The Daring Debutantes Bundle

by M C Beaton

  The Captain went straight to the point. “It’s about Annabelle,” he said, pacing up and down. “One minute it’s on and the next it’s off. What’s happening?”

  “It looks as if she’s made up her mind to go home,” said Lady Emmeline sadly. “I’ll miss her.”

  The Captain looked at her with some impatience. “Well, I’m glad you got something out of it. After all, she’s cost you a pretty penny as it is.”

  “She has amused me and kept me young and furthermore she’s saved my life,” said Lady Emmeline with quaint dignity.

  “Quite,” said the Captain, fingering his side-whiskers. “But I mean to say, since she won’t have me, it’s not as if she’ll get your money.”

  “Don’t be vulgar,” snapped the Dowager Marchioness.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake…I mean, you’ve known me from the cradle,” said Captain MacDonald. “You ain’t going to go cutting me out of your will.”

  “You’re in my will … somewhere,” said Lady Emmeline drily, “and for your further information, I have no intention of dying for a great many years.”

  “Of course, of course,” said the Captain hurriedly, and with that he had to be content.

  DARKNESS fell on the old buildings of Lincoln’s Inn. Lawyers, solicitors, and clerks had at last gone home. With the agility of a cat a dark figure slid up the old brick wall to the windows of Messrs. Crindle and Bridge. There was a sharp cracking noise, and the figure flattened itself against the wail.

  There was silence except for the faint cry of the watch. Another crack and the window opened, and the dark figure slid over the sill like a shadow.

  As he held the stump of a candle over the piles of papers and boxes, the flame wavered backwards and forwards, the light eventually coming to rest on a long black box with the name Eversley stamped on the front.

  A silver-barrelled pistol appeared in strong hands lit by the candlelight. With a sharp crack the butt was brought down on the hasp of the box.

  “Now,” whispered a voice in the darkness. “Now, dear Emmeline, Dowager Marchioness of Eversley, we shall see what we shall see…”

  “WE can’t wait around for Jimmy any more,” snapped Lady Emmeline. “We may as well get started. Horley, bring our skates.”

  It was a fine clear moonlit night. The Egremonts’ skating party was to be held at the side of a small lake on the Chiswick road. A bleak winter sun had thawed the sooty snow on the roofs earlier in the day, and now long, wicked-looking icicles hung over the streets.

  At times like this, reflected Annabelle, she was almost sorry to be going home. There would be no more parties or balls once she was safely back in the rectory, suffering the lash of her mother’s sharp tongue. Bit by bit Annabelle was remembering her home life more clearly instead of the unreal dream picture of warmth and safety she had conjured up in her mind.

  But go she must. She had encouraged the Captain. Looking back on her year in London, she found it all had an air of unreality. She had tried to do her duty as far as her mother and Lady Emmeline were concerned, and look where it had led! For the first time in her young life Annabelle realised she had a duty to herself. Let her mother rant and rave and say she had rained her chances and the chances of her sisters. Her duty did not lie in making a distasteful marriage.

  The little lake was lit with brightly colored lanterns strung through the trees. The lake itself gleamed like beaten silver, vanishing off into a long silver alley which was the small frozen stream which fed it. Tables had been set up beside the lake, the powdered and liveried footmen stamping their feet and blowing on their white-gloved hands to keep warm.

  The chatter was all about the weather. They knew it couldn’t possibly last, but while it did, everyone was determined to enjoy the latest skating rage. A German band played cheerful waltzes, and the exotic smells of food from the buffet tables set up beside the ice mingled with the perfumes of the ladies.

  Annabelle had made her curtsy to Lord and Lady Egremont and had allowed Horley to help her on with her skates. She was standing on the edge of the ice wondering whether to launch off herself or wait for a partner when she suddenly saw Sylvester Varleigh.

  He was skating rapidly towards her and as he came nearer, Annabelle saw he was regarding her with a strange tenderness and warmth which altered the habitually austere lines of his face.

  She half turned—unbelieving—expecting to see Lady Jane or some other dasher standing behind her. But, no. Lord Varleigh’s warmth was all for her alone.

