Sylvia Or The Moral High Ground

by Catherine Bowness

  “No,” he said, smiling slightly, perhaps at the use of the handkerchief. “I suppose you remember my saying that I wished you dead when we met in Bond Street. My dear, if I wanted you dead – and there have been moments when I have – I should want to kill you myself, with my bare hands around your lovely throat – like this.” He drew the rug and his coat down and put his hands around her neck but his fingers were loose, his thumbs, meeting in the hollow above her collar bone, rested on her beating pulse, their touch as light as thistledown. “I should not employ a ruffian to shoot you, nor yet a man in a travelling chaise to run you down.” He paused before asking in an odd voice, “Did you truly think that I would hire a man to kill you?”

  “Yes; you seemed to hate me so much.”

  He took his hands away and drew both the coat and the blanket up close to her chin again. “Have you been judging me in such a distorted fashion for the past seven years? Or have you only taken leave of your senses during the last few weeks?”

  “What have you done with the diamonds?” she asked abruptly.

  “What you asked. I returned them to your admirer.”

  “You mean Lord Marklye? He did not receive them.”

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “Yes. Did you put them into his hands?”

  “Certainly not. What the devil would he have thought if I had knocked upon his door and thrust a parcel into his hands containing a valuable – I assume it was valuable and not paste – box of jewellery which the object of his affections had decided she could not accept? I should not imagine he would have been pleased to know that you had confided in me; and he would have thought it odd that I should be carrying out such an errand for you.”

  “The Duke of Rother as an errand boy?” she asked with a faint inflexion of amusement. “I never thought of how it would look. You told me you would return them discreetly by means of a trusted servant; what did you do?”

  “What I said I would: returned them by means of a trusted servant. He did not give them into Marklye’s own hands because he was from home when my man called at his house. Polson refused to give them to the footman and insisted upon my lord’s valet taking charge of them.”

  “Then what has happened to them? Marklye did not receive them. He thought I still had them and expressed disappointment that I was not wearing them. What can he have thought?”

  “As you were not wearing them, I imagine he thought you had rejected them – and him; perhaps he thought you intended to sell them.”

  “Did you look at them?”

  “No, of course I did not. I was only the messenger. I did not consider it proper to examine the contents of the parcel. It might, for all I know, have contained a gun.”

  “I do not – and never have – possessed a gun.” She stopped abruptly.

  “Are you plucking up courage to ask if I read the note which I presume you enclosed?”

  “Did you?”

  “No. I opened neither the parcel nor the note. I gave it to Polson – a servant I have employed for years – just as it was and instructed him to take it to Lord Marklye’s house. I own I did not myself ascertain his direction; I left it to Polson to discover it but I insisted upon his giving the parcel to the valet and to his informing me when it was done. Were they, to your knowledge, worth a great deal of money?”

  “A king’s ransom, I should think. I cannot conceive why he bought them; he must have done so on a whim.”

  “You are very naïve if you truly cannot understand the man’s motives. He wanted you and evidently considered you worth a king’s ransom. He does not know you as I do.”

  “No,” she agreed, drawing away from him and sitting up straighter, the coat and blanket falling to her lap. “What shall we do about it?”

  “We? I rather assumed my part in the affair was at an end. Did you tell him you sent them back?”

  “Yes.”

  “And by whose hand?”

  “That too.”

  “Marklye and I seem to be connected in a curiously intimate fashion. And now he has been injured. He must be rueing the day he met you; that is something he and I have in common.

  “I will question Polson again and endeavour to discover what has happened to them but it’s my belief that, whatever has befallen those cursed diamonds, it befell them in Marklye’s own house.

  “Now, do you wish me to take you home or are you feeling sufficiently recovered to return to the ballroom?”

  “I will go back.” She cast aside the blanket, rose and shook out his grace’s coat before handing it to him. Then she walked to the mirror above the mantelpiece and peered at her face. “Do I look respectable?” she asked, patting a stray curl into place.

  “More or less. Come here!”

  She turned away from her own reflection and walked back to where the Duke stood, attempting to put his coat on.

  “Would you like me to perform the services of a valet?” she asked.

  “You can if you wish. I was about to offer to perform those of a lady’s maid.” He turned his back so that she could help him put on the close-fitting coat. She did not feel she was much use because he was obliged to twist his shoulders and shrug himself into it. “You are too short!” he complained, stepping away from her.

  When he faced her once more she held out his handkerchief. He shook his head. “I do not think I want it back, thank you.”

  “What am I to do with it?” she asked as he leaned forward, withdrew one of the pins from her hair and re-inserted it more firmly to keep the curl in place.

  “You can put it in the useful pot.”

  “Oh no, that would be too horrid. Why, they might not find it for weeks. Why can you not put it in your pocket?”

  “Why do you not put it down your bosom?”

  “It is not mine.”

  He smiled. “We are at point non plus, are we not? I will give it to you, although I realise that it is a poor gift when compared to a diamond parure.”

  She bowed her head and began to push it into the bodice of her gown.

  He took hold of her wrist. “Give it to me. It will spoil the line of your dress.”

