Rules for Being a Mistress (39 page)

Serena quivered. “So soon, my lord?”

“My recent experiences have taught me that life is short and precious,” he explained. “This time next week, we shall be in Oranmore, my dear.”

“Oranmore!” she cried. “You don’t mean—! You do not intend to
live
in Ireland?”

“Of course,” he replied. “I am Lord Oranmore. I must live amongst my people, such as they are. We’ll have to stay in one of the tenant’s cottages while the house is rebuilt, of course. I’m afraid the rebels burnt the original structure to the ground in Ninety-eight.”

“Rebels!” Serena squeaked, turning white. “But, surely, my lord, with your vast fortune, we need not actually live in Ireland!”

He cupped his ear as if he had difficulty hearing. “Vast fortune?”

“Are you not rich?” she cried.

“I suppose I am,” he replied, “by Irish standards. You will not be obliged to eat cabbage more than twice a week, I should think.”

“What about the fortune you inherited from your aunt?” she demanded.

He glanced at Miss Vaughn who was murdering Mozart while listening feverishly to the conversation. “I seem to have misplaced it,” he said dryly.

“Never mind all that,” cried Miss Allegra Vaughn. “Where have you been all this time? What have you been doing? And why are you not dead?”

“And so, to make a long story short,” said Benedict, now seated at the dining table to the right of Lady Matlock, “he fired his pistol at me, point blank.”

Seated on the arm of his chair, Allie gasped in horror.

Benedict paused to take a sip of his claret. By this time, Cosima had abandoned the piano and was sitting on the arm of her mother’s chair. She caught her breath as she imagined the bullet of hot iron piercing his flesh.

“
Where
were you shot, Cousin Ben?” Allie demanded. “Have you got a scar?”

“He aimed for my heart, Miss Allegra, but it was a misfire.”

“’Twas a miracle, then!” Allie breathed.

“It was not a miracle, Miss Allegra,” he said impatiently. “A good assassin is conscientious. Thady wasn’t. He didn’t keep his powder dry, that’s all. When his weapon misfired, I stood up and kicked him in the face. The pistol flew into the carriage and landed on the seat next to me.”

“Good on you,” said Allie, favorably impressed.

“Don’t interrupt,” Benedict said sternly. “Master Thady became very civil after that. He confessed all. At first, I could not believe that my grandmother could be involved in such a dastardly scheme.”

“Lady Oranmore!” For a moment, Lady Dalrymple looked as if she meant to dash right out and find the nearest newspaper office, but then she seemed to think better of it.
Who,
and
what,
were not enough for newspapermen, as she knew from bitter experience. The loathsome creatures always wanted the
when, where,
and
why,
too, before they paid up.

Benedict continued. “Thady swore that, if he returned to Dublin empty-handed, my grandmother would—quote—‘do him in.’ I am not a vindictive man, I hope. I took pity on him. I gave him my watch and my ring to take back to Dublin in the hopes that my grandmother would be convinced he had done the job. I wanted to see what the greedy old harridan would do next.”

Cosima chewed at her bottom lip savagely.

“Thady went back to Dublin to tell Lady Oranmore of my unfortunate demise. The old girl was so upset that she instantly set about marrying off my first cousin Nuala to my second cousin, Mr. Power, who, in addition to being my second cousin, is also my heir. Poor boy. He wept when I sent him and his mother packing.”

“I hope you got back to Dublin in time to stop the wedding!” said Cosima. “That girl is not sixteen!”

“Yes, of course,” he said impatiently. “Nuala is my ward, and she can not marry without my permission.”

Cosima looked down at her hands. “So you never saw Castle Argent? You went back to Dublin, and that was the end of it?”

“
I
would have gotten your harp for you, Cosy,” said Westlands. “Come hell or high water. Oh! Begging your pardon, ladies. I did not mean to use such strong language.”

“I
did
go back to Dublin,” said Benedict, “but not right away. The assassination attempt had merely hardened my resolve to complete my errand, Miss Vaughn. I was very eager to get my hands on your…harp. I had no intention of going back to Dublin with nothing.”

He took a sip of wine.

“I walked on to the charming little village of Lucan. There I found a friendly tavern where none but the landlord spoke English—or so I was told. Perhaps they simply did not wish to speak to me. I don’t know. But I spent the night there, and woke up next to a man with a fish; neither had been in the bed when I laid down, but I daresay that was my fault. Fortunately, the salmon was well-wrapped in what appeared to be a lady’s shawl, but I don’t criticize.

“I explained to the landlord that I was trying to get to Ballyvaugn on the Grand Canal. The landlord winked at me in a friendly manner and said that I had the look of a man on important government business. Naturally, I was flattered. Not supposing that my true errand, that of fetching a young lady’s harp, would be of any interest to this earthy tradesman, I allowed him to think what he liked. He said he would have me there in a ‘shake,’ which, in Ireland, is usually, but not always, less than a fortnight. He gave me some very good directions to another charming little village from whence I found the canal. I got on the passenger boat without any difficulty, but rather surprisingly, my traveling companions were all Roman Catholic priests.”

“What! All of them?” said Cosima, startled.

“Yes; all. Two dozen holy men in long black dresses and me.”

“It’s called a cassock, you know!”

“They were so kind. They even shared their lunches with me. I suppose I must have looked hungry to them. After lunch, we continued on our way in prayerful silence, down the length of the beautiful, leafy, green canal, until finally, my endeavors were rewarded. I saw a splendid stone building rising in the distance to my right. Charmed by this vision, I asked the young seminarian sitting next to me if we had reached Castle Argent. He looked at me as if I were mad and said, ‘’Tis Patrick’s College.’”

Cosima gasped. “You went the wrong way entirely! You’re in Maynooth!”

