‘No,’ he was glad of the chance to be firm. ‘My mind is quite made up.’
‘Of course, it is.’ She smiled at him. ‘Do you know, Mr Mandeville, all these dramatics have made me most unconscionably thirsty. Do you think your friend with the red nose could be prevailed upon to bring me some ratafia?’
He laughed and rang the bell. ‘I am sure of it.’ He gave the order and stood, smiling down at her, very much too close for her liking. ‘Your composure, Miss Fairbank, is admirable. You have not even asked me how I propose to get you to France.’
‘Why should I?’ She returned his gaze coolly. ‘I am sure you have made excellent arrangements. And it is evident enough that you have had a deal of practice in the abduction business.’ She regretted the taunt as soon as it was spoken.
He flushed and came a little closer, his hand heavy on her arm. She looked down at it, then exclaimed: ‘La, Mr Mandeville, only look at your hands. Why, they are dirty as a stable boy’s. I declare, I should blush to sit at table with you. Our red-faced friend will, I am sure, be good enough to keep me company while you make yourself fit to be seen.’
He looked at her in amazement. ‘I am sure I do not know what you would be at. But, if you wish it, I will certainly make myself tidy. After all, this is a time to celebrate.’ He called the landlord, explained to him that the young lady was liable to nervous fits if left alone and left them together.
The landlord looked in some surprise at Jennifer, sitting composedly in her fireside chair, but complied. While Mandeville was away, she prattled gaily to him about the pleasures she expected in Paris, interlarding her conversation with as many ‘las’ and ‘I vows’ as she could get her tongue round. ‘And the Rue Rivoli,’ she was saying when Mandeville returned, ‘and the place where they killed that poor Queen, and the Tull...’ She hesitated for the word. ‘Well, that palace everyone says is so monstrous fine. I shall see it all and have a new wardrobe too.’
‘Are you gone quite mad?’ asked Mandeville, when the host had left them.
‘Why, no, I am merely practising my part. Do you not like it?’
‘I find it ridiculous.’ He took an angry turn about the room. ‘And I do not understand you.’ He came and loomed over her. ‘What is going on in that pretty little head of yours?’
She tossed her curls. ‘Merely a vast desire for my dinner, and a little philosophy, Mr Mandeville. If I am to end my days as a bit of muslin—I believe that is the phrase?—I must get into the spirit of it. But here, at last, is dinner.’ She watched with well-concealed anxiety while the landlord and a scrubby boy of about fourteen brought in the various dishes and bottles that constituted the meal. Would they open all the wine at once? Everything depended on that. At last, hiding her relief, she saw the host open one bottle and economically leave the others on the side table.
Mandeville made a great parade of seating her at the table, but she managed to take the chair furthest from the fire, facing the window and close to the side table. Then, forcing down the food that nearly choked her, she compelled herself to be entertaining, reciting, for her companion’s benefit, one after the other of the more lively scandals with which she had been used—how long ago it seemed—to amuse the old Duchess.
The meal passed uneventfully. Mandeville, to her disappointment drank only in moderation. ‘This is no night to be bosky,’ he told her, giving point to his words with a leer and a tilt of his glass in her direction.
She felt sick, but this, and sundry other insinuations of his, made it easier to go ahead with her plan at which she had found herself almost boggling. The table had been cleared now, and the dessert laid. The host had opened another bottle of claret, but one still remained, unopened, on the table behind her.
‘That will do.’ Mandeville dismissed the man. ‘We can look after ourselves from now on, can we not, my pretty?’ He drew his chair closer to hers, and put his hand on her knee.
‘Of course we can, Mr Mandeville, and, to begin with, my glass is empty. You may not wish to find yourself bosky, as you so elegantly put it, but, do you know, I rather think I would prefer to be.’
He burst into a guffaw and filled her glass. ‘That’s a good one, damme if it isn’t. Just you wait till I tell them that at the Club. “Prefer to be bosky”...Damned if I don’t like your spirit, Jennifer.’ Absent-mindedly, he emptied and refilled his own glass. Dared she wait until he had drunk a little more? No. His hand was back on her knee, and beginning to travel. She looked suddenly at the window:
‘Lud,’ she exclaimed, ‘if it isn’t Lord Mainwaring!’
