Dangerous Dalliance

by Joan Smith

  “What crime?” Bunny asked.

  Fairfield blinked rather stupidly. “There was no crime. It was a joke,” he explained.

  Bunny said, “Oh.” Then he laughed dutifully.

  Aunt Lovatt said, “I am sorry we will not be able to offer you much in the way of entertainment, milord, but as you know, we are in mourning.”

  “I would not be here if you weren’t.” He frowned at this rather ambiguous speech and said, “What I mean is, the pigeons would not be for sale if Mr. Hume were still alive.” It was a hard remark to reply to. After a short pause, Fairfield continued with a bow in my direction. “The pigeons will be entertainment enough for me.”

  His quizzing smile seemed almost to include me amongst the entertaining pigeons. There was an air of admiration in it.

  As we had finished tea, I said, “Would you like to go up and see them now, Lord Fairfield?”

  “Indeed I would. I am most eager to go.” In his eagerness, he leapt to his feet. I rose to accompany him. “You need not bother to show me the way, Miss Hume. A servant...” He looked around, but our servants were not so plentiful that we kept them on hand to pass us a piece of cake, or fill a teacup.

  “This way,” I said, and he followed me.

  “Do you want me to go with you?” Bunny asked.

  I had assumed he would, yet could not like to ask for his escort. That was as good as an announcement that I did not trust Fairfield.

  “I shall see that Miss Hume is safe on the staircase,” Lord Fairfield said, and took my elbow to lead me off toward the dining room.

  “It is this way,” I said, steering him right.

  “I was always interested in these old historical homes,” he said as we climbed. This compliment was wearing a trifle thin, but I smiled my pleasure and kept climbing.

  “It’s a lot of stairs, is it not?” he asked as we reached the third floor.

  “It is not much farther, milord.”

  His conversation gave way to panting. I pointed out a few of the house’s highlights. “Charles Fox stayed in that room,” I said.

  “On the servants’ floor!” he exclaimed.

  “There was a boxing match in the neighborhood. Every room was filled when he arrived unexpectedly. He wanted no more than two chairs and a bolster by the fireplace.”

  “Who was boxing?” he asked. That was his only interest in the illustrious Fox. Lord Fairfield, I feared, was not one of those gentlemen who improved on longer acquaintance. His appearance and manners were good, so that he made a fine first impression, but already he was beginning to seem shallow.

  “I believe one of them was called the Tin Man.”

  “By Jove! Wouldn’t I like to have seen that.”

  We finally reached the loft. Fairfield was puffing like a winded jade, which surprised me. I had thought a Corinthian would be in better shape. Snoad was sitting on one of the mildewed chairs reading a book when we entered. He rose and hastened forward. His employer, myself, did not receive such condescension.

  “Lord Fairfield, this is—”

  Snoad stuck out his hand and gave Fairfield’s a wrench. “Snoad. I tend the pigeons.”

  “This is Lord Fairfield,” I said with a heavy frown. I disliked his eagerness to rub shoulders with the nobility.

  “Don’t I know you?” Fairfield said, examining Snoad with keen interest.

  “I believe we met at Branksome Hall three years ago, your lordship. Kind of you to remember.”

  “Of course! Branksome Hall. The duke had a hurdle race.”

  “And you won. Fine riding, your lordship. I helped to set up the hurdles, and gave a hand with the horses.” The day obviously stood out more sharply in Snoad’s memory than in Fairfield’s. Fairfield wrinkled his brow, but did not appear to remember the details. “You were driving Beelzebub, an Arab gelding,” Snoad prodded him.

  “I would like you to give me a hand showing Lord Fairfield the pigeons, Snoad,” I said, to bring his groveling to a halt.

  He bowed to our guest. “It would be a great pleasure, your lordship.”

  He took Fairfield by the arm and began walking along the row of nests. I lingered behind, because I wanted to see what Snoad had been reading with such avid interest. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be a book of poems by Lord Byron. I soon espied something more suspicious. There was a piece of paper stuck into the book, and a patent pen on the table beside it. I had to see what he had been writing. I picked up the book, glancing to see that Snoad was not watching. He turned and leveled a menacing look at me. I set the book down.

