“Of course there are—dozens of ’em!”
“How horrible!” she shuddered. “I will leave you the candle but do not think by that I shall relent!”
“I won’t,” he promised.
Miss Grantham withdrew, feeling baffled.
Upstairs, she found that Lord Mablethorpe had vanished and guessed that he had slipped away to talk to Phoebe in the back-parlour. Lucius Kennet came strolling up to her, and asked her under his breath how the prisoner was faring. She whispered that he was determined not to surrender. Mr Kennet grimaced. “You’d best let me reason with him, me darlin’”
“I will not. You have done enough mischief!” she said, remembering his perfidy. “How dared you trick him in my name. I told you I would not have it!”
“Ah, now, Deb, don’t be squeamish! How was I to kidnap him at all, without he walked into a trap?”
She turned her shoulder, and went away to watch faro-players, resolutely frustrating an attempt upon her aunt’s part to catch her eye.
The half-hour she had promised to allow Mr Ravenscar for final reflection lagged past, and she found herself at the end of it without any very definite idea of how she was to persuade him to submit if he should still prove obstinate. Her aunt was leading the way downstairs to the first supper when she paid her third visit to the cellar, and she could not help thinking that her prisoner must, by this time, be feeling both cold and hungry.
She unlocked the cellar door, and went in, closing it behind her. Mr Ravenscar was standing beside his chair, leaning his shoulders against the wall. “Well?” she said, in as implacable a tone as she could.
“I am sorry you did not send your henchman down to me,” said Ravenscar. “Or your ingenious friend, Mr Kennet. I was rather hoping to see one, or both, of these gentlemen. I meant to shut them up here for the night, but I suppose I can hardly serve you in the same way, richly though you deserve it!”
He had straightened himself as he spoke, and moved away from the wall. Before Miss Grantham could do more than utter a startled cry, his hands had come from behind his back, and he had grasped her right arm, and calmly wrested the key from her clutch.
“Who let you go?” she demanded, quivering with temper. Who contrived to enter this place? How did you get your hands free?”
“No one let me go. Or, rather, you did, my girl, when you left me a candle.”
Her eyes flew to his wrist, and a horrified exclamation broke from her. “Oh, how could you do that? You have burnt yourself dreadfully!”
“Very true, but I shall keep my appointment tomorrow, and you will not get your bills,” he returned.
She paid very little heed to this, being quite taken up by his hurts. “You must be suffering agonies!” she said remorsefully. “I would never have left the candle if I had guessed what you meant to do!”
“I do not suppose that you would. Don’t waste your sympathy on me! I shall do very well. We will now go upstairs, Miss Grantham, and set Sir James Filey’s mind at rest. Unless, of course, you prefer to remain here?”
“For heaven’s sake, don’t lock me in here with rats!” begged Miss Grantham, for the first time showing alarm. “Besides, you cannot go into the saloons like that! You will very likely die if nothing is done to your hands! Come up with me immediately! I will put some very good ointment on them, and bind up your wrists, and find you a pair of Kit’s ruffles in place of these! Oh dear, what a fool you are to do such a thing! You will never be able to drive tomorrow!”
“I don’t advise you to bet against me,” he said, looking down at her with a good deal of amusement. “Do you really mean to anoint my hurts?”
“Of course I do! You do not suppose that I am going to have it said that you lost your race through my fault, do you?” she said indignantly.
“I was under the impression that that was precisely what you meant me to do.”
“Well, you are wrong. I never thought you would be so stupidly obstinate!”
“Were you going to release me, then?”
“Yes—no! I don’t know! You had better come up the backstairs. You may tidy yourself in my brother’s room while I fetch the ointment, and some linen. I wish I had never laid eyes on you! You are rude, and stupid, and I was never so plagued by anyone in my life!”
“Permit me to return the compliment!” he said, following her along the passage.
“I will make you sorry you ever dared to cross swords with me!” she flung over her shoulder. “I’ll marry your cousin, and I’ll ruin him.”
“To spite me, I suppose,” he said satirically.
