by M C Beaton
“If you will give me some time …” began Miss Stride, cracks beginning to show in her new veneer of assertion.
“I ain’t got the time,” said Augusta. “I’m taking a trip to France and I won’t be back for a long time.”
“But I have no money,” wailed Euphemia Stride. “You have furthermore encouraged me to run up these bills and although several of them may be in my name, I would remind you they were gowns ordered for you.”
“Then it might teach you a bit of worldly wisdom,” laughed Augusta. She suddenly pushed her large face towards the spinster.
“Lookee here, Euphie,” she said. “You’ve simpered and talked of the importance of having aristocratic connections and a good name. Well, then, I suggest you take your good name and go and live off somebody else. Remember, the good Lord says that unto them that hath, shall be given, an’ I hath, Euphie, and you hathent. So there!”
“You’re heartless,” said Miss Stride, beginning to cry. “You don’t even care what became of that niece of yours.”
“No, I don’t. Any more than I care what happens to you,” said Augusta with her smile at its widest.
“You see, it all comes of being too trusting. Now I—I am never trusting. Look at that idiot Penelope.
She needs must go and fall in love with Hestleton and so she ends up in the gutter. Anyway, he didn’t drop Penelope ‘cause she had a bit of a roll in the hay with him. It was all on account of that brother of his, dying like that.”
“But it was a seizure,” gasped Miss Stride, momentarily diverted from her own troubles.
“Ho! That was no seizure. Why, that silly Charles takes a pistol and blows his brains out and he leaves this silly letter …” Augusta bit her fat lip and her protruding eyes bulged from her head in alarm. She had nearly gone too far.
“What were you about to say?” said Miss Stride sharply.
“Nothing,” muttered Augusta.
“You had something to do with Charles’s death,” said Miss Stride, her voice suddenly becoming stronger. “Pay these bills, Augusta, or I shall … I shall …”
“You’ll what?”
“I’ll … I’ll go straight to the Earl of Hestleton and tell him what you told me!”
“Go ahead,” said Augusta with massive indifference, “I won’t be around when his lordship comes calling.”
“You’d better not,” said Euphemia Stride as she turned towards the door, “because I am going right to the Earl this minute and … and … don’t ever come back to London again, Augusta, or it will be the worse for you.”
“Get out of here before I kill you,” said Augusta quietly.
Miss Stride looked at her ex-patroness, and what she saw in Augusta’s green eyes made her pick up her skirts with a squeak of alarm and run from the house.
Rourke, the butler, looked disapprovingly at the flustered spinster standing in the Earl’s hallway. A lady like Miss Stride, he thought, should know better than to go calling on a gentleman in his town house.
“But it is very important,” Miss Stride was insisting. “I have news for my lord concerning Miss Vesey.”
“In that case,” said Rourke, his face hardening, “my lord is most definitely not at home.”
“What is it, Rourke?”
The butler and Miss Stride swung round. The Earl was standing at the top of the stairs, dressed to go out. Miss Stride scurried round the butler. “My lord,” she called, “my lord! ‘Tis vastly important. I have news of Miss Vesey.”
A shutter seemed to close down over the Earl’s face. He descended the stairs slowly, drawing on his driving gloves. “I am going out, Miss Stride,” he said in a flat voice. “I beg you to excuse me.”
“But Penelope …”
Rourke was already holding up the Earl’s many-caped driving coat.
“But it also concerns your brother,” wailed Miss Stride. “About that letter … and about Charles shooting himself.”
The Earl paused, frozen, one arm in the sleeve of his coat. Rourke’s face was like wood.
The Earl slowly withdrew his arm.
“Follow me, Miss Stride,” he said abruptly and led the way upstairs to his private sitting room.
Miss Stride followed him in and sat down on the edge of a rope-backed chair. The Earl looked very grim. She began to wish she had not come.
“Very well,” said the Earl, sitting down opposite her. “Proceed!”
“Well … well …” faltered Miss Stride. “It’s like this.”
