The Penwyth Bride (The Witch's Daughter Book 1) (13 page)

I resolved to stay away from Roger Penwyth in future, or risk becoming undone.

My eyes were bent upon the ground before me as I was habituated to do because of my foot, and so I did not see Susannah Penwyth until I nearly knocked her down.

“Have a care!” she exclaimed in annoyance.

I was too far gone in my own thoughts to retort that she too, should have seen me, but her snapping eyes and flushed skin told me that she had a guilty secret of her own to conceal.

I muttered a pardon, and made to limp past her.

“Just a moment,” she said.

I did not pause, for the force of Roger’s eyes still bored into my back like the gaze of justice. She grasped my arm.

“What is it you want?” I burst out.

Her lips parted in surprise. “So the mouse has a temper, eh?” she said waspishly. Then her eyes narrowed. “You look different.”

“I do?”

I pulled my arm away and waited with a look of impatience, deciding to brazen it out. The crackle of energy from the garden popped through me in zips of power, and the fumes of unknown lusts clung to my skin.

She shrugged. “For your information, I only wanted to warn you that Mama has visitors, the horrible DeVeres, and that you were wanted in the parlour an hour ago to make their acquaintance.”

“Were you looking for me?”

“No.” She clenched and unclenched her hands as if suppressed excitement had electrified her nerves. “I want you to do me a great favor. Will you, Miss Eames?”

“It depends.” Despite my wariness, I was intrigued. No one had ever asked me to do them a favor.

She saw my curiosity and dove after it.

“Sally Armitage has sent me a note begging me to see her new painted patch-box, come all the way from Flanders. Will you tell Mama that I have gone to her?”

She brandished a slip of paper.

I eyed the crumpled note. “Sally Armitage,” I repeated skeptically.

A smile upturned her tiny mouth, and I blinked. For a brief moment she had become beautiful, as only a woman with the possibility of being kissed in passion can become.

“Thank you . . . Persia. I’ll not forget this.” She tucked the note in her bodice and waved at me before darting away, over the moor in the direction of the Penwyth Quoit.

I watched her go, running full out, knowing her lungs would be bursting with the pleasures of deception and anticipation, envying her speed, envying her certainty. Love had made Susannah Penwyth as soft as clotted cream.

It was only as I shunted my lame foot forward that I remembered who, exactly, the DeVeres were. Damon owed Henry DeVere a great deal of money, and I wasn’t supposed to know that.

###

Jenny hovered by the kitchen door, viciously kicking at one of Sir Grover’s hounds stretched out in boneless abandon beside the stoop.

“There you be,” she spat when she saw me. “Mistress be asking for ye for the last forty minutes. I’ll not get another whipping because ye decided to go wandering away when ye were supposed to be dressing for the DeVeres’ call!”

“No one told me they were coming,” I protested, squeaking in pain when Jenny snatched at my arm, her nails digging like talons.

“I know,” she snarled, dragging me inside. “Ye never do anything interesting, so I thought ‘ee would stay put, talking to that bird of yours like ye do, and I never bothered passing my lady’s message. Quick now!”

She bundled me up the back stairs. I heard the murmurs of conversation coming from the parlour, and a woman’s fluted laugh before Jenny prodded me savagely in the small of my back. Once in my chamber she stripped my muddy work frock from me, ripping the stay loop in her angry hurries. Powder was dashed over my chest and breasts before she thrust me into a pretty rose-colored confection that had come from Sarah Eames’ London box. It was a mark of her haste that she did not dawdle over it; or perhaps she had already examined the gown without my inconvenient eyes upon her. Once I had been hastily strapped in, she ripped a comb through my tangled hair, bringing tears to my eyes and a cry of protest to my lips. Muttering an insincere apology, she crammed a tiny lace cap over the bushy mass.

“Hurry now, miss, hurry!” she whispered, pushing me off the stool and out the door.

