Chapter 31
She must have fallen asleep eventually because, if she had not, she would not have woken with such a start when someone entered her room.
“Frank?”
“No; is he in the habit of coming into your room at night?”
“My lord! What are you doing here?”
Honoria sat up abruptly and, although she could not identify the features of the man who had come into her room, she knew his voice.
“I am sorry to wake you but you must get up at once if you are not to be dragged back to England and forced to marry against your will!” Lord Ninfield said in an urgent undertone. “Your cousin has found us!”
“Have you spoken to him?”
“Yes; I met him in the hall as I was coming upstairs. He ordered me to give you up to his charge and threatened to shoot me if I did not pack my bags and take myself off at once!”
This report not unnaturally disturbed Honoria. Although she found it difficult to believe that Frank could have made such a bloodthirsty threat, particularly when he had, only a few moments before, seemed so reasonable, she was perfectly aware that he could behave in a hasty manner and that he did indeed wish Lord Ninfield at Jericho.
“I do not think you should refine upon it,” she said, rather in the manner which she might have adopted in the face of one of Helen’s indignant observations. “I daresay he had drunk too much wine on top of travelling for so long. It would be preferable to discuss it in the morning, my lord.”
“He and I had something of an altercation during the course of which I discovered that he means to drag you from your bed and set off within the next few minutes. If you wish to avoid a forced marriage, we must leave at once. I have already ordered the horses to be put to and roused your maid. She will pack your bags and follow with Black in the morning. There is no time to get dressed; we must go at once.”
“Pray leave my room,” she countered, beginning to feel a little hysterical and wondering why his lordship should be so frightened of Frank for, whatever that young man had threatened, he was considerably lighter than Ninfield and unlikely to do anything so rash as shoot a man with whom he had had a difference of opinion. His whole manner earlier had been level-headed and it had been she who had begged to leave without delay and he who had advised they wait for the morning.
In any event, since he knew that she had no intention of marrying Ninfield, it seemed unlikely that he would have felt the need to terrorise his lordship to such a degree. Ninfield’s story fitted neither Frank’s character nor the situation. She was, however, beginning to suspect that, having met Frank on the stairs, his lordship was well aware that his attempted abduction was about to be summarily concluded and was determined to make sure that she was sufficiently compromised to be more or less forced to marry him; running away in the middle of the night in her nightgown, leaving her maid behind, would undoubtedly achieve this.
His response to the command to leave her room was not at all what she expected. He strode across the room so rapidly that the flame of his candle wavered and flickered. With a muttered oath, he slowed, taking instead such excessively long strides that he looked like a comic villain. The hand holding the candle was so rigid that even in the dim light she could see the sinews standing out in his wrist.
“I do not think you understand the gravity of the situation; he has threatened to kill me and snatch you. We must not tarry a moment longer than necessary; if you are not afraid, I am. Pray get up at once!”
“No!” she responded with equal determination. “Whatever he may have said, he will do no such thing, but I will kill you if you do not leave my room this instant,” she added, remembering the pistol with which his aunt had equipped her and which she had formed the habit of placing beneath her pillow as that intrepid lady had advised.
“Don’t be foolish!” he snapped and, taking firm hold of her wrist, pulled her unceremoniously to her feet.
As he did so, she put her hand under the pillow, found the little gun and, with some difficulty, managed to turn it round the right way and point it at him. She had no time to fiddle about with the safety catch and was thus perfectly aware that she could not in fact shoot him immediately.
“What the devil!” he exclaimed, dropping the candle. “Where did you get that?”
“Your aunt gave it to me. I do not suppose she thought I would need it to protect me from you. Have you gone completely mad?”
But, if he had, taxing him with it did not restore him to sanity; he did not cease his efforts to overpower her, trying now to wrest the gun from her grasp. In the dark, it was difficult for him to find the hand which held the weapon for she struggled against him with considerable energy if not a great deal of science.
“Frank!” she shouted, aware that she would not be able to hold out much longer.
Ninfield had her tight about the waist and, as she cried out, hit her so hard that she fell to the floor in a heap of disordered hair, tangled nightgown and limp limbs, exclaiming as he did so, “It is your own fault; I have no wish to hurt you but you must come with me – now!”
No longer in the least doubt that he meant ill by her, she lay where she had fallen, pretending to have lost her senses, while she wrestled frantically with the safety catch on the small pistol.
She heard him move away and hoped that he would leave the room. He did not; he lit another candle and bent to pick her up.
“Put me down!” she cried, raising the pistol so that the barrel not only pointed at his chest, but was pushed up against it. “Make no mistake; I will shoot,” she warned, her voice wavering with fear for even Honoria, ignorant as she was in the matter of firearms and their effects, did not doubt that a shot discharged directly into his chest would likely be fatal.
“Don’t be a little fool!” he adjured her, taking hold of her wrist and endeavouring to remove the gun from his chest. “I expect it has the safety catch on,” he added with scorn.
