Calhoun shook his head. “I don’t believe so, my lord. I can look into him, if you wish.”
Sebastian nodded. “But cautiously. I understand he has a nasty disposition.”
Chapter 11
Saturday, 23 January
Sebastian left London before dawn, driving O’Malley’s team of fast creamy whites and with his own young groom, or tiger, Tom, clinging to the perch at the rear of the curricle. The boy had been with Sebastian for two years now, ever since he’d tried to pick Sebastian’s pocket in a low St. Giles tavern. Sebastian had been on the run at the time, charged with a murder he didn’t commit. The young street urchin had saved Sebastian’s life, although Tom always contended they were more than even.
They drove through misty flat meadows filled with frost-whitened grass, and sleepy villages with stone-walled, thatched-roof cottages and wind-ruffled millponds where ducks foraged amongst the freeze-nipped reeds that grew in the shallows. The sun rose in a muted pink haze above winter-bared stands of elm and birch, and still they pressed on, the team’s galloping hooves eating up the miles, their heaving sides dark with sweat by the time Tom blew up for the change.
“We ain’t never gonna make ’Artwell ’Ouse in three hours,” said Tom, critically eyeing the new team as it was put to.
Sebastian snapped shut his watch and smiled. “Yes, we will.”
They made it in just under two hours and fifty minutes.
An elegant small manor dating to the time of the Tudors, Hartwell House had been hired by the exiled Bourbons some four years before. Sebastian had heard that Sir George Lee, the owner, was not happy with the treatment his estate was receiving at the hands of the royals. As Sebastian drew up his curricle on the ragged gravel sweep before the manor’s small porch, he thought he could understand why.
Crude new windows had been punched through the venerable old stone walls, while tattered laundry hung out to dry on the roof flapped in the cold wind. What was once a grand sweep of turf had been torn up here and there and planted with vegetables; the bleat of goats and the cluck-clucking of chickens filled the air.
“Looks worse’n a bleedin’ back court in St. Giles,” said Tom, scrambling forward to take the reins.
“Not exactly Versailles, is it?”
Tom scrunched up his sharp-boned face in puzzlement. “Ver-what?”
“Versailles. It’s the grand palace that was home to the kings of France until the revolutionaries dragged the royal family into Paris in 1789.”
“Oh.” The tiger didn’t look impressed. But then, Tom had no use for foreigners in general and the French in particular.
Sebastian dropped lightly to the ground. “Do keep your ears open around the stables, will you?”
Tom broke into a gap-toothed grin. “Of course, gov’nor!”
Still smiling faintly to himself, Sebastian turned toward the manor’s small, somewhat shabby portico. Virtually anyone else driving out from London uninvited to see the daughter of the last crowned King of France would most likely have been curtly rebuffed. But not Sebastian St. Cyr, heir to the powerful Earl of Hendon, Chancellor of the Exchequer. The estrangement between the Earl and his heir might be well-known, but few understood its reasons, and no impoverished European royal was going to risk alienating the member of the cabinet responsible for all economic and financial matters.
As a result, Sebastian waited in the dingy vestibule for only a few minutes before a powdered footman in threadbare livery appeared to escort him back outside and around the far wing of the house to where Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, Daughter of France, waited to receive him at the entrance to a long topiary arcade that stretched toward a silver shimmer of water in the distance. She had been standing with one of her ladies, her gaze on the canal. But at his approach she turned and nodded her dismissal of the footman.
Sebastian had met her before, at various London balls and dinners. On those occasions she had always been every inch the King’s daughter, dressed in velvets and silks and dripping the diamonds and pearls that her mother, Marie Antoinette, had managed to smuggle out of France with friends in the early days of the Revolution. Today she wore a somewhat shabby gown of dark green wool, made high at the neck with only a modest touch of lace at the collar and cuffs; an unfashionable, heavy wool shawl draped her shoulders. But her carriage was eminently regal, her head held high as she moved to greet him.
“Lord Devlin,” she said, her voice oddly high-pitched and scratchy and still noticeably inflected by her native Parisian accent. “How kind of you to call.”
He bowed low over the hand she offered. “Thank you for agreeing to see me on such short notice.”