Lord John and the Private Matter
Page 9

“Yes, my lord. Has been all day, I’m afraid.”
Normally, he rather enjoyed his mother’s weekly musicales. However, he was in no condition to be sociable at the moment. He ought to go and spend the night at the Beefsteak—but that meant an arduous journey back across London, and he was perished with hunger.
“I’ll just slip through to the kitchen,” he said to Hardy. “Don’t tell the Countess I’m here.”
“No indeed, my lord.”
He stole soft-footed into the foyer, pausing for a moment to judge the terrain. Because of the warm weather, the double doors into the main drawing room stood open, to prevent the occupants being suffocated. The music, a lugubrious German duet with a refrain of “Den Tod”—“O Death”—would drown the noise of his footsteps, but he would be in plain view for the second or two required to sprint across the foyer and into the hall that led to the kitchens.
He swallowed, mouth watering heavily at the scents of roast meat and steamed pudding that wafted toward him from the recesses of the house.
Another of the footmen, Thomas, was visible through the half-open door of the library, across the foyer from the drawing room. The footman’s back was turned to the door, and he carried a Hanoverian military helmet, ornately gilded and festooned with an enormous spray of dyed plumes, obviously wondering where to put the ridiculous object.
Grey pressed himself against the wall and eased farther into the foyer. There was a plan. If he could attract Thomas’s attention, he could use the footman as a shield to cross the foyer, thus gain the safety of the staircase, and make it to the sanctuary of his own chamber, whilst Thomas went to fetch him a discreet tray from the kitchen.
This plan of escape was foiled, though, by the sudden appearance of his cousin Olivia on the stair above, elegant in amber silk, blond hair gleaming in a lace cap.
“John!” she cried, beaming at sight of him. “There you are! I was so hoping you’d come home in time.”
“In time for what?” he asked, with a sense of foreboding.
“To sing, of course.” She skipped down the stairs and seized him affectionately by the arm. “We’re having a German evening—and you do the lieder so well, Johnny!”
“Flattery will avail you nothing,” he said, smiling despite himself. “I can’t sing; I’m starving. Besides, it’s nearly over, surely?” He nodded at the case clock by the stair, which read a few minutes past eleven. Supper was almost always served at half-past.
“If you’ll sing, I’m sure they’ll wait to hear you. Then you can eat afterward. Aunt Bennie has the most marvelous collation laid on—the biggest steamed pudding I’ve ever seen, with juniper berries, and lamb cutlets with spinach, and a coq au vin, and some absolutely disgusting sausages—for the Germans, you know.…”
Grey’s stomach rumbled loudly at this enticing catalog of gustation. He still would have demurred, though, had he not at this moment caught sight of an elderly woman with a swatch of ostrich plume in her tidy wig, through the open double doors of the drawing room.
The crowd erupted in applause, but as though the lady sensed his start of recognition, she turned her head toward the door, and her face lighted with pleasure as she saw him.
“She’s been hoping you’d come,” Olivia murmured behind him.
No help for it. With distinctly mixed feelings, he took Olivia’s arm and led her down as Hector’s mother hastened out of the drawing room to greet him.
“Lady Mumford! Your servant, ma’am.” He smiled and bent over her hand, but she would have none of this formality.
“Nonsense, sweetheart,” she said, in that warm throaty voice that held echoes of her dead son’s. “Come and kiss me properly, there’s a good boy.”
He straightened and obligingly bussed her cheek. She put her hands on his own cheeks and kissed him soundly on the mouth. The embrace did not recall Hector’s kiss to him, thank God, but was sufficiently unnerving for all that.
“You look well, John,” Lady Mumford said, stepping back and giving him a searching look with Hector’s blue eyes. “Tired, though. A great deal to be done, I expect, with the regiment set to move?”
“A good deal,” he agreed, wondering whether all of London knew that the 47th was due to be reposted. Of course, Lady Mumford had spent most of her life close to the regiment; even with husband and son both dead, she maintained a motherly interest.
