The Butler Did It (4 page)

“Let's talk about locking you in your dressing room,” Emma said succinctly, ringing the small bell on the tea tray, at which time Thornley appeared in the doorway, just as if he'd been standing right outside all along, waiting for the summons…and hearing every word the ladies said.

“You rang, Miss Clifford?” Thornley inquired, already picking up the tea tray, and not appearing at all surprised to see that one of the marquis's priceless china cups was now in seven uneven pieces.

“Yes, thank you, Thornley,” she said, laying her damp, tea-stained serviette on the tray. “I was wondering—” she looked straight into the man's eyes “—do you happen to know the whereabouts of Mr. Clifford?”

Thornley, eyes quickly averted, looking somewhere in the vicinity of the portrait of the late Marquis and several of his hounds that hung over the mantel, said, “I believe he is resting, Miss Clifford.”

“He's still in
bed?
” Emma sighed. “It's nearly gone
five, Thornley. What time did my brother get in this morning?”

“I couldn't really say, Miss Clifford,” Thornley said, still avoiding her gaze, even as she stood—which didn't come close to putting her on eye level with the man, but she'd hoped to at least be able to read his expression.

But Thornley
had
no expressions, other than Proper, and possibly, Prudent.

“Very well, as I know he accompanied my brother, I'll ask Riley,” Emma said, brushing past him as she headed for the stairs. She stopped, turned back toward the pair of sofas. “Mama? Do you have another penny?”

“That won't be necessary, Miss Clifford,” Thornley said stiffly. “Riley escorted Mr. Clifford to a…a sporting event last evening, and they returned here at approximately six this morning, Mr. Clifford rather the worse for wear. Riley has been reprimanded, Miss Clifford.”

“A sporting event?” Fanny asked. “What was it? Mill? Cockfight? Oh, wait. A sporting
event,
you say, Thornley? Or a sporting
house?
”

Emma watched as Thornley's ears turned bright red. Poor fellow. He could keep his spine straight. His expression never betrayed what he might be thinking. And she hadn't really needed to see his eyes. Those ears of his were a dead giveaway.

“Ah!” Fanny crowed, punching a fist into the air. “Good for him, and about time, too!”

Daphne, who had come within Ames Ace of swooning into the cushions at the thought of being murdered in her bed, now gave way to the blessed darkness that swam before her eyes.

 

D
ARKNESS WOULD HAVE BEEN
swimming in front of Morgan's eyes, save for the fact that the fog wouldn't let it. The entire countryside had turned a thick, ugly gray-yellow, slowing the progress of the pair of coaches to a crawl.

They should have reached London hours ago, he knew, snapping shut his pocket watch after checking the time. He'd returned to the coach at the last posting inn, to rest Sampson, and because he did not much care for the feel of the gray-yellow damp on his face, but it was now past his usual dinnertime, and he was hungry. Damn early country hours, where he'd become accustomed to eating his main meal long before six.

“We still should arrive before eight, don't you think?” he asked a morose and rather pale-looking Wycliff, who didn't seem quite at his best riding backward in the coach. “In plenty of time for supper.”

“I…I really hadn't thought much about…about food, my lord,” the valet choked out, somehow able to speak without really opening his teeth.

“Really? And here I am, famished. As I recall the thing, Mrs. Timon always had a way with a capon. Gaston will be in charge of the kitchen while we're there,
but for the most part, Mrs. Timon does just fine. Except for the eel. Don't care for eel, Wycliff,” Morgan said, watching the man closely.

“I…I also don't care for…for eel, my lord.”

Morgan was being perverse, he knew it, but he had cause. Wycliff had made a cake of himself after departing that last posting inn, insisting almost to hysteria that the three harmless-looking farmers who had shared the common room with them were sure to follow the coaches, intent on slitting their throats.

Morgan would consider a figurative crawl inside Wycliff's head, just for a moment, to see where the man's brainbox had been wound up incorrectly, except he'd first have to fight his way through the maggots that doubtless collected there.

