Sweet and Twenty (17 page)

Neither of these complaints was new or likely to be the cause of the glee in the enemy camp, for it was becoming clearer by the minute that Reising was in alt about something.

“What did yon say to them?”

“Just what you told me, Matt. Said it was safe as a church, and had never killed a soul or fallen or a thing in America. I said the tolls was only for carriages, and I’d let the poor go on foot for free.”

“That’s good, Tony. Remember those two points. Was there anything else?”

“Well, it came out that that sneak of a Sara was giving out pamphlets for Alistair, but that was early on, the day she and her mama went around to the shops for us to send all them wilted turnips and what-not to the orphanage and poorhouse.”

“Was she, by God! And none of them mentioning a word of it to us. She must have known.”

“Course she knew! She had them hid in her reticule. I’ve been telling you all along she’s a clever puss.”

“I meant Miss Watters, but it can’t be that they’re smirking about. That was weeks ago. You should have told me though. Always tell me everything, Tony
.
You haven’t gone and pitched yourself into a duel or anything of that sort, have you?”

“What, with Alistair? I ain’t such a flat as that. He’s a devil with his pops. Could hit a bull’s-eye across a field. No sir, I don’t hold with dueling.”

“You have no idea what’s going on then?”

“They’re putting a good face on their defeat. It’s the only course open to them now that they’ve lost.”

Matt found it impossible to be certain yet that they had lost, and when Reising and Alistair turned to leave the market, he was after them, risking leaving Fellows alone with his admirers for five minutes. Reising turned to see Hudson and waited for him. “How’s your lover-boy today?”
he asked in a tone of heavy sarcasm.

Matthew breathed a sigh of relief, thinking it was only some nonsense to do with Sara. “In high gig, as you must have seen for yourself just now.”

“He won’t be in such high gig when it gets out what he’s been up to.”

“People take a lenient view of bachelors’
making up to the ladies. Alistair has been doing a spot of wooing of his own, I hear.”

“Ha ha—but Mr. Alistair is more discreet. He restricts himself to single ladies, and to the spoken word, too. You might warn your man of the danger of
billets doux
to married ladies. I’m surprised you haven’t done so.”

Admitting ignorance was something never done by either whipper-in, and Hudson swallowed the lump in his throat, preparatory to trying to discover what that ass of a Tony had been up to behind his back.

“You have managed to get a copy of the letter, I assume?”
he asked, hoping to get a look at what was being spoken of, to see just how damning it was and of course to whom it was addressed.

“No, Hudson, I have the originals.”
Reising smiled and pulled out three pieces of paper. Hudson recognized Tony’s round writing at a glance. He reached out a hand for them, but Reising drew them back.

“You’ll have to wait and read them in a special pamphlet we are having prepared,”
he said. “We mean to distribute it the day before the election—tomorrow, that is. I expect young Miss Monteith will help us circulate them.”
A gratuitous blow, but hardly important. It was imperative to see just how damaging the letters were.

“May I have a look?”
Hudson asked, showing no more than mild curiosity.

“Let him, Reising,”
Alistair said, laughing. “Mr. Hudson may decide to withdraw his candidate and save us the expense, and Lady Marie, the embarrassment, of distributing them.”

Lady Marie! Good God, that fat yellow-haired Tory wife of Sir John Sinclair! But it was Basingstoke who was spoken of as her hopeful lover. Hudson, with the cool nerve of an assassin, reached out an unshaking hand for the letters. He read through them quickly, pretending to do no more than glance at them, but many phrases were indelibly printed on his mind. It was drivel of the worst sort, extremely damning drivel, couched in ardent schoolboy’s prose. He wondered how Reising had got hold of them and that Lady Marie should let them out of her own hands for a minute.

“Sir John won’t appreciate having this bruited about,”
he said, this being the only possible response he could think of on the spur of the moment. “A backhanded trick to serve your heaviest supporter. I have heard a thousand pounds mentioned as his contribution.”
Hudson knew it was seven hundred and fifty pounds to a penny Sir John had kicked in, but the managers always feigned a little more ignorance than they possessed as a basic tactic.

