Black Heather

by Virginia Coffman

  I heard Mrs. Sedley’s sweet, plaintive voice reply, still sweet, but sharper. “My goodness! How very busy our young visitor is, to be sure! Giving orders to dear Nicky’s servants quite as though she were already installed here. But, Mrs. Hardwicke, you will come down here to me as soon as you are given Miss Kate’s kind permission, will you not?” I caught the malice there and laid it to her fear for the outcome of the relationship between her granddaughter and Sir Nicholas. It occurred to me that having ruined two lives with her first meddling in the love affair between Sir Nicholas and Megan Sedley, she might more wisely leave Elspeth to work out her own life—not to mention the man whom she had once before rendered so bitterly unhappy.

  However, their happiness or lack of it was no concern of mine. I was still furious with Elspeth for her part in trying to set down everything that had happened to me tonight as mere fustian or the imagination of a girl who did not know truth from fancy. But I knew truth well enough. I was thoroughly convinced that the Hag who had sat on my bed tonight and moved to tighten those terrible fingers upon my throat had been real, very likely someone I knew and had spoken with, disguised for what reason I could not yet surmise. Nor could I be sure what had been the reason for the attempt upon me. I had done very little in Yorkshire to arouse that kind of wild enmity.

  I went out into the corridor, past Elspeth and to the head of the stairs. “Mrs. Hardwicke, have you notified Sir Nicholas that we would like to see him?”

  “It’s no easy thing, that, Miss. Nayther can I find Hardwicke himself. Nor yet have the maids been and seen nothing.”

  “Is Jacob back yet from Maidenmoor?”

  “Not to my knowing, Miss, if you please.” Jacob had made the ride to Maidenmoor ostensibly to notify the Sedleys of my presence here, and since his news had merely succeeded in packing Mrs. Sedley off to Everett Hall to flaunt all the virtues of her granddaughter and forestall any “wiles” of mine, I could see no reason why he should not have returned, even if he had walked the distance across the moor by way of the Hag’s Head and Seven Spinney. He had been a friendly, common-sense person when I met him on the hearth, and I thought his presence at Everett Hall would help to uncover any chicanery.

  “What is it, girls?” asked Mrs. Sedley, a trifle anxiously.

  Elspeth spoke quickly behind me. So close and so silently she had moved that I started nervously, despite my intention to brave each of these suspicious people and get at the truth of tonight’s happenings.

  “No, Grandmama. There is nothing at odds up here. Kathleen had a nightmare. That is all.”

  “Aye, most likely,” Mrs. Hardwicke put in unasked and, so far as I was concerned, decidedly unwanted.

  “I don’t know what the two of you may mean by that,” said I as firmly as I had ever spoken in my life, only by extreme care excluding the growing panic from my voice. “But you are both lying, and I mean to find out why. Sir Nicholas will soon be well aware that you both have not told the truth about what is happening here, and I warn you, you cannot fool him, whatever game you may think you are playing with me.”

  “I suppose,” said Elspeth with a faint curl of those lips her grandmother had extolled for their sweetness, “you intend to prevail upon Nicholas by some such flirtation as has already gotten you so far into his good graces. But I doubt very much if even you can fool Nicholas forever.”

  “And how am I to be fooled?” asked Sir Nicholas’s voice from the gallery on the lower floor as he came to the foot of the stairs and looked up at three flushed and quarrelsome females.

  Mrs. Hardwicke coughed, curtseyed to him somewhat inadequately in her plaid nightgown, which covered her to the chin and to the toe.

  “I believe the young ladies fancied seeing a ... kind of phantasm and was after sending for Your Ludship for to catch the foul thing, such as it was.”

  “It was nothing at all, believe me, Nicholas,” said Elspeth, moving out from behind me and descending the stairs with her usual grace. She seemed never at loss, in public, for that beauty of face and movement which her grandmother justly praised, though I felt my own teeth on edge at the thought of it. But surely Sir Nicholas was too intelligent to be swayed by her words, however much he might find her ravishingly lovely in her nightgown and robe and slippers, all of pink with satin bows.

