by M. C. Beaton
He dragged her screaming, yelling, and kicking into the drawing room and then into the hall. He sat down in a carved oak chair, slung her over his knee, took off his thin leather show, and applied it forcefully to Patricia’s bottom.
All the fight went out of Patricia and she began to cry dismally. Lord Charles set her on her feet.
“Now, will you behave?” he roared.
The drawing room door was open. The curtains billowed out about the jagged hole in the window. Firkin and Miss Sinclair stood as if turned to stone. The enormity of what she had done made Patricia begin to tremble.
For almost the first time in her life, she apologized. “I am sorry,” she whispered. “But I am not used to such harsh treatment.”
She stood, shaken, the tears running down her face.
All at once, Lord Charles’s anger left him. He felt sorry for her. It was not her fault she had been so spoiled.
“You may lead a very comfortable and easy life if you will only do as you are told. Miss Sinclair will take you to the schoolroom and there you will begin your lessons. Tea will be sent up to you.”
Lord Charles heard the sound of carriage wheels. “Callers,” he said. “Firkin, put them in the library. Miss Sinclair, take Patricia up to the schoolroom.”
In ten minutes’ time, the Misses Grant and their mother were warmly ensconced by the library fire, eyes shining with excitement as they surveyed this rich and handsome addition to the neighborhood.
“I am sorry Miss Patricia cannot be with us,” said Lord Charles.
The sisters looked at him hopefully, but they saw he had no intention of explaining where Patricia was or what she was doing.
“We are come,” said Agnes, “to see if Patricia still intends to go to the ball at Barminster.”
“When is this ball to be held?”
“In two days’ time.”
“I think,” said Lord Charles, “that my ward is a trifle young to attend balls. She has not yet made her come-out.”
“It is different in the country,” said Mrs. Grant placidly. “It is only the local assembly at Barminster. Everyone goes, even the very young children.”
“Then perhaps I shall escort her myself,” smiled Lord Charles.
Patricia was immediately forgotten in all the excitement this statement produced. Both Emily and Agnes were anxious to cut a dash by securing at least one dance with this most eligible lord. Conversation rattled on happily over the teacups until Mrs. Grant indicated to her reluctant daughters that it was time to leave.
Lord Charles sat for a long time in the library after they had left. The Grant girls were pretty and frivolous and very like Patricia on the surface. He began to feel ashamed of himself. He had never struck a female in the whole of his life, and the more he thought about it, the more he become convinced he had behaved like a monster. Patricia had behaved disgracefully. But there were other ways of disciplining her.
He finally took himself up to the schoolroom where Patricia sat bending a tear-stained face over her lessons.
“I hear there is to be a ball in Barminster,” he said. “I have decided you may attend, Patricia. In fact, I shall escort you myself.”
She looked at him coldly and said, “And to think I was looking forward to it.” Then she bent her head over her books again.
Lord Charles slammed his way out of the schoolroom, all new, kind thoughts about Patricia utterly gone.
Snow fell that day and the next. Lord Charles found himself hoping that roads would be blocked so that he would not have to take that pert minx to the ball.
But on the Friday, the day of the ball, a thaw set in and a watery sun struggled through the clouds. By afternoon, the skies were calm and blue. The roads were clear and there was to be a full moon that night.
When she was not in the schoolroom, Patricia had spent the rest of the time shut up in her bedroom. Lord Charles assumed she was preparing some grand toilette for the ball.
But Patricia was planning revenge.
She did not hate Miss Sinclair, considering her a colorless creature who was merely obeying Lord Charles’s every order. Anyone with more spirit would have felt some compassion for a beautiful pupil condemned to spend long hours in the classroom, thought Patricia, who could not bear to admit to herself that she was actually beginning to enjoy those terrible lessons.
But Patricia did hate Lord Charles. Now that the shock of breaking the window was over, all her remorse had fled. Lord Charles had struck her, and for that he must be punished.
