‘I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,’ said Robert neutrally.
The newcomer wafted a languid hand in greeting. ‘Sir Francis Medmenham, at your service. Like the rest of these louts, I am passing the holiday season on your largesse.’
With his gleaming boots and large gold signet ring, he made a very unconvincing mendicant. His appearance accomplished that towards which Frobisher only strove, his coat boasting a restrained three capes, his hair brushed into a perfect Titus, and his hat brim tilted just forward enough to provide a rakish air without obscuring his vision.
The name poked at Robert’s memory. ‘You haven’t been in the army, have you?’ he asked.
‘Me? No. I might sully the shine on my boots. My valet would never forgive me.’
‘I wish you would,’ grumbled Frobisher. ‘Then he might finally defect to me.’
Medmenham looked the other man up and down with chilling disinterest. ‘I don’t think so.’
Frobisher scowled, but was still.
‘It’s just that your name sounds familiar,’ said Robert.
Medmenham’s lips curled in a thin smile. ‘You’re probably thinking of my illustrious relations – the Dashwoods of Medmenham Abbey.’
‘Good God,’ said Robert. ‘So that’s it.’
‘What’s it?’ asked Charlotte innocently.
‘Nothing,’ said Robert quickly.
At least, nothing his cousin ought to know about. Medmenham Abbey had, in the previous century, been home to a group of devoted debauchees known sometimes as the Order of the Friars of St Francis of Wycombe, sometimes as the Monks of Medmenham – in short, the Hellfire Club. Robert’s father, who had tottered drunkenly on the edge of polite society by virtue of his position as son of the second son of a duke, had once been invited to their revels. He enjoyed recalling the occasion in lurid detail while in his cups. There had been strange initiation ceremonies and underground chambers dedicated to mysterious rites, most of which seemed to involve wine and women, generally in that order. As far as Robert could tell, it boiled down to nothing more than wenching with a fringe of the occult.
It was, however, exactly the sort of organisation with which a certain Arthur Wrothan specialized. Wrothan had run his own version of the Hellfire Club back in Seringapatam, pandering to the jaded palates of the officer set. Having firmly turned down his first invitation, Robert hadn’t been asked again.
‘I have a rather well-known house,’ said Sir Francis smoothly. ‘An architectural gem of its time.’
‘Really?’ said Charlotte innocently. ‘How nice.’
‘Oh, it is rather,’ agreed Sir Francis genially. ‘We have lovely parties.’
‘I’m certainly glad you could join our party,’ Robert broke in smoothly, shifting so that he stood between Medmenham and Charlotte. ‘Are you passing the entirety of the holiday at Girdings?’
Medmenham observed the new arrangements with quiet amusement. ‘Ten lords a-leaping and all that rot. Sorry – I forgot that it’s your rot, now. No offence meant, old chap.’
‘None taken,’ said Robert, echoing his tone of urbane detachment. Charlotte, he noticed to his relief, had been distracted by the task of extracting her friend from the company of Mr Martin Frobisher. From the practiced way with which Charlotte looped her arm through her friend’s and gradually eased her away, he gathered that this was not the first time that particular manoeuvre had been effected. ‘You’ll have to acquaint me with the other leaping lords. I’m afraid I’ve been abroad a very long time.’
‘Have you been on the Continent?’ Medmenham enquired, his eyes roaming idly over the rest of the party. In the shifting light of the torches, Charlotte was shepherding her friend away across the clearing, towards a very large young man in a cravat patterned with pink carnations, who appeared to be attempting to cut down a tree with the blunt side of his saw. ‘I hear there are still bits of Italy that are habitable, despite Bonaparte’s best efforts.’
‘No,’ said Robert shortly. ‘I was in India.’
‘Ah.’ Medmenham looked him full in the face. ‘You must know Freddy, then. Lord Frederick Staines,’ he clarified.
Robert plastered on his best expression of worldly ennui. ‘I’m afraid I know him only by reputation.’
‘I needn’t ask what that is,’ said Medmenham, with casual scorn. ‘Freddy always was too dim to know which tit to nurse from.’
