A School for Brides (15 page)

Robert was to escort the ladies of the dower house down to their carriage and see them off. Mrs. Westing had only been able to manage to coerce her hosts into playing a few hands of vingt-et-un and was in an irritable mood; Miss le Strange, who considered that her evening had been spent more profitably, followed after, offering graceful thanks for the entertainment. As Robert attempted to offer Miss le Strange assistance in descending the unlit stairway, however, she halted and clapped a hand to her throat.

“My necklace!” she cried. “It is gone!”

OF COURSE, AN
immediate and futile attempt was made to find the necklace in the dark, which involved many stumbles and tripping over half-rolled rugs. The search soon devolved into a version of blind man's buff in which all the participants, rather than the player designated as “It,” were blindfolded. The shrieks and muffled laughter that resulted convinced Miss Quince to call a halt to the proceedings, lest someone tumble over the parapet or, perhaps, use the occasion as an excuse for some undignified and improper behavior.

“Ladies! I must ask you to descend and go to the drawing room at once,” she said, raising her voice to be heard over the general hubbub and the rushing wind. The consequent move toward the stairs set off another chain of collisions, but under Miss Quince's management, all were gotten downstairs without injury or impropriety. Once the company had assembled in the drawing room, the search was declared over for the night. “But my necklace!” objected Miss le Strange. Greatly daring, Miss Crump lifted her eyes to look at her governess, but that lady seemed quite unconscious of any possible offense.

“I myself shall superintend the search,” promised Miss Quince. “We shall not find it tonight, unless it is brought downstairs with some of the furniture or carpets. Tomorrow during the daylight hours will be the best time to discover it.”

“It was that footman,” Miss le Strange said. “I know I had it up until the moment the candles blew out. He took his opportunity
then
and abstracted it.”

“Oh, pray do not say so, Miss le Strange,” said Miss Quince. “Robert is an excellent young man—we are all so fond of him. I cannot believe he would do such a thing.”

“You doubt my word, then—the word of a le Strange—and choose to believe in the innocence of a footman?”

“Please, Miss le Strange, remember we do not know that the necklace is lost. We will most likely find it in the morning, if not tonight.”

“Very well. But do not forget: I am suspicious of that footman. I felt something brush against my neck when the lights were extinguished, and he was helping me with my shawl. I have little reason to doubt that that was the instant in which he unfastened it.”

“Most likely what you felt was the shawl itself, Miss le Strange,” said Miss Quince coldly. “I must ask you to wait until we have had a thorough search before accusing our servants.”

“And
I
must ask
you
to understand that the pendant on that necklace was a Burmese ruby the size of a quail's egg. It is part of a parure, and the necklace is the most valuable piece.”

Miss Quince lifted her eyebrows. She knew something of the state of finances in the le Strange family. “An heirloom set, I suppose? Something handed down to you from your ancestors?”

“It was a gift,” Miss le Strange said, in tones quite as chilly as Miss Quince's.

“Ah, I see.”

“I rather doubt you do, Miss Quince,” said Miss le Strange. “It was a gift from my fiancé, Viscount Baggeshotte.”

For the second time that week, Miss Crump toppled over in a dead faint upon the floor.

“She was unaware of your engagement?” Miss Quince asked after Miss Crump had been carried to her chamber and they were standing at her bedside, looking down at her insensate form.

“Certainly she was, and she would not be aware of it now had I not needed to defend my reputation against your insinuations, Miss Quince. I wished to allow her father to make that announcement; however, he is ill at present and unable to do so. In fact, he is so ill, he is unable to speak or move. A palsy following apoplexy.”

Miss Crump's eyelids fluttered open. “My father . . . ill? Apoplexy?” She fainted for the third time; this time, at least, she was at no risk of injury from falling.

“I see you also refrained from telling your prospective stepdaughter about her father's health,” Miss Quince remarked, and Miss le Strange stiffened at the headmistress's tone.

“Miss Crump is a poor, feeble creature, I am afraid,” she said in tones of profound contempt, “suffering from every sort of mental and emotional weakness. I feared that the knowledge of her father's illness would have a deleterious effect upon her own health. As you can see, the news has laid her out, limp as a flounder on a fishmonger's slab.”

Miss Quince shifted her attack. “Your fiancé is so ill, and yet you are not at his side. I am surprised you can spare the time from him.” It was not like the gentle Eudora Quince to be so combative, but really, this woman! Her heart ached for poor Miss Crump.

Miss le Strange smiled, a thin stretching of the lips. “I thought it my duty to see to the welfare of his only child. I
had
thought to convey her to her father's sickbed, but
most unfortunately
I was prevented.”

