Oh, Pamela was his, all right, whatever Virginia had become afterward! And Pamela, child of his own loins, must be protected at all costs.
“Stay in your room,” he commanded Virginia. “Answer to no one. Sleep late—and forget this ever happened. You did not meet this stranger, you had gone to bed with a sick headache. When did he arrive?”
“Late.” She moistened her trembling lips. “I had dismissed the servants some time before and I heard a banging on the door. I went to answer and he swept off his plumed hat with a flourish and begged my indulgence. He told me he had lost the road to Taunton.”
Taunton... That told him the road the stranger would take.
“Latch this door behind me,” he said and departed.
Downstairs he walked past the wineglasses Virginia had left carelessly on the table—then frowned and returned to them, stuck them in a cupboard.
Then he climbed aboard the stranger’s horse and, leading one of his own, took the road to Taunton, hoping against hope that he would meet no one this night.
He did not. Ten miles down that road he paused in an open glade and went through Alfred Soames’s saddlebags thoroughly. They contained nothing to help him, only extra clothing, a razor and a little money. He replaced them all carefully just as they had been, gave the horse a slap on the rump and watched it canter riderless down the road to Taunton.
With luck the horse would keep going, for the hedgerows here crowded too close to give much food and several miles on there would be a stream just at the edge of a town. The horse would pause there for water and to munch the green grass growing at the stream’s edge—and he would be found, and the missing rider inquired into. And hopefully presumed drowned for at places the road had bordered the river.
Clifford Archer’s face was very set at that point. For if this Alfred Soames turned out to be a person of some importance, there’d be a stir raised throughout the countryside, a search instituted. God willing that search would not lead to Virginia—he could only hope she had been telling the truth when she said that Alfred Soames was a stranger to her—if he was not, if they had been carrying on a secret affair, then they were lost.
Feeling that he’d aged ten years, he climbed onto his own unsaddled horse and rode back to Axeleigh, eyes and ears alert for returning merrymakers.
Now too late it occurred to him that he could have made the “drowning” real—he could have dumped Alfred Soames’s body in the river. But that would have entailed riding down the road with that body conspicuously draped over the saddle—perhaps he had been wise not to risk it. His mind still roiling with what he perhaps should have done, he reached the gates of Axeleigh, dismounted, and sent the saddleless horse on his way with a light slap on the rump.
Dawn was breaking as he started down the drive. Forcing his thoughts away from the nightmarish events of the night, he strode down it jauntily, feeling the morning breeze blow across his sweaty face.
A groom walking by the front of the house looked at him in some surprise, for the Squire was not addicted to walking—he was a riding man.
“Did you see to my horse?” he called, to distract the fellow’s attention. “Brought him in last evening, you must just have gone.”
“Oh, aye, to the bonfire, sir. Give him a good rubdown, I did, first thing when I got back.” He still looked curious at having found the Squire walking down the drive.
“Lost a gold watch out there somewhere,” he told the groom in an easy voice. “Thought I might have lost it riding through the gates last evening”—he nodded behind him— “but I’ve searched the whole drive, couldn’t find anything. Have a look for it, will you, there’s a good fellow. There’s a shilling in it for you if you find it.”
The groom grinned and hurried down the driveway. He turned as the Squire called, “I heard a horse whinny out there just now. Could be one of the horses got out of the pasture—can’t have them out in the road.”
“No, sir,” agreed the groom. “I’ll have a look about, I will.”
The Squire stood for a moment and watched him go with narrow crystal blue eyes. Then he relaxed. There’d be no suspicion there, just a lost watch that would turn up later and a horse that had jumped the pasture fence—for he’d been careful to choose a good jumper.
Now there was only one thing left to do to end this night’s business—and it would take some doing. He went inside—and froze suddenly.
The wine cellar! He had forgotten to lock the wine cellar!
With unhurried steps, in case he was being observed from the hall above—and he was always to feel that every one of the casual footsteps that carried him there cost him a year off his life—he went and got a candle, lit it, and made his way to the wine cellar. The door stood open and unlocked just as he had left it and he cursed his folly—he must have been more excited than he knew. A few strides took him to the dug hole in the foundation from which a pile of stones had been removed—and he felt his heart lurch.
The clothing had been disturbed—the hat was in the wrong place.
And then, even as he took an involuntary step forward, he realized that the cloak and doublet and gloves that concealed the body stuffed into that narrow hole were still in place—the plumed hat had merely slipped down. A quick look around the wine cellar showed him nothing else had been disturbed. The candle he had left earlier had long since guttered out. He heaved a sigh of relief.
That morning the Squire became a stonemason. He shed his coat and shoveled back dirt into the hole to cover the hat and cloak and other clothing of Alfred Soames that showed, and then he lifted the heavy stones one by one and mixed mortar and somehow got them back into place. And stacked a large pile of kegs in front of the newly mortared stones.
