He turned around and there she was, Elsie Glump, wearing an even more colorful turban today, and a dress in which someone much younger would appear to great advantage.Do I pretend I don’t know who she really is?he asked himself, suddenly at a loss.
She solved the dilemma for him. She executed a perfunctory little bow for someone who still considered herself far superior to the little son of a cooper.
“Dougie Bowden,” she exclaimed in that booming voice he remembered.
I can play this too, he thought as he gave her a better bow. “Mistress Elsie Glump. I never thought to see you on England’s far side. I remember you last in a butcher shop not too far from my father’s cooper yard.”
She gave him a thoughtful stare, and heaven help him if he didn’t start feeling younger and less confident by the moment. He remembered that stare, especially during a hard time in the barrel business when the Bowdens were eating little meat and only the cheapest cuts. He stared back gamely and watched the hard light leave her eyes.
She indicated a seat, plumping herself down. He followed suit.
“I thought you must know who I am,” she said finally.
He didn’t think he imagined the glimmer of fear in those eyes now, just a small glint, but enough to suggest that the road between Glump and Telford might have been unexpectedly rocky.
“I do.”
“Then I thank you for not giving me away to Miss Grant,” she replied.
“Not I,” he said, unwilling to ruin the woman’s life byeven hinting that everyone in Edgar already knew who she was. “I came here for two reasons. The first is that I am concerned about the way your eye droops. It looks more pronounced than on my first visit here.”
“I have a physician,” she informed him, obviously inclined to toss out a better title than mere surgeon. “Sir Rodney Follette of Edinburgh, who sees quality clientele.”
“I am relieved,” he said, wondering what game she played. “I would suggest that you pay the man a visit soon.”
He could tell she had no intention of doing that. He also thought she had no real desire to talk to him, which made him wonder why she had agreed to seat him in her parlor.
“And your second reason?” she asked, her tone frosty.
“It can wait,” he said, even though he knew it couldn’t. “I really would like to know the happy set of circumstances that took you from a butcher’s shop to Lady Telford.” He gestured around the overdone room. “You and Sir Dudley have evidently done well.”
Her eyes filled with tears. Whether that came from his mention of her late husband or some other source, he couldn’t be certain. From what he remembered of Dudley Glump, a coarse and overbearing bully, he thought it must be the latter.
But she was a woman suffering from something, and his bedside manner overpowered his hesitation. He joined her on the sofa and took her hand. “Lady Telford, kindly tell me what is bothering you.”
“Nothing,” she said immediately, but she did not withdraw her hand from his. Never mind. He could wait her out. “Perhaps there is something,” she said, after only a short pause, “but you must swear yourself to secrecy on that … that hypocritical oath.”
“Confidentiality is for medical matters,” he explained, as he swallowed down a laugh of epic proportions, “but I will never tell anyone anything, if that is your wish.”
“Aye, it is.” She looked around elaborately, perhaps making certain that no enemy agents or members of the peerage lurked. “Dudley—Mr. Glump—sold a boggy piece of property to a gent buying up land for a canal scheme.”
“Plenty of boggy land in Norfolk,” Douglas agreed. “Did Mr. Glump buy more land then and increase his fortune that way?”
Lady Telford shook her head so vigorously that her turban shifted a bit on its axis. “He wanted to, but I told him about a joint stock company in the slave trade, name of the Royal African Company, and made him put it there.” She looked at him, triumph in her eyes now. “We made a pile of money.”
On black men and women’s bones, Douglas thought, more than a little disgusted. He recalled one memorable afternoon when their frigate had come upon a slave ship becalmed in the doldrums. The stench across the water had been unbelievable. The ship had run up signals requesting a surgeon, and his captain sent him aboard. He did what he could among the dead and dying, felled by dysentery and starvation, but mostly loss of hope. Months passed before he could close his eyes and not see mothers chained to the deck and holding out their dying babies to him.
“I suppose you did,” he said, merely because she seemed to expect some commentary. “Made you wealthy, did it?”
“More than,” she crowed, and the satisfaction on her face turned to something less joyful. “This brought Dudley to the attention of Prinny, himself.”
And he needed money in the worst way, Douglas thought, recalling wardroom stories about the Prince of Wales’s constant penury. “Let me guess: Mr. Glump loaned him a healthy sum, in exchange for a title.”
“A baronetcy,” Lady Telford said. She looked at him expectantly, as if waiting for him to congratulate those shrewd Glumps.
“Why Telford?” he asked, unwilling to congratulateher on a title handed out by the Prince Regent like sweets at Christmas, all to cover his own debts and with no regard for the country’s well being.
“You remember that pretty manor house near Walton,” she said.
