Lord John and the Hand of Devils (26 page)

“She wrote to you, you say?” He glanced involuntarily back at the house, and she correctly interpreted the look.

“She sent a letter in care of Simon Coles, the lawyer. He is—a friend.” Her color deepened. “It was but a brief note, to assure me of her welfare. But I have heard nothing since. And when we heard that Philip—that Lieutenant Lister—was killed…Oh, my fears for her will destroy me, sir, pray believe me!”

She looked so distressed that Grey had no difficulty in believing her, and so assured her.

“May I—may I ask, sir, why you have come?” she asked, pinkening further. “You do not
know
anything of Anne, yourself?”

“No. I came in hopes of learning something regarding her whereabouts. You are familiar with Lieutenant Lister’s family, I collect?”

She nodded, brows knit.

“Well, Mr. Lister is most desirous of discovering your sister’s current circumstances, and offering what assistance he might, for his son’s sake,” he said carefully. He really did not know whether Lister would be interested in helping the young woman if she had
not
given birth to Philip Lister’s child, but there was no point in mentioning that possibility.

“Oh,” she breathed, a slight look of hope coming into her face. “Oh! So you are a friend of Mr. Lister’s? It was wise of you not to tell Father so. He holds the Listers responsible entirely for my sister’s disgrace…and in all truth,” she added, with a trace of bitterness, “I cannot say he is wrong to do so. If only Marcus…
He
would have quit the army for Anne’s sake, I know he would. And of course now he is invalided out, but…”

“Captain Fanshawe was an—a suitor of Miss Thackeray’s?” Grey said, hastily substituting that term for the more vulgar “admirer.”

Barbara Thackeray nodded, looking troubled.

“Oh, yes. He and Philip both wished to marry her. My sister could not choose between them, and my father disliked them equally, because of their profession. But then—” She glanced back at the house, involuntarily. “Did you
see
Marcus?”

“Yes,” Grey said, unable to repress a small shiver of revulsion. “What happened to him?”

She shuddered in sympathy.

“Is it not terrible? He will not allow me or my younger sisters to see him, save he is masked. But Shelby—the parlor maid—told me what he is like. It was an explosion.”

“What—a cannon?” Grey asked, with a certain feeling of nightmare. She shook her head, though.

“No, sir. The Fanshawes own a powder mill, by the river. One of the buildings went—they do, you know, every so often; we hear the bang sometimes, in the distance, so dreadful! Two workmen were killed; Marcus lived, though everyone says it would have been a mercy had he not.”

Shortly after this tragedy, Philip Lister had eloped with Anne Thackeray, and bar that one short note, evidently nothing further was known of her whereabouts.

“She said that Philip had found her a suitable lodging in Southwark, and that the landlady was most obliging. Is that a help?” Barbara asked hopefully.

“It may be.” Grey tried not to imagine how many obliging landladies there might be in Southwark. “Do you know—did your sister take away any jewelry with her?” The first—perhaps the only—thing a young woman left suddenly destitute might do was to pawn or sell her jewelry. And there might be fewer pawnbrokers in Southwark than landladies.

“Well…yes. At least…I suppose she did.” She looked doubtful. “I could look. Her things…Father wished to dispose of them, and had them packed up, but I—well, I could not bear to part with them.” She blushed, looking down. “I…persuaded Simon to speak to the drover who took away the boxes; they are in his shed, I believe.”

A distant shout made her look over her shoulder, startled.

“They are looking for me. I must go,” she said, already gathering her skirts for flight. “Where do you stay, sir?”

“At Blackthorn Hall,” Grey said. “Edgar DeVane is my brother.”

Her eyes flew wide at that, and he saw her look closely at him for the first time, blinking.

“He is?”

“My half brother,” he amended dryly, seeing that she was taken slightly back by his appearance.

“Oh! Yes,” she said uncertainly, but then her face changed as another shout came from the direction of the house. “I must go. I will send to you about the jewelry. And thank you, sir, ever so much!”

