The Penwyth Bride (The Witch's Daughter Book 1)

by Bolton, Ani

  “Hurry now, miss, hurry!” she whispered, pushing me off the stool and out the door.

  I stumbled down the stairway, stopping only when I reached the cracked door of the parlour. Lady Penwyth’s voice rose and fell on the other side, so clearly I thought she might be standing next to the door. I paused to take a deep calming breath, pushing the lace scrap more securely upon my crown. Lady Penwyth’s next words, spoken in an enraged whisper to an unknown listener, made me freeze.

  “Susannah has always been headstrong, but now she’s become quite ungovernable. Punishments have no effect upon her. I whip, I plead, I withhold pocket money--nothing will control her!”

  A low and cool murmur of sympathy answered.

  “She’s intractable over the least little things . . . why, when I informed her you were coming to sup, she became quite wild with rage. I tell you Annabel, I am at my wit’s end.”

  “She sounds normal enough to me,” a satiny female voice replied. “Girls at Susannah’s age are often rebellious. At least the interesting ones are.”

  “But do you think it normal to ride the moors for hours on end and come back distracted, confused, almost on the verge of tears?”

  “Hm,” came the noncommittal answer, and I instantly felt that the unmet Annabel DeVere knew exactly where Susannah Penwyth was.

  The furtive conversation came closer to the door, and I thought it wise to scratch and enter.

  I almost fell over Lady Penwyth and her companion. Lady Penwyth regarded me with nettled surprise. “Miss Eames! I did not hear you coming.” Her eyes flicked down to my feet. “Usually I do.”

  At my entrance, Sir Grover and an unknown gentleman tore their attention from the backgammon table to me. Damon looked up from where he watched the game, sipping wine with indolent ease. He winked when our eyes met.

  Flustered, I looked away to the petite woman whose graceful neck was swathed in a netted pearl choker. She was studying me with unconcealed interest.

  So many eyes boring into me made me nervous. My foot caught on the edge of the carpet and I stumbled.

  “Forgive me my lateness,” I stammered. “I . . . I was . . . walking . . .”

  “Pray allow me to introduce our guests.” Lady Penwyth smoothly cut across my stutters.

  The couple was briskly introduced as Mr. and Mrs. Henry DeVere. Damon seemed supremely unaffected by the fact that his largest creditor sat calmly dicing with his father. Sir Grover’s expression betrayed nothing.

  Mr. DeVere rose from his seat at the backgammon table and bowed over my hand. He was not much older than Damon, if I judged correctly. His nose, split by unfortunately large nostrils, hooked over a mouth with a lower lip larger than the upper, giving his features the appearance of a perpetual sneer. His bright “How d’ye do?” seemed good-natured, but he immediately lost interest in me after my curtsy, his eyes drawn longingly back to the backgammon tiles before him.

  His wife, I was surprised to note, seemed a decade older than her husband. The sunken cheeks, rendered so by the loss of several important teeth, did not belie an air of elfin naughtiness, and she dressed in good style that showed her trim figure off to her advantage. Mrs. DeVere’s shrewd eyes sized me up in one swoop, and she invited me to sit beside her on the divan. Lady Penwyth watched us in indecision for a moment before turning her attention to the tea tray with an air of relieved absorption.

  After the usual inquires about my impressions of Cornwall, and a forage into my brain about my opinion on London fashion and manner, Mrs. DeVere observed: “I see that your ankles are still muddy, the sign of a good walker.”

  I crimsoned. Obviously she had not noted my clubfoot too deeply.

  “I wonder if you’ve seen our Miss Susannah out on your ramblings,” she continued.

  “Yes, would you know where my daughter has got to?” Lady Penwyth asked querulously as she fussed over the lemon.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Damon, who had been leaning over Mr. Henry DeVere’s shoulder to the game board, tense.

  “She . . . is visiting at the Armitages,” I said.

  Lady Penwyth’s hand over the tea caddy suspended. “She is? I had no idea they were back from their visit abroad.”

  My mouth dried. “Sally Armitage has a new patch-box to show Susannah,” I dutifully related.

