“Anyway he is so incensed at the Duke’s apparent ill manners that Charmaine says she is quite convinced that he will allow her engagement to Clive Brothwicke to be announced before Christmas!”
“My old Nanny used to say it is an ill wind that turns none to good!” the Duke remarked with a smile.
“Thomas Tusser! 1524 to 1580,” Verena exclaimed. “I was made to learn all his poetic versions of old proverbs and there is one that would have been a useful warning to the Odious Duke!”
“Which is that?” the Duke enquired.
“It is about the buying or selling of a pig in a poke!” Verena replied. “And that is what His Grace was doing in deciding to marry Charmaine without knowing anything about her!”
The Duke tried to find suitable words to excuse himself, but Verena continued,
“But that is not what I wanted to tell you about. Lord Upminster was declaiming quite inordinately about a terrible hold-up along the road just outside Eaton Socon that took place three days ago.
“His Lordship is a Magistrate and it was reported to the Court this morning that the dead bodies of two guards were discovered in the ditch and that the two coachmen who had been driving the bullion coach were found gagged and bound inside it.”
She paused for a moment for greater effect before carrying on,
“The horses had been cut from their traces and had been allowed to wander in the fields, so nobody found and examined the coach for quite some time. And the wretched men inside the coach were half-dead with fear, hunger and thirst! What is more, his Lordship is now convinced that the Bullion contained in the coach, which was on its way to York, was of immense value.”
“Did you say anything to his Lordship about what had happened in the cellar?” the Duke asked.
“I am not such a cork-brain as that!” Verena responded scornfully. “The men have the money. We have no idea of who they are or where they may be now. What use is it to talk? What we have to do is to plan somehow to catch the thieves red-handed. You would have been able to do so if they had not knocked you out.”
“I see your point,” the Duke said drily. “But, have you not forgotten they said that they would not be using The Priory again?”
“The gentleman said not for a month or two. All we have to do is to wait.”
“Are you seriously suggesting,” the Duke enquired, “that we should say nothing at all and allow those murderers to ramp about the country, attacking Bullion coaches in the hope that eventually they will return to The Priory?”
“What else can we do?” Verena retorted. “If I tell his Lordship now what has happened, he will overwhelm you with questions, but you can tell him nothing. While I can describe what the gentleman and Hickson look like There must be thousands of others almost exactly the same in appearance.”
The Duke considered this for a moment.
Then he asked,
“Have you mentioned my presence to Lord Upminster?”
For the first time since he had known her a faint flush came into Verena’s cheeks.
“I did not,” she answered. “Perhaps it was wrong of me, but I felt it might be slightly difficult to relate how I met you and why I should be concerning myself with a stranger whose horse had dropped a shoe to the point of inviting him to stay here with Grandpapa. Besides how was I to explain the wounds on your head?”
“I think you have proved that discretion was very much the better part of valour,” the Duke said with a smile. “Incidentally how did you get me back here? I am interested to hear the end of the story!”
“I rode home on Assaye and told Travers what had happened. He collected three of the gardeners and they carried you here on a gate. It is not more than half a mile but they found you extremely heavy! You are a – very big man. Major Royd!”
“Are Travers and the other men to be trusted?” the Duke enquired.
“Travers was with Grandpapa at Waterloo and the others will do as they are told. I have told them it is of the utmost importance that they do not talk and I don’t think that they will. They are all used to taking orders from Grandpapa and I believe in this instance they will obey me.”
“Then what we have to decide,” the Duke said, “is how we can find the gentleman with the astute mind who organises the Bullion robberies and his servant, Hickson, who carries them out.”
“It sounds exciting. Oh, I wish Grandpapa could help us. I know it is something that he would enjoy more than anything else.”
“I am sure that the General would not approve of us just sitting back and waiting for it to happen again. I heard about these Bullion robberies before I left London and they are causing a great deal of concern amongst the Military.”
“The Military?” Verena asked in surprise.
“It is the Army that guards the Bank of England where the Bullion comes from,” the Duke explained.
“There does not seem much point in guarding the Bank of England when the robbers ambush the carriages on the roadways,” Verena said. “It would be much better if they sent a Military escort with the coaches.”
The Duke remembered that Harry Sheraton had said very much the same thing. He wondered what Harry would think of Verena. Of one thing he was quite sure, that his friend would be exceedingly amused at the position he now found himself in.
By now he should have been leaving Copple Hall en route for Lord Wilmington’s estate in Derbyshire. Instead he was the secret guest of a brown-eyed country wench who had got him mixed up in just the sort of unsavoury trouble that he had always made sure of avoiding.
There were some amongst his friends who enjoyed hunting down the highwaymen or attempting to trick cardsharpers and other cheats into positions where they could be exposed and denounced.
It was the type of thing he personally had always abhorred and yet here he was now in a situation where it would be impossible for him to pretend ignorance of what had occurred.
And yet at the same time he had no desire to reveal the somewhat ignominious part that he had played, as he must if he was to report how the Bullion robbers had used The Priory as a place of hiding.
