“I remember everything,” he told her in a low vicious tone. “Naked strumpet! You’ve let that stableboy have you!” Overcome by rage—for he had meant to have beautiful Constance first himself—he leaped from the bed and threw out his arm and sent her spinning violently across the room to crash into the farther wall.
Constance’s scream as her body struck the wall brought the servants running.
“Mistress Constance has had a slight mishap,” smirked Hugh. “She slipped on something. Be good enough to take her from my sight.”
On an ankle that was mending, Constance fled. A little later a curious, bright-eyed Henriette reported to her that Hugh, elegantly dressed in puce satins and carrying a large pistol, was searching the grounds for a missing stableboy.
Sir John heard about that and his heavy brows drew together. It was as well the stableboy had run away—Hugh might have murdered him and made more scandal. But the girl had become a beauty and that made her dangerous. The old baronet sighed. He would have to think what to do with her. In the meantime.. .
“Tell Mistress Constance to lock her door,” he directed.
Felicity looked up from her lace as the key turned in the lock. “Why are you locking the door, Constance?” she asked in an indifferent voice.
“Because Sir John sent word to do it,” said Constance grimly.
Felicity seemed to be content with that explanation.
Two days later Hugh was sent away on the Grand Tour. He would be gone a year, perhaps two. Constance breathed easier—and had more time to mourn Dev. And now she remembered—she had told Dev she was going to write to Margaret Archer and she would do it! And she would ask Henriette to post the letter for her.
From information I have lately received, she wrote in the stilted manner of a schoolgirl, it would seem that I have been misinformed as to my parentage. My mother was Anne Cheltenham and until recently I had believed myself to be the daughter of Hammond Dacey, her husband. But now it has been flung at me that such is not the case, and I have chanced upon your letter written no doubt years ago to Sir John Dacey, in which you state that I am your dead brother’s child. I realize that much may have changed in the meantime but—and here she poured out her heart more eloquently—the bitterness against me here is such as will destroy me, for Sir John grows feeble and his grandson Hugh, who will succeed him, hates me from his soul. I would come to you at Tattersall, if you will receive me.
And she signed it Your obedient niece, Constance Dacey.
She was half a mind to scratch out “Dacey” and substitute “Archer” in her signature, but after some hesitation she decided against it. “Dacey” was after all her legal name and Hammond Dacey had claimed her against the world as his own—she would honor him for it. Her eyes misted over as she remembered how he had swept her up on his shoulder at the frost fair and glided with her over the ice. How gallant he had been! And what if he had not been there at her conception? He had been a true father in all ways and she would never reject him, never!
Henriette, on her next journey into Ripon, dispatched the letter. It was taken aboard a cart hauling furniture into Leeds, where it would be given over into the care of a stagecoach driver. But the letter never reached Leeds. Sudden rains flooded the roads and swelled the rivers. The supports of a wooden bridge gave way and cart and furniture, driver and letter, were all dumped together into the swirling muddy waters. In his anxiety to retrieve his cart and the valuable furniture, the carter forgot all about the letter and never mentioned to anyone that he had lost it.
Sir John, had he known about it, would have informed Constance crisply that it did not matter, for when he had received that letter he himself had made inquiries. He would have told Constance, young and full of hope, that she had written a letter to a woman over whose headstone moss had long been growing.
The headstone of Margaret the Visitor.
Part Two
The Lightskirt
The blazing fires of yesterday are banked now, sad and cold,
No longer do they shimmer her pale hair into gold,
No longer do her arms reach up and twine around him so,
And heaven's where it always was—but hell is here below!
Axeleigh Hall, Somerset,
December 23, 1684
Chapter 10
Although neither girl had so much as a glimmering of it, an event would happen that night at dinner that would change their lives.
Bent on providing only a background for Pamela’s new splendor, Constance had slipped over her head a sinuous raspberry sarsenet silk and scooped the skirts up into panniers over a French gray satin petticoat. She told herself the effect was both festive and restrained as befitted a dinner on the brink of the Christmas season.
Across from her Pamela was talking very vivaciously, trying to attract her father’s attention to the gown Constance had insisted would suit her even though all the way down the stairs she had complained that she couldn’t move her arms properly in it.
“Aunt Margaret chose the living room drapes but Mother chose these.” Pamela indicated the handsome pale blue damask hangings. “She said Aunt Margaret was never home to eat in the dining room anyway, so why should she care about the drapes?” Her laughter tinkled. “Mother was always asking Aunt Margaret where she was going this week. They didn’t get along. Mother called her ‘Margaret the Visitor.’ ”
So that was where they got that derisive last line for the tombstone jingle that went:
Alger the Strong,
Alfred the Long,
Richard the Pate,
Brandon the Late,
Virginia the Inquisitor,
And Margaret the Visitor!
And what did Margaret call your mother? Constance was tempted to ask, but she forbore, looking down and studying her plate.
