The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes (London Highwaymen, #2)(35)

Chapter 16




Rob was still at the kitchen table, on his second cup of tea, when he made the acquaintance of yet another elderly person, this one even older than the last two. The average age of residents in this house had to be damned near a hundred.

“And who are you?” asked the man. His gray hair was tied in a neat queue and he wore knee breeches and a pair of spectacles with thick lenses. He was, Rob supposed, the butler.

“Robert Brooks.” Rob wasn’t sure why he felt compelled to use his full name. He didn’t have much to do with butlers and had to admit he was a little bit awed. “I brought Marian from London.” That made him sound like a coachman—which, he supposed, wasn’t far from the mark.

“Marian?” the man asked sharply.

“The Duchess of Clare,” Rob said, correcting himself.

Some confusion dissolved from the man’s face. “A grand lady. A fine figure of a woman.”

That wouldn’t be how Rob would describe Marian, but he supposed it wasn’t untrue, if one’s ideal of womanhood extended to scrappy termagants with acid tongues, which Rob’s admittedly did. “Indeed. I made a pot of tea, if you care for some.” Rob hoped he wasn’t being presumptuous.

“Can’t stand the stuff.” The butler instead passed through a door and emerged a moment later with a bottle of brandy. “Foul day. Have this instead. Do you a world of good.” He splashed a generous quantity into Rob’s cup and then another few inches into one of the empty cups. Rob murmured his thanks.

“One of Lucy’s gets won a hundred guineas at Newmarket. Richard was a damned fool to sell him. A hundred guineas, I tell you.”

“That’s quite a sum,” Rob agreed.

“I should say so.” The man fixed him with dark eyes that must have once been coal black but were now clouded over. He narrowed them and pointed a bony finger at Rob. “Drink your brandy to ward off the chill, young man.”

Rob did as he was told. He didn’t much care for brandy but the way the butler was looking at him would have got him to drink candle wax.

“No sign of the rain letting up, is there? Probably have to find a bed for the duchess. Eleanor will be beside herself.”

Rob didn’t know who Eleanor was, but if the pattern held then she would be approaching a hundred and ten. “I believe she’s taking Hester’s room.”

“Dear me, no, can’t have that. You’ll have to tell Eleanor yourself, because I need to make sure Lucy’s dry.” He rose to his feet and Rob followed suit, not liking the way the older man wobbled.

“I can check on Lucy myself,” Rob offered. There was no way this man was going to make it through the muddy bog that was the expanse of ground between the house and the stable without coming to grief.

“Father!”

Rob turned to see Marian in the kitchen doorway.

“You weren’t in your room.” Marian approached the old man, reaching for his arm. He took a shaky step backward and lost his footing. Rob caught him, the old man’s frame a negligible weight in his arms.

“Your mistress would not like to hear that you’ve been running about with no shoes or cap,” the man told Marian, firmly but not unkindly, as he regained his balance. “I suggest you do something about that before she returns.”

“I see,” Marian said slowly, her face doing something complicated. “What a very good idea. What if I walk you upstairs first?”

Hester appeared then, red-faced, out of breath, and full of apologies. Pleading and coaxing, she got the man to follow her upstairs.

“Your father,” Rob said unnecessarily once they were alone.

Marian began opening and shutting cupboards and drawers, as if performing an inventory, or as if the solution to all her troubles might be found among the ladles. “He’s the only one who’s unaware of it.”

Rob didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t imagine someone he loved not knowing him. “He’s very old,” he said.

“He was past fifty when I was born.” She opened a door on the wall opposite the hearth and peered in. “Larder. Some butter and cheese. Oh, and a ham. Well, that’s the first good news I’ve had today, and it’s a ham.”

“He was about to go outside to check on a horse named Lucy.”

She stilled with her hand on the door. “Lucy’s a stallion back at Chiltern Hall.”

“Lucy is a stallion?”

“Short for Lucifer. He was horrible as a two-year-old but Marcus and I doted on him and we got him sorted out. Father thought his name was indecent, so he shortened it to Lucy.” She turned to face Rob. “He was going to go outside? Heaven help us. Hester and Nurse left him alone to find clean bedsheets. He has to be watched every minute of the day and night.” She pulled at the cuffs of a gray woolen gown that was too short in the sleeves and too wide everywhere else.

“Who is Eleanor?”

“My mother. She died when I was a baby.”

Rob wondered how much of the confusion that the elderly experienced had to do with the fact that the people—and animals, apparently—who filled their memories were no longer around, and the insides of their minds no longer matched the world outside.

It occurred to Rob that when the earl spoke of the Duchess of Clare, he had meant Marian’s predecessor, Lord Holland’s mother. It also occurred to him that he had just had a conversation with an earl. He didn’t think he had ever done that before. He certainly hadn’t wanted to. Christ, it had been bad enough when Rob had thought him a butler.