Constance gave a last wistful look back at the snowy landscape as they stood beneath the shelter of the carved stone entrance. Somewhere back there across the endless miles was London. That was home. Not this place of cold stones and shrieking wind and snow that struck at you like pellets.
And then the heavy door had swung open and they were ushered in.
Her mother, frail, lovely creature that she was, had been shivering as they entered, for the chill of this last leg of the journey had pierced through to her slight bones. She had held Constance to her, almost defensively, when they had arrived at last in the vast echoing hall that stretched about them in medieval splendor and were being looked over coldly by the Dacey clan.
Sir John Dacey, Baronet, Hammond’s father, old and stiff and grim, with a lock of gray hair sticking out from under his rumpled sandy periwig, came forward to greet them, leaning heavily on his cane. Beside him his gaunt second wife gave a faint sniff and a disapproving rustle of her maroon skirts as she surveyed their worn luggage and threadbare clothing. Standing on Sir John’s other side, rather like a watchdog determined to ward off interlopers, young Hugh Dacey glowered. Three years older than Constance, Hugh stood stolidly, balanced on heavy legs spaced wide apart, his big head and shoulders already giving promise of the massive man he would become and his little piglike eyes darting over the newcomers with a kind of half-human intelligence that chilled the little girl shivering against her mother’s skirts. Half hiding behind her stepmother was Hugh’s sister. Felicity Dacey, two years older than Constance, a painfully thin, pallid little girl with pale sad eyes and a crushed demeanor. Felicity was richly dressed in persimmon velvet ornamented with creamy lace. When their parents had met their death in a careening coach that shattered in a ditch, the old baronet—newly married to a raw-boned frowning woman named Elvira—had taken on the task of rearing his older son’s children.
And now his younger son had brought his little family home to him.
There was no joy in the air, no spirit of welcome.
Constance curtsied mechanically when she was presented to Lady Dacey, who gave her a curt greeting and a scathing glance.
When she trudged up the massive stairway with the others, being escorted to the rooms they would occupy, Hugh Dacey surreptitiously managed to trip her and Constance fell forward with a little cry to bark her shins against the wide parquetry stair treads.
It was a portent of things to come.
Constance never forgot that first week at Claxton House, the big damp echoing rooms, the strange unfriendly atmosphere, the long hours her father spent closeted with Sir John behind a closed library door, the heated voices that issued from it, never quite distinguishable, and sometimes what sounded like someone pounding on a table for emphasis. Constance had lurked near the door but only twice had she managed to hear anything. Both times it was her mother’s name and the word “mistake” almost shouted. It didn’t make sense to Constance.
Her father always emerged from these sessions gray-faced and looking years older than he was. He would dash up the stairs to their rooms and go to her mother, and her mother would bury her lovely appealing face in his chest and they would whisper and comfort each other—the child, watching, puzzled, never knew what about.
That winter her father died. He came in out of a biting gale, his lips blue, and clutching his heart. He made wild groping motions, clawing at the air, and fell to the floor writhing. Frozen in terror, Constance heard behind her her mother’s scream. Anne ran past her to Hammond and sank beside him in her worn voluminous skirts—and, while she wept, he died in her arms.
After that her mother wore black. The mirrors were covered with black drapery and black hangings were substituted for the apple green sarsenet window hangings. Even the bed wore a black coverlet. Constance was a pale shadow of herself in mourning clothes.
Now the family, cold enough toward them during her father’s time, seemed to draw away from mother and child even further. Once after Hugh snowballed her with big chunks of ice and she came in limping, Constance asked her mother in a whispered sob, “Why? He wanted to hurt me. Why?”
And her mother, paler now than she had ever seen her and with a racking cough that would not seem to leave, held her close in protective arms and said huskily, “Don’t ask. Don’t ever ask.”
More bewildered than ever, little Constance watched her mother drift away from her in the spring, gliding almost imperceptibly into the Land of Death.
