Edwardian Candlelight Omnibus

by Beaton, M. C.

  But only that evening, he, Gerald, had been remembering the explosion. “It probably was,” he said slowly so as not to frighten her anymore, “but I think we should certainly inform the police. There’s that business about the telegraph boy.” He told her how the boy had delivered her wire to Courtney and that someone had given him a sovereign. “So you see,” he ended, “whoever received the telegram knew you were coming back and did not tell the rest of the household. Whoever it was was the one who abducted you and whoever it was is someone at Courtney. Do you think Cyril or Jeffrey—”

  “No,” interrupted Ginny with a shake of her blond head. “They are not ruthless enough.”

  “We shall see the police as soon as possible,” said Gerald firmly, “and then I shall move my belongings to Courtney for a visit. I shall find some excuse. You need someone to look after you.”

  He felt very strong and masterful despite the cold, which seemed to be eating into his very bones. And she looked so small and frail and vulnerable, dwarfed as she was in his large motoring coat.

  “It is a pity,” he went on, “that the road is so deserted. I hope this walk will not prove too much for you after your experience. I am afraid my poor motor is a total wreck.”

  “You’re as well without it,” said Ginny. “Nasty, smelly thing.”

  He gritted his teeth. The old Ginny was back. “Do you realize, dear girl,” he said acidly, “that my Lanchester is a total wreck and all because of you? Had I not been able to command such a turn of speed, God knows what would have happened to you.”

  “Anyway,” said Ginny, who seemed to be becoming infuriatingly chirpy, “your horse will be glad to have you back again. He must have felt sorely neglected.”

  “Don’t be so infuriatingly sentimental,” snapped Lord Gerald, made doubly angry by the fact that he had felt rather guilty about his neglected horse, Brutus, and had actually been caught one embarrassing day telling the animal so by an amused groom.

  “I think it would be better if we ceased to chatter,” he added in as nasty a tone of voice as he could manage, “and conserve all our energies toward getting to that inn before we freeze to death.”

  “All right,” said Ginny mildly in exactly the same way as she had said those two little words when he had told her he never wished to see her again.

  They marched on in silence through the winter night. Ice on the road crackled under their feet and Lord Gerald, looking down at the frozen puddles, could only wonder that the carriage that had abducted Ginny had not crashed.

  He irrationally felt that it would have been easier to feel… well… warm and sympathetic toward Ginny if she had been hurt in any way. But apart from looking thinner, she seemed much the same as ever.

  The inn was locked and bolted when they at last reached it. Lord Gerald pounded vigorously on the door until a nightcapped head appeared at one of the upper windows. The moonlight shone on the barrel of a game rifle and an angry voice told his lordship to stop it or the “perleece” would be fetched.

  In a voice of weary patience Lord Gerald explained their predicament.

  “Take yourselves off,” snorted the landlord. “I’ve never heard such a farradiddle in all my born, that I ain’t. Chases and crashes and the like. I know your sort. Trying to break in, that’s what.”

  “My good man,” drawled Lord Gerald in tones as arctic as the night air, “I am Lord Gerald de Fremney and I command you to come down here instantly and let us in.”

  “Quite to the manner born,” murmured Ginny.

  But his lordship’s name and autocratic tones had the desired effect. The head disappeared from the window and several minutes later they heard the sound of heavy bolts being drawn back on the main door.

  The landlord held a dripping tallow candle up to Gerald’s face and appeared to be satisfied. “Come in, my lord,” he said, leading them into the bar. “I recognize you from earlier. You was in just afore I closed. Fact is, my boy is in hospital in Maidstone and Missus is over there with him. My hired man’s got leave to go see his mother, what is poorly, so you see I’m on my own and a man on this deserted spot can’t be too careful. It’s not as if we was on the main road,” he added, lighting the oil lamps and throwing logs on the fire.

  “What is the matter with your son?” asked Ginny.

  “Broke both his legs, mum, that he did, falling off a hayrick what he was told not to climb,” said the landlord. “I’m not that fit myself, mum, what with having just got over the plooreisy in the chest.” Here he gave a graveyard cough to bear out his words.