At first, Patricia toyed with the idea of killing him, but could not really think of a safe method of doing away with him. Growing weary at last with useless plots, she decided to escape into the works of one of her favorite authors, Miss Louisa Sydney Stanhope. The new volumes of her latest work, The Confessional of Valombre, had arrived just that day from the Minerva Press.
Patricia opened the page and plunged in. The first paragraph surely described such a man as Lord Charles Gaunt.
“It was at the close of the festival of St. Fabian, when the last sonorous tone of the organ had ceased, and the pale glimmer of the tape had expired, when nature had sealed the eyes of fanaticism, and even the vigil virgin had ceased to watch, that a stranger paused at the gate of the convent of Valombre…”
The dressing bell sounded and Patricia dropped the book and glanced at the clock in amazement. Time had passed quickly while she had searched her mind for ways of revenge. As she dressed, she now saw Lord Charles as the villain of a Gothic novel. He looked satanic. He had black hair and green eyes. He was pitiless. He had struck her. He was a monster.
This villain, this fantasy of a cruel monster, was very comforting and much more reassuring than any real-life guardian who had struck her in a temper because she had smashed the drawing room window.
She had altered a ballgown for the occasion, removing most of the bows and frills which she had realized made it overfussy. Her ensemble consisted of a simple underdress of straw silk with a white gauze overdress embroidered with gold. A gold tiara studded with large topazes was set among her curls and a topaz and gold necklace was clasped around her neck.
When she finally joined Lord Charles in the drawing room, it was to find him cross at her tardiness, and he looked more like the villain of her fantasies than ever. She shivered with Gothic fear and Lord Charles asked her testily if she were cold.
He was wearing a black evening coat and black silk breeches. His long white waistcoat was embroidered with silver, and diamonds sparkled on his fingers, in his stock, and on the buttons of his coat.
Lord Charles was tempted to tell Patricia to go upstairs again and put on jewelry more suited to a girl of her years, but she looked so scared and downcast that he had not the heart to criticize her.
Their arrival at the assembly caused a small sensation. As she removed her mantle in the cloakroom, Patricia was besieged with questions about Lord Charles. All the ladies declared him to be divinely handsome, which the cynical Patricia translated in her mind as “divinely rich.”
She was surprised that some of the girls of her age kept insisting that Lord Charles was the most good-looking man they had ever seen. He was so very old, thought Patricia, quite in his dotage, and steeped in dark sin, she reminded herself.
Patricia was soon surrounded by a court of admirers when she entered the ballroom. Among them was the handsome captain who had looked at her through the window of the pastry cook’s.
He was only about twenty, and had thick, curling brown hair and a roguish eye. She danced with him twice and then let him lead her into supper.
The captain’s name was Peter Oxford. He flattered her with compliments and said he hoped to ask her guardian for permission to call on her.
“He will never give permission to you or any other gentleman,” said Patricia sadly.
“I am of a good family!”
“That is not what I meant.” Patricia avoided Lord Charles’s reproving glare, glad he was on the other side
of the room, and drank a huge gulp of wine.
“Then what is the matter? Does he want you for himself?”
Patricia remembered a delicious novel she had read the year before, when a wicked guardian had tried, in order to gain her fortune, to force his ward to marry him. She drank some more wine.
“Alas,” she said, lowering her voice to a dramatic whisper, “I am afraid he does. He tyrannizes me, and only this week he… he beat me!”
“An angel like yourself? I shall call him out!”
“He would never meet you,” said Patricia sadly. “He would report you to your commanding officer.”
“Coward!”
“He is insufferably arrogant. Only see how he stares at me, his eyes full of venom.”
The captain looked across the room and met the cold, green glare of Lord Charles Gaunt.
“Gad’s ’Oonds! He looks like the devil. My poor Miss Patterson.”
Patricia drank more wine. “I cannot escape,” she said. “There is no one to help me. He has engaged a sort of woman jailor. Most of the time I am kept locked in the schoolroom.”
“Monstrous! You are not a child.”
