The Girl in the Gatehouse (49 page)

In the corridor, Agnes Merryweather looked weary and shaken. Lost. Mariah took her hand gingerly, anticipating it being thrown off. Instead, Agnes gripped hard, the metal of her thin ring biting into Mariah’s flesh.

She did not complain.

“How close they seem,” Mariah said. “But can they really know one another so well, when he has been kept isolated?”

Agnes allowed Mariah to lead her down the passage to two chairs. “Oh, Amy would sneak up to his room whenever she could. Poor dear could hardly walk, but she would pull herself up those long stairs. Wore her out, but nothing I said would stop her going. For all his failings, John Pitt is a bit of a romantic. He would sometimes slip away so the two could talk privately through the door.”

“Still, never really together . . .”

“Oh, they knew each other long before the poorhouse.”

That’s right,
Mariah recalled. What had Captain Prince said? Something about remembering Miss Amy awaiting him back in England?

Agnes’s eyes remained misty, focused on some distant point across the dark passageway, across the years, across the memories.

“It is because of him she is alive today, though not for many more hours, I fear. . . .” Her thin shoulders shook, and she lifted a handkerchief to her narrow, lined face.

Mariah put an arm around the quaking woman. After Agnes recovered herself, Mariah asked gently, “How did they meet?”

Agnes nodded. “It was when Amy was . . . when my father sent her away. Vile man. Needed money for drink, so he sold his very own flesh and blood.”

Shock jarred Mariah.
What!
It could not be. Agnes must be confused. Mariah had assumed the bitter Agnes was the sister Mrs. Pitt had meant, the one who had lived through such ignominy. Could she have been so utterly mistaken? Or had Agnes transferred her own story to her sister to distance herself from the memories, to make it possible to revisit those bleak days?

“She was forced to work in a bawdy house in Bristol,” Agnes continued. “A port town, you know. I understand the captain looked up and saw her sitting in the window, staring up at the stars. Somehow he recognized her. I guess he had seen her years before in Whitmore, where we lived. Knew who she was by appearance, if not by name. Knew enough of my father to guess the rest.

“He went inside and demanded to see the woman in the window. The hateful proprietor brought her down like so many oranges to be squeezed and sniffed to extract the highest price. Amy said the captain, in full dress uniform, stared at her, almost angrily she thought, and she was fearful of him. She’d had more than enough experience with angry, cruel men. But there was something about his eyes, his bearing, that made her realize he was not angry with
her
. He asked, ‘How much for the girl?’ A price was given. But he said, ‘No, not for an hour, not for a night. Forever. For her freedom.’

“A ridiculously high figure was named, the peddler of flesh clearly having no wish to part with his profitable acquisition. In fact, the amount was far higher than the sum Father had received for her. But without a word, without taking his eyes from Amy’s, Captain Prince reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a heavy purse of gold and tossed it at the man. Then he said to Amy, ‘Get your things. We are leaving.’ ”

“What a story!” Mariah breathed, mind reeling. Had cheerful, godly Amy really been a . . . She could not even think the word in the same sentence with Amy’s name. How had she survived, her spirits intact?

Agnes nodded. “The captain placed Amy in a boardinghouse with a God-fearing family he knew. They were loath to take her in, for she looked the part she’d been forced to play. But they did, for his sake. They had a few lovely days together, Amy told me later, and he was a perfect gentleman. He encouraged her to write to me, and she did so – to my great relief, as she had not been allowed to do so before. The captain’s ship was leaving port, and he said he would be gone many months but promised he would visit her first thing upon his return.”

Agnes leaned her head back against the wall behind their chairs. “Amy believed he would marry her. I did not. Kind as he was, she was too far beneath him, even before her fall at my father’s hand. But I had not the heart to caution her. And so we waited. Six or seven months later, news came that his ship had sunk, and most of the men, the captain included, had lost their lives.”

“How dreadful.” The sadness of it struck Mariah anew, although she had heard the story of the shipwreck before, from Captain Prince’s point of view.

“It was dreadful, for Amy. As for me, I got my sister back. Only then was she willing to quit the place where she’d kept vigil for him and return to Whitmore. Our father died leaving debts, and eventually we had to sell our family home. We took a small pair of rooms together and got on quite well. Those were happy years for us both. Though Amy never quite got over her loss and her health began to decline.”

“How astounded she must have been to find him here. In the last place she wanted to be, no doubt!”

Agnes sniffed. “Astounded indeed. It salved the pain of having to come here – though of course Amy credited God. But it was several months before the other inmates trusted us enough to tell us about the man on the roof. It was longer yet until she recognized his voice. For a long while she thought she must be imagining things – for Captain Prince was dead, was he not?”

Mariah said, “He told us about his head injury, the memory loss, the years as a castaway. . . .”

Agnes nodded her familiarity with those events and wiped her sharp nose with the worn handkerchief.

“Still,” Mariah continued. “How surprising that he should end up here in this little-known poorhouse beside Windrush Court.”

Agnes looked at her pointedly. “Not surprising at all, really, considering we were all born and raised in this very parish.” Tears swamped her eyes again. “How glad I am he
is
here. For poor Amy’s sake.”

