The Butler Did It Read Online Free PDF Page B

part, Mrs. Timon does just fine. Except for the eel. Don’t care for eel, Wycliff,” Morgan said, watching the man closely.
    â€œI…I also don’t care for…for eel, my lord.”
    Morgan was being perverse, he knew it, but he had cause. Wycliff had made a cake of himself after departing that last posting inn, insisting almost to hysteria that the three harmless-looking farmers who had shared the common room with them were sure to follow the coaches, intent on slitting their throats.
    Morgan would consider a figurative crawl inside Wycliff’s head, just for a moment, to see where the man’s brainbox had been wound up incorrectly, except he’d first have to fight his way through the maggots that doubtless collected there.
    â€œNo? Then, at last, we’re agreed on something. The thing about eel, Wycliff, is that rather rubbery texture when it isn’t cooked just right. Do you know what I mean? It can be swimming in the best, most creamy parsley sauce, but if you put it in your mouth and it sort of bounces off your back teeth, well—”
    God was both testing him and punishing him, Morgan decided, as Wycliff tossed up his accounts all over his lordship’s shiny Hessians.
    Â 
    T HIS WAS IT , the final test of his resolve. Edgar Marmon, Adventurer, and currently known as Sir Edgar Marmington, counted to ten to calm his queasy stomach as he stood just outside the tavern at the bottom end of Bond Street. He was getting too old for this, and knew that, if he hesitated, he would be in danger of losing his nerve.
    But, as he was also in no monetary position to turn tail and run, and too aged to contemplate employing the sweat of his brow in an honest day’s work—probably because he’d never used the words “work” and “honest” in the same thought—he screwed himself up to the sticking point and soldiered on.
    Once inside, his gaze roamed the place, seeking into the darkest corners, on the lookout for anyone who might see through his disguise of now snowy-white hair, a bushy white mustache, and the cane he used to support his limp, a leftover of his valiant service against the French, years earlier.
    If one could count tagging after the army valiant as, for the most part, he had hidden himself in the rear during the day and left his visits to the battlefields to the dark of night, when he scavenged for any bits of loot he could find and carry away. If, not to make too fine a point on it, one could even call it a limp, as Sir Edgar, just to be sure he’d keep favoring the correct leg, placed a few pebbles in his left boot each morning, to remind him.
    Sir Edgar selected the perfect small table in the corner, and carefully sat down in the chair that positioned his back to the wall. He ordered a bottle and two glasses, and announced very clearly to the disinterested barmaidthat he was waiting for his good friend, the Viscount Claypole, to join him.
    He’d wait a good long time for that, too, as Sir Edgar had made it his business to send the viscount a missive in the middle of the night, telling him he needs must hie himself home at once, as his father, the earl, was on his deathbed. As Claypole was located nearly thirty miles above Leicester, and the viscount was looking hard at finally inheriting his earldom, Sir Edgar was not disappointed in the man’s alacrity in obeying the summons, and waved him on his way from an alley as the viscount’s coach set north at first light.
    Two or three days to Claypole. More, if this fog had drifted to the countryside. A few days’ rest as the viscount asked his father, repeatedly, “Are you quite sure you’re not dying?” A few days for the return trip.
    And, by then, nobody would remember that Sir Edgar had even mentioned the man’s name.
    â€œOh dear, oh dear, where can he be?” Sir Edgar said several times over the next hour, as he consulted his pocket watch, as he looked