She gave him a quick, low curtsy, then picked up her skirts and fled, gray-striped stockings flashing as she ran.

“Hmm!” he said. Used as he was to general approbation of his person, he was amused to discover that his vanity was mildly affronted at her plain astonishment that such an insignificant sort as himself should be brother to the darkly dramatic Edgar DeVane. He laughed at himself, and turned back toward the spot where he had left Edgar’s horse, swishing his stick through the hedge as he passed.

Despite her rather prominent eyes and her lack of appreciation for his own appearance, he liked Barbara Thackeray. So, obviously, did Simon Coles. He hoped Coles was a more acceptable candidate for marriage than Lister or Fanshawe had been, for the young woman’s sake.

He rather thought he must go and speak to lawyer Coles. Because while Barbara had received only the one note from her sister, both her father and Mr. Lister appeared to believe that Anne had later borne a child. It was possible, he thought, that Simon Coles knew why.

H
e was not sure what he had expected of Simon Coles, but the reality was different. The lawyer was a slight young man, with sandy hair, a sprinkling of freckles across a thin, homely face, and a withered leg.

“Lord John Grey…
Major
Grey?” he exclaimed, leaning eagerly forward over his desk. “But I know you—know
of
you, I should say,” he corrected himself.

“You do?” Once again, Grey found himself uneasy at being the unwitting subject of conversation. Perhaps Edgar had mentioned his impending arrival; he
had
sent a note ahead to Blackthorn Hall.

“Yes, yes! I am sure of it! Let me show you.” Reaching for the padded crutch that leaned against the wall, he tucked it deftly beneath one arm and swung himself out from behind the desk, heading so briskly for the bookshelves across the room that Grey was obliged to step out of the way.

“Now where…?” the lawyer murmured, running a finger across a row of books. “Ah, yes, just here, just here!”

Pulling down a large double folio, he bundled it across to the desk, where he flung it open and flicked the pages, revealing it to be a sort of compendium, wherein Grey recognized accounts from various newspapers, carefully cut out and pasted onto the pages. For variety, he glimpsed a number of illustrated broadsheets, and even a few ballad sheets, tucked amongst the pages.

“There! I knew it must be the same, though Grey is not an uncommon name. The circumstances, though—I daresay you found those sufficiently uncommon, did you not, Major?” He looked up with sparkling eyes, his finger planted on a cutting.

Unwilling, Grey felt still compelled to look, and was mortified to read a recently published and highly colored account of his saving a cannon—the gun reported as being named “Tod Belcher”—from the hands of a ravening horde of Austrians after the tragic and untimely demise of the gun’s captain. He, Grey, having personally swept an oncoming Austrian cavalry officer from his saddle, then pinned him to the ground with his sword through the officer’s coat, demanded and accepted his surrender, and then (by report) had fought the gun virtually single-handed, the rest of the crew having been slain by the accident which took the life of “Philbert Lester,” the doomed captain, whose detached limbs had been scattered to the four winds, and his bowels torn out. Rather oddly, the explosion of the cannon that had concluded this remarkable passage at arms was treated in a single offhand sentence.

Whoever had written this piece of bombast
had
managed, to Grey’s amazement, both to spell his own name correctly—scarcely a blessing, in the circumstances—and to note that the event had occurred in Germany.

“But Mr. Coles!” Grey said, aghast. “This—this—it is the most arrant poppycock!”

“Oh, now, Major, you must not be modest,” Coles assured him, wringing him by the hand. “You must not seek to lessen the honor your presence grants to my office, you know!”

He laughed merrily, and Grey, with a feeling of helplessness, found himself obliged to smile and bow in an awkward parody of graciousness.

Coles’s clerk, a youth named Boggs, was summoned in to meet the hero of Crefeld, then sent off in a state of wide-eyed excitement to fetch refreshment—against Grey’s protests—from the local ordinary. Where, Grey reflected grimly, he was no doubt presently recounting the whole idiotic story to anyone who would listen. He resolved to finish his business in Mudling Parva as quickly as possible, and decamp back to London before Edgar and Maude got wind of the newspaper story.

