A Heart Too Proud Page 3

  Mrs. Goodbody paused in the act of serving out the mayberry pie, remembering another piece of good news.

  “It’s to be new clothing from London for you girls! The marquis has had orders sent to some hoity-toity dress shop in London so you’ll be dressed as is fitting for your station. Lord Dearborne says it is high time you were dressed as proper young ladies.”

  What the marquis had actually said, as Mrs. Goodbody confided to me long afterward, was:

  “For God’s sake, get that chit out of those rags before one of my friends mistakes her for a scullery maid and gives her a toss in the nearest haystack.”

  Chapter Three

  Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight;

  Red sky at dawning, shepherd’s warning.

  I don’t know what color the sky had been at dawning but by the time I had risen from my cot the heavens had taken on a grayish ombré. The rain came on and off all morning, collecting in the worn ruts in the carriageway to make hundreds of silvery looking glasses. Lifting our long skirts to keep the hemlines dry, my sisters and I made hasty progress down the front drive during a pause in the deluge. We had decided to await Christopher’s arrival in the gateway cottage where Joe Hawkins, the coachman, lived with his nine cats. “It’s like having eighty-one cats, for they each have their nine lives,” Joe would say with his huge wink. Since Cleo wasn’t very sociable with felines we left her at home to comfort Mrs. Goodbody during thunderclaps.

  I sat musing by the window while the twins played hide-and-seek with the cats around the heavy old furniture in Joe’s parlor. We were prepared to wait all day for the coach if need be, but shortly after one o’clock we heard the rumble of carriage wheels like thunder from afar. A few moments later, the carriage pulled through the gate, rain steaming off the horses’ backs. The looking-glass puddles were shattered into crystals by the stamp of powerful hooves.

  The twins and I pulled woolen shawls over our heads to keep off the halfhearted drizzle and followed the marquis’s impressive coach up the drive to the mansion. We watched from a wary distance as Lord Dearborne gracefully descended the front steps. The coachman pulled the team to a stop, and out stepped—a handsome adolescent boy. His friendly open face was glowing with affection as he looked up at the marquis.

  Lord Dearborne smiled back; a warm, rich grin that penetrated through the coldness of his eyes, softening them. I felt my breath catch in my throat.

  “Lord, who would think the old crosspatch could look so chummy?” Caro whispered to her twin, sotto voce.

  “ ’Lo, Uncle Nicky,” said the youth.

  “Lord, brat, every time I see you you’ve grown another inch. I hope this wet weather hasn’t dampened your young spirits any.”

  “No, sir, I’m in excellent gear for all that it’s plaguily damp. I confess to one or two bad moments back on your drive, though. I feared the potholes in the lane were going to tip the carriage over into that jungle of undergrowth. I’ve never seen such a place for rack and ruin. I hope you know what you’re doing, coming here.”

  Lord Dearborne lifted his hand, rumpled his ward’s hair lightly.

  “Have faith, halfling,” he said. Mrs. Goodbody joined us, puffing from her quick walk from the cottage. The smile remained with Lord Dearborne’s mouth as he turned to her, though his eyes became distant.

  “Mrs. Goodbody, may I present my ward, Christopher Warrington.” And Christopher Warrington took her hand just as though she was some great titled lady, which warmed me to him right from the start. Having a little boy to fuss over had its charms, but those paled into insignificance compared with the prospect of having a lively friend of one’s own age.

  “To be sure, Your Lordship,” stated Mrs. Goodbody. “ ’Twill be a fine thing to have a lad about the place. But Mr. Warrington must meet my dear charges. They’ve been looking forward to your coming, like Christmas.”

  I stepped forward, eager to waste no more time in establishing friendships with this handsome boy whose kind brown eyes were smiling down into mine.

  “Why, you must be as old as I. And quite six feet tall in the bargain,” I said, shyly. “It would take a rocking horse big as entered Troy to hold you.”

  “It has been a few years since I rode my last rocking horse,” he said with a puzzled grin.

