by Regina Darcy
“Snow makes it seem as if all the ugliness is hidden,” Henrietta remarked, her thoughts still lingering in the past.
“And so it is. You are not listening to me, petite. If you intend to have your revenge against the scoundrel who destroyed your mother, you must understand the nature of your adversary. I am not sure that you will be able to do what you intend.”
“Of course I will. Revenge is what I have lived for all these years.”
Madame surveyed Henrietta. She loved her as if she were her daughter, but she was mystified by the girl’s single-minded sense of purpose at an age when other girls her age were thinking of beaus and gowns and planning a future with the young men of their dreams.
Madame sighed. Henrietta had no dreams; she only had a thirst for vengeance. Her uncle did not know of her plans. Only Madame knew.
However, he was mystified as to why an heiress would choose to go to England, the nation of her birth but a foreign land to her, to become a governess of all things. Madame had counselled him to be patient. He respected Madame’s wisdom and had followed her advice, however reluctantly.
“Revenge is an unusual crusade for someone so young.”
“He destroyed the lives of my mother and my father and as a result, my life as well. I cannot be at peace until I have ruined his.”
Madame sipped her tea thoughtfully, taking time to savour the warmth. She contemplated the beloved young woman in front of her. Her intensity prevented her from fully living in her youth because she was consumed by the tragedy which had been set into motion a decade before. But however hard she tried, Madame had yet to find a way to steer the girl away from her stubborn destination. A destination that, at best, led to grief, and at worst, to life-long bitterness.
“I have taught you what I know, petite, and I know a considerable lot about men. But I am experienced and you are not. You have chosen a challenging path.”
“Madame, I have seen you with the gentlemen who adore you. You promise much more than you intend to deliver and yet they cannot resist coming to you.”
“It is true that I am not, perhaps, as generous to men as they would like me to be. But I please myself.”
“As I intend to do.”
“By making the guardian of the child to whom you will be a governess for fall in love with you.”
“Yes,” Henrietta answered her voice unfaltering.
“And when he has done so, you intend to cruelly reject him,” Madame continued. She placed her teacup back on the saucepan.
“It is not impossible that you will succeed. You are young, beautiful, accomplished, and very clever. You are also intelligent enough to disguise your cleverness. Many men do not like clever women.
However, it troubles me that you will be spending Yuletide on a mission of such venom. Christmas was always your favourite time of year. It distresses me that you are using this holiday as a vehicle for vengeance.”
“I cannot help the timing, Madame,” Henrietta said impatiently. “I have completed my studies at the academy, and now, I must leave.”
“You do not have to leave. You could stay in Paris with your uncle, spend Christmas with him, and enjoy mulled wine, gingerbreads and other Christmas delicacies in front of the hearth. You know that it is what he wishes. He does not understand why you have decided to be a governess when you will inherit his fortune and estate, in addition to the inheritance from your parents that will be yours when you come of age.”
“I have told him that I want to see England before I return to France. It is, after all, where I was born and where he and my parents came from. Is it not natural that I should be curious?”
“To see England, yes, certainly. But to work as a governess? You, who have never had to worry about so much as a sou?”
“I’m sure you will explain it to Uncle much better than I can, Madame. You know that I must do this.”
“So you say,” Madame sighed. “Very well, then. If you must, you must. You are ready? You have your governess dresses, I presume?”
Despite her current state, Henrietta could not help but laugh at Madame’s shudder at the mention of the dresses she would wear as a governess.
“Yes, Madame. Everything is ready. I will be dressed in decorous fashion and I will be quite prim and proper.”
“Some men like that sort of thing,” Madame said, sounding as if such men were not at all the sort with whom she was familiar. “You intend to light a fire in this Englishman’s heart, wearing your drab gowns and dull hats and, I suppose, not a bit of perfume or finery?”
“You said yourself that Englishmen are cold, Madame,” Henrietta teased. “Should I not be likewise at first?”
“Have a care, petite,” Madame warned. “A man who has once taken what he wanted from a woman, and given no thought to what was to become of her, is a dangerous man and not one to be trifled with.”
“I shall be very careful, I promise.”
“You must write to me or send me letters in the ones you send to your uncle.”
“Madame, I shall have to be discreet. I do not want the Duke to know that I am anything other than Henrietta Jamieson, an ordinary governess making her way in the world. If he finds out that I am an heiress, he would be suspicious.”
“As your uncle was estranged from your mother, disclosure is unlikely. But you must communicate somehow, under whatever pretext. Again, you are going into the domain of a dastardly man who has no qualms about doing whatever is necessary to gain his desired ends. You will be in a country that is foreign to you, unknown to anyone. You must not be isolated from the ones who love you and care about you.”
Henrietta smiled. “I promise that I will communicate somehow with you and with Uncle.”
“I shall think of you at Christmas, petite, remembering how you were as a young child when the holiday was still, despite your grief, a blessed time of year. I shall trust in the miracle of Yuletide to bring you your victory and then to bring you safely back to Paris.”
