by M. C. Beaton
“Very long,” whispered Mary.
Mary raised her eyes, and Emily, who knew her so well, read the unspoken words in her wide, frightened gaze. Too long.
Chapter 3
Two days had passed since the arrival of the earl. Emily did not know what Mary was really thinking about. There seemed no time now to sit and chat. The house was in an uproar, with guests beginning to arrive, caterers discussing catering, musicians discussing music, and Mr. Parsons hiring extra staff.
The weather was cold and clear. Two large marquees were to be erected on the lawn at the back of the house, one for dancing and the other for food.
It came to be known that the Earl of Devenham was not pleased that accommodation had not been arranged for relatives from his side of the family. Mr. Anstey had naively thought that since the earl’s parents were dead, it followed that he did not have any relatives at all.
The local inn had to be taken over and rooms found in various private houses for the other remaining guests. Society was quite prepared to house the earl’s relatives. No one really wanted the Anstey relatives, whom they damned as being either pushing and vulgar or faded and vulgar.
Emily knew that the day after his arrival, the earl had taken Mary out for a drive. When they had returned, Mary had looked quiet and resigned, and the earl more taciturn than ever. One thing was certain. They were no longer in love.
But there was no sign of either of them calling off the wedding, thought Emily miserably. Mary seemed determined to put a brave front on things and kept saying in her quiet way that she was very happy.
Emily twisted one golden curl nervously around one finger and looked out of the drawing room window to where Mary could be seen hurrying down the drive.
She is going to the church, thought Emily. I do hope she does not find our poor Mr. Cummings is in love with her. It would be just too much to bear. Mary is too sweet, too retiring, for such a cold autocrat as Devenham. If only there were something I could do!
Suddenly it all seemed very silly to Emily that two people should get married just because they felt they had to. Mary was a dutiful girl, but surely the earl could be appealed to. He possessed a great fortune. It should be easy for him to find a bride.
Emily decided to try to speak to him before her courage failed her.
She knew he had gone to The Green Man, the inn in Malden Grand, to meet his friend, Arthur Chester, who was to be bridesman. She would slip out of the house and ride into the village. If Mama caught her, she could say she had to buy ribbons for her gown.
Emily took a great deal of time over her appearance, putting her unusual concern over the niceties of her dress down to nerves. At last, attired in a fashionable riding habit of bright green cloth, ornamented down the front and on the cuffs with black braid à la Militaire, a small riding hat of black beaver trimmed with a gold cordon and tassels, and a long green ostrich feather and black half-boots, laced and fringed with green, Emily rode off on her little gray mare, Sylvia.
For a little of the way, she simply enjoyed the ride; she had been pent up in the house for an unconscionable period of time because of the long days of rain.
It was only as she was approaching the inn that Emily’s courage began to desert her. Papa would learn she had ridden out without a groom and would give her a lecture, and God forbid he should find out the nature of her visit. What if Lord Devenham had told him! Somehow, Emily could never think of the austere earl as Peregrine.
But the thought of Mary’s sad, sweet, resigned face drove her on.
The inn seemed to be full of people coming and going. The earl may once have been plain Captain Peregrine Tracy, but that did not preclude his having a great many very grand relatives. They were distinguishable from the other guests at the inn by seeming to be very tall, very hard-faced, and very haughty.
As Emily went in search of the landlord, one lady who appeared to be all nose and glaring eyes said in a loud voice to her companion, “Well, if dear Peregrine is set on tying himself down to a family of counterjumpers, there is nothing we can do.”
The landlord informed Miss Emily Anstey that the Earl of Devenham was abovestairs in Mr. Chester’s private parlor. He would ask my lord to descend to the coffee room.
Heart beating hard, Emily selected a quiet and dark corner and sat waiting, pressing her knees together to try to stop their trembling.
When the earl entered the room, stooping to pass through the low doorway, Emily’s courage nearly deserted her. His face wore a closed and shuttered look as he approached her. He looked not in the least pleased to see her.
“I had hoped it was my fiancée,” he said abruptly. “Is anything the matter?”
“No, Devenham,” said Emily, deciding Devenham was a compromise between Peregrine and my lord.
