Mary Or The Perils 0f Imprudence

by Catherine Bowness

  “If only I could,” she said. “I fear I am not so light.”

  “It is not a question of weight,” he pointed out. “It is a question of aligning your body correctly. If you lie flat on the water with your head in a perfect line with your body and let yourself go limp, you will float.”

  He had by this time managed to get to his feet although he was standing up to his knees in water. He looked at Mary, who was endeavouring, not altogether successfully, to do what he had suggested.

  “There, you see,” he said, when she managed to achieve something approaching a horizontal position. “Now that you have stopped thrashing about as though wrestling with a serpent, you are floating perfectly well. You look like Ophelia,” he added. “There is weed in your hair.”

  “Am I floating? But you are holding me.”

  “Only your hand. It is not through my offices that you are lying so peacefully more or less on the surface of the water. You would continue to do so were I to let you go. Shall I demonstrate?”

  “No!” she cried. “Pray do not! You could not rescue me only to let me go again; that would be too cruel.”

  “You told me to a moment ago,” he argued. “Come: only try. I will catch you again if you begin to sink, I promise. Let go of my hand, keep your legs straight – you can wave your feet about a little – although I daresay those boots aren’t much help. Will you not try?”

  “Must I?” she asked, still terrified and wishing that he would not tease her but afraid that, if she did not yield, he would drop her hand and let her sink again.

  “Yes, for, if you do, you will know what to do next time and you will have learned a valuable lesson.” He leaned down and laid the hand he held gently against the surface of the water. “Look up at the sky and count slowly to ten.”

  Mary had never been a willing pupil and it was many years since she had put her trust in a man but it seemed to her that she had not much choice. Since he had taken the trouble to rescue her, she reasoned that it was unlikely that he would be so cold-hearted as to let her drown in front of his eyes. She clamped her lips shut, although they trembled horridly, looked up at the sky, as instructed, and saw a couple of birds a long way up, making their way through the insubstantial blue above her. But it was not easy to relax and the movements of her feet soon took on a more energetic waving, not to say kicking, and, to her utter amazement, she found herself moving backwards along the surface of the water.

  “There, you see,” the man said. “You are swimming; just dabble your hands a little, do not lift them out of the water and keep looking at the sky.”

  Mary did as she was bid – possibly for the first time in her life. She wished she could see him – was he still there or had he abandoned her?

  “Where are you?” she asked, her voice rising in panic and her feet sinking.

  “Beside you,” he replied in that calm, reassuring voice and she heard the movement of the water as he walked alongside her and a moment later felt his hand beneath her back. “I will teach you to swim properly another day, if you like, but I daresay you have had enough for the moment; in any event, this is not an ideal place to learn: the ground shelves too sharply and it is very muddy underfoot. There is a more suitable place a mile or two from here. Take my hand and see if you can stand.”

  She felt his fingers lock on to hers and pull her upright. When she put her feet down, she felt the shifting and unnerving softness of the river bed beneath them and found herself sinking into the mud. There seemed to be no certainty as to where the ground began and she found herself envisaging a new horror of being swallowed up to her eyes in mud.

  “It is all right,” he said. “We are very nearly there. I promise I shall not let you die – at least not today.”

  He put one arm around her and drew her firmly against his own body for she had begun to shake. She found her cheek pressed against a chest behind whose firm muscles she could discern a beating heart and, beginning to cough, looked up and saw, for the first time in any detail, her rescuer’s form.

  He was an exceptionally tall man so that, while his legs were immersed up to the knees, hers were submerged almost as far as her hips.

  “I suppose,” he observed with a little smile, still holding her while she returned whence it came a large portion of the river, “that it seems deeper to you than it does to me. Are you up to your knees in mud?”

  “I don’t think quite as far as that,” she managed after a considerable pause while he not only held her but began to hit her quite hard, she had to presume with the best intentions, between her shoulder blades, “but certainly up to my ankles from the feel of it.”

  “It’s a trifle unnerving, is it not? I will pick you up and pull you free now that you given up what I daresay you did not mean to take in the first place.”

  As he fought the mud for possession of her, the river bed at length reluctantly gave up her feet, upon which he swung her into his arms, the water cascading from her boots in a muddy torrent. He, however, was still held fast and she felt him wrestling to free his own legs from the sludge into which he had no doubt sunk a little further now that her weight was added to his.

  Their progress was slow as he sank again at every step but at last they were within reach of the grassy slope, which, on this side, was far less steep. He threw Mary up on to the bank, saying, “Take care you do not fall in again.”

  Having flung her clear, he climbed out himself. Mary, crouching close to the edge, watched him with some anxiety and heard the protesting squelch as the mud was forced to give up its prisoner. But at last he too was on dry, firm ground and leaned down to take Mary’s hand again to haul her up after him.

  “There you are!” he said with some satisfaction. “Safe and sound on dry land again! Have you any more of the river inside you, do you think?”

  “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

  “I should not think so although you never know what people may have put in the water higher up in the village.”

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, horrified, her eyes widening.