By afternoon, aching in every bone, he had got the job done—and fairly creditably. But he could take no pleasure in his work. His hands were filthy and bleeding in several places, his fingernails broken. Wearily he put on his travel-stained outer garments, locked the wine cellar door carefully behind him, and as he went out through the many storerooms that honeycombed the cellars of Axeleigh he stumbled against a barrel of molasses and its contents spilled out over the floor.
When he reached the hall he bellowed for Stebbins. “I’ve been inspecting the cellars and a fine mess they are with molasses strewn about! See to it—and send me up a bath!”!
The serving maid Stebbins sent to clear the mess passed the Squire going up as she made her way down and she told cook later that she had never seen the Squire’s eyes look so bloodshot—he and his lady must have made quite a night of it!
After that night Clifford Archer had slept in his own room and had not visited Virginia’s bedchamber. He felt a reluctance to touch the young wife who had led him to murder—a murder for which he could still be hanged.
Virginia was crushed at first, gazing at him across the long dining table with woeful hazel eyes, fixing her long pale hair in exotic new ways to tempt him, leaning across the table in gowns cut so low that her breasts threatened to pop out. When he still remained cold, she became aggrieved, resentful. And then she had tossed her fair head in a gesture very like Pamela’s and taken a lover-one that he knew about, although how many others there were he could only imagine. Grimly, Clifford Archer had looked the other way. For she was Pamela’s mother and he would have no scandal roiling around Pamela’s pretty head.
It was only what he might have expected of Virginia, he told himself, for she was at heart a lightskirt. Amoral. He knew that now, what his friends had tried so hard to tell him in the days when he was courting her. God help him, he had near broken Lambert Beall’s jaw when Lambert had made some too broad hint about Virginia’s virtue! And Virginia had faked virginity, oh, so well! She had winced and cried out and clawed at him with her fingers and entreated him to stop. He had fallen eagerly into her every trap.
But still he could not hate her.
His ardor for her had cooled, and he made do with tavern wenches and an occasional willing chambe
rmaid. He knew well what his young wife was doing, that she took her pleasure here and there and roundabout, but he let her go her own way.
It was, he felt, partially his own fault for not having seen her more clearly. She was a lightskirt and lightskirt she would always be. He was no more to her than any of the others, he had merely pressed his suit harder and been more acceptable to her parents because of his wealth.
It was a bitter cup to drain but he must drain it. But in the draining his desire for Virginia had ebbed away....
When Pamela was ten, Virginia had taken a sudden cold. It had turned into pneumonia and she had died despite doctors from as far away as Bristol.
The Squire had mourned her in his fashion. He had sat up late of nights drinking and remembering the good things—the light in Virginia’s hazel eyes when first he had asked her to wed him and she’d said yes so softly against his doublet, the beauty of her in the mornings when she stood naked at the window and stretched her arms and let the rays of the morning sun kiss her slender white body. He had lain in his bed those mornings, waiting for her to rise before him, just so he could view that morning ritual. He would lie there marveling at her piquant rose-tipped breasts, at the heavy pale hair that moved so languorously along her dainty back and fell past her waist to tweak at her soft round hips. His eyes had traced her shapely limbs and he had felt—always at those times—a tightening of his loins and a mad desire for her sweep upward through his whole being. “Come back to bed,” he would say huskily, and she would turn and smile and come.
He remembered her at other times, riding through the rain beside him on their wedding trip and seeming not to mind. And smiling at him over breakfast. And looking so tired but so happy when she presented him with Pamela.
And he remembered the feel of her, sensually pressed against him in the big bed, and the fragrant flower smell of her, and the tingling touch of her.
And—reluctantly now that she was gone, he remembered all those other men—especially the first, at least the first that he had known about, the man he had killed. Fool that he was, he’d had no inkling that Virginia’s skirts would flutter lightly up for any man who caught her fancy!
And that memory warned him off marriage. Virginia had made him wary of women.
So to everybody’s surprise, the Squire of Axeleigh did not replace his young wife with another. And they whispered that it was because his heart was buried with her in the churchyard.
But that was not what had happened.
Clifford Archer had built a wall of stone around that heart, as surely as he had built a wall of stone to hide the body of the man he’d killed. And no woman’s charms had ever been enough to pierce that wall. They were all lightskirts, he knew bitterly. Under their ingenuous smiles and their endearing ways they were all lightskirts.
Except Pamela, of course.
Now at his dinner table, he shot a glance down toward his lovely daughter. Save for that recklessness which she had inherited from her mother, Pamela was breath of his breath—she had his directness, his optimism, his valor. But it always amazed him that she could look so like Virginia. Except for her coloring it might have been Virginia sitting there smiling at him.
And she had slept that whole terrible night through....
But now that night had come back to haunt him—and it was not the first time it had happened.
Last summer, the day before the Midsummer Masque at Huntlands which had brought Constance to him, he had received another blackmail note—the first. He had found it when he had reached into his saddlebag for his water flask as he returned through the summer heat on the dusty road from Bridgwater.
Reading it, he had sat at gaze until a farmer coming by in his cart and tipping his cap respectfully to the Squire had brought him back to the present. After the cart went by—and he never knew later what he said in response to the farmer’s bluff greeting—he had reread the note with sweat pouring down his face.
