by Fiona Monroe
Elspeth closed her eyes obediently, hoping that this would encourage Arabella to get out. Her head was swimming with fatigue as she listened to the rustle of Arabella's skirt, and a few scuffles as, she supposed, Arabella took it upon herself to rearrange a few of Elspeth's possessions.
She did not hear the door close. She was aware of nothing more until she felt herself break the surface of a deep, dark ocean of dreamless sleep, to find a maid gently placing a lit candle and a dish of tea on the table by the bed.
Elspeth bolted upright with a gasp. The light in the room was much dimmer than it had been, no longer shining brightly behind the heavy drapes. "What time is it?" she demanded.
The maid, who was very young, looked shocked to be addressed. "Nearly eight o'clock, my lady." She curtseyed clumsily and added, "Her ladyship's compliments, and dinner is at nine."
What an absurdly late dinner hour for the country, Elspeth thought with irritation. This was clearly another of Arabella's fashionable innovations.
And then—"Wait! What's your name?"
The very young maid had been on the point of slipping away. "Birnie, my lady," she said with another inexpert curtsy.
Elspeth experienced a moment of complete disorientation before she realised that this girl must be some relative of her lost sewing maid. "Birnie. Where is Captain—" She had a moment's panic, as she realised that she had forgotten his latest pseudonym. "The naval gentleman I arrived with earlier. Is he still with the company downstairs?"
The other Birnie looked terrified. "I'm sorry, my lady, I don't know. A gentleman left in a carriage an hour ago, my lady."
Elspeth threw back the coverlet, jumped off the bed and ran frantically downstairs. The great drawing room was deserted, and there was nobody in the dining room but the butler Grieves and some footmen laying out the table. She spun around at the door, ignoring Grieves's respectful but warm exclamation of pleasure at seeing her home, and pelted back up the main staircase towards her brother James's suite of rooms.
She had only got as far as the corridor that led from the upper main landing towards the east wing, where James's apartments were, when she all but collided with Lady Atholl coming the other way.
Arabella was already fully dressed for dinner in pale rose silk, diamonds glittering at her white throat, a fashionable spray of feathers in her hair. In the drawing room, she had been fresh and elegant. Now, she was stunningly beautiful. She caught at Elspeth to prevent the collision.
"Dear sister! Are you feeling better—oh no, you are still unwell..."
"I am not unwell!" Elspeth cried, crossly pulling away from the soothing hand on her arm. "Captain—" In her agitation, she still could not remember the latest name he had adopted. "The Captain who brought me home. Where is he?"
"Oh, Captain Morris left around an hour ago. Neither your brother nor I could persuade him to remain to dinner in the end. He said he wanted to return to his ship in Aberdeen before the light failed."
"Did he not—did he not ask to say farewell to me?"
Arabella's eyes widened fractionally, as much discomposure as her calmly beautiful countenance seemed to allow. "Oh, there was no question of that, my dear. You were resting, I would not on any account have had you disturbed. Did you manage to get some sleep?"
Elspeth turned away, distraught, desperate with the realisation that she must attempt to conceal her emotions. And she had a sudden sinking feeling that her new sister would be considerably more interested in those emotions than her nearest real sister, Henrietta—preoccupied from childhood with keeping her in her place, and now in distant Fife and absorbed in her own marriage—or her other older siblings, none of whom had lived at Dunwoodie for years and who had always looked down on her as the baby. As long as she caused no trouble, James would not notice if she were dying of a broken heart. Arabella would, and Elspeth feared her secret would not long be safe.
But it almost overpowered her, to know that he had really walked away and left her here, and without a single word of farewell.
She struggled. She almost swayed on her feet.
"Elspeth, dear," said Arabella, in her coldly cooing English voice.
She would not let it overpower her. So, he had fled her like a coward, for all his apparent chivalry and bravery. Like some cad in a novel, he had ruined her and thrown her aside like a broken dish. But she would not let him destroy her life, she would not let this interfering, domineering girl guess that he had been anything to her; far less, what had happened.
No, she would hold up her head and go back out into society and find a husband who would treat her properly, and act the shy maiden on her wedding night if needs be.
"Yes, thank you," she said, turning back towards her sister-in-law. Lady Atholl would, after all, be an excellent chaperone and could doubtless introduce her to all kinds of eligible suitors. "I slept, I slept quite soundly."
"Oh, I am glad. Lord Atholl was so worried about you."
"Well, there is no need."
"Do you feel equal to joining us for dinner?"
"Yes, of course."
She felt Arabella's eye flick critically up and down her sea-stained gown.
"I'll just go and dress," she muttered, before Arabella could say anything. She would show her that she could look just as fine when properly arraigned.
"I'll send my maid to you." Arabella hooked her arm into Elspeth's and led her back towards her own apartment. "I understand you are without one at the moment."
It was Elspeth's first impulse to spurn this offer, but she bit down the response. She was going to have to get used to accepting kindnesses from Arabella, she thought bleakly; and besides, she could hardly hope to dress elegantly enough for dinner at Dunwoodie under its new regime without some assistance. She was no longer on board ship, with nobody to please but the Captain.