  He looked up at me when she had finished speaking, and I saw how dark and powerful his eyes were as they caught the light of Mrs. Hardwicke’s lamp. I felt again in that instant the peculiar weakness I had felt early in the evening before dinner, when he had been so kind and gentle, brushing my hair and showing me every attention.

  “Yes, sir,” I said, since he seemed to expect me to make some sort of reply or defense. “I did see something. A—person entered my room. I think it meant to do me some harm. But a noise in the corridor or else a clap of thunder from the storm frightened it off.”

  “But Nicholas,” Elspeth interrupted, “no one else saw this thing. And when Miss Bodmun first complained of it, she seemed to think it might have been a mere fancy—a nightmare.”

  I leaned forward on the edge of the stairs and called to her furiously, forgetting I was not now on a beach at home quarreling with a fisherman’s daughter, “You liar! How dare you say such a thing! It is the greatest untruth that ever was!” To my astonishment and chagrin, Sir Nicholas was smiling when he took the stairs in three long steps and, getting between us, carefully and firmly seized my arm.

  “Come, child. Up to bed. We’ve had enough excitement for one night. Undoubtedly you ate too much syllabub. It always makes for nightmares.” I shook all over with fury, to be so humiliated, and in front of those three detestable women, not one of whom would dream of coming to my rescue. Surely, Mrs. Hardwicke might have said something about those red-mud spots on the carpet. But if she had, then, I supposed, she would imagine herself the target for abuse because of her poor housekeeping.

  As for Sir Nicholas, I looked up and saw his faint smile and very nearly wrenched myself free of his grasp. Was he actually so ignorant, after all that had happened about the dogs in the garden tonight, that he still believed I had merely been having nightmares? Too much syllabub, indeed! As a matter of plain fact, Mrs. Sedley’s collapse had interfered seriously with my taking a second helping.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I went, more or less under pressure, to my room, dragging or pulling all the way. When he thrust the door open with the toe of his boot, I realized it was no good my protesting further. He had everything under his own control and would pay no heed to me, being so very sure of himself in all matters.

  He kicked the door shut behind us, which seemed greatly daring to me. What would the others think? And would Mrs. Sedley write the full and dreadful details on a page to Mama?

  He swung me around by one hand, and I sat down abruptly on the foot of the bed, smoldering at the indignity of it all.

  “I assure you, sir,” said I in what I hoped was the oldest voice had I ever used, “every word of what I said was true. I did see someone in my—in this room. And it tried to kill me. It was someone pretending to be the Hag.”

  With that extreme patience used by normal adults to scarcely breeched infants, Sir Nicholas stood before me, removing the candles from my hand and nodding at my assurances.

  “Yes; yes, certainly. But you must forget these wild efforts of yours to promote a fear of the Hag’s Head. My man is purchasing it from the Sedley agent tomorrow in Maidenmoor. Now, will you be the sweet, sensible puss I know you are? Lock yourself in here when I leave. Then go to sleep and do not leave this room until after your breakfast tea is served.”

  “Excellent, sir,” I replied demurely, incensed at his announcement of his own plan to purchase Megan Kelleher’s inn before I could do so. Apparently he would stoop to any stratagem to thwart me.

  He set down the candles and took my two hands in his. Had I not been so very angry, I am persuaded I should quite have fallen in with his blandishments, for he had never seemed so handsome or s
o very imposing. But I knew his use of these qualities was for his own ends. He wished me to be out of his way, for what purpose I could not imagine, unless we knew all along that I was telling the truth and wished to silence me before I betrayed too much. I would not in the least put it beyond him.

  “That’s my good girl,” he said in a voice whose warmth and merry tenderness made me shiver with that now familiar sensation of uneasy pleasure he aroused in me. How skillfully he used his insincere weapons against women like me! I supposed it might have been much the same with Megan Sedley before she married Patrick. Only she had guessed this man’s use of his charm.

  “Thank you,” I said, adding just as he was sure he had me beaten, “Only I cannot lock myself in and do as you ask me—sir.”