“I am nineteen,” said Patricia, quickly adding three years to her age. Her head swam pleasantly with the wine she had drunk. She was enjoying her story. It was quite like living in a book.
The captain had drunk a great deal himself. He was bewitched by Patricia, by her huge pansy eyes, by the creaminess of her skin, and by the odd color of her hair.
“I would snatch you away from him!” cried the captain.
“But if I marry without his consent, I do not get a penny of my fortune until I am twenty-one.”
“Two years to go,” thought the captain. “A fortune and all this beauty!”
Aloud, he said, “I have my pay and an allowance from my father. We could marry. The married people in my regiment always have comfortable quarters.”
Patricia sobered slightly. All at once she saw how to revenge herself on Lord Charles. If she ran away with this young man, Lord Charles would be shamed and humiliated. Furthermore, it would be wonderful to be married to a handsome young captain who would pet her and fuss over her. Patricia saw the captain as a sort of masculine combination of Miss Simpkin and Nanny Evans. It would be fun playing house. She would entertain his friends. She would be the toast of the regiment. The Prince Regent would get to hear of her beauty…
“We could run away,” she said lightly.
The captain prided himself on being a man of action. “Why don’t we run away now,” he said. “We could rack up at some inn. I’ll go back to my barracks for a day or two until the fuss dies down and we can be married by special license.”
“Now?” said Patricia, her eyes very wide.
“Why not?” he grinned. “Now or never, I should think, from the furious look on your guardian’s face.”
Patricia felt elated and breathless. Good-bye to lessons. Good-bye to humiliation and being treated as a slave.
“Yes,” she said. “I will marry you. But how do we leave the ballroom without his following us?”
“Spill some wine down your gown and dab at it and make a fuss. Then excuse yourself as if you are going to go and clean it. Get your cloak and meet me outside. I’ll leave the minute Lord Charles takes his eye off me, which he surely will once you have left.”
Patricia jerked her wine glass and spilled it on the gauze of her gown. She jumped up with a little shriek and started dabbing at herself with a napkin.
“Now look what she’s done,” said Lord Charles crossly to his supper companion, Miss Emily Grant.
“Soda water is the best thing to remove a wine stain,” said Emily. “Oh, she is leaving to go to the cloakroom. I shall go and help her.”
“You are very kind, Miss Grant,” said Lord Charles. “Give her a message from me, pray. She is to drink no more this evening.”
Eager to please, Emily hurried off.
Patricia was not pleased to see her. In fact, she looked furious.
“What do you want?” she asked nastily. “Has Lord Charles sent you to spy on me?”
“I only came to help you,” said Emily. “He wants you to stop drinking wine. He told me to tell you so,” she added with a toss of her head.
“Why do you not mind your own business,” said Patricia, desperate to have her gone. She realized she had never liked the Grant girls. They were relative newcomers to the county and the gentlemen were apt to be very silly and spoony about Emily and Agnes, calling them beautiful and nonsense like that. The fact that Patricia’s nose had been decidedly put out of joint by their arrival did not occur to her.
She flicked a curl in the mirror and said maliciously over her shoulder, “Go back to Lord Charles. You should suit very well. He is old and you, dear Emily, are dull.”
“Oooh! I hate you!” Emily stormed out of the cloakroom.
No sooner had she gone than Patricia snatched up her mantle and slipped out to the front of the inn where the captain was waiting.
“Let us go, Miss Patterson,” he said gaily. “Our life together has just begun!”
Chapter 3
Deborah Sinclair gave a little sigh. She studied her reflection thoughtfully in the glass. She was, she decided, quite a fine-looking woman. Her nose, which others of lesser perception and gentility might condemn as being a trifle too long, was, in fact, she decided, an outward manifestation of her inward good breeding. Her slightly prominent eyes were large and blue, not a vulgar bright blue, but an interestingly pale color.
Her waist was trim and her bosom generous. She raised her skirt an inch. Her ankles were slim and neat enough to please the highest stickler.
