Page 62 of The Truth About Dukes
“Weatherby, the case could not be simpler,” Neville said, keeping his voice down amid the hum of multiple conversations. The club was busier than usual for noon on a Monday, and nobody could out-gossip lawyers.
Solomon Weatherby was both a neighbor in the country and a fellow legal practitioner in York. His wife, Elspeth, was one of few women Phoebe considered a friend. Neville did not consider Weatherby a friend, but he had been useful on several previous guardianship cases.
He was not being useful now. Not at all.
“Philpot, you know as well as I do that the cases appearing simple initially are the cases that become the most grievous messes all too soon. Missing heirs, complicated trusts, opinions from Chancery, secret weddings, mistresses bearing grudges…We see more drama behind the doors of the average courtroom than the public pays to see on the stages of Drury Lane.”
Weatherby delivered this sermon while sawing away at his beefsteak. Took his victuals seriously, did Solomon.
“I have never seen such drama as I witnessed when His Grace of Rothhaven fell to the ground,” Neville countered, “not two streets from here. The poor man commenced shaking and twitching worse than any case of Saint Vitus’s dance you ever beheld.”
Weatherby chewed a bite of steak, his mouth working vigorously. “I have never beheld a case of Saint Vitus’s dance and I would hazard you ain’t either. Besides, one can be physically infirm without being disordered in one’s thinking, and God knows the reverse is also true. My own daughters are all too hale and fit, while they drive me to Bedlam with their chatter.”
Neville took a long drink from his tankard, for good porter should not go to waste when a man faced a tedious discussion—or any other time, come to that.
“And what do my daughters chatter about?” Weatherby asked, gesturing with his knife. “Marriage. Marriage, engagements, flirtations, who is walking out with whom, and which callow nincompoop stood up with which featherbrained twit at the last assembly. And why, I ask you, is this topic of obsessive interest to them? It’s not as if marriage has led their parents to anything approaching connubial bliss.”
“Young ladies are a hopeful sort,” Neville remarked, though his own hopes were feeling somewhat daunted at the moment. “I am prepared to generously compensate you for bringing this petition, Weatherby.”
That compensation would flow outside documented channels, of course, as per usual when Weatherby brought petitions at Neville’s suggestion.
“How much?” Weatherby washed down his steak with a quarter tankard of good porter and held up his glass for a refill. He had once been a handsome young man. Now he was thick about the middle, and his nose had taken on the deep pink of the inchoate sot.
“I will pay you triple the last arrangement,” Neville said, quietly.
Weatherby set his tankard down slowly. “What are you up to, Philpot? Rothhaven is a duke, and possibly well-to-do, but his ancestral pile is falling apart. The drive is a weed patch, the terraces crumbling, and the roof doubtless leaks in fourteen places. The old duke wasn’t exactly a genius at investing, and keeping up those stately manors takes a fortune. As guardian, you will have to see to the Hall, and the whole time, Lord Nathaniel will be glowering over your shoulder demanding to inspect the accounts.”
“And he will be permitted to see them.” Those accounts would balance to the penny, and reflect efforts intended to safeguard Rothhaven Hall as an asset. The figures would not necessarily match what was paid to the tradesmen actually restoring the Hall. “If Lord Nathaniel grows too bothersome, his daft older brother will be sent to another private madhouse, and there’s nothing his lordship can do about that. A guardian’s authority is quite extensive.”
Other diners arrived, the noise level in the room rose, and laughter erupted from a table by the window. Sir Levi Sparrow’s wife was said to be in anticipation of a happy event, and that apparently occasioned a jovial crowd around his table, the good wishes and bad jokes flowing apace.
Weatherby waved his fork, another bite of steak speared on the tines. “Philpot, aren’t you getting a bit ambitious? So Rothhaven has the falling sickness. He has a fit, he takes a nap, he wakes up, and he’s still a duke who can likely recite Caesar’s Gallic letters by heart. Find us a bit more porter, if you please.”
Neville held up Weatherby’s empty tankard and signaled a harried waiter. “Rothhaven’s situation is far more complicated than a few seizures. We don’t know how long he’s been at the Hall, but for whatever time he’s dwelled there, he’s been unwilling to leave the premises.”
“You said he had a fit in church. He apparently leaves the Rothhaven premises now, don’t he?”
“That’s only the second time he’s attended divine services in my memory, and when the fit subsided, he was barely coherent. I witnessed the same sad truth when he took a fit right outside Cranmouth’s office. In that state, His Grace can’t stand unaided, he doesn’t seem to recognize friend from foe, and I have it on good authority that he will soon be dwelling at the Hall without his brother to coddle him.”
Phoebe really should have been an intelligence officer, for she missed nothing and saw connections others were blind to.
“Lord Nathaniel is off to join the navy, is he?”
“He’s getting married, and he plans to dwell with his bride at Crofton Ford, twenty miles distant from Rothhaven Hall.”
“The moment I file this petition, Lord Nathaniel will scrap those plans, and his bride will have nothing to say to it.”
“Let him, for that will only put Rothhaven under the thumb of the same sibling who all but imprisoned him at the Hall in the first place. Our case becomes that much stronger.” Phoebe had made that point too. “Lord Nathaniel stands to benefit the most by exacerbating Rothhaven’s malady. Epileptic fits can be fatal, you know.”
“Now you’re a physician, Philpot?”
The waiter came with a pitcher and refilled both tankards.
“You can leave that pitcher here, boy,” Neville said, “and a plate of buttered crab legs wouldn’t go amiss.”
The waiter tossed them a bow and moved away. Neville detested the untidiness of buttered crab legs, but Phoebe claimed Weatherby was partial to them.
“I am not a physician,” Neville said. “Dr. Warner is prepared to serve in his usual role.” Warnerlookedlike a physician—dark-haired, tall, lean, handsome, and articulate, with a canny balance of a younger man’s charm and a mature fellow’s professional confidence. The judges liked him, as did the aging females he tended to collect as patients.
