Penelope (15 page)

The fact that she had lost her virginity to a heartless rake and had been also duped by her hard and grasping aunt made her alternately boil and burn with shame and hate. Added to that was the awful fear that she might have become pregnant and surely even the kindly Jenningses would have thrown her out of doors should that have happened. Her temperature rose alarmingly and she spent her first week at the Jenningses turning and tossing in fevered coma.

At last the fever had broken. With it had come the knowledge that she was going to live after all. Penelope had shakily started to put her mind and her world together again. Gradually she began to work at her duties as governess.

Jane and Alice Jennings did not seem overly interested in learning the hows and wherefores of social behavior. They were jolly country girls, very like their mother. But they enjoyed Penelope’s company on their walks and shopping expeditions and tried very hard to become fashionable young ladies to please her.

It was, surprisingly, their mother, the noisy, garrulous Mrs. Jennings, who became Penelope’s most successful pupil—although not in the arts of social behavior. Mrs. Jennings turned out to have a great love of music and was never happier than when Penelope was giving her lessons on the pianoforte or listening to Penelope playing in the long, dark autumn evenings when chill winds blew across the English Channel and great waves pounded at the foot of the chalky cliffs.

Penelope was able to lose herself in her music and find some relief from her painful memories.

The Jenningses’ house was a square barracks of a place, built of gray stone, standing four square near the edge of the cliffs and surrounded by a neat and formal garden. The furniture was old-fashioned and the floors were uncarpeted, but the Jenningses went in for roaring fires and great, satisfying meals so that the house was always redolent of the smells of woodsmoke and good country cooking.

Local village society seemed to be limited to that of the schoolmaster and his large, noisy family of small children and to the vicar and his shy, little wife. Jane and Alice would often stop in the village street to giggle and laugh with the farmers’ sons, and Penelope often thought that they would make excellent farmers’ wives, being more interested in the friendly camaraderie of the farming families and crops and cattle than they were in preparing for the parties and balls in nearby Dover.

One day Mr. Jennings proposed that Penelope should escort the girls into Dover on a shopping expedition. She was to spend the afternoon with them in the town and then take them for tea to the Green Man which was famous for its cakes and pastries and then bring them home before dark.

The day was fine when they set out, a great pale yellow sun glittering and shining on the frosty fields and bare, skeletal branches of the trees. Penelope observed to the Jenningses’ coachman, John, that it was fine weather, to which John eyed the sky uneasily and said it was “too bright.”

“What do you mean?” laughed Penelope. “Surely in England the sun can never be too bright!”

John scratched his powdered hair. “Well, it’s like this, miss,” he said. “When the sun is all shiny and glittery like that, usually it means we’re going to get a powerful bit of wind.”

“Nonsense!” teased Penelope. “You’ve been reading your almanack again, John. Why, there’s not a breath of wind!”

Certainly it continued fine as the carriage lumbered onto the turnpike road and started the six-mile descent to Dover with a series of chalk cliffs and the blue sea on the right and, on the left, the bare winter brown of the cornfields.

Before they reached the town of Dover, Penelope glanced once more out to sea. The sky still stretched blue and cloudless as far as the eye could see, but the sea appeared to have abruptly changed to a gray metallic color which seemed to change to black, even as she looked.

She pointed this phenomenon out to John, sticking her head out of the open carriage window and calling up to him as he sat majestically on his box.

John promptly reined in his horses. “It’s like I told you, miss,” he said, twisting round on the box to look down at Penelope. “Storm’s a-coming. We’d best go back.”

“Oh,
no
!” screamed Jane and Alice in unison, their black ringlets bobbing. “Miss Vesey, tell him we
must
go on.”

“Very well,” smiled Penelope, amused at the girls’ enthusiasm for shopping, little realising that Jane and Alice had heard that Farmer Galt’s sons were visiting Dover and that they hoped to see them.