  “Oh, I suppose then they must have returned. How odd not to send a note.”

  Lady Penwyth allowed a frown to briefly distort her mouth before bending over the tea caddy once more. I ignored the frisson coming from the tea leaves, their withered stems lamenting the crisping destruction of the sun and the coming scald of boiling water.

  When Lady Penwyth’s attention seemed safely upon the tea, Mrs. DeVere whispered, “Tell Susannah to have a bit more care in her lies. The Armitages are still in Margate.”

  “Oh no!”

  “Never fear, I can keep secrets,” Mrs. DeVere murmured, “until the appropriate moment arises. And the one regarding Miss Penwyth has not come yet. Why worry her mother unduly?”

  She leaned back on the divan in a supremely elegant manner, and I felt a rush of gratitude toward her.

  “Besides,” Mrs. DeVere continued, “there are other, more interesting tidbits yet to unearth.”

  She smiled a bewitching, closed-mouth smile at me, completely at ease with her unabashed curiosity.

  “I hope you do not become too disappointed,” I said. “There is nothing of interest about me whatsoever.”

  She giggled girlishly for a woman who must be hard by her fortieth year, but it was not annoying in the least. “My dear, everyone has something of interest about them. It only takes time to work out why.” And she proceeded to draw me out, bit by bit, as no one else had ever done.

  I felt no resentment over her probing because I knew I could answer her curiosities about my life in the North without fear of betraying my witch origins. Only once did I falter over a question about my mother, which I glossed very smoothly by saying she died horribly when I was young. Even the intrepid Mrs. DeVere was not so bold as to pursue the topic.

  Over by the backgammon table, the conversation had turned to business. Sir Grover had been speaking to Mr. DeVere about his new mining venture. Henry DeVere watched Sir Grover through heavy-lidded eyes that shone with sleepy alertness. I realized suddenly that despite his harsh words to his son, Sir Grover was trying to smooth over the unpleasantness caused by Damon’s gaming debt by offering Mr. DeVere an appetizing alternative.

  Certainly Damon looked bored as the conversation showed no sign of turning from tin mining. He stifled a yawn as his father remarked, “Tin is fetching six and forty on the Exchange this spring, and copper more so.”

  “Hm,” Mr. DeVere murmured noncommittally. “Tinning takes so much work and expense to chip it out of the rock. The clay pits provide with little ado over the getting of it.”

  “Ah yes, but three tuns must be got of clay to equal a fifth of the value of tin,” Sir Grover replied silkily. “And then the clay must be refined before it can be used in the pottery slips, whereas tin may be sold raw.”

  “Dear Sir Grover, how cunning you’ve grown,” Mrs. DeVere remarked from where we sat. “I remember a day--very long ago, Miss Eames, and pray do not to ask how long--that you never used to be so concerned with matters of business.”

  “That was before I acquired a wife and two mouths to feed,” Sir Grover answered.

  “Was it?”

  Mrs. DeVere’s amused expression did not change as she uttered the question, but Sir Grover shot her a pointed look that I could not interpret.

  Mr. DeVere moved a tile around the gaming board. “I’m a dashed lazy fellow when it comes to changing horses mid-race, Penwyth. I’ll continue with the china clay speculation until results prove otherwise.”

  Sir Grover shrugged and lifted his brows to his son as if to say: well, I tried.

  Damon quaffed the wine in his glass in one pull and rose to the sideboard for yet another.

  Mr. DeVere
lazily shook dice in the handsomely tooled leather cup. “Annabel and I crossed paths with Mr. Roger Penwyth yesterday at the Zennor parish church.”

  “We stopped on a courtesy to the curate, who is shamefully starved by the vicar if you ask me,” Mrs. DeVere put in. “I left a hamper of cheese and bread with the poor man.”

  “Zennor?” Sir Grover scooped up the dice. “Roger went there? It’s seventeen miles down the South Road.”

  Mr. DeVere selected tiles to move. “It was the damned queerest thing.”

  “What is?” Damon asked with a hint of a slur. “That my cousin would be seen inside a church? Of course, Roger is an irreligious dog.”

