A whole lot of things in the past week did not bear thinking of.
He instructed Crutchley to have the old curtains restored to his bedchamber, winds and gales be damned, and to see to it that there were no more uncomfortable surprises awaiting him when he went to bed at night. His heart might well not stand the strain. And he intended to stay in the earl’s chambers, he added, even if he found eels or frogs or both in his bed tonight.
He steeled himself for the ordeal of stepping into the dining room for breakfast. He was still not sure if he owed Lady Barclay an apology, though he was rather inclined to believe he did not. If she did not like being kissed, then she could jolly well keep herself out of his reach. Which was, as it quickly became apparent, exactly what she had decided to do. Lady Lavinia almost fell over her tongue in her eagerness to impart the dreadful tidings that dear Imogen wasgone. But before Percy could conceive more than a flashing image of her fleeing up over the bleak moors in the general direction of the even bleaker Dartmoor, he was informed that she had returned to the dower house to stay even though all thosemenwere still swarming all over the roof. Lady Lavinia made it sound as though each of them had a peephole up there and had nothing better to do with his time than peep through it.
Lady Barclay had taken nothing with her, of course, impractical woman as she was. Presumably she would prefer to freeze and starve and live forever in the same clothes and be deafened by hammer blows rather than spend another day beneath a roof with him.
Well, he preferred it too—that last part, anyway.
He left the dining room without further ado and gave orders to pack up her clothes and other personal belongings and send them after her, together with any and all supplies she would need, including her own housekeeper. He gave instructions that the servants who conveyed everything remain to make the house fully habitable even if it took all day, as it probably would. The roof, he believed, would not let any of the elements in, even if it was not quite finished. When he stepped into the drawing room for a moment, the cat that always kept his chair warm for him glared balefully at him and dared him to banish her, and he gave the order to send her over to the dower house to glare at Lady Barclay and perhaps give her some company. That would get rid ofonestray.
She wasnotgoing to make a martyr of herself for the pleasure of sitting heavily on his conscience. It would be just like her—a conclusion that was without any solid evidence and doubtless unworthy of him.
He needed to get away from the hall and the park. He needed to blow away some cobwebs.
He spent much of the day in Porthmare, therefore, though not the part of it in which most of his new acquaintances had their homes, the genteel part in the river valley, sheltered from the sea and the rawest of the elements, their houses arrayed on the slopes to either side of the river with pleasant views over it and the picturesque pair of arched stone bridges that spanned it. He decided instead to see the fishing village below, its whitewashed cottages built about the broad estuary that connected river and sea and was fully exposed to the latter. The people down there, mostly fisherfolk, did not belong to him and did not work for him, except perhaps at some seasonal jobs when extra hands were needed. But they were a part of the neighborhood in which he had his principal seat, and while he was here he might as well acquaint himself with some of them if he could. He might even be able to think of some intelligent questions to ask.
He left his horse at the inn where the assembly had been held the night before and walked down to the lower village. There was much open space here, he found, the steep cliffs at some distance on either side of the wide estuary. Fishing boats bobbed on its sheltered channels. Gulls wheeled and cried overhead. It seemed a little warmer down here than it did up on Hardford land. The scenery was definitely more stark, though. The air was saltier. The tide was out.
He spent several idle hours simply wandering about and exchanging greetings with villagers who happened to be outdoors, working on an upturned boat or a net, or standing in groups gossiping while children darted about in exuberant pursuit of one another. He ended up in the taproom of an inn less grand in appearance than the one in the upper village, but reasonably clean and serviceable nonetheless. There were several men there, hunched over their ale, and Percy drew a few of them into conversation
He did not have a perfectly easy time of it, of course. It was impossible to blend into near invisibility among these villagers, who probably all knew one another anyway. They tended to be either awed speechless by the sight of him or clearly suspicious, even resentful, of his appearance thus among them in their own domain instead of remaining in his own, where he belonged. Well, he could not blame them, he supposed. He might resent it too if they took to wandering uninvited about his park and expected him not only to bob his head and pull on his forelock at the sight of them but also to exchange respectful greetings. And when a few men at the inn did respond to his conversational overtures, it seemed at first almost as if they were speaking a foreign language, so thick was their Cornish accent. He had to listen carefully just to get the gist of what they were saying.
