Constance joined in her merry peal of laughter, but her own laugh was strained. She was thinking of Margaret, with her scarred face and her memories, out there on the lonely moors.... She turned away from the window. “You’re keeping Dick Peacham waiting an unconscionably long time,” she reminded Pamela.
“Oh, he’ll wait,” said Pamela airily. “Who is that riding down the drive?” She craned her neck to see.
“Chesney Pell. You can recognize him by his periwig!”
“Oh, then you’d better take off that wrapper and dress to receive callers! For he’s surely come to see you—I saw the way he looked at you at Hawley Grange!” Pamela was off on a merry peal of laughter, almost tripping over Puss, who leaped to safety upon the bed.
Constance was dressing in leisurely fashion when Tabby came running upstairs to tell her she had a gentleman caller, a Mr. Pell. By now it had occurred to Constance that Pell might have something to tell her concerning the Cause. At least she could talk to him about it.
Quiet and composed, she went downstairs, moving easily in her plum velvet gown with its big puffed sleeves caught up by amethyst satin ribands. She floated into the drawing room. Chesney Pell scrambled to his feet as she entered and almost lost his periwig to the depth of his bow. Behind him through the window she could see a playful Pamela overwhelming Dick Peacham with a flurry of snowballs.
“Mistress Constance!” Chesney straightened up and his cherubic face broke into a wide smile, for she was even lovelier than he remembered. “Oh, it is good of you to let me call upon you like this!”
Constance acknowledged his greeting coolly. She saw that Pamela on her way out had already seen to their guest, for he had set down a wineglass as she entered. “I thought perhaps you might have some message for me from the group?”
“Ah—no. I am afraid they did not reconsider.” Chesney leant forward, caught by the spell of her femininity. “Had I had the arranging of it, Mistress Constance, you should have had your wish!”
“But when you had the opportunity, you did not vote for it,” she reminded him grimly.
“Ah, but that was because I am new to this group and could not be so bold as to vote one way or the other. But we’ve a group in Lyme Regis on the South coast that could use you as a courier, were you there! I’ve great influence with them!” He tried to look important and only managed to look beatific.
“I’m sure that would be nice,” sighed Constance. For she knew that to attempt such a thing would be out of the question. Tom and these other lads who knew the Squire might be able to hoodwink him into letting her go, but never a stranger.
“Lyme Regis,” she murmured. “That’s on the Channel, isn’t it?”
“The English Channel.” He bobbed his head and beamed at her.
“I thought you were visiting Cart Rawlings in Bridgwater. Isn’t he with you?”
“No, Cart stopped off at Hawley Grange, but he gave me the sleigh and bade me Godspeed!”
And so he had come calling. She sighed inwardly, and invited him to tell her about life at Oxford. She smiled sympathetically and let her thoughts wander while Chesney Pell told her more than she wished to know about life in the great university town where he was a student.
“... and the Great Tom Bell tolls every night precisely at—” he was saying when there was the sound of a door opening, a slight scuffle in the hall, a sharp “Absolutely no!” from Pamela and the sound of a slap.
Chesney Pell broke off. He looked alarmed and started to rise but Constance waved him back to his seat. She managed to control her mirth when Pamela and Dick Peacham burst into the room, their color rather high and Dick rubbing his cheek ruefully. Pamela’s crystal blue eyes were snapping as she pulled off her gloves, and her glance at Constance told her that Peacham had taken liberties and been brought to heel for it!
“Ned is here,” she told Constance crisply. “We came in to tell you he’s riding down the drive.” She cast a speculative look at Pell.
Ned here again to prod her about marriage! Constance sat up straighter. Well, she would show Ned how little interested she was in his suit for her hand! When Ned came through the door she was fairly hanging on Chesney Pell’s words and he was so flattered that his thin voice was turning falsetto and trembling as he spoke. He gazed at her adoringly, enraptured by all this sudden interest.
Pamela watched, bright-eyed, as Ned surveyed the two of them with a frown. Barely hiding her amusement, she led Peacham back outside.
“Mistress Constance.” Ned bowed crisply.