  It was as clear as could be that he was writing up some spy message. Fortunately, Fairfield distracted Snoad with a question, and I was able to slide the piece of paper out without disturbing the book. I strolled to the other end of the loft, and with my back to them, read the paper. I had another shock in store for me. It was a poem, a love poem to a lady. It was entitled “Dove.”

  I read:

  Dove gray her eyes,

  Dove soft her sighs.

  In moonlight or sunlight,

  Love-soft the ties

  That bind me.

  Alone in the cloud

  Too fierce and too proud

  To open my mad heart.

  No love avowed.

  Joy found me.

  I stood a moment, staring at it. Was it a coded message? Or was it what it seemed, a love offering to his lady with the gray eyes? Whatever it was, I had to get it back into the book before Snoad realized I had seen it. While the men were busy at one of the nests, I quickly returned and slid the paper back into the book. Then I walked nonchalantly along and joined them.

  “Where are the males while the females are hatching the eggs?” Fairfield asked.

  “They’re about the loft,” Snoad replied. I remembered him telling me that it was the males who sat on the eggs during the day. Why did he not tell Fairfield? And even more interesting, why did Fairfield not know it, if he was a breeder as he claimed to be?

  A little later, Fairfield expressed some surprise that so many of the nests held two eggs. Two glossy white eggs were the standard. Really, the man was even more ignorant about the whole business than I was.

  “All of this is old hat to Miss Hume,” Snoad said. “Do not let us keep you, ma’am, if you have other business to attend to.”

  I had no intention of letting him run me off, and said, “It is Caesar and Cleo that Lord Fairfield is particularly interested in. Where are they? I have not seen them any of the times I have been up here recently.”

  “Cleo is in the tree, waiting for Caesar to return,” he said. I looked, and saw a bird that might have been Cleo sitting in the tree. She was almost all white, with a splash of burgundy on her chest. Her maternal grandmother was a passenger pigeon from America. Pelletier had introduced the strain into his roost for their superior size. The fleshy protuberance at the base of her beak—Papa called it a cere—was also distinctive. It was darker than most, almost black. That she dared to sit in that tree was proof enough that she was indeed Caesar’s mate. No other birds dared to touch it. Caesar had a sharp temper.

  Yet the other day, he had told me Cleo was nesting. He had said Caesar was with her. “Where is Caesar?” I asked.

  “He got bored, and is out for a flight,” Snoad replied. “While you are here, ma’am, there is something I would like to discuss with you. Now that your father is not here, I really need a helper. The birds being trained must be taken some miles from the loft and released on a regular basis, so they will learn to fly home. I shall need someone in the loft while I take the birds away, or someone to take them while I remain here.”

  “I’d be happy to do it,” Lord Fairfield said.

  “But you will only be here a few days, milord,” Snoad pointed out.

  “If you’ll cage the birds, I’ll have the groom take them out,” I told Snoad. “Just tell him where you wish them to be taken.”

  “It would be better if you could let me have a footman on
a regular basis—one person that I could give some rudimentary training,” Snoad persisted.

  I didn’t like to quibble in front of Fairfield, and agreed, sullenly, to let him have the use of the backhouse boy and a jig for a part of each day. I was thoroughly bored, but Fairfield seemed to have an inexhaustible interest in the pigeons. After the better part of an hour, I spotted Bunny in the park and left the loft.

  Bunny was just returning from the direction of the blasted pine. I dashed out to meet him. “A note from Depew—er, Martin,” he said excitedly. “He’s coming tonight—eleven o’clock, at the tree.”

  “Excellent! I have dozens of things to tell him. Fairfield is a phony, and Snoad is writing up some cryptic messages.”

  “Did you get hold of them?”

  “I caught a glimpse of one. He is hiding the message in a poem. I tried to memorize it. It was short.” We went to Papa’s study, and I wrote out what I could remember of the few lines.

  “Sounds like a love poem,” Bunny said. “Dashed pretty.”

  “Don’t be foolish. It is a message to the French. What can it mean? He mentions moonlight, you see. That could refer to the time of an attack, or a troop movement, or some such thing.”

  “What do you figure that bit about alone in the cloud means?”

