Penelope (11 page)

Penelope, who had been opening and shutting her mouth, trying to get a word in edgeways during this rather incoherent lecture, gave it up as a bad job and kissed Aunt Matilda’s withered cheek before that lady sailed from the room with a smug smile on her face, indicating that she felt she had just completed a distasteful task and had done it well.

But after the maid had prepared her for bed, Penelope stood for a long time, looking out of the window into the garden and leaning her hot forehead against the cool glass. Her body seemed to be trembling with unrealised, unknown, and unfulfilled passion.

Too much kissing, she thought. Too much sudden restraint on the Earl’s part. Too much of suddenly putting her away from him. They were soon to be married after all. Why was it then considered a sin to do more than kiss? Perhaps she, Penelope, was not a lady after all!

A glimmer of white in the garden below caught her eye. Her room was on the second floor and had a little wrought-iron balcony with long windows in the French manner. She pulled a wrap round her shoulders and drew open the windows. The iron of the balcony felt cold on her bare feet and a cool breeze sent her long nightdress billowing about her legs.

The Earl of Hestleton was walking backwards and forwards below her window. He was wearing a cambric shirt, open at the throat, leather breeches, and top boots.

A ripple of laughter escaped Penelope, and he quickly looked up. “You look like a pirate,” she said in a soft whisper which carried to his ears on the still night air.

He stood with his hands on his hips, looking up at her, his head thrown back. He did not say anything, only stood there, looking up at her very intently, his gray eyes gleaming silver in the bright moonlight.

Penelope stared back at him, her heart beginning to thud against her ribs. She knew what the look meant and the unspoken question in his eyes.

She gave a funny jerky little nod of her head and he moved deliberately forward and seized the creeper which grew against the wall and began to climb.

Penelope retreated to her room and sat very solemnly on the edge of the bed.

He climbed in at the window and then stood in front of her, looking down.

She rose to her feet and threw herself into his arms, her body trembling down the length of him. “Faith, I no longer know myself,” she whispered. “I love you, Roger.”

He lifted her gently in his arms and laid her on the bed and then lay down beside her, stroking her shaking body and muttering husky endearments and then kissing her and kissing her till the world went away.

At last he tried to move away, but she cling onto him desperately, her arms wound round his neck.

“Oh, dear heart,” said the Earl, “how on earth am I going to make love to you with all my clothes on?”

Penelope drew away from him and said with a shaky laugh, “It must have been the duckling.”

And, “Three cheers for the duckling!” said the Earl of Hestleton as his shirt and breeches followed his top boots onto the floor.

The stay at Wyndham Court was over and the Earl and Penelope drove slowly back into summer London in an ecstatic silence. Everything looked crystal clear and new, fresh minted in the sunlight.

Augusta Harvey had returned from France and the Earl did not want his perfect happiness to be marred by a social visit to Miss Harvey. He kissed Penelope’s hand as he left her on her doorstep and reminded her again that he would be calling on her on the following day to take her to the peace celebrations in Hyde Park.

He then drove to Grosvenor Square and whistling a jaunty tune, strode into his mansion.

“My lord,” said his butler who had let him into the hall, “I am very worried about Lord Charles.”

“Why, what’s he been up to now?” asked the Earl, stripping off his York tan gloves and handing his hat and cane to the butler.

“Lord Charles has been in the study, my lord. There was a strange report from the room and I tried the door, but it was locked.”

“He’s probably in his cups and falling over the furniture or writing love letters to some
inamorato
,” said the Earl cheerfully. He walked across the hall and rattled the study door, calling out, “Charles! Hey, Charles! It’s me, little brother. Let me in!”

Silence.

“
Charles!
” he cried again in a voice suddenly sharpened with anxiety.

The house suddenly seemed very still and quiet.

The Earl drew back and crashed his booted foot against the panels of the door and kicked, kicked again, until the door splintered and flew open.

What was left of Charles, Viscount Clairmont’s head was lying buried in his arms. He was slumped across a pretty little escritoire.

