Point of Honour (20 page)

She turned around to find Versellion leaving coins on the table. “To settle the shot,” he explained. “Are we climbing down?” He did not seem dismayed by the idea.

“I think we—”

She was interrupted by a hard knocking on the door. Miss Tolerance took up her sword in its hanger, slung the whole over her shoulder, and motioned Versellion to the window. To his credit, he went through without a murmur, dropped lightly onto the dormer, and was on the ground before Miss Tolerance was out the window herself. She dropped to the earth just beside him and they ran for the stables. Above them, continued knocking persuaded her that their departure had not yet been discovered. At the door of the stable, Miss Tolerance crept around the sill, letting her eyes adjust to the dim light.

As she expected, another man was guarding their horses, a short, blocky fellow. She did not recognize him from the attack the night before; there was a chance he was merely a stableboy. She could not afford to assume so, however. She moved forward in the shadows until she was behind the man, and in one movement she had his arm doubled behind him and her pocketknife at his throat.

To her captive she murmured, “Be silent and I shan’t hurt you. Move, and …” She did not finish, letting the man’s imagination provide a suitable admonition. “Sir,” she called, as loudly as she dared. Versellion appeared at once. “That rope, if you please? Thank you. Now, our horses.”

As Miss Tolerance tied the man and gagged him with her own handkerchief, Versellion saddled the horses, brought them to the stable door, and mounted his own.

A crash, and the landlady’s scream of outrage, suggested that their tracker had at last broken into their lately vacated room. Leaving the guard on his knees amid the straw, Miss Tolerance swung up on her horse; at her nod, Versellion crashed through the stable door into the yard, and thence to the road. Miss Tolerance was directly behind him. There were several shouts of “Stop!” but Versellion set a racing pace. He led them down the road for a quarter mile and then, after a bend which blocked them from the view of any pursuer, took off over a field toward the cover of a wood ahead of them.

They rode hard for a good half hour. At last, Versellion slowed his mount to a walk.

“Do you think we’re followed?”

Miss Tolerance shook her head. “I think they will have tried, but—no. I do wish I’d had the presence of mind to loose the other horses in the stable. That would have made us certain of it.”

The earl grinned. “I seem destined to adventure in your company, Miss Tolerance.” More soberly he added, “This would not have been necessary had I trusted your instincts a little further.”

There was no need for Miss Tolerance to agree. “I think we might stop a few minutes now and rest the horses.”

They found a clearing and tethered their horses to crop the grass. Miss Tolerance sat under a tree and took off her hat to wipe her brow. Her braid, unpinned again, fell heavily across her shoulder. As she undid the braid and combed her fingers through her hair, she became aware that Versellion was watching her.

“The perils of hard riding,” she said briefly. Quickly she braided her hair and pinned it thoroughly.

Versellion smiled. “You should find more occasions to wear your hair down, Miss Tolerance. It suits you.”

Miss Tolerance flushed. Versellion did not appear to notice her discomfort, for he had taken the long-sought fan from his pocket and opened it in the sunlight. He turned it this way and that, opening and closing it, holding it flat before his eyes and sighting down its length as he might down the barrel of a hunting rifle. It was a pretty toy, Miss Tolerance reflected, but there was nothing about it to indicate why two people had lost their lives for its sake.

Miss Tolerance cleared her throat. “My lord?”

Versellion looked up, blinking in the sunlight.

“The question I asked you last night grows hourly more pressing.”

Versellion seemed lost. “Take me with you, Miss Tolerance. Which question?”

“Why people have died for this fan. Do you know?”

He shook his head. “The longer I examine it, the less I understand.” He handed the fan to her. Miss Tolerance turned it over in her hands as he had done; the rounded end-sticks were warm from the sun and the touch of Versellion’s fingers.

“Perhaps if you tell me why you sought the fan so anxiously?” she suggested.

Versellion did not answer at once; Miss Tolerance suspected he was trying to judge how little information he could give without appearing to evade the question.

“I will find it out,” she told him. “But by that time you may be dead, or your careful secret may have become common gossip.”