“Oh, he’s a good sport. He don’t take it amiss that his wife is a handsome woman. No secret Basingstoke takes to her, and while it won’t add to her reputation to have attached such a gudgeon as Fellows, it is pretty clear from the tone of the letters that there was no reciprocation of feeling. The last one, you will notice, is all to do with her not bestowing so much as a glance or a smile on him. It appears to have been a one-sided affair, which says a good deal for the lady’s common sense.”

“Publishing them says little for her discretion.”

“A case of the pot calling the kettle black, Mr. Hudson. Your allowing Fellows to go calling on his amour in the middle of a campaign is a piece of indiscretion on your part that quite baffles me. I don’t know what you thought to gain by it, but whatever it was, it backfired. It was the very thing that made Sir John suspicious and then angry enough to allow the letters to be published.”

Hudson would as soon have cut off his arm as admit he had bungled, so he only smiled as if he were concealing some devious trick,

“In a small community like ours, carrying-on of this sort will be taken very ill,”
Alistair pointed out. “Well, what do you say, Mr. Hudson? Do you wish
to withdraw Fellows?”

Hudson had been considering this in the half-minute allowed him for planning, but was not ready to capitulate so easily. By pretending to, though, he might delay publication till it was too late to circulate the letters. “Let me think about it,”
he said carelessly.

“Go ahead. You have till tomorrow,”
Alistair told him.

“Meanwhile we’ve had the copies printed up,”
Reising added, “in case you’re thinking to stall us off.”

It flashed into Hudson’s head that he must break into the newspaper printing office and purloin the letters, and the next moment he was juggling Isaac Armstrong against his own flash culls for the job. The city crooks had been kept in town in case of just such an emergency as this. But Reising was no Johnnie Raw, and knew precisely what was in his mind.

“They’re not being done in Crockett, of course,”
Reising informed him with a grin. “The story would be around by now if we’d done that, and we hope to keep it for a bit of a surprise. They’ll be on the streets tomorrow morning.”

“Had them printed in London, did you?”
Hudson asked nonchalantly.

“No, I didn’t, Hudson, and there’s no point trying to find out where they were printed, for I don’t have a mind to have them snatched by your fellows before they get on the streets. We may have them all printed up and secured, or we may have them coming to us from any direction, and not even you, old friend, can canvass so many possibilities in less than twenty-four hours. You’ve got yourself saddled with a rare boy this time. You nearly pulled it off—I take my hat off to you about the bridge and the dinner—but not even you could have foreseen this turn. You know where you can reach us if you decide to pull Fellows out. We ain’t anxious to drag Lady Marie into it, but we have her permission, and Sir John is eager to see the riding in Tory hands, so there’s no hope they’ll go denying the authenticity of the letters.”

“I didn’t think you’d stoop to blackmail, Reising,”
Hudson said in a severe tone.

Alistair, really still a novice at this game, felt cheap to be looked down on by Mr. Hudson, who seemed every inch the fine gentleman, with his gray-tinged hair, his pending title, and his noble countenance.

“Ha ha, not much you didn’t!”
Reising laughed merrily, having a much more accurate knowledge of his opponent. “You’d have done the same thing yourself if you’d had the chance or the necessity. I don’t suppose you forget the night you barged into the George at Reading to catch Macintosh, my boy, with that young trollop he’d picked up in the tavern. And it was you set her on to him too, if I know anything—and then brought half the voters in the county with you to catch him.”

“I didn’t set her on to him. That is one trick of yours I refuse to use. But when a clergyman runs on the strength of his moral principles, it is only fair that his constituents know how closely he follows his own advice.”

“I didn’t blame you. It was a cute trick, but I’ve got you this time. I owe you one for Macintosh, and by God it gives me pleasure to repay you.”

“You
haven’t repaid
me
yet, Reising. I’ll be in touch,”
Hudson said, and left with a wry smile that turned to a desperate grimace as he turned his back on them and went to the market to collect Tony.

He found him in the middle of a crowd, expounding his views on the Tories. “Blackguards, every one of them. I wouldn’t trust them with a penny, or with my sister either, if I had one.”

Hudson groaned at the irony of it and managed to get his candidate away by implying there was weighty business to discuss. As soon as they were in their carriage, away from the crowd, Hudson put it to him.

“You wrote love letters to Lady Marie Sinclair?”
he asked, though he had no doubts at all regarding those disastrous scribbles.

