The Hidden Blade (13 page)

Leighton blinked. He had never been sick a day in his life.

“Please go back into the house, Master Leighton,” Adler beseeched.

“And what if I don’t?”

Adler swallowed. “Then Mr. Twombley will write to Sir Curtis.”

Mr. Twombley was in charge of the staff at Rose Priory. “And?”

“Mary—Mary Pye in the town house. She is my sweetheart, you see, and she was just made upper maid. Her knees are in bad shape. If she has to go back to the heavier work of a lower maid…Please, Master Leighton. It’s nice and warm inside the house.”

Leighton did not need to be nice and warm. He wanted to go into the village to speak to Mr. Brown. But as he looked at Adler’s weather-beaten face, he could not make himself refuse the man’s entreaty—not if it would lead to pain and suffering on the part of the woman Adler loved.

In refusing to condemn his parents and Herb before Sir Curtis, he had not only shown defiance, but his character. And unfortunately for him, Sir Curtis had read him all too clearly and now understood exactly how to fetter Leighton with his own scruples.

“Very well,” he said, his voice raspy.

The house, for the first time, felt small and stuffy.

A few days later, Leighton climbed out of the house as the clock struck midnight. It was eerie to be out on the moors in the dark, the light of a half-moon the only source of illumination, a faint scattering of silver gleam that only seemed to make the shadows impenetrable. And the silence was so profound that he, who had always lived in the country, found it unnerving.

He almost screamed as he came unexpectedly upon a pair of Dartmoor ponies. A few minutes later he stumbled into a stream that he had easily leaped across many times. The water was icy cold and he dared not remain abroad for longer than necessary with his trousers and boots soaking wet.

The return journey was teeth-chatteringly cold, but he made it to his room without further incident, built up the fire in the grate, and spread his wet clothes on the seat and the back of a chair to dry. Then he cleaned his boots as best he could with a towel and stuffed more towels inside to pull out any additional moisture—he had seen Father’s valet do this one time when Father and Leighton had both fallen off their rowboat and returned with squelching wet shoes. He set his alarm clock at quarter past six, shortly before the time the maid would come in to sweep the grate and relight the fire, to put away the dried clothes and take the towels out of the boots, so that nothing would appear abnormal.

The next night he managed to get past the stream without getting wet, but had to turn back when he noticed that the stars were disappearing behind clouds. He barely managed to find the house as a dense fog rolled in.

The third night he at last reached his original goal: a tor about two miles from the Rose Priory. He added a rock to the tor and wished he could set down his nocturnal adventures in his letters to Mother.

The next afternoon he returned to his room after his lessons to find that an iron grille had been installed on his window. And a locksmith was working on the door, putting into place a bolt that could be opened only from the outside.

“I hear you are a sleepwalker, young master,” said the man from the village who had come to do the work.

Leighton could not understand. How? How had he been found out? He had not seen nor heard any movements in the house when he left nor came back at night. His door had been locked from inside. And there had been no habit on the part of the servants to come and check on him after his bedtime.

He realized his error only when he took his walk in the garden with Mr. Colmes: He had failed to take enough care with the ivy outside his window. It looked trampled, the leaves broken, the vines bruised. He swore under his breath. But it was no use.

He was now a prisoner in Sir Curtis’s house.

Chapter 9

The Prisoner

As autumn deepened into winter, things did not improve for Leighton.

First, out of concern for his “health,” he was dissuaded from walking even in the gardens, since the days were cold and wet. Then his curriculum, hitherto that of a classical education, narrowed to only the study of the Greek Bible. A few days later the locksmith was back in the house, and when he was gone, the library and its two hundred-some volumes of history that Leighton had counted on to last him until his departure to a public school were no longer accessible.

All the changes he accepted numbly, almost meekly—defying Sir Curtis had its cost, and he had known that there would be repercussions. But when Twombley came and took away the books Leighton had brought with him from Starling Manor, many of which had been gifts from Herb, a slow-burning anger at last ignited inside him.

With it arrived the realization that there would be no public school education for him: With its hundreds of potential playmates, a proper curriculum, and a plethora of sports, a school could prove to be far too pleasurable an experience. And Sir Curtis, who had made it plain that there was no such thing as a cruelty too small, would probably cut off his own nose before seeing Leighton enjoy himself.

In a way, it was a relief to at last understand his situation. Now he no longer needed to dread what else would be taken from him. Now he understood the answer to be “everything.” Now he could plan his countermeasures.

He would run away—there was no other choice. Either he must break free or he would be slowly crushed under the weight of his shackles.

But how did he break free? Just as important, how did he remain free? He did not have access to his inheritance—nor any other significant sources of money. And even if he could somehow scrape together enough funds, he was a child—a child from a prominent family, no less. There would be a search. And if he were found and brought back, Sir Curtis would make sure that he never escaped again.

In December, Sir Curtis and Lady Atwood returned, as devoted to each other as ever. During their previous stay, Leighton had seen little of either. But Yuletide called for greater family proximity, and on several different occasions he and Mr. Colmes were summoned to keep the master and the mistress company, as the latter admired the newly trimmed tree, dispensed gifts to the servants, and posed for photographs. Sir Curtis even had Leighton sit for a solo portrait, declaring that his mother would treasure such a photograph.