  The beginnings of a frown cracked up that handsome, hitherto unfurrowed brow, and I beheld his forbidding scowl. “Really? May one ask why?”

  “Certainly!” I ended triumphantly. “If you would examine that door, you will find it impossible to lock.”

  He gave a sigh of exasperation at my trick, then broke into a laugh. Greatly to my astonishment, he reached out beyond my hands and caught my shoulders, and before I could turn my head, he kissed me as close to my lips as makes no matter, and then smiled at my surprise. With his eyes glowing under the light of my candles, he looked at me for a moment before letting me go. I licked my lips deliberately to let him know he was not to win my obedience by such methods, but he only laughed, chucked me under the chin with his curved forefinger, and left me. He paused before entering the hall to consider my problem of the lockless door.

  After looking around at the room’s furnishings, he lifted a lyre-backed chair over to the door, propped it under the doorlatch, and showed it to me.

  “When I have gone, place the back under the latch—so. It would be exceedingly difficult for anyone in the corridor to open the door. You see?”

  I nodded, unable to speak; for I was rather shocked to find that I had thoroughly enjoyed his kiss, and I did not wish him to guess his power over my emotions.

  When he had gone, I got up and started across the floor to do as he suggested. As I did so, my stocking foot trod upon something stiff that stuck to the heel of my stocking.

  I reached down, scraped it up between two fingers, and found that it was a clod of red mud. I moved more slowly across the floor, examining every part of the carpet, noting that the marks were found wherever Sir Nicholas’s boots had stepped in my room. I opened the door wider and looked into the gallery-corridor. However I might have been deceived about Elspeth’s removal of the mud spots from my room, I had seen her remove all signs from the corridor. And more—I had examined that corridor myself after catching her. There had been no spots of red mud. There were now, though, and further traces wherever Sir Nicholas had walked or paused a few minutes before.

  I began to shiver, feeling the rush of chill air through all the galleries and corridors of the large house. I went back into my room quickly, thrust the chair under the latch as Sir Nicholas had indicated, and ran across the room to wrap my shivering arms in my coat while I calmed these dreadful, nagging fears and cleared my mind for immediate plans. I was still so nervous that I could scarcely remain calm long enough to ask myself why Sir Nicholas found it necessary to frighten me by wearing that preposterous Hag’s garments. Or even worse—had he intended to strangle me before being interrupted by the thunder? Perhaps, though, he could be kind at one moment and a raging lunatic the next. That would explain all very cozily—except, of course, his maddening fascination to me, which made my discovery of his crimes all the worse.

  Small wonder he had dismissed Ezra Hardwicke’s comment about the frantic dogs and scoffed at my story of the invader who might be a phantom. Phantom, indeed! How could I have been so gullible? Nothing on earth could really look like that Hag. It had all been a trick. It surprised me to discover that the most painful aspect of the masquerade was not the danger to my life, but the feeling that I had been betrayed by a man with whom I might have fallen in love. Only minutes before I had again been under the influence of the man’s sensuous power. This was what came of not heeding Mama’s strictures on the subject. How often she had reminded me, “Brief acquaintance does not bear well. One must know a person a length of time before making judgments.”

  The warm cavern formed by the coat around my body soon restored my spirits, and in no time I was making vigorous plans to outfox my dangerous adversary. Only to think that such tricks and masquerades, and even attempts on my life, must have been pursued in order to keep me from purchasing the Hag’s Head Inn! What could possibly be worth so much in that abandoned building?

  Every time I thought about that idiotic fright I had received at the inn, a fright that had killed poor Macrae, I became angry with Sir Nicholas all over again. How could he care so very much about a mere piece of real estate that he would help to spread such wild tales and even wear Guy Fawkes fright masks with which to accomplish his purposes?

  My childish attack of nerves, for which I was heartily ashamed, had nearly subsided, when every nerve started up in alarm as I heard the latch of my door tried softly. The chair I had thrust under the latch began to move and shake under the pressure. I glanced around the room in renewed panic, wondering what force the simple, delicate chair would withstand.

