by Fiona Monroe
"Number seventeen?" he asked.
"Yes, your lordship."
"See, there is a light in the hallway. You won't have to dismiss your servant after all."
It was true. A light glimmered faintly but distinctly through the fan of glass above the big front door, which meant there was a lamp or candle lit in the entrance hall.
Margaret stopped, feeling suddenly sick. Lord John halted briefly, glanced down at her, but then strode briskly forward and pulled her with him. He mounted the four front steps and, without any attempt at subterfuge or concealment, rapped the doorknocker three times.
Almost immediately, the door was opened by Mrs. Brown, the housekeeper. Despite the hour, she was fully dressed.
And behind her, stepping into the light of the candlestick held aloft by Mrs. Brown, was her aunt.
"Good evening, madam," said Lord John with a bow. "Lord John Dunwoodie at your service. Forgive me for rousing the household so late, but I have the honour and satisfaction of delivering Miss Bell safely back to her friends. Miss Bell, good night. It was a pleasure."
His hand went reflexively to his head to sweep off the hat that was not there. He turned the gesture into a deeper, more formal bow, and departed with rapid clicks of his heels echoing in the quiet of the night.
It was only long habit that caused Margaret to dip a curtsy in return and mumble some platitude that he could not possibly hear.
Mrs. Cochrane had said nothing at all to her unexpected visitor, merely stared at him coldly as if he were a beggar on her doorstep. When he was gone, she transferred her glare to Margaret.
Margaret hung her head and mounted the steps.
As Mrs. Brown closed the door with a dreadful, doom-laden clunk, Margaret felt as though the prison gates were being slammed behind her. At the same time, she was glad to be in the safety of her home after the terrifying and humiliating walk through the streets.
It was cold in the hallway. Margaret wrapped her arms around herself and looked down at the sad state of her evening gown. The white muslin was covered in mud and horse manure.
"Where have you been?" Mrs. Cochrane asked in tones of outrage.
"To… Mrs. Hamilton's soiree. I'm sorry, Aunt."
"In company with that gentleman?" She spat out the word as if it were an insult.
"No! Of course, not. I went with… I went with Mrs. Douglas. L-lord John escorted me home—"
Her aunt's face tightened. "You walked at night in company with that man, alone?"
"No! I set out alone, but he chanced to—that is—I wish to go to bed now, Aunt. Please excuse me."
She could not understand why her aunt was awake and dressed and appeared to have been waiting for her. Mrs. Cochrane usually retired for the night at just after ten o'clock, being a believer in early to bed and early to rise. She tried to go past her, heading for the staircase, but Mrs. Cochrane's hand clamped with a firm grip on her forearm.
"Oh, no, my girl," Mrs. Cochrane said. "You have gone too far this time."
"Leave me alone!" Margaret cried, roughly pulling her arm back.
But Mrs. Cochrane's hand was like an iron clamp, and she would not let go. "It's as I've always said to your uncle; you have been spoiled and indulged, and this is the result. Blatant disobedience, leaving the house at night—alone—walking the streets at night, alone—walking the streets at night, with a man—and going into society with a woman you have been expressly forbidden to associate with! You are a wicked, defiant, disobedient girl, and you ought to have been taught a lesson long before this."
Margaret felt the justice of much of this, and it angered her. "Let go!" she cried. "I'll call for my uncle!"
"Oh, your uncle quite agrees with me now, that he has neglected his responsibilities in bringing you up. He approves the remedy, even if he has not quite the resolution to apply it himself. But I have no such qualms. I have never shirked my duty toward Charity, and I am determined to take my role as your aunt just as seriously."
While she was talking, Mrs. Cochrane was determinedly steering Margaret toward the staircase, and Margaret, though a minute before, she had been headed that way herself, resisted the direction as a matter of course. She made a further, more serious attempt to break free of her aunt's hold, and when her aunt responded by gripping her wrist all the tighter, Margaret screamed in frustration and anger and lashed out with her foot.
