Mischief

by Laura Parker

  “You wouldn’t dare!” four voices chorused together.

  “ ’Tis a great drafty place …”

  “Without a single comfortable bed …”

  “… Or proper servants!”

  “… Or heat!”

  By the time the butler stepped inside the door, the chorus of invective had degenerated into an all too usual public school-style brawl complete with volleys of food and tableware.

  Hyacinthe spied him first and clanged her fork against her teacup for silence. “Yes, Bersham?”

  The long-suffering family retainer did not blink an eye as a late-launched biscuit skimmed past his shoulder. “Misses Abbott, the mail coach has been spotted coming up the drive.”

  Laurel lowered the spoon she was about the send hurtling toward Cynara. “Did you say mail coach?”

  “Yes, miss.” He glanced quickly at the wallpaper to see what would be required to remove the jam that had been flung at it.

  “We’ll just see about that.” Hyacinthe rose, her features set in consternation, and headed for the exit.

  The remaining girls overset chairs in their haste to beat one another to the dining-room door where they pushed and shoved and even tore the sash of one gown and stepped on the hem of another before they had successfully passed through.

  They all reached the windows of the front hall in time to see a great black coach rock to a halt on the drive. Its team of heavy horses pulled up short under the driver’s virulent cursing and sawing on the reins, spewing gravel beneath heavy iron-shod hooves while shivering and snorting great clouds of breath into the chilly air. It was a singular sight for the sisters who had never had need to even consider a public equipage.

  “Remarkable display,” Hyacinthe murmured under her breath and withdrew a little lest the passengers notice her at the window. “Bersham. Ask that fellow what he means by plowing up our drive with his great beasts.”

  As the butler hurried to the front door the postillion leapt down from his perch.

  “Croesus Hall!” the driver bellowed in a voice better suited for the coach yard of a travel inn. “One-minute stop to unload a passenger!” he added as the postillion opened the coach door and lowered the steps.

  “Oh, Lord!” Cynara jumped up and down. “I’ll bet it’s her!”

  Laurel, stung with excitement at the possibility gushed, “This is too delish! Our new step-mama come to Croesus Hall in a common conveyance!”

  As passengers began piling out into the chill morning air, the five sisters pressed to the windows for a better view.

  “Is that her?” Cynara questioned impatiently when she spied through the lace curtains a woman of middle years.

  “I have no way of knowing until she presents herself,” Hyacinthe answered. Yet, she, too, had picked out for her particular inspection the woman in brown serge whose face, beneath her bonnet, was broad and plain-featured.

  “She ain’t brown like an Indian,” Cynara observed.

  “She scarce seems a lady,” Alyssum mused aloud.

  “One supposes the Indies do not provide much opportunity for brilliance in womanhood,” Laurel murmured in satisfaction. “We must expect oddity.”

  None of the other passengers appeared, in the least, a more likely candidate. Two of them were male, a farmer and a military officer. The fourth and final passenger was a young female who scarcely reached the shoulder of the officer who offered his hand to help her down. She wore a deep black bonnet and a wholly unfashionable sheepskin garment that looked like something a shepherd had stitched together for warmth on a winter heath.

  In short order, three small valises and one very large trunk were unlashed from the back and placed on the drive. Then as briskly as before, the postillion ordered the passengers to climb back onboard. Every one of them did so but the young woman in the fleece-lined cloak.

  “Is that h-h-her?” asked Peony as she danced on tiptoe behind her taller sisters.

  “Surely not!” murmured Alyssum in doubt.

  “But she’s young!” Laurel exclaimed in vexation. “Remarkably young!”

  “Younger even than …” Cynara began.

  Hyacinthe held her silence but her opinion was writ large on her face. Her eyes, rounded with amazement, were fully trained upon the frightful creature moving toward Bersham with a bright smile. In her hand was a valise bearing the Shrewsbury crest!