“I would not run the risk if I were you,” she countered, her voice quivering with fear. Although she held the weapon, she was more afraid than he because she did not wish to kill a man; it seemed that it was a matter of her honour or his life and she was uncertain which held the stronger claim.
“I don’t intend to,” he said and, with one final violent twist of her wrist, forced her to drop the weapon.
He did not bother to pick it up but hit her again, this time so hard that she knew no more.
When she came to her senses she was initially confused. She had, over the several days she had been travelling, grown accustomed to waking in a different room each morning but there was something clearly amiss this time. Although she was wrapped in a blanket and wearing her nightgown, she was not lying in bed; she was propped up in the corner of the carriage in which she had spent the greater part of every day for the past few weeks. Her feet were bare and it was dark.
“Ah, you are awake,” Lord Ninfield, who was in his accustomed place beside her, observed. “I would not have disturbed your rest if I could have avoided doing so.”
“What is going on?” she asked more to play for time than because she expected a sensible answer for she thought she could recall only too well the precursor to finding herself, with an exceedingly sore head and a painful wrist, travelling through the night beside a man whom she had once considered a saviour – and had even contemplated marrying - but now feared was nothing less than a monster.
“Do you not remember?” He sounded surprised but also, not unexpectedly if she remembered events correctly, relieved.
“No,” she said, feeling her way. “Why is it so dark? My wrist hurts.”
“That is my fault, I am afraid,” he admitted.
He sounded so reassuring that she began, almost against her better judgment, to wonder if she had imagined the whole.
Frank! He had arrived at the inn and she had spent some time talking to him – or was that a dream? She had gone to bed, exhausted but by no means disposed to sleep, and had spent a goo
d portion of the night, so far as she could recall, going over what he had said as well as trying, unsuccessfully, to dampen the joy which had afflicted her as soon as she saw him. It would not be odd if it was a dream because she had found herself dwelling to an increasing degree upon what had passed between them before she left home as well as struggling vainly to resist imagining a reconciliation scene, complete with all the romantic embellishments which had made reading gothic romances from the lending library so enjoyable.
“We were obliged to flee at short notice when a fire broke out.” Lord Ninfield continued astonishingly. “It must have been when I was carrying you that you hurt your wrist. When you didn’t appear downstairs I went up to your room and found you still asleep and the room already filled with smoke. Do you not remember any of this?”
“No,” she admitted with perfect truth for the more he said the more she did recall and her memories differed markedly from his.
“In my haste to gain the outside I am afraid I must have caught your hand on the door jamb. Does it hurt very much?”
“No, not much at all,” she lied, somehow managing to speak in the calm way she had perfected years ago in order to manage the vagaries of her aunt and cousin. Frequently forced to listen to their capricious outbursts, she had learned to suppress her own sentiments to such a degree that it had become second nature. “I must thank you for rescuing me and account a sore wrist a small price to pay in the circumstances. Where are Patience and Black?”
“Behind us, but I am afraid most of your belongings have probably been lost; there was no time to pack and not even sufficient to get dressed. I wrapped you in a blanket but that and the nightgown you are wearing are very likely all you now possess. We can buy more just as soon as we reach Vienna, which I hope to do before the end of the day.”
“Goodness! I did not know we were so close. I own to feeling excessively fatigued; would you mind if I went back to sleep for a space?” As she said the last words, she was put in mind of her aunt whose usual excuse for avoiding her family had always been ‘fatigue’.
“Of course not.”
Once again she thought he sounded relieved. It seemed that he believed her loss of memory to be genuine and she was afraid that further discussion might lead her to give herself away.
Subsiding into her corner and closing her eyes, Honoria tried to make sense not only of what Ninfield had said but also of what she remembered of the earlier part of the night. First, where was Frank? Had Ninfield done something so horrifying to him that he was now bent on denying her cousin had ever been in the inn?
And what did he intend to do with her? She was fairly certain that he meant to marry her, his interest being in her fortune rather than her person although she was not sure how he planned to achieve this since, as Frank had pointed out, she could not marry without her uncle’s consent for another six months. Perhaps he was relying upon the fact that, by the time they returned to England, she would have spent several weeks in his sole company.
The whole thing was terrifying and the fact that she had precipitated it herself by running away – just as though she had been a heroine in one of those pernicious romances – was no comfort. She fell to wondering what one of those – for the most part irritatingly lachrymose - females would have done in the circumstances although she suspected that it did not much matter what they did because, after being subjected to the most frightful torments, they were invariably rescued by the hero. But who was the hero? If she had, for a deluded space, considered Lord Ninfield to be the man who would save her from Frank, she no longer did; indeed, the man from whom she had originally been fleeing – Frank – now looked the more likely hero. She seemed to have got everything wrong. Frank had turned up and offered to rescue her – not perhaps quite in the manner of a hero but with a reassuring degree of good sense - from the man he clearly considered a scoundrel. It was only a pity that he had, in his unromantically practical way, decided to put it off until the morning, thus affording the villain the opportunity to snatch his prize and make off with her while the unsuspecting hero slept.