  Ginny stumbled slightly as she made her way over to the fire, and Lord Gerald looked at her with reawakened concern. Her hands, he noticed, were torn and bleeding where they had been scraped on the road.

  “We must find a doctor immediately,” he said. “You—what’s your name…”

  “Figgs, me lord.”

  “Well, Figgs, I shall guard your inn while you ride off and fetch help. We shall need a doctor and—”

  “Utter rot!” said his fair companion. “I am not dying, and poor Mr. Figgs is certainly not going anywhere tonight with that bad chest of his. Why, the cold night air could kill him. It is very late, Lord Gerald. Since I do not suppose you have any spare bedchambers, Mr. Figgs, we shall make ourselves comfortable here in the public bar till morning.”

  “Well, it ain’t as if we was a residential type of inn,” said Mr. Figgs. “We ain’t even got a private parlor or a snug—only the public here. But you’re both welcome to my own bedroom, and I’ll doss down the settle. Or there’s the single bed in my boy’s room.”

  “We are not married, Mr. Figgs,” said Ginny firmly before Gerald could speak. “I feel it would be less compromising if we just stayed here for a few hours until dawn.”

  “Have you got a horse?” asked Gerald. “I could ride for help.”

  Mr. Figgs shook his head. “Missus took horse and cart over to Maidstone and won’t be back till morn.”

  “Don’t be so stuffy, Lord Gerald,” said Ginny. “No one need know we spent the night in this inn together except the police when we put in our report, and neither they nor Mr. Figgs will feel we ought to get married. Mr. Figgs, if you could find us some nice hot punch and some sandwiches, I am sure we shall manage very well. No, my lord, I am not going to walk one step farther tonight.”

  Lord Gerald gave in with bad grace while Mr. Figgs bustled about fetching the ingredients for a bowl of punch and cutting sandwiches. Ginny and Lord Gerald sat on either side of the now roaring fire while the landlord placed a scarred oak table between them and, having laid out the sandwiches and the bowl of steaming punch and informed Miss that the first-aid box was in the kitchen, he said good night.

  Gerald felt angry. He felt Ginny should not have taken over like that and started giving orders, and she had made him feel like a callous, unfeeling brute over Mr. Figgs’s pleurisy and also because he had forgotten about her torn hands.

  Instead of thinking that the girl had shown remarkable fortitude, he decided she was insensitive in the extreme and left her to rummage in the kitchen for the first-aid box by herself.

  He was all set to enjoy a deep and—unusual for him—enjoyable fit of the sulks when he realized that she could not bandage her hands by herself and reluctantly got to his feet and followed her into the kitchen.

  He found Ginny wincing as she bathed her hands in an enameled basin, watched by an interested audience of black beetles.

  The kitchen was small and dark and not very clean, bearing witness to the fact that Mrs. Figgs had other problems on her mind. He took over and insisted on disinfecting the scissors before he cut the bandages, and then made a very neat and efficient job of binding Ginny’s hands up. With a sudden pang of concern he noticed that she had a lump the size of an egg on her forehead. A rattling at the window made them both jump, but it was only the wind, which had suddenly risen, shaking the branches of the ivy on the wall outside.

  Gerald decided that the best way to get
through this night of enforced intimacy was to treat Miss Bloggs with polite courtesy, as if they were both in the drawing room at Courtney instead of in this ancient relic of the Tudor age, with its low ceilings, tiny doorways, and blackened rafters.

  “Do you think this was always an inn?” asked Ginny, looking around curiously as they reentered the bar.

  “I should think so,” said Gerald, ladling out the punch. “It has probably only turned respectable in the last couple of decades. It would be a type of hedge tavern in the old days—a thieves’ kitchen more like. They’ll get quite a bit of trade in the summer now, what with hop-pickers and day-trippers and picknickers—they like to explore these lanes away from the main road. And whatever you might think of the motorcar, it’ll turn out to be a blessing to small places like these.