Fellows blushed and looked a little sheepish. “Lord, how did you tumble to that? It was six months ago. Me and Basingstoke was both after her, but she seemed to favor Basingstoke’s suit. Of course he was living closer to her and could go in person to butter her up. I had to rely on letters, and nothing came of it. Writing letters ain’t my strong suit, to tell the truth.”

“You never actually had an affair with her?”

“No, no, and don’t believe I would have had she given in either, for she’s a bit long in the tooth to suit my taste. Basingstoke thought she was all the crack, and he’s so longheaded, you know, that if he likes her, she must be a bit of all right.”

“Oh God, you’re hopeless.”

“No, no, there was never a thing to it, I swear. I mind Allingham asked me before they put me up to run if there was anything in my past that would disgrace me if it came out, and he mentioned a mistress in particular, and my
hands are clean.”

“The hands have nothing to do with it. Those letters are as incriminating as hell. You asked her to be your mistress.”

“Well, dash it, you’ve got to say something in a love-letter! I didn’t mean it. I’d have palmed her off on Basingstoke if it had ever come down to it,”
Fellows said defensively.

“Reising has the letters and means to publish them. We’re finished; you’re disgraced. You should have told me—I’ve asked you a dozen times to tell me anything that might be of interest.”

“I didn’t know you was interested in my letters or I’d have told you, Matt. Truth to tell, I thought she’d got rid of them. She said she would, as I destroyed hers.”

“You had replies to them! When was this? What was in them?”

“Why, the softest muck you ever heard of. Calling me a naughty boy and saying as how she looked forward to seeing me at some party or other and all sorts of things. She was half-gone on me, if you want the truth. I never let on to Basingstoke, but I think I might have had her for the taking if I’d kept after it. But I eased off somewhat, you know, and then she cooled down. I only wrote once after that, for I felt I was pretty safe; I jawed her out a bit for being cool to me, but the fact of the matter is I was relieved.”

“And you destroyed her letters! You got rid of that good evidence! Tony—oh, what’s the use! Does she know they’re destroyed?”
he asked, hoping yet for a reprieve by a little blackmail of his own if he could lead Reising to believe he had the answers.

“Yes, I got rid of them, Matt, so you needn’t fear they’ll publish her answers. And she knows it, for I did it right in front of her eyes.”

“Marvelous!”

“Yessir, they can’t go stealing her answers and publishing them. She asked me to get rid of them, and truth to tell I wasn’t half-eager to have them sitting around the house where the servants might stumble on them, for they root around when you ain’t home, no denying.”

“Why didn’t you get yours back?”

“She said she’d get rid of them. It was at a do at my place she asked me for hers, and I tossed ‘em right into the fire before her very eyes, and she said she’d do the same with mine the minute she got home, so how is it possible you’ve seen them?”

“She gave them to Reising. He’s going to publish them for the whole town to snicker over and see what a damned fool you are!”

“She couldn’t bear to part with them when it came down to it. And you know how the girls like to brag about having landed a fellow. As to using them, well, they’re all Tories together. They haven’t seen the light. You can’t really blame them. Basingstoke wouldn’t have been sweet on Marie if she ain’t the goods, so there’s nothing to be ashamed of in it. Anyway, nobody will believe a word of it. They’ll think it’s just a low Tory trick, for I’ve been telling them this very morning that you can’t trust a Tory.”

“You can trust a Tory to publish those letters, believe me. What are we to do?”

“It’s just as you said. They’re using one of them cheap
hominem
things, abusing me, and so I’ll tell the world.”

“You’ve got to withdraw. It’s the only thing. You won’t get a single vote.”

“I’ll get Basingstoke’s and Allingham’s, for Basingstoke knows all about my letters and he didn’t take it amiss in the least since I backed off. And I’ll get
my
vote.”

“Three votes won’t carry you to London.”

“There’s the bridge. And how about all them
sine qua non’s
we’ve been spending in the village? Wearing this ugly old lid of Saunders’s too
.
”

“That bastard of a Reising has outwitted me. I don’t know where he’s got the printed pamphlets and I haven’t time to find them. You have to pull out. You can claim ill health. A soft brain would be credible, I think.”