Robert raised an urbane eyebrow. ‘So you’re friends, then.’
Medmenham’s lips quirked in appreciation. ‘Old Freddy has his redeeming points.’
‘Such as?’
‘A talent for collecting … interesting people.’ A red ring glinted on Medmenham’s gloved hand as he lifted his handkerchief delicately to his nose. It looked, thought Robert, uncommonly like the ring he had noticed on Frobisher’s hand as well. ‘And a perpetually open purse.’
‘A useful person to know.’ What had seemed like mere scratches on Frobisher’s ring were more deeply etched on Medmenham’s. The incised lines took up the entire surface of the stone, curving in a series of overlapping curlicues. When seen right side up, the whole came together as a stylized flower that Robert recognised from thousands of temple carvings. One could scarcely go anywhere in India without seeing the representation of a lotus.
It was not, however, a flower generally favoured for pictorial purposes in England, at least not that he could ever recall. The only recollection he had of the lotus flower prior to India was classical in origin, the island of the Lotus Eaters in Homer’s Odyssey, where the inhabitants dreamt their days chewing on the opiate leaves of the lotus.
‘I shouldn’t think you would be wanting for blunt.’ Medmenham ran an appraising eye over the huge urns that towered along the roofline of the jutting wings of Girdings. ‘How many tenants do you have?’
Robert supposed he must have tenants, but it wasn’t an item with which he had acquainted himself. He had made a point of never taking any income from the estates that accident had tossed his way. They were not, as far as he was concerned, really his. But that certainly wasn’t something he was going to share with Medmenham.
Instead, he shrugged, like any other bored young man of the world. ‘Who keeps count?’
It was obviously the right answer. The lotus ring glinted in another lazy pass through the air. ‘Who, indeed. Leave that to the estate agents. That’s what they’re there for. Why drudge away when there are so many other pleasures to be had?’
‘Why, indeed,’ echoed Rob as the hazy outlines of a plan began to take shape. It couldn’t be coincidence that both Frobisher and Medmenham bore the same ring, or that Staines was reputed to collect ‘interesting people.’ If one of those interesting people was the man Robert sought …
Rob’s pulse pounded in his ears as he said, with studied casualness, ‘If someone unfamiliar with the land were to wish to know more about such pleasures …’
‘I believe that might be arranged,’ said Medmenham. ‘For a price.’
In the torchlight, his eyes gleamed as red as his ring. ‘There is always a price.’
Chapter Three
It was Christmas Day, and all throughout the county, Christmas bells were ringing. Robert’s head was ringing, too, from too much strong drink the night before.
Charlotte hadn’t lied: the duchess did celebrate Christmas in the old style, complete with pipers piping, lords a-leaping, and mummers’ plays put on by grizzled locals with accents thick enough to cut up and serve as Christmas pudding. Robert hadn’t seen the partridge in the pear tree yet, but he was sure there had to be one somewhere. It was impossible to pass through a doorway without being attacked by dangling bits of mistletoe and roughly hacked pine boughs perched precariously on every plausible surface. The pungent scent made Robert’s stomach churn.
Long after the frozen revellers had returned from the woods, long after the Yule log had been ceremoniously dragged in and set alight, the mulled wine continued to flow. The ladies had said their goo
d nights and retired; the duchess had thumped through on her way to her stately – and, one presumed, solitary – bed; and the younger and more dissolute had kicked back in the aptly named Red Room, dealing cards and knocking back whatever beverage came to hand. By eleven, poor Tommy had been all but horizontal, more out of his chair than in it. By midnight of the dawning of the day of the blessed Saviour’s birth, Martin Frobisher was puking out the window. An hour later, Lord Henry Innes passed out in front of the fire and had to be carried out by a pair of blank-faced footmen.
The Duke of Dovedale and Sir Francis Medmenham played cards.
By three in the morning, Robert had won fifty guineas and a tentative invitation to Medmenham. He would have preferred information to the invitation, but Medmenham was damnably tight-lipped about his little club, even after several decanters of port. Carefully calibrated questions elicited only a raised eyebrow and the unhelpful comment that only initiates were privy to the ‘inner mysteries.’