  “Fierce and proud sounds like Napoleon.”

  “Except he is not alone in a cloud. Almost sounds like God.”

  “We’ll let Mr. Martin decipher this,” I said, and hid the copy in my pocket.

  It was time to dress for dinner. I looked forward to our first formal meal with Lord Fairfield. “Keep him as long as you can over port, after dinner. I’ll go up and search his rooms.”

  “Wish I could go with you.”

  “Your role is equally important, Bunny. You are the only other gentleman here, so you must delay Fairfield, to make it safe for me to do the job. We are a team.”

  “By Jove, it makes a fellow feel good to be doing something real for a change. I just wish we could tell everyone.”

  “We must not breathe a word!”

  “Mum’s the word.”

  On this solemn speech, we parted. I checked the afternoon post. There were no replies to our advertisement in the Brighton journals, nor did I expect any.

  Chapter Ten

  The feast that Cook provided was excellent. Other than that, dinner with a baron proved very little different from dinner with the vicar, or any provincial neighbor. The gentlemen pretty well monopolized the conversation, as gentlemen in the country generally do. I daresay society matrons know a few tricks to divert the talk from horses, but neither Mrs. Lovatt nor I possessed this desirable skill.

  “A dandy-looking bay mare you brought along, Lord Fairfield,” Bunny said.

  “I got her for an old song off Alvanley. He has a hunter I have my eye on as well.”

  “I’ll tell you where you can get a good hunter, and it won’t cost you a limb either. Singer, right in Hythe, has one for sale. Bred and trained in Ireland. A dandy jumper. Straight off her hocks, she can leap Soper’s fence. She’s a good hacker, too. She knows which side of the road is up.”

  “Perhaps you can introduce me to Singer.”

  “Gladly.”

  “How’s the riding hereabouts?”

  “Heather enjoys riding,” Mrs. Lovatt said, to put me forward.

  Fairfield passed along an impatient smile, before turning for Bunny’s answer. That was the way the entire two courses and two removes went. I was impatient to leave the gentlemen to their port, and get upstairs to root about Fairfield’s rooms.

  At the proper time, Auntie and I retired to the drawing room. “What a charming man Lord Fairfield is,” Auntie said.

  “He is certainly handsome,” I allowed.

  “And rich! All those houses he will inherit!”

  “And an oubliette,” I added, with a teasing smile. “Come now, Auntie, you must admit he is no conversationalist.”

  “Pooh! What has conversation to do with anything? You would be a baroness, and a marchioness one day, lording it over London society. You always wanted a Season.”

  To escape without suspicion, I said, “In that case, I had best go upstairs and refurbish my toilette.”

  “Such a pity we are in mourning, and cannot show Lord Fairfield a livelier time. Do you think, Heather, a colored shawl would be too disrespectful? Black does not do anything for you.” I was wearing my one decent mourning gown.

  “We could say I don’t have a black shawl.”

  “You are wearing a black shawl.”

  “Yes, but Fairfield would not have noticed.”

  “He does seem somewhat immune to ladies,” she admitted.

  Yet he had kissed my hand in Brighton, and gazed into my eyes. Where had his chivalry gone? Had he done it to con me into inviting him here? “Perhaps Bunny will get an offer. They hit it off uncommonly well.” On the way upstairs, I asked Thumm if Fairfield’s servants were having their dinner now, for I did not want to run into his valet.

  “They are making merry in the kitchen, Miss Hume,” he said.

  I ran upstairs, and hastened along to the Gold Suite. It was not locked. I closed the door quietly behind me. There was still sufficient light that lamps were not necessary. Fairfield had brought such a superfluity of toilet articles and clothes with him that it made searching difficult. The toilet table was littered with half a dozen unsuccessful cravats, along with a handsome array of brushes, comb, shoehorn, little lady’s hand mirror—what on earth did he need that for?—toilet water, shaving paraphernalia, nail clippers, and suede nail-polishing brush with a horn back.

  The clothespress was jammed tight with jackets, trousers, evening slippers, Hessians, top boots, and a pair of hand-knitted bedroom slippers. I quickly searched through the pockets of the clothing, again encountering a bewildering array of items, including a deal of money. Whole jingling bunches of guineas and shillings. This was a strange way of being dipped!