  She withdrew the damp handkerchief and put it into his hand; he looked at it for a moment with a curious expression before pushing it into his pocket.

  Chapter 29

  In the aftermath of the Barnaby ball, Sylvia woke with a headache. It was very early in the morning, the sun had barely put its head above the horizon, and she felt entirely unrested. She lay for a time, trying to empty her mind of scenes of the night before but, the more she tried to drive the thoughts from her brain, the more her head hurt. At last, she rose and, going to the washstand where a jug of cold water stood, dashed some of the contents at her face. It dripped down her chin and wet her nightgown without having much effect upon her headache. She drew the curtains back and peered out at a day that showed promise of being bright – too bright for a person feeling as she did. She twitched the curtains together again, dampened a handkerchief and returned to bed where she dabbed at her temple.

  It had been an evening of high drama beginning with her arrival at the Barnaby house where she was obliged to pretend to know how to behave in an aristocratic household as one of the guests rather than as a paid servant. It had not been easy. She had believed, once, many years before, that she was a pretty enough girl but she had not thought about her appearance for many years; prettiness was not a requirement for her job; indeed it would have been a deterrent for most women looking to appoint a governess. The more she thought about it, the odder it seemed that Lady Sullington had engaged her so readily. She had not even reached her eighteenth birthday when she had presented herself for interview. Certainly she had done her best to look older by dressing in the most unbecoming and fusty garments she could find (she had unearthed them in the attic) and scraping her hair back from her face with such viciousness that she had given herself a headache that day too. Later, of course, it became apparent that Lady Sullington was ba
rely able to keep a governess for as long as a se’nnight.

  She had seen Lady Sullington and her daughter almost as soon as she had entered the ballroom. Melissa had started towards her but had been almost immediately led on to the dance floor by the Duke while she herself had been claimed by Lord Marklye.

  This morning she remembered the malignity of her ladyship’s stare and the way her face had paled beneath her rouge; how her lips had twitched and pursed as though an annoying fly had perched on them. She had whispered to her neighbour, a woman in an orange turban, while her eyes had remained on Sylvia’s face.

  Lord Marklye’s revelation that he had not received the diamonds had been followed swiftly by the shots and his lordship’s injury. Who had fired the shot – or who had paid someone to fire it – and at whom had it been aimed? Had it been directed at her or at him?

  His lordship had seemed to think the Duke was the principal and that he had intended to remove his rival. That had not occurred to her for the simple reason that the Duke had said quite clearly in the middle of Bond Street that he wished her dead. Why should he have wanted to kill Lord Marklye? He did not want her himself; his one desire appeared to be that she should suffer, although that could, as a long shot, be used as an argument against his being her would-be murderer: if she were dead, her suffering would be at an end. Of course it was possible that his motives were even more tangled: by killing the man he assumed to be her lover, he might hope that she would be tormented by grief.

  She could think of no one else who would wish her dead. Certainly Lady Sullington wished her ill, but dead? That would be absurd.

  If Lord Marklye had been the target, the perpetrator might have been the Duke - or it might have been anyone else who had a grudge against him. Sylvia, having little idea of the man’s past except that he had only recently inherited his title and fortune, had no idea who this person or persons might be but supposed that there might well be several who wished him at the devil.

  It seemed to her, on balance, a great deal more likely that Lord Marklye had been the target and, that being the case, the gunman could have had no interest in her at all.

  This being a far less harrowing conclusion than the one where the Duke was involved, she abandoned the subject altogether and composed herself for sleep, believing that it was far too early for a guest to rise. The nobility was not expected to put in an appearance much before ten and, after a night such as the one just past, noon might be considered more acceptable.

  But sleep did not come. No longer wrestling with the identity of the target of the shot nor of the perpetrator, Sylvia’s mind was instantly possessed by her memory of the one dance she had had with the Duke: that terrifying waltz.

  The way he had whirled her about had, she now thought, been designed to make her swoon. Her head had been swimming and he had not helped to make her feel at ease with his alternate bouts of verbal attack and something almost approximating friendliness. Just when she had begun to relax, he had assaulted her again with his sarcasm and bitterness. No wonder she had lost her senses when the music stopped and he had abruptly dropped her.

  Lying restless in her bed, she flushed with shame as she recalled this dreadful episode. She wished she had not gone to that horrid party at all, she wished she had not been dressed to dazzle by Lady Wey’s dressmaker, she wished above all that she had not been besieged by quite so many eager gentlemen; the memory of their expressions, of the way they had almost fought to reach her side as soon as she had entered the room, filled her with a kind of shrinking horror. She wished that she had not been so lacking in moral fibre that she had acceded to the Countess’s plea to be beribboned and be-laced and put on display for all to admire. She had no doubt come by her just desserts. It had been vanity that had led her to succumb to the temptation of being admired and she had been punished for it, although she was uncomfortably aware that not only had the larger part of the punishment been meted out to poor Lord Marklye – who did not deserve it in the least - but that the punishment was by no means complete.