Who had received her with quiet and warm admiration always, she thought miserably. She might have turned up at the great cabin barefoot, in her petticoat and with her hair loose down her shoulders, and he would have kissed her hand and drawn back a chair for her as if she were dressed like a queen.
She pulled herself up short. No, she had to put a stop to all thoughts of him, and she had to start right now.
Arabella's maid turned out to be exactly what Elspeth would have expected; a soft-spoken but decisive Frenchwoman of a certain age, so refined that she might have been taken for a countess. Certainly, there seemed no likelihood that this Fontaine would have the poor taste to marry a ploughman.
Elspeth gazed desolately at her own reflection in the dressing table mirror. She had not seen herself properly for a long time, having relied on imperfect glimpses in a hand mirror. She looked thinner, which was hardly surprising given the shipboard diet, and her eyes were swollen and sad.
"My lady is pale," said Fontaine critically. Her English seemed perfectly fluent, but it was much more heavily accented than Mercier's. "We must wear light colours, so as not to make the complexion appear to the worse."
"Anything. I don't care." Elspeth's resolve to be brave and proud was already breaking down.
Fontaine had made herself free of Elspeth's wardrobe, and was laying out a selection of evening gowns from the many she had left behind. They were supposed to have been packed up and shipped out to her in Barbados, but nobody seemed to have organised that. Everything in her dressing room, bedroom and writing-closet was exactly as she had left it, what felt like a lifetime ago.
Another swell of tears threatened, and she swallowed down hard. She became aware that Fontaine was watching her, perhaps too astutely.
Anything that she gave away now, any tears or weakness, would be reported straight to Arabella, Elspeth realised. That was the real reason her sister-in-law had sent her maid to her. She was a spy.
"This gown is very fine, my lady," Fontaine murmured, holding up something in pale pink crepe, decorated with silk rosebuds. "The colour, it will complement my lady's golden hair."
It passed reflexively throug
h Elspeth's mind that pink crepe and rosebuds would do poorly in the salt air, before she was forced to remember yet again that she was no longer at sea. She stood up passively to let Fontaine slip her day gown off over her head and unlace her stays, and her eye fell on a book on the table by the door that she was sure had not been there before.
"Is that your book, Fontaine?"
"Ah! No, my lady. My apologies. My Lady Arabella, Lady Atholl I should say—" She pronounced it 'a-toll'—"she bade me give you this." Fontaine left off unlacing to fetch the book.
Elspeth took it into her hands with a shock of some emotion she could hardly identify at once. It was nothing more than volume one of The Curse of Blackthorne Abbey, but of course it had to be the very same she had been reading to the Captain.
"My lady said that the gallant Captain left it for you, my lady."
"Was—was there any message?" She could not keep the tremor out of her voice. She was clutching the cheap clothbound volume as if it were the most precious object in the world.
"No, my lady," said Fontaine, with an infuriating shrug. "May I see my lady's jewels? Diamonds would suit this gown, as would pearls, if they are white or pink in hue. Not black."
"I don't care!" Elspeth cried, her self-command breaking all of a sudden. "No, keep out of my jewel case, just go away. Leave me!"
The Frenchwoman looked utterly unperturbed. She stepped calmly away from the cabinet where her professional instinct seemed to have divined, accurately, that Elspeth kept her jewellery, but she made no move to leave the room. "The dinner bell will sound in twenty minutes' time, my lady. We must make haste."
"I said, get out! I'm not going down to dinner. Tell Lady Atholl I have a headache."
Fontaine hesitated for a moment more, but then said, "Very well, my lady."
She would be reporting Elspeth's outburst straight to Arabella, but for the moment Elspeth didn't care. As soon as the door closed softly behind Fontaine, Elspeth dashed through to the bedroom, flung herself onto the pillows, and opened the cover of The Curse of Blackthorne Abbey with shaking fingers.
She had so vividly imagined that he would have written her a message, a note of some kind on the flyleaf, that when her gaze fell on the page, blank but for the title and the author's name, she felt a sickening swoop of disbelief. Clumsily, she leafed through the other front pages and checked in the back, at anywhere a space free of type might have allowed a few lines of writing. But there was nothing. He really had simply wished to restore her property to her. She must have left it unawares in his cabin on their last evening together. He had not even wanted to keep it as a memento.
She had known all along how hopeless it was, from start to finish, but in that moment it was as if all hope was extinguished afresh. She flung the book to the floor and gave in to a paroxysm of despair so violent, that she did not at first hear the soft tapping.
When Arabella's elegantly be-feathered head appeared around the corner of the door, Elspeth hastily rolled herself into a ball with her face averted and bunched the coverlet over her. She was still in nothing but half-unlaced stays.
"Dear sister! Fontaine told me you were feeling unwell again. I thought earlier that perhaps you were over-reaching your strength. Would you like some dinner brought up to you?"
"No. I have a headache. I want to sleep."
"I will have Fontaine bring you lavender water, then."
"Please do not."
"Let me see if you have a fever. I should not be at all surprised if the shock of your terrible ordeal has made you ill."
