He slammed a piece of paper in front of Andrew. “You’ve seen this?” he demanded without preamble.
Andrew stared at the sheet. Jeffries had folded it down the middle, so now a deep crease separated him from Darius. It seemed appropriate. “They spelled my name wrong,” he said dully. They’d called him Andrew Gram.
“It prevents them being sued.” Without being asked, Jeffries hauled the chair Andrew usually used for clients and plumped down in it. The sturdy Windsor chair creaked alarmingly. Andrew was fond of that chair, but its imminent destruction was the least of his concerns right now. “They tweak the names a little.”
“I saw it on the way here.” Andrew decided to put a brave face on it. Having regained his composure, he looked up and met the head’s gaze from under hooded eyes. “It’s nonsense, of course.”
“Naturally,” Jeffries said. “But it does put rather a dark light on us here at chambers. You understand that, I take it?”
“I do. It will pass.”
Jeffries flashed a sudden smile. “Is it your first time?”
“What?” Considering the nature of the picture, Andrew blinked, taken aback. “Is what my first time?”
Jeffries waved a hand, vaguely indicating the vile thing. “That you’ve been caricatured.”
“As far as I know.”
“I’ve had a few, but none with accusations like this. Usually they’re protesting something I said in court. I have taken care to preserve my private life. I have a wife and children, and I live a few miles outside the city. Do you see what I mean here?”
Discretion. Andrew breathed a sigh of relief. He had half-expected Jeffries to demand his immediate removal. He didn’t depend on the barrister work for his living, but he’d miss it terribly. Another chambers wouldn’t take him if he left this one in disgrace. “I assure you, sir, that nothing…nothing happened.” Bar a few kisses. Kisses he would treasure the memory of for the rest of his life.
“Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Don’t deny it directly. That forces you into defending your position. What if you can’t? And from the expression you tried to hide a moment ago, you’re skating lightly on the truth here.” Jeffries stood up, the chair creaking mightily. “I’m forced to give you a warning. Be careful, Graham. If you are caught, you will become a criminal, and you will lose everything. If you wish to become the friend of a known sodomite, gather your defenses around you.”
Andrew could say something about that evening. “Miss Angela Childers invited me to her house for the ball the night before last. She wished to ask a favor of me, and I assume, see how I coped in exalted society.”
Jeffries snorted. “And did you?” He leaned back. The chair creaked some more.
“Well enough, I think. But she invited Lord Darius and me to a private room and spoke to us on a matter I’m not free to discuss yet.”
“Is it about Lord Valentinian Shaw?”
“No.” Of course he would think that. “Not directly, although she said the case brought me to her notice. Sufficient to say that she would bring a great deal of business to chambers if our arrangement comes to pass.”
A gleam lit Jeffries’s pale eyes. Andrew could never decide if they were gray or green. Today, with the bleak weather and the cold light filtering through the single window, gray predominated. “Indeed? If that happens, we will welcome the business. Until then, I must ask you to leave until the scandal has died down. I’ll get the clerk to redistribute your cases. And Lord Darius? Will you see him again?”
“I doubt it,” Andrew said, suppressing his sorrow. “I will no doubt come across him in the course of business.”
“That’s a good thing.” Jeffries got to his feet with a scrape of wood and left the room.
Andrew sat there, his hands steepled, the fingertips touching the underside of his chin. That message was plain enough. If he did not redeem himself, if he failed to bring Miss Childers’s business here, he was finished in chambers. No doubt someone else wanted his place here. Competition for these rooms waged as fiercely as war.
He wouldn’t put it past one of the contenders to have paid for this cartoon to be circulated. Private citizens with a grudge would often do so.
Since he had nothing else to do with his day, he would put that theory to the test. He would fight this slur with knowledge. In the way of snowballs rolling down a hill, the picture could lead to his downfall. He would not accept that. But he had no antecedents in the law, no powerful patron to protect him from calumny.
Fleetingly, he thought of Miss Childers but dismissed the notion. He did not know her well enough yet, and he could destroy any relationship he might build with her if he went to her cap in hand now. She had made it clear that beggars and charlatans beat a path to her door on a regular basis. He would not be one of them.
Andrew walked back past the clerk, who did not raise his head, and out of his Chambers into the drizzling misery of a rainy day in London.
Surely he could not get much wetter.
Chapter 10
After an interesting visit to the printer who had made the caricature, Andrew had another visit to make. He would not let this matter rest. By now his shock had subsided, giving way to pure white anger. He went home and changed, viewing his drenched clothes ruefully, and then took a chair to Whitehall. He missed his quarry, so he took another chair to Brook Street.
General Court was not at home, his housekeeper said. Andrew scribbled a note on the back of a visiting card, and turned the corner down firmly, indicating he was attending in person. He gave the card to the woman. “Take that to him. Tell him he sees me now.” Anger consumed him, but the cold kind that had served him well in the past.
As he expected, a servant returned to ask him to follow him. The general would see him now.
The servant led Andrew upstairs to the general’s bedroom. The man was in shirt and breeches, his head covered by a skull-cap. He sat before a dressing table with a triple mirror. “You said it was urgent. Get on with it, man. I’m expected for dinner.”
Andrew silently reflected that the general would make a serving for a dozen people, if roasted properly. It seemed like the best thing to do with him. The extreme lack of courtesy only added to his anger. He had not been offered refreshment, nor had the general bothered to put on a coat and meet him in a reception room. He would, Andrew determined, be asked to dinner before he was done. Not that he would stay.
He sat in the hard wooden chair the general’s valet reluctantly offered him. The valet returned to his master and reverentially lifted a curled white wig from the stand on the dressing table. When he removed the cap, he revealed sparse, grizzled hair cut short.
Clearly the general was not about to dismiss his servant. That suited Andrew. He would have his say in front of anyone the general pleased.
“I assume you have become aware of the scurrilous caricature prominently displayed in all the printshops today.”