Stephen rode on, as if that revelation was on the order of a missing jar of jam having been found.
“Stephen, if you’ve been sneaking about, putting the servants up to sneaking about, or in any way—”
He held up a gloved hand. “How you wound my tender spirit. In the first place, I wouldn’t admit to sneaking about, if one of my lurching gait could be said to sneak. In the second, I didn’t have to. I was quibbling over a line of scripture, and Miss Maddie fetched her Book of Common Prayer, your library having none to offer. I happened to notice her name inscribed in the front, and a date of birth. She was christened at St. Andrew’s, Holborn. She’s twenty-eight, by the way. Nearly doddering, though not so venerable as you.”
“This is what you meant, about confiding without meaning to.” Every child was given a Book of Common Prayer by a doting godparent, auntie, or vicar. Even Uncle Victor had given Duncan a copy, a fine, sizeable version suitable for a vicar’s nephew.
“Precisely. If Miss Maddie didn’t want me to know her last name—truly, truly did not want me to know—she would not have passed the book into my hands.”
Not so. People slipped, they mis-stepped, they grew weary and careless. Sometimes.
“You will tell no one,” Duncan said. “You will forget whatever you glimpsed or thought you saw. A prayer book is highly personal and likely one of few possessions she values.”
Stephen turned his horse up the Brightwell driveway, another expanse of muck, ruts, and mud bordered by dirty melting snow.
“I’ve already forgotten that her last name is Wakefield, her mother’s name was Delores Gunning, and her father’s name is Thomas Wakefield.”
Maddie had people. Duncan had assumed so, but knowing their names did not ease his worry. The worst betrayals came from the closest ties.
“Right,” Duncan said. “Forget the lot of it, unless you also saw her middle name. That you may forget as soon as you tell me what it is.”
Chapter Seven
A tactical retreat was called for, though Colonel Lord Atticus Parker had to give notice of the retreat to his quarry—his other quarry. Searching for Matilda while keeping a close eye on her father had become a complicated undertaking.
“You’re off to the shires to foxhunt in this weather?” Wakefield asked.
Parker poured himself a cup of tea. Wakefield served an exquisitely aromatic China black that was cause on its own to pay a call.
“To a soldier, weather is immaterial, though boredom is a constant foe. Racketing about the Midlands in pursuit of vermin passes the time.”
Wakefield used a delicate pair of silver tongs to drop a lump of sugar into his own cup. “Have you descended to crude innuendo where your former fiancée is concerned, Colonel?” Wakefield’s tone was mild, his manner pleasant, as always.
“My former fiancée? Has Matilda corresponded with you, communicating news I should be aware of?”
Wakefield used the sugar tongs to set a tea cake on Parker’s plate, though Parker didn’t care for sweets.
“If her actions don’t make her position on the matter of marriage to you apparent, then a full-page ad in the Times would be unavailing. Unless you’d have me believe the press gangs are now stealing the widows of German dukes, she left this household of her own volition.”
No press gang would willingly tangle with Matilda Wakefield, known on the Continent as Matilda, Dowager Duchess of Bosendorf.
“Have you ruled out a foreign government taking an interest in her?” Parker asked. “She accompanied her husband to various pumpernickel courts, attended all manner of social events, and called upon diplomats and influential people without number. Perhaps her former in-laws have decided she was privy to too many state secrets. She also traveled with you from her girlhood on and saw much even before her marriage.”
Almost all of which she recalled, if what she’d seen had been in print or handwriting. She had that sort of mind, but was less accurate with spoken words, thank heavens.
Wakefield took a leisurely sip of his tea and set down the cup and saucer with an equal lack of haste.
“Most children who’ve lost their mothers end up in their father’s care,” he said. “I could not trust servants to tend to a grieving girl in my absence, and Matilda seemed to enjoy the travel. As for her in-laws, German dukes are thick on the ground, though in point of fact, Duke Karl was Germano-Danish. I’ve made inquiries, and her former in-laws have no idea of her whereabouts.”