And, more to the point, what should she do now? She had no clothes, it was dark and cold outside and she did not know where she was. While she had remained an innocent dupe, Lord Ninfield had been an agreeable companion. From the few words that had passed his lips since she had woken, it seemed that he was trying to return to this more pleasing persona. Remembering the other side of his character, the one which did not hesitate to employ violence when crossed, she decided that she had much better fall in with the fiction of the fire and the last-minute rescue and wait, as patiently as she could, for an opportunity to give him the slip.
Chapter 32
Although she remained as wakeful and alert as she could in the hope that Lord Ninfield would fall asleep and give her a chance to escape, she kept very still. She must, while yet it remained dark, work out some plan of escape, even if it involved running about the country in her nightgown.
She was fairly certain that his lordship did not want to kill her - at least not until after she had become his wife. This conclusion, although partially reassuring, did not obviate the need to handle him with extreme care for he had already proved that, if crossed, he could become unpleasant.
She thought it likely that he would reiterate his offer of marriage in the belief that doing so would convince her of his good intentions. Equally, she must be prepared to receive it in a manner that would not arouse his suspicions; accepting with too much alacrity might strike him as inconsistent with her previous lack of enthusiasm while an outright refusal might trigger another bout of violence. She must hope that she would be able to plead lingering weakness caused by the fire together with a measure of maidenly irresolution.
The night seemed to go on for ever and it was not until she perceived a slight lightening of the sky when she opened her eyelids a fraction that Lord Ninfield coughed and touched her hand.
“It is morning; I hardly need to ask if you have slept well for you have not stirred all night.”
“What? Oh …,” she cried in a startled voice, sitting up as though suddenly roused from a deep sleep.
“Do you always wake in such a dramatic manner?” he asked, nothing but gentle amusement in his tone.
“Not if I have been permitted to wake by myself,” she retorted for, while she thought it unwise to oppose him too obviously, she judged a little of her usual spirit would reassure him of her ignorance as to his true nature. “Where are we?”
“Very close to Vienna. Do you remember what happened last night?”
“I remember practically nothing except you telling me that there was a fire. Was that a dream – or did you indeed tell me that?”
She opened her eyes fully and saw that what passed for daylight at this time of year illumined a scene obscured by what had over the last few days become tediously repetitive: large flakes of snow were tumbling out of a uniformly grey sky. It was like looking through a lace veil: pretty but difficult to discern detail.
“I am afraid so; I carried you, fast asleep, to the carriage and we have been driving all night. I am afraid you have no clothes but for the nightgown you were wearing when I plucked you from your bed; the fire had taken hold so strongly that I thought it best not to delay our departure.”
“No; I am sure that was wise, but what am I to do now?”
“I have given the matter some thought and believe that the best course is for us to find rooms in a hotel as soon as we reach town. I will carry you in, explaining that you are unwell, and will leave you in your chamber while I fetch Waldron. I do not know if he will be able to come immediately but I am sure he will not delay for long.”
“No, no, I daresay he will not. Is Patience far behind us? I could send her out to buy me some more clothes.” She thought that a feminine preoccupation with what she should wear would help allay any suspicions he might have.
“Yes, they are both behind – she and Black – and we can indeed send her out to th
e shops as soon as they arrive. Do you know Waldron’s direction or should I go to the Embassy?”
“No, I do not.” They had discussed this before so that she was convinced he had merely asked the question in order to make some attempt at conversation. “Do you think he will be difficult to find?”
“Oh, no, I am certain he will not. I will go straight to the Embassy just as soon as you have been made comfortable. Look out of the window and you will see the beginnings of the town.”
“What will you do when you have found him and brought us together? Will you return to Würtzburg to join your aunt? I am excessively grateful for your kindness in accompanying me all the way to Vienna but do not wish to detain you any longer than necessary.”
“Not at all; it has been the greatest possible pleasure. Indeed, as I mentioned last night, my earnest wish is to spend the rest of my life with you. I know that I took you by surprise when I told you how strong my feelings were and I promise I had every intention of saying nothing further on that head until we had made contact with Waldron but I must confess to a burning desire to know whether, now that you have grown a little used to the idea, you may be ready to entertain the possibility of becoming Lady Ninfield one day.”
He paused and Honoria, who had barely listened to this long-winded and, in the circumstances, implausible declaration, said with as earnest an expression as she could contrive, “My lord, I – yes, of course I have thought about what you said; indeed, I thought of little else when I retired to my room but so much has happened since then that I hardly know whether I am on my head or my heels; pray allow me a little more time before I answer.”
Honoria Or The Safety 0f The Frying Pan Page 26