Drusilla could not help herself. She began to laugh. He had the habit of saying all those dreadful things which she often thought—but could never publicly utter.
‘There,’ he said encouragingly, patting her hand. ‘You are feeling better already. A good laugh cures many ills. May I ask what brought that one on?’
‘Oh, it was because you come out with such outrageous remarks. Do you say such things to everyone—or am I especially favoured?’
They were in the library now, a large room full of books, most of which looked as though they had never been disturbed for years. There was a massive table in the middle with a pair of chairs before it. Devenish led her to one of them.
‘This is more comfortable than I had expected,’ he told her approvingly. ‘And, yes, I have noticed that my naughtier bon mots meet with your approval—particularly when we are alone. I have observed that when I perpetrate them in company, in your desire to be seen as an innocent young widow you always suppress your natural instincts to laugh.’
He must have been watching her carefully during the short time in which he had known her to be so aware of what she was doing and thinking. Drusilla did not wish him to know what she had just learned of him although the temptation for her to confront him with her new knowledge was great.
Instead she said, roasting him a little for that was all he deserved, ‘It is not every man, m’lord, who, seeing a woman in distress, would regard a library as a suitable place to take her to recover herself.’
‘But you are not every woman, either, or I would not have brought you here!’
Whether he knew it or not his cavalier manner with her was assisting her to recover, Drusilla thought. She was sure that he did know. For once his usually impassive face was full of an amusement which transformed him quite. She suddenly saw a different man from the one he usually showed the world.
The question was—which was the true man?
Thinking this, Drusilla ignored his compliment—if such it were—and allowed the quiet coolness of the room to envelop her. Devenish said nothing further, but walked to the far wall to examine the books ranged there. This enabled her to watch him.
He pulled a book from the shelves and examined it carefully. He was truly the most contained, controlled person whom she had ever met. He made everyone around him appear callow and unformed—even older persons like Leander Harrington and Parson Williams. As for Toby Claridge and George Lawson, they seemed like children beside him.
He was speaking to her again, amusement still written on his face, ‘You may,’ he told her, ‘return from whatever distant country you have just visited in order to inform me whether I am correct in finding it odd that Mr Harrington has so many abstruse theological works in his library. Tom Paine I would have expected, and Rousseau, for they are the Gods whom Jacobins like Harrington worship, but not this well-thumbed motley collection,’ and he waved his hand at the shelves before him.
‘Perhaps,’ ventured Drusilla, ‘he inherited them from his father.’
‘Maybe,’ said Devenish. ‘But many of them are of recent origin.’
He frowned, ‘I dislike mysteries.’ He shut the book he was holding, replaced it and walked to another wall to examine what was shelved there.
‘Poetry,’ he announced, ‘and old novels, all as pristine as when they left the bookshop.’ He pulled a volume from the shelf, and opened it, saying, ‘Lord Byron as I live and breathe, how very apt.’
Silence fell as he turned the pages for a moment, before he lifted his head and began to recite, his eyes hard on her. His voice was as beautiful as his face, and the words flowed slowly from his mouth like thick cream poured from a jug.
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes.
Drusilla was entranced—as he doubtless meant her to be.
Devenish put the book back on the shelf, walked over to where she sat, bent down and took her face in his hands. He kissed her lightly, not on her mouth but on her eyelids, for her eyes had closed at the moment that he had touched her.
He said, or rather breathed, ‘You have no notion how much I wish to make love to you, here, in the library.’
He released her even as he spoke.
Drusilla opened her eyes and said as softly as he, ‘Make love—or make lust, m’lord? Which?’
His answer was a short laugh. ‘Pray, madam, what’s the difference?’
Her response was as steady as her grave grey eyes. ‘Oh, you know better than that, m’lord, both you and Lord Byron, for all your cynicism. When we love our aim is to give pleasure to our partner, but in lust we consider only our own.’
Devenish’s expression had become unreadable. He nodded his head, and assumed her gravity. ‘Rightly rebuked, but I was not being frivolous, you understand, I meant what I said. And…’ he paused for a moment ‘…I suppose that young Claridge was warning you that I might behave exactly as I have just done. Am I right?’
‘Indeed, you are. And did you speak so in order to disarm me or to prove him correct in his assumption that you wish to seduce me—and live up to your nickname by doing so?’
This time his answer was to bow low to her, ‘Ah, madam, if I had known that I was going to meet such as you in the country I would have visited it long ago.’
‘Then your visit would have been wasted, for I would either have been too young to attract you, or too recently married to a man I loved to listen to your blandishments.’
She rose. ‘We have been together overlong, and tongues will be wagging. I will leave you now, I think. I am quite recovered.’
‘Unkissed?’
And whether he was mocking her, Drusilla could not tell.
‘Better so,’ she told him, before turning to open the door.
‘Do not fear for your reputation,’ he said coolly, ‘for I shall now take Paley’s sublime work on moral philosophy with me into the garden, beard Mr Harrington and ask for his opinion on it as though I have just been reading it for the first time. He is not to know that I read it long ago and will therefore believe that I have spent my time indulging in the higher thought instead of in the lower!’
