My Dearest Enemy

by Connie Brockway

  Francesca’s startled glance turned abruptly into a burst of laughter. “Yes, I shall definitely have to stay.”

  Francesca ushered her through an arched doorway into a small gallery. A number of portraits faced the windows, a distinct family resemblance declared itself in intense, improbably blue-green eyes and sensualist’s lips.

  They stopped before a recent oil of an adolescent male built like a scarecrow. He had the Thorne eyes and the Thorne lips and a large nose with what looked like a break to it. The artist had chosen—in Lily’s opinion unwisely—to position him in an aristocratic pose, one large-boned hand on his hip and one leg forward. Unfortunately, it only accented his spindly calves and knobby wrists.

  “Who is that?” Lily asked.

  “That is the only Thorne who really has any attachment to Mill House. That is Avery Thorne.”

  That skinny, large-nosed, boy was Avery Thorne? That was the other contender for Mill House?

  “This was painted five years ago,” Francesca went on, “when he was seventeen. I haven’t seen him for a few years now, but I have been told he’s filled out.”

  “That’s nice. Is he very … bright? I mean he looks a sullen sort of weed—” She broke off abruptly, blushing profusely.

  “Here now,” Francesca chuckled, “that’s my darling cousin you’re speaking about. But, to answer your question, yes, if the infrequent letters he wrote my father were any indication, he is bright. Decidedly bright.”

  Lily studied the portrait warily. The boy’s nose had probably been broken being thrust where it had no business. His eyes were too deep-set … hooded. His mouth was sneering.

  The thought intruded that perhaps she was being harsh on Avery Thorne for no other reason than she fully intended to beat him out of part of his inheritance. She dislodged it. Being a man, he’d have any number of opportunities to secure his future. She had one. This one.

  Chapter Three

  The French Congo, Central Africa

  March 1888

  Avery picked up his pace, swatting at the mosquitoes draining blood from the back of his neck. This deep into the interior, the damn things grew as big as song-birds. He withdrew the gnawed stub of his cigar from between his teeth and blew a thick bluish cloud, hoping to discourage the less committed bloodsuckers.

  As Avery entered the camp, his former college classmate, Karl Dhurmann, looked up from where he stirred a noxious-smelling stew. Propped against the trunk of a mahogany tree sat John Neigl, the American leader of their expedition. In spite of the heat, he was wrapped in blankets, the trembling in his body pronounced, his eyes half-closed.

  He’d contracted malaria six weeks ago. The sunken-cheeked apparition he was now mocked any resemblance to the burly young man who’d led them so confidently forth. Luckily, they were only ten miles from Stanleyville, where Avery had spent the day booking John’s passage back to Europe.

  “How goes it, old man?” Avery asked.

  “Simply grand,” John said around his chattering teeth. “Did you get things arranged? Am I to go home?”

  “Yes,” Avery said. “You’re going home.” Noting the tension draining from John’s taut face, Avery wondered for one moment where he would have been shipped had he been the one to succumb to malaria. Certainly no home awaited him, no haven where he had the right to be and where he would always find welcome. Not yet.

  “That’s not all I got.” Avery withdrew a parcel from his pocket. “I have a package from England.”

  “From whom?” John asked and Avery was gratified to see a spark of interest in his dulled eyes.

  In answer Avery tore open the wrapping. An envelope fell out, his name scrawled in a decisive hand upon its surface. On the back was written the name “Lillian Bede, Mill House, Devon, England.”

  “It’s from that woman,” he said.

  “What woman?” Karl asked, his interest engaged. “You don’t know any women. You’re not a woman’s sort of chap. Never were. Unless you were leading a secret double life during college, one as frail cantankerous scholar and the other as a debonair lady-killer.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” John murmured. “Old Avery’s some sort of damned human chameleon.” His face gleamed in the camp light with oily perspiration. “This Godawful journey doesn’t seem to have done him any harm. I hate to have to remind you both, but I am supposed to be the vigorous, hirsute leader of this expedition. Avery’s role was to have been the consumptive, albeit witty, chronicler.”

