Milady in Love (The Changing Fortunes Series, Vol. 5)

by M C Beaton

  “My fisherman husband was killed in a drunken brawl, and I took over his organization.

  “When I read the viscount’s advertisement in the local paper, I saw my chance. My convent education had not taught me much, but I felt sure I could pass muster. How much better to run things from inside the castle itself.

  “Life became easier when I arranged for two English accomplices to obtain posts as footmen in the castle almost immediately after my arrival.”

  She fell silent and tilted her head a little to one side, listening to the diminishing sounds of bustle coming from outside as one by one the servants finished their duties and went to bed.

  “But you started after juicier game,” said Yvonne. “You saw a chance of becoming Lady Anselm.”

  “And I would have succeeded,” said Patricia, her eyes blazing with fury, “had you not gone out of your way to stop me. Well, you shall pay dearly for your folly.”

  “How? In what way?” demanded Yvonne through dry lips.

  “I am taking you over to France, where you will be held prisoner until I have secured the affections of Lord Anselm.”

  “But why should you want him? Why?”

  “He is rich, I admit. But I love him, love him as a silly virgin like you could not even begin to understand.”

  Her anger subsided as quickly as it had risen, leaving her as cold as ice. The pistol in her hand did not waver.

  Keep her talking, thought Yvonne. I must keep her talking.

  “The men in that boat who kidnapped me,” she said. “They were in disguise. I have a feeling they were very young.”

  “They are little more than boys. The young ones are the loyal ones. The older ones, because I am a woman, try to take over from me.”

  “I went to the Kennel,” said Yvonne. “An old man there said he had seen your ghost. But if you left when you were a child, how did he recognize you?”

  Patricia shrugged. “The eyes of the old can discern the child in the grown woman. He talked, and it made the people of the Kennel run for hiding. I went back twice to remind myself what might await me if my courage faltered.”

  “It was you at the window that evening,” said Yvonne. “You looked in at the window and saw him put the diamonds on me.”

  “That was one of my accomplices, one of the footmen. I was sure he must be mistaken. I told him it was impossible to see clearly through the leaded panes. But he said that one of them was clear, and by putting his eye to it, he saw Lord Anselm put the tiara on your head. I knew then I had little hope. I knew even then that you must be removed. And yet I hoped… But you, with your sluttish ways, entrapped him that night in Truro. I saw you both at his bedroom window.”

  “That was you I saw.” Yvonne sighed. “But you are wrong. I was only in his bedchamber because I thought I saw you in the courtyard of the inn with two men. I ran to his room.”

  “Could you not leave well enough alone?” demanded Patricia. “But I can still have him—without you around.”

  “How do you plan to get out of the castle without being seen?” asked Yvonne. “There is always someone about.”

  “They will all soon be asleep.”

  “But someone among the servants must have suspected something,” said Yvonne desperately. “I saw the boat below the castle.”

  Patricia gave a short laugh. “When anyone got too curious I had my accomplices frighten them with tales of the ghost of Black Jack. They are very superstitious.”

  All at once Yvonne realized how quiet the castle had become.

  “Yes.” Patricia smiled, reading her thoughts. “The time has come.”

  She stood up. “You will walk in front of me. Remember, should we meet anyone, you will smile and nod. One look of warning, one sound from you, and I will blow your brains out.”

  Yvonne rose slowly from the bed. “Are you leaving the diamonds?” she asked. “I would have thought a felon such as you would want to take them.”

  “I shall have them, legitimately, when I am Lady Anselm. Now, move!”

  As she passed the toilet table, Yvonne brushed it lightly with her fingers and they closed on a small pair of nail scissors.

  Not much of a weapon, but perhaps it could be put to some use.

  As Patricia urged her out of the bedroom, Yvonne held the scissors down at her side and snipped at the red and gold fringe of her robe.

  Patricia thrust the cold barrel of the pistol against Yvonne’s back.

  “To the dining room,” she whispered. “Our dining room, where we have spent so many cozy evenings together.”

  Numbly, Yvonne walked along to the dining room at the end of the corridor and pushed open the door.

  “Go over to the wainscoting,” she said, closing the door gently behind them, “and press that carved knob to the left of the fireplace.”

  Yvonne did as she was bidden and gasped in terror as a panel slid back, exposing a flight of stone steps leading downward.

  Her last hope of escape had gone. There was no way now that she could meet some servant or wandering guest and try to get help.

  Stumbling a little with fatigue and fright, she went on through the panel. There was a click as Patricia closed it behind them, leaving them in total darkness.

  With the hard muzzle of the gun against her back, Yvonne groped her way down and down.

  “How did you find this staircase?” she asked.

