Devenish instantly, and instinctively, disliked. He disliked most of all the expression on the fellow’s face when he spoke to Drusilla, and the way in which he fawned on her, holding her hand a little too long after she had offered it to him.
He thought the dislike didn’t show, but Drusilla registered it immediately. To her surprise, and much to her shock, she found that she was beginning to read Devenish’s mind.
She smiled a little to herself, when, in swift succession, Devenish made further invitations to dinner to John Squires of Burnside, Peter Clifton of Clifton Manor, and a series of minor gentlemen. When Leander Harrington returned to ask m’lord to dine at the Abbey in the near future, he invited him as well.
‘And you, too, Mrs Faulkner,’ he added, ‘and Master Giles. He is quite old enough at eighteen to join us and it is time he made his entry into the polite world.’
It was a pity, Drusilla thought, that she had always held Mr Harrington in dislike, for he was one of the few men who behaved to Giles as though he were a normally healthy person. For some reason which she could not explain, however, he made her flesh creep.
She would have been astonished to learn that Devenish was—to his surprise—registering her concealed dislike of the man. He thought that it showed her acumen as well as her good taste.
He had not expected to discover anything about the missing men and women on an occasion such as this. He moved about the grounds of Lyford House, being bowed to and responding with his most pleasant smile, his cutting tongue for once not in evidence. He was thinking, not for the first time, of the vast difference in life between the few fortunate men and women who surrounded him, and the vast mass of people at the bottom of the social heap.
Men—and women like the missing girls.
Here food was piled up in plenty on beautifully set tables. Elegantly dressed men and women talked and laughed in the orange light of the late afternoon’s sun.
For the unlucky in their wretched homes a meagre ration was laid out on rough boards in conditions so vile that the workers on his estate would not have housed pigs in them. Their clothes were ragged, and the men and women who wore them were stunted and twisted.
Devenish shivered. He thought of Rob Stammers’s surprise when he had ordered that the cottages on his estate should be rebuilt and the men’s wages increased so that they might live above the near-starvation level which was common in the English countryside.
It was when he was in this dark mood which sometimes visited him at inconvenient times that John Squires approached him and asked diffidently, ‘If I could have a serious word with you for a moment, m’lord, I should be most grateful.’
‘As many serious words as you like,’ he responded. ‘But what troubles you, that you wish to be serious on a fête day?’
Squires coloured. He was a heavyset fellow in early middle age, ruddy of face, a country gentleman who was also a working farmer.
‘It’s this business of the missing wenches, m’lord, but if you prefer not to talk about it here, we could perhaps speak later—’
‘No, speak to me now. I have had one conversation about a missing wench since I arrived in the district, and another will not bore me.’
‘Very well, m’lord,’ and he launched into a lengthy story of the miller’s daughter in Burnside village who had disappeared six months ago.
‘A good girl, her father said, until a few weeks before her disappearance, when she became cheeky and restless, and not hide nor hair of her seen since. Just walked out one evening—and never came home.’
His words echoed those of Hooby. Devenish decided to test him.
‘And why should you—or I—trouble ourselves about missing girls?’
Squires stared at him as though he were an insect, lord though he might be.
‘They are God’s creatures, m’lord, and I have learned this afternoon that others are missing. It troubles me, particularly since one of them, Kate Hooby, was the miller’s daughter’s best friend.’
‘Strange, very strange,’ Devenish remarked, as though he were hearing that there was more than one lost girl for the first time. ‘I share your worries about this. They cannot all have decided to run away to London to make their fortune on the streets.’
John Squires decided that he might have been mistaken in his first judgement of m’lord. ‘Then you will cause an enquiry to be made, m’lord.’
‘Indeed, I shall ask Mr Stammers to make a point of it.’
‘My thanks then. The miller is a good man, and what troubles him must trouble me.’
Devenish watched him walk away, and decided that since the matter had been raised now by two others he might safely speak of it without any suspicions being aroused as to why he was doing so. He looked around for Drusilla and found her immediately. Despite the fact that she was carrying a fat baby boy, he decided to make a beginning.
‘You are encumbered,’ he drawled. ‘Pray sit down, the child is too heavy for you, and sitting will be easier than walking.’
He waved her to one of the stone benches which stood about the lawns, and saw her settled before he sat down beside her.
‘You know,’ Drusilla observed quietly, watching him as she spoke, ‘you are quite the last person, m’lord, whom I would have thought would wish to sit next to a woman holding a baby boy dribbling because he is teething. It only goes to show how mistaken one can be and should teach us all not to jump to over-hasty conclusions!’
‘If you did not look as demure as a Quaker saint, I would think that you were bamming me, Mrs Faulkner.’
‘Oh, dear, no, m’lord, just wondering what you have to say to me that is so urgent that you cannot wait until I shed my burden. And, by the by, do the Quakers have saints? I rather thought that they didn’t.’
Robert, watching them from a little distance while he talked to Miss Faulkner, was surprised to hear Devenish’s shout of laughter and wondered what Mrs Faulkner could have said to cause him to behave so informally.
‘If they didn’t, they ought to have,’ Devenish finally riposted. ‘I never thought that I should have to come into the wilds of the country in order to find a woman who would give me a taste of my own verbal medicine.
‘Let me confess that I do have an ulterior motive in sitting by you. John Squires has just been telling me the surprising story that several of the local wenches have disappeared mysteriously. Have you mislaid any? Or is the Faulkner estate so considerately managed that no one from it has absconded to London to make their fortune?’
‘Now, m’lord,’ responded Drusilla seriously, wiping the little boy’s dribbling mouth with her lace-edged linen handkerchief, ‘this is not a matter for levity. The parents of the girls are most distressed, and no, none of my people has disappeared.’
‘I stand corrected, or rather, I sit so. I see by your reply that I must take this matter seriously. Does that child have an endless supply of water in his mouth? Both you and he will be wet through if he continues to dribble at this rate.’
As though he knew that
