I was ready to faint with shock. I had been estranged from my father for many years, ever since I took Holy Orders, and had never dreamed to see him in this neighbourhood. But from somewhere I drew enough strength to bow low, and to kiss the hand he extended. “Father! Sir, may I present Dr. Hansard? Edmund, Lord Hartland.”
Both, one from the height of his magnificent horse, the other an equally proud pedestrian, bowed with great civility. Neither eyed the other with any pleasure.
With less haste, the other riders had turned their mounts and gathered round us. I recognised one as Lord Ewen, whose estate adjoined Lord Wychbold’s. He greeted me far more cordially than my father had done, bidding me to sup with them that very night. “And your friend, too,” he added with a careless smile. “You must both join us for dinner and a hand of cards. It’s a bachelor establishment, Campion, so do not expect more than a mutton stew.”
“I regret that I am engaged, my Lord,” Hansard said, as I knew he would, since his love of gambling had once near ruined him and he no longer played whist for so much as a matchstick. “A friend of my dear wife’s...” he murmured.
“Another evening,” Ewen declared with a smile. “Campion shall furnish me with your address.” He nodded to me. “We sup at six-thirty.”
“Of course you will go, Tobias,” Mrs. Hansard said severely as, in the chaise on our way back to Langley Park, I explained what had happened. “You are the first to preach reconciliation and forgiveness: Now you must act on them. I have no doubt that you parted from your father with great anger on both sides, but in my experience, that simply shows how much love you bear for one another. And my dear Edmund is quite right to have cried off, so that you may have private conversation with Lord Hartland, though I hope he will present himself on a more eligible occasion — no country doctor can afford to spurn a possibly lucrative acquaintance,” she added, impish dimples belying the mercenary motives she suggested.
Silenced by her logic, Edmund and I exchanged a sheepish glance. Edmund recovered more quickly than I. “But we have far more important matters to discuss. What gossip did you two old biddies dish over your tea?”
Since, with her fine complexion, excellent teeth, and elegant figure, Maria might have passed for a lady ten or more years her junior, to stigmatise her as an old biddy was a gross slander. But it earned him no worse a rebuke than an ironic raising of her eyebrow. “No one has left the village in a hurry, man or woman. There has been no talk of broken betrothals. All is, it seems, perfectly well. I must tell you, however, that Mrs. Hendry’s little serving-maid looked at me as if I were an avenging angel when I asked how she and her family did. And Mrs. Hendry reports more gossiping in corners, a greater sense of unease about the village, than is usual. In short, my dears, everyone knows something and no one dares admit anything.”
Edmund nodded.
“I rely on you to be our eyes and ears at Ewen Court tonight, Tobias,” he declared.
The murder might be on everyone’s lips, in everyone’s thoughts, but my father took a different view. “Investigating a crime! With some bumpkin sawbones!” he repeated, so that the words, originally spoken quietly, echoed round the dining room. “You are a man of the cloth, Tobias, not some flea-bitten parish constable.”
Ewen, perhaps shamefaced, though the amount of port he had consumed made it hard to tell, explained that Dr. Hansard was a medical man of considerable reputation. As for the constable, none of the small villages in the area had such a representative of the law.
“Then it is about time you did,” my father growled, topping up his own glass. Such were his potations that I was alarmed; many a time I had seen an evening like this followed by many days of painful, gout-ridden repentance.
Soon cards were called for. Although, unlike Edmund, I had no fear of gambling, I had neither taste nor money for the occupation. So at last I made my excuses and left, with an odd sense that my action irritated and pleased my father in equal measure.
I make no excuse for failing to concentrate on the journey home. My mind, when I let it wander, was still afflicted with images of the crucified man. Then there was my strange reconciliation with my father, in which nothing at all was said about the six or seven years since our last meeting. Titus was used to my absentmindedness, and was as surefooted as any horse, but even he could not have been calm in the face of two men jumping up in front of him and grabbing his bridle. Wrenching me from the saddle, they set about me with a will. I tried to fight back, but at last I lost my footing and slipped into the darkness surrounding me.
The first face I saw was the dour verger’s. Then Edmund’s swam into view.
“Stay where you are, Tobias. You have taken a rare beating. It is only thanks to Mr. Weller here that you escaped worse. He saw you lying in a ditch and gathered you up and brought you here to his own home.”
I managed to frame a few words of gratitude. “Titus? My horse, Mr. Weller?”
“Long gone. Run off. Stolen. Who knows?”
I could not hold back a deep groan. Titus and I were old friends — I had depended on him to take me to deathbeds and weddings alike.
“And I am come to take you home to Langley Park, where Maria is even now preparing you a bed. I don’t think any bones are broken, my young friend, but you are as bruised as if you had taken on the great Cribb himself. Let me help you into the fresh garments I have brought for you.”
Even as I pulled on my breeches — an agonising task — I heard a commotion outside the cottage. Against the low drone of the verger’s protests, a man’s voice rose in desperation and anger. Edmund went out to see what the matter was, returning long-faced.
“Here’s a pretty pickle. I have one patient who should be conveyed as swiftly as possible to his sickbed, and I have another who has been brought to bed of a child and is likely to die. Can you remain here, Tobias, awhile longer, if Mr. Weller permits?”
I forced my arms into my coat. “Indeed I cannot stay here. My place is with you and the dying woman, Edmund, as well you must know. If you would be kind enough to lend me an arm — and you, Mr. Weller, if you please — then I can pray while you heal.”
The wretched young man likely to lose his wife and his son was distraught twice over, weeping that his son would die unbaptised. I sent him reluctant but hot-foot to the church, for holy water and wine and wafer. His son would be baptised and his wife receive the Sacrament on her deathbed.
“So both live? Edmund, what a miracle! But Tobias should be in bed — no arguments now.”
I could not argue. Nor could I tell how long I slept.
There was no sign of Hansard when I awoke to find Maria sponging my face and hands with lavender water.
“Edmund left these drops for you,” she said, “Only think, he has already been summoned to Ewen Court to treat one of the gentlemen there. How wonderful it would be if he became their regular medical man.”
“It would indeed,” I agreed. Idly I wondered who needed his ministrations; I also wondered if he had been admitted to the front door, or if, like many a country doctor, had been forced to present himself at the servants’ entrance.
Voices downstairs and a tap at my chamber door took Maria from my side. In her absence I resumed my drowsing state, somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, dimly aware that whoever attacked me must have been provoked by our questions.
Edmund returned home with a huge basket of fruit from Lord Ewen’s succession-houses and an even larger smile. “You’ll never guess who my patient was,” he said gleefully, his enthusiasm distracting me as he embarked on the painful process of replacing my various bandages. “Lord Hartland himself! Yes, of course — the gout. I prescribed for him a lowering diet and perhaps a sojourn in Bath, where you might do well to accompany him to allow those bruises to heal. The inner ones, Tobias, as well as the outer ones. But perhaps you are two men who will always love each other more when you do not have to rub along cheek by jowl. Certainly neither of you is in any position to visit the other at the moment. Almost done — hold still awhile longer! But he wants above all to hand over your assailants to the justices. Like you, he believes Dr. Coates would be well placed to know the cause of all the unhappiness in the village, and has promised to locate him.”