An Unmarried Lady

by Willman, Anna

  Elaine allowed a trickle of exasperated laughter escape. “You are a couple of caper-witted rogues, the pair of you – one just as bad as the other!”

  “Oh no! How can you be so unjust?” exclaimed the Viscount. “I assure you that I am a great deal more the culprit than our Friday-faced Captain here. Indeed he was most difficult to persuade, and though I hasten to reassure you that he is not usually so poor spirited, still he was quite determined not to, er, join in the play, so to speak. In fact, sad as it may seem, he sounded to my ears quite like our old headmaster when he had caught us in one of our pranks.”

  “Yet I see you did, in the end, persuade him,” Elaine said.

  “Well, you see, it was his great respect for your…” He eyed James questioningly.

  “For my Papa,” Elaine finished for him.

  The Viscount hooted in laughter. “Yes, exactly. You are a knowing one, are you not Miss Howard? So you can see that it was positively his duty to comply with a request from the head of his family.”

  “I see that the pair of you have a good deal more hair than wit!” responded Elaine severely.

  “Have we indeed sunk ourselves beyond redemption?”

  “You have indeed.”

  “Now it is you who are gammoning us! No, Miss Howard, I can see that you are of a forgiving nature, for my friend’s head remains attached to his shoulders and I find myself also intact.”

  She stifled a chuckle. “Oh do go away, or I shall be sorely tempted to remedy that mistake!” And Lord Derring laughed outright and swept out the door with a deep bow.

  Elaine turned to James. “We will have to find Chudleigh and Mrs. Fraidy and set them both straight as to your identity. They will take care to inform the others. What a disgraceful way to introduce yourself to the household to be sure!”

  “Yes. I am sorry for it.”

  “Enough of your ‘sorries’! I warn you I will listen to no more of them.”

  He bowed.

  “And once we have spoken to them it will be time to go down to the Dower house. Or is Captain Howard not the educationist that Mr. Merrival was?”

  “Oh, I am still the same man as I was before, Cousin. Only the name is different. We shall have to tell the youngsters, too, I collect.”

  “You will have to tell them. You are the transgressor.”

  “Of course. I’m sor-, I understand.”

  “Well, don’t look so unnerved. I expect the children will consider it a great joke. I only hope it will not require half of the class time to settle them back into their work.”

  She noted with some satisfaction that he refrained from apologizing. Well, she would certainly refrain from forgiving what was, after all, unforgivable.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: In which the Puzzle is Solved.

  Mr. Howard, anticipating a serious scold, was relieved to find his elder daughter disinclined to give him one. “Only tell me you are at last done with your scheming, Papa, and I will say no more about it.”

  This he was eager to do, and though this time he spoke only the truth, he could see that she didn’t quite believe him. Nevertheless she kept her word and said no more.

  Anne, when informed of it, thought the charade a great joke, and marveled at her sister’s catching the culprits out. “For I would have never guessed it. How delightful that your dear Mr. Merrival is really our cousin and the Captain a Viscount! How they fooled us!” and she went off into a charming peal of laughter.

  “Really Anne,” Elaine replied, “it was very ill done of them. Just look at how everyone at Lynnfield is in an uproar. It is sheer luck that Mrs. Fraidy decided that the masquerade was the result of a wager and spread that about, for it appears people are always ready to believe the gentry capable of making extravagant bets of all sorts.”

  “Well if it was a wager, they lost it. For you rumbled them!”

  “So I did, though it would be more appropriate for a young lady such as yourself to express that thought without resorting to common cant!”

  Libby was a little shocked at the news, but encountering the true Captain Howard at the breakfast table, was induced to pardon the culprit once she saw what she perceived to be his genuine contrition. “If I know anything about human nature, it’s the other one who put him up to it,” she told Elaine later.

  To which Elaine, merely replied, “Yes. And it shows a sad lack of character that he was so easily persuaded to do something he knew from the start to be most improper.”

