Amanda Scott (34 page)

“Perhaps not, but if you think I mean to sit here and listen to you telling me what an old sobersides you’ve become when you just won that beast on the most ridiculous wager—”

“Fustian. Nothing ridiculous about it. If I’d lost, I’d have had to stand Halstead to a dinner at the Drake in Reading, where they pad the reckoning with every crumb and scrap they can. Likely I’d have ended franking the place for a fortnight. Still, the odds must be shockingly against tossing a pack of cards into the air and having every single card land face down. I couldn’t have known I’d win the best hunting dog in all England, could I?”

Mr. Lasenby shook his head sadly. “Bran, old fellow, if you think Halstead would stake an even passably decent dog against one dinner, no matter what the odds were, you must be all about in your head. Why, the wine at the Drake is only tolerable, and the caper sauce they served the only time I ever dined there was a joke. That’s a fact, Bran.”

Manningford shrugged. “I like him. Here, fellow,” he added, holding his hand out to the dog. Raising its head again and looking over its shoulder, the dog politely sniffed the hand and, evidently finding it pleasing, pushed its nose against it. Manningford grinned. “See that, Sep. He likes me.” He patted the dog’s head. “Good lad. I say, Sep, do you happen to remember by what name Halstead called him?”

“Haven’t a notion,” Mr. Lasenby replied, gazing with disfavor at the dog. “Knowing Halstead, I should think it would have been something ridiculous, like King or Duke or Chief, don’t you? That man’s got feathers in his cockloft.”

“Or Prince,” Manningford said, ignoring the rider. He eyed the dog skeptically. “He doesn’t respond to any of those names.”

“Probably got more sense than Halstead,” Mr. Lasenby said. “How about Stinker or Duffer or Tramp?”

The dog put its head down on its paws again.

“There now, look at that,” Manningford said reprovingly. “You’ve hurt his feelings.”

“Well, if you expect me to apologize, you’re fair and far out, for I shan’t do any such thing. I’ve told you what I’d name him if he were mine.” A shudder crossed Mr. Lasenby’s cherubic face at the thought, and he glanced out the near side window again. They were passing a portion of the city’s medieval wall, and when the chaise emerged just then into the opening known as the Saw Close, Mr. Lasenby found himself facing a carved wooden plaque informing passersby that the house it adorned had belonged to Beau Nash, that once great arbiter of social life in the City of Bath. “I say, Bran, is it true that Nash’s mistress spent the rest of her life sleeping in a tree after his death?”

“Good Lord, Sep, how should I know?”

“Well, you lived here, after all.”

“Not then I didn’t. Good Lord, he died half a century ago! I do know her name though,” he added with a smile. “Popjoy, it was—Juliana Popjoy. An appropriate name for a mistress.”

Mr. Lasenby chuckled, and silence fell between them until the chaise had passed by the beautiful central garden of Queen Square and made its way up Gay Street to the Circus, which, inspired by the Roman Coliseum, had been designed by John Wood the Elder and built by his son in three curved segments so that at each of the three approaches one was met by a sweeping, three-tiered facade of columns. The chaise rattled across the cobbled, circular central area and turned west onto the steep incline of Brock Street, slowing noticeably.

“Only a short distance now,” Manningford said.

“Steep street, this one,” Mr. Lasenby observed, shifting his legs away from the dog’s pressing weight. “Makes one feel some sympathy for the horses.”

“Save it for the chairmen we’ll hire if ever we come up on a rainy day,” Manningford told him. “One rarely employs a carriage in Bath, and chairmen charge extra to carry one up this hill. But only wait until you see the view from up top.”

A few minutes later, when the chaise drew to a halt before the Royal Crescent, crowning the hilltop, Mr. Lasenby agreed that the view was all that had been promised. The city lay behind and below them to the east, while away to the south, under billowing clouds, beyond well-tended grassland, all the way to the horizon, lay green fields dotted with sheep and parkland lush with trees.

Mr. Lasenby raised his quizzing glass. “Sheep?”

“A ha-ha runs across the grassland there to prevent them from straying this far,” Manningford said. He glanced at the door in front of which the chaise had halted. “Doesn’t appear that our arrival has been noticed. I hope Father hasn’t turned off all the servants again.”