  He silently took her gloved hands in his and led her onto the ice.

  “I’ve missed you, Miss Quennell,” he said quietly, and Annabelle’s heart gave a dizzy lurch. All the barriers she had set up against him melted away before that single sentence.

  The reflection of the lights bobbed and danced dizzily on the ice under feet. Far above the stars wheeled drunkenly in their courses as Annabelle hung onto Lord Varleigh’s hands and wished never to let go.

  Skating faster and faster, he swept her far away to the other side of the lake which was empty and deserted. Still holding her hands, he drew her down onto a fallen log at the edge of the lake. There seemed to be so much they had to say—there suddenly seemed to be so little they had to say.

  His eyes glinted strangely in the moonlight as he bent his head towards hers.

  Annabelle closed her eyes as his lips came down on hers, pressing deeper and deeper, becoming more and more exploring until the pleasure and passion became almost a pain, and she clung to him, drunkenly and dizzily, freeing her hands only to clasp them behind his neck and draw him closer.

  His long white fingers slid under the fur of her mantle and began to caress her breast, and Annabelle stiffened in fright and trembled and then with a little sigh turned her face up to him again.

  “Annabelle! Annabelle!” Lady Emmeline’s voice echoed across the ice, and Lord Varleigh gently released Annabelle. Smiling gently into her eyes, he straightened her bonnet. “Run along,” he said softly, “and see what it is she wants. And then come back to me. Or I shall come looking for you.”

  With her face glowing and her eyes like the stars above, Annabelle flew across the long expanse of ice to where Lady Emmeline was teetering inexpertly on her skates.

  “Annabelle!” she cried. “We have been looking everywhere for you.”

  The “we,” Annabelle noticed with a sinking heart, was Lady Emmeline and Captain Jimmy MacDonald.

  “I’ll leave you two young things together,” said Lady Emmeline with her usual irritating giggle, and she waddled off rapidly on her skates towards the buffet, leaving them standing together.

  “I c-can’t speak to you just now, Jimmy,” faltered Annabelle, straining her eyes to the far side of the lake where Lord Varleigh was waiting for her.

  “I’m surprised at you, Annabelle,” said the Captain reprovingly. “Allowing a fellow like Varleigh to kiss you like that! He’s always sitting around kissing girls at parties, but it’s usually women like Lady Jane, not respectable debutantes. He must think you art fast.”

  “He d-doesn’t…I d-didn’t…,” stammered Annabelle, while all the time her mind raced and raced. Lord Varleigh had not said he loved her or wished to marry her. The fact that he had said he missed her did not add up to a proposal of marriage. She felt cold and betrayed and miserable. What did she know of this social world anyway? A world where lip service only was paid to the moral code and the only crime was to be found out.

  She dismally became aware that the Captain was skating her off towards where the river wound away through the trees and that her skates were following him with all the mindless action of a clockwork toy.

  She was too confused and upset and miserable to notice that he was leading her very far away from the party indeed.

  The flat frozen river grew narrower and narrower and darker and darker as the trees almost met overhead, the moonlight sending their skeletal shadows crisscrossing across the ice.

  Annabelle tugged at Jimmy�
�s large hands in a sudden attempt to free herself. He seemed like a large stranger, and she began to wonder whether she knew him at all. He finally stopped and spun her round to face him. She could not make out his expression as his face was in the shadows of the overhanging trees.

  “I’m sorry about this,” he said in a serious voice. “Emmeline left you all her money, you see. She won’t live long. I decided I was wasting my time trying to kill her. Now, if you had married me, as your husband I would have had control of your fortune. But you wouldn’t. Not you. But you had the luck of the devil. First Varleigh drags you from that shed and then that poor bitch Caroline took the bullet that was meant for you.”

  Annabelle wrestled desperately and futilely in his arms. “Th-this is one o-of y-your mad jokes,” she stammered wildly.

  “Joke!” he laughed, giving her an almost absent-minded little shake. “That’s a good one. I’ve never been more serious in my life.”

  “You killed Caroline,” whispered Annabelle, ceasing her struggles as the full enormity of what he was saying penetrated her frightened brain.