Medmenham, thought Robert irritably, was deriving altogether too much enjoyment from stringing him along.
Medmenham and Frobisher hadn’t been the only ones wearing the ruby rings with the lotus petals etched on the bezel. There had been the sullen gleam of a red stone on Lord Henry Innes’s finger as he collapsed before the fire. When Lord Frederick Staines had lifted his hymnal in church that morning, a red ring burnt on his finger like a little cauldron of condensed hellfire. It had become a morbid sort of game, picking out the rings, wondering who else was part of their secret society – and whether Wrothan lay at the heart of it, or merely a pack of debauched dandies reenacting the greatest hits of Sir Francis Dashwood and the Monks of Medmenham.
Robert rather hoped he could track down Wrothan without having to go through the mockery of an initiation ceremony into Medmenham’s little Hellfire Club. Whatever his father might have enjoyed, he really had very little interest in running around in a robe in a clammy cavern, bare-arsed, while dandies in masks gibbered what they fondly believed to be demonic incantations. There were better ways to spend an evening. Like being slowly flayed over a hot fire.
Tommy was being no help at all. He was too busy gazing longingly at the bright red head of one Miss Penelope Deveraux, as though she personally had taught the torches to burn bright.
He would have to see what he could get out of the other, less guarded members of the club. Lord Henry Innes was a type he recognised, a simple-minded brute with equally predictable appetites for wine and wenches. Not women, wenches. Innes had been quite explicit on that point. As he had explained before sprawling out on the hearth rug, he enjoyed the kind of gel one could get an arm around – none of them squealing milk-and-water young misses for him, although he supposed the mater would make him marry one of them sooner or later, eh, what?
Innes reminded Robert tremendously of his father: an inebriate brawler, and all-around lout. The only thing noble about his father had been his name, and he had done everything possible to debase it. He had died as he had lived: in a brawl in a tavern.
Like his father, Innes had a certain rough charm that was nine-tenths bravado and one-tenth pure thuggishness. Plied with enough strong drink, away from Medmenham’s inhibiting presence, Innes would cheerfully tell him anything and everything he knew – presuming he knew anything at all.
As for Frobisher, there was a different kettle of eels, and just as slippery. Given the way Medmenham had quelled him the night before, Robert had no doubt that Medmenham held something over him, even if that something was only the threat of cutting off his access to their exclusive society – but he might be driven into admissions by his own desire to boast. With the right conditions, he might just be egged into bragging about their secret rites and what a very central part he played in them all. But would he know Wrothan?
And then there was Freddy Staines, who might be questioned if only Medmenham would ever leave his side. Staines hadn’t been part of the group the night before, having taken to his bed with an attack of la grippe that Robert suspected more aptly translated to the mother of all hangovers. Once he made his appearance on Christmas morning, he had been impossible to pry away from the rest of the pack. The four of them moved in concert, like a pack of dogs. They had gone together from Girdings to the village church, and then from the village church back to Girdings for the duchess’s morris dancers, mummers’ plays, and other pseudo-medieval flummery. Robert had left them all in the hall, placing wagers on whether St George, as played by the village blacksmith, was going to trip over his own spear.
They placed wagers on everything. So far, he had watched them wager on how many times the vicar would say ‘um’ in the course of his sermon (thirty-two); whether anyone would slip on that icy patch right in front of the steps (yes, but only because Innes crowded them into it, which was accounted a foul); and how many times Turnip Fitzhugh would walk right into the same sprig of mistletoe before remembering to duck (eight and still counting). When they started wagering on whether the dowager duchess wore drawers, Robert knew he had to get out. While the others were peering interestedly at the duchess’s nether regions, he had ducked under that dangling mistletoe, slipped out the door of the hall, and kept right on going. Even a mere two rooms away, the air felt clearer and sweeter, free of the miasma of last night’s port that seemed to seep through the pores of their skin like rot.
Or maybe he was the rotten one. If they were rogues, then wasn’t he doubly so, for using them?