“Be quiet! Do you want to bring the servants out upon us?”
“It is a matter of indifference to me.”
“Well, it is not a matter of indifference to me!” she said.
He laughed, but said no more until they had reached Kit’s room upon the third floor. Miss Grantham left him there with the candle, while she went off to hunt for salves and linen bandages. When she returned, he had pulled off his coat, and discarded the fragments of his charred ruffles, besides straightening his tumbled cravat, and brushing his short black locks. The backs of his hands were badly scorched, and he winced a little when Miss Grantham smeared her ointment over them,
“It serves you right!” she told him. “I dare say it may hurl you, and I am sure I don’t care!”
“Why should you indeed?” he agreed.
She began to wind her bandage round his right hand. “Is it any easier?”
“Much easier.”
“If I were a man you would not escape so lightly!”
“I dare say I should not. Or even if you had a man to protect you.”
“You need not sneer at Kit! To be sure, it is the height of folly for him to be falling in love with your sister, but he could not help that! Give me your other hand!”
He held it out. “You are a remarkable woman, Miss Grantham.”
“Thank you, I have heard enough about myself from you!” she retorted.
“Jade and Jezebel,” said Mr Ravenscar, grinning. “Harpy.”
“Also doxy!” said Miss Grantham, showing her teeth.
“I apologize for that one.”
“Pray do not trouble! It does not matter to me what you think me.” She pulled open one of the drawers in the dressing table, found a pair of lace ruffles in it, and began swiftly to tack these on to the sleeves of his shirt. “There! If you pull them down, the bandages will not be so very noticeable. I have left your fingers free.”
“Thank you,” he said, putting on his coat again.
“If you take my advice, you will go home now, and to bed!”
“I shall not take your advice. I am going to play faro.”
“I don’t want you in my house!” said Miss Grantham.
“It is not your house. I am very sure your aunt desires nothing more than to see me at her faro-table. She shall have her wish.”
“I cannot stop you behaving imprudently, even if I wished to, which I don’t,” said Miss Grantham. “If you are determined to remain here, you had better go in to supper, for I dare say you must be hungry.”
“Your solicitude overwhelms me,” returned Ravenscar. “I own I had expected at least a loaf of bread and a jug of water in my dungeon—until I learned, of course, that you had some idea of starving me to death.”
Miss Grantham bit her lip. “I would like very much to starve you to death,” she said defiantly. “And let me tell you, Mr Ravenscar, that Lucius Kennet is downstairs, and if you have any notion of starting—a vulgar brawl in my house, I will have you thrown out of it! There is Silas, and both the waiters, and my aunt’s butler, and my brother too, so do not think I cannot do it!”
“This is very flattering,” he said, “but I fear my fighting qualities have been exaggerated. It would not take all these people to throw me out of the house.”
“And in any event,” pursued Miss Grantham, ignoring this remark, “your quarrel is with me, and not with Lucius. He merely did wh
at I asked!” She moved towards the door, and opened it. “Now, if you are ready, I will show you the way down the backstairs, so that no one shall know you have been up here.”
“You think of everything, Miss Grantham. I will go out back area-door, and come in again by the front-door, picking up my hat and cane on the way, which we were so thoughtless as to leave in my dungeon.”
She made no objection to this, but led the way down the back stairs again. As she was about to let him out of the house, an idea occurred to her, and she asked abruptly: “How came you to know that Ormskirk held the mortgage, and those bills?”
“He told me so,” replied Mr Ravenscar coolly.
She stared at him. “He told you so? Of all the infamous. Well! I have always disliked him excessively, but I did no dream he would behave as shabbily as that, I must say!”
“You have always disliked him?” he repeated, looking rather strangely at her.
She met his look with a kindling eye. “Yes!” she said. “But not, believe me, Mr Ravenscar, as much as I dislike you!”
Chapter 13
Five minutes later, Mr Ravenscar knocked on the front door. It was opened to him by Silas Wantage, and he walked into the house with his usual air of calm assurance.