  “Quiet, while I tell you. I must tell you,” he went on in that calm, serious voice. “I watched you very carefully. Thought we were going to tie the knot after all. Then you said I made you sick. Now you shouldn’t have done that, Annabelle. That was naughty, especially when a man has every dun in London banging on his knocker.

  “So I broke into Emmeline’s lawyers’ office and read the will. If you die, I’m next in line to inherit. And why? What a joke! The irony of it! You were to get the money for saving the old girl’s life when I was trying to kill her. Rich, isn’t it? But for that, you wouldn’t have seen a penny of it once you had turned me down.

  “So now you’ve got to die. I hope you understand, Annabelle,” he went on in an earnest, almost boyish voice. “I’ve got my reputation as an officer and a gentleman to consider.”

  “What are you going to do to me?” whispered Annabelle.

  “This,” he said.

  He gave her a sharp push. She catapulted backwards across the ice and tumbled headlong into a jagged hole of black water.

  “Nicely done. Very nicely done,” said the Captain appreciatively as Annabelle’s bonnet disappeared beneath the water. “I thought Id never be able to hack through that ice in time.”

  He moved slowly forward on his skates. Annabelle’s pathetic little hand emerged and scrabbled at the jagged edge of the ice. Almost lazily he pried it loose with the toe of his skate.

  “I hope she’s not going to take too long,” he muttered to himself. “It’s demned cold.”

  Once again Annabelle surfaced and let out a watery scream, and the Captain sighed with impatience. Then he swung round with an oath as he heard an answering cry and heard the hiss of skates racing towards him across the ice.

  Lord Varleigh came speeding towards him with all the velocity of the bullet that had killed Caroline Dempsey. The Captain put up his fist, but Lord Varleigh had gained double his strength through fear and rage. He dodged under the Captain’s guard and planted the best flush hit of his life right on the point of the Captain’s chin.

  Captain Jimmy MacDonald hit the ice with an almighty crash and lay still.

  Lord Varleigh seized a dead branch from the bank and, lying flat on his stomach, muttering prayers and curses, he edged towards the hole. Annabelle, making a last desperate effort, felt the branch somehow with her numbed fingers and held on. Sliding right up to the edge of the hole and praying that the ice would hold, Lord Varleigh slid his arms into the water and under her armpits and then held cm like grim death while he hallooed and shouted for help. His arms were rapidly turning numb with the cold and Annabelle had fallen unconscious—he hoped—and was swaying limply in them, her head just above the icy water, looking as white and as pale as the indifferent moon above.

  Just when he felt he could stand the strain no longer, he heard the blessed sounds of answering shouts. Soon he was surrounded by a crowd of guests and footmen. Willing hands helped him to support Annabelle, ropes were brought to tie up the Captain, and ladders were brought to place across the hole. All the while Lady Emmeline teetered and squawked, “It can’t be true. Not Jimmy. It can’t be true.”

  Annabelle was wrapped in blankets, hot fiery drinks were poured down her throat, and slowly her large eyes fluttered open.

  The watching members of the ton gave a great sigh. Was it relief? Or was it disappointment?

  After all, it would have made a far better piece of gossip had she died.

  Chapter Twelve

  On the same evening a more international drama was taking place.

  At the Congress of Vienna the tinkling sleigh parties drove nightly home from the Wienerwald, and the music of a succession of balls, concerts, tableaux vivants and masques kept the reelected statesmen in their powdered wigs and silk-covered calves too busy to pay any attention to the threatening rumors from France.

  On March 7 while Vienna prepared for another great ball and the Czar of All the Russias spent a pleasant afternoon judging which of two ladies could dress the quickest—one managing the process in a minute and a quarter and the other in a minute and fifty seconds—a courier arrived at Metternich’s house with dispatches from Genoa. The Chancellor was too tired from the exhausting combination of business and revelry to open them directly.

  After resting for a while on his couch, he felt once again strong enough to deal with affairs of state. And he opened the dispatch.

  Napoleon had escaped from Elba. The Sovereigns of Europe, assembled in Vienna, had been too busy to pay attention to that one ever-present threat. And they had let the Corsican ogre escape from his cage.

