Miss Wonderful (The Dressmakers 1)

But she didn’t dare have the law on him, because she knew she didn’t have a scrap of real evidence against him.

She’d persecuted him, and it was the old man’s fault, for letting her do as she pleased. He let her run roughshod over people who knew more than her, never caring if it was almost the same as sending a man to the workhouse.

This was Caleb’s thinking, and the more he stewed about it, the less he liked the idea of traveling all the way to Northumberland, nursing the old dodo and looking after him like he was royalty.

If Jackson had only gone away, like he was supposed to, Caleb could have poured some more cordial down the crackbrain’s gullet early last night and dropped him into the nearest abandoned mine. The hill was honeycombed with old mines and shafts. Accidents happened all the time. People would think Mr. O took a tumble, like he was bound to do, sooner or later, with his wandering the hills like he did, in every kind of weather. No one would be surprised when they found his body. If they ever found it.

But Jackson wouldn’t go, and now they were stuck, the three of them, in this smoky little hovel—and Mr. O, being a gentleman, got the one bed, and all the best victuals, and even wine, if you please.

Wednesday night passed into Thursday morning, and the cordial’s effects having worn off, the old man tried to give them the slip. After that, they had to start dosing him regular with the laudanum Caleb happened to have on hand—in case of mining accidents, he said.

But Jackson was the one who dosed their prisoner, and he was almighty stingy with the drug—only enough to keep Mr. O smiling and dreamy and happy to sit in one place, looking at an old twig or a feather for hours on end.

As the morning wore on, Caleb’s patience wore down, too. “The day’s wasting, and Northumberland ain’t getting any closer,” he told Jackson.

“I’ll see about hiring a carriage,” Jackson said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

He soon left, taking their one horse and, to Caleb’s vexation, the laudanum bottle.

ALISTAIR did not reach Oldridge Hall until well into afternoon. He found the place nearly deserted, most of the staff being out assisting with the search for Mr. Oldridge.

Three separate parties were out combing the botanist’s usual haunts. Sir Roger Tolbert had organized a party to search the area about Matlock and Matlock Bath. Captain Hughes and his group were covering the southeasterly portion of Longledge Hill. Mirabel and her servants were working their way over the vast estate itself.

Mrs. Entwhistle remained at Oldridge Hall as search coordinator, receiving and dispatching messages from the various parties. When Alistair was shown into the library, he found her at the writing desk.

She did not waste time with social niceties but promptly apprised him of the situation.

Mr. Oldridge never missed dinner, she reminded him. It was only very rarely that he could be prevailed upon to dine away from home. When he failed to appear Wednesday evening, Benton immediately surmised a mishap. Mr. Oldridge never became so lost as to fail to return home in time for dinner. He was never hindered by inclement weather, and yesterday had not become inclement until well past the appointed dinner hour. The only possible explanation was that he had met with an accident. This was why Benton instantly sent word to his mistress. As he reasoned, if Mr. Oldridge turned up in the interval, it would be easy enough to send another messenger to intercept Miss Oldridge as she was returning.

Mr. Oldridge did not, however, turn up in the interval. He had not dined elsewhere.

“Consequently, one can only hope the mishap was a minor one,” Mrs. Entwhistle said.

Alistair remembered his own tumble into the Briar Brook. A sprained ankle. A minor concussion. He might have broken his neck.

“Mr. Oldridge has been wandering the countryside most of his life,” he said. “He is nimbler than I—really, he is as nimble as a boy, I think. Who knows these hills and dales better than he? It cannot be anything but a minor accident. And with so many engaged in the search, he is sure to be found before the day is out. Please tell me how I can help.”

“You’d better go to Mirabel,” the lady said. “She knows what she’s about, but she could do with moral support.” The ex-governess fixed him with a steely stare, which was a disconcerting contrast to her plumply feminine appearance. “You are capable of providing that, I trust?”

While disconcerting, the stare—which had surely reduced erring children to terrified obedience—was nothing to the Gorgon glare his paternal grandmother could administer. “Certainly ma’am,” he said, quite uncowed, “that and whatever else the lady requires.”