  Ever the governess, Libby conceded the truth in that, but then surprised her friend by adding that she considered it an excellent thing in a gentleman to have a lively sense of humor and to have the gumption to enter into a joke quite worthy of the Bard himself.

  It seemed to Elaine that, apart form the principal culprit himself, only Mary Hastings saw the suffering imposed by the imposture. She listened to her friend’s description of the encounter in the garden and said that it would require some time for the Captain to prove himself an honest man. And then added, “Your brother was right in the end. This Captain James is a true Howard after all. He’s proven himself to be a scholar of some note and also prone to getting himself into quite unforgivable scrapes.”

  Unforgivable indeed! Mary understood the masquerade for what it truly was – an act of deception that had destroyed Elaine’s peace of mind. For although Elaine could readily appreciate the joke itself, she could not forget that the man that she loved was a deceiver. He had assured her it was a prank and the rest of the world apparently accepted him at his word. But while she wanted to accept his word as well, she could not forget that it was after all the word of a liar, and the regrettable truth remained that there was a fortune at stake.

  So she withheld any explicit forgiveness and kept him still at a distance while she questioned her heart, mistrusted her feelings, and generally made herself very miserable indeed.

  Once, passing the Blue Drawing Room, she overheard a snippet of conversation between the Captain and the Viscount.

  “Well, your fortune’s made, James, at any rate,” the Viscount was saying. “For my part, I must follow your lead and find myself an heiress to save Challon.” She hurried past and did not wait for the Captain’s reply. She did not want to hear it. And yet later, she could hardly bear not knowing what it had been. Was he false? Was he true? No, that was not in question, for he was a proven liar. She did not need to know anything more.

  All rules of etiquette required that she behave as if all were well, so she smiled at the Viscount’s jokes, spoke politely to the Captain, who she considered had overcome his sense of remorse altogether too rapidly for her taste, and did her best to avoid both of them as much as possible.

  Fortunately there was work at hand that did not concern either of them. She threw herself into preparations for the upcoming Christmas festivities until Mrs. Fraidy ordered her out of the kitchen, saying she had never known Miss Elaine to be so fidgety about what was after all an annual event that she was perfectly capable of handling this year as she had done these many past years, without nobody needing to keep asking about the vegetables twenty times a day, thank you very much!

  Thus banished, Elaine retreated to the library and after a few moments perusing through the sketches and letters set aside as containing possible clues to the whereabouts of the talisman, got up and went to find Mary Hastings.

  “Come to the library for a moment, Mary. It seems to me that we need a fresh outlook on our mystery.”

  She had already mentioned the talisman to her friend, but now she went into more detail, explaining the history of the talisman and the reasons for the selections they had made. She told her, too, about the small portrait of Kathryn Howard in the nook and how it was the Captain who had noticed that it had been duplicated in great detail in their great grandfather’s portrait up in the picture gallery.

  “The first one without the loyal heart in it anywhere?” Mary asked.

  “Why yes. How did you come to notice that?”

  “
Long ago, when I was first an under housemaid, it was my job to dust the gallery. That was when reading was still new to me, so I noticed the word written across the heart in all those big pictures and thought it only fitting it was your family motto, because you were always such a true friend to me.”

  “Only it is not our motto, but the motto of King Henry the Eighth, who was never a true friend to any one, least of all to the Howards. For though he married two women from our family, he caused them both to be beheaded, and a good number of other Howards along with them.”

  “But this talisman thing is something he gave to this Kathryn when he was courting her, so to speak?”

  “Well, rather more than traditional courting, I would say. I believe she was probably already his mistress at the time. She was very young and not very wise, and he was very powerful and they say very much in love. He was also getting rather fat and was not in good health, so lacking physical charms to recommend himself to her, he resorted to showering her with jewels and rich presents of all kinds. The talisman was one of those rich gifts – most likely ugly as well, for she lost no time in handing it off to our ancestor.