Mr Wantage made a sound as of one choking, and stood stock-still, staring at him with bulging eyes. Mr Ravenscar me this bemused stare with a look of irony, but gave no sign of recognition. He merely held out his hat, and his cane, an waited for Silas to take them.
Mr Wantage found his voice. “Well, I’ll be damned!” he muttered.
“Probably,” said Mr Ravenscar. “Have the goodness to take my hat and cane!”
Mr Wantage relieved him of these, and said helplessly: “I dunno how you done it, but I won’t say as I’m sorry. It goes against the grain with me to tie up a cove as can plant me as wisty a facer as you did, sir!”
Mr Ravenscar paid no heed to this confession, but glanced at his reflection in the mirror, adjusted the pin in his cravat, smoothed the ruffles over his bandaged hands, and strolled across the hall to the supper-room.
His entrance created quite a stir. His hostess, who was sipping claret in the hope of steadying her nerves, choked, and turned purple in the face; Mr Lucius Kennet, standing by the buffet with a plate of salmon in his hand, said “Good God!” in a startled voice, and dropped his fork; the Honourable Berkeley Crewe exclaimed, and demanded to be told what had kept Mr Ravenscar from his dinner engagement; Sir James Filey was thought by those standing nearest to him to have sworn under his breath; and several persons called out to know what had befallen Ravenscar. Only Miss Grantham showed no sign of perturbation, but bade the late-comer a cool good evening.
He bowed over her hand, looked with a little amusement at Lady Bellingham, who was still choking, and said: “I’m sorry, Crewe. I was unavoidably detained.”
“But what in the world kept you?” asked Crewe. “I thought you had forgotten you were to dine with me, and sent round to your house to remind you. They said you had set out just after dusk!”
“The truth is, I met with a slight accident,” replied Ravenscar, taking a glass of Burgundy from the tray which a waiter was handing him. As he raised it to his lips, the ruffle fell back from his hand, and his bandages were seen.
“Good God, what have you done to your hand, Max?” asked Lord Mablethorpe, in swift alarm.
“Oh, nothing very much!” Ravenscar replied. “I told you I had met with a slight accident.”
“Have you been set upon?” demanded Crewe. “Is that it?”
“Yes, that is it,” said Ravenscar.
“I hope it may not impair your skill with the ribbons!” said Filey.
“I hope not, indeed,” answered Ravenscar, with one of his derisive looks.
“Gad, Ravenscar, do you suppose it was an attempt to stop you driving tomorrow?” exclaimed a gentleman in an old fashioned bag-wig.
“Something of that nature, I fancy,” said Ravenscar, unable to resist an impulse to glance at Miss Grantham.
“What the devil do you mean by that, Horley?” demanded Sir James belligerently.
The gentleman in the bag-wig looked surprised. “Why, only that there has been a great deal of money laid on the race, and such things do happen! What should I mean?”
Filey’s high colour faded; he muttered something about having misunderstood, and swung out of the room, saying that he would try his luck at the hazard-table.
“What’s the matter with Filey?” inquired Crewe. “He’s become devilish bad-tempered all at once!”
“Oh, haven’t you heard?” said a man in an orange-and-white striped waistcoat. “You know he was mad to marry one of the Laxton girls? Pretty child, only just out. Well, the Laxtons are trying to hush it up, but I had it from young Arnold himself that the filly’s bolted!”
“Bolted?” repeated Crewe.
“Vanished, my dear fellow. Can’t be found! No wonder our friend’s sore!”
“Well, I don’t blame her,” said Crewe. “Filey and a chit out of the schoolroom! Damme, it’s little better than a rape! But where did she bolt to?”
“No one knows. I told you she’d vanished. And the best of it is the Laxton’s daren’t set the Runners on to her track for fear of the story’s leaking out! Wouldn’t look well at all forcing a child of that age into marriage with a man of Filey’s reputation!”
“It wouldn’t come to that!” objected Mr Horley.
“Oh, wouldn’t it, by God? You don’t know Lady Laxton, when there’s a fortune at stake,” chuckled the man in the orange-striped waistcoat.
