by M. C. Beaton
“Good heavens!” he exclaimed. “I hope nothing has befallen her.” He knocked again.
“Perhaps she is asleep,” suggested Fanny.
He took the key out of his pocket. “Miss Dunn gave me this key,” he said. “We should go inside and see if she is there.”
“I shall wait for you here,” replied Fanny.
“In truth, I would rather you came in with me,” he said earnestly. “She may be ill, and I am not very good at coping with sick ladies.”
He unlocked the door and pushed it open. Fanny followed him into a neat parlor. She looked about. Everything was tidy and clean but had an oddly unlived in air about it.
“Miss Dunn!” called Lord Bohun loudly.
Fanny listened to the echoes of his voice. What on earth would Miss Grimes say if she knew that she was alone in this cottage with Lord Bohun? thought Fanny. For she was all at once sure that there was no one at home. But Lord Bohun was making for the narrow wooden stairs that led off the back of the parlor.
“I had better see if she is resting.” He held out his hand. “Come, Miss Page, I may need your assistance.”
Fanny hesitated. “I think you should go upstairs by yourself, my lord. I will wait for you in that pretty garden. Should Miss Dunn be there and need my assistance, call me.”
Now the time had come to seize her in his arms. But she looked so small and dainty and trusting. Besides, he had left the front door standing wide open, and, as he looked, a couple strolled past arm in arm, talking loudly. So to perfect his plan, he would need to walk past her and slam that door, turn the key, and then proceed to ravish her.
Perhaps the best idea would be to let her go outside, to ascend the stairs, then call for her in an alarmed voice and get to work when he had her upstairs in the bedroom.
“I won’t be long,” he said.
Fanny walked out and into the garden just as Sir Charles Deveney rode up and swung himself down from the saddle. “Charles!” cried Fanny, running to meet him. “What are you doing here?”
“I am come to save you from ruin. Where is Bohun?”
“He is upstairs, looking for his old nurse. He is afraid she might be ill. Really, Charles, you must stop following me around.”
“Look here, you idiot. I don’t believe there is an old nurse or even was. Bohun’s set on a seduction … and you are falling neatly into his trap.”
Lord Bohun had seen Sir Charles arrive from the upstairs window. Memories of Sir Charles’s expertise at pistol shooting made him sweat in the confines of the small bedroom. He ran lightly down the stairs and let himself out through the back door. A solitary man was sculling past on the river. Lord Bohun hailed him, and when the man had rowed to the bottom of the garden and shipped his oars, Lord Bohun said urgently, “Like to earn yourself a guinea?”
“So,” Sir Charles was saying, “if you will just step aside, Fanny, I will go in there and give Bohun the beating he deserves.”
“Pooh!” said Fanny. “You will only get hurt. He is bigger and stronger than you.”
She had backed to the cottage door and was now blocking it. He picked her up as if she weighed nothing at all and set her to one side—and walked in just as Lord Bohun was emerging from the back garden with a man behind him.
“Deveney!” exclaimed Lord Bohun with well-feigned surprise. “What are …? No matter. This is a grave business. This person informs me that poor Miss Dunn departed this life last week.”
He took out a large handkerchief and covered his face and bowed his head.
“Oh, dear,” said Fanny in distress. “How terribly sad.”
Sir Charles eyed the bearer of the sad tidings narrowly. The man was standing, twisting his cap in his large red hands and grinning sheepishly. “How did she die?” he asked.
He noticed the way the man’s eyes flew to Lord Bohun, as if for help. “Dunno,” retorted the man, transferring his gaze to the blackened beams of the ceiling. “Old age, I reckon.”
Lord Bohun uncovered his face. “You have been of great help. I must be left alone now with my grief.”
The man tugged his forelock and escaped.
“We will be glad to leave you alone,” said Sir Charles in a chilly voice. “Come, Fanny.”
“But you’ve only got one horse,” exclaimed Fanny, “and poor Lord Bohun!”
“As you heard,” said Sir Charles grimly, “he wants to be alone with his grief. Is that not so, Bohun?”