Such shamelessness! Drusilla had difficulty in suppressing her desire to laugh. She decided to reprimand him instead.
‘I see, m’lord,’ she said, ‘that you are well practised in those low deceits which are designed to throw the curious off the scent. I shall expect you to provide me later with the details of your dialogue with our host. Preferably in public this evening after supper—unless you have earlier drunk too well of Mr Harrington’s good wine. Until then, adieu.’
She was gone, having had the last word, as usual. Devenish threw his head back and laughed, before tucking Paley under his arm and going to find his host—who was delighted to discover that m’lord was more serious-minded than he had supposed, so he rewarded him by treating him to a lecture on the mistakes which the Reverend Mr Paley had committed in his erudite text—displaying his own superior learning while he did so.
It was also to be supposed that Lord Devenish appreciated his condescension since, his head on one side, and an expression of intense concentration and admiration on his face, he endured Mr Harrington’s sermon to its long-delayed end, uttering ‘Quite so’ at regular intervals.
What he was actually considering was Mrs Drusilla Faulkner’s terse and telling definition of the difference between lust and love and wondering by what miracle this quiet and chaste country girl could have achieved such wisdom.
And what was Mrs Drusilla Faulkner considering? Why, Lord Devenish, of course!
What mainly concerned her was how to hold him off. His assault on her virtue was so subtly organised, so delicate that she was in danger of succumbing to it. For every step he took forward, he seemed to take two steps back.
He had kissed her lightly—and then withdrawn. She was in danger of
finding herself beneath him without knowing how she had got there!
She could not help contrasting him with the husband of her distant cousin, a country squire, whom she had met for the first time almost a year after Jeremy’s death on a visit to their home. She had thought him kind, for he had made sure that her visit was a happy one.
Alas, one evening, half-cut after dinner, he had cornered her in a corridor and pressed her against the wall, his breath hot on her neck.
‘Come,’ he had muttered, ‘let us engage in flapdoodle, my dear. ‘Tis a year since you were widowed—you must be ready for it.’
She had staved him off easily enough for he was not a man to assault an unwilling woman. She was dismally aware that he might have misunderstood her friendly overtures to him, taking them for more than they were worth. It had made her wary of all men. She had found an excuse to go home soon afterwards, knowing that a long friendship with her cousin was at an end.
Flapdoodle! She had laughed at the word later when she was safe home again, and now she contrasted his boorish approach with that of Devenish’s—and knew that the latter’s subtlety was the more dangerous. It did not assist her composure to know that Toby’s reading of him appeared to be correct.
Or was it? She remembered most vividly the strange expression on Devenish’s face when she had refused him and had offered him her distinction between love and lust.
Had he, after all, been pleased that she had not fallen into his arms? Was it possible that he, in his devious way, had been testing her? And if she had allowed herself to be seduced, would he have found her wanting—been disappointed, even, not triumphant?
It was a strange thought—but then he was a strange man. For there was not only the puzzle of what he truly felt for her to occupy her mind but something quite different which had nothing to do with her at all. It concerned Leander Harrington.
The problem was that her memory failed her when she tried to recall what it was that he had done or said which had led her to believe that his interest in Leander Harrington and in Marsham Abbey was that of more than simple curiosity.
But then, there was nothing simple about him, was there?
Chapter Six
‘What in the world was all that piff-paff you were engaged in with our esteemed host, Hal, about the Reverend Paley and the evidences of Christianity? I never knew that you were interested in such stuff.’
‘Nor am I, but our host is. He has the oddest mixture of books in his library.’
‘Oh, so that was where you absconded to with the pretty Mrs Faulkner. I suppose it was quite useless of me to try to persuade you not to seduce her.’
‘Not at all—I have not the slightest intention of doing so. As for the lady—well, pretty she may be, but strong-minded she is, and reprimands me severely every time I seem to make a move in that direction!’
Rob Stammers and Devenish were chatting together in Devenish’s suite of rooms before supper. His friend’s last reply set Rob laughing.
‘Sits the wind in that quarter, then? I would have thought a provincial nobody would have been easy prey. That she isn’t must be a new experience for you.’
Devenish cuffed playfully at Rob’s head as though they were still lads together. ‘You know me better than that, Rob. First of all, I don’t regard women as prey, and secondly, anyone I have made my mistress has come to me willingly and without coercion. Indeed, like Lord Byron I may safely claim that with some of them I have been the seduced, not the seducer.’
‘So you say. But your determination to talk philosophy with our host still baffles me.’
‘Does it? Tell me, how does he strike you?’
Rob thought for a moment before replying. ‘As a rather silly man with his maunderings about the Rights of Man which sits ill with his air of being the local magnate and determined that everyone shall know it. You have put his nose a little out of joint, you understand, by choosing to visit your estates here.’
‘Would it surprise you that I don’t agree with you about his silliness?’
Rob laughed. ‘Not at all. You are usually contrary. But what makes you think that?’
‘Nothing that I can offer you as evidence. Just an odd feeling.’
‘An odd feeling.’ Rob stared at Hal. Hal had experienced odd feelings before, and the fact that they were now alive, well, expensively dressed and waiting for dinner in a great house in the country was due solely to them.