  “It looks clean enough,” he said by way of reassurance, “and does not smell disagreeable.”

  “No,” she said doubtfully although she was, at the moment, so glad that she was not dead that she could not feel too anxious about what she might have swallowed.

  “Here, I daresay you feel cold,” he said, leading her to where he had dropped his coat and wrapping it around her.

  She was shivering, probably not so much from cold as from shock, the violent tremors making her limbs jitter and dance as though she were a puppet.

  “How fortunate that it is such a warm day,” she observed, striving for a conversational tone although her teeth were chattering so much that she could barely enunciate the words.

  “Indeed. Why did you fall in? I assume it was not intentional. You were making heroic attempts to swim when I arrived.”

  “No, oh no; I was not attempting to put a period to my existence,” she exclaimed, stung. “I was trying to climb down the bank to pick some of those irises.”

  “I hope you will not take it amiss if I point out the imprudence of such an action. The bank is by far too steep and there is no flat surface at the bottom. It looks from here as if the ground runs directly into the water. What on earth were you thinking?”

  “I own it must look to you as though I wasn’t thinking at all, but I was, although obviously not much to the purpose. I thought how charmingly they would look in a vase of which I am particularly fond.”

  “Do you still want them?” he asked curiously, fixing a pair of steady grey eyes upon her face.

  “It would not be much use my wanting them, would it? I cannot reach them.”

  “No, but I can,” he said and, before she could stop him, he had run down the bank and plunged into the water again.

  She watched him swim across the short stretch of water. When he reached the other side, he stood up, the lower half of his legs remaining immersed. He picked several stems
then threw himself backwards and returned that way, the blooms held above his chest.

  “Shall I come down to get them?”

  “No, for Heaven’s sake do not; stay where you are; I have no wish to rescue you again.”

  She heard the now familiar squelch as he lifted first one foot and then the other out of the mud before coming back up the bank where he executed a mock bow, fell to his knees in front of her and held out the bunch of irises.

  “Fair lady, please accept these as a token of my admiration.”

  “Why, thank you, kind sir,” she replied, smiling and taking them before adding mischievously, “The rest of the flowers I picked are at the top of that bank, sir.”

  He was no longer on his knees but had moved to sit on the ground a foot or so in front of her and she addressed her remark to a muscular back clad in wet white linen which had moulded itself to his form. He turned his head and shoulders to look at her and, raising one eyebrow, studied her with eyes brimful of laughter, beneath which lurked an almost calculating gleam.

  She, having been fascinated by the sight of his back, had not until this moment given any thought to her own appearance but, faced with this teasing assessment, she became instantly conscious of the spectacle she must present – or have presented before he had wrapped her in his own coat - sodden from head to foot, her clothes clinging to her form in such a manner that she might have been wearing nothing at all and her hat, its dripping pink ribbons still tied below her chin, covering her head with all the style of an oversized, waterlogged leaf. Her reaction was as shamed as Eve’s must have been when she first became aware of her nakedness: the hot colour rose in her cheeks.

  “Why did you not point that out before I fetched the irises?” he asked, clearly enjoying her discomfiture.

  “Because I did not know what you were about to do. You rushed off pell-mell – I had no time to say anything.”

  He turned down the corners of his mouth. “So now it is my fault that your flowers are abandoned on the other side of the river and I who have been guilty of impetuousness!”

  “No, of course it is not. Thank you for picking the irises. You did not have to jump into the river again to fetch them.”

  “I could not have fetched them without doing so,” he pointed out reasonably. “Retrieving your other bunch is more difficult since you have left them on the top of that exceedingly steep bank, but I suppose it is not impossible and the worst that can happen is that I shall roll down the bank as, presumably, you did.”

  Without waiting for a reply, he leaped to his feet, ran down the slope again, plunged into the river, swam across and climbed out. Mary watched, transfixed, as he climbed up the almost perpendicular bank down which she had fallen. He moved very quickly and his long legs made short work of the distance. In a moment he had the flowers, stood at the top and waved them at her.

  She clapped her hands to show her appreciation and saw him spread out his arms as she had done, the flowers clutched in one hand. But, where she had attempted to show caution by descending slowly, he approached the problem from the opposite direction and ran down the hill to within a few inches of the water when he took a flying leap, landing with a considerable splash some way out, the blooms held aloft.

  While he was negotiating the river for the third time, she took the opportunity to remove her half boots and tipped out quantities of water. Having relieved herself of these and the horrid discomfort of having her feet seemingly permanently encased in mud, she untied the ribbons of her bonnet and laid that too on the grass so that, by the time he had clambered back up the bank with her original bunch of flowers, she was sitting with her stockinged feet stretched out before her and her hair tumbling damply around her shoulders.

  He swept her a low bow and presented the flowers.

  “Thank you,” she said, taking them. She was beginning to recover her sangfroid, stimulated by his teasingly flirtatious manner, which took her mind off her near-drowning as well as her déshabille. “I am vastly impressed.”

  It was his turn to blush, the colour rising unevenly in cheeks whose natural colour inclined more to the sallow.