TWO
“It’s very unusual, Miss, for it to be snowing so early in December,” the innkeeper told the young woman shivering in front of him. “Once the Duke knows that you’ve arrived, he’ll send for you, never fear, but this isn’t a night for anyone to be out if they can stay in. He’d not want you out on such a night as this. You’ll reside here until the weather clears.”
Henrietta sighed and nodded her consent. Now that she had arrived in England, she was eager to begin her campaign.
The crossing from France had been rough, and although she was an excellent sea traveller, she had taken refuge in her cabin because of the high waves and wild winds. It seemed as if winter had been determined to make its cold white presence known across Europe.
Had she stayed in Paris, she might have been with Uncle or Madame, sitting in the glow of the fireplace as the wind howled outside. She took a deep breath and shook off her apprehension. Her course was set, she would not deviate.
Upon arriving in the village of Farringdon, Henrietta followed the travel instructions provided by the Duke’s estate. A room was reserved for her at the Blackfriars Inn.
A groom from the inn met her at the ship and drove her to her lodgings. The foul weather made the journey a longer one than the miles would have indicated and there were several times when Henrietta felt fearful as the carriage wheels slid in the slippery snow.
But when they arrived, the innkeeper’s wife, Mrs Lodings, greeted her with a pot of hot tea, freshly baked bread, and a bowl of thick, aromatic stew. Afterwards, she took Henrietta to her room where a fire blazed merrily, casting a warm glow over the chamber.
“The Duke bids you stay for the night, Miss, and maybe for another night as well,” Mrs Lodings said as she brought in the tray of food. “He sends his apologies. With a storm like this making all the roads treacherous, he doesn’t want to risk a carriage journey up to the estate. He also sent word that we are to take care of you and he will settle with us later, so you are not to worry yourself on tha
t account.
“Now, our girl, Mary, will bring in a hot brick to warm your sheets before you are ready to turn in for the night, so you just sit by the fire and let your things dry while you eat. ‘Tis a bad night to be out, but as long as you’re inside, it’s ever so cosy. The Duke was most particular that you were to have a room to yourself and not share it.”
“That’s very good of him,” Henrietta replied politely.
“Oh, he’s a good man, make no mistake. Good to his people, good to the village, and he just dotes on little Lady Jacqueline, his niece. He has raised her since she was a wee one, he has, after her parents died. But now that she’s ten, it’s time she had schooling and she needs a more sophisticated hand than her nanny.”
The innkeeper’s wife seemed very familiar with the goings-on at the Manor.
“I suppose it will be very hard for Lady Jacqueline’s nanny to turn over the schooling of her charge to a stranger.”
“Oh, you don’t know Nanny. She has been telling His Grace for the last two years that he needs to find a proper teacher for the girl. Bright little thing she is and ever so well mannered. She is quite excited about your arrival and she has been practising her French to impress you. You’re not French though, are you?”
“No, my parents were English. But I grew up in France and was educated there.”
“Your parents were English? Are they gone, then Miss?
“Yes,” Henrietta replied. “I am an orphan and I must make my own way in the world.” As she spoke, she put all thoughts of Madame and Uncle out of her head. She must act the part of a woman who had no other means than what she could provide on her own, so that her ruse was credible.
The face of Mrs Lodings turned sympathetic. “And you so young, too. Well, I shouldn’t wonder but you’ll do better here in England. Terrible goings-on there were in France.”
“It is much calmer now,” Henrietta said with a smile.
“I don’t know… that guillotine sounded quite horrid to me. I said to my husband, what do they want to do to be cutting off heads that way? They say the streets ran with blood.”
“It was not a peaceful time,” Henrietta conceded, “but the Revolution was over by the time I was born and the Emperor brought things under control. For France, I mean,” she said swiftly, seeing the woman’s alarmed reaction to the reference to Napoleon.
“I suppose he did at that,” Mrs Lodings agreed grudgingly. “I’m grateful we’re over here where we don’t have terrible things like that. That guillotine… you’d never find that over here.”
It seemed to Henrietta that the manner in which a person was executed, whether it was by the hangman’s noose or the guillotine’s blade, made very little difference in the end, but it was important to establish herself in this English community, so she nodded in agreement with the woman’s statement.
“The Duke, now, he was in the fighting, and so was his cousin. Just a young man he was. They both were young, but he was determined to do his part. He is not all that old now, mind, still a young man, and young to be the Duke, but his father died. Moreover, he was the heir, so he gave up his plans for a military career. His older brother, who would have been the heir, he died young, leaving the poor mite, Lady Jacqueline, an orphan.”
“I understand that her mother died as well?”
“Yes, when the little lady was only three. Of course, the Duke stepped in to make sure the little girl had a family. What else could he do?”
“Indeed,” Henrietta replied dryly.
It did not matter to the Duke that he had destroyed her family, leaving her also to be raised by an uncle because of that ghastly behaviour that had led her mother to suicide and her father to die of grief.
In England, the Duke might be regarded as a magnanimous family man but Henrietta knew a different side of him.
She suddenly felt very tired. The innkeeper’s wife clearly wanted to chat and give Henrietta her thoughts on the Duke and his excellent qualities, but Henrietta was not of a mind to listen to a glowing account of his saintly qualities when she knew otherwise.