Jane and Alice were dressed alike. Their warm pelisses and velvet dresses were of different colors, eighteen-year-old Jane being in blue and seventeen-year-old Alice in scarlet, but they were so alike in character that somehow they always
looked
as if they were dressed the same. Both were buxom, both had rosy cheeks. Jane had smaller eyes and a longer nose than her sister, but that seemed to be the only difference.

“Perhaps we shall find a beau for you, Miss Vesey?” teased Jane. “You are so pretty, it seems a shame you are not married.”

“I shall never marry,” said Penelope in a quiet voice, and both her charges fell silent, remembering their mother’s speculations that Miss Vesey was suffering from a broken heart.

The sun was still bathing the cobbles of Dover in a warm, pale golden light when Penelope and the girls alighted from the carriage. But John, the coachman, was still muttering and prophesying bad weather, and after Penelope and her charges had left to look at the shops, he drove to the Green Man and bespoke rooms for all them for the night. He had a strong feeling in his rheumaticky bones that they would not be returning home that day.

The town of Dover was very like other English seaport towns except that it was cleaner and had fewer ruffians hanging about. Penelope found it a very picturesque place. On one side of the town the old castle was perched on the top of a very steep hill. On the other side was a great chalk hill, very nearly perpendicular, rising up from sixty to a hundred feet higher than the tops of the houses which huddled at the foot of the hill. Penelope was amazed to see cows grazing on a spot apparently fifty feet above the tops of the houses and measuring horizontally not more than twenty feet.

It made the perspective look excitingly and magically wrong somehow—like the perspectives in some early paintings. On the south side of the town stood the cliff described by Shakespeare in
King Lear
:

On a previous visit Penelope had stood on the cliff, watching the men gathering plants below and had then retreated quickly from the edge of the cliff, almost overcome with dizziness. It had not changed at all since Shakespeare’s day. She envied the cows and sheep that grazed, unconcerned, at the very edge of the cliff as if they were browsing in some placid valley.

Penelope ushered the girls into Mr. Jobbin’s in the high street—to buy green tea on the one side of the shop and to examine silk ribbons on the other. The shop was pretty well filled. Shy farmers stood around the grocery counter, slicking down their hair and looking nervously out of the sides of their eyes at Mr. Jobbin’s smart young assistants who had on very fashionable cravats and leaped backwards and forwards over the counters, vaulting with amazing dexterity, their coattails flying behind them.

Penelope had taken to wearing caps which she felt suitable to her governess position. While the girls were looking through a box of ribbons, Penelope bought herself a new cap and stood back to wait until the girls were finished. It was then, as their plump gloved hands turned over the silk ribbons, that Penelope saw a flash of gold-colored ribbon. All at once she was transported back in her mind to that night at Almack’s where she had worn the dress with the gold ribbons. She felt suddenly weak and faint and looked wildly round until she found a chair to sit down on. Gradually the faintness receded. She arose unsteadily and went to the silk counter to fetch her charges, but of Jane and Alice there was no sign.

Thoroughly worried and harassed, Penelope asked the stately Mr. Jobbin himself if he had seen the girls. “I saw them stepping out just some minutes ago, ma’am,” said Mr. Jobbin with a low bow. “They said something to me about getting some fresh air and that they would be meeting you at the Green Man for tea.”

“
Oh
!” said Penelope with a mixture of amusement and exasperation. “I believe the girls have gone to look for something less salubrious than fresh air.”

Now, thought Penelope, standing outside the shop, if I were making an assignation, where should I go? The quay, that was it!

As she walked down the steep hill towards the quay, she suddenly realised that great black clouds were massing on the horizon and a blustery wind had begun to blow from the sea. The tall, thin masts of the ships were bobbing and swaying as if some winter forest had come to life.

It did not take her long to spy the buxom figures of her charges, giggling and laughing with Farmer Galt’s sons.

Her charges accepted her rebuke with their customary good humor while the Galt brothers grinned and looked sheepish.

Penelope marched the girls up the windy hill to the Green Man. The wind was now blowing with full force and as they came in sight of the inn, an icy squall of rain struck them and sent them scurrying for shelter.