  Avery shrugged uncomfortably. There was no mistaking the bittersweet flavor of truth. Avery hadn’t anticipated taking to such a dangerous existence. He’d certainly never expected to flourish in it.

  “I’m sure the proper order of things will be restored once you’re back on your feet, John.” Uncomfortable with the turn of conversation, Avery held up the letter. “What I’d like to know is how in the bloody hell she managed to get this delivered out here?”

  “Women have ways,” Karl said mysteriously. He scraped the last of the tinned beef into the blackened pot with his knife and then wiped the blade clean on his tongue.

  “Don’t they teach simple table etiquette where you come from?” John asked petulantly.

  Karl’s only answer was the clicking of his pocket watch lid as he flicked it open and shut. He’d once told Avery that it reminded him that no hour was promised, no tomorrow assured. And that name and family and home, all a man owned, all a man held dear, could all vanish in minutes.

  A civil war had resulted in the dissolution of Karl’s country—and that of his entire aristocratic family.

  As if he had read his thoughts and would not suffer his pity, Karl said without looking up, “Why don’t you read the damn letter.”

  Avery sliced open the envelope, puffed into the opening, and upended the packet. Eighteen ten-pound bills fluttered to the muddy ground. “What the bloody hell?”

  “Perhaps the letter might explain,” John suggested.

  “Right,” Avery said and read aloud, “ ‘Mr. Thorne, I have been assured that any persons traveling through the Congo will eventually come to a place called Stanleyville and that this letter shall there find your hand.

  “ ‘Perhaps, in the future, you would like to inform me of where I might send my correspondence? I am sure you will not have realized that should I fail to furnish you an adequate allowance I shall have broken the terms of my guardianship of you, thereby possibly endangering my own anticipated inheritance?’ ”

  How dare the chit question his honor? Avery thought incredulously. She was actually baiting him! Clearly she thought she could win this preposterous challenge that Horatio had forced her—forced all of them—into.

  “ ‘Indeed,’ ” he read on, “ ‘I am sure your continued inaccessibility is mere happenstance and not a concentrated effort to put yourself beyond my reach.’ ”

  “Why the suspicious, low-minded … female!” Avery burst out, winning a startled look from Karl. “Listen to this. ‘Still, one can’t be too careful when dealing with men.’ ”

  “Men?” His brows climbed. “I am a gentleman. Though I daresay Miss Bede—consorting with those suffragists as she does—will have had such scant traffic with gentlemen she might be incapable of recognizing one.”

  Karl stared at him with a bemused expression. “What a marvelous imagination,” he muttered.

  “I won’t even attempt to recognize to whom or what you’re referring.”

  “Good,” Karl said. “Now about this letter …” he trailed off invitingly.

  Avery read on.

  “ ‘I shall deliver into your hands your quarterly allowance. Now, to business: I have looked over the bills you left outstanding upon your flight from London—’

  “ ‘Flight from London!’ The insufferable chit makes it sound as if I were running away in the most nefarious manner imaginable.”

  A wheezing laugh erupted from John’s throat. “I swear, I can’t remember being so well entertained. A woman who can match your let
hal sarcasm.”

  Avery chose to ignore this. After all, the man was ill. He turned the sheet over. “ ‘I have looked over the bills you left outstanding upon your flight from London and paid them. It is doubtless my plebian antecedents which have me drawing faint breath over settling an account of 50 pounds for a hunting jacket. Pray, sir, satisfy my curiosity. Could you not hunt in, say, a simple jacket? Or would the fox take exception?

  “ ‘Needless to say, I shall not be paying such bills again. I have decided to allot you a quarterly allowance of 180 pounds. Here then, is your first installment.

  “ ‘Should you find this is inadequate to meet your needs, I suggest you learn to need less.

  “ ‘Cordially yours,

  “ ‘Lillian Bede

  “ ‘Post script: You are welcome at Mill House for Christmas. Your trip to Africa has quite captured your cousin Bernard’s imagination.’ ”

  “What a wonderful woman,” Karl declared. “I swear I shall propose as soon as I return to England.”

  Avery lifted an eyebrow in his friend’s direction. “Nonsense. She’s not your type at all.”