Lady Bellingham, feeling that her cup was now full to overflowing, cast a despairing look towards her niece, and wondered why a mouthful of cold partridge should taste of ashes.
“It is not to be supposed,” said Lord Mablethorpe carefully, “that Filey will wish to marry any female who shows herself so averse from his suit.”
“If you think that, you don’t know Filey!” said Crewe. “He would think it added a spice to matrimony.”
Under cover of this general conversation, Lucius Kennet had moved across the room to Miss Grantham’s side, and now said in her ear: “Do you tell me you persuaded him to give up the bills, me dear? Sure, you could have knocked me down with a feather when he walked in as cool as you please!”
“I have not got the bills,” she replied.
“You have not got them? Then what the devil ails you to be letting him go, Deb?”
“I didn’t. He escaped.”
He looked at her with suspicion. “He did not, then! I tied his hands meself. It’s lying you are, Deb: you set him free!”
“No, I did not. Only he asked me for a candle, and I let him have one, never dreaming what he meant to do! He burned the cord round his wrists, and when I went down to the cellar he was free: There was nothing I could do.”
He gave a low whistle. “It’s the broth of a boy he is, and no mistake! So that’s why his hands are bandaged! Will he be able to drive?”
“He says so. I am sure I do not care!”
She was disinclined to converse further on the subject, and moved away, only to fall a victim to Lord Mablethorpe, who drew her into a corner of the room to ask her if she had heard what had been said about Phoebe Laxton’s disappearance. She answered rather curtly that she did not know what it should signify, but Mablethorpe was not satisfied, and said the question of Phoebe’s future was troubling him very much.
Miss Grantham was pleased to hear this, but she had borne much that evening, and felt disinclined to embark on a discussion of Phoebe’s affairs in a crowded supper-room. She answered rather briefly, therefore, and incurred Lord Mablethorpe’s censure for the first time in her life.
“It’s very well, Deb, but she cannot stay here for ever, and I don’t think you are bothering your head much about her,” his lordship said gravely.
“I have other things to think of,” said Deborah.
“I am sure you must, but she has no on
e but you to think for her, or to take care of her, remember!”
This was said with a gentle dignity which Miss Grantham had not met before in her youthful swain. She reflected that close association with Miss Laxton was investing his lordship with a sense of responsibility, and liked him the better for it. “It is very hard to know what to do for the best,” she said. “I quite thought that her parents would have relented. They may still do so.”
A little crease appeared between his brows. “Even so-!” He paused, and went on again after a moment’s hesitation: “She has confided in me to some extent, Deb. I dare say she may have told you more. But I have heard enough to realize that she can never be happy at home. Those parents-! If it were not Filey it would very likely be someone as bad. Lady Laxton cares for nothing but money. I should feel we had betrayed Phoebe if we let her go back. She is not like you, she needs someone to protect her.”
This naive pronouncement made Miss Grantham feel much inclined to inform him that to have someone to protect her was every woman’s dream, but she refrained, and said instead that she did not know what was to be done. She added that she must go upstairs to the card-rooms, and left him feeling more dissatisfied with her than he would have believed, a week before, that he could be.
If the truth were told, his lordship had been finding his inamorata a little trying ever since the evening they had spent at Vauxhall. Her behaviour then had certainly shocked him and although he had never again seen her assume such peculiar manners, he could not help wondering sometimes if then might be a recurrence the next time she found herself it elevated circles.
Then there was her manner towards himself, which occasionally chafed him. She was often rather impatient with him, as though she found his youth and inexperience exasperating; and she had developed a habit of ordering him about more than he liked. There had even been moments when the memory of a governess he had had in early childhood most forcibly recurred in his mind. He was by no means a fool, and he had begun to perceive that Miss Grantham’s seniority gave her an advantage over him which might well preclude hi assuming the mastery over his own establishment. Lord Mablethorpe had a sweetness of temper which made him universally liked; he was very young still, and diffident; but he was no weakling, and he was growing up fast.
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