Avery found that he had rather badly miscalculated. It did not happen often. But then, he was not often called upon to deal with young earls who had just lost title and fortune and discovered themselves to be penniless bastards.
He did not discover Harry at any of the expected places during the evening or the night, though he spent weary hours wandering and looking and asking numerous questions of the boy’s erstwhile cronies and hangers-on. Dispossessed ex-earls soon lost their appeal, it seemed. It was all enough to make one lose one’s faith in humanity—if one had ever harbored any.
He did encounter Uxbury, however—Viscount Uxbury, Camille’s esteemed former betrothed—when he took a break from his search to call in at White’s Club. Uxbury waylaid him as he was passing through the reading room, which was virtually deserted at that hour of the evening.
The viscount was someone to be avoided at the best of times. It had always seemed to Avery that if one were to pick him up and shake him vigorously, one would soon find oneself engulfed in dust, blinded and choked by it. What Camille saw in him, though she was admittedly rather starchy and high in the instep herself, Avery had never understood, though since he did not need to understand, he had been content with ignorance. By this evening, however, he resented even more than usual being hauled aside by this particular gentleman. The engagement was off, he had heard from his stepmother, hence Camille’s having left London with Abigail and their mother. Avery did not know who had ended the engagement or exactly why. He really did not need or particularly want to know.
“Ah, Netherby, old chap,” Uxbury said. “Come to celebrate your freedom from an irksome responsibility, have you?”
Old chap? Avery raised his eyebrows. “Responsibility?”
“Young Harold,” Uxbury explained. “The bastard.” He said the word not as an insult, but as a descriptor.
“A word of warning,” Avery said, possessing himself of his quizzing glass. “My ward does not like to be so called and will not scruple to tell you so. He claims that it makes him feel like a balding Saxon king awaiting an arrow through the eye. He prefers Harry.”
“What he is,” Uxbury said, “is a bastard. I have had a very near escape, Netherby. You will wish to congratulate me upon it, I daresay. If the late Riverdale had died six months later than he did, I would have found myself riveted to his by-blow before discovering the truth. One can only shudder at the thought. Though you would have escaped altogether having to deal with a wild and petulant youth.”
“And so I would,” Avery said, dropping his glass on its ribbon. He was tired of this conversation.
He clipped Uxbury behind the knees with one foot and prodded the stiffened fingertips of one hand against a point just below the man’s ribs that would rob him of breath for a minute or ten and probably turn him blue in the face into the bargain. He watched Uxbury topple, taking down a table and a heavy crystal decanter with him, and causing a spectacular enough crash to bring gentlemen and waiters and other assorted male persons running or at least hurrying from every direction. He watched Uxbury reach for a shout and not find it—or his next breath.
“Dear me,” he said to no one in particular. “The man must have been drinking too deep. Someone ought to loosen his cravat.”
He strolled away after a few moments, when it seemed there was enough help to revive a swooning regiment. It was, he decided as he left the club to resume his search, Camille who had had the near escape yesterday, not her erstwhile betrothed.
Even the youngsters who might still be counted as Harry’s friends were unable to point Avery in the right direction. He was told variously that Harry had gone off to a gaming hell, a brothel, a tavern, a postperformance theater party, another fellow’s rooms, and home. He was to be discovered at none of those places. The boy was usually quite predictable. Finding him was generally no more arduous than following a blazing trail would be. But this time he appeared to have fallen off the map, and Avery was beginning to wonder if perhaps he had slipped off to join his family in Hampshire.
It was Edwin Goddard, his secretary, who finally discovered the lad the following morning, no more than an hour after Avery had enlisted his assistance. God bless the man, he was worth his weight in gold.