The note had demanded ten gold guineas to keep silent about the matter of Alfred Soames and gave directions as to where the money should be placed. He had followed those directions to the letter and he had not heard from the blackmailer again—he had thought the matter was over and done and had heaved a great sigh of relief.
And now it was all happening again.
For this note read—and in the same cramped handwriting as the first: I know all about what is buried in your wine cellar—and how it happened. And it instructed the Squire when and where to leave ten gold guineas.
Nothing else. The note was unsigned.
“What’s the matter, Father?” asked Pamela. “You look pale.”
The Squire looked up. It always astonished him that Pamela, who was like him in so many ways, who had his unflinching pride and courage and steady loyalty, should not only look but sound so much like Virginia... that same sweet voice, those same endearing tones. He managed a laugh. It sounded hollow to his own ears but quite normal to the others. “I’ve not been feeling too well today,” he admitted. “Think I’d best not eat any more.” He excused himself and rose from the table. He needed time to think and he couldn’t do it engaging in light conversation with his daughter.
“Was there something in the note?” wondered Pamela, stabbing intuitively at the source of the trouble.
“Of course not,” he told her easily. “Just a receipt I’d forgot to pick up, for some wool. Fellow needn’t have bothered—I could have got it later.”
Hours later, pacing back and forth across the floor of his green-painted bedchamber, he would try to reconstruct that night, to think who could have written this note, who could have known.
The chilling fact was borne in on him that someone in his own household must have placed that note on the hall table. And Stebbins had said all the servants denied putting it there. Assuming they were telling the truth, that left Stebbins himself—but he could not believe it was Stebbins. Stebbins had been butler here when he was a boy, had taught him to fish—Stebbins was as loyal as any man alive. No, it could not be Stebbins.
He thought back. It had surprised him at the time that he had heard nothing of the riderless horse. But he had assumed that some country fellow had simply stolen it and ridden away—a stroke of luck for him!
That had been a summer of storms and repairing damaged outbuildings naturally took precedence over some whim to expand the wine cellar. By the next year expanding the wine cellar was forgotten and when eventually the pile of kegs he had used to shield his work got moved and the new masonry was revealed, it was not remarked—everyone had assumed someone else had done it for it was none so big a job.
He had thought he had covered his tracks well—until last summer. And now again today.
He was now forced to confront the chilling possibility that that first blackmail note had not been slipped into his saddlebag at Bridgwater, that it too had originated at Axeleigh. If so, it was reasonable to assume that whoever had penned that note had been employed here the night he had accidentally killed Soames. That included all the house servants except Tabby, for Axeleigh was a happy household. Those fortunate enough to be employed here usually left feet first at the end of a long life of service—or retired to pleasant cottages from which they wished the Squire well and drank his health.
He ran a hand through his hair—he must be missing something. He was! Of the servants in his household, only Stebbins could read and write—and his half-literate writing was nothing like the cramped style in which the two blackmail notes had been penned.
Which added another panicky conjecture: Could an illiterate servant have dictated the first letter? And could the scribe who wrote it have penned the second? For the tone was slightly different, more confident somehow. As if it were written by a different person, or that person had subtly changed....
But that note had appeared in the front hall without any banging of the knocker, without any horseman riding up. Good lord, could there be an accomplice from within? The very thought made the back of Cliff
ord Archer’s neck prickle slightly.
He would have reeled with shock had he known that it was Constance’s hand that had set that note upon the hall table.
Claxton House,
The West Riding, Yorkshire,
Spring 1683
Chapter 11
April had come to Yorkshire, bringing rain and apple blossoms, and all of England was agog over the discovery of the Rye House Plot. Revolt had been brewing, for discontent with Charles II’s high-handed policies was widespread, but a handful of extremists had decided to resolve the matter more simply—by murder. The plan was to cut down the King and his unpopular brother, the Duke of York, at Rye House, a farmstead owned by one of the conspirators, which the royal entourage would pass on the way back to London from the Newmarket races. With the King and his brother both dead, they would then set the Duke of Monmouth (the King’s eldest illegitimate son—for he had no legitimate heir) upon the throne. But the plan had been discovered and Sidney and others of the “council of six” who favored revolt but had no part in any murder scheme were arrested and charged with high treason.
At Claxton House, cook—serving up steaming Yorkshire pudding to one and all in the servants’ hall—summed up the popular view.
“Ye should all mourn, ye should,” she told the kitchen help impressively (with Constance listening, as eager for her portion of the crisp, gravy-topped baked pudding as the others), “for ’tis the country that lost out that day. Mind ye, King Charles is bad enough, but if James comes to the throne we’ll all feel the pinch, for he’s bound and determined to make us all Catholics and if he can’t, he’ll light the fires of Smithfield once again and burn us all for heresy! Ah, the Protestant duke—though the King won’t admit ’twas a legal marriage that begot him, and him the son of the King’s own body!—he’s our only hope and now who knows if he’ll ever reach the throne?”
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