John was lounging at the entrance to the inn with a satisfied I-told-you-so look on his face.

“We’ll not get home to Wold,” he told Penelope with obvious satisfaction. “I took the liberty of bespeaking rooms for you and the Misses Jennings. Also a snug private parlor.”

Penelope could only thank him as she looked back at the rain-drenched street and up at the sky which was now boiling black above the town.

By the time she and the girls were sitting over a substantial tea in their parlor, the rain was already changing to snow. Sea and town were blotted out as great sheets of snow roared in from the Channel.

After tea she kept the girls amused with endless games of spillikins until it was time for dinner and then, after dinner, ordered them to bed.

But Penelope could not sleep. The snow changed to stabbing arrows of ice which rattled ferociously against the leaded windows. The old inn creaked and struggled in the grasp of the storm and the bed candle’s flame wavered and danced in a multitude of scurrying drafts. The images of the Earl and Augusta and Charles danced in the black corners of the room.

She thought for the hundredth time of the bitter complexities of the human character where a seemingly fastidious and honorable man such as the Earl, who had held her so passionately in his arms and promised her the world and all, should underneath be a weak and vicious philanderer.

She could not help wondering if he ever thought of her at all, and groaned as she thought that at that very moment some other naïve debutante might be trembling in his arms and listening to all those speeches of love which she had trustingly believed had been for her alone.

But there was no female present to console the unhappy and dispirited Earl who had returned from a fruitless visit to Bath. He had eased his feelings by giving the Misses Fry a piece of his mind, but now he did not know what to do.

He was roused from his depression by his butler, Rourke, who entered the room and stood before him, looking shaken and nervous and not at all like his usual calm and urbane self.

“What is it, Rourke?” asked the Earl testily.

“I have betrayed you!” cried Rourke. “Oh, my lord, forgive me. It was the Fatal Tendency.”

“What are you talking about, man?”

“I gave you my solemn promise not to reveal the particulars of Lord Charles’s death,”said Rourke in a shaky voice, “but I failed you. A certain young footman called Snyle knew of my weakness for drink and filled me full of ale, plying me with questions the while. I had no recollection of telling him anything.

“But Miss Harvey’s house is in an uproar. She has gone off to Dover to take a ship for France. She told the servants she was taking a short holiday, but it appears she has sold the house and left them without their wages. When I was talking to them, I learned that Snyle had been in her employ and had mysteriously disappeared on the day after I had been drinking with him. Well, Snyle had let several hints drop in the servants’ hall that he intended to make his fortune by finding out information about Lord Charles’s death. I cannot remember but I feel I must have let something fall when I was in my cups. Oh, my lord. I feel you can never forgive me!”

“Dover,” said the Earl, his face white and set. “I tell you, Rourke, you shall easily repair any damage you have done by serving me in this way. You shall accompany me to Dover and aid me in hunting down Augusta Harvey. Our name is worth nothing should this traitor go free … for I feel sure Augusta is a traitor.

“The roads will be bad, so we will need to ride. Have four of our best mounts saddled up and we shall take with us two of the burliest footmen. Now, bustle about man! We are no longer interested in the damage that has been done but how we can best mend matters. Mayhap Augusta knows the direction of her niece and I shall choke that information out of her—before I kill her!”

Penelope gave up trying to sleep. Her thoughts were too anguished and the noise of the storm too loud. She decided to go along the corridor and make sure that the girls were safely tucked up.

She put on her wrap and picked up her bed candle and quietly opened the door. The narrow corridor was very dim, lit only by the light of a small oil lamp hanging from a bracket on the wall halfway along. Then she heard the sound of another door being opened and drew back into the doorway of her own bedroom, not wanting to run into another guest while she was in her night attire. She cautiously peered round the doorjamb and then stood rigid, the candlestick tilting dangerously in her trembling hand. Augusta Harvey came quietly out of a room, went a little way down the corridor, and vanished into a room at the end.