“No? Then, at last, we're agreed on something. The thing about eel, Wycliff, is that rather rubbery texture when it isn't cooked just right. Do you know what I mean? It can be swimming in the best, most creamy parsley sauce, but if you put it in your mouth and it sort of
bounces
off your back teeth, well—”

God was both testing him and punishing him, Morgan decided, as Wycliff tossed up his accounts all over his lordship's shiny Hessians.

 

T
HIS WAS IT
, the final test of his resolve. Edgar Marmon, Adventurer, and currently known as Sir Edgar Marmington, counted to ten to calm his queasy stom
ach as he stood just outside the tavern at the bottom end of Bond Street. He was getting too old for this, and knew that, if he hesitated, he would be in danger of losing his nerve.

But, as he was also in no monetary position to turn tail and run, and too aged to contemplate employing the sweat of his brow in an honest day's work—probably because he'd never used the words “work” and “honest” in the same thought—he screwed himself up to the sticking point and soldiered on.

Once inside, his gaze roamed the place, seeking into the darkest corners, on the lookout for anyone who might see through his disguise of now snowy-white hair, a bushy white mustache, and the cane he used to support his limp, a leftover of his valiant service against the French, years earlier.

If one could count tagging after the army valiant as, for the most part, he had hidden himself in the rear during the day and left his visits to the battlefields to the dark of night, when he scavenged for any bits of loot he could find and carry away. If, not to make too fine a point on it, one could even call it a limp, as Sir Edgar, just to be sure he'd keep favoring the correct leg, placed a few pebbles in his left boot each morning, to remind him.

Sir Edgar selected the perfect small table in the corner, and carefully sat down in the chair that positioned his back to the wall. He ordered a bottle and two glasses, and announced very clearly to the disinterested barmaid
that he was waiting for his good friend, the Viscount Claypole, to join him.

He'd wait a good long time for that, too, as Sir Edgar had made it his business to send the viscount a missive in the middle of the night, telling him he needs must hie himself home at once, as his father, the earl, was on his deathbed. As Claypole was located nearly thirty miles above Leicester, and the viscount was looking hard at finally inheriting his earldom, Sir Edgar was not disappointed in the man's alacrity in obeying the summons, and waved him on his way from an alley as the viscount's coach set north at first light.

Two or three days to Claypole. More, if this fog had drifted to the countryside. A few days' rest as the viscount asked his father, repeatedly, “Are you
quite sure
you're not dying?” A few days for the return trip.

And, by then, nobody would remember that Sir Edgar had even mentioned the man's name.

“Oh dear, oh dear, where can he be?” Sir Edgar said several times over the next hour, as he consulted his pocket watch, as he looked anxiously toward the door to the street, sighed.

He only needed one. Two could be a problem, and three were definitely too many. More than one meant enough for a conversation, some shared contemplation, even an opening for a modicum of sense to overtake boundless greed. No, just one, that's all.

He was considering if he should give it up as a bad
job, and head for another tavern where the gentlemen of the
ton
thought it wonderful to rub elbows with the
hoi polloi,
select another target, when his last “oh, dear” finally caught the attention of the well-dressed, and fairly well into his cups gentleman at the next table.

“A problem, sir?” the man asked. Then, without waiting for an invitation, he picked up his glass and his bottle and joined Sir Edgar. “You're waiting for someone, right? So am I, but I've got the feeling old Winfield is still probably hiding his head under the covers. We drank fairly deep last night, and the man doesn't have the liver he should.” He stuck out his hand. “John Hatcher.”

Yes, Sir Edgar knew that. John Hatcher. No title, but a family that went back to the Great Fire (and may even have started it, if all his ancestors were as inept as this particular member of the Hatcher clan). Money that went back ever farther than that conflagration. Brains that had got misplaced somewhere along the way.

Oh, yes, Sir Edgar knew all about John Hatcher.

“It is a pleasure, sir,” Sir Edgar said, allowing his thin, trim hand to be half crushed in the bearlike grip of the much larger man. “Sir Edgar Marmington. I'm new to the city, never been here before, but my old school chum, Claypole, promised to…um…show me the sights. Can't imagine where he is.”

