The Lonely Earl (24 page)

Impressed in spite of herself, Betsy nodded. Then she tightened her lips. “I suppose it is too much to ask what this is all about.” 

“It is nothing,” said Zelle, her mouth working. “Do not let that man know she is here!”

Betsy took a step forward. If ever she saw fear in a pair of eyes, those eyes were looking back at her right now. But Althea made a small sound, and Betsy turned to retrieve the drained mug from slack hands before it fell to the floor. When she looked back to the doorway, it was empty.

Betsy studied on the problem for a spell while she served ale and put the supper pastries into the oven. It was getting after nooning, and Althea still slept on the cot behind the chimney. The poor child — seemed like they’d walked from Crale Hall, and while Zelle had done it often, yet Althea was quite a bitty tot to manage that long a walk. And they hadn’t kept to the roads, either, so Betsy thought, plucking twigs from the sleeping child’s long hair.

At length, she made a decision. As soon as young Joseph could be spared from the taproom, he was on his way to Kennett Chase. “And mind you give this to Miss Kennett herself, and no one else. And no use lollygagging around the Hall on your way, for that woman’s not there!” Betsy felt that urgency superseded the need for truth, and sent her son on his way without a qualm of conscience.

Within an hour, Faustina drove up, alone, in her gig. She had come at once, consumed by curiosity. She had read a warning between Betsy’s carefully formed lines, and came in the front entrance of the inn.

“Good afternoon, Benjamin! How are you? Fine spring weather now that the storm is past. I wonder whether Betsy might make some special scones for Sunday morning…”

In such airy fashion she moved adroitly past the open door to the taproom, not glancing inside, and down the hall to the kitchen door.

“Thank the Lord you are here,” said Betsy. I’m just at my wits’ end in puzzling out what to do, and that’s a fact.”

“I could not get Joseph to tell me what was amiss,” said Faustina, sitting down in a wooden chair and drawing off her gloves. “He will be coming along soon. He seemed not to want to come with me.”

“Used some sense for once,” grumbled his proud mother. “Best for nobody to know I asked you to come. But he couldn’t tell you anything, Miss Faustina, for he didn’t know. But this is what happened…”

In a few moments Faustina was in possession of the facts, as far as Betsy knew them. But I wonder why, she thought. Zelle is not one to put herself out for the child, I shouldn’t think.

Aloud she said, “The woman gave no hint? Well, perhaps Althea can tell us when she wakes.”

But Althea did not tell them. “I don’t know,” she said vehemently. “I don’t know anything!”

“Well, now,” said Faustina admiringly, “I know you would have been smart enough to ask Zelle why she was getting you up from your nap to walk all the way to town!”

“I wasn’t in bed, I was in the…”

Faced with the wedge of the small bit of information she had let drop, Althea capitulated. “If,” she bargained, “I can see the horses.”

This was not the time, thought Faustina, to attempt to rebuild Althea’s sadly lacking character. “Fine,” said Faustina. “When young Joe comes back, he’ll take you to the stables.” Her eyes sought Betsy’s permission. After Althea’s terse narrative, she was released in Joseph’s custody as he came in the back door. Faustina and Betsy looked at each other in dismay.

“What are we going to do?” said Mistress Kyd, looking hopefully at Faustina. “I don’t like that part about the ghost of the earl!”

Faustina’s memory served up to her the recollection of the shots in the night. Another inch, so she had been told, and the earl would indeed be a ghost.

“Miss Faustina!” said Betsy sharply. “I’ll get some brandy!”

“No, no, Betsy! I’m quite all right.” She thought swiftly. “First we must see that Althea doesn’t go back to that house. I can’t believe quite all she said she overheard, you know.”

“It does sound right queer,” agreed Betsy. “But if I ever saw a frightened woman, that foreigner was one. And I wouldn’t think she scared easy.”

“But what of the child? Do you think she understands?”

“Hard to say, miss. She’s like her grandmother. I daresay you don’t remember the old countess, but I tell you this one’s a copy if ever was. Took all her fences, as they say.”