  “Someone in the Kennel in the old days had the original plans of the castle, dating from the days when it was a lazar house. They were going to try to reach my grandfather before he was hanged. But the guards lied about the day of the hanging and hanged him a week earlier than anyone expected. But we kept the plans.”

  After Yvonne felt she had been groping her way downward for an eternity, she came up against a wooden wall.

  Patricia leaned over her shoulder and pressed a catch. “Go through and stand still and don’t move.”

  Patricia reached past her and opened a door. The passage came out at the back of a dusty closet. The closet door opened to face the cellar door.

  “It is locked, but no matter,” said Patricia, taking a key from her pocket.

  The well-oiled door swung open silently.

  Two figures detached themselves from the shadows of the cellar and walked forward to meet them. With a sinking heart Yvonne recognized two of the footmen—Abel and Jeb. She looked pleadingly at them. They were so very young, surely very little older than she was herself.

  But their eyes were shining with hero worship and excitement as they held up a lantern and looked at their leader—Ellen Tremayne, or Patricia Cottingham, as she was now called.

  “I suppose you plan to take me down to the old dungeons and from there by boat to France,” said Yvonne.

  “Very clever of you.” Patricia sneered. “You did not think we were going to walk you out of the main door of the castle!”

  If, thought Yvonne with a surge of hope, they planned to take her out from the castle by boat, then perhaps someone might see them. She snipped busily away at yet another piece of fringe. The footman called Jeb raised the lantern higher and looked at her. Yvonne hoped he would not look down at the floor, where shreds of red and gold fringe laid a trail from the door of the cellar.

  “We’ll take her out the usual way,” said Patricia.

  “She knows the usual way,” said Jeb.

  “What?”

  “I was hiding in the hall last night and heard them talking, her and his lordship. She was telling him how she rung that fire bell when she thought he was going to propose marriage to you and stumbled over the secret entrance.”

  Naked hate blazed in Patricia’s eyes, and she struck Yvonne across her face. Yvonne fell to the floor but leaped up almost immediately and darted to where the black rope of the fire bell hung down.

  But before she could reach it, Abel seized her in a cruel grip and swung her around to face Patricia.

  “Little fool,” hissed Patricia. “One more move like that and I shal
l shoot you dead. Since you know where the secret door is, go there.”

  “I have forgotten,” said Yvonne, looking wildly around.

  Patricia nodded to Abel, who urged Yvonne forward, still holding her in a tight grip.

  “She knows where it is now,” said Patricia. “Release her.”

  Yvonne stood looking down at the small canvas-covered door.

  “It’ll be a long time ’fore she can kiss his lordship again.” Jeb laughed.

  There was an awful silence for a few moments, and then she heard Patricia’s voice, high and strained, demanding, “What do you mean?”

  “Last night in the hall,” said Jeb, “they was hugging and kissing fit to beat the band.”

  There was another silence. Yvonne turned around. Patricia was looking straight ahead, her eyes completely blank.

  Then she said in a quiet, controlled voice, “Go through, Yvonne. I am right behind you.”

  Yvonne turned around and soon felt the hard point of the gun being driven into her back again.

  She got down on her hands and knees and began to crawl through.

  “Stand still on the other side,” shouted Patricia. “Remember—you cannot escape.”

  Yvonne stood cautiously upright at the top of the stairs on the other side. She could hear the thud and pound of the sea far below.

  Then, all at once, Patricia’s voice came right behind her and Patricia’s venomous voice hissed in her ear, “Goodbye, you little slut!”

  Patricia pushed with all her might and Yvonne went flying.

  Had Yvonne been prepared for the attack, then she might have gone rigid, might have tried to save herself, and broken every bone in her body tumbling down the stone staircase.

  But as it was, she was so shocked that she took off from the top of the stairs like a bird, sailing out into the blackness. Before she could collect her wits, before she quite knew what had happened, she came to land with a sickening thump.

  A roaring world of sea and spray and terror whirled about her eyes and then she lost consciousness.

  At the top of the stairs, Patricia called to her two henchmen. “Come through here and bring that lantern.”

  She moved down the stairs a little to leave room, and then, when the two men had crawled through, she said, “Hold that lantern high. I want to make sure that’s the end of her.”

  Jeb gasped. “You shouldn’t ha’ killed her. You said we was to wait till nightfall and get the others to take her off to France.”

  “Less trouble this way,” said Patricia with seeming indifference.

  “But there’ll be a great search when she’s found missing.”

  “Her body will be washed out to sea,” said Patricia, “and the next tide will bring it in down the coast. Hold that lantern up.”

