Mask of Duplicity (The Jacobite Chronicles Book 1) (3 page)

Yes,
he thought appreciatively,
she will be well worth a tumble later.

However, at the moment he had his dignity to preserve, and this strumpet was eyeing him as though she were his equal.

“I presume your mount belongs to the mistress of the house. Am I correct?” he said imperiously.

“Yes, you are,” replied the young woman, clearly unabashed.

“And where is the rest of the household?”

“They have all been given the day off, to attend the fair in Manchester,” she answered coolly. A suspicion was forming in her brain as to the identity of the visitor, but she did not say anything. Depending on the purpose of his visit, it could be better not to identify herself as yet.

“And do you,” the dragoon said, his eyes flickering briefly to the boy hovering uncertainly in the background, then back to lock on the woman, “think that lady would countenance what I presume to be her scullery maid haring around the countryside on her horse, in a state of the most improper undress?” His voice rose as he spoke, and ended almost on a squeak.

She knew without doubt who he was now. Ever since his voice had broken at the age of twelve he had been unable to control its pitch when he was in a temper.

“No, I am sure Miss Elizabeth would be extremely angry if she were to find out that the scullery maid had been riding her horse,” Beth replied, trying to sound humble and afraid. She would indeed be angry; the scullery maid was ten years old and had never been on a horse in her life.

The soldier now realised that he had this lovely girl under his power, which would render her suitably compliant to his wishes that evening.

“Well, we will speak of this later. But now you will conduct me to your mistress, if she is at home.” He would leave her to stew for a while. Later she would certainly be willing to do anything he wished, to avoid being dismissed or beaten. Maybe he would beat her anyway. He smiled in anticipation, but Beth, who was dismounting smoothly, didn’t see.

“If you will follow me, I will show you to the drawing room, and tell Miss Elizabeth you are here,” she said, her voice shaking slightly with repressed laughter, which she hoped he would interpret as fear.

He dismounted, and handing the reins to John, followed Beth round to the front of the house. The front door was unlocked, and opened onto a narrow wood-panelled hall, which ran the length of the house and which opened out two-thirds of the way down to accommodate a carved wooden staircase. Several doors led off the hall to the ground floor rooms, and it was to the second of these that she now led him, opening the door onto a comfortably furnished, if somewhat old-fashioned room, two of whose walls were lined from floor to ceiling with shelves of books. A coal fire burned in the grate, and a chair was drawn up to it. A volume lay open on a small table next to the chair. Clearly the mistress had been relaxing here earlier in the day, he thought.

“May I tell Miss Elizabeth who is calling?” she said softly, eyes downcast so he wouldn’t see the merriment in them.

 “You may tell her that her brother Sergeant Richard Cunningham, of his Majesty’s Dragoons has come home, and it seems, not before time,” he said imperiously.

She bobbed a little curtsey and left the room, closing the door quietly behind her, before tearing up the stairs as fast as she could.

Fifteen minutes later a young lady walked gracefully down the stairs, dressed in a pale blue satin dress, its voluminous skirts draped over a hooped petticoat to form a bell shape. Her elbow-length sleeves ended in frills of lace. She had washed her hands and face and brushed her hair back, securing it with a ribbon. More than that she could not achieve without a lot more time. The main thing, Beth thought as she smoothed her skirts outside the library door, was to
be presentable and as Richard would expect the lady of a small country house to look.

She opened the door and sailed in.

He was standing by the hearth, his hands clasped behind his back, examining a picture of their father, painted several years ago. The similarity between the portrait and the man standing beneath it was remarkable. In looks if not in temperament he was his father’s son to a T; just as Beth was her mother’s daughter.

“Good afternoon, Richard,” she said politely, and he turned to look at her.

She watched with amusement as his face first drained of colour and then flushed to a deep unbecoming red as he realised that he had been made a fool of.

“Ah...I...em...” he stuttered. She decided to be merciful and give him a chance to compose himself.

