But the Squire of Axeleigh, so reliable in all things, had followed Margaret’s instructions not only as to the manner of her arrival but as to the manner of her leaving.
A saddled horse with Margaret’s saddlebags already packed and a heavy black veil and widows’ weeds flung over the saddle awaited her in the shadows. She ran like a wraith across the lawn beneath the trees and sprang to the horse’s back. A moment later she was thundering away, the hoofbeats of her departure cloaked by the pandemonium that had broken loose inside the hall.
Hot tears coursed unchecked down her beautiful scarred face, to be dried by the winds of Somerset. In a quiet glade she stopped, and while the horse drank gratefully from a little spring, she slipped the loose-fitting widows’ weeds over her elegant ball gown, took from her saddlebag a riding mask of dull black fabric and fitted over her head the flowing black veil that Clifford Archer had provided.
And then she was mounted again, and flying through the night on the dark lanes back toward Devon.
It had been a night to treasure in her memory, but it had also been a very narrow escape. She would never dare risk it again.
The road ahead had never looked so bleak as she brought the galloping horse down to a steady pace and sought the back roads she knew so well. They would not find her, no matter how they looked, for she had a head start and was heading south—away from everything she loved.
And now, from her broken heart, she bade her lover a last good-by. For she knew she would not seek him out again.
Back at Huntlands, the Squire brushed aside Ned’s eager offer and took Constance home himself. Tom would bring Pamela, he assured her easily.
They were silent as they rode toward Axeleigh beneath oaks her father had known as a lad. Halfway there, Constance put the question she felt she had to know.
“That talk I heard about The Masked Lady?” she asked. “Is there anything to it?”
He shrugged. “I doubt it. Oh, there may be a woman somewhere who rides about masked carrying messages for Monmouth, but my guess is the whole story is vastly overblown—and nothing to do with Margaret, of course.”
“Do you happen to know anyone called Gates?” she shot at him, remembering that night on Dartmoor and the stranger who had been gone like the mist—that stranger Margaret had claimed was the Squire’s messenger.
“No,” he said and turned to her, mildly curious. “Am I supposed to know a Gates?”
“Oh, no,” she said hastily. “I just thought you might.” So Margaret had not taken her brother into her confidence....Perhaps she had not wished to involve him in the dangerous game she played.
Again they fell silent, riding along together until the long bulk of Axeleigh Hall reared up before them and they dismounted. After the grooms had taken their horses, the Squire led her toward the front door.
There he paused. “The world as we know it is wrong, Constance,” he sighed. “Yet the plain truth is that in the times we live in, it would bring shame on you to admit your true father. Would that it were otherwise and that I could openly claim you as my niece.”
She nodded, from a full heart.
In the moonlight the Squire studied the upturned face of his ward. There was little of his unruly brother to be found in that lovely face, he thought. Indeed, she must have taken after her mother’s side—that willowy grace, that cloud of dark hair, shining and fine, those enormous purple eyes, dark-fringed. Only her skin bespoke her blond father, for her complexion had the ethereal fairness of a true blonde. With her dark hair and enormous violet eyes the effect was startling. “Had my brother lived, he would have been master here,” he told her slowly. “The estate is not an entail and my father loved Brandon best—he would surely have left this manor to him, and at his death, had he no other offspring, it would have been yours. But Brandon died and my father left Axeleigh to me—and it will pass from me to my only child, Pamela.”
For a moment Constance’s violet eyes had widened. Had matters fallen slightly differently, she not Pamela would have been mistress here! Somehow she had not thought of it that way.
She waited, silent. On the decision of this rugged new-met uncle of hers would rest her future.
“The world being what it is, ’tis best none but you and I know you to be Brandon’s daughter.”
“Not even Pamela?”
“Most especially not Pamela. For Pamela has a loyal heart but a wayward tongue. I have warned her to curb it but she does not listen. But as you cross my threshold I want you to know that since you are Brandon’s daughter, you shall be a daughter to me also and reside here at Axeleigh until you marry. I will in all ways treat you as my own and when you wed I will give you a dowry.”
