Never Call It Love (2 page)

A
sound of a scraping flint, and then candlelight, falling on a bare wooden
table, on a huge fireplace hung with cooking pots, and on the dark, masked
figures jostling around her. Two of them held candlesticks aloft to light the
way as she was carried up steps, along a short corridor, into a formal entrance
hall. Eyes bulging with fear, tongue trying to free itself from the painful
gag, she gained a jumbled impression of a floor marbled in black and white
squares, and of gilded nymphs holding candelabra aloft at the foot of a wide
stair.

She
was borne up those stairs, along a corridor, and into a room. Evidently it had
been unused for some time, because the air smelled musty. Her darting,
terrified eyes showed her it was a bedroom, furnished in the massive
style of the
previous century. Across the room, near the bed canopied in dark red velvet, a
huge gilt-framed mirror hung. In it she could see a dim reflection of hovering,
dark-cloaked figures, and of her imprisoned self, mouth stretched into a
grotesque grimace by the gag.

Gathering
all her strength, she turned and twisted. She got one arm free, and raised her
hand to claw the face of the man who held her. Her curving fingers caught his
eye mask, and the string that held it in place gave way. Then he again
imprisoned her thrashing arm.

She
looked up into the face of a very young man, a face so beautiful it almost
might have been a girl's. Very pale yellow hair hung to his shoulders in
ringlets. His cleft chin, sensually full mouth, and straight nose were like
those of a young Greek god. And his large eyes were the deep blue of the ocean
on a cloudless day.

The
very beauty of that face heightened the impression it gave, an impression of
overwhelming evil. She could see that evil—cold, inhuman, obeying nothing but
its own appetites—looking down at her from behind those blue eyes.

Annoyance
had crossed his face when she pulled down the eye mask. But now he smiled and
set her on her feet. He stepped back from her, as if waiting with amused
curiosity to see what she would do.

She
stood swaying. Her eyes flew to the doorway. Three of them, grinning below
their masks, stood there beside a small table upon which the lighted candles
had been placed. But across the room, beside that huge mirror, she had seen
another door.

Because
she had no other hope, she ran to the door, tried vainly to turn the knob,
pushed with all her frail strength against the panels. They stood as solid as
the wall itself.

She
turned then, with the blood surging in her ears like the pound of distant surf,
and stared at those nightmarish figures. When the blond youth began to move
leisurely
toward her, she pressed her back against the door, as if in some insane hope
that her body would melt into it.

He
stopped before her, and while she stood paralyzed, undid the button that held
her cloak closed at the neck. His hand reached down inside her bodice until he
grasped, not only her gown, but the top of her shift, too. Stepping backward,
he ripped both garments to their hems. Then he stepped even farther back, the
torn lengths of material trailing from his hand. As if again curious to see
what she would do, he looked at her, smiling faintly, head tilted to one side.

Her
torn clothing dropped from his hand. Someone— not he—gave a low, excited laugh.
And then, like a pack of animals, the blond youth and all the others closed in
upon her.

In
the lamplit room on an upper floor of the Darnley Square house, a tension
filled the air, almost as palpable as the ticking of the ornate gilt clock on
the marble mantelpiece or the snapping of flames in the grate. Sir Patrick,
replacing in its stand the poker with which he had just prodded the logs, broke
a silence of several minutes. "I cannot understand what is delaying Anne
and her aunt."

Seated
in an armchair beside the fire, fat stomach stretching his fawn-colored
trousers and embroidered waistcoat, red face frowning beneath his glossy brown
peruke, Jeremiah Cobbin said, "Nor can I." His wife, sitting
tight-lipped
beside him, sharp features shadowed by her richly plumed hat, gave an audible
sniff.

Thank
God, Patrick Stanford thought, that a domestic crisis—a small fire in the
scullery of their house near the Strand—had caused the Cobbins themselves to be
almost half an hour late. Otherwise, dowry or no dowry, they might long since
have taken their offended selves and their son down the stairs.

Patrick
glanced at Thomas Cobbin, who sat stiffly on a straight chair a little apart
from his parents. He was an ordinary-looking young man, short of stature,
dark-haired, and sallow-complexioned. In Patrick's estimate, he lacked the
shrewdness and energy of his successful father. But on the other hand, Patrick
had detected in him none of the cruelty that sometimes lurks beneath the
surface of seemingly meek men. He had no reputation for debauchery. And most
important of all, he would someday inherit the Cobbin ironmongery. Yes, it
would be a remarkably fine match for an Irish fisherman's orphaned daughter.

It
never occurred to Patrick to wonder if the two young people would ever come to
love each other. Marriage for love was a luxury reserved to the poor. For the
middle and upper classes, marriage was a practical business, a means of
advancing one's family status, socially or financially or both. True, Patrick
had known a few fortunate couples who had found love within marriage. But
usually love was something a man felt for a mistress, or that a woman felt for
a lover, admitted by some trusted servant to her house and to her bed during
her husband's absence.

"Anne's
aunt sometimes gets things muddled," he said. "Perhaps she lost the
message I sent this morning, and then recollected the appointed hour as eight
o'clock, rather than seven."

"Perhaps,"
Jeremiah Cobbin said shortly. He looked at
the mantel clock. Its hands pointed to
ten minutes of eight. "Very well. We will wait until the hour
strikes."

Patrick
felt a growing uneasiness. Could Anne and Maude Reardon have met with an
accident? The thought made him realize how fond he had become of the
reddish-haired girl who had been in his charge these past seven years. He
recalled the night she had arrived at Stanford Hall, a thin child, motherless
since two days after her own birth, her small face set in a mask of grief that
made her look almost old. He had felt compassion for her then, and a sense of
deep responsibility, because it was at his orders that Tim Reardon had gone to
his death. In Patrick's opinion, it had been a hero's death, but his small
daughter did not know that. Only Patrick and his half-brother, Colin, and a few
others would ever know why Tim's fishing boat had caught fire and sunk in the
Irish channel one moonless night.