She told the Earl Augusta’s strange remarks about Charles’s death and the letter, ending up with the outburst of, “Augusta’s a wicked woman. She has no delicacy, no feeling. She even sneered at poor Penelope for having fallen in love with you …”
Miss Stride broke off. The Earl’s eyes had the hard, silver shine of mercury. “I’ll kill her,” grated the Earl, and Miss Stride realised with a gasp of relief that his rage was directed toward Augusta and not herself.
“Where is Miss Vesey now?” demanded the Earl.
“I-I d-don’t know,” stammered Miss Stride. “She disappeared after the Clarence House ball. She had no money, not a penny. She did not even take the diamond pendant that my Lord Barrington had given her. I have no money, my lord, or I would endeavour to find her whereabouts.”
“You can have all my money an’ you find Miss Vesey,” said the Earl grimly, well aware that the spinster lived on her wits.
Hope activated Miss Stride’s nimble brain. “Perhaps Miss Vesey has returned to the seminary in Bath, though she would have had to walk. Perhaps I could travel there myself …”
“I will go,” said the Earl. He crossed to his desk and scribbled rapidly. “There you are, Miss Stride—a draft on my bank and thank you for your information. I shall call on Miss Harvey first.”
Miss Stride carefully deposited the draft in her reticule before she spoke. “I fear Miss Harvey has already left,” she said. “She said she was leaving for France.”
“Then after I have found Miss Vesey’s whereabouts,” said the Earl, “I shall follow Miss Harvey to France and personally wring her fat neck. You may go, Miss Stride.” He tugged at the bell, but Miss Stride would not even wait for the servant. She fled from the room.
Outside she paused and took a deep breath and then slowly drew the Earl’s note from her reticule and blinked at the enormous sum. Euphemia Stride’s troubles and woes fled like magic to be replaced by a fierce gratitude. She would repay the Earl, who was obviously still in love with Penelope. Then, she, Euphemia Stride would help the couple in the only way she could. She would use her busy tongue to tell the ton that Penelope Vesey had been grossly misjudged, rouse their wrath against Augusta, and make sure that should Miss Vesey return to London, society would at least have a welcome for her.
The Earl sat in silence after she had left, his mind racing. He was suddenly sure that Penelope had had nothing to do with the blackmailing of Charles. He should have known all along, but the shock of his brother’s death had turned his mind. He groaned aloud. He was as bad as Augusta. And Augusta had said that Penelope had loved him! In his bitterness and hate, in his misguided attempts to save his brother’s name, he had condemned the only girl he had ever really loved … to what?
He suddenly sprang to his feet and, calling loudly for his racing curricle to be brought round from the stables, started to make hasty preparations for a journey to Bath. Augusta Harvey could await his vengeance. The most important thing was to find Penelope. Whatever had become of her?
Penelope had survived, although at times the Jennings had feared she would not. After the rigors of the journey to the Jenningses’ comfortable home in the small village of Wold outside Dover, after the settling in, after the introductions to Mr. Jennings’s two buxom daughters, Penelope had suddenly collapsed from delayed shock. Up till then the need to survive had sustained her. But in the relaxing and comfortable atmosphere of the Jenningses’ home all the memories had come tumbling back. As she tossed and turned at
night, the Earl’s voice sneered along the corridors of her dreams, “I would not touch her for a hundred pounds.”
The fact that she had lost her virginity to a heartless rake and had been also duped by her hard and grasping aunt made her alternately boil and burn with shame and hate. Added to that was the awful fear that she might have become pregnant and surely even the kindly Jenningses would have thrown her out of doors should that have happened. Her temperature rose alarmingly and she spent her first week at the Jenningses turning and tossing in fevered coma.
At last the fever had broken. With it had come the knowledge that she was going to live after all. Penelope had shakily started to put her mind and her world together again. Gradually she began to work at her duties as governess.
