He was not sure what he had expected of Simon Coles, but the reality was different. The lawyer was a slight young man, with sandy hair, a sprinkling of freckles across a thin, homely face, and a withered leg.
“Lord John Grey…Major Grey?” he exclaimed, leaning eagerly forward over his desk. “But I know you—know of you, I should say,” he corrected himself.
“You do?” Once again, Grey found himself uneasy at being the unwitting subject of conversation. Perhaps Edgar had mentioned his impending arrival; he had sent a note ahead to Blackthorn Hall.
“Yes, yes! I am sure of it! Let me show you.” Reaching for the padded crutch that leaned against the wall, he tucked it deftly beneath one arm and swung himself out from behind the desk, heading so briskly for the bookshelves across the room that Grey was obliged to step out of the way.
“Now where…?” the lawyer murmured, running a finger across a row of books. “Ah, yes, just here, just here!”
Pulling down a large double folio, he bundled it across to the desk, where he flung it open and flicked the pages, revealing it to be a sort of compendium, wherein Grey recognized accounts from various newspapers, carefully cut out and pasted onto the pages. For variety, he glimpsed a number of illustrated broadsheets, and even a few ballad sheets, tucked amongst the pages.
“There! I knew it must be the same, though Grey is not an uncommon name. The circumstances, though—I daresay you found those sufficiently uncommon, did you not, Major?” He looked up with sparkling eyes, his finger planted on a cutting.
Unwilling, Grey felt still compelled to look, and was mortified to read a recently published and highly colored account of his saving a cannon—the gun reported as being named “Tod Belcher”—from the hands of a ravening horde of Austrians after the tragic and untimely demise of the gun’s captain. He, Grey, having personally swept an oncoming Austrian cavalry officer from his saddle, then pinned him to the ground with his sword through the officer’s coat, demanded and accepted his surrender, and then (by report) had fought the gun virtually single-handed, the rest of the crew having been slain by the accident which took the life of “Philbert Lester,” the doomed captain, whose detached limbs had been scattered to the four winds, and his bowels torn out. Rather oddly, the explosion of the cannon that had concluded this remarkable passage at arms was treated in a single offhand sentence.
Whoever had written this piece of bombast had managed, to Grey’s amazement, both to spell his own name correctly—scarcely a blessing, in the circumstances—and to note that the event had occurred in Germany.
“But Mr. Coles!” Grey said, aghast. “This—this—it is the most arrant poppycock!”
“Oh, now, Major, you must not be modest,” Coles assured him, wringing him by the hand. “You must not seek to lessen the honor your presence grants to my office, you know!”
He laughed merrily, and Grey, with a feeling of helplessness, found himself obliged to smile and bow in an awkward parody of graciousness.
Coles’s clerk, a youth named Boggs, was summoned in to meet the hero of Crefeld, then sent off in a state of wide-eyed excitement to fetch refreshment—against Grey’s protests—from the local ordinary. Where, Grey reflected grimly, he was no doubt presently recounting the whole idiotic story to anyone who would listen. He resolved to finish his business in Mudling Parva as quickly as possible, and decamp back to London before Edgar and Maude got wind of the newspaper story.
As it was, he had considerable trouble in getting Mr. Coles to attend to the matter in hand, as the lawyer wished to ask him any number of questions regarding Germany, his experiences in the army, his opinion of the current political situation, and what it was like to kill someone.
“What is it like…” Grey said, thoroughly taken aback. “To—In battle, I suppose you mean?”
“Well, yes,” said Coles, his eagerness slightly—though only slightly—abating. “Surely you have not been slaughtering your fellow citizens in cold blood, Major?” He laughed, and Grey joined—politely—in the laughter, wondering what in God’s name to say next.
He was fortunately saved by Coles’s own sense of propriety—evidently he did have one, overborne though it was by gusts of enthusiasm.
“You must forgive me, Major,” Coles said, sobering a little. “I am sure the matter is a sensitive one. I should not have asked—and I beg pardon for so intruding upon your feelings. It is only that I have always had a strong and most…abiding admiration for the profession of war.”
“You do?”
“Yes. Oh, there you are, Boggs! Thank you, thank you…yes, you will have some wine, I hope, Major? Allow me, please. Yes,” he repeated, settling back in his chair and waving his reluctant clerk firmly out of the room. “Many of the men of my family in previous generations have taken up commissions—my great-grandfather fought in Holland—and I should no doubt have pursued the same career myself, were it not for this.” He gestured ruefully toward his leg.
“Thus my fascination with the subject. I have made a small study of military history”—this was obviously modesty speaking, Grey thought, judging by the impressive collection on the shelves behind him, which seemed to include everyone from Tacitus and Caesar to King Frederick of Prussia—“and have even been so bold as to compose a brief essay upon the history of siege warfare. I, um, do not suppose you have ever been involved personally in a siege, have you, Major?”
“No, no,” Grey said hurriedly. He had been penned up in Edinburgh Castle with the rest of the government troops during the Jacobite occupation of the city, but it was a siege in name only; the Jacobites had had no thought of battering their way into the castle, let alone of starving out the inhabitants.
“Mr. Coles,” he said, inspired by thought of battering rams, and seeing that the only way of progressing in his own interest was by bluntness, “I collect that you are acquainted with the Thackeray family—specifically, with a Miss Barbara Thackeray?”
Coles blinked, looking almost comically nonplussed.
“Oh! Yes,” he said, a little uncertain. “Of course. I, er, have the honor to consider myself a friend of the family.” Meaning, Grey thought, that Mr. Thackeray was probably unaware of Coles’s friendship with Barbara.