“I do not know how to thank you, sir.” Constance’s voice was husky.
“No need to thank me. Were it not for your own sake, I’d insist you call me uncle.” Abruptly he blew his nose. For there had been something in her wistful smile just then that had reminded him of the older brother he had in all ways copied as a lad.
With a courtly gesture, he swung wide the door and Constance stepped inside.
“Well,” he said, as light laughter drifted to them from the drawing room, “it would seem that Pamela has preceded us.”
Constance, her mind awhirl, gave him back an uncertain smile.
And went in to greet the lightskirt’s daughter.
Part One
The Tangled Web
Such times are these! Men go about pursuing empty schemes
Of setting dukes on princely thrones and such unlikely dreams!
One dream alone have I—and that is you one day to wed
And bring you willing, smiling, thrilling to my bed!
Axeleigh Hall, Somerset,
December 1684
Chapter 21
Summer had faded into fall and now in the Valley of the Axe it was winter again with snow whitening the landscape and gray skies reflecting their gunmetal vastness down into the silver river.
The Squire of Axeleigh had received another letter from Margaret and he braced himself to read it—for if it was like the other two, it was like to break his heart.
Within the month after she had left the Midsummer Masque at Huntlands so abruptly he had heard from her. The letter came, he noted with a sigh of relief, from Tattersall in Devon and it was written in Margaret’s own easily identifiable scrawl. He had torn it open with shaking fingers, afraid of what might spill out.
Even so, its contents rocked him.
It was foolish of me to come back. I know that now, the letter read. But at least I am back at Tattersall where I belong. I miss Constance, but of course I had expected to miss Constance. The Squire’s face relaxed into a smile.
How like Margaret! He would show Constance the letter and she would be pleased that Margaret had mentioned missing her, for the Squire had come to realize how close the two women were. He began to read again. Seeing Tony again has made me realize how empty his life must be with his wife gone. I hope that he will take an interest in Constance and perhaps offer for her. She is the finest girl I know and he is the finest man. I feel they would be right for each other. See if you cannot arrange a match between them.
The Squire had let the letter fall to the table. He sat stunned. Margaret, who loved Tony Warburton more than she loved her life, was actually asking him to arrange a match between Tony and Constance? He was appalled by the very thought.
That evening he told Constance that he had heard from Margaret and that she was well and back in Dartmoor. Constance’s face brightened and she asked if she could see the letter. The Squire told her cheerfully that he had lost it, but was sure he would find it again and he would save it for her.
She had to be content with that, although it did seem awfully careless of him.
The Squire’s lips had tightened as he walked away from her. That was certainly one letter the girl would never see. He had tossed it into the fireplace personally and watched it burn.
I cannot bel
ieve you mean what you say, he had written back. Do not urge me to do something which you will immediately regret.
He had hoped that such a sensible response would put a stop to Margaret’s wild suggestions. How could he know that in Devon she was remembering a double shadow in the moonpath and how she had once in the Hamiltons’ attic told Tony Warburton fancifully that he was seeing two women.... Or that she had fatalistically decided that her words had been prophetic; there were indeed to be two women in Tony Warburton’s life—but one of them was not the sad little Weatherby girl, sped almost before she was wed. The other woman in his life would be Constance. So now she had written to the Squire again and in the snows of December he had received it.
Tony has not forgotten me, she wrote frankly. I knew that when I saw him at the Masque last summer. And I will not have him grieving for me, Clifford. With Constance he would be able to forget me, once and for all—and that is what I desire, that he forget me. And again she urged him to make the match.
Reading those words, the Squire felt unaccustomed tears sting his eyelids. Valiant, foolish, stubborn, gallant Margaret ... his heart went out to her and he sat for a time with his head in his hands, wondering what to do.