For a moment the Duke wondered if Verena had dreamt the whole thing. Could what she had seen and heard really be true? And then he realised what a cleverly thought out and yet very simple plan the whole operation was.
Hickson, whoever he might be, employs three men on behalf of the unknown gentleman who informs Hickson where the Bullion coach can be intercepted, choosing early in the morning when the road is misty. The guards are shot before they can even see who is attacking them and the coachmen are tied up by men who wear masks.
The Bullion is loaded onto their horses and, after travelling a short distance cross-country, the treasure is hidden in a ruined house that must have been decided on previously by the gentleman and Hickson.
Then three of the robbers ride away and disappear doubtless into the underworld of London.
Only Hickson is then left to contact the unknown gentleman to come with him to the place of hiding, to deposit the evidence of the crime in the shape of empty Bullion boxes in the lake and then return to London with the booty hidden in a secret place in the gentleman’s curricle, where no one would ever suspect it to be.
It was almost a foolproof operation from beginning to end. The only unanswered question being how the gentleman knew when the Bullion coaches were leaving the Bank of England and their destination.
The Duke must have looked as if he was concentrating hard on the problem for after a moment he realised that Verena was watching him, a smile on her lips and her dimples very much in evidence.
“Well,” she asked, “have you found a solution?”
“Not yet,” he replied.
“One thing is quite certain,” she told him. “I am going to practise shooting again.”
“Shooting?” he asked her.
“Yes, I am a good shot with a musket. Grandpapa taught me until I can hit the centre of a target at fifty yards. But I have grown somewh
at rusty with a pistol. I have a feeling, Major Royd, we will need to be good shots before we have finished this chase!”
“There is no question of ‘we’,” he replied. “You are not going to be mixed up in anything so unpleasant and dangerous.”
“Do you really believe I would accept that?” Verena then asked him scornfully. “You cannot treat me as if I was some spooning female who would faint at the sight of a pistol or scream at the sound of a shot!
She paused to cough and she went on,
“I am to be a soldier’s wife and ride with the Army just like Lady Waldegrave. Grandpapa told me how, before the Battle of Salamanca, he had seen her for four days together amongst the skirmishers. And Mrs. Dalbiec rode at the head of the Fourth Dragoons on the march and was constantly exposed to fire. Did you not see those ladies?”
“I did indeed,” the Duke replied grimly, “and it only confirmed my unshakable conviction that a battlefield is no place for any female!”
“Is that your opinion?” Verena asked him. “Then you can leave your wife at home. The man I marry will be proud to have me by his side. Of that I am certain.”
“You are to be married?” the Duke asked.
Verena nodded her head.
“It is a secret,” she answered.
“Another one?”
She smiled, her eyes shining.
“The most important of them all. Unfortunately Grandpapa does not approve of Giles, so I can never talk about him. But he is a soldier, brave, intrepid and adventurous and I intend as soon as we are wed to go with him wherever he may be serving the King. I have no intention of being a dismal sit-at-home wife!”
“I think you are being quite nonsensical,” the Duke said sharply and then wondered why the thought of Verena on a battlefield annoyed him so intensely.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Checkmate!” Verena declared.
The Duke stared at the chessboard with a rueful expression on his face.
“You cannot have won again?” he said almost incredulously.
“I have,” Verena replied. “You left your King exposed. And that is something you should never do!”
“I have until now believed myself to be a good player.”
“Would you like another game?” Verena asked.
The Duke put his head back against the high velvet armchair which had been drawn up to the window so that he could breathe in some air from the open casement with sunshine on his face.
It was amazing to the Duke when he thought about it that he had now been the uninvited guest of General Winchcombe for six days and yet strangely enough he was neither bored nor in any hurry to leave.
It was true that for the first few days his head had felt as if it might split open and a continual headache had been so hard to bear.
But, as his head improved, he found himself amused by Verena and content to be with her in a way that he could not explain to himself.
Previously in his life he had always wanted to be entertained in the evening by witty, scintillating and elegantly gowned women, while in the daytime by hunting, shooting, a mill or racing.
If he had been told that it was possible for him to be content for six days to rest quietly and to enjoy the company of a young girl who, apart from the doctor and a servant, was the only person he saw, he would not have believed such a suggestion credible.
But Verena amused him simply because she appeared to make so little effort to entertain him. It was true that she played chess with him at which she always won and piquet, when he was undoubtedly her master, but her main attraction was that she was simply herself.
The Duke was used to women who deliberately set themselves out to be alluring, who flirted with their eyes, their lips and the movement of their bodies. They meant to attract him as a man and so they used every trick and artifice to arouse his desire for them.
Verena looked at him with a wide-eyed frankness that told him that not for one moment did she think of him as a potential beau, or indeed, a sobering thought, even as an attractive male!
When she entered the room, the sunshine seemed to come in with her and there was always something exciting she had to relate to him.