“Oh—Ned.” Constance acknowledged his presence languidly. “Chesney here has just been telling me the most fascinating things about Oxford. Oh, do go on, Chesney. Ned will want to hear too.”
Overjoyed both by the way she leant eagerly toward him and by her sudden surprising use of his given name, Chesney Pell waxed voluble on the subject of Oxford, and hardly stopped talking until a frowning Ned, fidgeting as he sat there watching, finally rose, bowed to Constance, and took himself off.
“Why, where is he going?” wondered Chesney, surprised.
“Warwood, undoubtedly,” said Constance in a cold carrying voice. “The Warburtons, I’m told, go out in any weather.”
Ned’s shoulders jerked slightly. He turned in the doorway. “I’ll be back tomorrow to take you in my sleigh to Warwood, Constance,” he said, reminding her of the planned sleighing party.
Constance’s vague indifferent smile passed over him and settled again on Chesney. Ned could not tell whether she had heard him or not. His lips compressed into a straight line and they heard the front door close rather hard as he left.
“Well, I must be leaving too, I suppose,” said Chesney. He peered at the window. “It’s snowing harder now.” He gave her a hopeful look.
Doubtless he was angling for an invitation to stay the night!
“Yes, it is beginning to snow harder,” said Constance, looking critically at the few flakes dusting down. Now that Ned had left, her sudden interest in her periwigged guest had evaporated. “You had best get started—you wouldn’t want to miss the entrance to Hawley Grange again!”
Chesney rose obediently. Constance guessed he was used to taking orders from women. It did nothing to recommend him to her.
As he opened the door to depart, Pamela almost fell through it and began brushing snow from her red cloak. “I was walking under a branch and suddenly this great pile of snow fell down my neck,” she gasped. “I left Dick admiring the maze. Good-by, Chesney—oh, Constance, do get it out! It’s freezing my back!”
Hastily Constance shut the door on Chesney’s eager “I’ll be back tomorrow to take you on the sleighride!” and while Pamela shook out her cloak, she dug the snow from her shivering friend’s collar.
“You can’t go in Chesney’s sleigh,” Pamela told Constance, giving a little screech as melted snow ran down her back. “You’re going with Ned, remember?”
“I am trying to show Ned that I do not love him,” said Constance calmly. “And if seeming to be interested in Chesney Pell can do that—”
“I doubt that will hold Ned back!”
“No,” said Constance through her teeth, for it had been very tiresome playing up to Chesney. “For Ned tells me the Warburtons are a determined lot! I don’t see how you can abide Peacham,” she added.
Pamela shrugged. “Oh, he’s a trifle pompous perhaps, but”—her crystal blue eyes sparkled—“an awfully good object lesson for Tom, don’t you think? Hearing how Dick Peacham dogs my footsteps?”
“You’re playing with fire,” warned Constance. “Tom may surprise you!”
But it was the Squire who would have surprised them both had they known that he was now measuring up every male caller at Axeleigh as potential husbands for his daughter or his ward—even Peacham and Pell!
Chapter 23
Since receiving the blackmail note that had jolted him from his calm sense of security, Clifford Archer had had time to think. The sum demanded was not so large, but it
angered him to pay a blackmailer. He was half tempted to ride out and meet the fellow with pistols blazing. Still... there was his daughter to think about. And Constance. Pamela did not deserve to have it flung at her that her father was a murderer, and even though indeed he was not, how could he ever prove it? The only eyewitness, his faithless wife, Virginia, was no longer alive—and was not the telltale body buried in his cellar? Hardly the action of an innocent man, a court would say! That he had only been trying to protect his womenfolk would be doubted.
He was in real trouble and he could see no way out of it. He could pay the blackmailer this time, but there would be another time, and another. And he knew his temper—eventually he would be driven to remove the blackmailer from the face of the earth. He would become what he was not now—a murderer.
These dark thoughts had plagued him through the night and were still with him the next day as he stood pensively by an upstairs window thinking. If only the girls were settled....
Peacham was even now strolling through the snowy maze with Pamela. The Squire could occasionally see the scarlet plumes of Peacham’s hat rising above a low place in the maze.
