by Laura London
The detachable cover had been removed from the wagon, so by climbing to stand tiptoe on the wheel hub. Lynden was able to look into the wagon body.
“Your histories have come, Raine,” she called. “I see the name of your bookseller on a parcel there, and oh! there are a thousand bandboxes—inscribed, if you please, with the name of some very fashionable London modiste. Why, Mr. Coniston, without telling a soul, you’ve ordered yourself a jaunty new wardrobe and you plan to take Loughrigg Fell by storm!”
“You’ve found me out, M’lady,” chuckled Mr. Coniston. “Take the finery t’ my chambers, lads!”
Lynden jumped off the hub, laughing, and ran around to the tailgate, where she fell upon an oversized hatbox and began to rip off its wrapping. “Never! It’s the clothes Aunt Eleanor ordered for Raine and me from London, isn’t it! Did they arrive at Penrith by carrier? And you picked them up for us, you sweet, dear man! Hooray!” Lynden tossed off the hatbox cover and pulled out a fetching cabriolet bonnet with a deep-red velvet brim and curly black plumes that nodded seductively from the side.
“This,” announced Lynden, with great satisfaction, “is what I call a hat!” She squashed it down over her hair and peacocked around the wagon, driving the maids and the stableboy into a fit of the giggles by rapping the grooms across the knuckles with an imaginary fan and denouncing them as sly rascals who quite turned her head with their flattery. Then she pulled off the bonnet, perched it on her sister’s head, and tore into another parcel, finding it to be filled with a pretty kelly-green morning gown with woven ivory sprig, as well as a quantity of expensive hair ornaments, ribbons, artificial flowers, and lovely dress trim. Lynden promptly declared that there was too much here for her or Lorraine to use, not even if they lived to their eighties. Lynden earned the everlasting devotion of the maidservants by dividing the trim into bunches and distributing it among them. She chose also a particularly attractive spray of artificial flowers and insisted that Mrs. Coniston have it, saying that it would be just the thing for that natural straw bonnet Mrs. Coniston wore to church.
The time was a little past two as the twins walked back to the house. It had stopped raining, but the air was muggy and the wind potent; the drizzle would start again soon. Lorraine and Lynden were walking slowly, speculating on the contents of the many other parcels and bandboxes which Mrs. Coniston had firmly forbidden them to open until they could be brought into the girls’ bedrooms. Lorraine was about to mention that she hoped Aunt had not forgotten to order more silk stockings for them when a boy of perhaps twelve years in a thick, gray country jacket ran toward them.
“Please ya, mum,” he called, “could ya bide? Ah’s a message fer Lord Melbrooke!”
“You could give it to me, if you like,” replied Lynden in a friendly voice, trying to remember if she’d seen the boy before. No, she was sure she had not. “I can take it to him.”
The boy drew from his jacket pocket a folded gilt-edged paper, set with crested fuschia sealing wax, and tapped it against his hand, watching Lynden with a sly smile. “Dunno if ah ought. M’mistress tole that ah should mind it direct to the Lordship.”
“Who is your mistress?” asked Lynden, with an unsuccessful attempt at disinterest.
“ ’Tis Lady Silvia. O’ of the castle,” he said, making no move to hand her the note.
Lynden’s brown eyes glowed with indignation. “Oh! Well, I am Lady Melbrooke, so naturally you can entrust the letter to me.” She put out her palm, trying to look formidable, and after a short show of reluctance, the boy thrust the paper at her, hesitating only a moment before galloping away across the lawn’s brown grass.
Puzzled, Lorraine watched the boy’s scampered retreat. “How peculiar! One wouldn’t think that Lady Silvia… Lynden! What are you doing? Surely you can’t be intending to open a piece of Lord Melbrooke’s mail!”
“Why not?” said Lynden, retreating inside the open doorway of a grain shed and beginning to pick carefully at the letter’s wax seal. “Where in the Bible does it say, ‘Thou shall not open thy husband’s mail’? And the marriage vows read ‘with all my worldly goods, I thee endow.’ Mail is worldly goods, isn’t it?”