“Claypole? Bit of a dry stick, that, don't you think? I mean, maybe you wouldn't know, not if you haven't seen him since your school days, but he's dull as…as a
clay pole. Har! Har! That was a good one, eh? No, friend, you don't want him. Claypole's idea of seeing the sights would be a tour of all the churches, Lord help you. You're better for him gone.”

Sir Edgar smiled, all attention. “Really? Not that I'm the hey-go-mad sort myself, understand. Sadly bookish, actually. But we've been corresponding, the viscount and myself, and he'd seemed so interested in my work…my travels through the ancient lands, my discovery of that old tome that told all about…”

Now Sir Edgar sighed. “I had so wanted to tell him in person that I'm wonderfully close now…at the very brink of discovery. He's been so generous, subsidizing me monetarily in my research all these twenty years or more, you understand, for the greater end, the final reward. All I need are a few more things to complete my duplication of the monks' experiments, the alchemist's notes, and he'd promised—but, no, this is of no interest to you.”

“Probably not,” Hatcher said, tossing back the contents of his glass, and then pouring himself another measure of wine even while calling for a full bottle. “Don't think I ever read a book, God's truth. Pride m'self on that. Monks, you said? And what the devil's an alchemist?”

Sir Edgar sat back, looked around the room nervously, then leaned in close, to whisper to John Hatcher….

 

“W
HAT'S THIS MESS
?” Olive Norbert whispered to Daphne Clifford in her booming voice (which is to say,
she was probably heard in Tothill Fields, by little old ladies with brass ear trumpets), as she employed her fork to poke suspiciously at something on her plate. “It don't look right. Looks sick.”

“More than sick, Mrs. Norbert,” Fanny said, winking at Emma. “It's dead. And, as it's escargot—that would be a snail, Mrs. Norbert—a snail, minus its shell, it demned well better would be dead, or I'll be marching into the kitchens myself to ask why not. Oh, and because you're looking as if you don't believe me, please allow me to state this very firmly—it's
food.
”

“Not on my plate, it ain't,” Olive Norbert declared, pushing the serving of genuine French snails away from her with the tip of her fork. “Slimy things, leaving trails up the wall in the damp. Here now, you. Cart this mess off,” she commanded to Riley, doing duty at the table this evening.

“Bring me some meat, boy. Bloody red with juice. And a pudding. Go on, hop to it! I'm paying down good money for snails? In a pig's eye, I am. Oh, and some ham, while you're about it. It's meat I want, and meat I will get or know the reason why.”

As Mrs. Norbert was twice Riley's size (width-wise), and a paying guest, Riley hopped to, ready to serve, although it grated on him something awful, it really did. Mrs. Norbert was a pudding herself, a short, fat prawn with tiny, mean green eyes glinting out of a lumpy face, and with piss-yellow hair that frizzed here, curled there,
but didn't quite cover the shine of skin on the top of the behemoth's head. She was no better than him. Maybe a whole lot worse.

“And it's not me wanting you to try to cudgel that ugly brainbox of yours to think up a reason why, no, ma'am, it's not,” Riley muttered under his breath as he turned to walk away.

Emma heard him, however, and kept her head down, to hide her smile. Mrs. Norbert might be crude, bordering on obnoxious most times, but she also had a point. When pinching the purse strings tight, the first thing to be sacrificed was meat. There had been many a meatless evening in the Clifford household until the next quarter's allowance arrived from her father's small estate.

“Um, Riley?” Daphne called timidly. “If…if I could also have this taken away? I…I think there may be
eyes
in it.”

“Oh, all right,” Fanny said, waving her hand. “We all want these snails gone, Riley. Might as well own up to it. Fancy is as fancy does, and I don't really fancy chewing on these things. What's up next?”

“I'll check straightaway, madam,” Riley said, gathering up the “snail course” and piling the plates on his arm. “Just nip belowstairs to ask Mrs. Timon.”

“Evening, all. Started without me, I see. Riley, you rotter, you look better than me, and I consider that an insult, I truly do.”

Riley, and the rest of the company, turned in the di
rection of the sound, to see Clifford Clifford lurching into the room like a man who has been at sea for months and was just now touching down on dry land, holding on to chair backs until he could collapse into his own chair, beside his sister.