A broad shaft of sunlight lit up the scene with an unreal clarity. The room was absolutely quiet except for the steady drip, drip, drip of blood onto the floor.

Charles had thrown his last dice and turned his last card. But in all his wasted life of idleness and failure, he had at last made a thorough job of just one thing. With an unerring aim and steady hand, he had blown his brains out.

T
HE REGENT HAD
ordered great peace celebrations in Hyde Park, St. James’s Park, and Green Park which were decorated with Oriental temples, towers, pagodas, and bridges. There were balloon ascents, a miniature naval battle on the Serpentine, and a hundred-foot-high Castle of Discord “with all its horrors of fire and destruction” which finally thinned out in smoke to reveal a Temple of Concord.

Penelope saw nothing of this except great bursts of fireworks which sent their thousands of stars cascading over London and lit up her white face as she sat in the corner of the window seat. The Earl had not come. And since the servants had been allowed the day off to watch the celebrations, she had no one to send to ask the Earl what had happened.

At last she could bear it no longer. Wrapped in a long cloak, she slipped from the house and made her way through the deserted streets to Grosvenor Square. All the world and his wife seemed to have taken to the parks.

Penelope’s first awareness that something was badly wrong was when she approached the Earl’s great mansion and found that the pavement and the road had been thickly strewn with straw to muffle the wheels of the passing carriages.

Someone must be ill! Surely not the Earl.

Then with a lurch at her heart she saw that a grim lozenge-shaped board had been hammered up over the drawing room window.

A hatchment!

Death!

Standing still, with her feet in the straw, Penelope stared up at the board, trying to make out the coat of arms on the hatchment. Then she slowly dragged her way up the steps and rapped on the knocker.

Rourke, the Earl’s butler, answered the door, and Penelope’s frightened eyes flew to the black band on his arm.

“Roger,” she whispered. “What has happened to Roger?”

“It is not my master,” said Rourke coldly, his usually pleasant face like a mask. “My young lord, the Viscount Clairmont, is dead, Miss Vesey.”

“What happened?” asked Penelope, trying to suppress a guilty feeling of relief.

“A seizure of the heart, miss,” said Rourke. “And now if you will excuse me …”

“But Roger … where is Roger?” cried Penelope. “I must go to him.”

She made to cross the hall, but Rourke barred her way.

“I am very sorry, miss,” he said, “but I have instructions from the Earl that you are not to be admitted.”

Penelope stared at him, wide-eyed, and then raised a trembling hand to her mouth. “Roger? Not see me?” she said faintly. “You must be mistaken.”

“No, miss,” replied the butler with an impassive face. “My instructions are very clear.”

He politely held the street door wide open and inclined his head.

He then stood on the doorstep and watched as the slight figure of Penelope was swallowed up in the darkness of the empty square.

“Rourke!” The butler turned at the sound of his master’s voice and, shutting the street door, walked towards the drawing room.

The Earl sat slumped in a George Smith armchair in front of the fire, his long fingers grasping the brass sphinxes on the armrests so tightly that his knuckles showed white.

“That was Miss Vesey,” he said in a flat voice.

“What did she want?”

The butler cleared his throat. “Miss Vesey did not know of the death of Lord Charles, my lord. When I told her—as … er … per instructions—that my young lord had been taken of a seizure, she asked to see you, my lord. I informed her of your lordship’s instructions, and Miss Vesey left.”

“Who was with her?” demanded the Earl harshly.

“That great, fat, white spider, Augusta Harvey?”

“No, my lord. Miss Vesey was not even accompanied by a maid.”

The Earl stared for some moments into the empty fireplace and, as Rourke was about to retire, he turned in his chair and faced the butler squarely. Rourke was taken aback by the bitterness in his set, white face. “I trust you
have
obeyed my instructions,” said the Earl. “Only you and I, the undertaker and the doctor, Rourke, know of how Charles took his life—and only you and I know of the letter he left. I would not like you to forget …”

“Indeed, my lord,” said Rourke, “I am in no danger of
ever
forgetting.”