“Thank you so much for your kindness,” she said, interrupting so smoothly into the woman’s discourse on the virtues of the Duke that her intrusion was not perceived.
“I shall very much enjoy this stew before it turns cold, and then I shall retire for the night. Please tell your daughter not to bother with the hot brick. I shall simply hop into the bed fresh from your supper and I shall be quite warm.”
“If you’re sure, Miss, but it’s a very cold night.”
“I shall be quite all right. And if it is to be a cold winter, I had best adjust to it soon.”
“Oh, bless you, the Duke doesn’t mind if there’s a fire blazing in every room, so long as everyone is warm and comfortable, so Nanny says. He’s no skinflint, that’s for sure.”
“That’s very generous of him,” Henrietta replied coolly. “I hope that the cook at Farringdon Manor can make a stew that smells as enticing as what you have brought to me.”
“Oh, Miss, they’ve a fine cook at the Manor, Mrs Merrick, she is, and she’ll put our humble fare to shame, she will.”
“I am sure that she will not,” Henrietta replied firmly. “But I have kept you too long from your work, and so I bid you good night and thank you for your kindness.”
Henrietta let out a deep sigh as the door closed shut behind Mrs Lodings. Finally, she was alone.
Relieved, she sank into the chair and dipped her spoon into the stew. Fortunately, it was still piping hot and the warmth of the broth helped to dispel the chill she felt from the damp, cold night. The bread was delicious, and she thought to herself that if the manor’s cook exceeded the inn’s cook in skill, she must be fit for royalty.
She wondered how long the storm and heavy snowfall would keep her at the inn and away from the manor. It was, she supposed, thoughtful of the Duke to arrange for her to stay at the inn at his expense until such time as he could send for her. He certainly had the people of Farringdon gulled into believing him a veritable saint. If they saw him through her eyes, they would form a very different image indeed.
THREE
The snow continued falling the next day. When the innkeeper’s wife brought her breakfast, she said that the roads were impassable and that no one would be able to fetch her. “But never you fear, miss, we’ll take good care of you whilst you’re under our roof. The Duke was most insistent that you were to be treated as if you were part of his family.”
“How very kind,” Henrietta murmured.
“His household staff do find him to be the most considerate of masters,” the woman said. “He’s ever so kind. And he’s so generous at Christmas. Why, every child on the estate gets a present from His Grace, think of that. He and Lady Jacqueline travel to all the cottages to deliver them. And doesn’t he send food to all the households in the village? It must be a frightful expense, but he’s like a child about Christmas, and he admits it. He told Nanny once that he can’t make up the loss of parents to Lady Jacqueline, but he can help her to share what she has with others.”
“Very thoughtful,” Henrietta murmured, barely able to hide her sarcasm. “I wonder, Mrs Lodings, if I might have some paper and ink? Since it seems that I am to be sequestered inside for the duration of the storm, I should like to write several letters to… people from the school that I attended. To let them know that I have arrived safely in England and that the English have been most kind.”
“Of course, miss, I’ll bring it up right away. I do hope you won’t find it tedious, waiting out the storm.”
“I shall do very well. I have brought books with me, and I have my embroidery to keep me busy.”
“Very good then. I’ll just put your breakfast here, miss, and you eat heartily.”
“I’m still full from supper last night, but I see that you are going to tempt me into indulgence again with your fare.”
“We do say that no one leaves the Blackfriars Inn hungry,” Mrs Lodings replied. �
��And if you want more, you’ve only to ask.”
“Thank you, but this will be more than enough, I assure you.”
The breakfast was as delicious and filling as the supper had been. It was plain that the Lodings took pride in their hospitality. The inn was clean and well maintained.
Henrietta’s room was spacious, the linens were fresh, and the furniture polished, indicating that the innkeeper and his wife took care of their rented rooms as attentively as if they were the ones sleeping in them.
After her breakfast tray had been cleared away, with yet another discourse on the marvellous generosity of the Duke and his graciousness, Henrietta was relieved at the prospect of privacy for a time. It was grating to hear someone who was ignorant of His Grace’s black heart discuss, at length, how he was the epitome of goodness.
Henrietta walked to the window and looked out upon a white world where the tree branches glittered with sparkling snow. Great drifts turned the innyard into a landscape of undulating contours of white.
She saw a groom struggling to make his way from the stable, taking great strides in order to step higher than the snow, which reached to his knees. He was accosted by a tall man in a greatcoat and beaver hat. It seemed odd and unlikely that a guest would have suddenly arrived by any means of conveyance; the Lodings had both assured her that the roads were closed due to the weather. The groom nodded at something the man said and pointed toward the inn.
The man turned around and as he did so, he caught sight of Henrietta standing at the window. He tilted his head back for a better look. Immediately, Henrietta let the curtain drop back into place and stepped behind it, out of view from the window. She could not think why she had acted so, but for some reason, she did not want the gentleman to catch a glimpse of her.
It was all very silly, she told herself as she settled into the chair by the fireplace and picked up her embroidery.
She was unused to being indoors for such a length of time. She was accustomed to taking daily walks.