“I flatter myself that I may count myself a friend to them, as well,” Grey said, “though our acquaintance is so new.” He smiled, and Coles, sunny by disposition, smiled back.
An understanding thus established, there seemed no reason to avoid mention of Mr. Lister with Coles, and so Grey put the matter before him straightforwardly.
“Miss Barbara said that she had had a note from her sister, forwarded by your kind offices,” Grey said carefully, and Coles blushed.
“I should have taken it to her father, I know,” he said awkwardly. “But…but…she…I mean, Miss Barbara Thackeray is…”
“A friend,” Grey finished for him, echoing Barbara Thackeray’s own words—spoken, he noted, with precisely the same blushing intonation. “Of course.”
Skating away from that delicate subject, he said, “Mr. Lister believes there is a possibility that Anne Thackeray is or was with child. From something that Mr. Thackeray let slip during our conversation, I believe he may have the same impression. I wonder, Mr. Coles, whether you can shed any light on this possibility?”
For the first time, Coles looked uneasy.
“I have no idea,” he said. Grey thought it was as well the young lawyer was a country solicitor; someone with so little talent for lying would fare ill before the Bench.
“Mr. Coles,” he said, letting a bit of steel show in his voice, “it is a question of the young woman’s life.”
The lawyer paled a little, the freckles on his cheeks standing out.
“Oh. Well…I, er…”
“Did you receive any further communications from Anne Thackeray?”
“Yes,” Coles said, succumbing with a distinct air of relief. “Just the one. It was addressed to me, rather than to Barbara—I should not have read it, else. It was written just before the news came of Philip’s death; she did not know of it.”
Grey noted the familiarity of the Christian name, and thought that Coles must have known Philip Lister personally—but of course he did. This was not London; everyone knew everyone—and very likely, everything about them.
Anne Thackeray had written in desperation, saying that she had recently discovered herself to be with child, had exhausted the money Philip had left for her, and was near the end of her resources. She had appealed to Simon Coles to intercede for her with her father.
“Which I did—or tried to.” Coles wiped his nose with a crumpled handkerchief, which, Grey noted, he wore in his sleeve, like a soldier. “My efforts were not, alas, successful.”
“The Reverend Mr. Thackeray does seem a trifle…strict in his views,” Grey observed.
Coles nodded, tucking away the handkerchief.
“You must not think too hardly of him,” he said earnestly. “He is a good man, a most excellent minister. But he has always been very…firm…with his family. And his daughters’ virtue is naturally a matter of the greatest importance.”
“Greater than their physical well-being, evidently,” Grey observed caustically, but then dismissed that with a wave. “So, when Mr. Thackeray refused to listen, you naturally went to Mr. Lister.”
Coles looked embarrassed.
“It was professionally quite wrong of me, I know. Indiscreet, at best, and most presumptuous. But I really did not know what else to do, and I thought that perhaps the Listers would be more inclined to…”
But they hadn’t. Mr. Lister had sent the young lawyer away with a flea in his ear. But that, of course, was before Philip Lister had been killed.
“What was the address on the letter?” Grey asked. “If she expected help, surely she must have given an address to which it could be sent.”
“She did give an address, in Southwark.” Coles took up his neglected glass of wine and swallowed, avoiding Grey’s gaze. “I—I could not ignore her plea, you see. I—we—that is, I prevailed upon a mutual friend to take some money to her, and to see how she fared. I would have gone myself, but…” He indicated his crutch.
“Did he find her?”
“No. He came back in some agitation of mind, and reported that she was gone.”
“Gone?” Grey echoed. “Gone where?”
“I don’t know.” The young lawyer looked thoroughly miserable. “He inquired in every place he could think of, but was unable to discover any clue to her whereabouts. Her landlady said that Anne—Miss Thackeray—had been unable to pay her account, and had thus been put out of her room. The woman had no idea where she had gone then.”
“Not very obliging of her,” Grey observed.
“No. I—I tried to make further inquiries. I hired a commercial inquiry agent in London, but he made no further discoveries. Oh, if only I had sent to her at once!” Coles cried, his face contorting in sudden anguish.
“I should not have wasted so much time in thinking how to approach her father, in screwing up my courage to go to the Listers, but I was afraid, afraid to speak to them, afraid of failing—and yet I did fail. I am a coward, and whatever has become of Anne is all my fault. How am I to look her sister in the face?”
It took Grey some time to console and reassure the young lawyer, and his efforts were only partially successful. In the end, Coles was restored to some semblance of resolution by Grey’s recounting of his conversation with Barbara regarding her sister’s jewelry.
“Yes. Yes! I do have Anne’s boxes, safely in my shed. I will look them out this afternoon. We must make some pretext, Barbara and I, to meet and examine them—”
“I am sure that such a challenge will prove no bar to someone with your extensive study of strategy and tactics,” Grey assured him, rising from his chair. “If you or Miss Barbara will then send me a note, describing any trinkets that may be missing…?”
He took his leave, and was nearly out the door when Coles called after him.
“Major?”
He turned to see the young lawyer leaning on his desk, his quicksilver face for once settled into seriousness.
“Yes, Mr. Coles?”
“What I asked you…what it feels like to have killed someone in battle…that was mere vulgar curiosity. But it makes me think. I hope I have not killed Anne Thackeray. But if I have—you will tell me? I think I would prefer to know, rather than to fear.”
Grey smiled at him.
“You would have made a good soldier, Mr. Coles. Yes, I’ll tell you. Good day.”