“Of course it is! And as it’s from Lady Silvia, there’s a chance that it’s a length more worldly than most goods! Please, Lynnie, it might make you unhappy. Don’t read it.”
“I’ve got to, Raine. If there’s something that will make me unhappy in it, why, it’s better that I find out now than have it popped on me unannounced, isn’t it? And how else will I find out anything, anyway? If we were back in Yorkshire there’d be dozens of discreet sources, but here—well, you know Mrs. Coniston’s less gossipy than a contemplative nun and if I ask any of the underservants, the whole county will probably know that I did within the hour. But what does Lady Silvia use in her sealing wax…? One practically needs gunpowder to blast the thing open. Wait, here it comes! Ah-ha! I knew it. Scented with toilet water! What’s more, she dots her i’s with circles… No, with hearts! It’s enough to make anyone toss their tea. Here, Raine, you read it. I haven’t the stomach!”
“Very well, but I really feel that we ought… oh, never mind. Let me see… it says: ‘Justin, dearest, Whatever is to be done about this dreadful rain? Don’t come today, as we had planned, I know you are too much the gentleman to cancel on your own initiative, so perceive me the noble one who declares herself ready to make the sacrifice of a day without your loving company, to save you a soaking!’ ”
“Bah!” snapped Lynden.
“Quite!” agreed her sister. “I’ve read enough, don’t you think?”
“Certainly you have. I’ll finish it,” Lynden plucked the letter from Lorraine’s hand. “It goes on: ‘So don’t come. There will be many more splendid days and intoxicating nights for us, my Prince Eros.’ Upon my word! Who’s this Eros?”
“It’s Greek for the god of love, and a more snockingly foolish affectation than prefixing it with prince, I cannot imagine,” said Lorraine severely. “What… what flubbidubbery! How she had the nerve to address that sort of trifling prose to the Bard of the Lakeland is more than I know!”
“I don’t suppose he cares a pinmark about the quality of her prose, Raine.” Lynden sank down onto the edge of a sidewise wheelbarrow and rested her chin glumly upon her fists. “It’s all those tidy blonde curls that must take her dresser an hour to set—and that enormous bosom!”
“Rubbish,” declared Lorraine stoutly. “Her bosom’s no bigger than mine and you only measure an inch or two less than me! You’ve let Aunt Eleanor put that in your mind. And as for the hair—didn’t Aunt Sophronia always say that you had the prettiest hair in the county?”
“No! She always said you had the prettiest hair in the county, and I had the hair most estranged from a hairbrush.” Lynden pulled a wan smile. “It was a very good try, my most sympathetic of sisters, but I believe I’ll have to wander down Melancholy Lane for a while before I’m ready to be cheered up.”
There was a scythe in the bin, its long, bent handle leaning against the wall, the curved semicircle of the single-edged blade buried a few inches in the musty dirt floor. Lorraine absentmindedly took hold of the handle and hefted it back and forth, not pulling it from the ground.
“Does it say anything else?” she asked quietly.
“Only a closing: ‘Believe me, I am, as always, your sweetest lover, S.’ ”
“Painted words! Whatever else she is,” said Lorraine, pulling the point of the scythe from the dirt and tentatively chopping the ground, “she’s an intolerable letter writer. Lynnie, I think she chases him.”
“Then I wish he would run faster in the opposite direction.” Lynden refolded the letter, morosely sharpening the crease between her thumb and forefinger. “And this right on the heels of—Rainey, I do wish you’d put down that blade, I swear it reminds me of Uncle Monroe the night he dressed as Father Time for Lady Isley’s costume ball and sliced the feathers off Aunt Eleanor’s headpiece with his scythe.”
> “I beg your pardon, Lyn. This is right on the heels of—what?”