  Caro and Christa came to my side, giggling. Christa told him:

  “We were expecting a jam-faced tot to mother. Wait until you see how we’ve fixed your bedchamber. There are toy soldiers and an old kite, along with the restuffed rocking horse. We’d even planned to take you on a picnic by Townsey Mill House tomorrow if this bothersome rain clears.”

  “I am not so ancient that I can’t appreciate a good picnic. Especially in such charming company.” His smile took us all in and visions of jam-faced tots were banished unregretted.

  That was the last we were to see of Christopher that day. The twins and I had planned to walk to Squire Macready’s stables with Jane Coleman if the weather would cooperate. Indeed, before the hour was out, the determined sun began to push aside the sulky rain clouds and Jane’s cheerful, freckled face poked around the cottage door. One of the squire’s huge plow horses had just that week foaled and we spent a long while peering between the bar gates of the hay-lined box stall in the corner of the stables, full of admiration for the proud mother and her frisky, dappled colt. It was almost dusk by the time we trudged back to the cottage.

  When we returned we found that Mrs. Blakslee’s predictions about Lord Dearborne’s London servants had been borne out. The French chef was especially difficult. His name was Henri, and he stated that the kitchen, with its old and wheezy stove, was fit only for the cannibal feasts of a wild tribe of aborigines. Or so Mrs. Goodbody told us when she returned for a short time in the evening to assist in seeing the twins to bed. Mrs. Goodbody said only the presence of His Lordship’s valet, Roger, made the experience bearable. He was, said she, “a fine gentleman, very proper and distinguished.” Chuckling warmly, Mrs. Goodbody bid us goodnight to hustle back to the kitchen and help poor Henri clean up his mess.

  After she had gone, I lay in bed, listening to the happy chatter of the twins as they hugged each other under the covers in anticipation of the morrow’s picnic. Then their talk grew quieter, with sleepy comments coming less and less often, until their slow rhythmic breathing informed me that they had fallen asleep. The chatter of the crickets took up the conversation where they had left it, with the night birds adding faraway high cadenzas. Unable to sleep, I left my bed and walked to the window where the curtain billowed quietly like a sail in the warm night breeze. The sky had cleared, the clouds having spent their tearful sorrows and moved on. The full moon made it nearly as bright as day, with the light of the distant stars adding silvery highlights to the warm glow from the windows of Barfrestly. As I watched, many of the lamps in the mansion began to blink off, leaving only a dim glow in the library, where I supposed Lord Dearborne and Christopher to be enjoying their after-dinner brandy and talk, and one in the kitchen, where Mrs. Goodbody was likely enjoying a late-night discussion of London downstairs happenings with the new servants.

  On a whim, I pulled an old cotton gown from the wall and threw on a light shawl to protect myself from the still dampness of the night. Stirring as I was with inexplicable longing, I wished to be out in the spacious coolness of the evening. I made my way out across the moonlit garden, my bare feet sliding softly through the wet grass. As I stood in the breeze in the middle of the grounds the night sounds played a concert of which I was the only patron.

  Then to my surprise I observed what appeared to be a man standing directly underneath the window of the library!

  After some reluctance to vacate my front-row seat, I decided I had better investigate, and I was nearly going to call out to the mysterious form when it vanished into a shadow. This warranted closer investigation. It didn’t occur to me to be afraid; I had never been in danger in my life. When I reached the spot under the library window I found nothing but a
decrepit ladder draped helter-skelter with old washrags, probably left there by some lately industrious servant who had planned on resuming his labors there on the morrow. I poked at the ladder and laughed at my fancy, and turned to resume my place at the opera when a scrap of conversation floated from the open library window above my innocent head.

  “I’m glad that you decided to bring me out here, Uncle Nicky. Anne is all at sea right now, what with her husband being posted to Europe. Lord, you wouldn’t believe all the fuss and botheration. Now that we’re out of black gloves, I daresay that Anne would use every spare minute to drag me to Almack’s and a mass of other devilish places, expecting me to do the pretty to a lot of stiff-rumped dowagers and their die-away daughters.”

  The speaker was, without doubt, Christopher Warrington. I heard Lord Dearborne laugh softly at Christopher’s morose tone.