“Indeed! I had gone north to the
Royal
Canal, when I ought to have gone south to the
Grand
Canal. But I daresay the landlord made an honest mistake. Father Moynihan kindly suggested that I go back to Lucan, and walk to Adamstown from there.”

“Right,” said Miss Vaughn.

“I explained that I was rather in a hurry, had important business, et cetera, and Father Traynor, who knew the area better, suggested that I take the shortcut to Straffan. He said it might save me as much as an hour.”

“Is there a road from Maynooth to Straffan?” Cosima said, puzzled.

Benedict summoned the waiter for more wine. “No,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

“You walked through the bog?” Cosima asked, wide-eyed. “In your gorgeous clothes?”

Benedict waited while the waiter poured his wine, then calmly held it to the light to examine its color. “The phenomenon,” he said slowly, “known as a
moving bog
is not as rare as one might think. It is caused, or so I am told, by significant amounts of water accumulating between the lighter, porous material of the bog and the hard clay that is usually to be found underneath. Water, as I’m sure you know, Miss Allegra, seeks its own level. As it does so, it carries the bog along with it, and, in this case, it carried me as well. So Father Traynor’s shortcut really
did
save me an hour.”

Miss Vaughn laughed. “I think Lord Oranmore is telling us a bit of a Munchausen story.”

Benedict ignored this impertinent remark. “So there I was, covered in flotsam, and, for all I know, jetsam, too, in what I supposed to be Straffan.”

“Was it not Straffan?” Cosima asked.

“Why not?” he replied. “If a miserable string of sod huts wants to call itself Straffan who am I to object? I explained to the lovely turf-cutters plying their trade in
Straffan
that Father Traynor of St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, had sent me to them, and that I had important business at Castle Argent. They could not have been nicer to me. One of them took me for a very educational tour of the nearby waterways in his flat-bottomed boat. At the end of the tour, he struck me on the back of the head with his—one wants to use the correct word here—
loy.
The Irish do not call a spade a spade,” he explained. “They call it a loy, but, believe me, it does the work of a spade.”

“Good heavens!” said Lady Dalrymple.

“I’m sure it was an accident,” Benedict said mildly. “I woke up in a clump of coarse yellow grass growing, I know not how, on a stretch of otherwise barren heath. My friend had vanished with his loy. No doubt, he had gone to get help, and, had I been thinking clearly, I might have waited for him. But I was not thinking clearly. I got up and walked, using the sun to navigate, in an easterly direction. Needless to say, by this time, I no longer had the look of a man on important government business. In fact, I had been stripped of my coat, my breeches, and my boots, and, of course, my wallet. I can only suppose that the man with the loy must have taken them to convince the skeptical authorities of my existence. I must say, I miss my boots.”

“What a good thing,” said Miss Vaughn, “that you gave your watch and your ring to Thady for safekeeping.”

“Quite. My grandmother tells me she sent them to my fiancée. Serena?”

Serena looked at him blankly. “What? I haven’t seen them,” she stammered.

Cosima opened her mouth to speak, and then closed it again.

Benedict mistook this false start for a yawn. “But I can see that I am boring my company,” he said grimly. “Suffice it to say that, once I no longer resembled a man on important government business, the local population couldn’t have been nicer, and their command of the English language was at least as good as that of any Yorkshireman. I walked to the nearest town and was conveyed to Ballyvaughn like a king on a cart piled with peat bricks.”

“So you made it there all right?” Cosima said anxiously.

He smiled thinly. “I did. I walked up the lane to the gates of your demesne, Miss Vaughn, a scant twenty-four hours after I left Dublin. Unfortunately, I no longer had your handkerchief to show your wolfhound, having carelessly left it in the pocket of my coat, along with my wallet.”

“That’s quite all right,” she assured him. “I’ve a lot of handkerchiefs. As for Dolly, she wouldn’t hurt a fly. She’s big as a horse, but gentle as a lamb.”

“That is just what I told her as she came bounding down the lane to meet me,” Benedict replied. “Coming at me at full speed as she was, she had only to put her paws on my shoulders, and down I went. I must have been very tired because I went to sleep immediately. I woke up sometime the next day, having been taken up to the house in my sleep by another Thady—”

“That’d be
our
Thady,” Allie said knowledgeably. “Thady Jackson.”

“Let us call him the ‘good Thady,’ Miss Allegra, to distinguish him from the ‘bad Thady’ who tried to kill me.”

“No wonder your hair turned white,” said Lord Westlands. “Personally, I would have thrashed ‘bad Thady’ within an inch of his life and driven him ahead of me all the way back to Dublin.”

“But then,” said Rose, “Lord Oranmore would not have gotten Miss Vaughn’s harp.”

“So you
did
get Miss Vaughn’s harp, after all,” said her mother. “Well done, you!”

“Oh, God!” Cosy said guiltily. “I should have told you. My harp isn’t at Castle Argent!”

“No,” said Benedict. “It isn’t.”

“You didn’t get the harp?” Lady Matlock pouted. “You mean you went all that way, only to come back empty-handed?”

Cosima bristled. “None of this would have happened if he’d taken the Grand Canal like I told him to.”

“You are quite right, Miss Vaughn,” he drawled in reply. “I should have trusted you.”

“This whole thing is ridiculous!” declared Lord Westlands. “
I
would have gone back to Ballyvaughn with a troop of soldiers. And if your harp was not there, Cosy, I would have found it, wherever it was.
I
would not have given up so easily.”

“Ah, to be young again,” said Benedict.

After dinner, it pleased Lord Oranmore to dance with his fiancée. Serena listened wide-eyed as he laid out his plans for his future wife. Afterward, he was waylaid by Miss Allegra Vaughn, but he coldly refused to dance with her.