‘What? Here?’ Mandeville turned to the window with an oath.
It was the chance Jennifer had planned for. She picked up the unopened bottle of claret and brought it down as hard as she could on his head. He gave a little grunt and settled down in his chair. She listened. All was quiet. At the back of the house she could hear the landlord’s voice raised, haranguing, no doubt, his wife and the scrubby boy. All was well so far. If only she had not hit Mandeville too hard. But he was breathing regularly, if heavily, and his pulse seemed steady enough. At once a different fear shook her. What if he should recover consciousness too soon?
With a shaking hand, she removed the well-lined wallet from his pocket. This went, curiously enough, even more against the grain than knocking him out. But there was no help for it. She must get away as quickly as possible, and that meant money. She tucked the wallet securely into her reticule, put on her bonnet, which she had been careful not to leave upstairs, and took a quick look round the room. She had left nothing that could identify her. Suddenly anxious, she damped a napkin and tied it round Mandeville’s head where the lump was beginning to show. That done, she went quickly out into the hall, shot the bolt of the big front door gently back and stepped out into the fresh air of the summer evening.
It had never smelt so good. She took deep breaths of liberty as she looked quickly up and down the village street that lay quiet in evening shadows. It must be very late. Lucky for her that this adventure had happened on one of the longest and lightest nights of the year. Now that she was safe away from Miles Mandeville, she found it impossible to be altogether in despair. Her position was difficult enough, it was true, but she was free, she had money, she would save herself—and her reputation—yet. It was a pity, she thought, starting briskly forward towards the centre of the little town, that she had no idea where she was, but the important thing was to know where she was going. Of that, she was very sure. She was going home. All her troubles had arisen from her folly in running away in the first place. She would go back to Denton Hall, establish herself at last as mistress of her house and defy the world and its gossip. If Mainwaring wanted to seek her out, good. If not—well, it was unfortunate, but must be faced. She would die the most eccentric of old maids. I will breed cats, she decided, or perhaps monkeys, and, entering the central square of the little town, found herself facing the main inn of the place.
A few people were still stirring in the square and she was aware of being the target of some curious glances. She should have been considering what story to tell at the inn to account for her unattended and baggageless state. Then she squared her shoulders and threw back her head in a gesture that Mainwaring would have found oddly reminiscent of her older brother. Why should she have to explain herself to these people? She had money and a clear conscience. What more could anyone want?
She swept into the inn with a very passable imitation of the Duchess’s manner when irritated and demanded the landlord in imperious tones. He came, somewhat reluctantly, from the toasted cheese he had been enjoying by the kitchen fire, and asked her with scant civility what she required at this time of night.
‘A hack chaise and four of your best horses at once,’ was her uncompromising answer.
‘A hack chaise? Four horses?’ He had never heard of such a thing. A young lady—he used the term with much implication of doubt—a very young lady. And all on her own...What could she be wanting with a chaise
and four?
‘That,’ said Jennifer, ‘is none of your business, my good man. I am late already. I will pay well if the chaise is ready in ten minutes.’ Casually, she withdrew Mandeville’s wallet from her reticule.
‘Oh?’ The landlord raised his eyebrows, begged her pardon and gave the necessary orders.
After an anxious quarter of an hour, in the course of which she learned by discreet questioning that she was in Epsom, and, in return, unbent so far as to favour the now mollified landlord with a few casual references to death and catastrophe in her family, she set forward, at last, for Denton Hall.
The sun had set long since. The moon rose. Jennifer slept fitfully, tossed this way and that as the carriage rumbled on. When she woke at last, stiff and tired, she recognised the walls of Petworth Park on her right. She was nearly home. The coachman stopped in Petworth Square for directions, then they lumbered on again. It seemed no time before they were in Denton Park. A deer galloped away, startled by the sound of the carriage. Cool dawn lay kindly on the old house. Jennifer alighted with a lump in her throat and a suspicion of tears in her eyes. Wiping them briskly away, she paid off the coachman and turned, with a strange lightening of her heart, to the steps of her house. She was safe; she was home; she was herself again.
