Letitia Or The Convalescent Heart

by Catherine Bowness

  “There, you see,” she said, “you are perfectly capable of dancing.”

  “Shall I approach Miss Pottinger next?”

  “I am sure she would be honoured, and she probably knows how to dance much better than I, so that you will be free to concentrate on your own performance rather than having to instruct your partner.”

  “Very well. Where is the pretty Miss Mott-Ripley, do you think? Mama said she was charming and so she is; I would not mind essaying a dance with her.”

  “I don’t know,” Letty replied a little petulantly. “I daresay she has gone outside with someone; she won’t be short of partners.”

  She had been willing to be generous to Miss Pottinger whom she did not consider a rival, but Miss Mott-Ripley was another matter altogether.

  “What did you think of her father?” she continued, making an effort not to display jealousy; she had rejected Archie and knew she could not reasonably object if he looked elsewhere.

  “I didn’t pay him much attention; I was more interested in his daughter.”

  “Evidently. Did you not notice how put out he was when he was introduced to me?”

  “Not particularly, but I did notice that the whole family was conducted into a side room by a footman. I took it he was feeling unwell; there seems to be a good deal of it about. Why? Do you think he is related to your aunt’s husband?”

  “I wondered, that is all.”

  “She is a lovely girl,” Archie went on, pursuing his own line of thought, “but it has to be admitted that her parents leave something to be desired. Can you imagine what Mama would say if I were to take more than a passing interest in her?”

  “I expect she would ask about the size of her portion,” Letty snapped.

  “I suppose so,” Archie agreed despondently. “The trouble is she would be right; I cannot afford to marry without a substantial injection of funds.”

  “You’re surely not thinking of marrying her?” Letty asked, now thoroughly annoyed. “You haven’t exchanged two words with her. I would advise you to dance with her at least once before you start planning the rest of your life together.”

  Lord Archibald cast her an amused glance and said, “I don’t recall you and I exchanging any words before you threw yourself at me.”

  “And you were just as silly,” she retorted. “You dragged me off in a carriage when we had exchanged nothing more than fantastical love letters.”

  “Indeed – and look how that turned out,” he besought, still amused and not making any attempt to conceal it.

  “Oh! You are just idiotic!” she exclaimed, breaking away from him. “Go and make love to her then and good luck to you!”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Outside to cool my head.”

  She walked off rapidly, far too quickly for him to be able to follow even if he had wanted to.

  Outside, the good weather appeared to have come to an end at about the same time as her re-awakened hopes concerning Lord Archibald. The sky, which had been that deep, clear, midnight blue of early summer, generously sprinkled with stars, had clouded over and become murky. A few hesitant drops of rain had begun to fall.

  With a little ‘tsk’ of annoyance, Letty pulled out the length of black silk and wrapped it around her shoulders as she emerged from the doorway and set off across the courtyard. She was not sure where she was going, her only desire being to get away from everyone. She was tired of flirting with sundry men, ranging from old ones who pretended to be avuncular while staring at her hotly, to young ones who blushed when she looked at them.

  She had not gone far when she felt a heavy blow on the side of her neck, gave a strangled cry of pain and turned to see who – or what - had assaulted her. But, before she had managed more than a fleeting glance at her assailant, he had hit her much harder, so hard that she fell in a crumpled heap at his feet.

  She did not hear the Countess, emerging from the Castle a few moments later, confront the assailant, demanding to know what he thought he was doing.

  Letty’s absence was noticed by Lord Archibald almost immediately, but he assumed that she had either gone outside, as she had threatened, or into a side room with a favoured admirer and, taking this as evidence of her indifference, refrained from searching for her.

  Aspasia, after a brief return to the ballroom, where she had seen Letty being led into supper by Lord Archibald, had gone upstairs again to pass the time with the Earl in his chamber.

  It was thus not until the residents of the Castle gathered in the saloon for a final cup of tea that anyone mentioned it.

  The Countess having retired for the night, the Earl, who had come down to bid farewell to his guests, invited Aspasia to pour the tea. The Major handed the cups round.

  “Where is Letty?” Aspasia asked.

  “I don’t know; I haven’t seen her for some time,” the Captain admitted.

  “I thought she was with you,” Lord Archibald said.

  “We danced a couple of times, but she went into supper with you, and I haven’t seen her since,” the Captain returned.

  “Yes, and I stood up with her immediately after supper, but then she took umbrage when I praised Miss Mott-Ripley’s looks and went off in something of a pet. I haven’t seen her since. I assumed she had sought you out and – well, you can imagine the rest.”

  “Imagining is certainly as far as I would get,” Captain Sharpthorne retorted. “She only has eyes for you, Meridew.”

  “What?” Archie exclaimed, astonished. “She is not in the least interested in me. She told me quite clearly that she had fallen out of love with me.”

  “Perhaps that was what she thought at the time, but she has changed her mind,” the Captain said. “For God’s sake, man, are you blind?”

  “Fortunately, not quite,” Archie replied sharply.

  “You two arguing will get us nowhere,” the Earl interrupted. “When did you last see her, Archibald, and which way was she going?”