Lord Bohun, who had no intention of enduring further questioning from Sir Charles Deveney, sank artistically into a low chair and bowed his head.
Sir Charles took a firm grip of Fanny’s upper arm and hustled her out.
“There is no need to be so rough. Or so unfeeling,” raged Fanny. “That poor gentleman needs our help.”
“Don’t argue. Up you get.”
Fanny gazed up at his tall hunter. “But I am not dressed for riding, and you do not have a side saddle.”
“And I am not going to argue with you. You deserve an uncomfortable journey home.” He tossed her up into the saddle and then mounted in front of her.
“Hold on to me tightly,” he ordered. She put her arms around his waist as he spurred his horse away from the cottage.
After several miles of this headlong jolting, Fanny shouted in his ear, “Do stop, for goodness sake. I am feeling sick.”
He swung in under the arch of a pretty little inn, and when an ostler had seized the reins, he dismounted and then helped a white-faced Fanny down from the saddle. She staggered slightly when he released her and moaned, “I do not think I shall have the proper use of my limbs again.”
The landlord came out to greet them and Sir Charles asked for lemonade to be served to them in the garden.
Soon Fanny gradually regained her color—and her temper.
“I am not a schoolgirl, Charles,” she snapped. “I am quite able to handle my own affairs.”
He looked at her steadily. “Do you know what I think, my sweeting? I do not think Bohun ever had an old nurse at that cottage. I think he bribed that idiot into saying he had the moment he saw me arrive.”
“Oh, you are determined to believe the worst of him!”
“All right. I will strike a bargain with you. If Bohun formally asks Aunt Martha leave to pay his addresses to you, if he places an announcement of your engagement in the newspapers, then you may do as you wish,” said Sir Charles, confident that such an event would never happen.
“I cannot let him print the announcement of our engagement in the newspapers,” said Fanny. “What if the vicar who married us should see it? Or any of the wedding guests?”
“Very well then. Let us forget about the announcement. If he is serious about you, then he will approach Miss Grimes in a formal way.”
“And if he does that, you will leave me alone?”
“On my honor.”
Fanny gave him a shrewd look. “You are prepared to promise because you are easy in your mind that such a thing will never happen.”
He shrugged slightly. “Drink your lemonade.”
The inn garden was very tranquil, with sunlight dappling the grass at their feet. The moving leaves on the trees above them cast flickering shadows over Sir Charles’s face. What do I really know of him? wondered Fanny.
Aloud she said, “What will Miss Woodward say to you going back to the wars?”
He smiled lazily. “She will let me go. I can hardly use my wife’s money to buy myself out.”
“What was your worst time … in the war, I mean?”
“Oh, that’s easy. Corunna, or rather the retreat to it, stumbling over the mountains, men dying of exhaustion, women with babies dropping at my feet. The resentment of the men toward Sir James Moore was terrible to behold because he had ordered the retreat. ‘Why die in these awful mountains, running like dogs?’ they said. ‘Let us turn and fight the French and die with honor.’ Discipline had crumbled. A great number of the soldiers were criminals released from prison to fight. Some of them
I was happy to see die because of the misery they inflicted on the Spanish with their drunken looting and burning.”
“I thought the French behaved like that,” said Fanny in a small voice. “Not the British.”
“It was the wine that started the problem. They were crazy for wine. In Benevente, the men found an extensive range of wine vaults under the square. The men fired their muskets at the casks hoping to puncture holes in them after they had dragged them up to the square. But the balls shattered the casks and wine gushed out in all directions until the street was ankle deep in it. The men tore off their caps, and, using them as ladles, drank from them. By morning the square was full of men and women so drunk they could not move, some still unconscious, with trickles of wine running from their noses and mouths.