The kick connected with her aunt's ankle underneath her skirt, and Mrs. Cochrane drew in her breath with a hiss. She did not release Margaret's arm, however. Instead, she hooked her other arm around Margaret's waist, and she found herself upended, lifted clean off her feet by her aunt's wiry arms.
She screamed again and twisted her whole body violently.
"Mrs. Brown," said Mrs. Cochrane, breathless but grim-sounding. "A little assistance with Miss Margaret, if you please."
"Certainly, madam," said the calm voice of Mrs. Brown.
To Margaret's astonishment and utter chagrin, she felt the housekeeper take hold of her ankles.
"Let me go!" Margaret shrieked. "Brown! How dare you! I am your mistress! Let me go!"
"I am the mistress of this house," said Mrs. Cochrane. She had Margaret caught around the upper part of her body and was lifting her sideways up the stairs. "You are a young unmarried lady in sore need of correction."
Margaret struggled and thrashed and shrieked as the two women carried her bodily upward, flailing her one free arm to hit out blindly at Mrs. Cochrane. Her head was hanging down and her hair was tangled into her face and she could see very little. Her hand connected with fabric and then, with a satisfyingly sharp slap, with bare flesh. She had managed to strike her aunt on the side of her jaw with the back of her hand. She felt her captor flinch and heard a gasp of what she hoped was pain.
"Margaret!"
The familiar and very welcome voice of her uncle quieted her immediately. She stopped struggling and lifted her head as best she could. Through the curtain of dishevelled hair, she saw her uncle, in his nightshirt and cap and holding a candle, standing at the top of the stairs.
"Uncle!" she cried. "See how I am treated! Tell them! Tell them to put me down!"
Her uncle's expression was frowning, tinged with sadness. "Did you just strike your aunt, Margaret?"
"Tell her to put me down!" Margaret started to weep noisily.
At a wordless nod from her uncle, Mrs. Cochrane at last released her hold of Margaret. Margaret found herself lowered to the stairs by her aunt and the housekeeper, and she let herself fall deliberately onto her knees and gave over to petulant sobs.
Her uncle came down two steps and stood over her. "You left the house, Margaret, when you were expressly forbidden permission to go to the party," he said in a quiet, troubled tone. His expression seemed still to be gentle. "You defied our will, also, in associating with Mrs. Douglas. I did not want to tell you, but we have good reason to believe that she is not at all a suitable person, that since she left this house, she has not conducted herself well."
"If so, it is your fault!" Margaret cried with a last burst of resentment. "You put her out; you made her desperate!"
"No, Margaret. No, indeed. I made arrangements that she should be comfortable and respectable in a small way. I saw that she should not want for the necessities of life. You knew this. If she wanted luxuries beyond her station, that was her own folly."
Margaret did indeed know this. She had very little to say in Emmeline's defence. Her discovery of Emmeline's character was the worst blow of this wretched night.
"You put yourself in danger by going out at night alone," her uncle continued. "You have done what no respectable young lady should ever do—"
"I walked along three streets! In the New Town, in the lamplight, in view of a policeman!"
"And the behaviour I have just witnessed toward your aunt—"
"She is not my aunt!" Margaret burst out. She could not hold this in any longer. "Oh, Uncle, why did you have to marry her?"
"Mr. Cochrane!" The woman
whom she heartily wished was not her aunt exclaimed in shock but, also, satisfied tones.
Immediately, Margaret wished the words unsaid. Her uncle's dear face looked pained.
"Margaret," he said. "My little sister, Fiona, was the person I loved most in the world. After my parents died, she was everything to me. She was the light of Leuchers House, even after she married, because you know your father was overseas fighting Napoleon, and you both stayed in her old home with me while he was gone. When he returned, they were going to take a house in the neighbourhood and live happily there with you. But we received news that Captain Bell had been killed in action, and Fiona went into a terrible decline. Her light went out. There was fever going around, and she caught it, and I am convinced she did nothing to fight it. She begged me on her deathbed to take care of her child, the only part she had left of her beloved husband. I made a sacred promise that I would do so, and I have failed."
"You have not failed! Dearest Uncle Cochrane, you have always loved me. I have been happy!"