‘No evidence at all?’
Devenish hesitated a moment before he replied.
‘None you would like. Only—Mrs Faulkner’s two attacks of the megrims in which she experienced a feeling of panic, fear and intense cold.’
Rob laughed again. ‘Oh, is that all! Put on to intrigue you, I suppose.’
‘Oh, I might have thought that, too, except that she experienced the second one when I was not with her. It appears that Mr George Lawson’s touch was enough to set her off.’
‘George Lawson? You mean the parson? I can scarcely believe that. She must be bamming you. And why do you connect Leander Harrington with it? She was never with him, I collect.’ He paused and then added slowly, ‘But you said that you have had an odd feeling, too. Is it at all like hers?’
Devenish studied his perfect reflection in the long mirror set in the wall opposite the windows before dismissing it.
‘No, indeed. Merely what you know I have experienced before. An intense unease. A feeling that the universe is out of kilter. That there is something hidden which should not be hidden—and which will shortly affect me. Stupid, isn’t it? I had rather have been a gypsy scryer whom they say sees the future in a crystal ball. A vague feeling of something wrong is not the most useful tool in the world.
‘As for connecting Leander Harrington with Mrs Faulkner’s distress, it is his territory on which these events are occurring. His gardens, his home—and his guests.’
Rob stopped being sceptical and became practical. ‘And your unease also has to do with Mrs Faulkner, Leander Harrington, George Lawson and Marsham Abbey?’
‘Indeed—but in no particular order. Will you be my eyes and ears, Rob? Tell me if you see, or hear, anything untoward.’
Rob sighed. ‘As before, and despite all my reservations about this mystic nonsense of yours, I will do as you ask. But I see no sense in any of this, you know. None at all. I think that, for once, you have been undone by a woman’s megrims.’
Devenish simply said, ‘Humour me, Rob. That is all I ask—and all I can tell you.’
This last he knew only too well was not quite true. He was deliberately not telling Rob of the mission on which Sidmouth had sent him for he believed that the fewer people who knew of why he was really visiting Surrey, the better. To preserve his secret he was willing to endure Rob’s critical banter.
He pulled his gold hunter from his watch-pocket and studied it. ‘Time for supper,’ he announced. ‘We must not be late, or, at least, I must not be, since as the senior person present no one may enter the supper room until I arrive.’
The smile he gave Rob was a rueful one. ‘You have no notion of how odd that circumstance seems to me—I don’t think that I shall ever get used to it.’
It was not the first time that he had made such a remark to Rob, and Rob, as always, pondered on its meaning, coming as it did from a man so supremely in command of himself, his surroundings and his staff. But he said nothing, and followed his friend downstairs.
The first person Devenish saw in the drawing room was Mrs Drusilla Faulkner. She appeared to be quite recovered from her afternoon’s distresses.
She looked particularly enchanting in a pale green silk evening gown, with a cream silk sash around a high waist. She was carrying a small cream fan with crocuses painted on the parchment which carried its ivory sticks. Her jewellery was simple: a string of small pearls circled her elegant neck, pearl ear-drops, and a silver pearl studded bracelet on her left wrist completed her ensemble.
Perhaps he saw her first because, for him,
she was the person of most importance in the room. Unhappily he was unable to enquire whether or no she was recovered, for Mr Harrington approached him to introduce him to the Dowager Lady Cheyne who had arrived but a few hours earlier. He was delegated to escort her into the supper room as the only lady of a rank to equal his own.
To say that the lady was pleased to be introduced to him was an understatement. She was, Devenish discovered, not so very much older than himself, touching forty, he thought, but her manner and dress were that of a very young girl and did her no favours at all.
She shook her gold curls at him, and pouted pretty painted lips. ‘Oh, how delightful. I had heard of you from my cousin Orville, but I never thought to meet you here in the wilderness.’
She spoke as though Surrey was a jungle filled with ferocious animals, and Devenish was tempted to answer her in kind, by advising her not to stray too far in the Abbey gardens lest she fall prey to a passing lioness.
Instead he gave her his most charming smile, and remarked that fortunately Surrey, although far from town, had nothing more dangerous to offer than a few foxes which rarely appeared in the day.
‘Too amusing—’ she twinkled at him ‘—you destroy all the romance in life. Next you will be telling me that Marsham Abbey is nothing like those in Mrs Radcliffe’s romances. I am not to expect banditti, nor horrid happenings in the Abbey crypt! There is a crypt, I am sure.’
‘Indeed there is,’ returned Devenish gravely, amused by her inconsequence. ‘I understand that few Abbeys are without them.’
‘Oh, famous.’ Her voice rose an octave and she placed a pretty hand on his arm. ‘Then you will help me to persuade Mr Harrington to allow us to visit it. I have never visited a crypt and would wish to know whether they are as horrid as report paints them.’
As the lady prattled merrily along, not pausing to allow him to reply, Devenish was able to watch Drusilla without seeming to. She had been paired off to go into supper with George Lawson and he wondered, a little anxiously, whether his company would distress her.
The Devil and Drusilla Page 8