“Well, he didn’t take it with him to Charles Town,” he said firmly. “It’s no more than a three-day ride. I’ll go and find him. Put that stuff somewhere safe.”
Charles Town
WILLIAM HAD NOT expected ever to meet Sir Henry Clinton again. But there he was, frowning at William in a way that made it evident that Sir Henry recalled very well who he was. William had been waiting in an anteroom of the gracious Charles Town mansion presently serving as command headquarters for the Charles Town garrison, having requested a brief audience with Stephen Moore, one of Clinton’s aides-de-camp with whom he had been friendly—and one who he knew was familiar with the Duke of Pardloe. He’d sent in his name, though, and five minutes later Sir Henry himself popped up like a jack-in-the-box, his appearance nearly as startling.
“Still Captain Ransom, is it?” Sir Henry asked, elaborately courteous. There wasn’t any bar to a man resigning one commission and buying another, but the circumstances of William’s resignation of his commission under Sir Henry had been dramatic, and commanders in general disliked drama in their junior officers.
“It is, sir.” William bowed, very correctly. “I trust I see you well, sir?”
Sir Henry made a hrmph noise, but nodded briefly. He was, after all, surrounded by the evidences of a significant victory: the streets of Charles Town were pitted and marred by cannon fire, and soldiers—many of them black—were everywhere, laboriously restoring what they had spent weeks blowing up.
“I am come with a message for the Duke of Pardloe,” William said.
Sir Henry looked mildly surprised.
“Pardloe? But he’s gone.”
“Gone,” William repeated carefully. “Has the duke returned to Savannah?”
“He didn’t say he meant to,” Clinton replied, beginning to be impatient. “He left more than a week ago, though, so I imagine he’ll have got back to Savannah by now.”
William felt a coolness on the back of his neck, as though the room around them had subtly changed from one moment to the next and an unseen window had opened.
“Yes,” he managed to say, and bowed. “Thank you, sir.”
He walked out into the street and turned right, with no intent in mind save movement. He was at once alarmed and incensed. What the devil was Uncle Hal about? How dare he go off about his own business when his own brother had disappeared?
He stopped dead for a moment, as the thought struck him that his father and uncle might have disappeared together. But why? The thought died in the next moment, though, as he spotted a familiar red-coated form a hundred yards down the street, buying a packet of tobacco from a black woman in a spotted turban. Denys Randall.
“The very man I wanted to see,” he said a moment later, falling into step alongside Denys as he walked away from the tobacco seller.
Denys looked up, startled, then looked forward and back before turning to William.
“What the bloody hell are you doing here?” he asked.
“I might ask the same of you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous; I’m supposed to be here, and you aren’t.”
William didn’t bother asking what Randall was doing. He didn’t care.
“I’m looking for my uncle Pardloe. Sir Henry just told me that he left Charles Town more than a week ago.”
“He did,” Denys said promptly. “I crossed paths with him as I came down from Charlotte on the … oh, when was it … the thirteenth? Maybe the fourteenth …”
“Damn what day it was. You mean he was riding north, not south?”
“How clever you are, William,” Denys said in mock approval. “That’s exactly what I meant.”
“Stercus,” William said. His stomach knotted. “Was he alone?”
“Yes,” said Denys, looking at him sideways. “I thought that odd. I don’t know him to speak to, though, and hadn’t any reason to do so.”
William asked a few more questions, with no results, and so took his leave of Denys Randall, with luck, for good.
North. And what lay to the north that might lead the colonel of a large regiment to depart suddenly and without word to anyone, riding alone?
Ben. He’s going to see Ben. The vision of a black bottle rose in the back of his mind. Had Hal thought of poisoning himself, his son, or both of them?
“Too bloody Shakespearean,” William said aloud, turning his horse to the south. “Fucking Hamlet, or would it be Titus Andronicus?” He wondered whether his uncle ever read Shakespeare, for that matter—but it didn’t matter; wherever he’d gone, he hadn’t taken the bottle. At the moment, all he could do was go back to Savannah and hope to find his father there.