Three days later, he walked into Number 12 Oglethorpe Street and found Amaranthus in the parlor, poking the fire. She swung round at the sound of his step and dropped the poker with a clang. An instant later, she was hugging him, but not with the fervor of a lover. More the action of a stranded swimmer reaching for a floating log, he thought. Still, he kissed the top of her head and took her hands.
“Uncle Hal’s gone,” he said. “North.” Her eyes were already dark with fear. At this, the little blood remaining in her face drained away.
“He’s going to see Ben?”
“I can’t think what else he could be doing. Have you had any word from Papa? Has he come back?”
“No,” she said, and swallowed. She nodded at an open letter that lay on a small table under the window. “That came this morning, for Father Pardloe, but I opened it. It’s from a man named Richardson.”
William snatched the letter up and read it quickly. Then read it again, unable to make sense of it. And a third time, slowly.
“Who is that man?” Amaranthus had retreated a little, eyeing the letter as though it might suddenly spring to life and bite. William didn’t blame her.
“A bad man,” William said, his lips feeling stiff. “God knows who he really is, but he seems to be—I don’t know, exactly. ‘Major General Inspector of the Army’？ I’ve never heard of such an office, but—”
“But he says he’s arrested Lord John!” Amaranthus cried. “How could he? Why? What does he mean ‘infamous and scandalous acts’？ Lord John?”
William’s fingers felt numb and he fumbled the sheet of paper, trying to refold it. The official stamp beneath Richardson’s signature felt rough under his thumb, and he dropped the letter, which caught a whiff of air and spun across the carpet. Amaranthus stamped on it, pinning it to the floor, and stood staring at William.
“He wants Father Pardloe to go and speak to him. What the devil shall we do?”
138
Inherited Evil
A week later
IT WAS QUIET, BAR the usual shipboard noises and shouted orders from the deck of the Pallas, echoed faintly across the water from other anchored ships.
Grey had quite recovered from the effects of his abduction and was somewhat prepared when two deckhands came to fetch him from his small cabin. They bound his hands loosely in front of him—a bit of thoroughness that he appreciated as professional caution, though he deplored its immediate effects—and propelled him forcibly up a ladder and across the deck to the captain’s cabin, where Ezekiel Richardson was waiting for him.
“Sit, please.” Richardson gestured him to a seat and stood looking down at him.
“I have as yet had no word from Pardloe,” he said.
“It may be some time before you can reach my brother,” Grey remarked, as casually as possible in the circumstances. And where the devil are you, Hal?
“Oh, I can wait,” Richardson assured him. “I’ve been waiting for years; a few weeks doesn’t signify. Though it would, of course, be desirable for you to tell me where you believe him to be.”
“Waiting years?” Grey said, surprised. “For what?”
Richardson didn’t answer at once, but looked at him thoughtfully, then shook his head.
“Mrs. Fraser,” he said abruptly. “Did you really marry her simply to oblige a dead friend? Given your natural inclinations, I mean. Was it a desire for children? Or was someone getting too close to the truth about you, and you married a woman to disguise that truth?”
“I have no need to justify my actions to you, sir,” Grey said politely.
Richardson seemed to find that amusing.
“No,” he agreed. “You don’t. But you do, I suppose, wonder why I propose to kill you.”
“Not really.” This was in fact true, and the disinterest in Grey’s voice needed no dissimulation. If Richardson truly meant to kill him, he’d already be dead. The fact that he wasn’t meant that Richardson had some use for him. That, he wondered about, but chose not to say so.
Richardson drew a slow breath, looking him over, then shook his head and chose a new tack.
“One of my great-grandmothers was a slave,” he said abruptly.
Grey shrugged. “Two of my great-grandfathers were Scotch,” he said. “A man can’t be responsible for his ancestry.”
“So you don’t think the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the children?”
Grey sighed, pressing his shoulders against the chair to ease the stiffness in his back.