It hurt him in his heart to think of Margaret, wasting her life away on those barren moors. Many times he had debated telling Tony Warburton that she still lived. But always he had thought better of it just before he spoke—for he knew Margaret only too well, knew her determination and her courage. He would not put it past Margaret to drink a draft of hemlock or throw herself from the rooftop if Tony Warburton came calling—for she who had once been the beauty of the county could not brook the thought of being less.
It shook him now that he had actually suggested that Tony ask for Constance himself. What would have happened if Tony had latched on to his suggestion? Would Margaret, draped in black, have come north to attend the wedding as she had done, against his remonstrances, when Tony had married the little Weatherby girl?
If so, it well might be a very different story. For Tony, while kind, had not seemed wildly infatuated with the little Weatherby girl. But with Constance as a bride swaying beside him, who knew what the effect on Margaret would be?
He had a sudden nightmarish vision of Margaret sitting quietly through the ceremony and then, unable to bear the thought of Tony’s wedding night, riding off hell-bent for the Cheddar Gorge and oblivion.
Although he did not know it, the real world was about to deal him a blow harsh enough to blend in with his dark imaginings. Even now Fate was riding toward him through the snow in the person of one Jack Drubbs, who had last summer escaped the trap the King’s men had laid for him and was now coming back to the Valley of the Axe.
It had been a bad year for Jack Drubbs. April had found him summarily dismissed from his job as male nurse in London, his patient’s wife shrilly declaring him both neglectful and lazy. Drubbs, who was both, had smouldered for a time at his sister’s cottage near Richmond and then gone out on a quest.
Never overly brave, Drubbs had gone about his mission cautiously for it was of a new sort for him. In his time he had pilfered rings and crosses from the dead, spirited away cadavers to sell to the medical profession, and even on occasion, at the insistent (and well-paid) urgings of relatives anxious to inherit, assisted—with the aid of a smothering pillow—an elderly patient or two into the next life. But he had never openly tried blackmail.
This chance, however, was too good to miss. For hadn’t the patient babbled endlessly in his delirium about a certain squire in Somerset who had done his best to kill him, indeed who even now doubtless believed him walled up as dead in the foundations of his house? Hadn’t Drubbs, shut in with a patient deemed contagious, had to listen hour after hour to the wild tale of his escape—without hat or cloak or boots or doublet, on foot into the Mendip Hills where he had stolen some clothes from a clothes line and hailed a dray and somehow—for the Squire had not taken his purse—made it back to London? Never too quick-witted, it had taken Drubbs a long time to figure how this knowledge could best serve him.
Finally he had set out, but being ever cautious, he had set up for himself an identity as a “Monmouth man,” one of those roving Dissenters who roamed the English roads, preaching Dissent to all who would listen. It had given him some good contacts as he crossed England toward the West Country and had led him eventually, in the common room of an inn in Bridgwater, to a man who was ideally suited for the use to which Drubbs wished to put him: For Nick Netherbury was not only a staunch Monmouth supporter, like so many West Countrymen, but he had the virtues of being both extremely gullible and of working for the very Squire of Axeleigh that Drubbs meant to blackmail.
It was Nick who innocently pointed out the Squire, riding by on his way to make a deal on some sheep, and it was an easy thing for Jack Drubbs, unobserved, to slip a blackmail note into the Squire’s saddlebag as he bargained near the bridge across the River Parrett for the flock.
The note had dropped like a shot from a catapult upon Axeleigh’s squire, who had thought that business of Virginia’s dead lover over long ago. But the amount demanded was not large. He was to leave a purse containing ten gold guineas—or an equivalent amount in pounds or florins—on Midsummer’s Eve in the rotted hollow of the big fallen oak on the road midway between Axeleigh and Huntlands. That was the price of silence.
The note had been unsigned.
Midsummer’s Eve had been chosen with intent, for on that night so many masques were held all over England that a man might wander the roads costumed and masked and little notice be taken of it.