“Hugh’s mother? I don’t remember much of her but a great beak of a nose and… Well, what is this to the point? If Hugh is in danger, we must do something!”

But what to do? It was surely like something she had seen in the theater in London — villains, and heroes, and black deeds done in the night. But this was real, this was Devonshire, where she would have walked anywhere in the shire without fear of more than footpads. But murder…

“I must tell my cousin,” she decided. “Ned will know what to do. I do not wish to trouble my father with it. Besides, I doubt he would take it seriously.”

“If he had seen that woman’s face, he would.”

“Well, there’s little likelihood of that. So I must be on my way. You’ll keep the child?”

“For a bit. But I can’t keep her here if Master Vincent comes, you know that, miss.”

“I know that. I’ll send Bucky for her as soon as I get home. It won’t do for me to come back. It might be as well if no one knows where she is.”

Faustina had reached the door before Betsy Kyd spoke what was in her mind. “What if Lord Pendarvis is really in… in trouble?”

Faustina paused. “You mean, suppose he is connected with the smuggling? I tell you this, Hugh Crale doesn’t have a criminal bone in his body. He is not a smuggler, believe me!”

She was halfway to the vicarage before it occurred to her to wonder how she could speak with such finality of a man whom she did not truly know. Moreover, a man whose character she had no great opinion of, and had said so, more than once. But she simply
knew
, she thought, and rightly dismissed the possibility.

Ned would be at the vicarage. He had told her he was taking a book to Miss Bidwell, “to beguile her hours of pain.” Faustina had looked at him in starting surmise. “Is her ankle so bad, then?”

“There’s more than one kind of pain,” said Ned with tight lips, and left at once. Speculation ran over her mind quickly, as Ned headed for the stables, whistling, but she was not allowed the time to wonder further, for just then young Joseph had arrived with Betsy’s urgent message.

Now she reached the gate of the vicarage, a small spreading house under an oak tree next to the church, at the opposite end of the village from the Green Man. For the first time she speculated on the life that was lived beneath that roof. Helen Astley was not a favorite of hers, nor was the vicar. She thought suddenly that Helen would be very hard to live with, and in such a small house there would be no safe retreat from her. Perhaps this was the pain that Ned meant.

She had not yet lifted the latch when Aubrey emerged from the front door. “I am happy to see you here, Miss Kennett,” he said. “I wonder whether you would give me five minutes?” Upon receiving her surprised assent, he said, “Shall we stroll along to the church? I should like to talk to you.” He glanced nervously over his shoulder at the vicarage.

“I really must talk to Ned first,” she said anxiously. “I have some unpleasant news he must hear at once.”

“The family is greatly upset,” said Aubrey. “Believe me, your cousin is not at liberty to speak to you. And I really want to ask you—”

“Not at liberty?” A quick vision of Ned tied up with rope and tossed in cellar flitted across her mind, and was gone. “What do you mean?”

Aubrey Talbot was clearly laboring under some distress of mind. But, as he quickly indicated, it had nothing to do with Ned. “I must ask you this,” said Aubrey in agitation. “How is Miss Waverly? Why will she not see me? I called this morning at the Chase, and was told she would not see me. Do you know why? What have I done to offend her?”

Faustina soothed him as much as she could. “Nothing that you have done, I am sure. It is only that my aunt has taken ill…”

There was no way she could soften the situation for him. She looked carefully at him, noting the broad brow, the strong eyebrows, the pleasant good-natured face with resolute mouth and chin. The brown eyes, anxiously watching her face…

“I’m sorry,” said Faustina. “Julia has promised her mother that she will not see you again.”

“But
why
?”

“Truly I do not believe that logic plays a part in this. My aunt is something of a law in herself, and Julia thought it best, I must suppose, to make that promise.”

“I thought she liked me a little,” he said, deeply troubled.

Remembering the lost expression in Julia’s eyes, and her confession to Faustina, she could only agree. But to Julia a promise was a promise — and whether given under duress or not, Faustina could not give Aubrey any reason to hope.

