“No, I can manage now,” she assured him with a quick smile. “This is my territory, and these are my friends. I am quite capable of looking after myself here.”
“I know you are. Then take care, and I will call in the morning, quite in command of my temper.”
“Marcus?” she said, clinging to his hand when he would have released her. “Thank you for coming for me.”
“I’d cross the world for you and more,” he said. “I’m only sorry I let you go in the first place.”
His words warmed her, even as he released her and she hurried up the front step, shivering. She could not help glancing behind her as the footman closed the front door, just to get a last glimpse of him as he drove away.
“I hope we haven’t held up dinner,” Helen said to the maid, whipping off her muddy cloak and bonnet before they could be seen by too many people.
“No, Miss, there’s time to change still,” the maid assured her.
By then, Eliza, Horatio, and George were all but tumbling downstairs to greet her. At least they remembered to be polite to the Marshalls before they hauled her away by the hands, all talking at once.
The children’s welcome and their company did most of all to restore her to a feeling of normality. But once at her chamber, she shooed them back to their own quarters, promising to say goodnight to them after dinner. For she needed to wash and change before seeing Lady Overton.
Her evening gown had been cleaned since she had seen it last, and she donned it with some relief before brushing and pinning her hair. That done, she felt human once more and was just blowing out the candles when a knock at the door heralded a maid with a message from Lady Overton.
“Her ladyship would like to see you in her morning room at your earliest convenience.”
“Thank you,” Helen said. “I’m just coming.” When returning from anywhere, with or without the children, Helen always reported first to Lady Overton. Her ladyship’s summons was unusual. She could only suppose she wished to discuss Carla’s health, or she had somehow got wind of her abduction. Either way, now was the time to tell her all. She just hoped her ladyship would not imagine she had encouraged Philip in any way.
When she entered the morning room, Lady Overton’s back was to her as she gazed out of the window into the darkness. She held a letter at her side.
“My lady,” Helen greeted her. “Miss Robinov appears to be on the mend. Her mother gave me this letter for you.”
Lady Overton turned and held out her hand.
Obligingly, Helen crossed the room and gave her Mrs. Robinov’s letter. “How are the children? They seem well and lively.”
Instead of answering, Lady Overton held out the open letter in her other hand. The usual amiable if vague welcome was absent from her eyes, leaving them anxious and oddly cold. “Is this your writing, Miss Milsom? Did you truly pen this?”
Helen took the note, frowning. It was short, a mere few lines in a hand quite similar to her own. However, the oddity of this didn’t strike her just at first because the epistle began, “My dear Marcus.”
Her gaze flew back to Lady Overton’s, and she thrust the paper back. “No, I have never written to Sir Marcus in my life. I do not wish to read his letters.”
“But it is your writing, is it not?”
Helen glanced down at the note in her outstretched hand. “No,” she said, bewildered now as to where this was all going. “It is somewhat similar, but I could not have written this.”
“That is what I said when I first saw it. Miss Milsom could not have written this, could not have done this.”
“Done what?” she asked.
“Read it,” Lady Overton commanded.
Reluctantly, she drew her hand back and gazed at the letter. Although she forced herself to concentrate, the words didn’t seem to make any sense. They declared love in a florid and explicit style that would have made Helen blush even if they hadn’t been aimed at Marcus. And they invited him to elope with the writer by picking her up on the main Brighton Road from Finsborough, where she would be waiting for him with impatient desire, for she could not wait to settle in their love nest.
No, none of it made sense. Least of all, the fact that it was signed, yours in desperate love, Helen.
The letter fluttered to the floor as Helen stared at her employer in consternation.
“Did you meet him on the Brighton Road this afternoon?” Lady Overton’s voice, like her eyes, contained both hope and dread. She did not want to believe this, which gave Helen hope.
