Lord John and the Private Matter (Lord John Grey #1)

In Hal’s absence, command of the regiment devolved upon its two regular Colonels, Harry Quarry and Bernard Sydell. Grey had had not the slightest hesitation in choosing to whom to make his report. Sydell was an elderly man, crotchety and strict, with little knowledge of his troops and less interest in them.

Observing the inferno in progress, one of the ever-watchful servants came silently forward to place a small porcelain dish on Quarry’s chest, lest the fuming ashes of his cigar set his waistcoat on fire. Quarry ignored this, puffing rhythmically and making occasional small growling noises between his teeth.

Grey’s cheroot had burnt itself out by the time Quarry removed the porcelain dish from his chest and the soggy remains of his own cigar from his mouth. He sat up and sighed deeply.

“No help for it,” he said. “You’ll have to know.”

“Know what?”

“We think O’Connell was a spy.”

Astonishment and dismay vied for place in Grey’s bosom with a certain feeling of satisfaction. He’d known there was something fishy about the situation in Brewster’s Alley—and it wasn’t codfish.

“A spy for whom?” They were alone; the ubiquitous servant had disappeared momentarily, but Grey nonetheless glanced round and lowered his voice.

“We don’t know.” Quarry squashed the stump of his cigar into the dish and set it aside. “That was why your brother decided to leave him be for a bit after we began to suspect him—in hopes of discovering his paymaster, once the regiment was back in London.”

That made sense; while O’Connell might have gathered useful military information in the field, he would have found it infinitely easier to pass it on in the seething anthill of London—where men of every nation on earth mingled daily in the streams of commerce that flowed up the Thames—than in the shoulder-rubbing confines of a military camp.

“Oh, I see,” Grey said, shooting a sharp glance at Quarry as the light dawned. “Hal took advantage of the gossip regarding the regimental posting, didn’t he? Stubbs told me after luncheon that he’d heard from DeVries that we were definitely set for France again—likely Calais. I take it that was misdirection, for O’Connell’s benefit?”

Quarry regarded him blandly. “Wasn’t announced officially, was it?”

“No. And we take it that the coincidence of such an unofficial decision and the sudden demise of Sergeant O’Connell is sufficient to be … interesting?”

“Depends on your tastes, I s’pose,” Quarry said, heaving a deep sigh. “Damn nuisance, I call it.”

The servant came quietly back into the room, bearing a humidor in one hand, a rack of pipes in the other. The supper hour was drawing to a close, and those members who liked a smoke to settle their digestions would be coming down the hallway shortly, each to claim his own pipe and his preferred chair.

Grey sat frowning for a moment.

“Why was … the gentleman in question … suspected?”

“Can’t tell you that.” Quarry lifted one shoulder, leaving it unclear as to whether his reticence was a matter of ignorance or of official discretion.

“I see. So perhaps my brother is in France—and perhaps he isn’t?”

A slight smile twitched the white scar on Quarry’s cheek.

“You’d know better than I would, Grey.”

The servant had gone out again, to fetch the other humidors; several members kept their personal blends of tobacco and snuff at the club. He could already hear the stir from the dining room, of scraping chairs and postprandial conversation. Grey leaned forward, ready to rise.

“But you had him followed, of course—O’Connell. Someone must have kept a close eye on him in London.”

“Oh, yes.” Quarry shook himself into rough order, brushing ash from the knees of his breeches and pulling down his rumpled waistcoat. “Hal found a man. Very discreet, well-placed. A footman employed by a friend of the family—your family, that is.”

“And that friend would be …”

“The Honorable Joseph Trevelyan.” Heaving himself to his feet, Quarry led the way out of the smoking room, leaving Grey to follow as he might, senses reeling from more than tobacco smoke.

It all made a horrid sense, though, he thought, following Quarry toward the door. Trevelyan’s family and Grey’s had been associated for the last couple of centuries, and it was in some part Joseph Trevelyan’s friendship with Hal that had led to his betrothal to Olivia in the first place.

