A Difficult Disguise (2 page)

Fletcher looked at Beck for a long moment, then smiled. “You know what, m’friend? I think you’re right. You know what it is? I’m getting too old for all this to-ing and fro-ing. Besides, it’s bloody wearing. Whigs don’t go to the Cocoa Tree, Tories won’t be seen dead at the St. James’s. Brooks’s is Whig to a man, and White’s was known to be Tory, but took down its flag and now takes anyone, money being the most powerful politician of them all.

“The Czar is courting the Whigs, while Castlereagh and Metternich are publicly telling Swellfoot everything is fine and privately having a collective apoplexy at Alexander’s revolutionary ideas. I’m telling you, Beck, you can’t sit down to dinner anywhere and attempt conversation without feeling that you’re playing chess, blindfolded. I’ve even considered scribbling small hints to myself on my shirt cuffs, so that I don’t inadvertently start chattering away nineteen to the dozen about personal freedom or some other such progressive anarchy while supping alongside a Tory, causing the poor fellow to choke on his turbot.”

“Writing on your shirt cuffs? It’s a good thing you haven’t, Fletch,” Beck interrupted amicably, “as I have a devil of a time as it is keeping a washerwoman, with all the help tending to princes and kings and deserting their old employers. Although there are many things I’d do in the name of friendship, I’ll be damned if I’ll scrub your cuffs for you.”

“That’s another thing. I am so heartily sick of all the royalty that’s running about.” Fletcher stood up and began to pace, his bad temper catching him on the rebound. “The Princess of Wales is giving everybody fits, reminding all who will listen and half who won’t that she is related to nearly all of her husband’s royal guests and should be included in the festivities even if she isn’t living with the Prince, most probably in the hope she can wring a reconciliation—or at the least, a higher allowance—out of the business. Prinny goes about the town with his great bulk hunkered down behind the closed drapes of his carriage, whether through fear of the mobs or his wife is anybody’s guess.

“I tell you, Beck, I am almost nostalgic over reminiscences of short rations and forced marches in mud to my knees. Upon recollection, it was easier and probably less dangerous than trying to run about in society without getting tripped up over some inadvertent
faux pas
. Yes, I think I have had enough.” He stopped his pacing and turned to his friend. “Beck,” he asked, suddenly feeling better than he had in weeks. “I’ve had a thought. How would you like to go home?”

“Home? To Grasmere? With the real festivities still weeks away? I’ve heard that Prinny is building strange palaces in Hyde Park for a grand celebration. Go home? Can we do that?”

Fletcher, his clear gray eyes twinkling, answered happily, “Yes, yes, yes, and who in blazes is going to stop us? Think, my friend. I have given up my commission. I’m no longer a lieutenant colonel. I’m a plain, private citizen again. Fletcher Belden, landowner, who has been gone from his estate for nearly five years—more if you count that Season in London before I left for the Continent. It’s more than time I took myself home.”

This was a moment Beck had been both hoping for and dreading. He went to the doorway and flagged down a passing servant to order hot water brought for the master’s bath, then turned back to face his friend. “What about the many clothes you ordered, Fletch? You commissioned enough to outfit a regiment in anticipation of all those invitations that are cluttering up the mantelpiece downstairs, and less than half of them have arrived—the clothes, that is. The rest of them can’t possibly be completed for at least another fortnight or more.”

Fletcher was pacing again, but this time it was with excitement rather than frustration. “Clothes?” exclaimed the man whose impeccable attire was most favorably compared with that of the incomparable Beau Brummell. “Hang the clothes! I’ll be busy today, going about bidding my farewells to people I shall genuinely miss, and offering regrets to a half-dozen hostesses for being called back to my estate on some business matter or other that the two of us will have to trump up between us. My clothes can run home after me or remain here, for all I care. I don’t have any time to lose. I’ve already missed the mating frenzy of the lapwings. Remember how we used to lay on our backs in the deep grassy hills above Lakeview and watch the males do those great twisting somersaults high in the sky over our heads? God, Beck, who would have thought I should be homesick for a bird?”