She climbed the steps and played a lively tattoo on the knocker. So, years ago, her brothers used to announce an unexpected return. Oddly, she found, for the first time, that she could think of them without pain. I am grown up, she told herself; how strange.
But a light had sprung up in the still-dark house and now the big door swung slowly open to reveal Soames, the butler, in his greatcoat and nightcap, a candle in one hand, his old face a mask of anxiety.
It thawed at sight of her. ‘Miss Jennifer,’ he said, ‘oh, happy day. You are home at last.’
‘Yes, Soames,’ she stepped into the quiet hall and he shut the big door behind her. ‘I am come home to take charge, as I should have long since.’
He wiped an incongruous tear from the side of his nose. ‘This is good news indeed. But, Miss Jenny, are you all alone? No boxes? No abigail?’
She smiled at him ruefully. ‘Is it not shocking, Soames? What a fortunate thing there is no one but you here to see. Now, I am going direct to bed, and, I think, Soames, that I have been here, indisposed, for some time.’
He smiled at her in affectionate comprehension. ‘Ah, Miss Jenny, you were ever a wild one. It broke our hearts in the servants’ hall, indeed it did, to see you knuckle under to that...’
‘Hush, Soames,’ she interrupted him, ‘enough of that. It is all over now. And back to bed with you before you catch pneumonia. I am going to my room. You may call me at noon, and please arrange for Hobson the agent to see me at one o’clock.’
He was so delighted at this fresh proof that she meant to take charge of the estate that he did little more than mutter unavailingly about aired sheets and warming-pans as he led her up the stairs to her room. She dismissed him with a summary, ‘Nonsense, Soames,’ climbed into the familiar bed, and was asleep.
CHAPTER XVIII
In London, Lord Mainwaring paced up and down, up and down, this way and that, in his grandmother’s boudoir, while she sat, very upright, in her big chair and watched him with sympathetic, malicious eyes.
‘George, you make me giddy,’ she said at last, ‘it is worse than the beasts at Exeter ’Change. Can you not sit down and possess your soul in patience, like a Christian?’
‘No, ma’am.’ He paused beside her. ‘If it was not all my own fault, I could bear it. But I have done so much to affront her. How can she forgive me?’ He resumed his pacing, but in a different direction which allowed him to look, as if casually, out of the window for sight of his grandmother’s footman, returning from his message to Jennifer.
‘How she forgives you, I collect, is her problem,’ said the old lady, ‘but forgiveness, you know, comes more easily to a female. The times I have forgiven your grandfather...Oh, dear me...’
‘But you were married to him, ma’am.’
‘You think that makes it easier? I wonder, George, I wonder.’
But he was no longer listening to her. ‘At last,’ he said. ‘What can the fellow have been doing all this time? But here he comes, I think.’
He made as if to leave the room and go to meet the footman, but his grandmother held up a restraining hand. ‘Patience, George, patience a little, and remember that the note will be addressed to me.’
But there was no note. After what seemed to Mainwaring a quite intolerable delay, the footman appeared in all the splendour of his indoor livery and reported to the Duchess that he had received no answer to her message.
‘No answer?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘No, stay, George, do not go to the devil yet. I find this hard to believe. Miss Fairbank—I beg her pardon, Miss Purchas—is proud, but she was never discourteous.’ She turned to the footman. ‘You delivered the note into Miss Fairbank’s own hands as I bade you?’
He quailed under her penetrating eye. ‘No, I could not, your grace, she was not there.’
‘Not there? Then why did you not await her return?’
The man reddened and wriggled his neck as if the collar of his livery jacket was too tight: ‘If your grace would bear with me...I know you do not like to listen to servants’ gossip...I waited as long as I could...They were all at sixes and sevens, your grace. There seemed no sense in staying longer.’
‘No sense? Or do you mean that it was your dinner hour? Plague take you for a faithless featherheaded fop of a worthless servant. But what is this about sixes and sevens and servants’ gossip?’