It wasn’t a close friendship; one founded on a commonality of association, clubs, and political interests, rather than on personal affection. Still, if Hal had been looking for a discreet man to put on O’Connell’s trail, it would have been necessary to look outside the army—for who knew what alliances O’Connell had formed, both within the regiment and outside it? And so, evidently, Hal had spoken to his friend Trevelyan, who had recommended his own footman … and it was simply a matter of dreadful irony that he, Grey, should now be obliged to interfere in Trevelyan’s personal life.

Outside the Beefsteak, the doorman had procured a commercial carriage; Quarry was already into it, beckoning Grey impatiently.

“Come along, come along! I’m starving. We’ll go up to Kettrick’s, shall we? They do an excellent eel pie there. I could relish an eel pie, and perhaps a bucket or two of stout to go along. Wash the smoke down, what?”

Grey nodded, setting his hat on the seat beside him where it wouldn’t be crushed. Quarry stuck his head out the window and shouted up to the driver, then pulled it in and relapsed back onto the grimy squabs with a sigh.

“So,” Quarry went on, raising his voice slightly to be heard over the rattle and squeak of the carriage, “this man, Trevelyan’s footman—Byrd, his name is, Jack Byrd—he took up rooms across from the slammerkin O’Connell lived with. Been following the Sergeant to and fro, up and down London, for the past six weeks.”

Grey glanced out of the window; the weather had kept fine for several days, but was about to break. Thunder growled in the distance, and he could feel the coming rain in the air that chilled his face and freshened his lungs.

“What does this Byrd say occurred, then, the night that O’Connell was killed?”

“Nothing.” Quarry settled his wig more firmly on his head as a gust of moisture-laden wind swept through the carriage.

“He lost O’Connell?”

Quarry’s blunt features twisted wryly.

“No, we’ve lost Jack Byrd. Man hasn’t been seen or heard of since the night O’Connell was killed.”

The carriage was slowing, the driver chirruping to his team as they made the turn into the Strand. Grey settled his cloak about his shoulders and picked up his hat, in anticipation of their arrival.

“No sign of his body?”

“None. Which rather suggests that whatever happened to O’Connell, it wasn’t a simple brawl.”

Grey rubbed at his face, rasping the bristles on his jaw. He was hungry, and his linen was grimy after the day’s exertions. The clammy feel of it made him feel seedy and irritable.

“Which rather suggests that whatever happened wasn’t the fault of Scanlon, then—for why should he be concerned with Byrd?” He wasn’t sure whether to be pleased at this deduction or not. He knew the apothecary had been lying to him in some way—but at the same time, he felt some sympathy for Mrs. O’Connell. She would be in a bad way if Scanlon was taken up for murder and hanged or transported—and a worse one, were she to be accused of conspiracy in the affair.

The opposite bench was harlequined with light and shadow as they clopped slowly past a group of flambeaux-men, lighting a party home. He saw Quarry shrug, obviously as irritable as he was himself from lack of food.

“If Scanlon had spotted Byrd following O’Connell, he might have put Byrd out of the way, as well—but why bother to hide it? A brawl might produce multiple bodies, easy as one. They often do, God knows.”

“But if it was someone else,” Grey said slowly, “someone who wanted O’Connell out of the way, either because he asked too much or because they feared he might give them away?…”

“The spymaster? Or his representative, at least. Could be. Again, though—why hide the body, if he did for Byrd, too?”

The alternative was obvious.

“He didn’t kill Byrd. He bought him off.”

“Damn likely. Directly I heard of O’Connell’s death, I sent a man to search the place he was living, but he didn’t find a thing. And Stubbs had a good look round the widow’s place, as well, while you were there—but not a bean, he says. Not a paper in the place.”

He’d seen Stubbs poking round as he made arrangements for the payment of O’Connell’s pension to his widow, but had paid no particular attention at the time. It was true, though; Mrs. O’Connell’s room was spartan in its furnishing, completely lacking in books or papers of any kind.