Ned had gone flinging out and now there was Chesney leaving. The Squire, who had assumed that Constance harbored a secret fancy for Ned, but was too “missish” to say so, had regarded Chesney Pell thoughtfully.
Pell was eligible enough, of course. Cart Rawlings’s father had told him that Pell, who had come home from Oxford with his son Cart for the Christmas holidays, was the son of a wealthy linen draper in Lyme Regis, who would come into money as soon as his widowed mother let go of the apron strings. At the same time the elder Rawlings had bewailed his own son’s refusal to go back to Oxford. Love, it seemed, had the boy by the throat. He feared to leave lest Melissa Hawley be bespoken by somebody else!
The Squire had given his friend back a placid look. To have Cart Rawlings ardently courting Melissa Hawley suited him perfectly, since he’d always had an eye on Tom for Pamela and Tom had been spending too much time at Hawley Grange of late.
What Pamela saw in Peacham the Squire could not imagine. He would never understand women, he realized grimly. He had not understood his young wife and although he had thought he understood Pamela, believing her to be anxiously waiting for Tom Thornton to settle down and ask for her, now—after her calm assertion in Tom’s presence that she might accept Peacham—he was not so sure that he would ever understand her or any other woman. In any event he had asked Dick Peacham to spend the night, and Peacham had accepted with alacrity.
Below him now Pamela and Dick Peacham were just strolling out of the maze, Pamela in her indigo wool with her red cloak flying in the wind, and young Peacham in his fashionable scarlet cloak enriched with gold braid hovering over her. The Squire had never seen cuffs so wide, nor quite so many gold buttons. He snorted. A popinjay the lad was—his tomboyish daughter would surely never choose a fellow who thought more of the cut of his trousers than how neatly they would swing over a saddle!
His mind came to a full stop. Down there in the snow a remarkable thing was happening. Pamela, who had seemed to give a swift covert glance in a direction past the Squire’s line of vision, through the trees, had suddenly lifted her head. Archly. Smiling lips parted in a gesture of invitation. Her red woolen hood had fallen back and her golden curls spilled out fetchingly, and Peacham, apparently driven mad at the sight, had seized her and was kissing The Squire held his breath, waiting for Pamela to wriggle free and give Peacham such a slap as would rock his teeth. He had seen her in action before! To his utter astonishment, Pamela seemed to be wriggling closer and her arms had stolen up around Peacham’s neck. Unbelievable! The Squire passed a hand before his eyes to clear them and turned away, telling himself sternly he would not spy on lovers.
He was not to know that Pamela had spied out of the corner of her eye Tom Thornton strolling down the snowy drive, walking his horse which was limping badly. Guessing that he would not know she had glimpsed him, she had recklessly invited Dick Peacham to kiss her and kiss her he had! His ardent lips had done their best to ravage her mouth, but even as her body stiffened in rejection, she had been mindful to let her arms slip around his neck, for Tom was watching. She was going to pay him back, for thinking that Dick Peacham had come to call on Constance! Let Tom see plainly that Dick was here to court her!
As she pulled away, she had a strong desire to slap Peacham, for he had attempted to take liberties with his tongue, probing hungrily at her suddenly closed mouth.
“You assume too much!” she muttered, and then suddenly seeming to become aware of Tom’s presence—for indeed he stood at gaze, watching them from the driveway—she ducked her head as if in sudden embarrassment and jumped quickly away from Dick Peacham. “We’re being observed, Dick,” she cried merrily and, seizing him by the hand, began to thread her way across the snow toward Tom. “What brings you here, Tom?” she hailed him.
“A lame horse,” replied Tom, who looked like a golden Viking in a suit the color of his saddle, and a serviceable cloak. “Didn’t want to walk Satan all the way back to Huntlands on that leg, thought to rest him in your stable for a couple of days. Well, Dick, I see you’re back again,” he added in a bluff voice.
Dick Peacham acknowledged Tom’s greeting irritably. He was confused over Pamela’s response. First she had seemed to invite his kiss, then she struggled under it even while her arms wrapped round his neck, then she pulled away and bluntly told him he assumed too much! And now here was this cursed Thornton fellow again! He always seemed to be underfoot and it was hard enough to get Pamela alone without these constant neighborly visits from Thornton!
