“It is, sir.” William bowed, very correctly. “I trust I see you well, sir?”
Sir Henry made a hrmph noise, but nodded briefly. He was, after all, surrounded by the evidences of a significant victory: the streets of Charles Town were pitted and marred by cannon fire, and soldiers—many of them black—were everywhere, laboriously restoring what they had spent weeks blowing up.
“I am come with a message for the Duke of Pardloe,” William said.
Sir Henry looked mildly surprised.
“Pardloe? But he’s gone.”
“Gone,” William repeated carefully. “Has the duke returned to Savannah?”
“He didn’t say he meant to,” Clinton replied, beginning to be impatient. “He left more than a week ago, though, so I imagine he’ll have got back to Savannah by now.”
William felt a coolness on the back of his neck, as though the room around them had subtly changed from one moment to the next and an unseen window had opened.
“Yes,” he managed to say, and bowed. “Thank you, sir.”
He walked out into the street and turned right, with no intent in mind save movement. He was at once alarmed and incensed. What the devil was Uncle Hal about? How dare he go off about his own business when his own brother had disappeared?
He stopped dead for a moment, as the thought struck him that his father and uncle might have disappeared together. But why? The thought died in the next moment, though, as he spotted a familiar red-coated form a hundred yards down the street, buying a packet of tobacco from a black woman in a spotted turban. Denys Randall.
“The very man I wanted to see,” he said a moment later, falling into step alongside Denys as he walked away from the tobacco seller.
Denys looked up, startled, then looked forward and back before turning to William.
“What the bloody hell are you doing here?” he asked.
“I might ask the same of you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous; I’m supposed to be here, and you aren’t.”
William didn’t bother asking what Randall was doing. He didn’t care.
“I’m looking for my uncle Pardloe. Sir Henry just told me that he left Charles Town more than a week ago.”
“He did,” Denys said promptly. “I crossed paths with him as I came down from Charlotte on the … oh, when was it … the thirteenth? Maybe the fourteenth …”
“Damn what day it was. You mean he was riding north, not south?”
“How clever you are, William,” Denys said in mock approval. “That’s exactly what I meant.”
“Stercus,” William said. His stomach knotted. “Was he alone?”
“Yes,” said Denys, looking at him sideways. “I thought that odd. I don’t know him to speak to, though, and hadn’t any reason to do so.”
William asked a few more questions, with no results, and so took his leave of Denys Randall, with luck, for good.
North. And what lay to the north that might lead the colonel of a large regiment to depart suddenly and without word to anyone, riding alone?
Ben. He’s going to see Ben. The vision of a black bottle rose in the back of his mind. Had Hal thought of poisoning himself, his son, or both of them?
“Too bloody Shakespearean,” William said aloud, turning his horse to the south. “Fucking Hamlet, or would it be Titus Andronicus?” He wondered whether his uncle ever read Shakespeare, for that matter—but it didn’t matter; wherever he’d gone, he hadn’t taken the bottle. At the moment, all he could do was go back to Savannah and hope to find his father there.
Three days later, he walked into Number 12 Oglethorpe Street and found Amaranthus in the parlor, poking the fire. She swung round at the sound of his step and dropped the poker with a clang. An instant later, she was hugging him, but not with the fervor of a lover. More the action of a stranded swimmer reaching for a floating log, he thought. Still, he kissed the top of her head and took her hands.
“Uncle Hal’s gone,” he said. “North.” Her eyes were already dark with fear. At this, the little blood remaining in her face drained away.
“He’s going to see Ben?”
“I can’t think what else he could be doing. Have you had any word from Papa? Has he come back?”
“No,” she said, and swallowed. She nodded at an open letter that lay on a small table under the window. “That came this morning, for Father Pardloe, but I opened it. It’s from a man named Richardson.”
William snatched the letter up and read it quickly. Then read it again, unable to make sense of it. And a third time, slowly.
“Who is that man?” Amaranthus had retreated a little, eyeing the letter as though it might suddenly spring to life and bite. William didn’t blame her.
“A bad man,” William said, his lips feeling stiff. “God knows who he really is, but he seems to be—I don’t know, exactly. ‘Major General Inspector of the Army’? I’ve never heard of such an office, but—”
“But he says he’s arrested Lord John!” Amaranthus cried. “How could he? Why? What does he mean ‘infamous and scandalous acts’? Lord John?”
William’s fingers felt numb and he fumbled the sheet of paper, trying to refold it. The official stamp beneath Richardson’s signature felt rough under his thumb, and he dropped the letter, which caught a whiff of air and spun across the carpet. Amaranthus stamped on it, pinning it to the floor, and stood staring at William.
“He wants Father Pardloe to go and speak to him. What the devil shall we do?”
138
Inherited Evil
A week later
IT WAS QUIET, BAR the usual shipboard noises and shouted orders from the deck of the Pallas, echoed faintly across the water from other anchored ships.
Grey had quite recovered from the effects of his abduction and was somewhat prepared when two deckhands came to fetch him from his small cabin. They bound his hands loosely in front of him—a bit of thoroughness that he appreciated as professional caution, though he deplored its immediate effects—and propelled him forcibly up a ladder and across the deck to the captain’s cabin, where Ezekiel Richardson was waiting for him.
“Sit, please.” Richardson gestured him to a seat and stood looking down at him.
“I have as yet had no word from Pardloe,” he said.
“It may be some time before you can reach my brother,” Grey remarked, as casually as possible in the circumstances. And where the devil are you, Hal?
“Oh, I can wait,” Richardson assured him. “I’ve been waiting for years; a few weeks doesn’t signify. Though it would, of course, be desirable for you to tell me where you believe him to be.”
“Waiting years?” Grey said, surprised. “For what?”
Richardson didn’t answer at once, but looked at him thoughtfully, then shook his head.
“Mrs. Fraser,” he said abruptly. “Did you really marry her simply to oblige a dead friend? Given your natural inclinations, I mean. Was it a desire for children? Or was someone getting too close to the truth about you, and you married a woman to disguise that truth?”
“I have no need to justify my actions to you, sir,” Grey said politely.