Within a few moments, his lordship looked up from his plate and said, “Arrow through the heart. While you sleep.”
“I must say-” I began weakly.
“Nonsense!” said her ladyship firmly.
“It is not nonsense!” protested my host. “I’m a damned sight better with the bow and arrow than you are with pistols. I’ll creep into your room through that old priest’s hole.”
“Now, there you’re out!” said her ladyship. “The priest’s hole is in Lord Dallingham’s room-the exit, in any case.”
At this, Dallingham, who had been drinking steadily from the moment of our arrival, was overcome with mirth.
“I find nothing amusing…” I tried again.
“By Jupiter!” his lordship said, “You’re right! Hmm. In that case, it shall have to be something more subtle. Perhaps when you go riding-”
“Please!” I said. “Your lordship, your ladyship… I beg pardon… not my place, really… but I can’t possibly face the next course if there is to be nothing but this talk of murder!”
There was a moment of profound silence before his lordship said, “Not face the next course? Rubbish! There’s to be lark pudding!”
And so the exchange of murder plots continued. I would have made good on my threat to excuse myself from the table, lark pudding or no, had not the former Miss Bannister looked at me so beseechingly, I forgot all else.
By the time the ladies retired to the drawing room and Lord Bingsley offered his excellent port, though, I had heard our hosts exchange no fewer than twenty threats of foul play, and had decided to leave this odd household by first light, beseeching looks or no. Miss Bannister had married a bounder, but it was his place to take her away from such humbuggery, not mine.
But Dallingham was extremely well to live by then, as the saying goes-or at least, in too much of a drunken stupor to converse. Other than expending the effort required to continue to drink, he seemed to be using whatever powers of concentration remained to him to prevent himself from falling face first into the table linen he so admired.
Sitting there over port, blowing a cloud with his lordship, I sought an excuse for an early departure. But as if reading my mind, his lordship said, “Must forgive us, Rossiter. Her ladyship and I are not much in company, as you must know. You are outraged, as any good man would be.” He paused, and looking at Dallingham, said in a low voice, “Unlike yon jackanapes! Were I twenty years younger, I’d darken his daylights! But here… well, we keep the ladies waiting. I only mean to ask you-nay, beg you-and I’m not a man who often begs!-beg you to see your way clear to remain with us another day or two.”
“My dear Lord Bingsley-” I began, but in what was becoming a habit in him, he interrupted.
“For Amelia’s sake!” he whispered, then added, in a normal speaking voice, “You’ll grow used to our havey-cavey ways, I’m sure.”
I bowed to a man who-as I was to learn-was a masterful persuader.
Two stout footmen carried the jug-bitten Lord Dallingham to his chambers that night. That his wife slept apart from him did not surprise me in the least-I only hoped that she had locked the door against him.
He did not appear at breakfast, when Lord Bingsley asked if I would be so good as to accompany his niece, who wished to ride her mare about the estate. “Going to miss Bingsley Hall, she tells me. By God, Bingsley Hall shall miss her!”
“Perhaps Lord Dallingham would like to join us,” I suggested.
“Daresay he would,” Lord Bingsley said, “if he hadn’t eaten Hull cheese! My valet informs me he shot the cat! Too blind to find the basin like a decent fellow, damn him. Wonder if he’ll be so fond of that carpet now!”
“I-I believe I shall find Miss-Lady Dallingham,” I said, feeling a bit queasy myself.
He offered to accompany me to the stables. We delayed some moments on the steps to exchange pleasantries with Lady Bingsley, who was to call upon an ailing tenant that morning. His lordship, determinining that there was some slight chill in the air, begged her to wait while her maid should fetch a shawl, and once this item was retrieved, solicitously placed it about his lady’s shoulders. He handed her up into the carriage, and her little dog as well, and then a large hamper of food for the tenant’s family, and, after receiving assurances from the coachman that he would not drive too fast over the country lanes, stood watching the carriage as it pulled away.
At the stables, he saw to it that I was very handsomely mounted on a fine gelding. I assisted his niece-who wore a delightful blue velvet riding habit-with her mare, and in the company of a groom who stayed some distance behind us, we rode out.
Lord Bingsley’s lands were in good heart, and if I had been Dallingham, no doubt I would have been estimating their yields. But my mind was wholly taken up with the thought that I had forever lost the opportunity to ask the woman beside me to become Lady Rossiter.
“How do you fare this morning, Lady Dallingham?” I asked, trying to accept that fact.
“Oh, please do not address me by that hateful name!”
“Hateful? But-”
“May I count you my friend, sir?”
“Most certainly! If there is any service I may render-”
“I am afraid, Lord Rossiter, that I have been duped.”
“By me?” I asked, aghast.
“Oh, no, Lord Rossiter! Never by you!”
“I don’ understand, Lady… er, beg pardon, but I don’t know quite how one should address-”
“Amelia,” she said. “I should like it above all things if you would call me Amelia.”
“Very well, Amelia, and you shall please call me Christopher-no, dash it! Call me Kit.”
“Do your friends call you Kit?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then, Kit,” she said-and by the saints and angels, Charles, she could have asked for the world from that moment on. She didn’t.
“I am so sorry that a man of your sensibilities was forced to… to accustom himself to the odd behavior of my aunt and uncle,” she said. “They mean well, but-”
“Mean well! Talking of poison and setting traps with old armor or contriving to make a fellow walk beneath loose roof tiles!”
“Oh, Kit, no! They are trying to get me to show a little-I believe Uncle calls it ‘rumgumption.’ ”
“I beg pardon?” I said, all at sea.
“Oh, I know I shouldn’t use cant-”
“No, no, I mean-I don’t mind it-the cant, I mean-but what the blazes have you to do with their plans to do one another a mischief?”
“One another? Oh no, Kit-”
“Discussing-over the syllabub, mind you-how they’re going to put a period to the other’s existence!”
“But that is not what they are about, Kit! I am sure… that is, I begin to wonder… well, the thing of it is, perhaps I should murder Harry!”
“What!”
“Oh, yes. It’s the only way out of this tangle I’m in.”
“My dear Amelia! Surely-”
“You see,” she said, exhibiting an inherited tendency to stop a fellow from saying what he ought to say, “Peter-he’s my half-brother, you know-Peter told me that Harry had some-some rather displeasing information about my dear aunt, and that Harry would make it public, if I didn’t marry him straight away. Only now I find out that my aunt doesn’t care a fig about any of it, that it was some old scandal from long ago, and Uncle Bingsley called me a goosecap, and said that Peter and Harry had arranged it all between them, because according to my parents’ will, a certain sum of money came to Peter on my marriage, which is why he wanted me to have a London season in the first place, which I wouldn’t have cared for at all, because really it’s quite exhausting and gives one the headache, except that it afforded me the chance to-to meet a few admirable persons, although he-they-seemed to take little interest in me, for which they can hardly be blamed, and so-and so I married Harry.”