I stumbled down the stairway, stopping only when I reached the cracked door of the parlour. Lady Penwyth’s voice rose and fell on the other side, so clearly I thought she might be standing next to the door. I paused to take a deep calming breath, pushing the lace scrap more securely upon my crown. Lady Penwyth’s next words, spoken in an enraged whisper to an unknown listener, made me freeze.

“Susannah has always been headstrong, but now she’s become quite ungovernable. Punishments have no effect upon her. I whip, I plead, I withhold pocket money--nothing will control her!”

A low and cool murmur of sympathy answered.

“She’s intractable over the least little things . . . why, when I informed her you were coming to sup, she became quite wild with rage. I tell you Annabel, I am at my wit’s end.”

“She sounds normal enough to me,” a satiny female voice replied. “Girls at Susannah’s age are often rebellious. At least the interesting ones are.”

“But do you think it normal to ride the moors for hours on end and come back distracted, confused, almost on the verge of tears?”

“Hm,” came the noncommittal answer, and I instantly felt that the unmet Annabel DeVere knew exactly where Susannah Penwyth was.

The furtive conversation came closer to the door, and I thought it wise to scratch and enter.

I almost fell over Lady Penwyth and her companion. Lady Penwyth regarded me with nettled surprise. “Miss Eames! I did not hear you coming.” Her eyes flicked down to my feet. “Usually I do.”

At my entrance, Sir Grover and an unknown gentleman tore their attention from the backgammon table to me. Damon looked up from where he watched the game, sipping wine with indolent ease. He winked when our eyes met.

Flustered, I looked away to the petite woman whose graceful neck was swathed in a netted pearl choker.
She
was studying me with unconcealed interest.

So many eyes boring into me made me nervous. My foot caught on the edge of the carpet and I stumbled.

“Forgive me my lateness,” I stammered. “I . . . I was . . . walking . . .”

“Pray allow me to introduce our guests.” Lady Penwyth smoothly cut across my stutters.

The couple was briskly introduced as Mr. and Mrs. Henry DeVere. Damon seemed supremely unaffected by the fact that his largest creditor sat calmly dicing with his father. Sir Grover’s expression betrayed nothing.

Mr. DeVere rose from his seat at the backgammon table and bowed over my hand. He was not much older than Damon, if I judged correctly. His nose, split by unfortunately large nostrils, hooked over a mouth with a lower lip larger than the upper, giving his features the appearance of a perpetual sneer. His bright “How d’ye do?” seemed good-natured, but he immediately lost interest in me after my curtsy, his eyes drawn longingly back to the backgammon tiles before him.

His wife, I was surprised to note, seemed a decade older than her husband. The sunken cheeks, rendered so by the loss of several important teeth, did not belie an air of elfin naughtiness, and she dressed in good style that showed her trim figure off to her advantage. Mrs. DeVere’s shrewd eyes sized me up in one swoop, and she invited me to sit beside her on the divan. Lady Penwyth watched us in indecision for a moment before turning her attention to the tea tray with an air of relieved absorption.

After the usual inquires about my impressions of Cornwall, and a forage into my brain about my opinion on London fashion and manner, Mrs. DeVere observed: “I see that your ankles are still muddy, the sign of a good walker.”

I crimsoned. Obviously she had not noted my clubfoot too deeply.

“I wonder if you’ve seen our Miss Susannah out on your ramblings,” she continued.

“Yes, would you know where my daughter has got to?” Lady Penwyth asked querulously as she fussed over the lemon.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Damon, who had been leaning over Mr. Henry DeVere’s shoulder to the game board, tense.

“She . . . is visiting at the Armitages,” I said.

Lady Penwyth’s hand over the tea caddy suspended. “She is? I had no idea they were back from their visit abroad.”

My mouth dried. “Sally Armitage has a new patch-box to show Susannah,” I dutifully related.

“Oh, I suppose then they must have returned. How odd not to send a note.”

Lady Penwyth allowed a frown to briefly distort her mouth before bending over the tea caddy once more. I ignored the frisson coming from the tea leaves, their withered stems lamenting the crisping destruction of the sun and the coming scald of boiling water.