The casket closed over Anne Dacey when the northern buds were sprouting and apple blossoms bursting all about. For Constance there was no joy that springtime. It seemed to her that they had all come north to die.
Her life changed abruptly that summer. Sir John had taken to his bed in March with the gout, and by summer Lady Dacey was in firm command and running the house with a merciless hand. She made Hugh and Felicity toe the line—but she was fierce in her rebuffs to Constance.
The mourning draperies all came down. Constance was relegated to a sleeping alcove off Felicity’s large bedchamber. Her handsome mourning garments were taken away and she was reduced to wearing her old tattered clothes or garments made over from the pitiful remnants of her mother’s wardrobe.
“Be of some use,” her step-grandmother was fond of remarking crisply whenever she passed Constance.
The child, bitter at the great gap in treatment between herself and those luckier children, Hugh and Felicity, managed to hold her tongue. It was wise that she did so, for Lady Dacey was as quick to box one’s ears as she was to criticize and give orders.
And so life for little Constance settled down at Claxton House into a drab routine enlivened only in the schoolroom by Henriette Ladoux, the plump, lively, black-haired, black-eyed French governess who had been brought all the way from Paris to instruct young Hugh and Felicity in her native tongue.
Clever Henriette was her only friend in the house. Attracted by the wistful dainty child, it was Henriette who had brought the idea to the lord of the manor that his granddaughter might learn faster by having a female companion at her lessons—and it was Henriette’s delight to teach the girls dance steps and social graces and watch Constance excel over Felicity.
Henriette was always bursting with gossip about the household and its visitors: The Penningtons had been near to killing each other when they arrived—had Constance but looked out the window she would have seen Lady Pennington strike her husband in the face as they dismounted. And the reason was not hard to find. Did Constance know that doelike Mary Audley had crept into Lord Pennington’s bedchamber when they had spent the night here? That was while his wife was off visiting the Stantons. Oh, yes, indeed she had! And she had come out of that bedchamber at an unfortunate moment—just when her husband, that great bear of a man, was strolling down the hall. But Mary Audley, caught outside her lover’s door in her nightdress, had been equal to it! She had thrust her arms straight out in front of her and stalked down the hall, pretending to be sleepwalking! Plump Henriette fell into gales of laughter. And then she had given Constance’s dark head an affectionate pat.
“You will do well in life, ma chère, ” she assured Constance in her soft whirring French. “You could well end up a great lady for you have a flair. Not like—” She gave Felicity a hopeless look, for Felicity was apathetic in the classroom.
Felicity did not care that “Mademoiselle,” as the children called Henriette, despaired of her. She was consumed by her one great passion: the making of delicate webs of spider-fine point lace. All her energy she poured out upon the lacy magic that appeared beneath her clever fingers. Just now she was creating a miracle of diaphanous scrolls and flowers in Venetian rose point lace.
Henriette gave her charge a jaundiced look. “My mother was very expert at making point d'aiguille,” she told Constance.
“I learned to do it. See the réseau—these fine threads of the groundwork? And these slender threads that connect the patterns are called brides; the spiky little knots are picots. Wou
ld you like to learn how? I could show you.”
Constance shook her head. With all the great world beckoning, she had no desire to spend her days crouched like Felicity over needlework.
Henriette gave her an understanding glance. “It was the same with me.” Her smile deepened a trifle. “Perhaps you would like to learn some new dance steps, no?” And as Constance brightened, the French woman whirled about, her feet tripping lightly over the floor. “Come, Felicity,” she commanded. “You must learn too.”
Regretfully, Felicity laid down her lacework and stumbled indifferently through the dance. When it was over and Constance wanted to try it again, Felicity shook her head and slipped away from them, back to her window seat, back to her lace.