But somehow Mariah felt less sorry for Amy than she did for poor Agnes, the sister being left behind.

Restless, her mind whirling with worry over Miss Amy, Maggie, and an angry Captain Bryant, sleep eluded Mariah that night. She left her candle burning on her bedside table, hoping the light might fend off the worst of the dark dread filling her, especially when she thought of the hardships Maggie might be exposed to at that very moment. Remembering Miss Amy’s – as well as Dixon’s – admonition, Mariah prayed, contritely asking God to forgive not only her offenses, but for wavering in her devotion. She also asked God to watch over Maggie and Miss Amy, and to heal the rift between her and Matthew. She felt more peaceful afterwards but still could not sleep.

Giving up, Mariah pulled out one of her aunt’s journals and began reading. She decided it would be the very remedy for her sleeplessness, especially after enduring a number of tedious pages describing Francesca’s plans to renovate the rose salon and her own bedchamber after her marriage to Frederick Prin-Hallsey, complete with lists of tapestries, upholstery, and furniture to buy, friezes to be commissioned, et cetera.

Mariah skipped ahead several pages and read with more, if morbid, interest of Francesca’s feelings about her second husband’s failing health, as well as the mounting tension between her and Hugh.

But then something quite different caught her eye.

The Prin-Hallseys never fail to surprise me. I have learned
something rather shocking. In all truth, I am not certain I should
write it down. For could not my own fate be tied up in, or unraveled,
should the truth come out?

I have learned that Honora Prin-Hallsey’s reasons for granting
the funds and land for the poorhouse were not selfless after all. She
was not motivated by Christian charity in the least, or certainly not
as primary aim.

Perhaps that is not entirely fair. I suppose they could have conjured
some other means of keeping Windrush Court for themselves. Some
ruthless workhouse in the north, or some asylum in London. Or a
convenient shooting accident, fall, or overdose of laudanum. So perhaps
I judge them too harshly. After all, here I sit, knowing what I know,
and doing nothing to change the situation. Mine, or his.

Dare I tell Hugh? A part of me revels at the thrill of revenge that
would be mine to savor as bearer of such devastating news. To see
the proud, demeaning young man lose all. But then that old sense of
self-preservation rears its stabilizing head and cautions me to consider
the consequences.

I wondered if he was the man I had glimpsed about the place
when I was a girl. Was he the elder son, the one who disappeared as
I once overheard Mrs. Prin-Hallsey confide to my mother?

I stumbled across a framed painting when I was refurbishing the
house. It was wrapped in paper and stored at the back of a cupboard.
The man in the portrait appeared to be in his late twenties and seemed
mildly familiar. It might have been the same man I had seen years ago,
but I could not be certain. I knew the eldest son had gone against his
parents’ wishes in joining the navy, but was that such a breach that
they would remove his portrait from the hall – especially once he was
missing and assumed dead? I asked Frederick about it, and at first he
attempted to pass off the young man as an ancestor, but the style of
clothes and of the painting itself seemed too modern to me. When I
persisted, he finally confided the truth, though he was careful to assure
me his brother was not in his right mind, and it was out of kindness
that he did not have him institutionalized elsewhere.

Kindness? I found that unlikely. Self-interest? That I would
believe.

As would I,
Mariah thought, staring off into the flickering shadows as the sputtering candle stub guttered and smoked. She closed the journal. Was it true? Was Captain Prince really a Prin-Hallsey?
The
Prin-Hallsey?

Reading from her aunt’s journal had certainly distracted her from her worries, but now her mind whirled over an entirely different set of circumstances . . . and what the startling truth might mean for them all.

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.

– Thomas Babington

chapter 38

Though she had not slept well, Mariah arose early in the morning, while the house was still quiet. Even Lizzy and early riser Dixon were still abed. Tiptoeing into the kitchen to start the fire, she was surprised to see a sealed letter on the floor, just inside the back door.

The letter was marked with her name –
Miss Aubrey
– in a masculine hand. Her pulse quickened. Fire forgotten, she sat down and with eager fingers broke the seal and unfolded the single sheet. Reading Matthew’s introduction, her heart thumped. As she read “The Foolish Fox and the Two Birds,” she alternately chuckled and pressed a hand to her heart.

Once there was a foolish, determined fox, who came into a far
country, determined to catch one of the rare yellow songbirds that
sojourned there. For many days he pursued the bewitching songbird,
but she scorned him, flitting about from branch to branch, high above
him.

Another bird perched in a modest nest near the fox’s den. She
was a beautiful bird as well, but not, perhaps, as showy as the yellow
songbird. Nor could she sing. Her feathers were dark, her eyes golden
and wise. She befriended the fox, called out warnings when danger came
near, or when he was about to step into a trap. Blithely he thanked her
and went on his way, chasing after the fickle songbird.

How foolish was the fox. How blind. To not see, not value the
friendship, the affection, the trust the brown bird offered him.

One day he caught the songbird, only to realize he did not want
her after all.

He ran to the humble nest of the brown bird and called up to her,
but she would not answer him.

Was he too late, or might she yet forgive him?

Mariah blinked back tears. No, it was not too late. And yes, she would forgive him.