  “That’ll be Ufton Nervet, ma’am.” The speaker, a young military officer, tilted his head toward the window of the mail coach. “Croesus Hall lies not far on the other side.” When Japonica looked up, he winked at her. “You are coming into service there? As governess, perhaps?”

  Japonica turned her head, ignoring his too-friendly manner as she had all his other attempts to draw her into conversation since the day’s journey began. She supposed he had bribed the driver in order to learn her destination. He could not learn the reason behind it for she had told no one. The squire and his wife who formed the third and fourth of their group had not spoken a word to her, which was just as well. She found very little reason to represent herself to the world as a viscountess when she meant to renounce the title.

  Pushing aside the coach’s leather window shade, she glimpsed townspeople so layered in wraps they appeared like so many bales of cotton. Many of them paused to watch the passing coach. In turn she watched them until her breath turned to frost before her nose, obscuring her view. The most amazing discovery of her journey so far was the climate.

  Two evenings ago when the coach halted at a posting inn for the night, she had stepped out into a silvery fall of tiny white points of light from the night sky! She had heard of it but never before seen snow. Delighted, she had danced about trying to catch a few flakes in her palm. But the cold had soon lost all fascination for her.

  Born and bred in a climate where flowers bloomed year round and the only seasons were dry and monsoon, she soon found the cold a torture. Today her hands and feet ached from the chill as bursts of wind-borne rain and snow continuously found every crack and cranny in the coach. Her travel clothes were near ruined, as were her spirits. She would not be here now but for the promise she had made to Lord Abbott, one she had thought many times in the past year that she would not keep.

  Would she have been brazen enough to carry out the deception of giving birth to her child beneath Lord Abbott’s ancestral roof? She would never know, as chance once more took charge of her life and changed its course utterly.

  Their ship had sailed into port at Lisbon last spring only days before Napoleon’s forces seized the port city. For the next few months they were stranded as unwilling guests of the French, until Lord Wellington’s troops arrived in summer to liberate them. By then, she was too close to her confinement to risk another long sea voyage. Meanwhile, Wellington himself saw to it that Lord Abbott’s body was shipped to England.

  On August 1, under the Sign of The Lion, she gave birth to a child with black hair and eyes with a strangely golden tint behind the natal blue haze. She should have suspected that the Hind Div had yet to cast his final spell upon her life. She had a son!

  So much for Aggie’s perfect apple of advice! At its center now lay a worm of complication: her impossibly sweet son. If he had been born in England and accepted as Lord Abbott’s child, that would also have made him heir to the Shrewsbury inheritance! That was a lie she could not perpetuate. That meant no one in England must know about Jamie, named after her father.

  Japonica bit her lip to still its tremor. She could still scarcely believe that she had had the strength to leave Jamie behind with Aggie in Lisbon. Yet there was very little choice. She could not risk his health or the questions his appearance would give rise to. The world would call her son bastard and the truth would do nothing to ease the shame. Her son would not have the legal protection of a father’s name. Would she one day find the words to tell him the truth? How to explain to a child the duplicitous nature of a father the world knew as the Hind
Div? No, better he not know.

  Love born of deception was still love. The fierce protectiveness which rose up within her when she first gazed upon her swaddled son remained unalterably powerful. Nothing and no one would harm him as long as she lived.

  But first she had a promise to keep.

  A scandalous and wicked woman she might be, but she was also an honest and trustworthy person. She had given her pledge to Lord Abbott to look after his little girls. She would not be free to live her own life until she had found a way to fulfill that pledge. And that required this journey to England.

  Japonica suppressed a sigh of misery. It was the right thing, was it not? No, she must not think about it all again, not any of it, not when she was about to meet her new family.

  The mail coach suddenly swung off the main road and the driver yelled out, “Next stop, Croesus Hall!”