“I wonder what they have done to the child in this terrible household to make her retreat like this,” wondered Henriette, her dark eyes suddenly filled with pity. “They are sauvage in this place—savages.” She gave her striped tabby skirts an angry twirl. “They treat me like dirt! Barbarous English!” She lapsed into French, muttering. “What do they have against you?” she asked suddenly of Constance. “Allowing you to go around dressed in rags! And where is that Hugh? He should be here, learning to dance!”
Constance flushed. “I suppose he is angry that you took a switch to him for putting a snake in your writing desk yesterday.”
“I suppose so,” sighed Henriette.
Constance, who was the special target for most of Hugh’s vicious tricks, was overjoyed when he did not show up for lessons. She had had her hair pulled, water spilled on the floor so that she would slip, her quill pens all broken, nasty things written on her copy paper, molasses substituted for her ink. Hugh had splashed her dress with a variety of things which would not wash out, had jumped out at her at the head of the stairs, startling her so that she nearly fell down the entire flight. She almost wept with relief when one day Hugh told Henriette belligerently that he was too old to be taught by a woman anyway, and abandoned the classroom altogether.
With Sir John indisposed, Henriette took the matter up with Lady Dacey, only to be told she should watch her own deportment, that Hugh had reported to her that she was deliberately displaying her ankles as she taught them dancing.
“She implies I am trying to seduce the little beast!” Henriette told Constance stormily—and retaliated by teaching Constance to make potpourri and attar of roses and pomades and to dress her hair fashionably. As a result, Constance went about in her shabby clothes with elaborate coiffures and smelling like a flower garden, which greatly irritated Lady Dacey.
“You had best be in the kitchen learning housewifely tasks,” she would scold. “For there’ll be a whole lifetime of cleaning and scrubbing and cooking ahead of you!”
Those words sent a chill through Constance. Their meaning was painfully clear. They told her that no matter what her expectations as a daughter of the house might be, she was not to achieve every young girl’s dream of a Great Marriage.
Not here. Not among these people who hated her.
The months went by, enlivened mainly by spirited Henriette, who was fond of comparing everyone about her to animals. “Look at Felicity in her white dress,” she would mutter. “With her white stockings and that long pale riband thrusting out at an angle toward her lace work, she could well be a unicorn!” And again, from a window, indicating Hugh, who was charging across the lawn, “Is he not a perfect example of a vicious wild boar? Indeed he needs only tusks to make him complete!”
Constance wished Henriette would not poke fun at Felicity, for whom she felt a puzzled sympathy. She tried to help her but Felicity—although she occasionally gave Constance a shy smile—wanted to remain remote—with her lace.
“What will become of us all if Sir John dies?” Henriette worried one day. “He is like a great antique stag, dying, with his big head almost ready to be stuffed and mounted! And if he does die that dreadful woman will take over entirely—it is only the fear that he may recover that holds her back!”
But the old baronet did not die. Instead his obnoxious second wife, leaning over the upstairs railing in an attempt to peer down and see if a too-pretty chambermaid (whose loose behavior she had already decried) was really huddled at the bottom of the stairwell kissing the butler, leant too far and with a wild scream pitched over the bannisters. She landed on her head on the polished floor of the hall, her neck broken.
Sir John was too ill to attend the funeral. The entire house, by his orders, was draped in black for three months and then the black hangings were all removed—Sir John was not one to mourn overlong, and especially for a wife who had not turned out as he had expected.
By fall his condition had bettered, he had sent Hugh away to school, and under the urging of old friends who came to call, he was persuaded to give a ball in November. A ball that had somehow managed not to include Constance, who had viewed the proceedings in the Banqueting Hall, bright-eyed from between the spokes of the second-floor balustrade. She had watched the guests arrive in their velvets and furs, she had watched them dance—and when she saw a new dance, she memorized the steps carefully. Henriette being confined to her room with a cold, Constance might have practiced the steps at once in the upper hall but as a bevy of guests ascended the stairs, she fled down a back stairway, seized a lanthorn and ran through the moonlit snow to the big warm stables to practice the remembered dance steps before she forgot them.