“Then it was you who were overcome by an irresistable desire to see me?”
“No, Devenham.”
“Well, Miss Emily, and what is you pleasure?”
The drawled words held a mocking note.
Emily raised her eyes to his and took a deep breath. “I have come,” she said, “to talk to you about your forthcoming marriage.”
“Odso! And …?”
“And after careful observation, I have decided that Mary and you are not in love with each other.”
“Mary has told you this?”
“Oh, no. Mary would not dream … Mary is so dutiful….”
“Miss Emily,” said the earl coldly, “I suggest you return home before I put you over my knee and smack you. Your sister is a woman of mature years and knows her mind. When a lady has waited faithfully for me for ten whole years, then it is my duty to marry her. Duty is a higher virtue than love. I suggest you keep you maudlin thoughts for those romances you read.”
Emily flushed. She felt very young and silly.
“I am sorry,” she whispered. “I love Mary and do not wish her to be unhappy.” Emily hung her head.
He put out a long finger and tilted her chin up, noticing the glint of tears in her brown eyes.
“You are a mere child,” he said in a gentle voice, “and yet a child with a tremendous power to make me angry. Get home with you, Miss Emily.”
She stared into his eyes, seeing something there she did not understand, wondering what it was. His gaze seemed twined and joined with hers like the poet’s thread. Color came into her face and her bosom rose and fell as she felt her breathing become restricted.
He released her chin, stood up, and, without another word, turned and stalked out of the coffee room.
Emily sat for a long time in silence. Never before had she felt so young and immature. In her humiliation, she began to think she had read signs of unhappiness into Mary’s demeanor that did not really exist.
With a little sigh that was half a sob, she got to her feet. She felt as if she had left a very dashing and mondaine Miss Emily Anstey behind. It was a chastened schoolgirl who mounted her horse and rode away.
Mary Anstey sat in the quiet of the church and prayed desperately for faith, strength, and hope to go through with her marriage. After a time, she became aware of someone kneeling beside her. She tried to concentrate on her prayers, but she was plagued with the ridiculous idea that the person beside her could read her thoughts.
She rose to her feet.
“Miss Anstey.”
Her silent companion in prayer had been Mr. Cummings.
“Mr. Cummings. It is a fine day, is it not? Our guests are seeing the countryside at its best.”
“Yes,” said Mr Cummings brightly, thinking of the bare, muddy fields outside and the skeletal branches of the winter trees.
“There is so much confusion and turmoil at home with all the preparations for the wedding,” Mary rushed on, “that I felt I had to come here for some peace.”
“And help?”
“Yes, naturally. One is always in need of spiritual guidance, no matter how … h-how h-happy one is.” And with that, Mary sat down again and burst into tears.
“Please, don’t,” begged Mr. Cummings, running his hands through his stiff hair so that it stood up in spikes. “I cannot bear to see you in such distress. I know. You are worried about the wedding. Young brides are often so.”
Mary dried her eyes very carefully and said in a flat little voice, “I don’t love him. He frightens me.”
“Ah!” Mr. Cummings let out a long breath and sat down beside her.
“He is not the man I knew,” Mary went on. “He has changed. He is hard and cold. He frightens me.”
“My dear Miss Anstey! The wedding must be called off. You must not go through with it.”
“Yes, I must. I have a duty to my parents. This marriage means so much to them. So very much. I know they seem worldly and silly, but they are very kind.”
“They were not very kind when they did not allow you to marry Devenham in the first place.”
“They thought they were doing the best thing,” Mary said wretchedly. One large tear rolled down her cheek and clung to a glossy brown curl, where it hung and shimmered in the candlelight of the church.
“I was very young. They thought I did not know my mind. And, oh, they were right! I have lived on dreams. He was so young and eager and unsure of himself when he was Captain Tracey, so gentle and kind. Now he is hard and demanding and overbearing.”
“You are become quite white,” said Mr. Cummings. “Let us walk in the churchyard a little. The fresh air will make you feel better.”
“I do not think anything will make me feel better,” sighed Mary, but she allowed him to lead her out of the church and into the hard wind and glitter of the day outside.