She had hoped Lord Charles might have asked her to attend the ball as chaperone. But he had seemed to think his own presence enough.
She had been surprised to find that Patricia was an apt pupil. The girl had an amazingly retentive memory.
She could not help hoping that Patricia would behave badly at the ball. It would be pleasant if Lord Charles sent for her on his return and asked her advice.
She decided to ring for tea and cakes and pass the long evening reading some improving work.
She pulled the bellrope.
Down in the kitchen, Firkin looked up from cleaning the silver and glared at the row of metal bells on the wall.
“Governess’s room,” said James, the first footman.
“Let her ring,” said Firkin sourly.
Mrs. Miles, the housekeeper, threw him an anxious look. “Better see what she wants,” said Mrs. Miles, “or she’ll go whining to his lordship.”
“I’ll ’pologize from the bottom of my heart and say the bell wire must have been broke,” said Firkin. “Lord Charles is master here now, and it is pleasant to have a man in charge stead o’ Miss Patricia and her flighty ways, but that’s not to say I agree with his lordship for giving that long-nosed governess leave to order us about.
“I can’t help feeling sorry for Miss Patricia. All that book learning. It don’t make sense. Education is wasted on girls. Poor Miss Simpkin’s near broke her heart.”
“But you always said Miss Patricia could do with a touch of the birch rod,” said Mrs. Miles. The bell jangled again. “’Specially when she put that essence o’ senna pods in your port and said she was funning.”
“Me complaining is one thing,” said the butler darkly. “I been here twenty year and Miss Patricia owns the place. It goes against the grain to see her being ordered about by a stranger.” The bell jangled loud and long. “When them chambermaids told me they was told by Miss Sinclair to tip Miss Patricia out o’ bed, I went to Lord Charles and complained. ‘Good God, man,’ he says. ‘I ain’t having her locked up in a cupboard all day or beaten with a broom handle like what I got in the nursery.’ And there’s the answer, if you ask me, Mrs. Miles. He had that rotten a time ’isself when he was young, stands to reason he thinks she’s being treated well.”
The bell jangled furiously.
<
br /> “Let it ring,” said Firkin. “That one’s got hopes of being my lady and it’s all his lordship’s fault for elevating her above her station. Lord Charles is a fine man and as sweet a master as any servant could wish, but it’s up to us to put that governess in her place. I do wish she would stop ringing. It makes my head ache something terrible.”
“I should have accompanied Miss Patricia to the ball,” sniffed Miss Simpkin as she sat in front of the nursery fire with Nanny Evans. “I always go. Well, I suppose I should be thankful he didn’t invite her. Poor baby, poor Patricia. All those dry, dry lessons. Patricia should rest after the ball tomorrow, but that horrible Sinclair woman told me she intends to have her out of bed and into the schoolroom at seven as usual. Oh, if only I could stop her.”
Nanny Evans lumbered up from her rocking chair and took a green glass bottle down from the mantelpiece.
“Take her a cup of tea and put some of this in it,” she cackled.
“What is it?” asked Miss Simpkin.
“Laudanum.”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t!”
“Suit yourself,” said Nanny Evans, sitting down again and beginning to close her eyes.
The door of the nursery opened and Miss Sinclair appeared. She was flushed and upset.
“I do not know what is up with the servants,” she said. “I rang and rang for tea and no one answered.”
Nanny Evans opened her eyes. “Then go down to the kitchens and see what’s up.”
“It is not my place to do so,” said Miss Sinclair haughtily. She turned to Miss Simpkin. “You go.”
“And why should I go when you will not?” demanded Miss Simpkin, coloring up under her rouge.
“Because I am a real governess and you are more of a nurserymaid,” said Miss Sinclair.
Nanny Evans gave Miss Simpkin a toothless grin and glanced up at the green bottle on the mantel.
Miss Sinclair regretted her words almost as soon as they were uttered, but Miss Simpkin said mildly, “There is no need to trouble the servants. We have just made some tea, the best Bohea. Go to your rooms and I shall bring it to you.”