But Drubbs’s plan went further. It had occurred to him that anyone who had “murdered” a man and walled up his body might be a difficult subject for blackmail. Such a “victim” might arrive with pistols blazing. So Drubbs again enlisted innocent Nick in his designs.
Some money for the Cause, he told Nick, was to be left in a certain hollow tree; he could not pick it up as he had business elsewhere. Would Nick do him this favor and pick up the purse, which he would collect from Nick later? Oh, and one more thing—he’d best wear Drubbs’s distinctive green cloak and tall black hat when he did it, for those who left the money might be watching and they’d believe that Drubbs himself had picked it up.
Flattered by the smooth-talking Drubbs and feeling himself a party to Great Events, gullible Nick readily agreed. And Drubbs, unbeknown to Nick, had ridden on ahead, carefully avoiding the hollow tree—for who knew, instead of gold it might contain a bell to give warning or even a poisonous snake—had passed by the tree and settled himself behind a nearby bush to observe events.
They had not been long in coming. Several horsemen had ridden up, dismounted, and hidden their mounts and themselves in the trees. Drubbs, sweating profusely, had been afraid to move. He cursed himself for his foolishness in attempting to blackmail this terrible squire.
Shortly thereafter Nick Netherbury, wearing Drubbs’s distinctive green cloak and black hat, had arrived and taken up the purse.
At that point not only had the men leaped from their hiding places but another contingent had thundered down the road, their uniformed leader crying out, “Stop, Jack Drubbs! Stop in the name of the King!”
Nick, in confusion, had leaped to his mount and departed in a hail of bullets.
They had all missed poor Nick—but one had found its mark. A stray bullet had caught Drubbs in the left shoulder and he had staggered out of the bushes after the King’s men and Nick had taken their quarrel elsewhere and somehow climbed upon his horse and ridden away. He had stuck it out grimly and made it all the way to his sister’s cottage near Richmond before his festered wound laid him low.
And there he had lain, recuperating, for months.
It had taken those months for Drubbs to realize that he had been too brash in his talk of rebellion out there in the West Country. The West Country was known to be partisan to the Duke of Monmouth, but this was the King’s land still. It was not for blackmailing some
local squire that he had been sought by a company of armed men—it was for treason. Drubbs had even guessed who had betrayed him to the King’s men—that servingmaid at the inn, that Mollie! Ah, he should not have trusted her, boasting that he’d be back that night with gold to buy her a new petticoat! It angered him how she had wormed out of him where he was going. Intoxicated by the pliable female warmth of her body as they dallied through the warm afternoon atop the coverlet of his bed, he had whispered that he would find her a new petticoat in a hollow tree! Mollie had giggled and raked his back delightfully with her plump fingers—and he had told her more. He had told her the location of the hollow tree and how he’d be back that night with enough gold to take her to the fair in Taunton.
Mollie obviously had preferred to attend the fair with somebody else. She had reported Jack Drubbs to the authorities and near got him killed. Trollop! His teeth ground as he thought of her, for he had counted on Mollie being a West Country girl and a supporter of the Duke of Monmouth like the rest of them. Now when it was too late he remembered that as he tasted the wine of her kisses, he’d learnt that she was from Ipswich in Suffolk and had reached the West Country via a lover who’d left her at Bristol and taken ship for the Colonies. Mollie had drifted to Bridgwater. And had only pretended to be a Monmouth supporter to fool him. She’d betrayed him to the King’s men and they had ambushed him!
Well, he’d be more careful this time!
Slowly, carefully, he made his plans—for if things went well, he could bleed this West Country squire of funds forever and never have to do another lick of work in his life. Since he’d attracted the attention of the King’s men by being a too-enthusiastic Dissenter, he now took the other tack and grew a mustache and a tiny clipped beard and borrowed money from his sister to secure a second-hand puce suit and a disreputable puce-plumed hat that made him look almost like a gentleman down on his luck. Using the name “John Hodge,” which he thought had a fine steady ring to it, he made his way toward the West Country just as winter was closing down.
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