When Lady Penwyth’s attention seemed safely upon the tea, Mrs. DeVere whispered, “Tell Susannah to have a bit more care in her lies. The Armitages are still in Margate.”

“Oh no!”

“Never fear, I can keep secrets,” Mrs. DeVere murmured, “until the appropriate moment arises. And the one regarding Miss Penwyth has not come yet. Why worry her mother unduly?”

She leaned back on the divan in a supremely elegant manner, and I felt a rush of gratitude toward her.

“Besides,” Mrs. DeVere continued, “there are other, more interesting tidbits yet to unearth.”

She smiled a bewitching, closed-mouth smile at me, completely at ease with her unabashed curiosity.

“I hope you do not become too disappointed,” I said. “There is nothing of interest about me whatsoever.”

She giggled girlishly for a woman who must be hard by her fortieth year, but it was not annoying in the least. “My dear, everyone has something of interest about them. It only takes time to work out why.” And she proceeded to draw me out, bit by bit, as no one else had ever done.

I felt no resentment over her probing because I knew I could answer her curiosities about my life in the North without fear of betraying my witch origins. Only once did I falter over a question about my mother, which I glossed very smoothly by saying she died horribly when I was young. Even the intrepid Mrs. DeVere was not so bold as to pursue the topic.

Over by the backgammon table, the conversation had turned to business. Sir Grover had been speaking to Mr. DeVere about his new mining venture. Henry DeVere watched Sir Grover through heavy-lidded eyes that shone with sleepy alertness. I realized suddenly that despite his harsh words to his son, Sir Grover was trying to smooth over the unpleasantness caused by Damon’s gaming debt by offering Mr. DeVere an appetizing alternative.

Certainly Damon looked bored as the conversation showed no sign of turning from tin mining. He stifled a yawn as his father remarked, “Tin is fetching six and forty on the Exchange this spring, and copper more so.”

“Hm,” Mr. DeVere murmured noncommittally. “Tinning takes so much work and expense to chip it out of the rock. The clay pits provide with little ado over the getting of it.”

“Ah yes, but three tuns must be got of clay to equal a fifth of the value of tin,” Sir Grover replied silkily. “And then the clay must be refined before it can be used in the pottery slips, whereas tin may be sold raw.”

“Dear Sir Grover, how cunning you’ve grown,” Mrs. DeVere remarked from where we sat. “I remember a day--very long ago, Miss Eames, and pray do not to ask
how
long--that you never used to be so concerned with matters of business.”

“That was before I acquired a wife and two mouths to feed,” Sir Grover answered.

“Was it?”

Mrs. DeVere’s amused expression did not change as she uttered the question, but Sir Grover shot her a pointed look that I could not interpret.

Mr. DeVere moved a tile around the gaming board. “I’m a dashed lazy fellow when it comes to changing horses mid-race, Penwyth. I’ll continue with the china clay speculation until results prove otherwise.”

Sir Grover shrugged and lifted his brows to his son as if to say:
well, I tried
.

Damon quaffed the wine in his glass in one pull and rose to the sideboard for yet another.

Mr. DeVere lazily shook dice in the handsomely tooled leather cup. “Annabel and I crossed paths with Mr. Roger Penwyth yesterday at the Zennor parish church.”

“We stopped on a courtesy to the curate, who is shamefully starved by the vicar if you ask me,” Mrs. DeVere put in. “I left a hamper of cheese and bread with the poor man.”

“Zennor?” Sir Grover scooped up the dice. “Roger went there? It’s seventeen miles down the South Road.”

Mr. DeVere selected tiles to move. “It was the damned queerest thing.”

“What is?” Damon asked with a hint of a slur. “That my cousin would be seen inside a church? Of course, Roger
is
an irreligious dog.”

“My good fellow, I wasn’t referring to the state of Roger’s soul, who would give a tosh about it? The man was fully clothed and soaked to the bone. The pew was dripping water, and great puddles were gathered under his boots. But there he sat for all the world as if he’d just stepped inside to cool off after a country stroll.”