At the head of his table, the Squire listened to the music of Pamela’s lilting laugh and looked upon his spirited daughter with pride. She was very like him in many ways—their coloring was identical, so was the steady way they both looked at you out of their crystal blue eyes, and Pamela would have a good head on her shoulders when she steadied up a bit. Marriage would do it, he told himself, and for that he favored Tom Thornton, once Tom settled down a bit. But there was a recklessness in the girl that troubled him—a recklessness that lovely Pamela had inherited from her mother.
Her mother... He had not thought of Virginia in years and now he looked down at his trencher and saw not the food on it. Instead he saw a woman with Pamela’s dainty features and fetching ways and intriguing figure. A light woman. His mouth hardened. Virginia had always been a light woman, born to stray—and of all the county only he had not been aware of it, it seemed.
“Father.” Impatiently, Pamela interrupted his thoughts. “Have you noticed anything different about me tonight?”
The Squire, who was brooding meditatively upon his roast capon, looked up with a start and considered his daughter.
“You do look a bit flushed,” he hazarded. “Aren’t coming down with a cold, are you? D’ye think ye should be wearing such a low-cut gown in this drafty room?”
Pamela flung Constance a comically rueful look. So much for this undulating dress that Constance had recommended! that look said. For the sinewy fabrics and startling décolletage urged on her by Constance had only given her father the conviction that she might catch cold!
Constance’s brows elevated as if to say the Squire’s opinion was not necessarily the world’s, but Pamela chose not to notice. Actually she much preferred her stiff and handsome ball gowns that seemed to stand at attention and glide about by themselves. She liked looking like a Christmas ornament on which one could always stick another flounce, or add a saucy riband or a bit of lace!
“Oh, I’m not the least bit cold,” she assured her father cheerfully and launched with a ravenous appetite into a platter of eels.
The Squire smiled at her. Surely no one could be ill with so healthy an appetite!
He looked up
. Stebbins, the butler, was bringing him a note and Stebbins’s lined forehead was wrinkled in perplexity. “ ’Twas found by one of the maids on the front hall table just now, sir,” he said in a somewhat aggrieved tone. “Although none will confess to hearing the knocker and when I looked outside there was no one about.”
Clifford Archer took the note without comment. He broke the red wax seal and scanned it rapidly.
And reading it, his world melted away—all the safety and security he had built up for himself and his daughter vanished on the instant and it was Midsummer’s Eve fourteen years ago.
As in a slow-moving nightmare he saw himself as he had been then, married but three years, rushing home unexpectedly to the young wife he loved—and pulling up with a frown in the driveway at sight of a strange horse tethered to the hitching post there. Which was odd, for at this late hour some groom should already have taken the horse to the stables. And then he remembered that this was Midsummer’s Eve and the servants would have been given permission to attend the great bonfires that always burned at this time, for there would be dancing and drink and much carousing tonight—and many a foolish maid would lose her virtue beneath the summer trees. No doubt the horse belonged to someone who had chosen to attend the bonfire in a cart with the others, and had been left there forgotten.
Not sure yet what to do about the animal, he stabled his own tired horse, gave him a fast rubdown and left him with food and water. The stableboys, when they returned from their frolic, could do a better job.
He had smiled and hurried inside, hoping against hope that Virginia would not have accompanied the merrymakers—for she loved dancing and pleasures and had been annoyed when he had told her regretfully that his business in Bristol would keep him gone for a fortnight. But he had arranged to ship the cheeses much faster than he had thought possible and had near worn out his horse in his eagerness to get home to her.
They’d have a late supper together, was his thought as he bounded, tired and dusty, up the moonlit stair. And he’d tell her how he’d bought an interest in the ship that was taking the cheeses, along with crockery and woolen socks and iron farm implements, to America, and how there’d be a great profit. He was thinking how he’d tell her of his plans to extend into buying up woolen cloth and cutlery and ship them to the Colonies too, for those merchants in Bristol were making a mint!
“Virginia!” He flung open without ceremony the door to his wife’s bedchamber—and froze.
There, leaping up from the big rumpled four-poster were two figures—not one. And the moonlight revealed in stark detail the stricken face of his young wife as she scrabbled at the covers to shield her nakedness.
In that single moment his world had exploded. He was conscious only of rage and shock—and of pain that began in his knuckles and shuddered up through his arm as his fist smashed into the frightened face of the man who had leaped up from Virginia’s bed and tried to make his escape. There had been the sound of bone striking bone and Virginia’s scream as that loose-limbed figure crumpled senseless to the floor.
Then—and only then—had he turned his attention to his young wife.
She was out of bed now, and she would have run toward the fellow on the floor but that he solidly blocked her way. He took Virginia’s bare shoulder—that shoulder he had loved to stroke and run his lips across—in the fingers of his aching hand and ground down upon it with a pressure that made her wince.
“Who is he?” he heard himself rasp.
“His name is Alfred Soames.” She sounded tearfully indignant and he realized for the first time that tears were coursing down her face. And he, who had once been reduced to trembling jelly by even a woeful look from her, remained totally indifferent as he stood above her, judging her.
“Why?” he managed at last, and it was a cry wrenched from the depths of him.
“You were gone!” she cried. “You are always gone when I want you—selling cheeses, buying cattle, God knows what else!”
