by M C Beaton
The butler opened the door to her. Frederica explained the reason for her early visit. He held out his hand. “I will take these to the kitchen, Miss Frederica, but the ladies are still abed, Miss Annabelle recovering from her ordeal.”
Frederica clutched the basket to her and looked up at him, wide-eyed. What a fool she was! She should have realized they would all still be asleep.
“I would like to present these to Lady Crown myself,” she said firmly. “I will return later.”
Lord Granton, descending the staircase in order to have an early breakfast before anyone else was awake, saw the little figure of Frederica confronting the butler.
He strode forward. “Good morning, Miss Frederica,” he said. “Can I be of assistance?”
He saw the relief in her eyes. “I am come to deliver some new-laid eggs to the Hall, but, of course, the ladies are all still abed.”
“Then leave them with Paxton here and let me walk you to the end of the drive.”
Frederica handed over the basket of eggs and walked slowly across the forecourt with Lord Granton until they were out of earshot, for the butler was still standing at the entrance, looking after them curiously.
“It is terrible, truly terrible,” began Frederica. She told him about the blackmail by Beth Judge.
“Tell me about this Judge woman,” he said, “and do not look so frightened. It is no use me giving you two guineas for her, for after I am gone, she will be back for more and will never give up.”
“She is nasty and horrid and old,” said Frederica. “When I was at school, we all thought she was a witch. She sells love potions and things like that and reads one’s fortune in the tea leaves.”
“Does she, now! Well, my chuck, tell me where she lives.”
“It is the second cottage you reach as you approach the village. On the left-hand side of the road, a very tumbledown place.”
“Leave the matter with me. Go home and forget about it.”
“Rupert…”
“I said, go home. I will see you tonight.”
She gave a little shiver despite the heat of the day. “It is no longer safe.”
“Then there must be somewhere safer. What about the church?”
“But that is holy ground!”
“And we are not about to do anything unholy. Is it locked at night?”
“Papa never locks it. He says that there is always someone in need of a place of worship day or night.”
“Sensible man. Until then.”
She looked up at him doubtfully. “Run along, child,” he said gently. “You have nothing to fear.”
Frederica hurried away. As she reached the lodge, she turned and looked back. He was standing in the middle of the drive, watching her. He raised his hand in a salute and then spun on his heel and strode back to the Hall.
Beth Judge squinted at the battered old carriage clock she kept on the table in her parlor. Nearly noon. Frederica would come and Frederica would have that money. Beth smiled slowly. She liked the feeling of power that blackmail gave her.
There was a firm knock at the door. Already planning what she would do with those two guineas, she shuffled over, opened the door, and fell back apace.
Lord Granton was standing on her doorstep, his hat in his hand. For one shaky moment she thought he looked like the devil himself, but then she rallied. “Step into my parlor, my lord.”
“Said the spider to the fly,” he remarked dryly. He followed her in, put his hat, stick, and gloves on the table, and sat down.
“You have been threatening Miss Frederica Hadley and trying to get money out of her.”
She grinned. “I don’t reckon you want anyone to know about it either.”
“Listen here,” he said calmly, “and listen well. You have the reputation of being a witch, a reputation that has, shall I say, never been substantiated. Not until now.”
She sat down in a rocking chair. “What d’you mean?”
“I mean if you ruin my reputation, I will ruin yours. I will say you deliberately set out to lure Miss Hadley and myself to that pool, that you were seen flying overhead on your broomstick.”
Although the witches’ gallows had been taken down in the seventeenth century and old village women no longer went in fear of their lives, Beth knew what such an accusation would do to her. Only the children thought of her as a witch. The people she blackmailed kept quiet, and the rest thought of her as a harmless old maker of potions. But once that dread word “witch” was thrown at her by someone as important as this viscount, she would be blamed for every bad harvest and every dead child and cow. And the villagers would take the law into their own hands.
“So hear this,” Lord Granton went on. “If you so much as approach Miss Frederica Hadley again, I will make what is left of your life a misery, you wretched old crone.”
“I swear to God,” she cried, raising trembling hands, “that I only meant to give missie a fright to point out the folly of her ways.”
He walked to the door while she shuffled after him. “I do not believe your lies. I think you are malicious and evil.”
Beth stood there after he had left. Her heart was thumping erratically, and her breath came out in ragged gasps. The heat of the small room suddenly seemed stifling. She could not seem to get a breath of air. She started to stagger, put out a hand to save herself, and then fell headlong to the floor, where she died of a seizure within minutes.
Lord Granton had been seen going into Beth’s cottage, and speculation ran around the village as to the nature of his visit. Most assumed he had heard of her and wished to have his fortune told.