And indeed the butler thought that scene would be burned into his brain until the day he died. He could still see the shattered mess that had been Lord Charles slumped over the desk, and the Earl standing over him, reading a letter. The Earl had looked up as Rourke had entered the room and had silently handed him the letter. Rourke had been in his father’s employ and had known the Earl since he was a baby.

The handwriting had been very shaky but the reason Charles had taken his own life had been all too clear. “My dear Roger,” he had written. “I have been working as a Bonapartiste spy. Augusta Harvey found out, but said she would not tell anyone, provided I made sure you married her niece, Penelope. Augusta and Penelope planned to enter the social world via a good marriage. But Augusta will never let me go. This is the only way I can escape her and escape bringing disgrace on our name. Forgive me, Roger.” Here the writing had trailed away in a pathetic line of blots.

In a cold, metallic voice the Earl had rapped out his instructions. The manner of Charles’s death must be kept a secret—and Penelope Vesey must never again be allowed to cross the threshold. Rourke had been appalled at the idea of Augusta getting off Scot-free, but the Earl had pointed out that to drag Augusta through the courts would only bring shame on Charles’s memory. “I am sure Charles did not pass on any information worth anything,” he had said. “He was always dropping in on Horseguards to visit old Witherspoon and Witherspoon knows no secrets at all but is excellent at making them up while he is in his cups.”

The Earl however had vowed to call on a certain Comte de Chernier, only to find that the Comte had mysteriously disappeared.

Now he wearily turned over in his mind the final arrangements for Charles’s funeral. The doctor, long in service to the family, had been persuaded to give a certificate of death from natural causes. The Earl would convey Charles’s body to Wyndham Court in the morning where it would be placed in the family vault. But before he departed, he had a letter to write, a letter that should shatter the social-climbing ambitions of Miss Harvey and her niece.

Rourke quietly left the room, softly closing the double doors while the Earl sat like a statue, remembering Penelope’s laughter and the feel of her young body in his arms. He realised with a shock that when she had sung that song, “The Harlot’s Progress,” on the first night they had met, she had not been trying to antagonise him but merely revealing herself in her true colors. She has the body of a virgin but the soul of a harlot, he thought savagely. The very thought of her filled him with complete and utter disgust.

He moved wearily over to a kneehole Chippendale writing table at the window and began to sharpen a quill. “My
dear
Penelope,” he began …

Penelope put down the letter the following day with trembling fingers and then picked it up again, although she already knew each bitter and acid word by heart.

Augusta bustled into the room and looked sharply at Penelope’s white face and then at the letter in her hands.

“What is it?” she demanded.

Penelope silently handed her the letter. Augusta read it closely and then gave a harsh laugh. “Pay no attention. His brother is dead, did you know?”

Penelope nodded.

“Well then. He’s feeling bitter, that’s all. He’ll come around. There’s something havey-cavey about young Charles’s death, though. My footman had it from Hestleton’s footman that there was the sound of a shot from the study and nobody’s been allowed to see the body.” Her protruding eyes narrowed as she looked at the letter again.

“He says here he enjoyed your favors. What favors?” she rapped.

Penelope dropped her eyes. She would never, ever tell anyone what had really happened or her life would indeed be ruined—if it could possibly be ruined more than it was already.

“As an engaged couple,” she whispered, “we naturally were very affectionate.”

“How affectionate?” demanded Augusta, coming to stand over her trembling niece.

“A few kisses, that is all,” whispered Penelope.

“You
fool
,” sneered Augusta. “You should have got him into bed and kept him there. Well, we must play his little game. I’ll send a notice, cancelling the engagement. But, harkee, I’m not going to waste all the blunt I laid out on a wardrobe for you, miss. I thought to send you packing if ever you failed to nab the Earl. But I’m not doing so badly on my own with Euphemia Stride to monitor me. Though why a body isn’t allowed to open her own mouth, I can’t say. Euphie says if I just sit still and say nothing, ‘tis better. So, now we come to you.