"Aye, Margaret, but have you been good? I very much fear that if your mother should be watching what has happened tonight, she would be heartbroken."
"Do not say that!"
"I thought it would be easy to bring up a little girl, and you were always a sweet and sunny little girl. People wiser than I told me that I ought to marry for your sake, that you needed the guidance of a good and holy woman, but I thought I knew better. Instead, I let your character be formed by a flighty young woman who has proven herself to be, well— "
"A wicked whore," said Mrs. Cochrane, again with satisfaction.
"No!" cried Margaret, even though she knew it was true. She could not bear to have used the word herself and was somehow surprised that her aunt should know it. She heaved in a breath and forced herself to speak in a small, contrite voice. "Uncle, I am truly sorry. I am ashamed. I did not know what Mrs. Douglas— I did not know about her situation. When I discovered it, I told her I could have nothing more to do with her." In truth, Margaret could scarcely remember what she had said to Emmeline in the shock of the moment. "I meant nothing tonight but to be introduced to Mr. Keats, the poet. Truly. I had no wicked intentions. Please do not say I am so very bad, dear Uncle, so very bad that my mother would be ashamed of me!"
She broke down into real tears there on the stairs, holding her face in her hands and hoping that she presented a pretty and pathetic sight to move the soft heart of her uncle to forgive her. She felt wretchedly tired, in every sinew of her body, and the soles of her feet were bruised and cold. More than anything, she longed to be safe under the sheets and blankets of her own bed, with a warming-bottle against her toes.
"I know you are not a bad girl, my child." Her uncle's hand touched the top of her head. "But you have wayward tendencies, and you have been led astray. Your aunt will teach you the lesson that I ought to have administered, years ago."
"Lesson?" Margaret looked from her uncle's sorrowful, resigned expression to her aunt's determined, flinty face. Surely, he could not mean that Mrs. Cochrane was going to punish her as she had sometimes heard her talk about whipping her own daughter with a belt? Something which Charity had said recently had suggested that she still expected to receive this chastisement if she did not behave, and Margaret had thought scornfully that no young lady of one-and-twenty should submit to such a humiliation.
Now, on her knees on the stairs, her hair in her face and her dress in ruins, her heart and soul heavy with guilt and self-disgust, she realised that all her own three and twenty years meant nothing. As Mrs. Cochrane had said, she was a young unmarried lady in her uncle's house, who had behaved disgracefully. She could flee her punishment, but where would she go? Back out into the streets?
"Go to your room," said Mrs. Cochrane. "Remove those filthy garments and prepare yourself for bed. I will be with you shortly."
Margaret could not move. She felt frozen to the stairs.
"Go! This moment! Or I will have Mrs. Brown carry you!"
Mrs. Brown started to move toward her, and Margaret found she could rouse herself after all. She climbed to legs that felt unsteady and numb, and she turned for one last appealing look at her uncle.
He gazed at her, shook his head as if in disgust, and turned back into his bedchamber.
As Margaret stumbled toward her own room, she caught a flash of movement above her.
Leaning over the bannisters from the landing above, her hair long and loose for bed, a raptly interested expression on her face, was Charity.
To Margaret's chagrin, Mrs. Brown followed her into her bedroom with the candle and placed it on the dressing table. Unasked, she took a nightdress out of the chest of drawers and shook it out over the counterpane then turned impassively toward Margaret as if she were going to help her out of her gown.
"Leave me," said Margaret shortly, peeling off her ruined evening slippers. They were kid and silk and had been decorated with little pink roses and glass beads, now stained and torn from their walk along the street. Her silk stockings, too, were sodden and ripped.
Mrs. Brown stooped to retrieve them, held them up to the candlelight and tutted. "These shoes cost a guinea, the roses a shilling each, the stockings twelve shillings a pair! They're ruined!"
"It's no concern of yours," said Margaret sullenly. She could not believe how Mrs. Brown was behaving toward her. She had always been at least superficially respectful, before Uncle Cochrane's marriage. "Leave me, I said!"
"I've to help you undress." Again, Mrs. Brown made to assist with the gown. "Mrs. Cochrane's orders."