‘Why, your grace, not to put too fine a point upon it, they were saying in the servants’ hall—if you can call it such, with but three maids, the cook and the butler, and him out of livery, too.’ He shrank at his mistress’s impatient exclamation and continued: ‘Well, to be short with your grace, they were saying in the servants’ hall that Miss Fairbank is run off.’
‘What, again?’ said the Duchess. ‘Impossible. No, George. I will not have you fly off before I have sifted this further. I am tired of your tantrums. Behave yourself and listen.’
No one had spoken to Mainwaring like that for a long time. Surprised at himself, he subsided into a chair and listened to his grandmother’s cross-examination of the footman. He had arrived, it seemed, to find the house in great commotion. Mr Gurning had come in to speak to Miss Fairbank, had found she had gone out unattended, and had flown at once into a passion—not, the footman had gathered from a sympathetic maid, a rare occurrence with him. Miss Gurning had done her best to soothe him, explaining that her cousin had only stepped out for a breath of fresh air and that her other cousin Edmund, anxious at the impropriety of her being out alone, had gone after her. As all this had taken place in the front hall of the house, the footman, comfortably ensconced below-stairs, had heard everything that took place and had waited, contentedly enough, it was clear, for Miss Fairbank to return. ‘I shall never remember to call her Miss Purchas,’ sighed the Duchess at this point.
But instead, Edmund had arrived, slamming the door, white of face, shouting out to all who cared to hear that his cousin Jennifer had been carried off by a man in a maroon travelling carriage. Mr Gurning had flown into a new passion, his sister had burst into tears, and his daughter had threatened to do likewise, but had refused to believe Miss Fairbank was gone off of her own free-will. By now, of course, the servants were unashamedly listening. They had heard Miss Gurning run upstairs and come back with a note addressed to Miss Fairbank, which she had found on the floor of her room. It made an assignation in the Temple Gardens. Going innocently to keep it, Miss Fairbank must have been abducted. At this point, Mrs Foster’s tears turned to hysteria and Miss Gurning had finally collapsed, dropping the note as she did so.
‘And what happened to it?’ asked the Duchess shrewdly.
‘Well, your grace.’ The man’s collar was too tight again. ‘I don’t know whether I d
one right and that’s a fact. I only hope your grace won’t be angry with me, but knowing what an interest you take in the young lady, and happening to have an opportunity.’ He pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to her. ‘I picked it up and here it is.’
‘Good,’ said the Duchess. ‘You have done better than I thought. Now you may go to your dinner.’
Alone with Mainwaring, she smoothed out the crumpled note and read it aloud: “My dearest life, I find I cannot live without you. You must forgive, you must marry me. I cannot visit you in Holborn. Meet me, I beg, in the Temple Gardens, by the river, as soon as you receive this. I will await you there, your humble servant, all evening.” Hmm,’ she considered it, ‘fustian, but to the point. And signed, George, with an “M”. You are not, I take it, responsible?’
‘I? Responsible? This is no time for jesting, ma’am. She is run off, it seems, with Mandeville. I know that maroon carriage of his. Well, I wish them joy of each other.’
‘George, you try my patience beyond bearing. Have you no sense whatever? Or are you so blind and deaf in your own passions that you did not hear what the man said? Miss Fairbank was carried off, George, in that maroon carriage, which, you say, belongs to Mandeville. This note, of course, is from him. I recognise the style. He has taken a fine revenge on you indeed. I wonder if he intended Jennifer to think the note was from you or whether that was merely a piece of luck for him.’
‘From me? What do you mean?’
‘God give me patience! Have you not twigged it yet? Jennifer, distracted, no doubt, from her scene with you, receives this note, with its talk of forgiveness and marriage, its initial “M”. Of course she jumps at once to the conclusion that it is from you and hurries off to the rendezvous to forgive and be forgiven.’
He jumped up. ‘And finds Mandeville instead. I shall never forgive myself. If I had only gone back to her instead of coming here and talking of my pride and my despair and a parcel of other trash...But we waste time. I thank you from my heart, ma’am, for making me see reason. Now, will you add to your kindness by lending me your fastest carriage and my grandfather’s pistols?’
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