Jane and Alice Jennings did not seem overly interested in learning the hows and wherefores of social behavior. They were jolly country girls, very like their mother. But they enjoyed Penelope’s company on their walks and shopping expeditions and tried very hard to become fashionable young ladies to please her.
It was, surprisingly, their mother, the noisy, garrulous Mrs. Jennings, who became Penelope’s most successful pupil—although not in the arts of social behavior. Mrs. Jennings turned out to have a great love of music and was never happier than when Penelope was giving her lessons on the pianoforte or listening to Penelope playing in the long, dark autumn evenings when chill winds blew across the English Channel and great waves pounded at the foot of the chalky cliffs.
Penelope was able to lose herself in her music and find some relief from her painful memories.
The Jenningses’ house was a square barracks of a place, built of gray stone, standing four square near the edge of the cliffs and surrounded by a neat and formal garden. The furniture was old-fashioned and the floors were uncarpeted, but the Jenningses went in for roaring fires and great, satisfying meals so that the house was always redolent of the smells of woodsmoke and good country cooking.
Local village society seemed to be limited to that of the schoolmaster and his large, noisy family of small children and to the vicar and his shy, little wife. Jane and Alice would often stop in the village street to giggle and laugh with the farmers’ sons, and Penelope often thought that they would make excellent farmers’ wives, being more interested in the friendly camaraderie of the farming families and crops and cattle than they were in preparing for the parties and balls in nearby Dover.
One day Mr. Jennings proposed that Penelope should escort the girls into Dover on a shopping expedition. She was to spend the afternoon with them in the town and then take them for tea to the Green Man which was famous for its cakes and pastries and then bring them home before dark.
The day was fine when they set out, a great pale yellow sun glittering and shining on the frosty fields and bare, skeletal branches of the trees. Penelope observed to the Jenningses’ coachman, John, that it was fine weather, to which John eyed the sky uneasily and said it was “too bright.”
“What do you mean?” laughed Penelope. “Surely in England the sun can never be too bright!”
John scratched his powdered hair. “Well, it’s like this, miss,” he said. “When the sun is all shiny and glittery like that, usually it means we’re going to get a powerful bit of wind.”
“Nonsense!” teased Penelope. “You’ve been reading your almanack again, John. Why, there’s not a breath of wind!”
Certainly it continued fine as the carriage lumbered onto the turnpike road and started the six-mile descent to Dover with a series of chalk cliffs and the blue sea on the right and, on the left, the bare winter brown of the cornfields.
Before they reached the town of Dover, Penelope glanced once more out to sea. The sky still stretched blue and cloudless as far as the eye could see, but the sea appeared to have abruptly changed to a gray metallic color which seemed to change to black, even as she looked.
She pointed this phenomenon out to John, sticking her head out of the open carriage window and calling up to him as he sat majestically on his box.
John promptly reined in his horses. “It’s like I told you, miss,” he said, twisting round on the box to look down at Penelope. “Storm’s a-coming. We’d best go back.”
“Oh, no !” screamed Jane and Alice in unison, their black ringlets bobbing. “Miss Vesey, tell him we must go on.”
“Very well,” smiled Penelope, amused at the girls’ enthusiasm for shopping, little realising that Jane and Alice had heard that Farmer Galt’s sons were visiting Dover and that they hoped to see them.
Jane and Alice were dressed alike. Their warm pelisses and velvet dresses were of different colors, eighteen-year-old Jane being in blue and seventeen-year-old Alice in scarlet, but they were so alike in character that somehow they always looked as if they were dressed the same. Both were buxom, both had rosy cheeks. Jane had smaller eyes and a longer nose than her sister, but that seemed to be the only difference.
“Perhaps we shall find a beau for you, Miss Vesey?” teased Jane. “You are so pretty, it seems a shame you are not married.”
“I shall never marry,” said Penelope in a quiet voice, and both her charges fell silent, remembering their mother’s speculations that Miss Vesey was suffering from a broken heart.