“It is wonderful to see you, Richard,” she said, wondering if it was, “although you really should have written in advance to tell me you were coming. I would have had everything prepared for you. As it is, I cannot even send for refreshments, although if we go over to the kitchen I am sure there will be something cold in the larder. As I said, everyone is in town and I do not expect them back for at least a couple of hours.” His colour had faded back to its normal sallow shade now, so she stopped talking.

“That was most unfair of you, Beth, to play such a trick on me,” he said grumpily, a frown creasing his brow. “You have made me look ridiculous. And in front of the stable boy, too. I assume he
is
the stable boy, and not some visiting dignitary?”

In anyone else this last statement would have shown that the victim had seen the humour in the joke, but Richard’s tone was formal, and she realised with a sigh that the young boy she had last seen when he was sixteen might have grown up, but he had not learned to take himself any less seriously.

“Yes, John is the stable-boy,” she answered. “I’m sorry, I had no intention of making you look ridiculous.”
You did that by yourself, with your pompous manner,
she thought. “But when I realised you hadn’t recognised me, I couldn’t resist playing a little joke. Forgive me,” she added, going for the conciliatory approach. “Let’s start again. Shall I run down to the kitchen and see what I can find to eat? I’m sure you must be hungry.”

He agreed, but by the time she returned, carefully balancing several plates of cold meat and cakes in her hands, his mood had not improved; one glance at his face told her that.

“Here we are,” she said gaily, ignoring his brooding look and setting the plates on the table. “There’s a bottle of claret in the cupboard here.” She bustled about gathering all the necessary things together, before throwing herself down in a chair, careless of her fine satin dress. He sat down more carefully opposite her and helped himself to a glass of wine.

“I’ve been expecting you to come for three months,” she said. “Didn’t you receive my letter?”

“Yes, I did,” he said. “It reached me too late for Father’s funeral, but I did receive it eventually. I couldn’t take leave from my regiment at that time, though. We have gone into barracks for the winter now. This was the first chance I have had to come.”

“I see,” Beth replied thoughtfully. “Have you been in the Low Countries then?” The war of the Austrian succession had broken out the previous year and many European countries were becoming involved, including England’s traditional enemy, France. A large force of British troops, amongst others, had been sent abroad and was now awaiting action. If Richard had been amongst them, it was quite understandable that he would not have been able to get leave, although he should at least have been able to write, which he had also not done. However, if he had been stationed in England all that time, she thought it unlikely that any commander would deny a soldier bereavement leave.

“No,” Richard answered, confirming Beth’s suspicions that he had stayed away voluntarily. “But I am here now, and I see there is a lot to be done. You have let things slip, Beth. The house is not in a fit state to receive visitors.”

Beth’s conciliatory mood evaporated instantly.

“Have you read Father’s will?” she asked.

Richard nodded, and opened his mouth, but Beth continued before he could speak.

“Then you will know that he left everything to you, except for the sum he set aside for my dowry, which is considerable, I admit, but also inaccessible unless I marry or reach the age of thirty, neither of which I have yet done. Father was ill for some years before he died,” she explained, her voice catching a little, “and he was not able to keep up with repairs.”

“I didn’t know that,” Richard said testily.

“No, well, you wouldn’t, would you? You have had no contact with the family at all since you disappeared into thin air thirteen years ago. The only reason we knew you were in the army was because Sam the farrier saw you and told us. Mother and Father were beside themselves with worry until then. They thought you’d been murdered or had met with a terrible accident. You could at least have let them know you were safe. You must have known how distressed they’d be.”

“How would I know that?” Richard replied hotly. “Father never took any notice of me at all after he married your mother. How long was it before he noticed I’d actually left?”

“Of course he took notice of you!” she said. “He loved you. You were his son.”

“I might have been his son, but he never loved me. Not after the lovely Ann came into his life. All he could see after that was her. You weren’t there, you don’t know what it was like. And after you were born, the only time he spoke to me at all was to tell me why he was about to beat me!” The venom and distress in his voice shocked Beth out of her temper. Was that really the way he’d seen their father?