On Christmas day, after the goose had been properly demolished, the company retired to the drawing room to open presents. Leighton received one Bible each from Sir Curtis and Lady Atwood, one in Parsi, one in Arabic.

“And, of course, Mr. Colmes will see to the purchase of the necessary dictionaries and grammar books to help you study the scripture in those languages,” said Sir Curtis magnanimously.

Lady Atwood’s smile was quite frosty.

Leighton made sure that he seemed barely able to keep his disappointment in check. But in fact he was thrilled. He adored learning new languages, and what better way to do so than with text the meaning of which he already knew?

After the presents had been opened and put away, Lady Atwood asked Mr. Colmes to read aloud from a magazine while she bent over her embroidery frame. Leighton sat in his chair in a corner of the drawing room, waiting for the moment of his dismissal.

But Sir Curtis beckoned him instead. “My dear Master Leighton, will you bring out the chess game?”

When Leighton had, he was instructed to sit down opposite Sir Curtis at the card table and set up the chess pieces.

“Do you know how to play, young man?”

“A little, sir,” Leighton answered cautiously.

“Excellent. Let us have a match.”

Leighton, playing white, opened with his king pawn. Sir Curtis countered with his own king pawn. Leighton advanced his king bishop pawn. Across the drawing room, Mr. Colmes’s voice lovingly described the architecture of the Taj Mahal.

“How are you, my dear nephew?” asked Sir Curtis, as he contemplated his next move.

Leighton tensed. Their previous conversation had begun much the same way—and had not ended well. “Very well, sir. Thank you.”

“Enjoying your life at Rose Priory?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You are very fortunate, Master Leighton. You are young, you are healthy, and you have a certain restraint in your character that should serve you well.”

The compliment only made Leighton warier. “Thank you, sir.”

“Not everyone is so lucky. Take Mr. Colmes, for example. Mr. Colmes has never married, but he has a daughter.”

An illegitimate child, in other words.

“To compound that mistake,” Sir Curtis went on, “he failed to provide the kind of strict, morally uplifting upbringing particularly necessary to children born in sin. The girl ran away from her foster parents and fell in with undesirable company. She began to offer her…time, shall we say, to men. And when she stole from one such man, she was arrested, convicted, and sent to prison.”

Leighton wished he could plug his ears—these were things Mr. Colmes would not want anyone to know—but he was forced to listen.

“She was not there for very long, just long enough for her to reflect upon her choices in life. When she was released, she decided that she wished for a respectable life after all. With some help from Mr. Colmes, who probably provided a forged letter of character, she managed to become a companion to a Miss Mulberry in Yorkshire, far from her former haunts in London.

“Her employer is very pleased with her. And after the squalidness of her misspent years, Miss Colmes has quite taken to the wholesomeness of life in a quiet, close-knit village. She sings in the church choir and does the flower arrangements for the altar. I hear there is even a widowed yeoman farmer who is shyly courting her.

“Mr. Colmes, needless to say, is thrilled. He believes that the mistakes of her youth are well and truly behind her, and hopes that her future will be secure. But mistakes of a certain kind never lose their destructive power, do they? Miss Colmes’s new life is fragile. The least whisper of her past and it will all come tumbling down.”

The relish in Sir Curtis’s voice turned Leighton’s stomach. How could anyone not wish Miss Colmes well? How could anyone not want her to succeed in her new life? But he knew now that the Sir Curtises of the world only ever saw the mistakes. Miss Colmes would only ever be a prostitute in need of punishment, and any happiness on her part was abhorrent and therefore intolerable.

Sir Curtis took out Leighton’s king bishop pawn. Leighton stared at the board, barely able to think. “What will happen to Miss Colmes?”

“Nothing, of course,” said Sir Curtis smoothly. “I want Mr. Colmes to focus on his task of educating you.”

A lexicon could educate Leighton, since his lessons now derived solely from the Greek testaments.

“As long as he shows himself competent and has you well in hand,” Sir Curtis went on, “I will have every incentive to keep him content.”

It wasn’t until Leighton had moved his knight that Sir Curtis’s meaning struck him: If Leighton attempted to run away, Sir Curtis would see to it that Miss Colmes’s new life was destroyed. So that even if Leighton managed to escape, he would always carry with him the heavy burden of knowing that his freedom came at the happiness of another.

The chess match ended in a massive loss for Leighton.

Sir Curtis and Lady Atwood departed for London in the first week of January. A few days later, as Leighton and Mr. Colmes took their afternoon tea, Leighton asked, “Do you have children, sir?”

Mr. Colmes, who had just reached out for a slice of buttered toast, stilled. “I do,” he said after a moment, “a daughter who lives in Yorkshire.”

Leighton spread clotted cream over his scone, gathering enough gall for his next question. If he was to give up his freedom, he had to make sure it wasn’t merely a hoax on Sir Curtis’s part, that there indeed was a young woman whose reputation and livelihood were at stake.

He felt sick as he forced himself to ask, “And has Miss Colmes ever been incarcerated?”

Mr. Colmes’s chair scraped as he scrambled to his feet. “How…What…” His face turned red; his hands shook visibly. He took a deep breath. “Did one of the servants say something to you?”