by M C Beaton
But the only person waiting in my lady’s bedchamber was the maid, Felice.
“Where is your mistress?” demanded the earl.
“My lady go out.”
“Go out? Go out where?”
“She … I mean, my lady have this little cat and she think it go out in the storm and so she go out.”
“And you let your mistress go out in this storm alone?”
The maid spread her hands in a peculiarly Gallic gesture, absolving herself of responsibility or blame.
The earl strode back down the stairs and called loudly for his servants. “Not you, John,” he said to his exhausted Swiss. “The rest of you, my lady is somewhere outside looking for a cat. I do not like to send you all out in the snow again, but you must help me in the search. She cannot have gone very far. You wait here,” he told John the coachman, “and tell the landlord he must send his own servants to hunt for her as well. Do not bunch together. We will go in different directions.”
The earl plunged into the storm, noticing as he did so that the visibility was becoming better, although the wind still howled.
“Is this going to be the pattern of my days?” he wondered savagely. “Running around in the worst weather this country has to offer, trying to find a runaway wife?”
He called and shouted into the storm. If she had any sense, so he thought, she would keep close to the inn. A cat would not go very far from warmth on such a night.
But Emily had no sense, so he assumed she had probably plunged out of the inn yard and into the road.
He was stumbling waist-high into the road when the storm, with a great roar, left, as quickly as it had come. One minute he could hardly see a thing, and the next all was empty and white, stretching for miles.
He saw, in the distance, a small black dot against the snow and, shouting Emily at the top of his voice, struggled toward it.
One minute she was so very far away. The next she was tottering forward into his arms.
He held her very close and then turned up her face and kissed her mouth, feeling her cold, frozen lips turn warm under the pressure of his own. The world became a magic place, a white plain of passion, where they seemed to turn and turn and turn in each other’s arms in slow, lingering ecstasy.
Then she drew back and sighed, “Oh, Peter,” and he could have struck her to the ground. He had assumed there were no loves in her past. Who was this Peter whose name she cried after that long and passionate kiss?
Emily looked wonderingly up into his stern, angry face. His eyes were as cold as the landscape.
“I am very glad to see you, Peregrine,” she said timidly. “I came out to look for my cat.”
“Then I take leave to inform you that you have put me and my exhausted servants to a great deal of worry and unnecessary trouble. A cat will not go far from food and warmth. You should have searched about the inn. Pray return immediately and forget about the wretched animal.”
“I cannot,” wailed Emily, tears beginning to run down her face. “He is so small and …”
“God give me patience,” the earl said between his teeth. “Let me carry you, and you can tell me about the cursed beast. Now, when did you last see the brute?”
“Felice took him up to our bedchamber, and, when I arrived, the cat was gone, and there was a damp spot on the floor under the window, although Felice swore she had not opened it….”
“She opened it,” he interrupted, “and threw the cat out, which is what any servant in her right mind would do. You should have searched in the snowdrifts under the window.”
“Oh, do hurry,” begged Emily. “Even now he may be dead.”
“With luck,” muttered the earl. Once more, he found himself carrying her back to the inn. A great black wave of depression hit him. Not only was Mary Anstey in love with another man; now it seemed as if his wife were mourning for some fellow called Peter.
He set her down in the inn yard after calling out to the servants that she had been found. “I want to make one thing very plain, my lady,” he said. “This precious cat, if you want to keep it, goes straight to the stables. The bedchamber is nowhere for a cat.”
“It is only a kitten, Devenham,” pleaded Emily. “Which is the bedroom, so that I may search underneath the window?”
The earl strode off to question the landlord. “The west side,” he called. Emily ran after him, tripping and stumbling through the drifts of snow.
She followed in the earl’s footsteps around the side of the inn. The earl was already bending over, digging with his bare hands in the snow.
At last, he gave a yelp and withdrew his hand. “I believe I have found your cat, madam,” he said coldly, showing her a long, bleeding scratch across the back.
“Let me,” said Emily eagerly. She gently brushed away the snow until a little cave was revealed, and, in the cave, one small, cold, angry kitten.
