Any joy, Tom?”
“Dunno as I’d go so far, me lord.” Tom looked dubious, and put a hand to his mouth to stifle a belch. “I will say as the Goose and Grapes has very good beer. Grub’s not so good as the Lark’s Nest, but not bad. Did you get summat to eat, me lord?”
“Oh, yes,” Grey said, dismissing the matter. In fact, his sole consumption since breakfast had been half a slice of fruitcake at Mr. Thackeray’s, and a considerable quantity of wine, taken in Mr. Coles’s company. It had come, he was sure, from the Goose and Grapes, but had not shared the excellent quality of the beer. It had, however, been strong, and his head showed a disturbing disposition to spin slightly if he moved too suddenly. Luckily the horse knew the way home.
“Were you able to hear anything about the Thackerays, the Listers, the Fanshawes, the Trevorsons—or for that matter, the DeVanes?”
“Oh, a good bit about all of ’em, me lord. Especially about Mrs. DeVane.” He grinned.
“I daresay. Well, perhaps we can save that for entertainment on our journey back to London,” Grey said dryly. “What about the Fanshawes and Trevorsons?”
Tom squinted, considering. He had declined to share Grey’s horse, and was walking alongside.
“Squire Trevorson’s a sporting man, they say. Gambling, aye?”
“In debt?”
“To his eyeballs,” Tom said cheerfully. “They didn’t know for sure, but the talk is his place—Mayapple Farm, it’s called, and there’s an unlucky name for you—is mortgaged to the eaves.”
“What the hell is unlucky about it?”
Tom glanced up at Grey’s unaccustomed sharpness, but answered mildly.
“A mayapple’s a thing grows in the Americas, me lord. The red Indians use it for medicine, they say, but it’s poison otherwise.”
Grey digested this for a moment.
“Has Trevorson got connexions in America, then?”
“Yes, me lord. An uncle in Canada, and two younger brothers in Boston and Philadelphia.”
“Indeed. And does popular knowledge extend to the politics of these connexions?” It seemed far-fetched, but if sabotage were truly involved in the cannon explosions—and Quarry seemed to think it might be—then the loyalties of Trevorson’s family might become a point of interest.
The denizens of the Goose and Grapes had not possessed any knowledge on that point, though—or at least had volunteered none. About the Fanshawes, talk had been voluble, but centered about the terrible misfortune that had befallen Marcus; nothing to the discredit of his father, Douglas Fanshawe, seemed to be known.
“Captain Fanshawe got himself blown up in one o’ the milling sheds,” Tom informed Grey. “Tore off half his face, they said!”
“For once, public comment is understated. I saw the captain at the Thackerays.”
“Cor, you saw him?” Tom was awed. “Was it as bad as they say, then?”
“Much worse. Did anyone talk about the accident? Do they know what happened?”
Tom shook his head.
“Nobody knows but Captain Fanshawe. He’s the only one that lived, and he doesn’t talk to anybody save the Reverend Mr. Thackeray.”
“He does talk to Thackeray?”
“Aye, me lord. He goes there regular to visit, but nowhere else. It’ll be weeks on end when no one sees him—and folk don’t speak when they do; he’s a proper creepy sight, they say, going about in a black silk mask and everybody a-knowing what’s behind it. The reverend treats him very kind, though, they say.”
Grey remembered Coles, young and earnest, saying, You must not think too hardly of him. He is a good man, a most excellent minister. Evidently Thackeray did have some bowels of compassion, even if not for his daughter.
“Speaking of Thackeray, did you learn anything there?”
“Well, there was a deal of gossip,” Tom said doubtfully. “Not really what you’d call information, like. Just folk arguing was Miss Anne a wicked trollop or was she se-dyuced”—he pronounced it carefully—“by Lieutenant Lister.”
“One side or the other prevalent?”
Tom shook his head.
“No, me lord. Six of one, half a dozen o’ the other.”
Opinion had been likewise divided as to the schism in the local Methodist congregation that had culminated in the Listers being ousted. Comment had been prolonged and colorful, but there appeared to be no useful kernels of information in it.
News exhausted, silence fell between them. The sun had long since set, and cold darkness crept up from the fallow fields on either side. Tom Byrd was no more than a shadow, pacing by his stirrup, patient as de—Grey drew himself up in the saddle, shaking his head to drive off the thought.
“You all right, me lord?” Tom asked, suspicions at once aroused. “You’re not a-going to fall off that nag, are you?”
“Certainly not,” Grey said crisply. In fact, he was desperately tired, hunger and unaccustomed exertion weighting his limbs.