He popped the tea cake into his mouth, the casual gesture only adding to his elegant, relaxed demeanor. Wakefield was very, very good at what he did, and he’d been doing it for a very, very long time.
“His Grace of Bosendorf promised Matilda a home and family of her own,” Parker replied. “She told me that she married him because she longed for a place to settle down and raise children.” That rare admission from a woman who was usually so self-possessed had formed the basis for Parker’s courtship of her.
“And Matilda—my Matilda—thought an officer in the British military would afford her a fixed address? Doesn’t that strike you as odd, Colonel?”
“Yes.” And yet, Matilda had spoken as earnestly about longing for a home as ever she’d spoken about anything. Had she spoken too earnestly? Deceptively?
Not that it mattered. “I’m in truth off to listen at keyholes rather than foxhunt,” Parker said. “Galloping to hounds is good sport, but the fellows usually get to gossiping while they’re riding in and enjoying their hunt breakfast.”
“Then the serious drinking starts around the card table,” Wakefield said. “Ah, the stupidity of youth.”
The insult was almost undetectable amid the affability.
“The serious drinking can lead to seriously honest talk. If someone’s mama has recently hired a new companion answering to Matilda’s description, if someone has heard talk of a governess particularly adept at languages or chess, then I’m more likely to catch that bit of gossip among the lordlings at Melton than I am in your drawing room.”
Wakefield refreshed his tea. “I must ask myself, though, why you persist in this quest, Colonel? You have no claim on Matilda, she’s been gone for months, and my best efforts—your best efforts—to locate her have been fruitless. I applaud your tenacity, but at some point, tenacity becomes a curious obsession.”
Wakefield was clever, declaring the betrothal null and void, casting devotion as obsession, and doing all of this damage over tea and jam.
“You claim to have loved your wife,” Parker said. “If I told you she was alive and well somewhere, but troubled, or unable to come to you despite yearning to do so, would you sit here sipping tea and reading Ovid?”
Wakefield peered at him over his teacup. “Outraged swain does not sit well upon you, Colonel. You might, in your way, love my daughter, but as the man who has known Matilda since her birth, I can assure you, she does not love you. I would also hazard that the regard you developed toward her during the months of one social Season in no way matches what a man and woman married for years can share. I must ask you to desist in your attempts to locate my daughter.”
And there it was, the gauntlet Wakefield had declined to toss down since Matilda’s disappearance.
“Have you heard from her, sir?” Parker asked.
Wakefield looked him straight in the eye. “I have not. Have you?”
Parker bit off half the tea cake. “Of course not.”
“Then please take her departure and her silence for your congé.”
A sensible man would, in the usual circumstances. “I’ve had another idea regarding her whereabouts.”
“None of your ideas have had a happy result, Colonel. Again, I must insist that you no longer regard Matilda’s whereabouts as any of your affair.”
The damned tea cake had raspberry jam in the middle, and a seed lodged itself along Parker’s gum.
“Your request does you no credit as a loving father, Wakefield. What man wouldn’t accept any and all aid in locati
ng his missing daughter?”
Another unhurried sip of tea. “What man would continue to tolerate the meddling of the very person whom that daughter obviously seeks to avoid? Make yourself scarce, by all means, and then perhaps Matilda will deign to send me a few lines. As long as you so publicly call upon me, as long as your uniformed buffoons are watching for her at the ports and turnpikes, she can’t contact me. You are doing more harm than good, to be blunt, though I have every sympathy for you.”
Wakefield, as always, made sense. “You suppose she’s somewhere in London, then, and able to keep watch on your doorstep?”
Wakefield sighed, the gentle long-suffering of a very patient man. “I have no idea where she is. I have corresponded with every friend, acquaintance, and business associate with whom I dare raise this matter. I have paid thief takers and runners and people you would not turn your back on in broad daylight. Matilda is intelligent enough to know exactly to whom I will turn. She’s a widow with means and she’s taken measures to remain hidden.”