  “I told you: I danced with her after supper and then she flounced off; she said she was going outside but I didn’t watch her leave. I’m going to look,” he added, abandoning his annoyance with Sharpthorne in favour of anxiety about Letty.

  “I’ll see if she has gone up to bed,” Aspasia said, rising. She felt guilty because she had clearly not done her job of chaperoning her niece properly, being far more taken up with exchanging confidences with the Earl in his bedchamber.

  But, when having run up the stairs and found no sign of the missing Letty, she was struck with an awful sense of doom.

  She called and peered into all the rooms several times as though she might somehow have missed the girl in her first hasty search; she even looked under the beds before running headlong down the stairs again. Arriving in the saloon, her eyes sought the Earl’s.

  He, seeing her expression, said, “I take it she is not upstairs?”

  “No. Where can she be?” Aspasia, usually so phlegmatic, was rapidly becoming overcome with panic.

  “Probably outside. She must have gone out with some eager swain and they have both lost count of time. Do not worry; she is bound to turn up soon. Archibald has already gone to look.”

  “But she was not interested in anyone except Archie and you, sir,” Aspasia argued, looking at Captain Sharpthorne.

  “That doesn’t mean they weren’t interested in her,” the Earl pointed out.

  He rang the bell and, when Crabb appeared, questioned him on what he knew of Miss Denton’s movements that evening.

  Crabb had nothing further to add. He had seen her go out shortly after she had completed her dance with Lord Archibald. No, as far as he could tell, she was alone.

  “She might have arranged an assignation, I suppose,” the Captain said when Crabb had left with instructions to organise a search.

  “With whom? As I said, the only men she might have agreed to meet are you and Lord Archibald,” Aspasia snapped.

  She was convinced that, although her niece did seem a little
inclined to change her mind about whom she loved, she was not the sort of girl who made assignations in a dark garden late at night with questionable young men.

  “We will find her,” the Earl promised, rising and moving towards the door. “Do you stay here and send word at once if she returns.”

  “You cannot go out,” she cried, starting towards him. “You are not well.”

  “I am quite strong enough to walk about the grounds with a lantern,” he countered. “In any event, there will be so many people out there it will soon be noticed if I collapse. Pray do not be anxious,” he added, coming back and squeezing her hand.

  “Can I not come too?” she asked. She hated the idea of sitting idly in the Castle while prey to the most horrid anxieties.

  “I would infinitely prefer it if you did not. We do not want to lose you too.”

  With which, he and the soldiers left the room and Aspasia found herself alone in a Castle that had grown disturbingly quiet.

  When Letty came to herself she could not at first tell where she was. It was pitch dark and there was a light but steady drizzle falling. She must be outside – but what in the world was she doing there?

  She did not remember anything beyond having some kind of an argument with Archie and going outside. She must have fallen over and knocked her head because, now that she was becoming a little more aware of her body, she discovered that her head ached abominably, as did the side of her neck. She must have been lying wherever she was for some time as she was wet through, her thin silk dress clinging to her. She was lying partially on her front, one arm and one leg twisted beneath her. Her face was buried in some sort of soft, wet material. It was not grass, even flattened grass, and it was not, at least not exclusively, mud. It was softer than she would have expected the ground to be but was at the same time peculiarly lumpy as well as rough and scratchy.

  She rolled over, wincing with the movement, and tried to get to her knees, but found that the hand she put out would not only not support her, but hurt excruciatingly when she tried to lean upon it. Where was she? Unnerved by her inability to use one of her hands, she remained on her knees, swaying slightly, for the surface beneath her was so uneven that she felt herself in danger of toppling over into its malodorous embrace at any moment. It was useless to look around, although she did, for she could see nothing in the darkness.

  She began, cautiously, to crawl forward, using the uninjured hand to steady herself, until she came to the edge of wherever she was. Unable to reach whatever lay beneath, she could not tell how far away it was and did not dare to try to leave the platform on which she was presently marooned. What if, stepping off it, she were to tumble into a void or – heaven forfend – the oubliette?

  Her heart began to beat hard and fast as a sudden awful thought assailed her. Had she in fact fallen into that grim medieval pit? And would anyone ever find her?

  Assailed by terror, she shouted. “Help!” and heard the sound echo around her. She was in the oubliette – or somewhere closely resembling it. She repeated her cry several times as loudly as she could. After each shout, she not only heard the noise reverberate, but it seemed to continue on a higher, more plaintive note, almost as though some creature were mocking her.

  She wondered if anyone would hear her and became convinced that the oubliette must have been built so that the cries of the poor wretches, if they survived the drop, would not be heard. After all, however bloodthirsty one was, and however little one cared what had become of one’s enemies, one would not want one’s peace disturbed by their miserable cries.

  Indeed, she did not herself like the – surely imaginary – plaintive moan that followed hers. She was afraid it might be a ghost – the lingering spirit of someone who had been here before her. Where the sound of her own voice invigorated her to some extent, convincing her that she was doing her best to alert someone to her plight, the wavering little groan which followed began to upset her so much that she resolved not to utter another word.