You were gone! Was that a reason for this? Surely it was not the reason he had expected. He had expected some tearful claim that this man, this Soames, had been her lover before, that she had been wrenched from his arms into an arranged marriage. Or that she had conceived a passion for Soames and nurtured it in secret. But no! He had been gone and therefore someone else must be found to occupy his bed!
He must have made some involuntary movement toward her for she shrank back. “You’d best check him, Clifford—he isn’t moving.” Her voice had a fretful note that amazed him—as if he were somehow at fault.
But he had turned his head slowly and seen that there was a certain quality of stillness to that figure lying on the floor in the moonlight. And he had bent down and touched him—and then in alarm listened for a heartbeat and found none.
He had straightened up then and looked full at his wife, who had clutched a blue dressing gown and was struggling into it. Her pale hair streamed down and she looked very frightened.
“The man is dead, Virginia.”
Her hand went to her lips to stifle the little cry that rose there. “Oh, God, Clifford, why did you hit him so hard?” she moaned.
“What is he to you, Virginia? Where does he come from?”
She shook her head miserably. “He was a traveler, lost and seeking directions. He came to the house after I had let all the servants go to the merrymaking at the bonfires. He seemed pleasant and I gave him some wine and—and we—” Her voice choked off.
Another thunderbolt struck him squarely between the eyes. Not even someone known to her—a stranger! He stared in disbelief at this woman he had courted and married, who had borne his child—a child sleeping peacefully, no doubt, in the next room in a crib more suited to a princess than to a plain country squire. A stranger. Virginia had taken to her bed a stranger! And all because he was not at the moment occupying it!
Without another look at Virginia, he slung the stranger’s limp body over his arm, scooped up his clothes—the man was not naked like Virginia, he was still wearing his smallclothes, shirt, and opened trousers and stockings although he had—thoughtfully—removed his boots. But a gaily plumed hat and a short cloak, a handsome doublet, a small dress sword and a pair of riding gloves lay across a chair. He now realized that the stranger had been darting toward that sword even as he had struck him. He swept them all up in his other arm without even breaking stride, for he was a powerful man. And realized bitterly as he did so that the reason this plumed hat and cloak and gloves were not downstairs was because his Virginia was careful—the caution of long practice, no doubt—lest the servants remark this evidence of a guest, disappeared above stairs.
Only the horse would betray his presence and she had probably not thought of that, so used was she to grooms who came out and magically removed the horses from their hitching posts to some more pleasant spot where hay and water waited.
Down the stairs he clumped in his dusty boots, trying to think above the great despairing ache in his chest and the dry sorrowful lump in his throat. He had struck the fellow in anger—and he had struck hard. It did not seem enough of a blow to have killed the stranger but it had. And now he must face the consequences of that.
Or must he? He paused for a moment on the stair and made a quick decision. In his writing desk in the drawing room lay the key to the wine cellar. He deposited his burden in the hall, detoured by the writing desk, lifted its polished walnut lid and removed the key. He would need a candle now—and he lit one. Having done that, he took his unexpected guest to the wine cellar.
There was an open hole dug there into the foundation, for he had only this week been meaning to enlarge the wine cellar. The hole was not very large, for work on it had been stopped almost immediately when a summer storm had blown off part of the stable roof. Now he studied that hole. Indeed it was of a very convenient size, he thought grimly, as he deposited the stranger’s body in it and heaped upon it the cloak and doublet and sword and gloves and hat.
Having done that, he
went back upstairs.
Virginia met him at her bedroom door, her hazel eyes wide and terrified. “Where is he?” she whispered.
“Gone,” he said briefly.
“Gone?”
“So far as you are concerned.” It had never been his custom to involve women in his affairs and although Virginia was certainly involved in this one, it was in his nature—now that there was danger—to shut her out of it. For although he felt at that moment only revulsion for the young wife who cringed before him, he was automatically protective of her. For him it was an automatic reflex.
She swallowed and looked away. “There will be a terrible scandal when he is discovered,” she whispered.
“He will not be discovered.” He had had time to think about that as he bore the body down the stairs. He had thought what this would mean for him, for Virginia, and for the lovely golden child he had fathered. For himself, a trial and possibly death by hanging. For Virginia—it was what might happen to Virginia that had shaken him most, for despite the shock he had received tonight he still loved the lovely incontinent woman who now stood before him in a hastily donned robe. Many things might happen to Virginia—all of them bad. At the worst was death by burning—for the law was fiercer to women than it was to men, and a woman would burn for the same offense for which a man would be hanged—at the least she would suffer public humiliation and ostracism. And it would—and there his square jaw had hardened to stone—be used to cast doubt upon his daughter’s parentage. Of that parentage at least he was sure, for Virginia had been menstruating on her wedding day—it had been a source of terrible embarrassment to her, he remembered—and all the week after. But they had made up for their enforced abstinence by such a wedding trip as would have made the gods blush. They had ridden far and stayed at strange inns and made love by the seaside and in forest glades—he had been with her every minute. And the child had been late in coming and she had had his coloring, even to the unusual crystal-blue eyes that looked so calmly from her sweet face.
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