  Leaning forward, she twitched open the leather curtain. She had been expecting a fine house. The imposing breadth of the large, handsome stone mansion she glimpsed through a copse of leafless trees quite took her breath away. Three stories in height, with smoke rising from several chimneys along the roofline trimmed in snow, Croesus Hall was a study of stately order surrounded by rambling woods. Through the countryside snaked a silver-backed river culminating in a lake before the palatial home. Had the viscount lived, this would have been her home.

  That thought surprised her anew as the mail coach rounded a curve, carrying her at breakneck speed toward the edifice. She was accustomed to managing her father’s household of five servants. A place of this size must command the attention of dozens of servants! It was just as well that the burden would not be hers.

  When the driver had brought the great black coach rocking to a halt, the other passengers rushed to step down, using the stop as an excuse to stretch their legs. Japonica deliberately waited to be last, attempting to dust off a little of her travel dirt. She had hoped to make a better first impression. In correspondence with the Shrewsbury solicitor in London, he had promised her that the Shrewsbury post chaise would meet her upon arrival at the dock in Portsmouth. But an autumn squall off the French coast had forced her ship to make port instead in Falmouth in far west Cornwall. To her dismay, there was not a private chaise to be had at any price in that town.

  “Hired away by officers of the fleet, what with the weather forcing so many ashore,” the coaching clerk had explained. “There’s only the Mail coach going out today, miss. If ye idle by a few days, ’twill come a coach for hire.”

  She did not want to add even a day to her time away from her son, so she had made the two-hundred-mile journey by public coach.

  She stepped down with the help of the young officer’s proffered hand, forcing an expression of cheerfulness she did not feel.

  “Good luck to you then, miss.” The officer pinched her elbow familiarly before he climbed into the coach.

  Ignoring the insult, she picked up her valise and approached the elderly man dressed as a servant who stood staring at her with a frown on his long face. She smiled at him. “Good day. I am Japonica For ….”

  “Who is she, Bersham?”

  Startled, Japonica looked up toward the owner of that commanding voice. At the top of the steps stood a tall young woman in the most unforgiving shade of lavender.

  “Good morning,” Japonica called out, and made her way toward them.

  By the time she reached the first step, four other young women had joined the first. They were too elaborately dressed to be servants, yet poorly groomed. If she did not know better she would think that they had just been in a fight, for there was not a neat head of hair between them and their gowns were soiled and wrinkled. Perhaps they had donned the castoffs of their betters in hopes of making a good impression on their new mistress. But how had they known when she would arrive?

  Uncertain how to present herself, she chose the most direct method. “I am Japonica Abbott, wife of the late Lord Abbott.”

  “Oh Lord!” cried the pudgy one. “It’s her!”

  “Our new step-mama?” said the youngest.

  Without a word to her, the tall woman lifted her gaze past Japonica. “You there, fellow, drive on!” she ordered in her deep contralto. The coach horses apparently understood that the order concerned them for they stepped immediately into stride.

  She waited until the rattling noise of the coach had subsided before bringing her gaze back to Japonica. “I am Hyacinthe Abbott, Lord Abbott’s eldest child. I suppose you must come in. For now.”

  Chapter Five

  “There must be some mistake.” Japonica stared uncomprehendingly at the five hostile gazes glaring at her across the morning room. In the bag at her feet were ribbons and sweetmeats for the children she thought she would be greeting. “I was told Lord Abbott’s daughters were still in the nursery.”

  “And we were told to expect a lady.” Hyacinthe looked over the younger woman’s road-worn appearance. “ ’Twould seem we were all misinformed.”

  Japonica tried to adjust her thoughts to this new circumstance. The Shrewsbury Posy was not comprised of cherubs. They were young women, and not all so young, to judge by the eldest. In her frosty severity she seemed a dozen years Japonica’s senior! Still, there was nothing for it but to begin again.

  She smiled as brightly as her fatigue would allow. “Surprise need not be unpleasant. I am certain we shall get on beautifully once we come to know one another.”