  “The days of the great coaching inns have gone and the posting houses, too. If they’re lucky enough to be near the railroad, then they change the name to the Great Western Arms or something and do very well. For these little places the motorist will be a blessing. He has no horses to be stabled and he doesn’t need to stay the night as much as a man with a carriage, who needs to rest his cattle. How are the sandwiches?”

  “Appalling,” said Ginny gloomily. “But I don’t care.”

  The wind suddenly gave a great howl and rattled ferociously at the door and the shutters.

  Snow, thought Lord Gerald. It might snow. He should walk on himself and find help. In fact, if he had not been so frozen and tired, he would have done just that in the first place. That was the problem, he reflected, as he watched the play of the firelight on Ginny’s face. One grew up with servants to jump at one’s bidding and never got into the way of performing quite simple actions oneself—like shaving or lighting a fire or finding one’s own clothes or drawing one’s own bath; cooking meals or getting out in the middle of the night and walking along a country lane to fetch some much-needed help.

  “You’re right about the sandwiches,” he said, chewing on a piece of dry bread and suspiciously smelly ham, “but the punch is excellent. When I’ve got myself thoroughly warm I shall go out and search for help. We can’t both go with only one coat between us.”

  Lord Gerald realized they must present a very odd picture indeed. Ginny was wearing a ridiculously thin silk dress, cut low on the bosom and embellished with a fine rope of pearls. She had planned to arrive at Courtney at dinner time, and since the weather in Bolton had been relatively warm she had cheerfully assumed it would be much warmer in the more southern part of England, and had worn her dinner gown under a warm herringbone-tweed cape for the journey. But now her cape was lying in that strange carriage along with her hat and her trunks, and the Kentish weather seemed all set to rival that of the North Pole. Lord Gerald was in full evening dress, complete with white tie and tails, frilled shirt, and diamond studs. He knew he looked at his best in evening dress and found to his irritation that he was hoping Ginny thought so, too.

  There was a clatter on the stairs and the door opened to reveal Mr. Figgs, coughing horribly and carrying an armful of rugs and quilts.

  “Here you are, my lord,” he said. “Best keep yourselves warm. I dunno when I last saw a night like this and I’ve seen some. Begging your pardon, my lord,” he lowered his voice, “the whatsit’s out in the garden at back and if you or Mum were desirous to use the conveniences, you’d best do it now afore the snow gets too deep. I only ’as me own chamber pot, so…”

  “Quite,” said Gerald hurriedly and then realized the landlord had said snow.

  “Snow!” he cried. He ran to the door and slid back the bolts.

  A white hell roared outside. He found he was looking out at what appeared to be a moving wall of snow. He shut and bolted the door with a bang.

  “That’s that,” he said bitterly. “No one’s going anywhere tonight. Oh, God!”

  He marched back to the fire and slumped down on the settle. Mr. Figgs regarded him with a kind of gloomy relish and then, dropping his bundle of wraps, coughed his way back up the stairs again.

  Ginny sat silently, looking at the flames.

  “Does nothing ever upset you?” snapped Gerald at last. “I don’t know how long we’re going to be stuck in this inn and heaven knows what will happen to our reputations.”

  “I can’t see what good it does making a fuss about something that can’t be helped,” said Ginny. “We must just make the best of it. Did your servants expect you home?”

  “No,” said Gerald. “They will think I am staying at my club.”

  “And since only my would-be assailant received my telegram,” said Ginny, “no one will know I have passed the night with you… except of course the police.”

  “I have no intentions of marrying you,” said Lord Gerald, instantly regretting it, for Ginny was looking at him from under raised eyebrows in a way that made him feel like an impertinent schoolboy.

  “I wouldn’t have you,” said Ginny in a vague sort of way. “After breaking my heart over Peter Paster, I have no intention of becoming emotionally involved with anyone. And now, my lord, if I think I heard our landlord’s mutterings aright, the geography of the house is situated in the backyard. Please excuse me.”

  Lord Gerald got to his feet and made her a chilly bow. Ginny picked up his coat and wrapped it around herself. She walked off into the kitchen. He could hear the sound of bolts being drawn back and then a faint exclamation of dismay.