And found that she was not alone—a stableboy was watching, studying her across the hay-strewn earthen floor.
“You’re Sweep, aren’t you?” she asked uncertainly.
“My name is Deverell Westmorland,” he said, stepping forward into the light. His dark russet hair gleamed red in it. His eyes, green as emeralds, held an admiring gleam. In the distance she had noted his stance, his bearing—and wondered privately that he should be only a stableboy. Now, close up, even in his shabby clothes his lean hawklike face and arrogant bearing gave promise of the man he would become.
“Then why do they call you ‘Sweep’?” she wondered.
A tinge of bitterness colored the boy’s voice. “They said ‘Deverell’ was a gentleman’s name, and not for a lad like me. And they called me ‘Sweep’ because I was thin enough when I came here to worm my way inside the chimneys and clean them. Since then my shoulders have broadened, so they decided I might get stuck there.”
Constance thought of those banks of vast upswinging chimneys, tall against the sky, and shuddered. She had a fear of heights. “I would not like that,” she said simply.
“I’ve seen you often,” he volunteered. “And wondered why you did not come down to the stables.”
“Oh—I’m not allowed to ride,” she told him. “ ’Tis not an accomplishment I will need. I’m told.” Her soft lip curled.
“But you do take lessons along with young Mistress Felicity, I’ve heard?”
She nodded and laughed. “That’s because Felicity is slow at learning and ’twas discovered that I’m not. ’Tis thought that I will be of help to her and that is the only reason I share her schoolroom.”
He was quick to detect the bitterness of her tone, the slight flush that darkened her delicate cheekbones. Although he had often paused to watch her from afar, he was unprepared for her blinding beauty at this close range. Never had he dreamt that a pair of eyes could be of so deep a violet; a skin so sheer, a tumbling cloud of dark hair have such a rich sheen. “Do your people live here on the estate?” she asked.
He stiffened at the suggestion that his people might be tenants of Sir John. “My father was Haverleigh Westmorland of Wingfield, Kent,” he said a trifle frostily. “He was the second son of the Earl of Roxford.” He did not know why he had blurted that out—he had been careful to tell nobody, for he would only have been laughed at, and scorn was something the youth did not relish. But he wanted to gain stature in the sight of this slim elfin miss who stood at last within range of his voice.
She gave him a startled look, half disbelieving.
“I believe you,” Constance said gravely. For who would believe, to look at her, that she was a baronet’s granddaughter? “How did you come here?” she wondered.
“My father’s family and my mother’s were old enemies,” he explained. “And when they ran away and got married, both families cast them out. My father took what little he had and purchased a cottage on the outskirts of Maidstone, but it burned down and they both died in the fire.”
“How awful!” breathed Constance.
“Yes, wasn’t it?” It had happened long enough ago that he could speak of it without flinching. “They could only afford one servant—catch-as-catch-can help. And the fellow got drunk and was careless with a candle, went to sleep leaving it too near the hangings, it’s thought, and the place filled with smoke and smothered them all while they slept.”
“Everything my mother’s people owned vanished in the Great Fire of London!” exclaimed Constance. “Their house and everything in it!” She looked at Deverell Westmorland more warmly. Somehow this shared disaster seemed to establish a bond between them.
“When my father’s debts were settled there was nothing left. My grandfather had died meanwhile; I was sent on to my father’s brother, the new earl, who had inherited the family seat of Wingfield in Kent.”
“So you were all right then?”
“For a while. But I fell afoul of my uncle’s new bride and she turned me out of the house.”
“Whatever did you do to merit that?” wondered Constance, fascinated.
“She laid my back open with her riding whip for running in front of her horse,” the boy remembered grimly. “I was scooping up a puppy that she was about to run down but she cared nothing for that. Said I could have caused her to be thrown. That night I put a frog in her bed.”
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