“Oh, Peter!” cried Emily, laughing. “I was so worried. My poor, poor Peter.” The kitten purred and snuggled up under her chin.
“Peter?” said the earl sharply. “why do you call the cat Peter? After someone?”
“No.” Emily laughed. “The only Peter I know is Peter Cummings. I called him Peter because he’s like a little rock. Very brave, are you not, my darling.”
The earl felt suddenly quite lightheaded. “Well, bring Peter into the inn,” he said. He felt he loved the world, he felt he could even bear the cat.
“Good Peter.” The earl laughed, reaching out a hand to the cat. The cat seized his thumb and bit it.
“Oh, I am sorry,” said Emily anxiously. “He did not bite you very hard, I trust. You see, he is. very young and playful.”
“I think that animal is possessed by the devil,” said the earl, glaring at the cat, who glared back. “But let us get indoors. I have had enough of this snow to last me a lifetime.”
After the earl had eaten a hearty supper, he went upstairs to the bedroom, to find his wife asleep. He had not told her that he had not ordered a separate room for himself. He sat on the edge of the bed and studied her sleeping face. Well, no one could call Emily missish, he thought. She seemed able to go through the most dreadful weather without even catching a chill. She looked very young and innocent with her gold hair streaming out across the pillow. He must go easy with her, he decided. Perhaps if he wooed her gently, he might find a passionate and loving wife like the Emily he had held in his arms out in the snow. He must make her want to come to his bed.
He undressed and slipped between the sheets. He turned on his side to blow out the bed candle, and five sharp little claws sank through his nightshirt, into his bottom.
“What the deuce!” The earl leaped from the bed and ripped back the sheets, while Emily mumbled and protested in her sleep. A small bundle of raised fur and glaring green eyes challenged him from the middle of the bed.
“Oh, no, my friend,” said the earl softly. “I am not going to have a mangy cat as a rival.” He scooped the cat up with one quick movement and placed it on the floor. “I must ask Emily not to be too harsh with Felice,” he thought sleepily. “It is an eminently throwable cat.”
Mary’s council of war did not go as she had expected. Mr. and Mrs. Anstey said she was making a to-do about nothing. Yes, Mary could throw herself away on Mr. Cummings if she wished, but that was no reason why Mary should be jealous of Emily’s being such a great countess. In vain did Mary and Mr. Cummings plead that Emily was unhappy. Mr. and Mrs. Anstey refused to listen. Mr. Cummings shrewdly realized that if he continued to protest, then perhaps his chances of marrying Mary would diminish again, and so he signaled to his love to be silent and confided to her in the hall, when the door was closed on Mr. and Mrs. Anstey, that it would be more politic to try again on the morrow.
For three days the snow kept the Anstey family housebound. But on the fourth day, when the roads were once again clear, Mary received allies from an unexpected quarter. Sir James and Lady Harrison, together with their ill-favored son, Billy, came to call
.
The Harrisons, Mary was well aware, had suffered much from Emily’s grand manner, so she set herself to please, wondering all the while why the Harrisons looked so triumphant.
“You will be visiting your daughter soon?” said Lady Harrison, exchanging a sly look with her husband. “She will no doubt be in sore need of your help.”
“Why?” asked Mrs. Anstey, fat face agoggle. “Our Emily is so taken up with being a countess and all, it will be a bit before she has time for her old parents. Ah, yes, she’s gone far above us all,” added Mrs. Anstey, with a malicious look at Lady Harrison.
Billy Harrison was slouched in his chair, picking at his teeth with a goose quill and making ugly sucking noises. He affected the Corinthian mode of dress, or what he fondly thought was the Corinthian mode, a belcher handkerchief tied round his throat instead of a cravat, and a great many whip points thrust in his buttonhole. His boots were muddy and his leather breeches creaked every time he shifted his bulk in his chair.
“Ah, poor dear Emily,” sighed Lady Harrison, applying a wisp of handkerchief to one dry eye. “I was just saying to Mr. Cummings this morning that all one can do is pray.”