And then as Frederica sat that afternoon in the parlor of the rectory with her mother and sisters, their maid burst in, her eyes wide with excitement. “Old Beth Judge has been found dead!” she cried. “Lord Granton visited her and she’s been found dead.”
“Tish, girl,” cried Mrs. Hadley. “Watch your tongue. You’ll be saying he murdered her.”
“’Tis most odd that he should call and then her drop dead like that.”
“I had better tell Dr. Hadley,” said Mrs. Hadley. “He will need to arrange the laying out and burial.”
Frederica sat very still, her head bent over a book. She saw not one word; all the time her mind cried out, “What has he done?”
She excused herself and hurried up to her room so that she could think more clearly. Relief and fear warred in her bosom: relief that the threat had been removed, fear that he had struck the old woman down. What did she really know of him? Why had she brushed aside his wicked reputation?
She should forget about him. She hugged herself and shivered despite the heat of the day. She had been playing a dangerous game, meeting him secretly. Why should she have had to meet him secretly? To all intents and purposes, everyone thought he was destined to be Annabelle’s husband. Never having been jealous in her life, Frederica did not recognize her own jealousy of Annabelle, Annabelle who could converse with him openly, have him under her roof, walk with him and talk with him in the sunlight for all to see.
No, she would not meet him that evening or any other evening. She would go to the ball. In that wonderful gown and with her hair up, she might attract some man, some amiable man who might want to marry her. She tried to dream of such a man, but the viscount’s wicked face kept rising before her eyes.
Over their early evening meal, Dr. Hadley suddenly said, “I have been at pains to go about the village putting down a most wicked piece of gossip that old Beth’s death was anything to do with Lord Granton. The physician has examined her and she died of a seizure. She was nearly eighty, a great age, and beyond our Lord’s appointed three score years and ten. People have strange and puzzling reactions. Mrs. Andrews, the baker’s wife, burst into tears when she heard the news and cried, ‘Thank God she is dead. My prayers have been answered.’”
Frederica wondered briefly if Mrs. Andrews had been threatened also with something by Beth, for surely the old woman had not suddenly t
aken to blackmail. But it seemed as if Lord Granton had had nothing at all to do with the death. Relief slowly seeped through her body. She had been picking at her food; now she suddenly began to eat with an appetite. She would meet him that evening.
Mrs. Hadley uneasily watched Frederica. Why, the girl looked radiant, beautiful. She could not remember Frederica ever looking so well. She thought of telling her she was not to go to the ball, thought of all that radiance dimmed, thought of strange Frederica’s incalculable reaction, and felt a burst of anger against her husband. Why should she be left with the dismal chore of breaking the news to Frederica? Her husband should do it.
But Dr. Hadley had fallen grim and silent. She wondered why he looked so forbidding.
Dr. Hadley was remembering a small stack of letters he had found in a chest in old Beth’s cottage when he had been going through her things to make sure there was nothing of value that might unaccountably go missing. They betrayed that the baker’s wife had once had a romantic affair with Hal Turpin, a farm laborer, and that Agnes Dunn, the miller’s daughter, had, while still a maiden, given birth to an illegitimate stillborn child. In some of the letters the women had pleaded that they could afford no more. He had burned the letters and gone to tell them so. He had not been at all surprised at Mrs. Andrews’s reaction but had no intention of telling his wife about the real reason, or anyone else for that matter. He was also glad that the old woman had died a natural death, for had she not, he would have felt obliged to turn the letters over to the authorities.
He came out of his worried preoccupation to notice Frederica’s radiant appearance. He kept shooting her puzzled little glances. Had it been any of his other daughters, he might have assumed her to be in love. But Frederica! He still thought of her as a child.
Frederica did not pause to think she might be falling in love with Lord Granton. She had always let her head rule her heart in every matter. Such as Lord Granton would never look on her as a marriageable prospect; she had been silly to become angry at the thought that she had to meet him in secret. It was a summer idyll, something to be remembered.
But she dressed with more than usual care and then on impulse braided her fine hair into a coronet on top of her head. She smiled at her reflection, pleased with the effect.
She ran down the back stairs and let herself out quietly into the evening calm of the garden. As she moved across the scrubby grass to the back gate, she felt she was walking onto a moonlit stage.
She must no longer get irritated with him, just enjoy the moment and think no further than the day after the ball when he would be gone from her life forever.
Chapter Six
Lord Granton let himself quietly into the darkness of the church. He drew back as he saw the elegant figure lit by a shaft of moonlight standing in the center of the aisle.
But, of course, it was Frederica. She turned and smiled at him. He caught his breath. She seemed a silver figure in the moonlight.