“Of course, we’ll be glad to welcome Satan to our stable,” said Pamela warmly, for she was almost as fond of Tom’s big black stallion as she was of Angel, her own dainty mare. “Come, we’ll walk you to the stable, won’t we, Dick?”
Dick looked glumly at Tom. Was he never to be free of Thornton to pursue his courtship? he wondered.
A few minutes later the Squire saw Captain Warburton ride up the drive. He was surprised to see him, so soon after Ned’s abrupt departure. A groom promptly appeared to take the big charcoal stallion with the white star on his forehead away to the stables—for the Squire had instructed them that in this rush of suitors coming and going, they’d best keep an eye on the driveway from dawn to dusk—and the Squire soon heard the Captain’s spurs ring on the stone flooring of the hall below. An affectation, those spurs, he thought, smiling, as he went down to greet his guest, for Tony never used them. Cinder, his big stallion, he treated with affection, and the horse was so well trained to his hand that a mere nudge of the knee would send him into a gallop, a muttered word from the Captain and Cinder would gallantly take any fence!
Captain Warburton cast a quick look around the hall as he entered. For although he might tell himself that he had come here again on behalf of Ned, he knew in his heart that he had come here in hopes of seeing Constance again, of hearing the raw silk rustle of her voice that dragged across his emotions like a warm bedsheet carrying him back to other days, other times, when his world had stretched out bright before him.
There was no sign of Constance in the hall, nor did her silken skirts appear, even though the Captain spoke in a hearty carrying voice to Stebbins, who let him in and took his cloak.
“Tony!” The Squire reached the foot of the stairway and strode forward to greet him. “Ye’ll sup with us, of course?”
“I’d be happy to, Clifford.” Captain Warburton smiled at his old friend.
“And stay the night as well, I hope?”
The Captain hesitated. It was tempting to spend a night under the same roof as Constance, to know that she was there perhaps just on the other side of a wall, that her silky feminine skirts might swish down the hall past his door. “I may take you up on that, Clifford, for it looks to snow in earnest.”
“Good,” said the Squire heartily, escorting his friend into the drawing room and reaching for
a bottle of port. “Pamela will have a room readied for you when she comes in. She’s out by the maze leading young Peacham a chase. It seems she fancies him.”
“Oh?” Captain Warburton’s straight dark brows elevated as he accepted a goblet of the rich red wine. “I’d thought it was Thornton she fancied.”
Clifford Archer sighed. “So did I, but it seems I’m often mistaken in these matters. Though what she sees in young Peacham, I wouldn’t be knowing.”
She sees in him a title and a chance to live in Taunton and walk on cobblestones, away from the mud and quagmires of the country, thought Tony Warburton cynically. He had seen it on the Continent, many a time. A pretty girl, besieged by suitors, suddenly accepting the most distant one—just to get away from her own surroundings! He didn’t tell his friend that, of course. “I hear he’s a head for business,” he said hopefully—indeed it was the only good thing he could think of about young Peacham.
“Yes, that’s in his favor,” agreed the Squire gloomily. He lifted his head and fixed the Captain with an unsmiling glance, for when he had heard the determined clatter of Tony Warburton’s boots in the hall just now, he had come of a sudden to a decision. One he would not be swayed from, he I told himself.
“I’ve thought about your offer, Tony,” he said frankly.
“Oh, you mean Ned’s offer?” The Captain toyed with his goblet, half afraid of what was coming.
“Don’t quibble, Tony.” Impatiently. “I mean, of course, Ned’s offer for Constance.”
“Yes?” asked the Captain softly. His gray eyes were very steady, studying his wine.
“I’ve decided you were right. ’Tis time she stops all this missishness and settles down. Ned shall have her!” And then even if I lose my temper and kill this blackmailer, she’ll have found safe harbor.
The gray eyes continued steady. Captain Warburton had taken blows before. “Ned will be overjoyed,” he said pleasantly, and took another sip of wine. He shot a look at Clifford, “Have you told her yet?”
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