  He got to his feet and strode into the kitchen to find Ginny standing on the threshold of the kitchen door, staring in blank dismay at the howling, raging storm. It was impossible to see more than a few inches into the garden.

  “Let me find a lamp,” he said. “I had better escort you, and to hell with the proprieties.”

  “Thank you,” said Ginny faintly. “I do not think I would like to die of exposure in such circumstances.”

  Lord Gerald found and lit a hurricane lamp. Then he took down an ancient oilskin from the back of the kitchen door and threw it around his shoulders and, taking Ginny’s arm, they both ventured cautiously into the storm. Although they could not see the “convenience,” they were able to smell it after they had taken several steps along what they hoped was the garden path.

  Lord Gerald swung the lantern and a tall, thin hut came into view.

  “Excelsior!” cried Ginny.

  Both were frozen to the bone by the time they returned to the inn parlor and fled shivering to the fire. After he had warmed himself Gerald went to the bar to rummage for ingredients to make a fresh bowl of punch—the old one having become cold—and Ginny braved the kitchen, with its attendant black beetles, to fill a kettle that she presently returned and hung on a hook and chain over the fire.

  “I wonder if Mr. Figgs has ever heard of a gas cooker?” she said. “Or even a nice little wood-burning stove. I believe they must do all their cooking over the open fire.”

  Lord Gerald came back with an armful of bottles. He looked very stern and remote with the expression of his black eyes hidden under their heavy lids. They both sat quietly, waiting for the kettle to boil. Ginny appeared to have resigned herself to her situation, but Gerald sat watching her face with a brooding expression on his own. He was going to have to watch very, very carefully or Miss Bloggs would be making one of her cracks about romance, and the next thing he knew he would be hugging and kissing her, and then after that he would be up at the altar. And not because Ginny loved him but because—he was sure—she enjoyed irritating him.

  The kettle began to sing on the hearth and he deftly mixed the punch, giving it all his attention.

  “I wonder where we should sleep?” said Ginny, seemingly oblivious of the suspicious look she was receiving from his lordship.

  “These settles are much too short. Perhaps if we drew back the table and spread the quilts and things on the floor, we could both sleep in front of the fire.”

  “No!” shouted Gerald, and then added more quietly, “I shall be perfectly comfortable where I am.”
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  Ginny gave him the benefit of her most empty stare and relapsed into silence. She was wishing there was some way she could remove her stays, which were digging uncomfortably into the soft flesh under her armpits. Lord Gerald was wishing he could unfasten his collar and take off his boiled shirt. Both decided to wait until the other fell asleep.

  The punch was very heady and after a while gave both a false energy and feeling of well-being. Gerald found himself forgetting all his suspicions and dislike of Ginny and thinking she was quite a good sort of girl, after all, and Ginny… well, one never knew exactly what Ginny was thinking. She suddenly began to discuss a problem she had. A greedy tenant farmer was taking the heart right out of the land and she wished to know how to get rid of him, or at least how to make him see sense.

  And Gerald, who loved the land more deeply than he ever realized, plunged into a long agricultural lecture fired by Ginny’s absorbed attention, while the punch sank lower in the bowl and the snow hissed and whispered around the old inn.

  His feelings grew warmer and warmer toward Ginny. She looked deuced pretty, sitting there in that flimsy silk gown of rose-pink. She had great shadows under her eyes and her face was thinner than he had remembered.

  “Have you lost weight?” he asked abruptly.

  “Oh, lots and lots,” sighed Ginny.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Worry, or something. I’ve been worried for quite some time about who at Courtney is trying to kill me.”

  Gerald looked at her in amazement. “But you do not think it is as serious as that? You said yourself it might be a practical joke.”

  “I never really believed that, Gerald,” said Ginny, unconsciously using his christian name. “I’ll tell you why. I love Courtney and I’m sensitive to the atmosphere of the house, in the same way as one is sensitive to the feelings of someone one loves. There’s a feeling of hate permeating the rooms and it increases and increases as the months go by. Someone is watching and waiting to kill me. I have had a private detective in residence for the past month but a fat lot of good he turned out to be.”