The sun was still bathing the cobbles of Dover in a warm, pale golden light when Penelope and the girls alighted from the carriage. But John, the coachman, was still muttering and prophesying bad weather, and after Penelope and her charges had left to look at the shops, he drove to the Green Man and bespoke rooms for all them for the night. He had a strong feeling in his rheumaticky bones that they would not be returning home that day.
The town of Dover was very like other English seaport towns except that it was cleaner and had fewer ruffians hanging about. Penelope found it a very picturesque place. On one side of the town the old castle was perched on the top of a very steep hill. On the other side was a great chalk hill, very nearly perpendicular, rising up from sixty to a hundred feet higher than the tops of the houses which huddled at the foot of the hill. Penelope was amazed to see cows grazing on a spot apparently fifty feet above the tops of the houses and measuring horizontally not more than twenty feet.
It made the perspective look excitingly and magically wrong somehow—like the perspectives in some early paintings. On the south side of the town stood the cliff described by Shakespeare in King Lear :
How fearful
And dizzy ‘tis to cast one’s eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles: half way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head …
On a previous visit Penelope had stood on the cliff, watching the men gathering plants below and had then retreated quickly from the edge of the cliff, almost overcome with dizziness. It had not changed at all since Shakespeare’s day. She envied the cows and sheep that grazed, unconcerned, at the very edge of the cliff as if they were browsing in some placid valley.
Penelope ushered the girls into Mr. Jobbin’s in the high street—to buy green tea on the one side of the shop and to examine silk ribbons on the other. The shop was pretty well filled. Shy farmers stood around the grocery counter, slicking down their hair and looking nervously out of the sides of their eyes at Mr. Jobbin’s smart young assistants who had on very fashionable cravats and leaped backwards and forwards over the counters, vaulting with amazing dexterity, their coattails flying behind them.
Penelope had taken to wearing caps which she felt suitable to her governess position. While the girls were looking through a box of ribbons, Penelope bought herself a new cap and stood back to wait until the girls were finished. It was then, as their plump gloved hands turned over the silk ribbons, that Penelope saw a flash of gold-colored ribbon. All at once she was transported back in her mind to that night at Almack’s where she had worn the dress with the gold ribbons. She felt suddenly weak and faint
and looked wildly round until she found a chair to sit down on. Gradually the faintness receded. She arose unsteadily and went to the silk counter to fetch her charges, but of Jane and Alice there was no sign.
Thoroughly worried and harassed, Penelope asked the stately Mr. Jobbin himself if he had seen the girls. “I saw them stepping out just some minutes ago, ma’am,” said Mr. Jobbin with a low bow. “They said something to me about getting some fresh air and that they would be meeting you at the Green Man for tea.”
“Oh!” said Penelope with a mixture of amusement and exasperation. “I believe the girls have gone to look for something less salubrious than fresh air.”
Now, thought Penelope, standing outside the shop, if I were making an assignation, where should I go? The quay, that was it!
As she walked down the steep hill towards the quay, she suddenly realised that great black clouds were massing on the horizon and a blustery wind had begun to blow from the sea. The tall, thin masts of the ships were bobbing and swaying as if some winter forest had come to life.
It did not take her long to spy the buxom figures of her charges, giggling and laughing with Farmer Galt’s sons.
Her charges accepted her rebuke with their customary good humor while the Galt brothers grinned and looked sheepish.
Penelope marched the girls up the windy hill to the Green Man. The wind was now blowing with full force and as they came in sight of the inn, an icy squall of rain struck them and sent them scurrying for shelter.
John was lounging at the entrance to the inn with a satisfied I-told-you-so look on his face.
“We’ll not get home to Wold,” he told Penelope with obvious satisfaction. “I took the liberty of bespeaking rooms for you and the Misses Jennings. Also a snug private parlor.”
Penelope could only thank him as she looked back at the rain-drenched street and up at the sky which was now boiling black above the town.
By the time she and the girls were sitting over a substantial tea in their parlor, the rain was already changing to snow. Sea and town were blotted out as great sheets of snow roared in from the Channel.