As it was, he had considerable trouble in getting Mr. Coles to attend to the matter in hand, as the lawyer wished to ask him any number of questions regarding Germany, his experiences in the army, his opinion of the current political situation, and what it was like to kill someone.

“What is it like…” Grey said, thoroughly taken aback. “To—In battle, I suppose you mean?”

“Well, yes,” said Coles, his eagerness slightly—though only slightly—abating. “Surely you have not been slaughtering your fellow citizens in cold blood, Major?” He laughed, and Grey joined—politely—in the laughter, wondering what in God’s name to say next.

He was fortunately saved by Coles’s own sense of propriety—evidently he did have one, overborne though it was by gusts of enthusiasm.

“You must forgive me, Major,” Coles said, sobering a little. “I am sure the matter is a sensitive one. I should not have asked—and I beg pardon for so intruding upon your feelings. It is only that I have always had a strong and most…abiding
admiration
for the profession of war.”

“You do?”

“Yes. Oh, there you are, Boggs! Thank you, thank you…yes, you will have some wine, I hope, Major? Allow me, please. Yes,” he repeated, settling back in his chair and waving his reluctant clerk firmly out of the room. “Many of the men of my family in previous generations have taken up commissions—my great-grandfather fought in Holland—and I should no doubt have pursued the same career myself, were it not for this.” He gestured ruefully toward his leg.

“Thus my fascination with the subject. I have made a small study of military history”—this was obviously modesty speaking, Grey thought, judging by the impressive collection on the shelves behind him, which seemed to include everyone from Tacitus and Caesar to King Frederick of Prussia—“and have even been so bold as to compose a brief essay upon the history of siege warfare. I, um, do not suppose you have ever been involved personally in a siege, have you, Major?”

“No, no,” Grey said hurriedly. He had been penned up in Edinburgh Castle with the rest of the government troops during the Jacobite occupation of the city, but it was a siege in name only; the Jacobites had had no thought of battering their way into the castle, let alone of starving out the inhabitants.

“Mr. Coles,” he said, inspired by thought of battering rams, and seeing that the only way of progressing in his own interest was by bluntness, “I collect that you are acquainted with the Thackeray family—specifically, with a Miss Barbara Thackeray?”

Coles blinked, looking almost comically nonplussed.

“Oh! Yes,” he said, a little uncertain. “Of course. I, er, have the honor to consider myself a friend of the family.” Meaning, Grey thought, that Mr. Thackeray was probably unaware of Coles’s friendship with Barbara.

“I flatter myself that I may count myself a friend to them, as well,” Grey said, “though our acquaintance is so new.” He smiled, and Coles, sunny by disposition, smiled back.

An understanding thus established, there seemed no reason to avoid mention of Mr. Lister with Coles, and so Grey put the matter before him straightforwardly.

“Miss Barbara said that she had had a note from her sister, forwarded by your kind offices,” Grey said carefully, and Coles blushed.

“I should have taken it to her father, I know,” he said awkwardly. “But…but…she…I mean, Miss Barbara Thackeray is…”

“A friend,” Grey finished for him, echoing Barbara Thackeray’s own words—spoken, he noted, with precisely the same blushing intonation. “Of course.”

Skating away from that delicate subject, he said, “Mr. Lister believes there is a possibility that Anne Thackeray is or was with child. From something that Mr. Thackeray let slip during our conversation, I believe he may have the same impression. I wonder, Mr. Coles, whether you can shed any light on this possibility?”

For the first time, Coles looked uneasy.

“I have no idea,” he said. Grey thought it was as well the young lawyer was a country solicitor; someone with so little talent for lying would fare ill before the Bench.

“Mr. Coles,” he said, letting a bit of steel show in his voice, “it is a question of the young woman’s life.”

The lawyer paled a little, the freckles on his cheeks standing out.