Mr. Anstey sat bolt upright. “Speak plain, my lady,” he said. “Is there something about our Emily you know that we don’t?”
Lady Harrison gave a genteel cough. “Really, I don’t know quite how to begin.”
Billy Harrison removed the quill from his mouth and grinned. “ ‘S all over London,” he said. “Devenham’s been seen everywhere with his ladylove, Cordelia Haddington. Was with her all over Christmas. Told her he was tricked into marrying Emily and he wishes he were out o’ it.”
Mary turned quite white. “I do not believe a word of this,” she cried. “Malicious gossip.”
“My dear,” said Lady Harrison, leaning forward and giving Mary’s hand a squeeze. “Your loyalty does you credit. But, ah me, what Billy says is the way of it. It’s the talk of the town.”
Mrs. Anstey struggled for composure. “We’ll find it’s all a hum,” she said comfortably. “My lord would not cheat on a girl he had just wed.”
“Unless he thought himself cheated,” said Sir James with a great horse laugh. “He was supposed to marry Mary, wasn’t he? Aye, and why was Emily, if she was supposed to be the one he was marrying, wearing a brown wig in church, heh?”
“I have never heard of such rubbish,” said Mary hotly. “My sister is very happily married. I am surprised, nay shocked, to find you the bearers of such malicious gossip.”
“I am sure it was well meant,” said Mrs. Anstey, unable to believe that her ascendancy over the Harrisons was crumbling.
Lady Harrison stood up and shook out her skirts. “It was merely told to you in friendship, Miss Anstey,” she said. “That Cordelia Haddington—who goes everywhere although she is not exactly comme il faut—is telling the world and his wife that Devenham means to have the marriage annulled.”
After the Harrisons had left, Mary rounded up her parents. “Now will you listen to me,” she said. “I told you and told you that Emily was monstrous unhappy, that Emily said there was another woman in the case. If I believed Devenham meant to have the marriage annulled, I would not care. But it is Emily I am thinking of. Are you going to set social ambition above your daughter’s happiness?”
“No,” said Mr. Anstey, after a long silence. “It is strange, but I always thought that once I had the county eating out of my hand, so to speak, I would be a happy man. But I ain’t. I prefer the city merchants and their wives, and that’s a fact. And so do you, my love,” he said to his wife. “You ain’t enjoyed it one bit. Oh, it was fun when Emily put them all in their place, but you did say yourself you thought Emily was sad or she would never have behaved so. We’ve done wrong by our daughter and we must right it. If Devenham has not already taken steps to have the marriage annulled, then we must persuade him to do so. And we must go to this Maxton Court so that we can tell Emily there’s nothing to be ashamed of. She can come back and forget she ever was a countess.
“You know, all these years we’ve stayed here, I’ve been bored to flinders. I want to get back to the city where I know my friends. I want to sit down in a chophouse and feel at ease without some jumped-up gentry sneering about trade.”
“Let us leave for Maxton Court as soon as possible,” begged Mary.
“We’ll need to wait until the roads clear, my love,” said Mr. Anstey. “Cheer up, mother,” he said to his wife. “You’ll get used to the idea of being plain Mrs. Nobody of Nowhere soon enough.”
“No, I won’t,” sobbed Mrs. Anstey. “I was that proud of having a countess for a daughter.”
Mary and Mr. Anstey tried to persuade her of the vanity of clinging to mere titles, but Mrs. Anstey wept on and would not be comforted.
To Mary’s dismay, Mr. Anstey had changed his tune by the following morning. He was once more the Mr. Anstey who had sent penniless young Captain Tracey to the rightabout and yet had welcomed home the rich Earl of Devenham without a blush.
It seemed that people changed their characters in a day only in novels and in Haymarket dramas. Winter began to give way to spring, with mist rising from the brown fields in the evening and birds chirping in the hedgerows in the morning, and still the Ansteys remained at Malden Grand. Emily’s cheerful letters were no help to Mary, who thought she saw hidden misery and sadness beneath every line.