  “Somehow I can’t picture you eschewing female companionship.” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice had become curiously gentle. “Give yourself time, Kit.”

  “Yes,” Christopher said quietly. “Uncle Nicky, have you come any closer, yet? Since coming to Kent, I mean?”

  “Little things happen; nothing dramatic though.” I wondered briefly what Lord Dearborne could be trying to come closer to and was suddenly struck by a flash of guilt. Here I was, eavesdropping, “pokin’ my nose” into Lord Dearborne’s affairs against Mrs. Goodbody’s emphatic prohibition. I was about to tiptoe stealthily away when I heard Christopher speak again:

  “I know what your business is here, but what do you do here for pleasure in this season?”

  “Ride mostly.”

  “So,” Christopher’s voice sounded amused, “have you succeeded in mounting the beautiful violet-eyed filly you have stabled in the back cottage?”

  Eavesdroppers never hear any good of themselves. How often I had heard Mrs. Goodbody say that to the twins, and how crushingly true it had just proved to be. I am the world’s worst sinner. My sisters had been stealing apples all along from the Squire’s orchard and the one time I went along, unwillingly, we were caught. And now I had been paid off again. I’d never before eavesdropped on a conversation, purposefully or otherwise; and while the twins had been getting away with it for years, on my one transgression I became the victim of humiliation. A mortified blush fanned my cheeks. If only I had stayed in bed where I belonged I might have been spared this mortification. I decided to return thence, where I would be safe from such punishing temptation.

  To avoid waking the twins I tiptoed over the threshold, but I heard Christa whisper, “Is that you, Lizzie?”

  “Yes it is, pet. Go to sleep now.”

  “Lizzie, Cleo was scratching at the door so I let her out. But when I called her she ran off toward the big house.”

  “Don’t worry then, Christa, I will bring her back. Go to sleep now.”

  I retraced my steps back toward the house, calling softly for Cleo. I decided to look toward the side of the house, where Cleo liked to dig for field mice in the weeds. But when I arrived there was no sign of the errant puppy.

  Suddenly there was a scrape and a rattle and something dropped in front of me, seemingly from out of the sky. When I bent down to pick it up, it turned out to be a piece of shingling from the roof. Ladders don’t knock off shingles, and Cleo can’t climb walls, I thought to myself nervously. I looked up toward the roof.

  No doubt about it, there was a man, or the form of a man, standing on the roof. He, or it, was facing away from me and was moving laterally, silently, across the edge of the roof. I resolved to follow it at a safe distance. It would do no good to call for help until I was sure I had seen what I thought I had. I began walking, keeping the form in view some paces ahead of me, until it disappeared at the corner of the house. Had it flown off into the air like some wild ghost? Or if it was a man, had he only crossed to the other side of the roof? I walked on a little farther until I too had reached the corner of the house.

  Cleo was digging underneath the lilacs there. I was very glad to see her.

  “Cleo,” I said, “help me find the scary ghost.” My voice sounded unnatural and brave in the night. Cleo looked up and then continued with her worrying.

  I bent closer to remove the object from her teeth, then held the thing curiously. In stunned horror I realized that what I held was a human hand! In the instant that this knowledge hit my consciousness another hand came to lie lightly on my shoulder and the scream that poured from my throat was a lusty one indeed.

  “There’s no need to shriek, you foolish child. I’m not going to hurt you.” Not five minutes ago I had thought that if I never saw the Marquis of Lorne again it would be much too soon for me. Now I almost wept with gratitude.

  “A hand,” I gasped rather incoherently.

  He stretched out an impatient arm to help me to my feet and I tried again.

  “There’s a hand under the lilac bush.”

  He went then and looked where I had pointed. I heard him curse softly under his breath as he pulled me roughly to my feet. With one sinewy arm about my shoulders he half dragged me across the grass to the kitchen door with Cleo running at my heels. He called Mrs. Goodbody sharply and thrust me into her arms as she came running.

  * * *

  The next morning I woke puffy-eyed and headachy. The events of the evening before had kept me away from my cot far beyond the usual hour. And being the discoverer of a dead man does not induce the most restful of slumbers, I assure you. The hand under the lilac bush had been connected to the body of a man with a broken neck. Henri, the French cook, had whipped his last soufflé.