  Mary sat down at the table and spent some time viewing the results of their research. She looked especially carefully through the sketches, finally pausing to ask Elaine, “There are no sketches of hearts, then?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

  “It’s nothing. Only it seemed to me that a lover might be likely to vow that he would give his heart to his mistress, and you did say that the loyal heart was the King’s motto. So I thought perhaps this talisman would be in the shape of a heart. But all we have here are cats.”

  She looked at the cats for a moment, as Elaine watched her. There was something about a heart, she remembered, but what was it? In a letter? She remembered then the hearts that had appeared along with swirls and circles on the small scraps of paper and went to fetch them out of the box. As she was moving the discarded sketches aside to reach the papers below, she happened to notice a drawing of a candelabra, with the arms extending up from the point of a heart that was at its center. She remembered considering it along with a number of drawings of other household items and discarding it, but now it took on a new significance, and she brought it over to Mary.

  “Could this be it? The candelabra sketched is really quite ugly – the heart is too bulky and the arms too slender. I’ve never seen such a candelabra around anywhere, have you? And anyway, the portraits in the gallery only had the heart, not the candelabra, so that would not make sense.”

  “No, you’re right, it wouldn’t,” Mary replied, examining the sketch closely. “And I haven’t seen any candelabra exactly like that either, but I think I have seen something like it somewhere. This drawing may be useful. Let’s keep it out at least until I remember what it was that I saw.”

  She hesitated and then asked, “Can you tell me how the lady spelled her name, with a ‘C’ or a ‘K’?”

  “I have seen it written both ways in the history books, though in our family letters it is mostly spelled with a ‘K’.”

  “And your great-great grandfather? The one who hid the talisman? How did he spell the name?”

  “I think with a ‘C’. Let’s look at his letter. Yes, look here. He wrote her name with a ‘C’. You are thinking the Cat might be a reference to her, are you not?”

  “A reference to her eyes, perhaps?”

  They went and looked at the painting closely, the shorter Mary standing on her toes to see it better, but they could see nothing at all remarkable about the lady’s eyes other than the fact that they were very beautiful and perhaps a little sad.

  “I wonder if she saw her fate,” Mary remarked.

  “Most likely not. She was supposed to have a cheerful disposition, and the natural optimism of the innocent. Even after she was sent to the Tower, she persisted in asking to see the King so she could explain to him that she was very very sorry, thinking that would make things all right. A true Howard, one might say. Her solemn expression can be set down to the fact that in general people prefer to have their portraits done with a sober face, the better to catch their true likeness. If she saw anything, it was probably a grand future as Queen of England.”

  “I’m sorry for her,” Mary said softly. They went back to the papers and Elaine brought out the scraps of paper to find the ones with hearts on them. One of them had both a heart and what might be construed as a hastily sketched cat’s eye, along with an almost illegible scrawl on it, in her great-great grandfather’s hand. The combination of symbols seemed to recommend it for further study, so they made an effort to decipher the words.

  “It says ‘Cat seeztal’,” Mary read. “Or maybe ‘Cat seez Tail’.”

  “Well, I don’t think it could mean that a cat seizes its tail, though I have seen one try to do so. However if we consider the cat’s eye, it might mean a cat sees a tail with its eye, or a ‘tal’, which could mean talisman. Do you think the cat’s eye on the paper is looking at the heart?”

  “It might be. But what does that tell us? For of course we already know that Kathryn saw the talisman.”

  “Really this scrawl could mean anything at all!”

  They sat and stared at the paper for a few more minutes. Then Elaine got up and walked back to the little portrait and stared at it very closely. Mary sat and watched with a puzzled expression on her face as Elaine suddenly turned and faced the room, standing as tall as she could. Suddenly she laughed and went and got a small folding step ladder used to access the higher shelves and brought it over in front of the painting. She climbed the steps so that her face was level with Kathryn Howard’s and then turned her head so that she was facing out into the room.