“I do regret that,” Miss Quince said as civilly as she could manage, “especially as you now inform me of your special relationship to Miss Crump. However, I reserve the right to take instructions only from her father, or from her legal guardian, if that becomes necessary. I know you will understand.”

Miss le Strange most decidedly did
not
understand. She did not deign to answer, but left the room without a backward glance.

“That poor, poor man,” murmured Miss Quince. “I cannot be surprised at his condition, under the circumstances.”

The necklace was not recovered, either that night or after a careful search in the morning. No one had had the heart to repeat Miss le Strange's accusations to Robert, but the whole of the servants' wing began to treat him as if he were sickening for some fatal illness. Cook presented him with three toffee apples, telling him he must keep his strength up, the housekeeper called him “m'boy” and patted him solicitously on the shoulder, and a chambermaid took one look at him and burst into noisy lamentations. Robert thanked them for these tributes, but could not fathom what had prompted them. After devouring all three toffee apples (he was a growing boy still) he returned to the search for the necklace with renewed energy, looking for it in both likely and unlikely places—inside cracks in the stonework of the roof, lying near the foundation of the school building, or caught up in the branches of nearby trees, and then, when that produced no results, rummaging through closets and kitchen cupboards to peer into hatboxes, soup tureens, and old boots.

The students, aware that an unpleasant charge was hanging over Robert's head, pleaded to be allowed to postpone their lessons and look, too. Miss Quince, who was becoming worried on his behalf, insisted on a brief French lesson, but then allowed them to disperse over the house and grounds, looking for a flash of gold or sparkle of ruby.

Even Miss Crump bestirred herself to help with the search, although she did little more than walk dully about, stirring the leaves near the perimeter of the building with a stick. She told no one that the necklace was not her father's to give—it had descended through her mother's family and had been Miss Crump's property since the day of her mother's death. To be fair to Miss le Strange, it was quite possible that she did not know this; but her father surely did.

All the pleasure of the star party seemed to have evaporated, and the scent of herbs had given way to a rather less attractive rural scent: that of the farmers fertilizing nearby fields in preparation for sowing the winter wheat. Most of the young ladies carried a handkerchief liberally drenched in eau de cologne pressed to their noses as they lifted curtains that had been lifted ten times previously and looked behind doors and under cushions that had already been turned and turned again.

With a score of people searching assiduously, it soon became obvious that the necklace was not within the building, at least not in any place where it might have gotten by accident. Reluctantly, Miss Quince spoke with her fellow headmistresses, addressing herself primarily to Miss Hopkins, whose house and whose staff it was, urging her to allow a search to be made of the servants' quarters.

“My dear Clara, it must be done,” she said, speaking with great compassion, for Miss Hopkins was by now almost hysterical, alternately weeping and abusing Miss le Strange, demanding to know why she and Mrs. Westing had ever come, as they had
not
been invited.

“I don't see why it must be,” said Miss Hopkins. “My servants have been with me since I was a baby, most of them, and even if poor, dear Robert
is
of unknown parentage, he has grown up in Lesser Hoo and is the gentlest and best behaved boy I've ever known.”

“Don't you see? It is for
their
protection,” Miss Quince said. “It is the first thing Miss le Strange will want to know, and we must be able to tell her that a search has been performed, without result. It ought to have been done sooner, so she could not say that we had given one of them time to dispose of the necklace elsewhere.”

“And in addition,” said Miss Winthrop, “Robert is a member of the lower classes, and say what you will, Clara Hopkins, people of that sort will get up to anything. Brought up in Lesser Hoo! Tut, what nonsense! Of course his room and his person must be searched.”

Miss Hopkins regarded her friend and co-headmistress with dawning dislike, and there might have been a serious quarrel had Miss Quince not interfered.

“
All
the servants must be searched, and
all
their quarters. In truth, I would not object to being searched myself—”

An immediate outcry arose over this, however, and Miss Quince admitted that such a search might be seen as prejudicial to the dignity of the Winthrop Hopkins Female Academy. “However,” she said, “some would point out that a single lady in a position such as mine might not be averse to a comfortable sum on which to retire, no matter how it was obtained.”

Miss Winthrop, who had never given any thought to what Miss Quince would live on when she was too old to teach, began to eye her speculatively, but Miss Hopkins burst out with an avowal of perfect faith in her integrity.

“I won't have it!” she cried. “Perhaps you are right about the servants, Eudora, but I won't allow my trusted and valued friend and relative to be suspected. No, not for the sake of that terrible woman, even if she is second cousin to every royal house in Europe!”