  Mrs. Goodbody had taken one glance at my wan face at breakfast and sent me back to bed for the balance of the morning. When I woke the second time I felt better and didn’t wince when I heard a determined rap on the cottage door. I pulled down my quilt and rose.

  “Yes?” I called.

  “It’s Christopher,” came a masculine voice. “Your sisters are eager to picnic and Mrs. Goodbody said that I should come and wake you.”

  “Oh, thank you,” I returned, though I felt shy. After what I had heard last night outside the window, I was embarrassed to face Christopher. At least he didn’t know that I had eavesdropped. It was some consolation.

  Yet it didn’t seem proper to go off merrymaking the day after someone had died right here on our very grounds, and I said as much to Christopher as I tied the frayed ribbons of my second-best bonnet under my chin.

  “Don’t be a goose,” replied Christopher, sounding muffled but sensible through the door. “Henri was related to no one here—I daresay you hadn’t even met him. What happened is a shame but we can scarcely mourn a man none of us knew. Uncle Nicky will do what’s proper for Henri’s remains, you can be sure of that.”

  I doubted that very much. Last night the Marquis of Lorne had shown little inclination to trouble himself with the business. When the squire, who is justice of the peace, arrived to examine the particulars of the matter last night, the marquis had suggested with freezing boredom that surely the matter could be handled as expeditiously as possible. Squire Macready, as cringing a sycophant as any you will find, had hastily agreed. He had no sooner listened to my sketch of the night’s events (my eavesdropping carefully omitted) than he had pompously pronounced it obvious that Henri had been attempting to gain entry to Lord Dearborne’s bedroom “for the purposes of robbery” when he had fallen to his death. It was clear to me that his opinion owed more to his desire to accommodate Lord Dearborne than to his own convictions.

  “ ’Lizbeth, are you going to dream away the whole day? Come on,” yelled my sister Caro peremptorily. I grabbed up a worn coverlet to sit upon and stepped out, squinting in the bright sunlight. The twins were standing, impatiently shifting about, with an oversized picnic hamper between them. Christopher stood nearby, his stylishly cropped brown hair tousled by the breeze. He gave me a smile that was at once so boyish and warm that my reserve melted away and I cheerfully took his proffered arm
.

  “Good morning, everyone,” I said.

  “ ’Tis afternoon, slug-a-bed,” teased Caro.

  “So it is,” I said. The sun streamed down from Olympian heights as we walked lazily to the back meadow, the twins merrily scattering a small herd of lambs. A meadowlark piped from somewhere in the woods to the west and the pungent odor of clover mixed with trampled sheep dung. We passed next to a low forest of brush and a bramble bush reached out to grab a bite from my gown. The thorns had just put out leaves to disguise their small sabers. One must tread warily past them.

  Finally we reached the shade of our favorite elder tree. Its branches leaned over a twinkling stream bordered with reeds. Spreading out the coverlet on a comfortable cushion of moss, we sat down and I gave the twins and Christopher an account of my nocturnal adventures. Afterward Christopher whistled, but respectfully gave his considered opinion that I should let be.

  “Well, of course I’ll let be. There’s nothing I can do. But here is a man dead and all Lord Dearborne can think is how he’s being kept from his bed. It was callous, Christopher, and I don’t think the full story has come out.”

  “And what was a cook doing on the roof?” returned Christopher with a knowing air. “Making soup from starlight?”

  “But Christopher, that’s the point. I’m not sure that it was Henri on the roof. I could barely make out that it was a man, much less the man’s face. When I tried to explain that to the squire he looked at me like I was a chair with its springs popping out. I tell you, he’ll never properly investigate because Lord Dearborne does not want the matter pursued. The squire dissolved into a slithering jelly in front of Lord Dearborne,” I finished in disgust.

  “If Uncle Nicky doesn’t want the thing looked into then there’s an end to it. He never does anything without a good reason, I promise you. How do you think that he got to be one of the most important men in the War Office?”

  “Influence!” I said firmly.