“Well, yes, in fact, we did meet there when he came—”
Lady Overton let out a cry of disappointment that cut Helen’s explanation short. “I would not have believed this of you! We have relied on you, made you quite a favorite in our house. My children love you, my married daughters treat you as a friend, and yet you were deceiving us this whole time, searching out a rich gentleman to entice, not even into marriage but into an illicit relationship. I suppose that was all a man of Sir Marcus’s stature would offer you!”
She could not allow that. “Sir Marcus is far too much the gentleman to offer such an arrangement to any gentleman’s daughter, let alone one in my vulnerable position. Your ladyship must—”
“Then it was you who initiated this, who did the enticing, the seducing!”
Helen’s face flamed. “Of course not!”
Lady Overton stared at her with something like confusion. “Well, you cannot have it both ways. I do not know now whether I am glad or sorry that Mr. Marshall brought you back here. I am disgusted to have to deal with it, and yet I wanted to give you this chance to defend yourself.”
“Wait,” Helen exclaimed, staring at her. “What did you just say? That Mr. Marshall brought me back here?”
“In the teeth of Sir Marcus’s opposition after the brute hit him.”
This was like some nightmare where all the elements of truth were there but twisted around somehow to mean something quite different.
“It wasn’t like that,” Helen said with an odd feeling of helplessness.
“Sir Marcus did not strike Mr. Marshall?”
“Well, yes, he did, for abducting me!”
“She told me you would claim that,” Lady Overton said bitterly.
She. Helen’s lips parted in shock. Though she shouldn’t have been surprised. A woman who stole from her hosts and calmly planted her loot in the chamber of a young man, ruining his life simply to further her own perverse schemes, would think nothing of lying to Lady Overton. Of getting revenge on Helen for the ruining of her pet project to marry Anne to Marcus for his money. She had even forged a letter as proof.
That, perhaps, Helen should have expected. But she would never have imagined Lady Overton would believe it.
“You were not so much nursing Carla Robinov as flirting with Marcus Dain, were you?” Lady Overton accused. “I have never been so deceived in my life.”
“I never deceived you!”
Lady Overton waved one weary hand. “Don’t even trouble to deny it. I have the evidence. Sir Marcus would not even come in here to face me this evening.”
“I would not let him!” Helen cried. “He was still so angry with Mr. Marshall, and neither of us wished to offend you. But he means to call tomorrow, when he will confirm everything I have told you.”
“I shall not be at home, though perhaps his lordship will be. You will be gone.”
It was inevitable after all that had been said already, but Helen’s knees still gave way. “You are dismissing me?” she whispered, seizing the arm of a chair for support.
For the first time, a flash of sympathy, even misery, crossed Lady Overton’s face. “I don’t want to, Miss Milsom. In truth, I always liked you and you were so good for Eliza.” She tugged at her slightly tousled hair with frustration. “Whoever I believe, their story is too ridiculous for words. But my guests, a lady and gentleman of standing, tell me the same story and provide evidence. How can I doubt them against a mere employee?”
>
“You can speak to Sir Marcus. You can look into my eyes and see that I tell the truth.”
Lady Overton stared at her. “If you have lied before, you are still lying.”
“And if I have never lied?”
Lady Overton looked almost pleading now. Even her voice was softer. “You must see I cannot take that chance. I cannot have such an immoral creature anywhere near my children. If that is what you are. Miss Milsom, I hope I am wrong, and if I am, I will beg you humbly to return to us. I’m afraid that is my final, if reluctant decision. You must take your dinner in your room. Then pack your things and leave tomorrow. Go.”
“Your ladyship must know that is unjust!” Helen exclaimed. “At least hear me before condemning me.”
At the accusation, Lady Overton straightened, and her face hardened once more. “All you have said so far merely confirms my worst fears. You admitted you met Sir Marcus on the Brighton Road.”
“Where I was escaping from Philip Marshall’s attempted abduction. Sir Marcus came to my rescue.”
Lady Overton pointed with loathing to the letter still on the carpet between them. “You expect me to believe this? After you wrote that letter to Sir Marcus?”