"I don't need help to undress!" Margaret cried. "I am not a child!"
She was stopped short as Mrs. Brown took hold of her arms, physically steered her to the bed, and sat her down as if she were indeed a truculent child. Then she took hold of her skirts and briskly pulled the gown over her head.
"This will have to be turned into rags, too!" she proclaimed and added the delicate muslin to the heap that was the stockings and shoes.
She began to unlace Margaret's stays with angry yanks, and Margaret submitted to it because she had not been sure, in fact, how she would have managed without assistance. She supposed she would have gone to bed with the stays in place and asked her own maid, Anderson, to adjust them in the morning before dressing her as usual. Anderson was young and devoted to her and would never betray her. She realised now that she ought to have told Anderson to wait up for her and let her in secretly. She was a poor adventuress.
Before Mrs. Brown could do it for her, while the housekeeper had turned to fold the stays away, Margaret untied her petticoat and shrugged quickly out of it.
It was the cold dead depths of night, and the air on her bare legs was bitter. She held up her arms and shivered as Mrs. Brown slipped the chilly cotton of the nightdress over her naked skin.
"It's cold," Margaret said shortly.
"It's past midnight," said Mrs. Brown, looking at the empty fireplace. "No sense in setting a fire now. I don't doubt Mrs. Cochrane will be long about her business."
"You might bring me a heated bottle."
"I might, if the kitchen range were lit, which it is not at this time of night. Nor will it be. Don't worry, Miss Margaret. You'll be warm soon enough."
The housekeeper said this with such emphasis and an expression on her face so near amusement that Margaret looked at her sharply. She supposed that she would warm up, when she got under the covers and the chill wore off. She thought about getting straight into bed and pulling the counterpane over her head and ignoring her aunt, and perhaps she would go away. But she could not even get her housekeeper to leave her room, the servant who had until recently theoretically been under her own command.
Her aunt could not really, truly be intending to punish her. Margaret decided suddenly that the best thing she could do would be to appear compliant and contrite and agree with everything her aunt said. There would be some tedious lecturing, but nothing worse. So, she sat on the edge of the bed, head bowed,
her heart skittering, a swooping, sick feeling in her stomach, and her fingers digging convulsively into the mattress.
Mrs. Brown said nothing more but finished folding the clothes then stood with her hands folded quietly in front of her.
It seemed a long time before her aunt's tread creaked on the floorboard outside the room, and the door slowly opened. Mrs. Cochrane came in carrying a candlestick, but nothing in the way of a belt or any other instrument of chastisement.
Margaret's insides melted with relief. She jumped to her bare feet and made a clumsy half-curtsy, half-bow and said in as small and meek a voice as she could command, "Dear Aunt Cochrane, I am so very sorry for my bad behaviour. It was inexcusable, but please forgive me. I will never, ever do it again, I promise."
She kept her head bowed before her aunt but snuck a glance upward through the tangles of hair over her forehead to check that her apology was being well received. Her aunt's impassive face, which, at the best of times, seemed to be carved from the same grey stone of the city, was set into lines of determination. Margaret could see no yielding, no softening.
"You will not," she said with quiet decision. "Not once I have finished with you. You'll remember it for some time, and I hope it will make you stop and think in future, what is due to your uncle, and to me, and to your own good name. Consider this, Margaret. A respectable man will not marry a young lady whose reputation is in any way tainted."
"Tainted! Aunt, I promise, all I did was go to the soiree. I am so very sorry for my disobedience, but Lord John did not escort me home as he said; he followed me without my knowledge and surprised me in the mews…" She trailed off as she saw the lines deepen around Mrs. Cochrane's mouth, and she realised she was doing herself no favours. She had meant to be meek, but she could not contain herself when her aunt brought her reputation into question.
"And what," said Mrs. Cochrane in dangerously soft tones, "were you doing in the mews?"
"I-I was trying to get into the house. I'm sorry!"
"Oh, no. No, Margaret. You are not sorry, not yet. But you will be a very sore and sorry girl before we've finished."