“Are you so certain the cause of all this uproar is the fan?” he countered. He looked away from her, across the clearing. He had taken up his hat in both hands and ran the brim between thumb and forefinger, smoothing the surface of the felt. “I have political enemies—”

Miss Tolerance cut him off. “Do you see any benefit to your political enemies in the death of an elderly woman in Leyton, or of my friend who was carrying a note to you? Those events seem uniquely tied to the fan. In the usual way of business, I would ask no questions; your secrets are your own. But now I cannot afford such nicety. Nor can you. Why did you want to retrieve the fan?”

Versellion continued to toy with his hat brim. “I presume when I say that my mother bade me do it, that will not satisfy you? She did. On her deathbed. I had never heard of the fan until two years ago when my mother became ill. For a time the doctors were hopeful of the outcome, but she began at last to fail. When she was certain that her illness was fatal, she told me—urgently—that I must find the Italian fan, that all would be ruined if …”

“If?”

“If my cousin found it first. What do you know of my family, Miss Tolerance?”

“Political. Wealthy. Whigs—your father was part of the Devonshire set, wasn’t he?”

“He was. Politics is a kind of mania in my family, Miss Tolerance. My grandfather Folle raised his sons to political power as a farmer might raise his sons to the plow. Unfortunately, in my father’s generation the politics of the family interfered with politics of the nation. My father and my uncle quarreled—my uncle envied my father the title and property, and my father, I believe, could not bear that his brother did not follow meekly where he led. I often thought my father valued me chiefly because as his heir, I kept Uncle William from—” He broke off. “This must sound remarkably trivial to you.”

“The rivalries of families are rarely trivial,” Miss Tolerance said blandly. “I presume the fan comes into this at some point?”

“I believe so. There was a schism in the family—my uncle William was of great assistance to the Crown when the King went mad in ’88, and when Queen Charlotte was made Regent, she created him baronet in his own right, and he tucked himself into the Crown party with a vengeance. My grandfather never spoke to him again; my father barely did.”

“May I infer that the baronetcy did not slake your uncle’s thirst for position?”

“It seemed rather to inflame it. The bitterness between my father and my uncle grew so profound my mother feared it might lead to a duel. It did not, but my cousin and I were raised to hate each other like—”

“Capulets and Montagues?” Miss Tolerance asked dryly.

“Precisely. Of the two of us, Cousin Henry was the apter pupil. It is not enough that our politics still divide us; he hates me as deeply as his father could have wished, and I believe he would stop at nothing to see me ruined.”

“And your mother did not wish him to have …” She held up the fan. “This?”

“What she said was not very lucid. My mother was in great pain, and the doctor had been giving her steady doses of laudanum. All I could make out was that the fan held some sort of secret that could bring ruin upon my family. She raved on about the fan. And Deb Cunning. She was quite … bitter about Mrs. Cunning.”

“I see. And no one had ever mentioned the fan before?”

“My father died in ’05 without mentioning the fan or potential ruin, or anything but his hope that Fox would return to the ministry again.” The earl’s tone was dry. Miss Tolerance suspected there had been little love lost between him and his late father. “What I know is what my mother told me. And frankly, for a time I did not think about it. But when the Queen was stricken—this is a time when the opposition could become a force. I had to be sure there was no way my cousin could harm my party—”

“Or your own chances?”

He looked at her, a little nettled by her cynicism, Miss Tolerance thought.

“Or my own chances,” he agreed. “And why not? I have worked for this, I have great hopes for reform, for—No, I will not make a speech to you, Miss Tolerance. In your work you must encounter in good measure the hunger and hardship this war has caused, and …”

Miss Tolerance did not listen too closely. The earl had been raised to politics, and it would not do to believe a client too wholeheartedly, particularly a client as elusive, and attractive, as the Earl of Versellion.

This cynical thought was broken by the sensation of a pinprick. Her finger had caught on a tiny bit of raised gold chasing on one of the fan’s end-sticks. She tried to push the wire down; it would not go. She looked more closely and an exclamation of surprise escaped her lips.