“I did not write that letter to Sir Marcus!”
“Then who did?” Lady Overton demanded with intensity.
“Mrs. Marshall.”
Lady Overton flung up her hands. “This is arrant nonsense. It makes no sense! You are really asking me to believe that Mrs. Marshall was complicit it her husband’s abduction of you?”
“Is it any stranger than believing that I—who have served you and your family faithfully and to the best of my ability for several months—am guilty of the vile things you have just accused me of?”
It was the wrong tone to take with her ladyship, and Helen knew it as soon as the words burst from her. Pushed into a corner, Lady Overton would only defend herself. Her face seemed to ice over. “The accusations against you are made with evidence—that letter, the fact that you came home with the Marshalls and did not come straight to me…”
“I was filthy from hiding in fields and ditches!” Helen interjected, and that did not help either.
“You have given me no evidence in defense of yourself or in accusation against Mr. or Mrs. Marshall. But in point of fact, Miss Milsom, this is not a court of law, and I have every right to dismiss you if and when I see fit. I may be wrong in my judgment—in many ways, I hope I am—but I won’t take chances with my children You are, with regret, dismissed.”
The world was tumbling in on her. She had lost her position, a position she had loved, by the lies of a woman who had become her enemy. Nothing she said made any difference.
Blindly, silently, she turned away to obey—before it came to her that there was still something she could do.
She could prove her accuser a liar and a thief.
“Miss Milsom?” Lady Overton’s voice seemed to come from very far away. “You will have no contact with my children. Is that quite clear?”
She had promised to wish them goodnight. Without warning, her throat closed up, forcing up tears she refused to shed.
“Quite clear,” she replied in a voice that shook only slightly as she walked out of the room.
She had one last chance to prove her good character, by exposing her accuser. It might earn her apology and reinstatement, or at least a reference. She walked up the stairs and along the passage to the guest bedchambers. Fortunately, a maid was hurrying along the passage to the servants’ stairs.
“Which is Mrs. Marshall’s chamber?” Helen asked her.
“That one, Miss,” the maid replied, pointing to the door on the left behind her.
“Thank you.” She strode up to the door, knocked loudly but briefly, and turned the handle. It yielded, and she walked in, uncaring at that moment whether Phoebe was there or not, with or without Philip. She was just grateful the door hadn’t been locked.
However, the room was empty. Phoebe must have gone down for dinner. Well, if she found the evidence of the thefts that she fully expected to, she’d have the entire household in here as witnesses. She did not even feel remotely guilty rifling through the woman’s possessions, as she had done when she’d helped Marcus search Anne’s room. As far as Helen was concerned, Phoebe’s behavior, her malicious, vengeful lies, had lost her all right to privacy or any other courtesy.
She opened a couple of drawers at random before her eyes fell on the trunk in the corner. Phoebe had planted stolen items in Kenneth’s trunk at the Hart. It was obviously where she expected thieves to keep their loot.
Accordingly, she hastened to the trunk, but the locked lid would not budge. Refusing to give up, she rifled through some drawers looking for the key, which she eventually found in the bedside table. It unlocked the trunk easily, and Helen opened it to find a large, used linen sheet.
Was it her own that she brought with her for staying at inns where the sheets were suspect? Or had she actually stolen a sheet from one of her recent hosts? Helen pulled it out, Underneath, was another, lumpier sheet. When she tugged at it, a few pieces of jewelry flew out—a man’s diamond tie pin, two bracelets, a ring. She didn’t recognize them, but when she unwrapped the sheet properly, she found two heavy, carved silver candlesticks.
As she stared at them, the bedchamber door opened without warning, and Phoebe walked in. She came to an abrupt halt, staring at Helen crouched before her trunk with Lord Silford’s candlesticks in either hand.
“I don’t think we need Lord Silford, or even Mrs. Cromarty, to identify these,” Helen said harshly. She stood, walking toward the bell rope. “I believe it’s time Lord and Lady Overton understood the true quality of their guests.”