  She should not have allowed his lordship to take her on to the terrace; she would never have countenanced anyone taking Melissa outside in that way for everyone knew what sort of things took place on a terrace, in the dark, away from other people. She had thought herself safe because she was no longer a girl but, if she had paid proper attention to the men vying for her attention, she would have known that her age did not by any means provide safety. She would have to be a great deal older before she was no longer an object of such naked desire in male eyes.

  The evening thereafter had progressed in a calmer fashion. Lord Marklye had remained upstairs; the Duke had danced several times but had not again approached her. She had been escorted into supper by Mr Harbury, who was clearly having difficulty approaching Melissa.

  “I am afraid your leading me in will not by any means further your interests with Miss Sullington,” Sylvia admitted as the young man offered his arm.

  “I have given up all hope of being allowed to speak to her,” he said in a dismal voice. “Her mama will not look at me; she turns her head away whenever I approach.”

  “And what does Miss Sullington herself do?”

  “She looks at me forlornly. Could you – I know it is a great deal to ask – but would you be able to speak to her on my behalf, do you think?”

  “I will try but you must know that I am no longer her governess and it is not impossible that her mama dislikes me even more than she dislikes you. You would be well advised to back off a little. I do not wish to be rude but you are not the most eligible gentleman in London. Her ladyship will cease to notice you if you withdraw a trifle.”

  “But then Miss Sullington will think I have lost interest!” he exclaimed.

  “I do not suppose that she will but there will be no harm done even if she does. If you truly love her, Mr Harbury, you will wish her to choose her future husband carefully and pressing her, as you have been, will only make it more difficult for her. She is besieged by suitors and hardly knows which way to turn. I wish that I had not been obliged to leave her for I believe she needs my support more than ever.”

  “She will be forced to accept Rother.”

  “He would not make her such a bad husband. In any event, I know Miss Sullington well and I can assure you that nobody will succeed in forcing her to marry anyone against her wishes. Pray believe that. She has a determined character and will, in the end, do as she pleases.”

  “Oh, thank you! That is an enormous relief to me. May I ask why you are no longer her governess? I heard that you are a cousin of Rother’s. He did not say so when we had tea at Gunter’s.”

  She smiled. “He is not overly attached to me; you may have noticed that he was reluctant to speak to me at all that day. It was his sister, Lady Wey, with whom I am staying, who insisted that I leave my employment.”

  “And yet you say that he would make Miss Sullington a good husband?”

  “I believe that he would. He may not like me but that is no reason to assume that he would not be kind to her.”

  “Will you …? Does he know that I care for her?”

  “I think everyone knows. Pray do not concern yourself about Rother: he will not make her an offer,” she added more gently, taking pity on him.

  Talking to Mr Harbury had made Sylvia feel positively antiquated. He was so very enthusiastic although he only seemed to have one topic of conversation. She wondered what he spoke of to Melissa on those rare occasions when he managed to spend a few minutes in her company; perhaps he spoke of her then too and Sylvia, remembering her own youthful love affair with the Duke, guessed that Melissa would be perfectly happy to hear her praises sung repeatedly. But what, she wondered, would happen in the end if they did marry? Would they grow bored with each other, would they find, once the first heady flush of romance had cooled, that they had anything in common? Would she and the Duke have found that?

  She had loved him ever since she first laid eyes on him; well, of c
ourse, he was very handsome and she had not, at the time - and had not still - very much experience of men other than her brothers. Why had he never replied to her letter breaking off the engagement? At first, she had wondered if he had not received it but, if that had been the case, would he not have written to her in a loving vein from Spain, after he had returned to his regiment? She had never heard another word from him. Then she had thought that he must have changed his mind, found that he did not love her after all, did not wish to make her his wife; she had feared that she had been jilted. But, surely, if that had been the case, he would have sent a message? There had been nothing after that last kiss, that last lingering glance, before he rode off with her brother. Even after her brother’s death there had been no word.

  When she had seen him again in Bond Street, her breath had almost stopped and she had thought she would suffocate. But he? He had been hostile, glacial; he had expressed a wish that she was dead. Since then, she had seen him in the street outside the jeweller’s and again last night. On both occasions he had been initially disagreeable but intermittently almost tender. There was that between them which still made her heart beat faster and sometimes she had surprised a look upon his face which made her think he felt the same. Would they have grown indifferent if they had married or would they have grown to hate each other as they did now? Did youthful love ever grow into mature love? Was indifference the best one could hope for? If that were so, she would be better to marry a man she liked rather than one she loved; that would surely lead to less disappointment.

  She found her mind veering towards Miss Minton and the look she had surprised on that beautiful face when she had heard the name ‘Holmdale’. She had no doubt that she had an enemy there. Miss Minton had been abandoned, according to the Countess, and clearly laid the reason at Sylvia’s door. For a woman who knew hardly anyone in London and had, until recently, been an obscure and unimportant governess, she seemed to have acquired a great many enemies: the Duke, Lady Sullington and Miss Minton. She understood that the Duke might feel bitter towards her, she could even see why Miss Minton might; but Lady Sullington? Why did she dislike her? Seeing the Duke kissing her hardly seemed an adequate reason for such spite for she knew quite well that her ladyship would not consider his dallying with a harlot in the street a bar to his marrying her daughter.