‘Mr Ryder, please, come and sit down.’
‘My lord.’ One would take him for a superior clerk in his sober, understated clothes and with his quiet manner. But his voice was that of an gentleman, he moved with a swordsman’s grace and the grey eyes, when they met Max’s, were cool and assessing. From a clerk the scrutiny would have been insolence; from this man it felt like being assessed by a surgeon. It was about as comfortable.
It was also steadying. Max gathered himself mentally and concentrated, much as he would before a fencing bout. ‘Lord Lucas recommends you highly.’
‘I have been able to be of use to him in the past.’ No false modesty or protestations there. ‘His lordship tells me that there is a personal matter requiring the highest discretion that you wish investigated.’
‘Yes. Ten years ago, when I was twenty-one—just twenty-one—I met a young woman called Drusilla Cornish. She was twenty, the daughter of an apothecary in Swindon. I fell in love with her, and I married her.’
There was a notebook in Ryder’s hand—it seemed to have appeared as though by magic. He jotted something and looked up, a faint smile on his lips. ‘I use codes and a shorthand of my own devising, my lord. Your lordship held your present title at this time?’
‘Yes. I was the Earl of Penrith, I did marry a tradesman’s daughter and, under the terms of my father’s will, virtually all my money was in trust until I reached the age of twenty-five, or married with the approval of my trustees. It was every bit as ill judged an action as you are most tactfully not saying.’
‘Special licence?’ Max nodded. ‘And the marriage took place where?’ He listened as Max recounted how he had recalled the out-of-the way church in Dorset from a visit to a friend’s country estate the year before. ‘And her address in Swindon? Her family?’
He told it all, the memory of the dusty little shop coming back so clearly as he spoke that he could smell the herbs and medicines, could see the light glinting on the glass vessels where the sun stuck through the lead-paned windows, could see the vision of loveliness that had seemed to swim out of the shadows like a black-haired mermaid at the sound of the tinny little bell.
‘I had toothache, of all the damned prosaic reasons for finding myself in this mess now. I wanted to see my own dentist in London, not submit to some rustic tooth-puller, but I needed something to dull the pain for a day or two. And there she was, serving. Her father was in the back, grinding up some nostrum, her small sister was perched on the end of the counter making up lavender bags.
‘I walked in feeling as though some demon were drilling holes in my jaw, fell in love and forgot the pain, all in one glance.’ It was surprisingly easy, talking to this dark stranger. Almost he could understand the allure of the confessional. He took a folded paper out of his pocket book. ‘Here. I have written down everything I can recall about names and places.’
‘Thank you, my lord.’ Ryder glanced through it, nodded and tucked it into his own notebook. ‘And then?’
‘Then I took Drusilla home. I knew my trustees would not approve, but, what the hell—my allowance was a thousand times more than her father earned in a year, we could survive very well for four years. My parents were both dead, my grandmother presided over Longwater. She took one look at Drusilla and told me to say nothing to anyone except the servants.’
‘You could rely upon them?’
‘Oh, yes, they were old family retainers, every one. They, and my grandmother, set about turning Drusilla into a countess.’
‘How well did they succeed?’
‘Not at all. She was appalled. She had no idea of what would be expected of her, she was intimidated by the house, by the servants, by my grandmother—by me, once she saw me in my proper setting, as it were.’
Mr Ryder just waited, silently. It was a technique Max used himself and he was wryly amused to find himself succumbing to it. ‘If she had loved me, I don’t think that would have mattered, but she didn’t. I think she had seen me as the equivalent of a wealthy merchant and that was the height of her ambition. She had not expected to have to work for the title and the wealth and the position. I might have been young, and I might have been besotted, but I knew what a countess’s duties and responsibilities were.
‘She realised that this was not a game and we both realised she did not love me. It took three weeks to reach that point.’
Mr Ryder taped his teeth with the end of his pencil. ‘I suppose that there were not grounds for an annulment?’ he enquired delicately.
‘No.’ Max looked back over the years with grim amusement. ‘I think you might say that the one place where we were compatible was in bed.’
There was a pause while the investigator gazed tactfully out of the study window and Max consigned those particular memories to a deep, safe, dark, mental cupboard.
‘Then she met a gentleman when she was shopping in Norwich. It is the closest town to my country seat. Drusilla enjoyed shopping and Grandmama saw no harm in it so long as she went incognito. That gentleman was handsome, charming, lived by his wits and was, as she informed me in the exceedingly ill-spelled letter she left me, fun. She left, taking all those jewels Grandmama had not locked in the safe.’
‘You pursued her?’
‘No. I wrote to her at the inn her note had come from and informed her that I was opening an account with my bank on which she, and only she, could draw, and that I hoped she was happy.’ He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. ‘I never saw her, nor heard from her, again. Money was taken out, to the limit I told her I would maintain, for two years. After that it was untouched and has remained so to this day.’
‘The logical presumption would be that she is dead, or no longer in the country,’ Ryder remarked.
‘I need more than presumption, Mr Ryder. I need to know whether I have a wife living or not.’
‘Indeed, my lord, I can understand why you feel that to be desirable. Did you contact her family?’
‘No.’
‘Make any enquiries at all?’
‘None.’
‘Why not, my lord? Nine years is a very long time with, if I may be so frank, the succession to an earldom to be considered.’
Chapter Ten
‘Because I had a guilty conscience and because I am unused to failure.’ Max had had long enough to work out why he had consigned the problem of his marriage to a locked cupboard. ‘Don’t think I feel any complacency about my lack of action. But I should never have married her—I took the poor girl completely out of her depth. And having done so, somehow I should have made it work. It may sound arrogant, Mr Ryder, but I am not used to failure.’
‘I am sure that is the case, my lord.’
Max paused, tapping the tips of his joined fingers against his lips. ‘And the longer I left it, the more difficult it became. I suppose, too, that my damnable pride got in the way as well. I had offered her a golden future and she tossed it back in my face to run off with an adventurer—I was damned if I was going to chase after her.’ Was that at the heart of it? Was that the real reason, and I’ve been too much of a hypocrite to admit it? Pride?
‘Well, my lord, I think I have enough to commence my investigations. I will write to you weekly to advise you of progress, unless, of course, I make a breakthrough. I will refer to the Countess in terms of a painting that was stolen some years back and which you wish to trace. That should be adequate cover in the event of a letter falling into the wrong hands.’
Ryder stood, tucking his notebook away in a breast pocket. ‘Just one more thing, my lord. Did none of her family make any attempt to contact you after the