  She had to find a way out. Surely there must be one, even if it involved crawling through secret tunnels. Hadn’t the Earl said something about how he and Archie had been used to creep in as boys?

  But, before she could try anything of that kind, she must find out whether whatever she had landed upon was right at the bottom or stuck partway down. She would have to climb off it if she was to examine her whereabouts but was reluctant to do so if there should prove to be another twenty foot before she reached the real bottom.

  She huddled, shivering, where she was for a few minutes until, realising that sitting there until she died of starvation or exposure was an exceedingly poor-spirited response to the situation, she decided that she must screw her courage to the sticking place and make some attempt to help herself. The first thing to do was to ascertain the size of the platform and what surrounded or lay beneath it.

  To this end, she crawled carefully all the way round, stretching out her hand every few inches to see if she could touch the wall. She could not, there was nothing within reach so, assuming that the platform could not be balancing in mid-air, she concluded that it must be on the ground at the bottom of the shaft. It was difficult to be sure, in the disorienting dark, how big it was but she suspected it was no bigger than a large bed and, judging by its consistency – firm but uneven – she guessed that it might be a mattress, probably a sort of straw palliasse, which had either been taken in by the Meridew boys years ago as part of a game, or thrown down more recently by someone eager to get rid of it without having to go to the trouble of breaking it up and disposing of it in the usual way.

  She sat still for a few minutes to gather her courage. She told herself that, when everyone had left, her aunt would surely notice that she was missing. She would raise the alarm, would she not? Would it therefore be best if she simply sat quietly and waited for rescue instead of putting her life in further danger by attempting to leave the relative safety of the palliasse?

  She did for a short time, but then she found she could not endure sitting on a sodden heap of straw in the rain hoping to be rescued. She was afraid she might sit there until she died and thought how utterly she would despise the sort of pathetic female who withered away because she was too cowardly to make an effort to save herself. She must do something!

  While she was sitting quietly, she noticed that the plaintive cry was not simply an echo, it persisted even when she did not open her own mouth. The longer she sat there, indecisive, the more sounds she heard. There was not only the plaintive cry, like a small animal trapped somewhere, there was also a steady drip which she was sure was not due only to the rain. Something else was dripping and for a moment she wondered if the palliasse was actually floating in water. No, it could not be, unless it had not been there for long; it would have become saturated and sunk, would it not? She found she did not know and wished that someone, some time, had had the forethought to teach her something useful – indeed teach her anything - for even the sort of things which females were usually expected to know had somehow passed her by: she could not dance, she could not play the pianoforte in anything but a clodhopping manner and she could neither sew nor embroider.

  She must do something. She could not die from sheer ignorance. If she had been taught nothing, she must not let such an oversight on the part of her preceptors prevent her from escaping. In fact, if she did – and if she could somehow get out of this horrid place – would not everyone revise their opinion of her, cease to think of her as nothing but a nuisance? It was a trivial thought – and very likely entirely unworthy of a person who was stuck at the bottom – she hoped it was the bottom and not halfway down – of an oubliette.

  She must try at least to explore her prison, ascertain whether there was a way out. Clutching a handful of straw and hoping it would hold her weight if she slid off into a void, she extended one foot over the edge and was startled to feel solid ground less than a foot below. She had landed on what did indeed appear to be a straw mattress lying at the bottom of
the shaft.

  Feeling momentarily optimistic, she climbed gingerly off it until she was standing ankle-deep in mud beside it. She wished it would stop raining and the moon would come out for it was exceedingly frightening to walk about in impenetrable darkness. One of her legs seemed reluctant to support her, the ankle having a disconcerting tendency to buckle, but she found that, although it protested and hurt dreadfully, it would take her weight so long as she positioned it carefully.

  She took a tentative step but, before she reached the expected wall, she tripped over something lying in her path – something horridly solid and at the same time soft, something suspiciously like a human body.

  Chapter 35

  Lord Archibald, who had rushed out of the Castle without waiting for anyone else, limped around the courtyard, calling Letty’s name. He had snatched up a lantern which one of the footmen had been using to escort guests to their carriages. It was raining quite hard so that he did not think it likely that, even if she had come out with a suitor to exchange kisses in the bushes, she would still be there. She – and her swain – would surely have found shelter somewhere.

  “Letty! Where are you? For Heaven’s sake, answer me! I don’t care who you’re with – just let me know you’re not dead – or injured! Letty!”

  As he stumbled from one shadowed corner of the courtyard to another, he came eventually to the oubliette and was struck by the terrible thought that she might have fallen down and be lying, broken, at the bottom, although he knew perfectly well that the way the shaft was protected made this extremely unlikely, if not impossible. It would have been no good having a deep open hole in the courtyard because all sorts of things might have fallen, or been thrown, down, including unwary people

  The top entrance, the one down which prisoners would have been lowered, was protected by a cover made from thick timber planks screwed together, with an iron grille in the centre, through which small objects could indeed be thrown but generally were not. The cover was not attached to the raised wall encircling the oubliette but simply lay across it, its weight being too great to make it easy to move.