“What?” Mr. Lasenby looked dismayed. “Turned them off! Why would he do a fool thing like that?”

Manningford, pushing open the door of the chaise, looked back and shrugged. “He does that sort of thing. No, dog, you wait until I see what’s what.” He stepped down and said to the postboy, “Someone will come out to get our things and the dog. Then you can take the chaise ’round back to the stables, where you’ll find a bite to eat and a place to spend the night if you don’t have to get the horses back today.”

Shaking beads of water from his yellow oilskins, the postboy, who was in fact a small, weather-beaten, middle-aged man, nodded and reached to take the money Manningford held out to him. “Right you are, sir. I’ll have my sup and be getting straight back, if it’s all the same to you.”

Mr. Lasenby, having followed Manningford to the flagway after carefully shutting the protesting hound inside the chaise, paused now to savor the full impact of the semi-elliptical, five-hundred-foot sweep of thirty houses joined in a single facade designed simply at ground level, elaborately above. “I say, Bran, are these houses all the same inside, too?”

“Not at all. In point of fact, if you were to step ’round to the far end there, by the Marlborough Buildings, and have a look at the backside, you’d see what a sham all this frontage is. From behind it looks like any street of houses in London, growing together cheek by jowl but all different sizes and all in a scramble.” Noting that the dog had continued to voice its disapproval of being left in the chaise, he glanced at it and said, “Silence, dog. I wonder what I shall do with you. Here, Sep, stop gaping about and come inside. I must find someone to deal with all this.” Extracting a key from his waistcoat pocket, he strode up the stone steps to the white-painted front door.

“Look here,” Mr. Lasenby said behind him. “Perhaps we ought to put up at an inn instead. If your father has no servants, we’ll be a dashed nuisance to him.”

“No, we won’t. We needn’t even see him.” Manningford pushed the door open, revealing a small, high-ceilinged entrance hall and, beyond an elaborately framed white arch, a curved stair with a dark wood railing. Two doors stood at right angles to the archway, both white and framed to match. Both doors were closed.

“Porter’s chair, but no porter,” Mr. Lasenby observed in disapproval, looking around. “Marble walls?”

Manningford shut the front door. “Painted with feathers and twigs to look like marble,” he said. “Fashionable forty or fifty years ago and probably not painted since. That stairway is not stone, either. Only looks like it, and the floor here is wood, not flagstone. Come up to the library, Sep. You’ll be more comfortable there while I see if anyone is about.”

“What’s behind those two doors?” Mr. Lasenby asked as Manningford strode through the archway ahead of him.

“Saloon to the right and dining room to the left,” he said. “If anyone is here, they will be upstairs. Come on.”

But Mr. Lasenby hesitated. “Look here, Bran, what do you mean we needn’t see your father? I’ve heard tales about the man but discounted most of them.”

“You’d have done better to believe them, Sep.”

“What, that he don’t see anyone? That he ain’t set foot out of this house in thirty years?”

“Not thirty, only twenty-five. You should feel honored, Sep. You are the first guest I’ve ever brought to stay here.”

“But surely, you see him!”

“I wouldn’t recognize him if I were to meet him coming down these stairs,” Manningford said grimly.

“You’re bamming me.”

“No. He sees only one man, his personal manservant, and how Borland has put up with him all these years, I’ll never know.”

Mr. Lasenby chuckled. “Perhaps this Borland murdered him years ago and has merely been having you on ever since.”

Manningford glanced back over his shoulder. “Don’t think that hasn’t been suggested by others before you, Sep, but I exaggerated the case. My sister Sybilla—the one married to the Marquess of Axbridge—has pushed her way in to see him once or twice, counting the cost afterward, and my brother, Charlie, sees him once a year. I don’t see him at all.”

“But did you never try? I should have thought—”

“Only once, when I was nine, but I got no farther than the door to his study. He ordered Borland to thrash me for daring to disturb him, and though the punishment was light, I never made another attempt.” At the top of the stair he crossed the landing to throw open a pair of double doors, revealing a spacious, book-lined room decorated in shades of peach with white-molding trim. “The library, Sep, and Madeira or some such thing in the decanter over there. Help yourself while I see what I can discover.”