“What were they searching for?”

The bearlike growl that emerged from the shadows in reply might have been Quarry, or merely his stomach giving voice to its hunger.

“Don’t know for sure what it might look like,” Quarry admitted reluctantly. “It will be writing of some kind, though.”

“You don’t know? What sort of thing is it—or am I not allowed to know that?”

Quarry eyed him, fingers drumming slowly on the seat beside him. Then he shrugged; official discretion be damned, evidently.

“Just before we came back from France, O’Connell took the ordnance requisitions into Calais. He was late—all the other regiments had turned in their papers days before. The damn fool clerk had left the lot just sitting on his desk, if you can believe it! Granted, the office was locked, but still …”

Returning from a leisurely luncheon, the clerk had discovered the door forced, the desk ransacked—and every scrap of paper in the office gone.

“I shouldn’t have thought one man could carry the amount of paper to be found in an office of that sort,” Grey said, half-joking.

Quarry flipped one hand, impatient.

“It was a clerk’s hole, not the office proper. Nothing else there was important—but the quarterly ordnance requisitions for every British regiment between Calais and Prague!…”

Grey pursed his lips, nodding in acknowledgment. It was a serious matter. Information on troop movements and disposition was highly sensitive, but such plans could be changed, if it became known that the intelligence had fallen into the wrong hands. The munitions requirements for a regiment could not be altered—and the sum total of that information would tell an enemy almost to the gun what strength and what weaponry each regiment possessed.

“Even so,” he objected. “It must have been a massive amount of paper. Not the sort of thing a man could easily conceal about his person.”

“No, it would have taken a large rucksack, or a sail bag—something of that sort—to cart it all away. But cart it away someone did.”

The alarm had been raised promptly, of course, and a search instigated, but Calais was a medieval warren of a place, and nothing had been found.

“Meanwhile, O’Connell disappeared—quite properly; he was given three days’ leave when he took the requisitions in. We hunted for him; found him on the second day, smelling of drink and looking as though he hadn’t slept for the whole of the time.”

“Which would be quite as usual.”

“Yes, it would. But that’s also what you’d expect a man to look like who’d sat up for two days and nights in a hired room, making a précis of that mass of paper and turning it into something a good bit smaller and more portable—feeding the requisitions into the fire as he went.”

“So they weren’t ever found? The originals?”

“No. We watched O’Connell carefully; he had no chance to pass on the information to anyone after that—and we think it unlikely that he handed it on before we found him.”

“Because now he’s dead—and because Jack Byrd has disappeared.”

“Rem acu tetigisti,” Quarry replied, then snorted, half-pleased with himself.

Grey smiled in spite of himself. “You have touched the matter with a needle”; it meant, “you’ve put your finger on it.” Probably the only bit of Latin Quarry recalled from his schooldays, other than cave canem.

“And was O’Connell the only suspect?”

“No, damn it. Hence the difficulty. We couldn’t simply arrest him and sweat the truth out of him with no more evidence than the fact of his being there. At least six other men—all from different regiments, damn it!—were there during the relevant time, as well.”

“I see. So the other regiments are now quietly investigating their potential black sheep?”

“They are. On the other hand,” Quarry added judiciously, “the other five are still alive. Which might be an indication, eh?”

The coach stopped, and the sounds and smells of Kettrick’s Eel-Pye House floated through the window: laughter and talk, the sizzle of food and clank of wooden plates and pie tins. The brine-smell of jellied eels and ale and the solace of floury pies lapped round them, warm and comforting, spiced with the sauce of alcoholic conviviality.

“Do we know for certain how O’Connell was killed? Did anyone from the regiment see the body?” Grey asked suddenly, as Quarry descended heavily to the pavement.

“No,” Quarry said, not looking round, but heading for the door with single-minded determination. “You’re going to go and do that tomorrow, before they bury the bugger.”