Chapter Fourteen

“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.