Waiting only until Mr. Lasenby had removed the stopper, sniffed, and begun to pour wine into one of the glasses set beside the decanter, Manningford shut the doors and turned to a second flight of stairs, narrower than the first, leading to the top floor. In most houses in the crescent, the top-floor rooms were allotted to servants. Here, the entire floor had been taken over by Sir Mortimer and his man.

Manningford paused on the upper landing to run a finger inside his neckcloth, rubbing the area that had been chafed in the carriage. Then, absently smoothing a crease, he stood for a moment longer, regarding the closed door opposite the head of the stairs. A narrow corridor led away from the landing on each side, but he felt no inclination to explore either passage. His attention was riveted on the room directly before him, but he felt no fear and little curiosity. Whatever feelings he had had as a child had long since faded, and the man who spent most of his hours in that room stirred interest in him now only as the chief source of the funds he required to live as a gentleman.

He drew a deep breath, stepped forward, and raised his hand to knock, but before he could do so, a door in the right-hand corridor opened and a barrel-shaped man in his late fifties, wearing a dark coat and breeches, emerged quickly from the room, his right index finger pressed firmly to his lips. Shutting the door behind him, he stepped quickly to the landing and murmured in a tone so low that Manningford had to strain to hear him, “Come back downstairs with me, sir, if you please.”

Turning to follow him, Manningford muttered back, “I’ve put a friend in the library, Borland. Where are the other servants?”

“Gone, sir, most of them. We’d best use the drawing room if you’ve put him in the library. Saw you from the window, I did, but couldn’t get away till now without him getting suspicious, and fair popped my ears, trying to hear you come up them stairs so’s I could tell you what’s happened before you see the master.”

“See him?”

“Yes, sir. I didn’t know where to send word to you, and what with Lady Axbridge and the marquess visiting in France, and Lady Symonds being in Scotland with Sir Harry and the children, and what with him saying he don’t want to be plagued by Mr. Charles telling him what Mrs. Charles thinks he ought to be doing about everything, well I—”

“Never mind all that,” Manningford said in a normal tone as he reached the lower landing and turned to the right. “What can my brother or my sisters, let alone their respective spouses—or myself, for that matter—have to do with anything here?”

“Sir Mortimer’s ill, Mr. Brandon.” His voice, now that he, too, spoke normally, was harsh, but his manner was gentle.

“How ill?” Opening the door to the drawing room, Manningford stepped inside, and when Borland did not answer at once, he turned and said curtly, “Is he going to die?”

The manservant gave him a direct look. “Would it distress you if he did, sir?”

“I don’t know him. How could it distress me?” On the chimneypiece in the center of the west wall hung a painting of his mother, and he glanced at it now. “My father left us when she died,” he said, allowing his gaze to linger on the pretty woman in wide red skirts and narrow waist, her hair powdered and piled atop her head, her right hand emerging from a flow of frothy lace to caress the slender black and white dog curled in her lap. “He never left the house, Borland, but he left my brother and sisters and me when I had scarcely turned three. I wish I could believe he did so out of grief at her loss, but I have never had reason to believe he cared for anyone.”

Borland nodded. “I know that, sir. A hard man to know, is the master, and a harder man to love. I, who have served him these thirty-five years and more, can say so without hesitation. Still, he needs you now.”

“Me? I think not. I am here only because I’ve let boredom, generosity, and my old devil, impulse, carry me to a point I swore seven years ago I’d never reach again. The loans are still out, the luck’s still against me, and though I’d hoped to recoup my losses last night, I only made things worse. So, since it’s little more than a fortnight to quarter-day, and since I haven’t come a-begging in all those seven years, I thought—”

“He won’t do it, sir,” the manservant said grimly, “and ’tis sorry I am to hear you’re in straits, for ’twill give him the sort of edge he best likes to have over his opponents.”

“Edge? Opponents?” Manningford glared at him. “What the devil are you talking about?”

“He needs help, Mr. Brandon. He has asked to see you.”

“Then he knows I’m here?”

“No, but I promised to send for you just as soon as I got word of where to send, and he’s been that impatient. Every morning he wants to know did I find you yet? I’d have taken you into his study to talk, but he’d be bound to hear us there, and then the fat would be in the fire.”

“How so?”

“Shout for me to bring you to him straightaway, he would, and if you refused, the good Lord only knows what would come of it, for it won’t do for the master to be losing his temper.”