“India, I heard,” Lady Mumford went on, frowning slightly as she fingered the cloth of his uniform sleeve. “Now, you’ll have your new uniform ready ordered, I hope? A nice tropical weight of superfine for your coat and weskit, and linen breeches. You don’t want to be spending a summer under the Indian sun, swaddled to the neck in English wool! Take it from me, my dear; I went with Mumford when he was posted there, in ’35. Both of us nearly died, between the heat, the flies, and the food. Spent a whole summer in me shift, having the servants pour water over me; poor old Wally wasn’t so fortunate, sweating about in full uniform, never could get the stains out. Drank nothing but whisky and coconut milk—bear that in mind, dear, when the time comes. Nourishing and stimulating, you know, and so much more wholesome to the stomach than brandywine.”
Realizing that he was merely proxy to the true objects of her bereaved affections—the shades of Hector and his father—he withstood this barrage with patience. It was necessary for Lady Mumford to talk, he knew; however, as he had learned from experience, it was not really necessary for him to listen.
He clasped her hand warmly between his own, nodding and making periodical small noises of interest and assent, while taking in the rest of the assembly with brief glances past Lady Mumford’s lace-covered shoulders.
Much the usual mix of society and army, with a few oddities from the London literary world. His mother was fond of books, and tended to collect scribblers, who flocked in ragtag hordes to her gatherings, repaying the bounty of her table with ink-splotched manuscripts—and a very occasional printed book—dedicated to her gracious patronage.
Grey looked warily for the tall, cadaverous figure of Doctor Johnson, who was all too apt to take the floor at supper and begin a declamation of some new epic in progress, covering any lacunae of composition with wide, crumb-showering gestures, but the dictionarist was fortunately absent tonight. That was well, Grey thought, spirits momentarily buoyed. He was fond both of Lady Mumford and of music, but a discourse on the etymology of the vulgar tongue was well above the odds, after the day he had been having.
He caught sight of his mother on the far side of the room, keeping an eye on the serving tables while simultaneously conversing with a tall military gentleman—from his uniform, the Hanoverian owner of the plumed excrescence Grey had observed in the library.
Benedicta, Dowager Countess Melton, was several inches shorter than her youngest son, which placed her inconveniently at about the height of the Hanoverian’s middle waistcoat button. Stepping back a bit in order to relieve the strain on her neck, she spotted John, and her face lighted with pleasure.
She jerked her head at him, widening her eyes and compressing her lips in an expression of maternal command that said, as plainly as words, Come and talk to this horrible person so I can see to the other guests!
Grey responded with a similar grimace, and the faintest of shrugs, indicating that the demands of civility bound him to his present location for the moment.
His mother rolled her eyes upward in exasperation, then glanced hastily round for another scapegoat. Following the direction of her minatory gaze, he saw that it had lighted on Olivia, who, correctly interpreting her aunt’s Jove-like command, left her companion with a word, coming obediently to the Countess’s rescue.
“Wait and have your smallclothes made in India, though,” Lady Mumford was instructing him. “You can get cotton in Bombay at a fraction of the London price, and the sheer luxury of cotton next the skin, my dear, particularly when one is sweating freely … You wouldn’t want to get a nasty rash, you know.”
“No, indeed not,” he murmured, though he scarcely attended to what he was saying. For at this inauspicious moment, his eye lit upon the companion that his cousin had just abandoned—a gentleman in green brocade and powdered wig who stood looking after her, lips thoughtfully pursed.
“Oh, is that Mr. Trevelyan?” Seeing his gaze rigidly fixed over her shoulder, Lady Mumford had turned to discover the reason for this lapse in his attention. “Whatever is he doing, standing there by himself?”
Before Grey could respond, Lady Mumford had seized him by the arm and was towing him determinedly toward the gentleman.
Trevelyan was got up with his customary dash; his buttons were gilt, each with a small emerald at its center, and his cuffs edged with gold lace, his linen scented with a delicate aroma of lavender. Grey was still wearing his oldest uniform, much creased and begrimed by his excursions, and while he usually did not affect a wig, he had on the present occasion not even had opportunity to tidy his hair, let alone bind or powder it properly. He could feel a loose strand hanging down behind his ear.
Feeling distinctly at a disadvantage, Grey bowed and murmured inconsequent pleasantries, as Lady Mumford embarked on a detailed inquisition of Trevelyan, with regard to his upcoming nuptials.