Nearly an hour later he found Mirabel at the outlook where, he now realized, his perceptions of Longledge had first begun to change. She was mounted upon the imperturbable gelding rather than the high-strung Sophy, but she was alone, and in a very short time it would grow dark.

He had come in the nick of time.

She heard his advancing hoofbeats and turned his way.

“You are vexed with me,” she said, reading his countenance all too easily.

“Of course I’m vexed,” he said. “You’re alone, the ground is still slippery from last night’s storm, and I know you hadn’t much sleep. It is a dangerous combination.”

“Have you come to look after me?” she said.

“I am your betrothed, not your nursemaid,” he said.

“I’ve come to help you look for your father. You should have sent word to me before you left this morning. But you were too upset to think of it, I daresay. Come, you cannot remain here staring at the moors and making yourself heartsick. We shall find him.”

“I didn’t want to wake you so early,” she said. “You never get enough sleep. And I’d hoped it was a mistake: that Papa had appointed to dine with one of the neighbors, and as usual forgot to tell anybody. All the way home, I was expecting to meet with a messenger telling me he’d dined with the Dunnets, for instance, and ended up spending the night because of the storm. I kept telling myself, ‘Any minute now, I shall turn back, and go to London, where I shall cause Mr. Carsington no end of aggravation.’ ” Her voice wobbled. “Alistair, I mean. It will take me a while to get used to provoking you by your Christian name.”

“You may provoke me by any name you like,” he said.

“Only come away from this place. It is desperately romantic, but at present not conducive to optimistic thinking.

One ought to come here to brood, Mirabel, not to plan how best to run a missing parent to ground.”

She turned away from the moors and started with him down the path.

“He cannot be in any danger,” Alistair told her. “He knows the place too well, every last twig, moss, and lichen of it. You must not make yourself anxious.”

“Yes, he is somewhere safe at this moment, no doubt,” she said. “Perhaps in one of the hamlets he likes to visit. He is probably quite comfortable in someone’s parlor or the local inn, talking about Sumatran camphor trees and reducing everyone in hearing range to a helpless stupor.”

MR. Oldridge was far from safe, though he was reducing his lone listener to a helpless stupor.

The sun was setting, the laudanum was wearing off, and the old dodo was lecturing Caleb Finch about Egyptians and poppies.

It had started out in Greek, which Caleb couldn’t understand a word of, and didn’t see any reason to, he said, as it was a heathen language, made to worship false gods.

“In eastern parts,” said his aggravating prisoner, “it is the language of the Christian church, and no more a pagan tongue than Latin.”

“Popery is as good as paganism,” said Finch.

Mr. O sighed and said, “In his great work, the Odyssey, Homer tells of Helen, a daughter of Zeus, who poured nepenthe into the wine the men were drinking at the feast, to make them forget all evil. She learned of this medicine, Homer tells us, from the wife of Thos of Egypt, where the fertile land produces so many balms, some good, and some dangerous. The men at the feast were gr

ieving for their friends and family lost in the Trojan War, you see, and the opium mixture she put into their wine gave them temporary forgetfulness. A respite. That is all I meant,” he said, half to himself. “A way to think of terrible things with less distress. I thought he might sleep better, poor boy. Virgil wrote of the poppy, as did Pliny the Elder.”

“I wish I had some of that elderberry cordial,” Caleb said under his breath. “That and the bottle Jackson took. I’d help you forget, all right.”

He walked to the door—the hovel was windowless—and looked out. As soon as it was dark, he promised himself, he’d lead the old man out. A blow to the head, a long drop into a mine shaft, and that’d be the end of his preaching and rubbing it in how he was an educated gentleman who knew Latin and Greek. That’d be the end of his prattling on and on about mosses, poppies, and heathens.

Then the red-haired hussy would be sorry. And in time she’d be sorrier still. Pretty soon Lord Gordmor’s canal would cut right through her fine meadows and farms and precious trees. Every day, all the rest of her life, she’d have to look at it.