Beck stopped in the midst of laying out three thick white towels for Fletcher’s bath, knowing he had to bring up another subject, one he had been studiously avoiding ever since he had joined his employer in town. “And your aunt, Fletch. She’ll be that pleased to see you again.”

The quietly uttered statement succeeded in halting Fletcher—who had been mentally waxing poetic over the nearly forgotten black-and-white lapwings with their incredible flashes of bright green and purple when the sun hit their feathers just right—in his tracks. “My aunt? What aunt?”

Busying himself with unearthing three starched muslin cravats from a drawer—as it was always prudent to have extras close at hand if some misfortune should occur during the tedious job of tying the original to perfection, rendering the thing unwearable—Beck answered quietly, “What aunt you ask, Fletch? Why, your Aunt Belleville, of course. As far as I can recall, she’s the only aunt you have.”

“Aunt Belleville is installed at Lakeview? Have you been hiding something from me, Beck? Am I ill?”

Fletcher pressed his well-shaped hands to his chest in dramatic fashion, as if to be sure his heart was still ticking along in a normal rhythm. “Good Lord, I didn’t know. I’m not dying, am I? I most certainly must be sickening for something. Ever since I can remember, that woman would swoop down on Lakeview whenever either Arabella or I turned up with the measles or some such thing. Sydney Smith must have known her personally, for his description of her kind in his
Peter Plymley
was Aunt Belleville to the life.

“He dubbed her sort the ‘affliction woman,’ as I recall—a long-in-the-tooth, near-penniless spinster, some distant relation of the family who would descend on us, bags stuffed full with various vile-tasting medicines and hideous slippers embroidered by her own hand, to establish herself in the house expressly to comfort, flatter, fetch, carry, and generally drive everyone into recovering as quickly as possible so that she might leave before we were forced into succumbing to the illness of the moment, if only in order to escape her cheerful ministrations. So, tell me, Beck, what terrible malady is about to strike me down in my prime? Don’t coddle me, man, I can take it.”

“You’re not ill, Fletch, as well you know. Aunt Belleville’s presence at Lakeview is in the way of an accident, actually. It was after Arabella’s, um, you know,” Beck explained haltingly, averting his eyes as he spoke of the death of Fletcher’s only sister. “Aunt Belleville was there for the services, if you remember, and just before you rode off hell-bent to get yourself killed on the Peninsula, you told her she could stay on at Lakeview as long as she liked because you couldn’t care less what she did. Aunt Belleville, well, Aunt Belleville liked. As a matter of fact, she’s been most happily in residence ever since.

“The old girl’s done wonders with the herb garden, Fletch,” he ended hopefully, for he had grown to like Aunt Belleville very much.

There was a knock at the door and two servants came in, lugging large steaming buckets of water that they set down in the center of the room before extracting a hip bath from behind a brocade screen in one corner and relocating it square in the center of the room.

Five minutes later Fletcher was in the tub, lathering his broad, liberally hairy chest. “Aunt Belleville,” he mused, knowing full well that his deliberate silence on the subject had been driving Beck to distraction. “And you’ve known this all along, haven’t you, Beck? Of course you have. You’ve been living at Lakeview; it would be dashed difficult to miss the woman. Did it never occur to you to ask her to leave?”

Beck, who had just finished giving Fletcher’s new dark-blue Bath suiting a vigorous brush-up, turned toward the tub with a grimace. “I think Lethbridge is sweet on her, Fletch,” he said by way of explanation, shaking his head.

Fletcher’s right hand stilled in the action of lathering his left arm. “Lethbridge?” he asked, his shoulders beginning to shake as he thought of the tall, too-thin butler and man of all work who had been at Lakeview ten years before Fletcher was born. “Our Lethbridge? God, what a picture! After all these years, to have the redoubtable Lethbridge smote by Cupid’s leveling dart. Now I know I must go home, if only to act as chaperon. Tell me, Beck, do people of their advanced years bill and coo, or are they more civilized?”