“I was nine when you left, Richard,” she replied quietly. “I remember a lot of things. I remember Mother always tried to be nice to you. You wouldn’t let her love you.”

“She wasn’t
my
mother.
My
mother loved me. And until she died, I thought he loved me too. But I was wrong. He never loved me, he hated me, just like he hated Mama.” Richard’s voice was harsh and petulant, and she was reminded again of the saturnine young boy who had skulked in corners with a permanent frown on his face. She had caught him by the pond once, when she was no more than five years old, pulling the legs off a frog, smiling cruelly as it struggled feebly in his grip. She had crept away quietly before he had seen her. After that she had been a little afraid of him and had kept out of his way as much as possible. Father had seemed to beat him a lot, that was true, but never without good cause. He was always naughty. Beth had been relieved when he left.

She looked across at the man sitting opposite her. Pain was etched on his face, and his eyes were deep pools of despair. Clearly he was also reliving some distressing event from the past. She had never realised how rejected he had felt. In her memory it had been him doing the rejecting. Richard had never accepted his father’s second wife, Beth’s mother, in spite of all her attempts to reconcile him to the marriage.

Richard saw the sympathy in Beth’s face and froze. His face closed, his mouth became a thin hard line, and he looked at her with open dislike. God, she looked exactly like that beautiful slut who had stolen his father’s love. How could he not have recognised her in the yard earlier?

“Anyway, that’s all in the past, and over,” he said, his tone telling her that it wasn’t over at all. “But the house is in need of some work before we can accept visitors.”

“We never have any visitors,” Beth replied practically, welcoming the change of subject; the previous one had been far too deep for a first meeting after thirteen years.

“You mean you are never invited to call at any of the local houses?” Richard sounded incredulous. Clearly his memory of the past was not perfect, then.

“No, Richard. You must remember that after Father married Mot...my mother, the family rejected him.” The well-to-do Cunninghams had been appalled that a member of their noble family should stoop so low as to marry a penniless Scottish seamstress, and had virtually cut him off from their society. Initially upset, he had soon resigned himself to his eldest brother Lord William’s rejection, and had retired to the country to live happily with the woman he loved.

“Yes, but she died years ago,” Richard countered. “Do you mean to say that they still aren’t speaking to you?” He was worried. He was banking on using his family connections, coupled with his inheritance, to achieve promotion and launch himself into society. If they still held a grudge, it would be a serious blow to his ambitions.

 Beth sighed. This conversation was a far cry from the joyous reunion she had envisaged, where they caught up with events, brought together by their shared loss of a father, regaling each other with tales of the lost years. Instead of which they had not yet exchanged two truly civil words.

“It’s true that after Mother died some of them did contact him. I remember going with father to see Cousin Edward once, about four years ago. It didn’t work out very well.” Her brow furrowed as she remembered sitting stiffly on the edge of her seat in a hideously uncomfortable formal gown. The conversation had dried up after ten minutes, becoming increasingly stilted, and she had sat politely, listening to the pendulum of the drawing-room clock tick away the silent minutes until they could leave. They had not returned, nor had they been invited to while her father was alive. “Cousin Isabella came to Father’s funeral,” Beth added. “She apologised for Lord Edward, who was out of the country, it seems. Anyway, she said I could go to visit them any time I wanted.”

“And did you?” Richard asked.

“No. I never wanted to. I have nothing in common with them, Richard. I enjoy the simple country life.”

“Nonsense.” The imperious tone returned. “We will write to them at once and tell them we would be delighted to call. Of course we must make the necessary repairs to the house so that we can return the invitation.”

“Do you have the money?” she asked.

Richard looked perplexed. “Surely there is money in the accounts?” he said. “Father had a lot of investments.”

“That was thirteen years ago, Richard,” Beth pointed out patiently. “As I told you earlier, after Mother died, Father became ill and didn’t have the energy to manage his investments properly. We’re only just making ends meet. There is a little in Father’s bank account, but only you can access that. Otherwise he owned the house and all the furniture outright. He left no debt, but he left no great amount of money either.”