  “Kathleen?” Elspeth called in an urgent whisper. “Let me in.”

  I hurried to the door, demanding from my temporary refuge behind the chair, “Why? Can’t it wait until morning?”

  “Kathleen! Please—he may hear us.”

  So she knew, as I did, that Sir Nicholas was our adversary. I removed the chair very slightly and opened the door scarcely more than the width of my hand. I could see one of Elspeth’s heavy lidded eyes staring at me through the barely open door, her true feelings masked as always by her lashes, long and dark and spidery.

  “What do you want?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Hush! He seems to be everywhere tonight. Let me in. Do.”

  I could not but be doubtful of this request in the deep night. Indeed, the strange dead gray mist that was the harbinger of dawn had already begun to creep into my room beneath the portieres at the windows.

  “Can’t it be later?” I asked, only to have her put her long finger to her lips, moving with a kind of deliberation that made her appear almost drugged.

  “Please. We cannot talk like this. He is sure to hear us. It is about Grandmama.” She rattled the latch again, and I felt that if she persisted in her odd behavior she surely would arouse Sir Nicholas, plus his dogs and any number of other unpleasant things. Whatever happened, I did not want to encounter his Hag’s disguise any more tonight.

  Before letting her in, I did what must have been conceived a very odd thing by anyone, had my action been subject to witness. I looked about for a weapon against this young vampire. I still smarted under Mrs. Sedley’s insinuation that I was inferior, less feminine, but I meant to protect myself against the eerie hint of danger she and her granddaughter presented.

  “Quickly!” Elspeth commanded in a hoarse whisper, rattling the latch angrily.

  “Yes. Yes. One moment. The chair is caught.” I ran my fingers over the escritoire to the right of the door and found amid the dust a pen with its shaven point split and broken. It was inadequate, but its ragged, broken point would certainly give pause to an attacker. I broke off the feather and put the rest of the pen inside the belt of my gown. Then I wrested the chair out from under the lock, and through the narrow space I yielded to her, she squeezed her way with a serpent’s ease, then closed the door silently behind her. I saw that her hands were shaking.

  She turned to me with dark, accusing eyes. “What have you done with her?” she asked. “Tell me where she went to.”

  Scarcely anything she said would have surprised me more.

  “Done with...? Sir Nicholas brought me here and went away. I haven’t seen anyone else.”

  “You must have. Grandmama is gone.
I couldn’t think of anywhere else she might have gone of her own wish.” She was looking around the little room all the time she spoke, her dark gaze taking in every shadowy corner where the candles did not penetrate. It made me excessively nervous.

  “In any case, I have not seen her,” I said, though I suspect it fell on deaf ears. “When I met you in the gallery earlier in the night, I heard your grandmother speaking to Mrs. Hardwicke. But I have not seen her since her illness at dinner.”

  I noted that Elspeth had dressed after we met earlier. It made me feel the importance of this odd business about Mrs. Sedley. Elspeth moved around the room shaking the portieres, so that I saw dawn was at hand, and rustling the frilled bed curtains, which remained open as they had been when I entered the room, so that they now gave off little sprays of dust.

  I watched her, finding her panic contagious.

  “She is not here. I give you my word. Can she walk without help?”

  A faint breeze came from between the windows, which I had incompletely closed, and it ruffled Elspeth’s muslin gown as she fluttered about, groping at the furniture, thrusting it out of the way. When she swung around toward me, her fingers like claws, her face whiter than I had ever seen it, she whispered in a way that made my skin prickle, “Where can she have got to? Nothing would make her walk further than a few steps. My own room was beside hers, and I heard nothing. I have gone through room after room. She is nowhere. Yet she never walks, except upon the most pressing occasions.”

  I unlatched the door and peered out into the gallery. It was as silent and at first as dark as it had been at midnight. I found it almost incredible that at this hour Mrs. Sedley should have chosen to walk beyond an adjoining room or two. At the same time, any alternate possibility was even more incredible.