Lynden was staring unhappily into the middle distance. “Melbrooke. He’s been trying to—oh, I don’t know what he’s been trying to do. Make love to me or something, I suppose. He’s so careful about it, and so odiously civilized, that I’m never quite sure what he’s about until I’ve had some time to think. Last night while you were dredging Handel out of that piano, he as good as told me, though in the politest manner, that I ought to become his real wife or have a very persuasive reason why not. At least that’s what I think he meant.” She jumped up from the wheelbarrow. “It’s not fair! Here he is conducting an immoral liaison practically upon my doorstep and at the same time expecting me to submit to him like a ha’penny harlot.” She walked away from her sister and looked out the doorway, her slim frame silhouetted against the misty gray light. “It’s not only that,” she finished sadly, “the truth is that—that I’ve become rather fond of him. No. More than fond, I think.”
“I’ve noticed that,” Lorraine stated softly.
“That’s like you,” Lynden answered without turning her head. “Rainey, I don’t think I’ve been cast in the mold of the resigned sufferer. I’m sure this is one of those cases that the vicar would have described as being good for the humbling of one’s soul. But I’m finding it ever so painful to have my soul humbled. I don’t understand why the ladies’ journals always make such a virtue out of males conducting their affairs with discretion. Melbrooke is more discreet than the sun in a cloudburst, and I don’t find it comforting at all.”
“No,” agreed Lorraine, coming to stand beside her sister. “Not if you’re fond of him. Perhaps, though, he doesn’t realize that. Consider the circumstances of your marriage, Lynnie. Perhaps he even thinks that you will feel more comfortable if you are not made responsible for receiving the full measure of his masculine attentions.”
“So with great nobility and immeasurable self-sacrifice, Melbrooke has gallantly decided to spare me by pursuing Lady Silvia. Phooey! And if you think I’m going to do anything to help Melbrooke realize he has animated my affections toward him—think of how pursued he has been, and how hanged on, think of the women that thrust themselves at him! If I did, it’s likely only to give him a complete disgust for me. I’d rather swallow my foot to the ankle!”
“An unwise choice. That would certainly give him a disgust for you!”
Chapter Eleven
The castle stood above them, up the smooth glacis that was lost under shaggy bushes, gray rocks, and wild beds of withered ferns. The turrets rose from either corner of the castle like horns pointing to the sky. The sun glinted from the iron crossbar of an arched Gothic window, making it a winking eye in the stony expanse of the curtain. The gate was a dark, yawning mouth, and the lowered drawbridge stretched across the moat like a protruding tongue.
It was a cold, windy day, blessed by a cloudless, ultramarine sky. The watery leavings of yesterday’s rains were being picked up and carried off in the gust, leaving only a minor, crystalline dampness on the sharp edges of the dry saw grass. At the foot of the hill, Lorraine and Lynden had set up easels bedecked with sketch pads, that, along with watercolors, brushes, and mixing pots, had been laboriously pushed, from Fern Court through the still muddy lanes, in the pit of a rusty wheelbarrow.
Warmly clad in her new astrakhan-edged, high-waisted redingote, Lynden, hands on hips, took two steps back to survey her own painting.
“You know,” she said with a considering air, “this wouldn’t be half bad if the wind hadn’t nipped up the page and made the colors bleed. What do you think?”
Lorraine, frowning in concentration, had been daubing at her own paper, but stopped to give Lynden’s effort a fair study. “I think it looks like, um, an inverted sewing thimble in tarnished silver sitting on a liver-brown pillow.”
Lynden grinned, pulling a face. “At least it’s got shape, which is more, least complimentary of sisters, than I can say for yours, which looks like a smashed orange on a mound of potato peels. When Lord Crant appears, I think we had better emphasize our interest in the castle from a historical standpoint, not an artistic one.”
“That has the virtue of being the truth, at least. But as for Lord Crant appearing, I only wish he would hurry up about it because my blue paint pot is freezing over,” said Lorraine, stabbing energetically at the offending receptacle with the pointed end of her brush.
“Set it away from the shady side of your easel, Raine,” advised Lynden. “And Lord Crant’s got to come out before long. What sort of gentleman would leave two ladies painting indefinitely in the March wind without inviting them inside for a warming drink?”
“Lord Crant’s sort of gentleman! Furthermore, if half we hear of him is true, the warming drink he’d invite us in to would be poisoned. Lynden, we’ve been here for a quarter hour at least. Have you thought of this. What if he isn’t home?”
