A door at the end of the line of stalls led to the quarters for the groom and his stable hands. A man emerged from this door just then. He was tall and burly, with black hair under a coachman's hat.
I stared at him. I recognized him--or thought I did.
He saw me, stopped, and ducked back into the shadows of the doorway.
"Who was that?" I asked Sebastian.
He looked up, puzzled at my tone. "Mr. Middleton," he answered. "The groom."
I had not seen this Middleton since my arrival. I usually visited the stables very early in the morning, and Sebastian alone prepared my mount.
But I knew Middleton. Or at least, I'd seen him before, in London. He had once been the lackey of a man called James Denis.
James Denis was a criminal, or should have been labeled so. He was a gentleman to whom wealthy gentlemen went when they wished to obtain a fine piece of art that was unobtainable, to gain a seat in Parliament that was already filled, to succeed in whatever enterprise they wished. In return, they gave their loyalty and a high percentage of their wealth to Mr. Denis.
I had encountered Denis far more often than I cared to. He had helped me once or twice, but he had also threatened me and once had his lackeys kidnap me and beat me to teach me to respect him. He wanted me to fear him, and my friends, Grenville included, advised me to, but Denis had only succeeded in making me very, very angry.
I watched the door, but the man did not reappear. "What do you know about him?" I asked Sebastian.
Sebastian shrugged. "Not very much. He's a coachman, or was. He's very good with horses. A gentle sort with the beasts."
"How long has he been here?"
"Don't know."
I moved to the stable hands still leaning on their rakes and asked them. Like Sebastian, they eyed me in surprise, but answered. Middleton had been employed at Sudbury for six months.
I might have been mistaken, I told myself. I had only glimpsed the man. But I did not think so. Why one of James Denis' men should have taken up a post in Berkshire, at a boys' school, I hadn't the faintest idea. But if I was right, this boded no good.
*** *** ***
"You sure it was him, sir?"
Bartholomew held my coat in one hand, his stiff-bristled brush in the other. The blond giant had stopped and gaped, wide-eyed, when I'd announced who I'd seen.
"No," I answered. I drank the thick coffee Bartholomew had brought after my supper. The quarters allotted to me consisted of a rather plain but cozy room on the top floor of the Head Master's house. My windows looked over the meadows behind the school and the line of trees that marked the canal. "He did not come out again, and I could not go charging after him. He looked just as surprised to see me."
"But he must have heard you'd come here," Bartholomew said. "That's why he's kept scarce whenever you came to take a horse, I'd wager."
"Well, if he is Denis' man, why is he here?" I wondered. "Did Denis send him to keep an eye on me?"
"Could be, sir. Or could be he's quit of Mr. Denis. Or could be he doesn't want Mr. Denis to know where he is."
"True." If I was correct about who he was, Denis had once sent the man Middleton to my rooms in Covent Garden to fetch me. Denis generally employed pugilists and former coachmen to serve as rather menacing bodyguards and lackeys. This one had been no less menacing than any of the others. I had refused the summons. Bartholomew's presence had helped, and the man had left in defeat.
I had never seen him again. Though I'd visited Denis not long ago, while pursuing the affair of the Glass House in London, Middleton, as far as I remembered, had not been there.
"Well, it's interesting," Bartholomew remarked. "What are you going to do?"
I lifted my cup. "I will let it lie for now. He obviously did not want me to see him. But I'll watch. I do not trust Denis, nor any man associated with him."
"No, sir." Bartholomew resumed brushing. "Of course, it does no harm asking about in the kitchens. Why he's here, I mean."
"Your curiosity might prove as dangerous as mine, Bartholomew," I said.
"Yes, sir."
I turned the conversation back to the pranks that Rutledge wanted me to investigate, and frowned in thought. "I wonder whether one house has seen more of the pranks than the other. It would be difficult, for instance, for a boy in this house to get into Fairleigh at night."
"The Fairleigh boys would chuck him right out if they saw him." Bartholomew grinned. "And not in a nice manner, would they?"
The houses, the Head Master's and Fairleigh, were similar in amenities and distribution of boys, but the two houses were fierce rivals, each convinced that members of the other were weak and ineffectual. It is common thing among mortals, I had observed, that when placed even arbitrarily into this or that group, they immediately begin to defend themselves against all other groups. I do not exclude myself from this phenomenon. In the Army, I valiantly defended the honor of the Thirty-Fifth Light Dragoons, and would have done so with my life. And of course, I esteemed the abilities of the light cavalry over the heavy. Still more serious was the manner in which cavalry viewed the infantry--that body of foot wobblers who could not shoot straight even standing on the ground and dug into place.
I fully admitted to prejudice in my views--I had realized once that if someone were to come along and paint a red or blue spot on each of our foreheads, we who had the blue spots would congregate to other blue-spotters and come up with reasons why we were infinitely better than the red-spotters.
The Fairleighs contended that they were superior to the Head Masters and vice versa. Therefore, if any Head Master boy were caught sneaking into Fairleigh uninvited, said boy had better be fast on his feet and good with his fists. In addition, news of such a break-in would be all over school the next day.
Therefore, the prankster must either be a master of infiltration and deception, or there must be more than one.
I continued to drink my coffee, and Bartholomew and I continued to speculate on the pranks until I sought my bed and slumber. The matter of Middleton, for the time, was dropped.
But the matter reasserted itself almost immediately. Bartholomew woke me early the next morning to tell me that Middleton had been killed in the night, his body fetched up in a lock of the nearby canal.
About the Author
Award-winning Ashley Gardner is a pseudonym for New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Ashley. Under both names--and a third, Allyson James--Ashley has written more than 30 published novels and novellas in mystery and romance. Her books have won several RTBook Reviews Reviewers Choice awards (including Best Historical Mystery for The Sudbury School Murders), and the Romance Writers of America’s RITA (given for the best romance novels and novellas of the year). Ashley’s books have been translated into a dozen different languages and have earned favorable reviews in Publisher's Weekly and Booklist.
More about the Captain Lacey series can be found at
http://www.gardnermysteries.com.
Or email Ashley Gardner at
[email protected].
Books in the series
The Hanover Square Affair
A Regimental Murder
The Glass House
The Sudbury School Murders
The Necklace Affair (a novella)
A Body in Berkeley Square
A Covent Garden Mystery
A Death in Norfolk
And more to come!
The Glass House Page 25