Grimacing, Robert rubbed his head. Life had been much simpler back in the Regiment, knowing one’s task and one’s enemy, knowing that one was fighting for the cause of right, and that it was honour to do so. The extermination of a traitor ought to be an honourable goal as well, but the means of it – the spying, the skulking – made him feel unclean.
Robert turned right, walking briskly through an abandoned music room and an anteroom of uncertain utility. The sound of his own strides echoed after him, pursuing him down the row of linked rooms like a phalanx of angry ancestors. At the end of the row, he came to the gallery, a vast rectangle of a room that stretched across a full half of the West Front of the house, the perfect place to stretch one’s legs on a cold afternoon.
Afternoon sunlight spilt through the long windows, turning the parquet floor the colour of fresh honey. Silver threads sparkled in the ice blue upholstery, and even his ancestors in their heavy, gilded frames looked less grim than usual in the frank glow of the late afternoon sun.
Robert’s steps slowed as he realised that someone else had taken advantage of the sunshine and solitude. Halfway down the long room sat Charlotte, curled in a comfortable ball on a padded bench by the window.
There was a book in her lap, of course, tilted to catch the sunlight. She had tucked her feet up beneath her, tucking the long skirt of her green wool dress up around her for warmth. She sat with one cheek leaning against the cool of the windowpane, pulling her hair free from its pins so that it stood up unevenly against the window on one side and snaked down on the other. With the sunlight washing over her, she glowed like one of the illuminated capitals on a medieval manuscript, from the gold of her hair to the deep green of her dress and the rich red of the cover of the book in her pale hands.
She didn’t look up as he ventured nearer, all her attention bent upon the page in front of her.
Robert tilted his head to try to read the title. ‘Evelina?’
‘What?’ Glancing wildly up, Charlotte dropped her book and cracked her head against the glass. ‘Owwwww.’ Robert winced in sympathy.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, bending over to retrieve her book. From the look of the binding, it had been in an advanced state of dilapidation even before taking its latest plunge. Robert smoothed out a bent page, closed the cover, and handed it ceremoniously back to her. ‘I shouldn’t have startled you.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Charlotte, holding out one hand to take the book from him as she pressed the other to the back of her head. ‘I was just …’
‘Elsewhere?’ Robert provided for her.
‘Very much so.’ Charlotte looked tenderly down at her book with the sort of affection usually reserved for well-loved pets and very small children. ‘Evelina was just carried off by Sir Clement Willoughby!’
Having no idea who either party was, Robert couldn’t tell whether that was a cause for congratulation or condolence. ‘Is that good or bad?’
‘Very bad,’ Charlotte informed him. ‘But fear not, she manages to free herself from his vile clutches.’
‘I am immensely reassured to hear that.’ Robert looked quizzically down at her. ‘I gather you’ve seen this Evelina carried off by Sir What’s-His-Name before?’
‘Many times,’ Charlotte admitted. She regarded the battered binding critically. ‘I may need to get a new copy soon.’
Robert rather felt that would be in order.
‘Shouldn’t you be watching the mummers?’ he asked, with mock reproach.
Wriggling her legs out from under her, Charlotte cast about for an excuse. ‘I saw them last year.’
‘And they’re awful,’ said Robert drily.
Charlotte grimaced. ‘And they’re awful. But they do try so hard.’
‘It might be less painful if they tried a little less hard.’ Robert held out his hand to help her off the window seat, since she seemed to keep getting tangled in her own skirts. ‘Having St George battle both Bonaparte and a group of maddened pygmies was certainly a unique concept.’
‘It might have been worse,’ said Charlotte, shaking out her skirts, which were sadly wrinkled from her sojourn by the window. There was a crease across one cheek where she must have been leaning against the edge of the drape. She looked flushed and comfortable and adorably rumpled. She shoved a stray wisp of her hair back behind her ear, a move that did little to right the rest of her coiffure. ‘Last year they had Mr Pitt fighting off the Saracens with a broomstick.’
‘I’m sure he’s capable of it,’ said Robert diplomatically. ‘Should there be any Saracens to fight.’