With an obvious effort, after a few moments Aubrey returned by stages to the present. “But you spoke of urgent news, and I am keeping you.”

“Perhaps you are the one I should tell, rather than Ned, anyway,” she said. “You are an old friend of Pendarvis?”

“Since our boyhood.”

“Then I should tell you what I have just learned.” Swiftly, in as few words as possible, she sketched the information received from Althea. “But of course I do not know how much to rely on the memory of such a small child.”

Aubrey said shrewdly, “The maid has decamped, has she not?”

Faustina said, “I do not know whether she has gone back to the Hall or not. I am so foolish! I just came away from Betsy’s without even thinking to inquire at the Hall. But then, Althea says that her father is away, and surely Zelle would not simply bring the child to Betsy without an overpowering reason. They are not on good terms, I should tell you.”

Aubrey nodded, lost in thought. “It is a strange thing,” he said, “that until I arrived in Devonshire, my life had been a fairly routine affair. No family to kick up trouble, no debtors to chase me. In fact, an orderly, unemotional,
dull
life. But now…”

“What shall we do?”

“Now,” he continued, as though she had not spoken, “there is a great row going on inside the vicarage. The one girl who has stirred me as I have not been touched for ten years refuses to see me. And my dearest friend is a target for murder. You must admit, Miss Kennett, that Devonshire has an invigorating influence.”

She could not spare time for Aubrey’s tangential philosophizing, she thought. “But what shall we do? Hugh’s away, and I don’t know where. How can I get word to him?”

Surprisingly, Aubrey the philosopher transmuted himself into a man of action. “I will take word to him,” he announced.

“You know where he is?”

“Yes. He borrowed my roan, because he thought his gray was not ready for a long trip yet. Yes,” he added in answer to her unspoken question, “Revanche is just now in the stable behind the vicarage. It will take me only a few minutes to saddle. I shan’t take Peasley with me.”

He left her. She stood undecided for a few moments, and then realized that she had done all she could for Hugh, at least for the moment. But there was still the need to tell Ned that perhaps his smugglers would attempt another murder, and if his riding officers were alert to the possibility…

With resolution she walked up to the vicarage door. No one answered her knock, so she pushed open the door and entered. Certain sounds from within directed her to the drawing room of the small house. Nothing in her life, except perhaps Aunt Louisa, had prepared her for the scene that confronted her in the drawing room of Mr. Astley, man of God.

Helen Astley was the center of the commotion. Sobbing with abandon, raising her tearstained face frequently to deliver a piercing stare at the man across the room, with a long-drawn-out moan she returned to her weeping.

Her father leaned over the back of the settee, soothing his daughter with meaningless syllables, which, quite properly, she paid no heed to.

In the intervals, he straightened in a queer little dancing step and shouted to the bewildered, red-faced man at the mantel. Her cousin Ned!

“You came here under false pretenses!” cried the vicar. “Leading my little girl to hopes you had no intention of fulfilling. And Lady Waverly, too. I do not like to speak ill of someone,” he added viciously, “but your mother has a great deal to answer for.”

“Leave my mother out of it,” roared Ned, stung. “She has nothing to do with this!”

Faustina advanced a step into the room in an attempt to hear better. Perhaps her ears were deceiving her, she thought, and all this would vanish if she could just understand it.

Ned caught sight of her, and his relief was embarrassingly obvious. “Faustina, damme, I’m glad to see you!”

“He swore at me!” cried Helen.

Diverted, Ned said, “I never did. You mean just now? That is outside of enough!”

“Ned, please,” said Faustina earnestly. “Mr. Astley, I beg of you to calm yourself.” Gratified to see her words having a slight soothing effect, she exerted herself further. Casting a quelling glance at Helen, who had subsided into mere weeping spasms, she added, “I suppose it is too late to try to bring Helen to a sense of decorum, Mr. Astley. I do wish she would remember that weeping does nothing to advance her beauty in the least. But of course, giving way is a great relief to a hysterical turn of mind.”