Now
he realized that over the years he had come to value the fisherman's quiet
daughter for her own sake, so much so that he would miss her when he returned
to Stanford Hall, so much so that now the thought of her having met with some
accident brought him sharp anxiety. But no, Maude Reardon, like many of the
Irish, had a dreamy, feckless streak. She must have laid his message aside,
been unable to find it, and then decided that the appointment was for an hour
later than he had stipulated. After all, when he had entertained the Cobbins
and his ward and her aunt at supper the previous week, he had asked them for
eight o'clock.

With
a murmured apology for turning his back, he moved to the front window, a tall,
lean man in black velvet coat and breeches. He looked down. Here in Darnley
Square, one of the fine residential areas developed during the last few years
as London spread west and north, the streetlamps were more closely spaced,
affording the rich householders added protection against night prowlers. He
realized that
he was fortunate to have lodgings—a bedroom and sitting room—in this fine
house, with meals cooked and served by a manservant and his wife in permanent
employment here. The house's owners, a socially ambitious merchant and his
wife, now on a long tour of the continent, were glad to charge a baronet only a
nominal sum for lodgings during the London season. And that was fortunate,
because Sir Patrick had other uses for his money. He needed it for buying fine
clothes in which to appear in London ballrooms. He needed it for nights at the
gaming tables with profligate Englishmen he despised, and with Anglo-Irish
landlords, absent most of the year from their estates, whom he despised even more.

Directly
below him, the Cobbins' carriage stood at the curb, with its driver huddled in
his cloak against the night's chill. Directly opposite, a sedan chair and two
carriages stood before Lord and Lady Armitage's house. Evidently they had
bidden friends to a small gathering, probably a whist party. One night the
previous week he had gone to a well-attended ball in that house, and the season
before, to an even larger one.

As
sometimes happened, a memory from mat night nearly a year ago crossed his mind.
Elizabeth Montlow, that young woman with the glossy chestnut hair and direct,
intelligent gray eyes. It was not just her beauty that had caught his
attention, although she was indeed beautiful, with classic features, and a
slender-waisted, high-breasted body molded by a satin gown the same shade of
gray as her eyes. What also had impressed him was the fact that she appeared to
have reached twenty-one or -two, a somewhat advanced age in London society for
a young woman, especially such a lovely one, to be still unmarried. He also
noticed that her face, in a roomful of beauties with white complexions made
even more so by powder, had a light golden tinge. When they met in the figures
of
the
dance, he had said, "I notice that you do not affect the London pallor."

She
smiled, showing a fugitive dimple, and widened her eyes in mock astonishment
"How perceptive you are, sir."

Later,
during the interval between a schottische and a gavotte, they had chatted for a
few moments over glasses of punch. "Tell me," he had persisted,
"why it is that you are not like the other ladies, shunning sunlight as
the devil shuns holy water?"

"I
live in the country most of the time. I love to walk, and to ride. Should I go
about swathed in veils ten months of the year, just so that I can present a
fashionable London paleness the other two?"

He
looked down at her, sensing in her a rare forthrightness and independence of
mind. How was it that she, part of a world in which drawling, languid
artificiality was the rule for both sexes, could have developed such qualities?

And
then he'd had a sudden vision of himself and this young woman, riding side by
side across his own green fields and hills through the misty Irish sunlight,
toward where the land dropped away to a rocky beach and the Irish channel. He
sensed that a man, married to her, might be one of those rare husbands in love
with his own wife.

And
she? Was it because she hoped to marry a man she could love that she was still
a spinster?

The
orchestra, seated on a platform at one end of the mirror-hung ballroom, had
begun to play again, and Elizabeth's partner for that dance had come to claim
her. But the next evening at Harry's Coffee House Patrick had made inquiries
about her. A fat young marquis, far gone in his cups, had been especially
informative.

The
Montlows, he said, were of an old but untitled family, with a country estate,
called the Hedges, about fifteen miles north of London. They also had a town
house,
only a few hundred yards off Darnley Square, on Kingman Street. The family consisted
of the widowed Mrs. Montlow and her daughter and son, a youth still at Oxford.

"The
house and the country estate are entailed to the son," the marquis said.
"But there's twenty thousand pounds held in trust for the daughter. It's
to be paid to her when she is twenty-five, or before that, if she
marries." He added sourly, "But she'll probably die an old maid,
since she's so proud. Although why she should be proud, I don't know. Twenty
thousand is no great fortune."

"She's
had suitors?"

"Aplenty,
but she's turned them all down." Patrick suspected that the marquis had
been one of those turned down. "They say she may marry a neighbor's son, a
fellow who never gets to town. Plans to be a parson, once the living his uncle
controls falls vacant."

The
marquis looked up at him with drunken slyness. "Thinking of trying your
luck there? I'll admit she's an appetizing wench. But twenty thousand pounds
isn't much. A baronet, even an Irish baronet, ought to be able to do better
than that"

Patrick
chose to ignore the slur upon his Irishness. The fellow was drunk. Besides,
even before the reign of Charles II, when Patrick's great-grandfather had been
awarded an estate confiscated from an Irish rebel, the Stanfords had been
landed English gentry for several generations.

And
the fellow was right about twenty thousand pounds' being no great fortune.
Patrick hoped to acquire a wife with more than that, much more. Besides, if
Elizabeth Montlow's taste ran to parsons, she would scarcely fancy an agnostic
such as himself. He had abandoned the idea of calling upon the Montlows in
their town house on Kingman Street. Since then he had given only an
occasional
rueful thought to the girl with the gray eyes and golden skin.