“You been overdoing. I knew it,” Tom said, with gloomy relish. “You’d best go straight to bed, me lord, with a bit o’ bread and milk.”
Grey did not, of course, go to bed, dearly as he would have liked to.
Instead, hastily washed, brushed, and changed by a disapproving Tom Byrd, he went down to supper to meet the consortium, all hastily summoned by Edgar at his request.
Matters did not proceed as smoothly as he had hoped. For one thing, Maude was present, and loud in her disbelief that anyone could suppose that the sacred name of DeVane could be disparaged in this wanton fashion.
Edgar, bolstered by support from the distaff side, kept thwacking a metaphorical riding crop against his leg, clearly imagining the prospect of thrashing Lord Marchmont or Colonel Twelvetrees with it. Grey admitted the charming nature of the notion, but found the repetition of the sentiment wearing.
As for Fanshawe and Trevorson, both appeared to be exactly as described—an honest, rather dull farmer, and a slightly reckless country squire, given to ostentatious waistcoats. Both were bugeyed with shock at news of what had been said at the Commission of Inquiry, and both professed complete bewilderment at what the commission could possibly have been thinking.
Ignorance did not, of course, prevent their speculating.
“Marchmont,” Trevorson said, in tones of puzzlement. “I confess I do not understand this at all. If it had been—you did say Mortimer Oswald was a member of this…body?”
“Yes,” Grey said, though he forbore nodding, fearing that his head might fall off. “Why?”
Trevorson humphed into his claret cup.
“Snake,” he said briefly. “No doubt he put Marchmont up to it. Feebleminded collop.”
Grey tried to form some sensible question in response to this information, but could make no connexion between Marchmont’s feeblemindedness, Oswald’s presumably serpentlike nature, and the problem at hand. The hell with it, he decided, glassy-eyed. He’d ask Edgar in the morning.
“Ridiculous!” Fanshawe was saying. “What idiocy is this? Explode a cannon by loading it with tricky powder? A thousand times more likely that the gun crew made some error.” He smacked a hand down on the table. “I’ll wager you a hundred guineas, some arsehole panicked and double-loaded the thing!”
“What odds?” Trevorson drawled, making the table rock with laughter. Grey felt the muscles near his mouth draw back, miming laughter, but the words echoed in the pit of his stomach, mixing uneasily with the roast fowl and prunes.
Some arsehole panicked…
“John, you haven’t touched the trifle! Here, you must have some, it is my own invention, made with gooseberry conserve from the gardens….” Maude waved the butler in his direction, and he could not find will to protest as a large, gooey mass was dolloped onto his plate.
Exercised by his revelations, the members of the consortium kept him late, the brandy bottle passing up and down the table as they argued whether they should go in a body to London to refute this monstrous allegation, or send one of their membership as representative, in which case ought it be DeVane, as the largest mill owner—
“I believe that to make such a formal representation would merely inflame a matter that is at present not truly serious,” Grey said firmly, suffering nightmare visions of Edgar striding into Parliament, armed with a horsewhip.
“A letter, then!” Fanshawe suggested, red-faced with brandy and indignation. “We cannot let such scurrilous insinuations pass unaddressed, surely!”
“Yes, yes, must compose a letter of complaint.” Trevorson was slurring his words, but his oxlike eyes swiveled toward Grey. “You would take it, aye? She…see”—he wiped a dribble of saliva from the corner of his mouth—“that it is delivered to this iniqui-tous Commission of In-qui-ree.”
That motion passed by acclamation, Grey’s attempts at reason being shouted down and drowned in bumpers of brandy.
At last, he dragged himself upstairs, leaving the consortium to the amiable exercise of composing insulting epithets amid shouts of laughter, Edgar—as the only one still sober enough to write—being charged with committing these to paper.
Head pounding and clothes reeking of tobacco smoke, he pushed open the door to his room, to find Tom reclining in a chair by the hearth, immersed in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. The young valet hopped up at once, put by his book, and came to take Grey’s coat and waistcoat.
Having briskly stripped his master and draped him in a clean nightshirt, he went to retrieve Grey’s banyan, which had been hung to warm on the fire screen. He held this ready, peering closely at Grey in concern.
“You look like…” he said, and trailed off, shaking his head as though the prospect before him was too frightful for words. This matched Grey’s own impression of the situation, but he was too exhausted to say so, and merely nodded, turning to thrust his arms into the comforting sleeves.
“Go to bed, Tom,” he managed to say. “Don’t wake me in the morning. I plan to be dead.”
“Very good, me lord,” Tom said, and lips pressed tight, went out, holding Grey’s wine-stained, sweat-damp, tobacco-smelling shirt at arm’s length before him.