“I was exhausted, too exhausted to care. I had been up all night protecting the home of an old Spanish lady. The men were mad to loot it, and how I kept them at bay I do not know, for they could easily have overrun me. The old lady thanked me with tears in her eyes. She was so very ill and frail. She gave me that old brass-bound chest that is with my luggage. ‘I can only live a few days,’ she said. ‘This contains my life, my memoirs. I wish you to translate what you find and make it into a book.’ I did not have the heart to refuse—and how I brought that ridiculous chest back over the mountains to the coast when most of the time I longed to tip it down a ravine is beyond me. But she had a certain quality of goodness, and she blessed me before I left, and I am sure her prayers brought me home.”
“It seems dreadful that women and children should be made to go on such a march,” exclaimed Fanny.
He sighed. “You cannot stop them. After we arrived in Portugal, we tried to send most of them back. We said we would have a special ship to take them. But they would not go. I think that is what you call love, Fanny, and it makes our moonshine games seem a trifle ridiculous.”
Fanny folded her lips in a firm line. She would have followed Lord Bohun to the grave!
“But we heard tales that the Spaniards, the aristocrats, entertained the British officers,” she said, to try to lighten the atmosphere, for Sir Charles’s face wore a haunted look.
He smiled suddenly. “Evenings in Spanish houses were quite dreadful, Fanny. Large, sparsely furnished rooms, hardly any of them with a fireplace, and the men and women facing one another across the room in long, formal rows. Card games, if there were any, were played in silence, and if there was music, you could hardly hear it because of the raucuous hawking of the guests, both Spanish men and women spitting indiscriminately on the floor.
“Young women were hardly ever seen. Sometimes an officer such as myself, who was known to respect the strict rules of Spanish society, was allowed to dance with one of the young women at a private dance, but she was closely watched every minute. Refreshment was usually sugared biscuits and lemonade or cups of rich chocolate, or one of them would offer me the damp and chewed end of a communal cigar. A very proud and a very brave people, the Spanish, Fanny, but difficult for the average Englishman to understand.
“We ourselves were so proud and brave at the beginning as we marched along the banks of the Tagus with our drums tapping. It was autumn and the fields were flooded with hazy, golden sunshine, and, oh, the beautiful scent of wildflowers and shrubs: thyme, myrtle, sage and lavender, woodbine, strawberry and rockrose. Then we marched toward the Spanish frontier, through pine woods, and vineyards, and past convents and Moorish castles, like castles in a romance. But what a nightmare it all turned out to be.”
“You must dread going back,” said Fanny.
“No, my dear, it is my duty. This is the first long leave I have ever been allowed. Besides, now we have Sir Arthur Wellesley as commander and he is a brilliant tactician.”
They fell into a comfortable silence until Sir Charles stretched and yawned. “We must return or Miss Grimes will have people out looking for us—and I must change and go to the opera, present my apologies to Miss Woodward.”
Fanny looked at him doubtfully. “You have been through so much, Charles. I would not see you hurt by this creature.”
“How dare you!” he cried, and their recent closeness splintered.
Fanny had the grace to blush. “That slipped out, Charles! There is so much talk of our wealth. And—and … she is so very beautiful. But ladies will talk, and it is said she is a sad flirt.”
“Beauty such as Miss Woodward’s always creates jealousy.”
“True,” said Fanny, downcast. “We must not quarrel, Charles. Until our situation is resolved, we must be very, very kind to each other.”
“Then do not be unkind about Miss Woodward!”
“Nor you about Lord Bohun!”
“I’ll try, Fanny.”
He rode back to London more slowly. Fanny, her arms wrapped tightly about him, was more worried about him than she had been before. It was not that she was in love with Charles, she told herself, but she did love him like a—like a brother. He was her Charles, and she didn’t trust that Amanda Woodward one little bit!
Sir Charles turned over several suitable lies in his mind as he made his way to the opera that evening. He could hardly tell Miss Woodward the truth—that he was so sure Lord Bohun had meant to seduce Fanny he had run off to Richmond in pursuit of her. He wished the Woodwards had decided to stay on at the Bidfords’ breakfast, where dancing would now have begun and where it would have been easier to hold a conversation, rather than at the back of an opera box.
As he made his way along the narrow corridor at the back of the boxes, he could hear the rising and falling of many voices, which showed that society found the production boring. No great diva or castrato was singing, and as society mostly came to the opera to see and be seen anyway, they were obviously enlivening the tedium of the evening in gossip.