Phoebe smiled. She should not have looked quite so unconcerned by this proof of her dishonesty. “Go ahead,” she drawled, sounding amused. “You were the one kneeling before my trunk in my room with stolen property in your hands. You have already lost your character, my dear. Everyone will see that you are planting them among my possessions, as you planted the others with the Robinov boy.”
“I could not possibly have planted those things on Kenneth Robinov! I had only just arrived at the inn.”
“But you had been before. And with your well-known pursuit of Sir Marcus Dain, I daresay you were furious to discover the Robinov woman there in full possession of your lover. You had to get rid of them somehow. Only your plan went awry when it merely drove them to announce their engagement.”
Helen stared at her, stunned. “You’re insane! No one would believe such a thing!”
“Wouldn’t they?” Phoebe smiled and sat down at her dressing table. “They already believe you tried to run away with Sir Marcus and that only Philip, in regard for his former relationship to you and your family, prevented it, even though he received a black eye for his pains. And you must remember, you, too, were at Steynings and Audley Park when the thefts occurred.”
In the dressing table glass, Phoebe’s eyes met Helen’s. The woman smiled. “Go on. Pull the bell. I shall scream and accuse you, and you’ll be arrested as well as dismissed. Face it, my dear, you have lost overwhelmingly.” She laughed. “Again.”
Blood sang in Helen’s ears. For the second time that evening, she was afraid she would faint. This was not right. And yet, she had already been dismissed by an employer whom she had thought valued, trusted, and even liked her.
“Good evening, Miss Milsom,” Phoebe said firmly with perfect confidence.
Face it, my dear, you have lost overwhelmingly. Again.
Phoebe was right.
Helen walked out of the room without troubling to close the door.
*
Sir Marcus arrived at Audley Park just after eleven the following morning. His mind made up, he simmered with determination and tension. He was a wealthy man of excellent family who had been eluding matchmaking mamas for two decades. And yet, he felt no certainty that the fiercely independent governess would accept him. She was not indif
ferent to him, he knew that. She liked him. He just didn’t know if she liked him enough.
Perhaps in all delicacy, he should not broach the matter until she had recovered from yesterday’s unpleasant little adventure. But he wanted the right to protect her immediately.
Rather to his surprise, he was not taken immediately to Lady Overton. Instead, he was shown into the reception room where they had once gathered to admire Philip painting an inferior copy of the scenery with Anne and the Robinovs in the foreground.
The easel and canvas were still there. By the rules he had laid down, the Marshalls should depart today. He had hoped they were gone already. Perhaps they had left the painting as a gift. He walked idly across to it.
The foreground had changed. Anne was still there, smiling. But in the place of the Robinovs, a figure who looked a little like himself, stood smiling attentively down at her.
Marcus snorted, just as quick footsteps crossed the parquet floor of the hall and entered the room. Marcus turned and bowed to Lord Overton, who nodded curtly.
“Dain. What can I do for you?”
It was not Overton’s usual amiable manner, but then, he had been putting up with unwelcome guests.
“First of all,” Marcus said briskly, “I was wondering if you had heard about yesterday’s…fracas.”
“I did,” Overton replied. “And I take leave to tell you, sir, I am no high stickler, but your conduct disappoints me in the extreme.”
Marcus blinked. “My conduct? What did Miss Milsom tell you?”
“Miss Milsom? Nothing. My wife spoke to her. I had the whole sorry tale from Marshall and his wife.”
Marcus frowned in consternation. “From Marshall? Then God knows what he told you! But before God, sir, you do not want such a man anywhere near your wife and family.”
Overton stared at him. “This from the man who seduced my governess!”
Marcus could be haughty, too. “Do you really intend to take the word of that popinjay over mine? After all the years we have known each other?”
Overton’s eyes flickered. “My wife believes Mrs. Marshall. And Miss Milsom did not, could not, defend herself.”
The Weary Heart Page 17