Beck picked up a thick towel and advanced toward the tub, his stiff left leg giving his slight body an awkward gait. “They don’t do anything, Fletch. Neither of them will acknowledge the attraction. But I will admit, it is great fun to watch them speak volumes with their eyes when the other isn’t looking. But she is your aunt, you know, and as oldest male, you’re responsible for her good name. Maybe it’s time you asked Lethbridge his intentions.”

Fletcher flung the dripping sponge at his friend, who quick-wittedly ducked, and they both applied themselves to making up a rollicking, risqué limerick they would gift Lethbridge with upon their return to Lakeview, so that the butler could, if he were to have run completely mad since Beck last saw him, employ it to win his true love.

Exactly two hours past noon Fletcher was sauntering up Bond Street feeling much more the thing, his ivory stick dangling idly from his hand, his entire attitude one of elegant ease as he casually inspected his surroundings.

He had been to see his tailor, for contrary to the impression he would like to give, Fletcher did care very much for his wardrobe, which was why he did not patronize Stultz, who, as Beau said, made clothes, not men. Fletcher was gratified to learn that the judicious application of a few guineas had guaranteed that he would not be traveling home without the remainder of his purchases.

By the time he got to Piccadilly the crush of people was very great and growing rapidly, with street vendors plying their wares at the top of their lungs while barefooted urchins slogged through the streets, muddy from a recent rain, to beg coppers.

He quickly turned toward what he hoped would be the relative quiet of St. James’s Street, any thought of a walk in Green Park forgotten. The disturbing noise of the dustman’s clappers and the pleas of several old-clothes men wearing long greasy caftans and balancing towers of hats upon their heads as they lurched along reminded Fletcher of the headache he thought he had left behind after a satisfying luncheon of grilled ham and biscuits.

He had taken no more than ten steps when he saw a tooth-drawer plying his trade on a very vocal, puce-waistcoated customer who was clinging to the underside of a three-legged stool for all he was worth while the tooth-drawer dug in the man’s mouth with a dirty instrument. Fletcher sighed, raising a handkerchief to his lips, knowing he was overreacting to what could only be termed an everyday sight, but he also knew he’d had his fill of London and was more than happy to be leaving it for the beautiful—and much more peaceful—Lake District.

“Corns! Here now, corns,” a large dirty man brandishing a knife and scissors yelled, not three inches from Fletcher’s left ear. “Corns to pick, guv’nor.”

Fletcher turned to the man, his lids lowered halfway over his suddenly hard gray eyes, and intoned gravely, “Gentlemen don’t have corns, my good man. Just as you don’t have teeth.”

“Jolly good, Fletcher,” came a voice from behind him as the quack surgeon backed away into the throng of people lining the flagway in the hope the rumor they’d heard earlier was true and Blücher was to visit the area today. “Care to join me for a drink? I can’t think why I believed I could get through this mass of unwashed on foot, but there you have it! The two of us should most certainly be better served to stop in at one of the clubs than to try to make it any farther without at least a dozen foot soldiers to carve out a path for us. Christ on a crutch! One can’t help but wonder if Prinny knew what he was about when he started on this celebration business.”

“Henry!” Fletcher turned around to greet Henry Luttrell, a man who had made a spectacularly successful career out of dining out, his quick wit and pleasing manner making him a favorite with hostesses throughout Mayfair, which was a very good thing, as the man had barely any fortune at all and the money he saved on food could then be spent on coal and other small luxuries. “Tell me something, Henry. Have you ever seen London in such turmoil?”

The two men fell into step, walking away from Piccadilly. “The better question, Fletcher, is whether I have ever really seen London. For my experience, the city on a fine day is like looking up a chimney, and on a rainy day, it is like looking down one. I can barely wait until all this nonsense is over and I allow Lady Holland to have me as her guest in the country for an extended rest.”

Laughing, Fletcher remarked, “I can only hope she will be sufficiently flattered. You don’t allow just anyone to feed you, do you, Henry?”