He paused outside the door of the box and straightened his cravat and brushed at the sleeve of his coat with his hand. He needed new evening clothes. He had planned to order new clothes from Weston, the famous tailor, and then simply not pay him, but he found he could not do that. But his cravat was ornamented with a fine sapphire pin. Rundell & Bridge had been amazed when the “wealthy” Sir Charles had sent back Fanny’s jewels that morning saying they “would not suit” and had sent him a present of the pin. Other tradesmen had lavished presents on him and on Fanny in the hope of getting the rich pair’s custom. How to live on nothing a year, he thought wryly, and reached out to open the door of the box. And then Mrs. Woodward’s loud and carrying voice stopped him.
“You must show more warmth toward Deveney, Amanda. Goodness knows, you have flirted with enough men to know how to do it.”
Then came Amanda’s voice, not sweet and charming as it was when she spoke to him, but high and shrill. “I wonder if he is worth the effort, Mama.”
And then Mrs. Woodward again: “As you do not and have not shown any interest in any gentleman, you may as well settle for wealth.”
“I suppose so,” rejoined Miss Woodward petulantly. “But it is all such a bore. Besides, I vow he is not really interested in me.”
“Then make him interested,” came Mrs. Woodward’s acid rejoinder.
Sir Charles stood stunned and bewildered, his hand to his heart. What a stupid dream he had been living in. All he had done was to make himself ridiculous and expose Fanny to the charms of Bohun.
He half turned to leave. And then he thought: No, I will play out this charade and get my revenge on the Woodwards. He opened the door of the box.
“Why, Sir Charles!” exclaimed Miss Woodward, her eyes flirting over her fan. “You are come at last. And we are monstrous pleased to see you!”
Several hours later, Sir Charles made his way slowly home on foot. He had dismissed the coachman earlier. The streets were quiet and washed with moonlight. The watchman shambled past, calling the hour in a hoarse, wheezy voice. He had played his part well at the opera ball. He could see the nodding heads of the dowagers as they gossiped. He knew by his performance that
he had been marked down as the beauty’s future husband. And yet all he felt still was the sour taste of betrayal—and the knowledge that he was as much a fraud and a cheat as his parents, and deserved all of it.
He thought of Fanny’s predicament with impatience. She would have to have her eyes opened to Bohun soon. If she wanted to find a real husband, she was wasting valuable time. Although he had been promised a long leave, he knew that the powers that be could easily and soon forget that promise and summon him back. And then what would become of pretty Fanny? She would either need to live in army quarters until his return or eventually rejoin her perfidious parents.
He crossed Hanover Square and let himself into the tall house. He climbed the stairs and walked toward his own room. He saw a light shining under the door of Fanny’s room and pushed open the door. A branch of candles was burning brightly beside the bed and Fanny, propped up against the pillows, was reading a romance.
She looked up and cried, “Oh, this is such a splendid story, Charles. I could not sleep until I had read some more. Goodness, look at the time! How did you fare? Are you forgiven?”
“Oh, yes.” He sat down heavily beside her on the bed.
She scanned his face. “You look tired, dear, and … sad. Did anything go wrong?”
He shook his head. Why cause her worry about his miseries? “I am concerned for you, Fanny. The whole reason for this mad escapade is to let you have some balls and parties and find the man of your choice. No! Do not bristle up. I shall not criticize Bohun. But I must point out that I have a feeling you will not bring him up to the mark. What will become of you if I am recalled?”
“I discussed that tonight with Miss Grimes,” said Fanny cheerfully. “She says that I can stay on in London as her companion.”
He had a sudden pang of sharp irritation as he looked at her carefree, glowing face. So no worries about the future for Fanny. He should have been glad, but he fought down a desire to shake her.
Instead he said, “And what did you do? Did you and Miss Grimes go out?”
“No, we were very quiet and domesticated and played cards. Captain Tommy made us laugh so much. I think Miss Grimes is very fond of him.”