resolution.
“Or, rather, this was,” she amended.
A man sprawled between the tombstones. Like Robert, he wore the simple brown wool cassock of the Order of St. Francis, tied at the waist with the regulation leather belt, tipped with twin prongs of metal. A pair of old-fashioned buckled shoes protruded from beneath his robe, any gems that had been set into the buckle long since prized out of their frames. His hood had fallen back from his head, revealing close-cropped dark hair and a face too thin for fashion.
The light of Lady Henrietta’s lantern reflected off the glistening surface of his eyes. For a moment, Robert expected him to speak, to lever himself up, to make a dash across the tombstones, through the churchyard. But the eyes were fixed, open, unmoving. It was only the treacherous lamplight that gave the illusion of life to eyes that would never blink again.
Someone had beaten Robert to his revenge.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Good heavens,” Charlotte whispered. “It’s Dr. Simmons.” Henrietta took a step back, leaving room for the other two to get a better view. “I’m afraid I . . . well, I stepped on him. Not that it can hurt him now.”
Nothing was ever going to hurt him again. Blood mingled with the slush and mud, creating an unpleasant musky smell that made Charlotte’s stomach churn, overlaid with the faint, delicate scent of a foreign flower. The incongruity made Charlotte’s stomach churn. Catching on to a tombstone for balance, she backed away, shutting her own eyes to block out that fixed and glittering stare. The dead features were frozen in an eternal gloat.
“At least he died happy,” said Charlotte faintly, doing her best to cultivate an expression of sangfroid and failing miserably. Dead bodies weren’t something she generally encountered.
Robert swung towards Henrietta. “Did you see who did this?” he asked sharply.
Henrietta shook her head. “I heard a thud — ” she began, when two men pounded around the side of the tavern.
“Hullo!” The larger of the two waved a hand in the air as he vaulted — quite unnecessarily — over a tombstone to land within a yard of the doctor’s body.
“I see you’ve found him,” Miles gasped, resting his hands on his thighs and bending over to catch his breath. “We chased the chap who did it, but — Hen?”
“Miles?” Recovering first, Henrietta clamped her hands on her hips. “I thought you had a card game!”
Miles was the picture of outraged dignity, marred only slightly by a patch of mud on his cheek. “I thought you were still at the theatre!”
Charlotte hastily interjected herself between the two. “This is a sort of performance,” she said soothingly. “Like a masque.”
“Looks more like a farce to me,” commented Lieutenant Fluellen sagely, earning a glower from his best friend.
“What in the — er, what are you doing here?” Robert demanded, turning his glower on Charlotte instead.
“What he said,” Miles seconded, looping an arm firmly around his wife’s waist before she could get away again. “Including what he didn’t say.”
Charlotte cocked her head at Miles. “What he didn’t say?”
She tried not to notice the way that Henrietta leaned against Miles, her head fitting comfortably into the crook of his shoulder. Even while ostensibly arguing, they still gravitated together. It would be so lovely to be able to lean against someone like that, with all the unspoken support it implied. Not to mention the warmth. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Robert standing next to her, near enough that the hem of his cassock brushed against the side of her pelisse. He radiated heat, too, but it was all of the wrong kind. Tension and irritation rolled off him in palpable waves. Charlotte felt her own shoulders stiffen in reaction.
“Never mind that,” said Robert brusquely. “Why are you here?”
“We were following the King’s doctor,” Charlotte explained defiantly.
“The King’s who?” Miles demanded of his wife.
“You first,” Henrietta said. “You still haven’t told us why you’re here.”
“Are we really going to have this conversation here?” Grimacing, Lieutenant Fluellen waved a gloved hand at the doctor’s crumpled form.
“Well, we don’t need to worry about him eavesdropping,” said Miles cheerfully, earning a poke in the ribs from his wife. “Ouch!”
Lifting an eyebrow at Miles, Robert took charge before further horseplay could ensue. “Perhaps we should search him,” he suggested. Coming from Robert, the suggestion had the force of a command.
“Jolly good idea!” Miles hunkered down next to the body like a dog with a particularly juicy bone. “I say, do cassocks have pockets?”
“Sometimes,” said Robert, patting down the area around the wound. “If the owner bothered to have them put in.”
“Unless the other chappie relieved him of any burdens before sticking him.” Lieutenant Fluellen crouched down beside them, inspecting the dead man’s shoes for concealed hidey holes.
Charlotte hastily stepped back to give them more room. Next to her, Henrietta stood on her tiptoes, craning her neck to try to see over the men’s bent backs.
“He had no time,” said Robert tersely. “Unless he lifted something off Wrothan in the Robing Room beforehand.”
“Wrothan?” asked Charlotte, head swimming in a flurry of masculine pronouns. The gentlemen all seemed to understand one another perfectly, but she had no idea who was meant to have stabbed whom.
“The dead one,” supplied Miles helpfully.
“You mean Dr. Simmons,” corrected Henrietta.
“Unless,” said Charlotte, “Mr. Wrothan is Dr. Simmons.”
Robert pushed himself to his feet, scrubbing his hands against his robe with a compulsive gesture that reminded Charlotte of Lady Macbeth. The movement only smeared the blood rather than removing it, giving him, in his medieval cassock, the appearance of something out of a novel by Mrs. Radcliffe.
“Dr.
who?” he demanded.
Lieutenant Fluellen lifted a restraining hand. His were streaked, too, but with mud rather than blood. “May I suggest we exchange stories somewhere more hospitable? By a fire, perhaps?”
“Oh, yes, please!” said Henrietta. “We have a carriage waiting at the end of the road.”
Miles staggered to his feet. “Our carriage?”
Charlotte glanced over her shoulder at the figure lying between the tombstones, nothing more than a shadow among shadows, shrouded in dirty snow. “But, surely,” she said uncertainly, “we can’t just leave him like this.”
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 i
s 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 delicately, “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.