She walked to meet him. “Do you like my hair?” she asked, pirouetting slowly in front of him.
“Very fine.” How odd that such a simple thing as putting her hair up had turned Frederica from a child into a young lady.
“Let us sit in one of the pews. Should anyone enter the church, we will not be observed.” He opened the door of one of the high-walled pews. They sat side by side.
“I do not think that old woman will trouble you again,” he began, “but should she do so, you must write to me in London or the country and I will come directly.”
“You have not heard the news?” cried Frederica. “Mrs. Judge dropped dead of a seizure shortly after your visit. Did you threaten her?”
“I only told her that if she continued to trouble you I would report her as a witch.”
“That must have frightened her to death,” said Frederica. “There was an old woman in a village near here who was said to be a witch. The talk grew and grew, and soon every misfortune that happened to anyone in the village was blamed on her. She was driven out of her cottage. My father said she was harmless, only senile.”
“I did not mean to frighten her that badly. On the other hand, I cannot mourn her death. If she tried to blackmail you, then it follows that she had been blackmailing other people.”
“I believe that to be the case.” Frederica looked down at her hands, suddenly shy. She wished they were back beside the pool, in the open air. Here, in the velvety darkness of the pew, she was intensely conscious of him, of the long, strong body so near her own.
“So this will be our last meeting before the ball,” he said. “And then I shall be gone. Will you miss me?”
The Frederica of the pool would have given him a simple yes, but the Frederica in the dark proximity of the pew muttered, “Perhaps.”
“Only perhaps?” he teased. “I shall miss you, Frederica.”
“Take me with you.” Frederica’s voice was very low. He bent his head toward her.
“My child, it would be such a scandal.”
“There is nothing for me here. You have had mistresses before.”
“Experienced women of the world with little in the way of reputation to lose. It would not answer. You will soon marry and forget this summer interlude.”
Not until I die, she thought. Why cannot he marry me? It would all be so simple. She realized clearly for the first time that when he went, he would take her heart with him.
They were silent. Lord Granton’s conscience had never troubled him before so fiercely as it was doing at that moment. He felt as evil as he was reputed to be, sitting in this ancient church with this virgin, meeting her on the sly. He gave himself a mental shake. He had done nothing that was wrong… by the letter of the law. They had not been found out, except by one poacher who would not dare to open his mouth and by one old woman, now dead. Tomorrow was the ball and the day after he would go.
He could not see her new appearance in the darkness, and so he conjured up the girlish Frederica with her hair down her back.
“What shall we talk about?” he asked lightly. “What have you been reading?”
“I have been reading some interesting articles on India. One writer complains bitterly about the rise of the half-caste children in Bengal.”
“And why is that?”
“Apart from the moral question, the writer argues that everywhere this intermediate caste has been allowed to rise it has been that land’s ruin. Spanish America is an example of this. He fears that in India this tribe may soon become too powerful to control. He proposes that every father of half-caste children should be obliged to send them to Europe for their education and leave them there.”
“And what about the ruin of Europe? Oh, I see. He feels this new breed might throw the British masters out of India?”
“I assume that is what he is saying. He says many are sent to England for their education but then are brought back to work in the mercantile houses.”
“I think perhaps religion might bring about the end of our rule in India. There is great resentment among the Hindus over the efforts of the missionaries. They should have followed the advice of the Duke of Wellington when he was in India and he ordered his troops not to interfere with either the religions or customs of that country.”
She fell silent again and he looked down on her shadowy figure, half in exasperation, half with affection. Poor Frederica. What gentleman was ever going to let her talk freely about half-caste children without being deeply shocked? Ladies were not even supposed to know about such matters. And how boring that did make them.
“How goes Miss Annabelle?” asked Frederica.
“Restored to health and spirits. It is my belief that were it not for this ball, she would have languished prettily in bed, eating grapes and enjoying her invalid status for several weeks.”
“Perhaps Papa might be persuaded to take the little money that is set aside for my dowry and send me to India,” said Frederica.
“Think of the heat! Think of the dreadful journey!”
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“But it would be an adventure,” said Frederica patiently. “There was an advertisement in the newspapers. An elderly lady in Calcutta advertised for a young companion, provided said companion was prepared to pay her own passage.”
“And what if the old lady should die before you got there? Calcutta is only bearable if one is leading a social life, and as companion to an old lady, you might find your days even more boring than they are here.”
“One should take risks, I think,” said Frederica sententiously. “It could be another scene entirely. She could be a very amiable, very rich old lady who would be so grateful that she would leave me her fortune, and then I might be able to marry an army officer and lead a dashing life.”