Mary had quite given up hope, when, one day late in March, Mr. and Mrs. Anstey arrived from their round of calls in great distress. The Harrisons had been entertaining their grand London friends, and, to the Ansteys’ horror, Lady Harrison had urged those friends to impress on the Ansteys the peril in which their daughter’s marriage stood. The friends, being lightweight, gossiping flibbertigibbets, were not loath to telling all and throwing in a great deal of fancy embroidery, besides. The result was that Mr. and Mrs. Anstey had reeled from the Harrisons’ mansion, finally persuaded that their daughter was in the hands of a lustful, rakish monster who had every intention of ruining her and casting her out in the kennel.
After much debate, they decided to inform the earl of their impending arrival, and it was just as well they did. After a week’s impatient wait, a letter came back from the earl’s steward to say that my lord and lady had gone to London.
“London!” said Mr. Anstey. “Poor Emily. She will find out for herself. We must be on hand to comfort her.”
“Let us leave immediately,” said Mrs. Anstey, ever hopeful. “It may be all a hum. It is best to see for ourselves.”
Mr. Anstey recalled a merchant friend who was leaving for the Indies and who would be glad to lease them his home in Russell Square. Not the most fashionable address, but then Mr. Anstey was weary of being fashionable.
Mary bid a fond farewell to Mr. Cummings, and the Ansteys set out.
If this lustful earl had kept his lusts outside his marriage and if Emily were still pure, the annulment of the marriage should be very easy.
Emily could consider herself well out of it. Mr. Anstey privately thought that any man who could live in celibacy with a beautiful young bride was strangely depraved.
But he did not voice his thoughts.
Chapter Eight
It was the cat who had ruined the pleasure of setting out for London.
My lord had been adamant. The cat had to stay behind at Maxton Court.
If Emily did not want to leave the cat, then Emily could stay as well.
Emily was in a state of misery. Relations between herself and her husband had slowly improved. Although he had not kissed her again, he had been charming and friendly. Gradually, they began to ride out together and talk in the evening until the candles burned low in their sockets. Both of them were enthusiastic about the new improvements to the estates.
The earl often kissed her hand when he said good night, and there was an increasing warmth in his eyes when he looked at her. But he still spent a great deal of the day on his own business or hunting with the local
farmers or shooting with friends,and Emily was often left for long hours to her own devices. When the weather was too bad to make calls, she contented herself by playing in the Long Gallery with the cat, Peter, while the portraits of the haughty Devenhams looked down in surprise.
Emily often had to admit to herself that Peter had not exactly grown up into a handsome cat. He had grown very large, muscular, and heavy. His fur gleamed with health, but his fixed stare and torn ear gave him a sinister look.
He was devoted to her and tried to show his devotion by laying dead mice, voles, and other horrible trophies at her feet. But he had developed a nasty sense of humor, and it seemed as if his favorite sport had become earl-baiting. He loved to lie along ledges and the tops of wardrobes and wait for the earl to pass underneath, at which point he would lean down and swipe the earl with one paw.
Perhaps the earl would have allowed Peter to travel to London, for he was secretly amused at the horrible creature’s devotion to Emily, but two days before they were to depart, Peter committed the worst crime of all.
The earl had decided to go into his wife’s bedroom to say good night as part of his campaign plan. He had noticed the way Emily’s eyes had begun to glow whenever she looked at him, but he still did not plan to rush his courtship. He was content to wait and take things one step at a time.
Emily looked very pretty sitting up in bed, reading a book, her golden curls covered by a frivolous lacy nightcap.
“Why … Peregrine!” exclaimed Emily. “Is anything the matter?”
“It is rather odd, don’t you think,” smiled the earl, coming to sit beside her on the bed, “when a man cannot enter his wife’s bedroom without that wife thinking something is wrong.”
“Oh, no … it’s only … well, this is the first time.”
“Don’t look so alarmed,” said the earl. “I am merely here to give you a good-night kiss.”
Emily blushed rosily.
There was a soft thud as the large cat leaped on the bed. Its fur slowly rose and it green eyes glared.
All of a sudden, the earl lost his temper. A male rival was one thing, but he was damned if he was going to compete with a cat.