“Of course he’s home. This is the wild north, where is there to go? Besides, there’s a flag aloft the left turret. It’s his, I suspect, and that means he’s in residence. We know for certain that he isn’t visiting Fern Court today, with Melbrooke ridden into Penrith.”
Lorraine paused in the act of making a bright yellow sun and glanced at her sister. “It’s not that I want to criticize, Lynnie, but, really, last night at dinner when Lord Melbrooke told us that his relative, the Duke of Wellington, would pass through Penrith on the way to Scotland today, and that he would be obliged if we came to meet him, do you think you acted wisely in refusing to go? You did it so cavalierly, too, Lyn, you know you did! I’m afraid it must have looked rather obvious, especially when you referred so dismissively to the Iron Duke as one of your, meaning Lord Melbrooke’s, third cousins, as though the Duke weren’t the nation’s greatest hero, and then said you felt too delicate to make the ride into town.”
“I know it wasn’t well done of me,” admitted Lynden, wiping her paintbrush on a piece of flannel. “I suppose it means that Melbrooke’s put me down to being a tedious, sulky brat. But there was something about the prospect of spending the whole day in Melbrooke’s company that… well, do you know what I mean?” She waited for her sister’s nod, then continued: “He was so cool and civil all evening, too, and it made me feel such a fool when I was seething inside and feeling hurt. When I acted so frigidly toward him and he behaved with such odiously well-bred courtesy toward me, it made me long to dump the platter of merlans aux fines herbes in his lap!”
“I think he knew you were snubbing him, Lyn, but he’s too much the gentleman to let anything show in front of me.”
“Or too little the brangler!” suggested Lynden.
“You can’t truly blame him for misliking brangles. I don’t like them myself,” said Lorraine seriously, watching a tiny chunk of ice as it fell from her paintbrush, slipping rapidly down the paper and bisecting her landscape with a spidery trail of blue. “This worries me, though: What if it comes to Lord Melbrooke that you’ve gotten the letter intended for him? That boy who brought the letter didn’t seem the discreet sort—quite the opposite, I should think. Will Lord Melbrooke find out you have his letter and ask you about it?”
“You worry that he’ll ask me for his letter and see I’ve opened it? Ha!” exclaimed Lynden, with bitter triumph. “The world’s most elegant lyricist wouldn’t have sufficient command of the language to find prose acceptable for the purpose of asking his wife to hand over a passionate letter from his mistress! I think Melbrooke will sidestep the issue as neatly as he would an ant pile! Sometimes I wonder if the man has a temper.” She put her paintbrush back in its leather pouch, rubbed her mittened hands together, and shook her head as though to get Melbrooke off her mind. “Listen, maybe there’s some obscure maxim of social usage we don’t know. Perhaps it’s perfectly polite to ignore painting ladies if they are further than fifty yards from your doorstep. Let’s load the wheelbarrow and move closer.”
Lorraine, who had begun to add doubts of t
he feasibility of the Crant plan to her already long-standing ones about the plan’s efficacy, wearily agreed and helped her energetic sister trundle the wheelbarrow load to a spot halfway to the glacis. Here they stayed for another twenty minutes until Lynden’s patience gave out and they moved upward again into the shadow of the castle.
“He’d better come now,” said Lynden grimly. “If we go any closer we’ll be in the moat.”
Their constant advance upon the ostensible subject of their watercolors finally had results. Before Lorraine’s blue pot could freeze a second time, from the bailey, onto the drawbridge, walked Lord Crant, a tall, dark figure clad in a deep-brown coat with tight breeches and riding boots, his black hair ruffled by the wind.
“Huzzah!” said Lynden softly. With Crant came a bowlegged man, whose pink bald pate reflected the sun’s rays brilliantly. As they drew nearer, the twins could see the white dueling scar on the stranger’s sparsely freckled cheek as well as his pronounced overbite, two oversized front teeth of nearly horizontal insertion.
Lynden was prepared to drop a quick curtsy, but Crant reached her, captured her hand, and shook it before she had time to whisk it behind her.