  “I very much doubt that,” Hyacinthe answered. “You are as we surmised, as far beneath us as we are above you.” She drew herself up to her full height, five inches above the intruder. “Your decided lack of propriety in arriving by public coach is nothing short of shocking! I presume your maid follows by pony cart.”

  “I have no maid,” Japonica answered forthrightly.

  “No maid?” Laurel repeated in a tone that made Japonica flush.

  “Every lady has a maid,” Alyssum said, as if she could save the moment.

  “Every lady,” Laurel responded with emphasis on the last word.

  A dull throbbing began at Japonica’s brow. “It has been a very difficult journey. I made it only that I might make the acquaintance …”

  Hyacinthe cut her off with an abrupt gesture, hugely enjoying her position of power. “The reason for your presence isn’t in the least of interest to us. If you had any finer feelings you would have come directly to England upon father’s death.”

  In satisfaction, she saw the younger woman pale. “I wrote to explain that I was unavoidably detained.”

  “So you say.” Hyacinthe sniffed. “You may as well understand that there is no place for you here. No one in this house will ever think of you as any sort of relation.”

  “Certainly not a step-mama!” added Laurel.

  “Never!” chorused the remaining three.

  Japonica lowered her gaze, caught between anger and embarrassment. She had not expected to be welcomed with open arms, but the depth of the hostility of these five young women made her feel a little sick, which brought to mind the smells of broiled meat and warm bread emanating from deep in the house. She had not eaten properly in days, but she brushed the thought aside. What she needed most at this moment was a chance to collect her thoughts.

  She glanced about for a distraction and noticed a fire blazing beyond the room in which they all stood. “Oh, lovely. A fire!” She moved deliberately toward it as if she had been invited. She did not care if they followed, so long as she could for a moment remove herself from their collective censure.

  She pulled free the ribbons of her bonnet as she passed from one room into the next and lifted it from her head.

  “Red hair!”

  “Do Indians have red hair?”

  “Mongrels do!”

  The words were whispered behind her but loud enough for her to overhear. Japonica did not glance back. She paused to lay her bonnet on a side table then swung her heavy Afghan sheepskin cloak from
her shoulders and draped it over the back of a settee before continuing toward the hearth. When she thrust her hands toward the fire, the stinging warmth greeted her like an old friend. Ah, but this was exactly what she needed!

  After a moment she turned with a smile to see the Abbott girls had joined her, at a distance. “We should become acquainted. Won’t you tell me a little about yourselves?”

  “I see no reason to do that,” Hyacinthe answered.

  “Then I will give you one.” Japonica rubbed her hands together. Chapped raw by the cold, they stung and turned an angry red. She had not meant to begin with the terms of her bond to them but it was as well that they understood it from the beginning. “I made your father a solemn promise that I would act as your guardian until each of you are wed.” She glanced doubtfully at Hyacinthe. “Or other suitable arrangements can be made.”

  “You expect us to believe Father would willingly have made you his viscountess?” Hyacinthe eyed the stranger as if she were a sickly sow. “You have no style, no polish. Your features, like your accent, betray your common roots. Impossible!”

  As if cued to do so, Laurel pressed a hand to her ample bosom and cried rather too theatrically, “Poor father! Old and ailing, alone in a strange land.”

  Cynara took a step toward Japonica. “Admit it. You forced this marriage upon Papa!”

  “If, indeed, it ever took place.” Hyacinthe spoke this last with a self-satisfied smacking sound.

  Japonica noticed the remaining two girls watched this confrontation with avid interest yet they made no effort to take part in the attack. Perhaps they were more willing to hear her out. “As a matter of fact, your father’s proposal of marriage came as a complete surprise. My first inclination was to refuse it.”

  “I don’t believe you. You are a liar!” Cynara’s face flamed with indignation, which only brought to prominence the angry color of her pimpled skin. “Why would Papa propose to you?”