  My hopes rose on those frequent occasions when my hand touched paper, but it was only invitations, bills, and one billet-doux from someone called Emerald, who spelled Knightsbridge as “nites bridje” and wrote of her “tru luv.” A lightskirt, I deduced.

  I looked under the bed, under the pillow and mattress, and in desperation in the toes of his various boots and slippers. I looked in every drawer and cranny of both chambers, and finally concluded that if Lord Fairfield carried any clues, he carried them on his person. I must try to create an opportunity to get him to take off his clothes. Poor Lord Fairfield would be inundated with wine or tea before the night was over.

  I was just racing for the stairs when I remembered that I was to change my shawl. I exchanged my black cashmere for a pretty paisley patterned in rose and blue, and returned below. I need not have hurried. Bunny did his job well. We waited another half hour before the gentlemen joined us. Aunt Lovatt was becoming quite restless. If Fairfield noticed I wore a prettier shawl, he did not say so. As we dined at country hours, there was still a long evening to be filled with some entertainment for our guest.

  There was only one entertainment worthy of the name where Mrs. Lovatt is concerned. She likes a “square game,” which means cards for four. She will tolerate piquet for two in a pinch, but her first and last love is whist. She had not had a game since Papa’s death, and was suffering for the lack of it.

  “I cannot think a little square game in the privacy of our own home is ineligible, even when we are in mourning,” she said, squinting to see if Fairfield was scandalized.

  “A shilling a point?” he suggested. “As ladies are present, I do not suggest playing for real money.” A shilling a point was pretty real to us. We usually played for pennies.

  “We play for chicken stakes,” Bunny told him. “Pennies.”

  “Ah.” The paltry stakes did not diminish Fairfield’s interest one iota. He didn’t wait to call a servant, but helped Bunny set up the green baize table himself and drew forward the chairs.

>   Just as we began to take our seats, Bunny threw a spanner into the works. “I must be running along now. Enjoy your game, folks.”

  “Running along!” Mrs. Lovatt howled. “But we need you for the fourth, Mr. Smythe.”

  “Thing is, the Parish Council is meeting tonight. Shan’t be long,” he said, directing this reassurance to me. “Unless old Ned Firth gets the bit between his teeth and insists on discussing raising the rates again. But I shall be back by eleven.” His tone gave an awful significance to the hour, and again he stared at me. I nodded, in hopes that he would stop these pointed looks.

  “Must you go?” Mrs. Lovatt asked. The parish meetings were held in Hythe. Just getting there and back would take long enough. She would have said a deal more if not for our guest, who was smiling dimly at Bunny’s desertion.

  “ ‘Fraid I must. Can’t let old Firth ram through a rise in our rates.” This possibility was almost as bad as missing her game.

  Lord Fairfield came to the rescue in an unforeseen way. “We could ask Kerwood to make a fourth. He is a famous dab at cards.”

  “Kerwood?” she asked with interest. “Is that your valet, milord? We often ask Mrs. Gibbons to make up a fourth, but she is not very sharp, poor soul.”

  Fairfield blinked. “I meant Kerwood Snoad,” he said.

  “Snoad!” she said, horrified. “No, no. I shall call for Mrs. Gibbons.”

  “He often made up a fourth at Branksome Hall, when the duchess was short a player,” Fairfield added blandly. “She spoke highly of his skill.”

  I watched as Mrs. Lovatt mentally dealt with this problem. In her opinion, outside of having a title or a Royal Pavilion, the finest adornment a person could have was skill with the cards. The table was out, the chairs arranged. And Snoad had the added respectability of having played with the duchess.

  “If you think he would do, then by all means, let us ask Snoad down,” she said.

  She summoned Thumm to deliver the request, which sounded very much like an order, and we waited. After ten minutes, I was beginning to wonder if Snoad meant to decline our offer. It would not have surprised me a bit, until I remembered his love of titles. He had fawned disgustingly over Fairfield. He would come; he was just making himself decent. I felt an arrow of pity for the man. He certainly would not possess evening clothes. We ought to have told him his good jacket would do.