Curtis repressed a grimace. Lady Armstrong frowned. “Now, really, Mr. da Silva, you must have some fresh air and exercise.”
“My dear lady, my constitution would scarcely survive such a thing. Simply inhaling in the countryside is as much exertion as I can bear. All that healthful freshness, so bad for the soul.” Da Silva shuddered dramatically. Miss Carruth giggled. “No; I shall apply myself to my labours. I must toil.”
“At what?” Curtis felt compelled to ask.
“The poetical art.” Da Silva was resplendent in a green velvet jacket this morning. He also, Curtis could not help observing, wore trousers far too close-cut for what most people would call decency, the cloth tight on what was admittedly, but all too obviously, a well-shaped form. Good God, could the fellow be any more blatant about his tastes?
“Poetical art?” he repeated, and saw Holt’s mock-despairing shake of the head.
“I have the honour to edit Edward Levy’s latest volume.” Da Silva paused invitingly. Curtis gave him a blank look. Da Silva raised his dark eyes heavenwards. “The Fragmentalist. The poet. You’re not familiar—? Of course not. Ah, well, genius is not often recognised. And you may prefer to draw your intellectual sustenance from Mr. Kipling’s barrack-room ballads, which are perhaps more to a man of action’s taste. They rhyme properly, I’m so very often informed.”
He waved a graceful hand at Lady Armstrong and drifted out, leaving Curtis staring open-mouthed.
“Of all the—” He stopped himself.
“Rotten dago queers,” James Armstrong finished for him, with more accuracy than good manners. “I bar that man. Honestly, Sophie, why you have to invite him—”
“He’s a poet himself, you know,” said Lady Armstrong. “Terribly clever. So modern.”
“He’s terribly good looking too,” Fenella Carruth offered, with a demure look at her companion. “Don’t you think, Pat?”
“Handsome is as handsome does,” said Miss Merton with severity. “Too flashy by half, if you ask me.”
The walking party set off fortified by a huge breakfast, leaving Curtis and da Silva in possession of the house. Da Silva announced his intention of settling in the library to commune with his muse. Curtis, feeling sorry for the muse, said that he preferred to explore the house and acquaint himself with its features.
He did plan to explore, but it was not modern amenities that he was looking for.
Sir Hubert’s study door was open. Curtis slipped in and turned the key in the door to lock himself inside. His heart was pounding and his mouth dry.
This wasn’t his style of thing. He wasn’t a spy, for God’s sake, he was a soldier.
Or rather, he had been a soldier, till the guns blew up at Jacobsdal.
He walked to the desk, and almost gave up there and then as he saw what was on it: a silver-framed photograph of a smiling young man in the uniform of a British lieutenant. He recognised the features from the full-length oil that hung in the drawing room, next to a stunning John Singer Sargent portrait of the current Lady Armstrong. Sir Hubert’s elder son, Martin, dead on the dry earth of the Sudan.
Surely a man who had lost his son to war could not have betrayed British soldiers. Surely.
Another painting of the dead man hung opposite Sir Hubert’s desk, staring down on Curtis with a thoughtful smile. It was displayed between a simple watercolour of a woman that Curtis guessed to be Armstrong’s first wife, and a pastel sketch of Sophie, Lady Armstrong. There didn’t seem to be a picture of James.
He made himself move on. The desk drawers were all locked but the filing cabinet was not, so he flicked through files and folders with the fingers of his left hand, wondering what he was playing at as he did so.
Sir Hubert had been vastly enriched by the collapse of Lafayette’s armament business after Jacobsdal, but that meant nothing. He was an arms manufacturer, after all, and there had been a war on; the business had to go somewhere. And of course Mr. Lafayette had wanted to shift the blame from his own factory, and the weight of the Jacobsdal deaths from his own shoulders. He had stood in Sir Henry Curtis’s drawing room, unshaven, thin and desperate, and he had raved about sabotage and plots, betrayal and murder, and his body had been dredged from the Thames not two weeks afterwards. He had said nothing that could not have sprung from guilt and madness.
But if there was the slightest chance that Lafayette had told the truth, Curtis could not ignore it. He had to do this, even if he had no real idea what he was doing or what he was looking for, so he flicked through his host’s private papers, his face hot with shame.
He spent as long as he dared in there, listening out for noises in the hallway or approaching servants, and it was with immense relief that he reached the bottom of the cabinet. There had been no evidence of anything untoward, simply bills and letters, the routine business of a wealthy man.