Elspeth wanted to snap back that if the shock of being captured by pirates were indeed to lay her low, it would have done so weeks ago when it had actually happened. She sat up frantically as her unwanted sister advanced into the room, solicitous hand outstretched to feel her forehand.
It was then that her eye fell on the book splayed open where it had landed on the rug, and the white fold of paper that was sticking out from behind the binding.
The edge of the book was actually brushing the hem of Arabella's dinner gown. At any moment she would notice it, and pick it up—because Arabella was not, as Elspeth had already learned, the kind of woman who would leave something lying out of place, even in someone else's bedchamber—and then she would see the note. And if she saw the note, she would open in and read it; again, because she was that kind of woman. Elspeth stared transfixed, then in a moment of desperate inspiration, leaned over and snuffed out the bedside candle.
With the curtains still drawn against the light summer evening, the room was plunged into gloom. Elspeth could still see the gleam of white paper peeking from the cover, though the book itself was dark and indistinct.
"I have no fever," she said, and she tried to force her voice to sound rational. "Only a headache. Please—sister dear—I would much rather lie down, in the dark, alone."
She hoped that this appeal to sorority would have an effect, and it did. In the half-light she saw Arabella smile slightly, and she said, "Of course. A good night's sleep will make the world of difference, I am sure. Goodnight."
She turned to go.
Elspeth held her breath as again, Arabella's dainty satin slipper stepped within half an inch of the edge of the book. But she carried on towards the door, and was gone.
Elspeth waited, unmoving, for as long as she could bear to make sure that neither Arabella, nor anyone else was going to come and disturb her. Then, heart beating so fast she felt dizzy, she tweaked open one side of the curtain to let enough light into the room to read by.
As soon as the paper was in her hands, she knew that she had been wrong; it was not a note from him, it was instead some kind of ordinary letter, folded as usual, with the remains of a broken seal and a direction written on the outer leaf. She stared in dazed disappointment at that direction, barely able to take it in for a few moments. When she did, puzzlement and curiosity rose a little.
The letter had no frank, but was addressed in what she was sure was her brother James's straggling, spidery hand to Mr Isaac Crowther, Crowther Estate, Barbados.
She turned it over to read the letter itself.
Dear Mr Crowther
Thank you for the very full and frank explanation in your last letter. I am sending this reply by hand of the captain of the ship that brings my sister to you, in order to ensure that there is no risk of our correspondence being intercepted.
You will conclude from the very fact that Lady Elspeth arrives along with this letter, that I do not consider your situation to be a material obstacle to the matrimonial alliance previously agreed in principle. As long as you have proof that no legally binding ceremony of marriage ever took place between yourself and the young woman in question, should the matter ever be challenged openly, then your association with this person can be no bar to your marriage with my sister.
How you choose to manage your domestic arrangements once you are married is not something about which I would presume to advise. Since you ask for guidance, however, I would offer this definite caveat—do not disclose any of this to Lady Elspeth until after the wedding. My sister is an innocent, sweet natured girl, unsophisticated and pure, and not as understanding of the ways of the world as she will be when she has lived longer in it. Were she to know about your mistress and children before she is married, it would only distress her and may even provoke her to raise objections to the union. After all is secure, it will become her duty to accommodate your pleasure.
The fact that, as you say, the young woman and her children live with you in the house may become an inconvenience, but let me reassure you once again that my sister's sweet, obliging disposition will make her a complying and obedient wife under any difficulties. I have no doubt that she will be reconciled to any arrangement, once she comes to accept her conjugal responsibilities.
I remain, sir, your most humble and obedient servant,
James, Earl of Atholl
All dismay at the letter not being a note of explanation from the Captain was supe
rseded by wonder and rage. Elspeth forgot about her headache, which had become real, and her tears. She forgot that she was wearing half-unlaced stays and petticoat, and was barefoot. She jumped from the bed and ran from the room, letter clutched in her hand.
Chapter Nineteen
Grieves the butler was just bringing the soup tureen to the table in all state when Elspeth burst into the dining room. Her brother was at the head of the table as usual, but Arabella was seated somewhat unconventionally at his right hand rather than in the mistress's rightful place at the other end. There was nobody dining with them, and both looked round at her in great surprise.
Arabella started to rise to her feet before Elspeth had a chance to open her mouth. "Elspeth, my dear!"
James put a hand on her arm as if to make her sit down again, as he saw Elspeth's wild expression.
Elspeth ignored her sister-in-law and marched right up to James, furiously brandishing the letter in his face. "How could you?" she cried. "How could you send me to be married to someone who has a wife already?"
A look of consternation passed briefly across James's features as he recognised his own letter. His first pained sideways glance was for his wife, then he hastily looked away from her. "He does not have a wife," he muttered. "The girl in question is a native—a negro. There can be no legal union."
"Children! They have children!"
"What is this, my dear?" asked Arabella mildly.
Grieves reached past Elspeth to deposit the soup tureen in its place in the centre of the table. Continuing to hold it aloft appeared to have been causing him discomfort. He stepped back with a carefully neutral expression, and did not offer to start ladling the soup into bowls.
"It is nothing, my love," he muttered. "My sister has somehow got hold of some private correspondence that is no business of hers, and is over-reacting as usual."