The protruding wire was part of a minute catch, so tiny she would have taken it for an imperfection of the design. When she inserted her thumbnail in the catch, the top of the rounded end-stick opened, revealing a space no more than half an inch across and less than a quarter inch wide. A slip of paper was folded inside it. Using her thumbnail again, Miss Tolerance pried at the paper until she could prise it out of its concealment. Without looking at the contents, she handed it to Versellion. “Perhaps this will make all clear, sir.”

Ten

T
he earl unfolded the paper gingerly. It was a flimsy sheet, written and cross-written in a tight, florid script. There was no crest or other identifier, but the paper was still white, the ink unfaded. Versellion smoothed the paper between his fingers, flattened it on his knee, and tried to read it. After a moment he shook his head, clearly frustrated.

“The damned thing’s written in Italian!”

“Italian?”

He nodded. “I believe so. I read French and Latin, but all I know is singers’ Italian.” He stared at the paper for several minutes, then shook his head. “I cannot make head or tails of its meaning—especially with the lines so tightly compacted. It seems to be about cookery.”

“Cookery?” Miss Tolerance held out her hand. “May I, sir?” She studied the edges of the paper on both sides, seeking the beginning of the document. “Ah, see.
‘Caro frate mio … ’
it appears to be a letter from someone to his brother. Have you an Italian connection in your family, Versellion?”

Versellion shook his head.

“What made you think of cookery, sir? Oh, I see. ‘
Pisi verde’:
green peas. And vines? Perhaps it is not cookery but gardening.” Miss Tolerance folded the paper and returned it to Versellion. Surely there was no recipe so powerful it would threaten one of the greatest families in England. She wondered if the late Lady Versellion might, under the influence of drugs, have confabulated the entire story. But if the whole matter was a wild-goose chase—why would anyone know? Why kill Matt or Mrs. Smith, or make an attempt upon Versellion’s life? “We cannot decipher this without help, which we will not find sitting here, sir. And we have rested long enough, I think.” She got to her feet and reached around the earl to untangle her horse’s rein from the branch to which she had tied it. At once Versellion was at her side and offered his hand to help her into the saddle.

“Where shall we go?” Versellion threw her up into the saddle and moved to mount his own horse.

Miss Tolerance thought. “I am convinced that the smaller roads are where your safety best lies. But we need to find a town large enough to support a bookshop.”

“A bookshop?”

“We need an Italian lexicon, my lord. That is, I presume you would prefer we try to decipher the note ourselves, rather than taking it to a third party who could read it for us. Good. Then let us start westerly and see what we can find.”

The last firm notion of their bearings Miss Tolerance had was in Briarton the night before. Since that time they had ridden—she imagined a map in her head—east and south, to find the inn they had slept at, then farther west to elude their pursuers. To say they were somewhere west of London was to include a singularly vast territory.

“Maidenhead and Reading should both be to the south of us,” Versellion volunteered at last. “Either is large enough to contain a bookshop. I recall one in Reading—”

“As well attach a fox’s brush to your hat, my lord, and loose the hounds, as to send you to a place where you are known.”

“Then why can we not simply return to London?”

“I don’t advise it until we have hired a bodyguard to bring you back to the city—and stay with you until you have hired another to keep with you there. Someone has killed to gain the fan, and twice attempted your life, and until we know for certain that no one in your establishment in London or your house in Richmond is part of that plot, I cannot advise you to go either where.”

“Then I’ll go stay with friends,” Versellion suggested.

“Which friends? Are you sure of them all? Even more, are you sure we could get to them unharmed? We do not know how many people are pursuing you, but if they found us on the Birmingham road, with no particular reason to believe that we had gone west rather than south or east, it suggests that whoever is behind this had men out on all the post roads.”

“Then let us hire a bodyguard at once. You cannot possibly understand how important it is that I return to London; the future of my party, of the nation, my own future—”

“Your own future is very much the point, sir,” Miss Tolerance said.

Versellion glared at Miss Tolerance. She kept her gaze steady and abruptly he shook his head as if to clear it. “I was trying to bully you. I’m sorry.” He held out his hand to her. “Forgive my temper.”