  “How would you know?” Karl scoffed.

  “Because you, Karl, like any man of discernment, admire soft, feminine women and she’s not. I saw an illustration of her in one of the wretched socialist rags. At best she’s a scrawny, hollow-eyed croneling.”

  “Croneling?” John tilted his head in perplexity.

  “Croneling. Noun. One who has yet to achieve cronehood. The adolescent phase of the British crone,” Avery lectured.

  “But the papers may have made her look ugly on purpose,” John protested. Avery watched the renewed animation on his two friends’ faces and offered a silent word of thanks to Lily Bede.

  “John, old man, a beautiful woman can have anything she desires simply because of the symmetrical arrangement of her features, the chance of pigmentation of her eye, the shape of the pore which molds the texture of her hair. If she’s a smart woman then she need only add to what nature bequeathed her by training her mouth to form more smiles than frowns. Having done this she can assure herself a life of being petted and cosseted and indulged.”

  “What is your point?” Karl asked.

  “My point,” Avery said, “is that as her letter attests, Miss Bede is an intelligent woman, if an annoying one. Therefore if she had even a modicum of good looks she would by now have used them to get herself wed.”

  John did not look convinced. “But perhaps the illustrator made her ugly because he did not like her politics.”

  “Yes. Her politics. Which only supports my theory regarding her lack of looks. Ask yourselves this, gentlemen,” he said, his kind smile declaring his patience with his friends’ obtuseness. “Have you ever seen a good-looking suffragist?”

  Devon, England

  August 1888

  “Olly olly oxen free!” Lily leapt into the air, tucked her arms around her knees and landed in the center of the mill pond, making an enormous and enormously satisfying splash. She came up laughing, shaking her head, sending showers of diadem sparked water flying across the rippling surface of the pool.

  From the edge of the bank, Bernard stared down at her in fascination.

  “Your turn, old chum!” Lily called, lifting her arm and waving the boy on.

  “Maybe I should wait until I swim better,” Bernard said dubiously.

  Lily scrunched up her nose. “You swim beautifully right now.”

  The boy’s sallow face flushed with pleasure and Lily was glad of the inspiration that had led her to—not exactly sneak—but rather circumnavigate Evelyn’s too intent supervision for these occasional swimming lessons.

  Being the child of two nonconformists had its boons, Lily thought, floating on her back and waiting for Bernard to scramble down the bank. Swimming was one of them.

  A moment later she heard Bernard making his entrance into the water. A gulp, a gasp—she waited. Her heartbeat jumped slightly, until she heard his breathing, even and unimpaired by the dreadful wheezing that sometimes tormented him.

  “Do you really think I swim beautifully?” he asked shyly, dog-paddling to her side.

  “Wonderfully,” Lily avowed, flipping over and treading the water so that her chin bobbed in and out. “I doubt any one of the other boys at school can swim half so well. If they can swim at all.” She grinned impishly. “It isn’t exactly a pastime one associates with gentlemen.”

  “Well, I like it,” Bernard declared. “And I am a gentleman … aren’t I?”

  “Decidedly.”

  Her confirmation brought a flood of relief to his worried-looking face.

  “Is it so important to be a gentleman, Bernard?” she asked gently.

  Her question brought an expression of shock to his narrow, pinched little face. “Of course. I am a Thorne. It’s my heritage. It’s—it’s English. Without gentlemen the world would be an uncivilized place.”

  “Who says?” Lily teased.

  But Bernard wasn’t about to be teased about something so important. “Avery Thorne.”

  “Hmph.” She should have known. Avery Thorne. Idol to small boys and tabloid readers across the nation.

  “Is something wrong?” Bernard, ever sensitive to the emotions of those around him, was once more looking worried.

  How she hated that expression on his ten-year-old face. If she had her way, it would not make another appearance this afternoon. Today they would both play hooky, she from all the cares and responsibilities of running an estate, and he from those of becoming a gentleman.

  “Nope,” she said.

  The sun was warm on her face as she lay back to float in the cool water, her hair streaming around her like black silk. She grinned again and Bernard caught the infectious pleasure she felt in this simple activity. He smiled back.