  But the feeble light of the lantern only illuminated halfway down the shattered steps.

  “I cannot risk going down there,” said Patricia. “Nor can you. She told Anselm about this secret way, and he may by some ill chance be already looking for her. There is no way she could have survived such a fall. In any case, the tide is coming in.”

  The two men, white to the lips, backed through the hole and into the cellar.

  “You’ve never done that afore,” whispered Abel. “You’ve never killed anyone.”

  Patricia looked at him coldly.

  “She was so very beautiful,” said Jeb in an awed voice.

  “Oh, I admit she was fair to look on,” said Patricia. Her eyes suddenly filled with tears. “Why do you stare at me so? Do you think it was easy for me? Do you think it was easy for me being brought up in the Kennel? I was six when I left there, but I am determined never to return to that level of filth and ignorance and poverty.”

  “We thought they did well, them wreckers,” mumbled Abel.

  “They never wrecked anything worth wrecking,” said Patricia, “until my mother did it for them. If they did get anything, they squandered it or brought the militia down on our heads. When I was five, I saw ten men—ten—from the Kennel kicking out their lives on a gibbet.”

  She took a deep breath. “Let us get out of here. I am weary. I have a part to play when the tide washes her body up on the beach.”

  With drooping shoulders, she led the way out of the cellar.

  The viscount strolled about the lawns, watching as the last marquee was brought to the ground.

  His mind was full of thoughts of Yvonne. Could he dare hope she might love him—love him as a woman should love a man, and not as a girl forms a tendre for an older man?

  Patricia must be sent away. That was another thought that troubled him. He had a guilty conscience. He had, at the beginning, treated her more familiarly than he should have treated any governess, however gently bred. And, yes, he had encouraged her to believe he might propose marriage.

  But surely his behavior toward her in the past weeks should have driven any such ambitions from her head. He had been correct and formal every time he had spoken to her. But he still cursed himself for his own folly.

  His mind swung back to Yvonne. He had no right to propose marriage to her while she was still so young. She must see something of London society first.

  It was only when he had been sending invitations out to the ball that he had realized what a dearth of eligible men there was in the county.

  He would send Yvonne to London for the Little Season. He racked his brains trying to think of a suitable household where she might live and a suitable chaperone to bring her out.

  He became aware that Fairbairn was at his elbow and was trying to get his attention.

  “It’s the diamonds,” said the butler reproachfully. “Apart from the ones that my lady was wearing to the ball, they are on the table in the morning room in full view.”

  “What a fool I am!” said the viscount. “Listen, Fairbairn, I allowed my ward to wear the jewels because I became convinced she did not take them. But if she did not take them, then someone else most certainly did. I should never have left them lying around. Come with me and we shall find another safe place for them.”

  Fairbairn followed his master to the morning room. After some thought, the viscount decided it best to put the jewels with his own jewels in the strongbox in his bedchamber.

  “And when I have done that,” he said, “I had better recover the others from my ward.”

  When he walked along to Yvonne’s bedchamber, he vowed he would not wake her, although the temptation to speak to her again and to study the expression in her eyes was very strong.

  He scratched at the door of her room.

  No reply.

  After some hesitation, he pushed open the door and went in.

  Sunlight winked on the tiara and necklace on the toilet table.

  But Yvonne’s bed was unslept in, and of Yvonne there was no sign.

  He seemed to hear Gustave’s voice in his head telling him that one day he might find he had lost something more precious than the Anselm diamonds.

  He crossed to the window and opened it and looked out. The rising wind streamed into the room. Black clouds were beginning to cover the sun, and the sea had turned a greenish-black color—a sure sign of a coming storm.

  Sharp, irrational fear gripped him. The sound of the waves pounding at the base of the cliffs was greedy and evil.

  He tried to tell himself she had gone off on one of her mad expeditions. But all of the strange things that had happened to her crowded into his mind.

  He went next door to Patricia’s room and opened the door. She lay fast asleep. There were the marks of recently shed tears on her cheeks, and once again he felt guilty, feeling obscurely he must have been the cause of her distress.

  He turned about and went downstairs, calling for his servants, rousing them from their sleep, demanding his ward must be found.

  Then he went to the stables to look for Gustave.

  With any luck, he might find Yvonne in Gustave’s room.

  But Gustave, struggling from sleep, imme
diately looked worried and alarmed when he heard Yvonne was missing.

  Bursting into voluble French, he insisted the governess be awakened and questioned. He, Gustave, had thought long and seriously about his mistress’s suspicions of Miss Cottingham. He felt they had not taken Yvonne seriously enough.

  But guilt over his own behavior toward the governess made the viscount insist the castle and grounds be searched first.