Observing the latter’s urbane demeanor, Grey found it increasingly difficult to believe that he had in fact seen what he thought he had seen over the chamber pots. Trevelyan was cordial and mannerly, betraying not the slightest sense of inner disquiet. Perhaps Quarry had been right after all: trick of the light, imagination, some inconsequent blemish, perhaps a birthmark—
“Ho, Major Grey! We have not met, I think? I am von Namtzen.”
As though Trevelyan’s presence had not been sufficient oppression, a shadow fell across Grey at this point, and he looked up to discover that the very tall German had come to join them, hawklike blond features set in a grimace of congeniality. Behind von Namtzen, Olivia rolled her eyes at Grey in a gesture of helplessness.
Not caring to be loomed over, Grey took a polite step back, but to no avail. The Hanoverian advanced enthusiastically and seized him in a fraternal embrace.
“We are allies!” von Namtzen announced dramatically to the room at large. “Between the lion of England and the stallion of Hanover, who can stand?” He released Grey, who, with some irritation, perceived that his mother appeared to be finding something amusing in the situation.
“So! Major Grey, I have had the honor this afternoon to be observing the practice of gunnery at Woolwich Arsenal, in company with your Colonel Quarry!”
“Indeed,” Grey murmured, noting that one of his waistcoat buttons appeared to be missing. Had he lost it during the contretemps at the gaol, he wondered, or at the hands of this plumed maniac?
“Such booms! I was deafened, quite deafened,” von Namtzen assured the assemblage, beaming. “I have heard also the guns of Russia, at St. Petersburg—pah! They are nothing; mere farts, by comparison.”
One of the ladies tittered behind her fan. This appeared to encourage von Namtzen, who embarked upon an exegesis of the military personality, giving his unbridled opinions on the virtues of the soldiery of various nations. While the Captain’s remarks were ostensibly addressed to Grey, and peppered by occasional interjections of “Do you not agree, Major?”, his voice was sufficiently resonant as to overpower all other conversation in his immediate vicinity, with the result that he was shortly surrounded by a company of attentive listeners. Grey, to his relief, was able to retreat inconspicuously.
This relief was short-lived, though; as he accepted a glass of wine from a proffered tray, he discovered that he was standing cheek by jowl again with Joseph Trevelyan, and now alone with the man, both Lady Mumford and Olivia having inconveniently decamped to the supper tables.
“The English?” von Namtzen was saying rhetorically, in answer to some question from Mrs. Haseltine. “Ask a Frenchman what he thinks of the English army, and he will tell you that the English soldier is clumsy, crude, and boorish.”
Grey met Trevelyan’s eye with an unexpected sympathy of feeling, the two men at once united in their unspoken opinion of the Hanoverian.
“One might ask an English soldier what he thinks of the French, too,” Trevelyan murmured in Grey’s ear. “But I doubt the answer would be suited to a drawing room.”
Taken by surprise, Grey laughed. This was a tactical error, as it drew von Namtzen’s attention to him once more.
“However,” von Namtzen added, with a gracious nod toward Grey over the heads of the intervening crowd, “whatever else may be said of them, the English are … invariably ferocious.”
Grey lifted his glass in polite acknowledgment, ignoring his mother, who had gone quite pink in the face with the difficulty of containing her emotions.
He turned half away from the Hanoverian and the Countess, which left him face-to-face with Trevelyan; an awkward position, under the circumstances. Requiring some pretext of conversation, he thanked Trevelyan for his graciousness in sending Byrd.
“Byrd?” Trevelyan said, surprised. “Jack Byrd? You’ve seen him?”
“No.” Grey was surprised in turn. “I referred to Tom Byrd. Another of your footmen—though he says he is brother to Jack.”
“Tom Byrd?” Trevelyan’s dark brows drew together in puzzlement. “Certainly he is Jack Byrd’s brother—but he is no footman. Beyond that … I did not send him anywhere. Do you mean to tell me that he has imposed his presence upon you, on the pretext that I sent him?”
“He said that Colonel Quarry had sent a note to you, advising you of … recent events,” he temporized, returning the nod of a passing acquaintance. “And that you had in consequence dispatched him to assist me in my enquiries.”