  “Want to learn how to dive?”

  Lily, standing beside Francesca and Evelyn at the top step leading down to the drive, tapped the envelope she held against her chin. Below a lorry driver and the head gardener, Hob, man-handled a huge wooden box from the wagon’s bed.

  “Is that another letter from one of your former maids?” Francesca asked, glancing incuriously at the lorry. “However do you manage to pawn off all these girls as widows with infant children on unsuspecting households? Does no one think it odd that you’ve employed no less than twelve recently bereaved widows in the last two years?”

  Lily didn’t answer, paying only partial attention. They’d had this conversation before. Primarily young, unmarried pregnant women staffed Mill House.

  Along with room, board, and a small salary, after the girls’ babies were born Lily wrote them sterling letters of recommendation, gave them a nice bonus, and if necessary, manufactured replicant marriage licenses. She then shipped them off to various remote households that were in pressing need of servants. It was an entirely satisfactory arrangement all around. She wasn’t sure why it so amused Francesca.

  “Whatever do you think it can be?” Evelyn whispered, gesturing at the crate.

  Lily glanced around, noting as she did an ivy vine above the front door. She’d have to snip it. Her gaze traveled with fierce, proprietal pride over the rest of Mill House. The pink granite steps sparkled, the brass doorplate gleamed, the rich wooden patina of the door shone.

  “Maybe it is some sort of bomb Lily’s suffragist friends want stored,” Francesca offered. “I swear I wouldn’t put it past that Polly Makepeace.”

  Lily speared Francesca with a look of mild reproof. Polly Makepeace may not have the most agreeable personality but her commitment to various important women’s causes was unquestionable.

  “Did that letter come with it?” Evelyn asked.

  Lily nodded.

  “Well, why don’t you read it?” Francesca suggested.

  “It’s not addressed to me. It’s to Bernard,” Lily said, unable to hide the frustration this fact engendered.

  “Bernard,” Francesca said, “went back to school last
week. I’m sure he’d want us to read whatever direction comes with whatever this is so that whatever it is might be properly cared for.”

  “Yes,” Evelyn agreed. “I believe Bernard would.”

  “Really?” Lily asked. The two women nodded vigorously. “Well, if you’re sure I couldn’t be accused of prying—”

  “Oh, no!” Evelyn protested.

  “You, Lily?” Francesca asked, her eyes wide with feigned shock. “Never.”

  Lily decided to be mollified. She opened the envelope and pulled out the sheet inside. “It’s from him,” she said with flat triumph.

  No further explanation was necessary. Evelyn pursed her lips in the approved expression of censure and Francesca grinned.

  Lily cleared her throat. “He begins, ‘March 14, 1888. Dear Cousin and whoever else might chance to read this letter.’ ” Lily snorted derisively. “ ‘I hope you enjoy Billy, as man-hating, crusty an aberration of nature ever to lurk upon earth. Billy here is actually a female. Please inform your dear guardian that any chance resemblance between old Billy here and, well, whomever is unintentional. Even the name ‘Billy,’ so similar in cadence to her name, is merely a curious coincidence.’ ”

  “Why are you snickering, Lily?” Evelyn asked in an affronted voice. “The blackguard is twitting you.”

  “I know,” Lily said, finally giving vent to her laughter. “He is so utterly impossible. And obvious!”

  “Read on,” Francesca urged.

  “ ‘So I really think it best that in the interests of chivalry we fellows switch Billy’s gender since Billy is beyond caring. Billy here was terrorizing a village when he/she/it succumbed to a shot from my Ruger .44. A shot, I might modestly add, which has resulted in the local tribesmen declaring me a god.’ Ha!” Lily broke out.

  “Lily, please,” Francesca pleaded.

  “Oh, all right.” She continued. “ ‘It is quite nice being a god, Cousin. I suggest you try it someday, though I must point out that an elevation to god status is unlikely in your present circumstances. But be brave, Bernard, I assure you there are households in America and Africa and even Britain where a man still rules his fate.’ The smug, officious—”