  Mary was on her feet now, looking up above her head, smiling broadly.

  “Did you, Mary, by any chance help clean the library when you were a housemaid?” Elaine asked.

  “Yes I did. And on one occasion, I remember quite well, assisting in the lowering and polishing of the very chandelier that now hangs over my head.”

  “And I’m sure that you have noticed that when I am as tall as this picture and look in the direction the lady’s eyes are facing, that I am looking directly at the center of the chandelier.”

  “Oh yes! We have found it! For your great-great grandfather, finding the heart too bulky for a mere candelabra, has had it built into the middle of much larger chandelier. Indeed it is a most unpleasant looking heart, all black and lumpy.”

  “We will find the gems painted over, no doubt. How large it is – as big as a real human heart! You were right, my dear friend. The besotted king gave his heart to the maiden.”

  Engulfed in a sense of unreality, Elaine went to the door and called Edgar, asking him to summon the other researchers. It took some little while, for they were in various corners of the house. Elaine and Mary waited impatiently, scarcely able to think or breathe or indeed to take their eyes from the chandelier, as the others came into the library one at a time, first Anne, then Captain Howard and finally Lord Derring. When they had all arrived, Elaine explained what she and Mary had discovered. The Captain placed the step ladder under the chandelier and climbed up to inspect the heart more closely. After some careful probing, he found a small lever that allowed him to lift the heart up and out. He backed down the ladder and gently set the black talisman into Elaine’s hands. It was heavy and clumsy-looking and covered with sharp little bumps.

  “I can scarce believe it!” Elaine let out a great breath of air. “Despite our best efforts, I never truly believed that we would find it.”

  “Can that really be our treasure? I don’t think I have ever seen anything so ugly in my life!” Anne declared, and Elaine had to agree with her.

  They brought the talisman into the Green Parlor to show to Mr. Howard, who examined it with great satisfaction. At his instruction they called for a pan of turpentine oils and set the great black thing in it to soak. From time to time, he ordered Carney to lift it from the
pan and bring it to him. Twice he scratched at it with his fingernail and rubbed it with his handkerchief and then had it placed back in the oily mixture.

  They sat around the room in near silence. On the third try, the old gentleman seemed satisfied and handed his oil soaked handkerchief to Carney, instructing him to rub the paint off.

  After a few moments of watching the elderly valet struggle with the handkerchief which kept tearing on the sharp protrusions, Captain Howard took the heart from him and placed it back into the pan. “We will need a stiff brush. Could you please ask Mrs. Fraidy for one? Something that she would have on hand for scrubbing the kitchen floor would do very nicely. And please, say nothing as to its purpose.”

  Carney bowed with excessive formality and left the room.

  “I suppose I’ve insulted him,” the Captain sighed.

  “Well, yes, you did, for Carney would never lower himself to gossip in the servants’ quarters, not even to Mrs. Fraidy,” Mr. Howard replied. “However, he will find great satisfaction in having confirmation that he is the only one, save Hastings, who knows about our secret treasure, and so in the end he will forgive you.”

  The scrub brush proved much more effective. When Carney tired of the effort, the Captain took it from him and continued until finally almost all of the black was removed, revealing a red enameled heart, encrusted all over with rubies. The word “loyal” was written in blue sapphires on a ribbon of diamonds that ran all the way around it. It was heavy and ugly and very, very vulgar. This time the Captain placed it into Mr. Howard’s rather shaky outstretched hands.

  “It is King Henry’s heart – the heart in all the old family portraits,” Mr. Howard said after examining it carefully. “A romantic gesture indeed!”

  “They say he was very much in love,” Captain Howard said.

  “I think I liked it better all painted black,” Anne commented. “It is so very… extravagant!”

  “It is truly worth a fortune!” Mr. Howard’s laughter had a shrill ring to it. “This is most wonderful! Carney, have Roberts bring a bottle of the very best champagne from the cellar. I am sure there are at least a couple of bottles left.”