A convincing hint of exasperation laced Wakefield’s words.
“We need to cast a wider net and go back further among your acquaintances,” Parker said. “Your closest business associations now are with the great families in Kent, Surrey, and Sussex, but what about those relationships you formed when Matilda was younger and you traveled less on the Continent?”
Wakefield rubbed his forehead. “You expect me to recall transactions from more than fifteen years ago?”
Doubtless Wakefield had them all documented in journals and ledgers, for his success among the British aristocracy depended on balancing unassuming friendship with a shrewd mercantile eye.
“I expect you to recall the houses where you bided for more than a week or so, the ones like Petworth, where visitors were a constant happy stream, and a young girl might have formed pleasant memories.”
Wakefield rose. “For God’s sake, Colonel, Matilda is not among Lord Egremont’s horde at Petworth.”
“You don’t know that for a certainty, and you sold the earl valuable art on many occasions. The place is huge and she could easily hire on as a maid or under-housekeeper.”
“With what references?” Wakefield asked, pacing before the hearth. “With what experience? From what agency? You have taken leave of your senses if you think Matilda has gone into service in the household of some duke or earl. Servants gossip like magpies, and a chambermaid who muttered in French or knew a Caravaggio from a Tintoretto would draw certain notice. Matilda’s hands are those of a lady, her table manners, her speech—she would have little success passing for a servant.”
This was true. Matilda was intelligent, but even a smart woman would have difficulty blending into the world of the English servant class when she’d spent few of her formative years in England. Her employers were unlikely to notice her differentness, but her fellow menials would.
“I don’t intend to stop looking for her,” Parker said, getting to his feet. “I understand your concern, and I promise I will be discreet, but I must ask you to provide me a list of those great houses and properties that would be known to Matilda or that she’d recall fondly.”
Wakefield braced a hand on the mantel. “Ask me? With what authority does a failed suitor ask me do to anything? Honestly, Colonel, I understand that defeat for a military man is a difficult pill to swallow, and I am of course worried for my daughter, but your searching for Matilda is likely the very reason she’s still in hiding.”
No, it was not. “We’ll talk more of this when I return from Melton, though I’ll send my direction that you might keep me apprised of any developments.”
This apparently amused Wakefield. “You demand an accounting from me of what goes on here in London, while you ride off for a month of drunkenness and chasing maids. Yet you expect me to believe concern for Matilda rather than male pride drives your pre-occupation with her whereabouts. Safe journey, Colonel.”
Parker respected Wakefield—one needn’t like a man to respect him—and he knew better than to trust him.
“I go only that I might expand my search for a woman I esteem greatly and whose welfare concerns me to the utmost. I wish you good day.”
He withdrew his gloves from his pocket and was pulling them on when the painting over the mantel caught his eye.
“I’ve often wondered why you keep that landscape in such a prominent location when you have far more impressive art elsewhere in the house. Is that a Gainsborough?”
Wakefield moved away from the hearth, for the first time betraying a hint of impatience. “As a matter of fact, it’s a Dupont, Thomas Gainsborough’s nephew. He was a fair hand with a landscape, though not the equal of his uncle. Poor man didn’t live long.”
“The property is attractive.” The painting depicted a manor house amid mature trees in their summer glory. A boy flew a kite on the lawn, a spaniel yapping at his heels. The house could have been any one of a hundred country homes, neither immense nor ostentatious, but lovely all the same.
“Who owns that house?” The only English landscape on display anywhere in the Wakefield dwelling deserved further study.
“A duke now deceased owned it. I’m fairly certain the property is in Middlesex or somewhere west of there. I bought the painting from the previous titleholder because he didn’t care for the child in the foreground. The old man loved his hounds, though. He died some years ago and I have no idea who owns the place now.”