  “My good fellow, I wasn’t referring to the state of Roger’s soul, who would give a tosh about it? The man was fully clothed and soaked to the bone. The pew was dripping water, and great puddles were gathered under his boots. But there he sat for all the world as if he’d just stepped inside to cool off after a country stroll.”

  My heart began to drum over the echo of Roger Penwyth’s voice. I’ve had some news . . . He had looked so ill when he told me this.

  From over by the teacart, Lady Penwyth gave a brittle laugh. “I would take no notice of our sad relation, for surely it was another one of his oddities. He probably stood under the miller’s water wheel to sketch an interesting tumble of rock.”

  “No, it was something more,” Mrs. DeVere said thoughtfully. “He looked . . . broken, if that is the correct word. His eyes . . . they were quite blind to the world.”

  “Roger marches to his own drummer, to be sure,” Sir Grover said as he threw the dice. “As my wife has said, I would pay him no mind.”

  “And he has nothing to be broken-up about,” Damon put in, resentfully downing another gulp of wine. “Roger is as rich as the Godolphins, if tavern gossip is to be believed, though he doesn’t spend any of his money properly. Barely owns a decent gun or servant.”

  An uncomfortable silence fell, broken eventually by the rattle of dice and the resumption of the backgammon game. Lady Penwyth poured the tea, and the subject of Roger was dropped. I could well believe that he had lost himself over a sketch if it involved one of his cranes, but to sit in church soaked to the bone was quite strange, even for Roger.

  Unwillingly my imagination pictured Roger with his shirt plastered to the lithe power of his body. Without warning, a coil of heat uncurled in my belly. I shuddered, wanting none of the feeling and to disperse it, I smiled boldly at Damon.

  Quickly suppressing a look of startled surprise, Damon rose with a flick of his lace cuffs. He strolled over to the divan and pointedly drew up a chair next to my knee. Ignoring Mrs. DeVere’s upraised brows, he devoted three-quarters of an hour to my amusement.

  I allowed him to make me laugh and to flirt. He was a gamester, a connoisseur of women, and self-consciously aware of himself . . . everything to which a young gentleman of fashion aspired. The attention he paid me was nothing more than another gamble, a hedge-bet that I could secure his future.

  I knew all this. Perhaps it was my inexperience with men, perhaps it was the low value I placed upon myself, or perhaps something else--a long suppressed recklessness--that responded to his audacity. Whatever it was enthralled me and made me almost forget Roger Penwyth and his eyes lit by perilous desires.

  I blushed, I simpered, I admired. I was so amused by Damon’s drawling witticisms that my sides ached from laughing, and when the DeVeres rose to say their goodbyes after drinking tea and eating Lady Penwyth’s rich iced plum cake, I hardly heard them.

  We followed them out to the front portico, where a very pretty landaulet drawn by matched bays waited. Mrs. DeVere gave me an amused look before she pressed her cheek to mine in farewell. I stood next to Damon, waving as they drove away at a spanking pace.

  “What a charming lady Mrs. DeVere is,” I said as they disappeared.

  “Miserable hag,” Damon murmured, holding his wrist out for my hand as if we were a married couple.

  My breath caught as my fingers touched his wrist. “Why do you say that?” I managed. “She is elegant and interesting. Mr. Henry DeVere seems devoted to her.”

  “It defies reason. She’s a beggar and brings nothing to his estate. He was a simpleton to be cozened into marriage by a pair of fine eyes.”

  I must have looked stricken, for he hastened, “The reason I dislike Mrs. DeVere is that she is an inveterate gossip and malicious to boot. She never misses the opportunity to blacken me to my mother, who now thinks that I’m the devil reborn, no small thanks to her.”

  I frowned. “I thought her most tolerant in her opinions.”

  Damon patted my hand on his wrist. “She’s allaying your cautions and gaining your trust so that she may drain you of gossip to use against you if she chooses. Oh, I’m not saying that she isn’t witty, but I would have a care around Annabel DeVere.”

  He gazed down at me with such tender concern that the thrill I felt beginning in my knees had worked its way up to my stomach. “Whatever you say, Damon,” I replied breathlessly.