It might be nothing more sensational than that a fox had nipped the heads off six old hens the night before, that Farmer Wilk’s prize cow had given birth to a calf with two heads or that Lord Upminster’s prize bull had escaped and found servicing a herd of very ordinary cows belonging to a smallholder who had never been able to afford the fees of a stud bull!
It was country talk and country lore and yet the Duke found himself laughing uproariously at a ridiculous situation simply because of the way that Verena described it to him.
While she brought him laughter, she also brought him solace when his headache became unbearable.
He just could not believe that a woman’s hands against his forehead could bring a relief from intolerable pain so quickly or make his eyelids droop so that he fell asleep almost before he knew what was happening.
He had questioned the credibility of Verena’s powers on the first day when she had massaged Salamanca’s fetlock, but, having now found how quickly and easily she could dispel his pain, he realised that never again would he be a disbeliever.
Now Verena sensed that he was feeling tired and, putting aside the chessboard, suggested,
“You must not do too much or Doctor Graves will be incensed with me. Would you care for me to read to you?”
“What do you suggest?” asked. “Love at First Sight or The Lost Heir?”
She laughed.
“How would you know the names of such nonsensical novels? But because of the insult you imply by suggesting them, I think I will read you Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft!”
“God forbid!” the Duke exclaimed. “And do not tell me you desire to be one of those strident women who talk about their rights.”
“I certainly think that as a sex we are downtrodden and imposed on by men,” Verena flashed at him.
“Never have I heard such fustian.” the Duke replied.
“Do you really consider it right in any way,” Verena asked, seating herself beside him on the window seat, “that a man should have complete control over a woman’s fortune and her estate from the very moment he makes her his wife?”
“Why not. She would be incapable of managing either by herself!”
“That is such an outrageous statement!” Verena cried out. “Do you realise that I have helped Grandpapa administer this estate for the last three years and now he is ill everything is done by me exactly as before.”
“Maybe,” the Duke admitted. “But the General planned it all in the first instance. Think what a mess the average woman would make of any estate if she had to start from scratch without the help and guidance of an intelligent man.”
“You infuriate me!” Verena declared, her eyes flashing at him. “Not all women are nit-witted without a thought in their heads save of pretty gowns and babies!”
“So what else would a man wish them to have in their heads?” the Duke asked with a twinkle in his eye.
“You are deliberately provoking me,” Verena said accusingly. “And it is dangerous for you to be excited, seeing to what a weak state a great big man like yourself has been reduced. So I shall not talk to you any longer, but shall read to you from a nice soothing book.”
“The weak and humiliating state I am reduced to is, may I point out, Miss Winchcombe, due entirely to the very hazardous enterprise that you enticed me into! Had I minded my own business and not gone into a haunted house in an effort to protect a frail female, my head would not be in the state it is now!”
“If you call me a ‘frail female’, I shall fetch my musket and blow a hole in you!”
“Wound an unarmed and injured man?” the Duke protested in mock horror. “Where could you have learnt such iniquities such as practised only by the French?”
Verena dimpled at him.
“It’s no use,”
she now sighed. “You always manage to have the last word. Well, which is it to be – Caesaris Commentarii in Latin or Plutarch’s Lives? I have read both to Grandpapa and he told me that the Duke of Wellington took these books with him on his voyage to India.”
The Duke raised his eyebrow, no young woman of his acquaintance could read Latin and few were interested in Plutarch!
“I wish, at the moment, to hear neither,” he replied. “I want to talk to you, Verena. Do you not understand that you are the only person who has the slightest chance of catching the gentleman ‘Evil Genius’? If you refuse to use your knowledge of what he looks like, more guards on the Bullion coaches will be killed. Can you really bear to be responsible for their deaths, Verena?”
Verena rose from the window seat and walked across the room.
“That is an unfair argument, as well you know, Major.”
“It is a factual one,” the Duke answered. “There is no one else who can help in solving not only the robberies but the murders, for they are nothing else, of the wretched men who guard the Bullion.”
“Do you really think that if I went to London,” Verena asked, “there is a chance of my encountering the ‘Evil Genius’? I just cannot believe he spends his time at Assemblies or attending balls!”
“Why not?” the Duke asked. “Let’s argue this out logically, Verena. You tell me that he has the appearance of a gentleman, youngish, well-dressed and somewhat of a dandy. Having obtained all this money, what is he likely to spend it on?”
“Horses, I suppose,” Verena said almost reluctantly.
“But, of course. Every smart buck wants to own good bloodstock. So we imagine he will go to Tattersalls and purchase the finest horseflesh available. “Next, he will wish to show them off to the Beau Ton, of which from your description of him, I would imagine he is a member. He will be invited to balls.”
“Then that precludes me!” Verena interposed. “You know quite well I am not of the Beau Ton and, if I go to London, I shall certainly not be asked to balls frequented by such a dandy as the ‘Evil Genius’. And what is more, I am not at all likely to receive a ticket for Almack’s!”
The Odious Duke Page 9