For a moment, the unflappable Thomas Wakefield had been off center. His savoir faire had returned in the next instant, but mention of this painting—this painting that Matilda would have seen day in and day out—had disturbed Wakefield’s equilibrium.
“I have little use for spaniels or house pets of any kind,” Parker said, moving toward the door. He wasn’t that keen on children, truth be told. “Do keep me informed.”
He bowed and withdrew, and as he accepted his hat and greatcoat from the butler, he turned his thoughts to the long trip north to the Midlands. The journey would be made longer still by a detour to the wilds of Middlesex and Berkshire, but then, hunting a missing fiancée was much more pressing business than running some starving little fox to ground.
* * *
Matilda was engrossed in Mr. Wentworth’s journey down the Italian coast from Nice to Rome. His companion in all of his travels was the same Lord Stephen now a guest at Brightwell. The youthful version of his lordship had been difficult, given to melancholia and rages, then to trying his hand at serial inebriations, all the while spending hours of every day in his Bath chair.
“You’re reading of our famous travels,” Lord Stephen said.
He leaned on a stout cane and the doorjamb. Matilda had noticed that he did this as a matter of habit: paused on the edge of every clearing, taking stock, probably charting the course with the fewest steps to whatever destination he’d chosen. She had learned the same caution for different reasons.
“I am translating those accounts written in French or Italian,” she said, “and editing for clarity as I go. You had some adventures.”
Lord Stephen had climbed the rigging of the Italian vessel in the middle of heavy seas, and all Mr. Wentworth had remarked on was “the lad’s prodigious strength and courage.”
Who could look upon such rash behavior with a calm eye and see only strength and courage?
“I was experimenting,” Lord Stephen said, leaving the door open and settling in beside Matilda. “Looking for ways to escape the pain.”
“Pain?”
He whacked his boot with his cane. “Pain. Unrelenting, miserable, maddening pain. I’ve yet to figure out how to turn that suffering into attention from the ladies. Doesn’t seem sporting when all the hale and hearty fellows can’t compete with me on the same footing.”
Matilda smiled, though she wasn’t fooled. Lord Stephen’s pain was real, and so too was his unwillingness to trade on anybody’s sympathy.
“Where are we now?” Lord Stephen asked, peering at the jou
rnal in Matilda’s hands. “Oh, sailing south to Rome. I nearly fell into the sea like Icarus; had a bit too much grog before going aloft.”
“More experimenting?” He’d left the door open, as was polite, but the result was an eddy of cold air around Matilda’s ankles.
He took the journal from her, closed it, and set it on the low table. “I want to have the damned leg cut off, you see, but I’m not brave enough to simply order it done. Somewhere on this earth must be a means of sending a man’s mind elsewhere so that necessary adjustments can be made to his person without him being cognizant.”
He spoke of brutal surgery in the same tones Papa had used when assessing Dutch Renaissance paintings.
“If you drink to the point of inebriation, or take opium or the nitrous gas, then you think you will be brave enough to part with your leg?”
“Not brave enough, asleep enough, though then there’s infection to worry about. Let’s have done with such cheery discourse and turn our talk to your adventures.”
No, let’s not. Matilda reopened the journal and pretended to read of the shipboard fare served to passengers on their way to Rome.
“You needn’t fear that I’ll pry,” Lord Stephen said. “I’ve been forbidden to pry, and if there’s one individual on the face of the earth whose admonitions I will at least consider, it’s Duncan Wentworth. He never asks anything for himself. Have you noticed that?”
Mr. Wentworth had asked Matilda to stay. She’d begun to hope a little of that request had been for himself, not out of blasted chivalry.
Though the chivalry was precious too. “I have noticed that Mr. Wentworth, unlike some, is every inch a gentleman.”
Lord Stephen patted her hand, the gesture less than reassuring. “He’ll fillet me if I attempt to flirt with you in earnest, and that’s fascinating. A crack has appeared in the unchanging façade my ever-stalwart cousin shows the world, and thus I must be concerned.”
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