He did not begin the conversation with any agenda in mind beyond getting better acquainted with this particular remote corner of England. But after a while he found himself tilting his apparently aimless chatter in a certain direction and gathering a few snippets of interesting information, even if doing so involved sifting through the barefaced lies he was told to get at the truth.
Smuggling in this area?Thisarea? Puzzled looks and slowly shaking heads. Scratched heads. No, never. Not in a hundred years or more, anyway. Not like in the days of their long-ago forebears. The old-timers, now, would be able to tell him a tale or two, but even they could only tell the talestheyhad been told around a winter fire when they were nippers. Smuggling wouldn’t pay these days, even supposing anyone was interested in starting it up. Not with the revenue men breathing down their necks and the riding officers wasting their time out and about on the headlands looking for what was just not there. The government was wasting its money on their wages, it was. There was nothing for them to find hereabouts. Why should they use their boats for smuggling, anyway, when they could get a good catch of fish far more easily and make a lawful and decent living that way?
Gangs? Violence? Enforcement? In the olden days, maybe. The old-timers did tell some tall tales that would lift the hairs on the back of your neck, but no doubt they were just that—talltales with no real truth to them. All they were good for was to make the nippers’ eyes grow big as saucers and get them calling out for their mams in the middle of the night. These days they were a law-abiding lot, they were.
There was definitely smuggling in the area, then, Percy concluded as he walked back to his horse and rode home. And it was clearly organized for maximum efficiency, with a leader and rules and a sure way of enforcing secrecy.
He did not particularly care if there was smuggling or not. It was a fact of life and was never going to end. There was no point in getting all excited and righteous about it unless one were a revenue man or a riding officer—or unless one’s own property was sometimes used as a transportation route or even for storage, as the cellar of the dower house had once been. And unless the servants in one’s employ were being terrorized and even harmed, presumably so that they would keep their mouths shut.
And,he wondered suddenly, arrested by the thought, unless the room one occupied at night were facing full-on to the sea so that on some dark and moonless night one might, if one happened to be awake, have a panoramic view of a fleet of small boats rowing into the bay below from a larger ship anchored some distance out and of a band of smugglers appearing through the break in the headland loaded to the gills with boxes and casks?
Wasthatthe explanation for damp beds and walls and soot and thick, opaque curtains?
He tried to picture Crutchley with a cutlass between his teeth and a patch over one eye. He found himself smiling at the mental image his mind created. But he had thoroughly aroused his own curiosity.
He rode back home and tethered his horse in the paddock behind the stables rather than leading it straight inside to be tended. He instructed Mimms, his own groom, to make himself scarce for at least the next half hour, and went in search of the limping stable hand he had seen a few times.
He was a thin, ginger-haired man who must be in his middle twenties if he had been fourteen when Lady Barclay went off to war with her husband, though he could easily have passed for thirty or forty or more. His legs were noticeably crooked. His face was pale and curiously dead looking. He was mucking out a stall when Percy hailed him.
“Bains?”
“M’lord?” He stopped what he was doing and looked in the general direction of Percy, round-shouldered and shifty-eyed.
“Walk out to the paddock with me,” Percy said. “I am a bit concerned about the right foreleg of my mount.”
The man looked surprised. “Shall I fetch Mr. Mimms?” he asked.
“I have just sent Mimms on an important errand,” Percy said. “I wantyouto take a look. You were personal groom to the late Viscount Barclay once upon a time, were you not?”
Bains looked further surprised. But he set aside his fork, brushed straw from his coat and breeches, and stepped outside. Percy waited until he had gentled the horse with skilled hands and crooning voice and was bent over its foreleg. They were out of earshot from the stables.
“Who did it to you?” he asked.
He did not expect an answer, of course, and he got none. Well, almost none. Bains did straighten up sharply.