  “I could not resist,” he admitted, sitting down beside her. “But I am not at all surprised that you fell in. That bank is ridiculously steep and, if you cannot swim and do not plan to fetch up in the water, it is not a descent which I would recommend. Did you like my imitation of a bird or were you too busy tipping water out of your boots to notice?”

  She laughed delightedly at this evidence that he had been seeking her admiration and said, “I never took my eyes off you. I am quite capable of taking off my boots without having to study my actions in detail. And, yes, I thought you made a splendid bird – and your impression of a fish is not to be derided either. How dull you make me feel: I can neither pretend to be a bird nor a fish. I can only walk and – what is more – must do so on a reasonably flat surface if I am not to tumble over.”

  “Oh!” he said, “but you have other talents, have you not? You have the power to conjure a rescuer from thin air, to bring him to your side and for him to be so smitten that he behaves like a schoolboy in order to impress you. Who are you? And whence do you come? Are you in fact a figment of my imagination? You are surely too fair to be real.”

  “Oh, I am quite real, sir, and surpassing dull. My name is Mary Best and I am companion to Lady Leland. That is her land on the other side of the river.”

  “Ah – my neighbour whom I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting. That must be remedied at once. She is, I understand, a very old lady.”

  “She is not much less than eighty, but I do not think you would know it for she has a great deal of spirit.”

  “You are no doubt well matched in that case. But you are very young, are you not?”

  “Not so very. I daresay my hair in rats’ tails makes me look younger than I am; and then my conduct is positively infantile. I am afraid I am not always sensible although I think Lady Leland quite likes that. Indeed, recently I have behaved in such a sedate manner that she has accused me of growing dull with age.”

  “Has she then known you a long time?”

  “Oh yes; since I was a child. I was used to be wildly impetuous but have had my wings clipped.”

  “So you can no longer fly? They can grow again, you know.”

  “Oh, I do not think so. In any event, impetuosity can land one in exceedingly hot water – or indeed cold on occasion. Are you always so rash?”

  “Rash? You mean jumping into the river? But you would have drowned if I had not.”

  “You did not need to return twice more,” she pointed out, striving for a prim look although she could not quite repress the tell-tale twitching at the corners of her lips.

  “No, that is true, although how could I resist trying to please such a ravishing nymph? Yes, probably I am rash and I have far less excuse than you, being at least ten years your senior. I have not done anything so cork-brained in order to impress a female for some time. I suppose I should put such things behind me.”

  Chapter 4

  At about the same time that Mary Best was being pulled from the river, one of the guests staying at Marklye Hall embarked upon a walk.

  She had arrived the day before and, not yet knowing her way around the Viscount’s estate, set out across the wide lawns fronting the house towards where she thought the lake, which she had glimpsed through the drawing room windows, might be found. This shining body of water had been artificially formed some generations previously by the simple but effective means of damming the river on one of its branches. The remaining curve into which Mary had plunged was narrower but no less deep, as she had discovered.

  Susan Porter was a very young woman of some seventeen summers; she was the daughter of an old friend of Lord Marklye and had been invited, along with her parents, to spend a month or two in the country at his newly restored house.

  Although she was not yet out, plans were afoot for her introduction to the ton the following spr
ing when she would be eighteen. Her birthday falling in June, she would have been a little too young if she had been fired off this year. The fact that Miss Porter could, with little exaggeration, be labelled gauche – somehow using the French word robbed the description of a scintilla of its bite – had, her mama insisted, nothing to do with the decision to hold her back for a year. That occasional gawkiness which was almost an adornment to a pretty girl was a grave disadvantage to a plain one, coming across as a sort of headlong ungainliness, which was astonishingly off-putting. The girl could hardly enter a room without knocking something over.

  Since she was clearly in need of further polishing, two specialist teachers had not only been engaged but had been transported to Marklye, along with a handful of personal servants, in order that Miss Porter could be given intensive instruction during the long summer months.

  It was, unfortunately, not only her manner which was disheartening but her constant expansion in all directions. As she grew – and why in the world had she grown so excessively fast? – it had become only too clear that she was not to be a Beauty. It seemed there was no stopping her augmentation and, now that she was seventeen, she was almost a giantess. Of course her papa was a big man – well over six feet in height – and Mrs Porter had never been described as a small woman – but why, oh why, must the girl be so very large? Who would wish to stand up with her at Almack’s – or indeed in provincial assembly rooms – when she was so excessively tall that she overtopped the majority of gentlemen and when she might inflict a painful injury if she inadvertently trod upon her partner’s toe?

  She had already, by the time nuncheon was due to be served, undergone two hours of instruction from her tutors, one of whom was employed, not only to show her the latest dance steps, but also to attempt to imbue in her a degree of grace presently remarkable for its absence while the other accompanied them on the piano.

  At the end of the first hour, the dancing master left and Miss Porter seated herself on the piano stool while the accompanist drew up another chair and endeavoured to improve her playing and – an even more challenging task – her singing. As both teachers were men she was attended by a yawning maid, whom the Porters had brought with them.