  IN Berkeley Square, while Annabelle Quennell tossed and turned in a feverish sleep upstairs, Lord Varleigh paced Lady Emmeline’s drawing room and dealt with a diplomatic problem of his own.

  Lady Emmeline had hysterically protested that Annabelle’s near drowning had been an accident. Lord Varleigh’s servants had placed the bound Captain in Lady Emmeline’s cellars while their master tried to make the Dowager Marchioness see sense. Lord Varleigh did not know of the Captain’s other attempts at murder or that he had been responsible for Caroline Dempsey’s death. He only knew that Captain Jimmy MacDonald, for some inexplicable reason, had tried to stop him from rescuing Annabelle. In his opinion the Captain should stand trial for attempted murder.

  Lady Emmeline wept and pleaded. She had no son of her own, she said. Jimmy was like a son to her. She would die if anything happened to him.

  In despair Lord Varleigh sent a footman to rout out the Captain’s Colonel.

  Colonel James Ward-Price was a clever man on the field of battle and incredibly stupid in peacetime. He loved and admired Captain Jimmy MacDonald as standing for everything the perfect soldier should be. Lord Varleigh could not have sent for a worse judge.

  The Colonel insisted on hearing Captain Jimmy MacDonald’s version of the story.

  The Captain was led into the room with his hands behind his back. He looked as if he were about to face a firing squad and he indeed thought the game was up.

  The first glimmer of hope he had was when Lady Emmeline rushed to him and threw her pudgy arms round his great body and smeared rouge and gray powder on his chest. She was weeping and exclaiming over his bound hands and blaming Lord Varleigh for his “inhuman treatment.”

  Then his Colonel ordered the footmen to unbind him and told him in a kindly gruff voice to sit down and tell them what it was all about because Miss Quennell was in a heavily sedated and feverish sleep.

  That sulky, brooding, almost childish look that Lord Varleigh remembered came over the Captain’s face and he leaned forward in the chair provided for him, his hands on his knees and began to talk earnestly.

  “Look, it’s like this. There’s no use me trying to say I haven’t behaved badly because I have. Annabelle had just told me finally that she was going home and didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I had seen her earli
er kissing Varleigh and taxed her with it. She laughed in my face and said Varleigh was another rake and she had been leading him on just in order to tease him but that it didn’t matter anyway because she was quitting London and she would never see him again either. Seems she’s got a tendre for some chap in Yorkshire and she prefers him to all of us.”

  “Go on,” said Lord Varleigh. His face was very white.

  “Well…she fell backwards into this hole in the ice. I was as mad as fire with her, and I thought I would let her have a dunking to teach her a lesson. Then right at that moment, you arrived on the scene, Varleigh, and I was jealous of you. I could still see you and Annabelle kissing and caressing in my mind’s eye. Oh, God!” The Captain groaned and buried his head in his hands. There was a shocked silence.

  Both Lady Emmeline and Colonel Ward-Price were convinced that he was telling the truth. Lord Varleigh thought that if he weren’t, then it was a consummate piece of acting.

  But Captain Jimmy MacDonald had just remembered that the broken window and deed box would be discovered in the morning when Lady Emmeline’s lawyers returned to work—hence the realistic groan.

  The Colonel cleared his throat. “Don’t take on so, my boy,” he said, placing his hand awkwardly on the Captain’s shoulder. “You behaved disgracefully, of course, and apologies are certainly the order of the day. But I don’t think any of us in this room could find it in his or her heart to prosecute. I … what is it, man?”

  An officer had bustled unceremoniously into the room and handed him a sealed letter. The Colonel broke it open and gave an exclamation.

  “Napoleon has escaped!” he said. “He is even now believed to be in France marshalling his troops.

  “Come, my boy,” he said, helping the Captain to his feet. “Your duty is clear. You will fight for your country once more. I am sure, my lord, you would not wish to see one of England’s finest soldiers in chains at a moment like this. Come, my lord, you have served with distinction yourself!”

  Lord Varleigh looked thoughtfully at the Captain. After all, all the criminal riffraff of the taverns and gutters would once more be marching to war as well. Most of them were better employed on the field of battle.