  He grinned and bent his head close to mine as if to whisper in my ear.

  At the same moment, I heard a scuffle and a quick intake of breath. We turned to see the maid Jenny skitter around the corner and down the stairs in a flurry of skirts.

  Damon released my hand with an indulgent smile. “Perhaps you and I should have a care as well. Gossip spreads like sewer-water below stairs as well as above.”

  “But there is nothing to gossip about,” I protested.

  A russet brow rose wickedly. “Perhaps we should give them something, then.”

  He picked up my hand and pressed a fervent kiss to it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The late summer sun had finally released its hold on the day when Susannah slunk into the parlour to face the wrath within.

  I excused myself when I saw her creep to the supper tray, driven by hunger, her eyes downcast to hide guilt and intoxication. Damon gave me a nod of understanding as I rose to get out of the way of the oncoming storm. He looked as if he would like to follow as I left the room, but consideration for Susannah bound him to stay while she endured the rage boiling on Lady Penwyth’s face. For all his faults, Damon loved his sister, and that gave hope that he was not irredeemably gone in selfishness.

  Darkness reached out at me as I entered my chamber. The window had been left open to receive whatever cooling drafts the hot August night would bring. Angry voices from the family filtered up through the floorboards, but I let the words fade into dissonance while I lit a rushlight, and sat at the dressing table to remove my necklet of pearls.

  Jenny hadn’t bothered to tidy after she had dressed me earlier. Absently I gathered ribands, velvet ribbon chokers, and garters, while the fragrance of wild garlic and honeysuckle called, wafting in on a welcome breath of air. The plants tried to coax me to come outside, and the elm seconded the request--I’d been neglectful--but I shut them out. Instead I began to gaze at stars as big as walnuts while I dreamed about Damon.

  I envisioned his handsome face moving closer to mine . . . now our lips pressed. I could feel his hands, taste his skin . . .

  I frowned. The picture in my head was changing; the face grew nebulous and shadowy. I tried again: Damon, russet hair glowing under its layer of powder, eyes laughing. The mist swirled and through it the eyes I could see were not amber, but green, gleaming like a cat’s, hypnotized by mine. Hands drifted silkily over my body . . .

  I jerked, scattering a box of hairpins over the floor.

  Clumsily I sank down on my knees to pick them up, panting as I tried to shake the tingle that ran from breast to cunny. If I had not known better, I would have thought someone was trying to ensnare me in a spell.

  A door slammed below, followed by stifled sobs and hurrying feet. Profound silence settled on the house, the kind that no servant dared break.

  The pins had scattered in a wide arc. As I sought and found each, it gradually came upon me that the silence was
too encompassing. All at once I realized that I had not heard any rustlings or chirpings from Pretty Peter.

  My eyes flew to the birdcage. It was empty.

  Pins forgotten, I rose and slowly approached the cage. A whimper forced its way past my teeth.

  Pretty Peter lay at the bottom on a mound of sand and suet. His head twisted backward, and he stared vacantly.

  ###

  They were Crying the Neck as I buried my murdered canary.

  “Ha . . . ha . . . har!” the field hands bellowed. The Cornish Cry was only slightly different from the Cries I had listened to in the North. They were bringing in the last sheaf of corn from the harvest and would trudge to Sir Grover’s front door with the sheaf leaking its final vestiges of life. Sir Grover would watch importantly, handing out the penny bonus with an air of good condescension.

  Usually I enjoyed the Crying, for it was a harbinger of my Quiet Time. The plants would go to sleep, and their whispers would silence gradually, leaving me in peace. But today I could summon no joy as I sat beside my pet’s grave. I had laid him under a hawthorne shrub in the walled garden, where the thorned bush would discourage foraging animals from digging up his body.

  Hatred had killed Pretty Peter. His neck had been viciously wrung between two angry hands, and with a shudder I wondered if I had been found out as a witch. Pretty Peter’s murder would be a potent warning from those who hated my kind. And I could not complain without exposing myself to more torments. It was a lesson I had learned early on in life.