They walked around the back of the church to where the tall, silent tombstones stood silhouetted against the pale blue sky.
“I do not know what to say to comfort you, Miss Anstey,” said Mr. Cummings. He leaned one square, dependable hand against a dropsical-looking marble cherub with a face of ageless evil. “Any man would wish to marry you.” He struck the cherub with his fist. “Any man. If I had the right…. but I must not say more. I should have spoken before this, but it all seemed hopeless. I knew you were waiting for him—waiting and longing—as I, too, have waited and longed.”
Mary turned and looked at him, pity and amazement in her tear-washed eyes.
“I did not know, Mr. Cummings, that there was some young lady who….”
Her voice died away before the blaze of love in his eyes.
For a long moment they stood looking at each other, Mr. Cummings with hopeless love and Mary with a dawning awareness of that love.
Wonderingly she raised a hand to his cheek and he grasped it, and, turning it over, pressed a kiss into the palm.
“There,” he said in a ragged voice. “My secret is out. A fine man of God I am, Miss Anstey. Instead of lightening your burden, I am adding to it.”
“Oh, no,” said Mary sadly. “I did not know. But I know now, and it is a knowledge I will treasure always.”
She turned and walked away around the side of the church.
There was nothing Peter Cummings could do but watch her disappear and think of the nightmare before him. In a few days’ time he would be marrying the love of his life to another man.
The wedding rehearsal took place the following day. The bride-to-be was wan and shaken. The groom-to-be was curt to the point of rudeness, and snarled his responses. Emily Anstey was worried to death.
To her, it seemed glaringly plain that somehow or other Mr. Cummings had declared his love, and gentle Mary in her turn had fallen head over heels in love with the vicar.
“Of course, only I can know that,” thought Emily. “Mary is so ill-looking, everyone else must surely think she has bride-nerves. Oh, dear, I must do something to stop this wedding. I don’t care if Devenham is humiliated again. He deserves to be humiliated, the great, arrogant brute! See how he glares at poor Mary.”
It was a relief when the rehearsal was over and the Earl of Devenham curtly refused an invitation to supper, saying he had matters to discuss with Arthur Chester.
“What’s amiss?” Mr. Arthur Chester asked curiously, once he and the earl were seated in the inn over a bowl of steaming punch. “You are in a nasty mood.”
“She don’t want me,” said the earl abruptly.
“Then don’t have her!”
“Oh, she’ll get used to me in time. One woman is much like t’other. But I refuse to be turned down again by the Ansteys—and all because their hen-witted daughter has fallen in love with the vicar.”
“My dear boy!”
“I am not blind, you know.”
“Then call it off!”
“No,” said the earl stubbornly. “I loved that girl with all my heart and I shall come to love her again. And she, me! When the Ansteys with their monumental vulgarity told me ten years ago that I was not good enough for their daughter, I longed to make them eat their words. I longed to return in triumph and have them crawl at my feet.”
“How gothic! Well, you have returned and nobody could crawl more. Leave her waiting at the altar. That way you will humiliate them the more, she can marry her vicar, and everything will be right and tight.”
The earl looked at his friend’s thin, dark, mobile face with great irritation.
“You make it all sound so easy. Just up and run. I have my pride. I have sworn to marry the girl, and marry her I will.”
Mr. Chester twisted his neck uncomfortably. He was wearing the latest thing in high stiff collars-called patricides—and wished his laundress had not been quite so generous with the starch.
He was in fact Colonel Chester, late of the 10th Dragoons, but since he had retired from the army, he had dropped his military title and had sworn he did not even want to see a uniform again.
He was small in stature, with olive skin and a great beak of a nose. He was of a romantic turn of mind and had eagerly traveled to Malden Grand to see his friend marry the girl he had waited for for so long. He was disappointed to find this particular romance on the verge of such an unhappy ending.
“Well, don’t you see,” he ventured cautiously,”she’s a pretty little thing and very shy. You’re so used to ordering men around and fighting battles, well, no one could say you’ve got a gentle touch with the fair sex. Pity you wasn’t marrying the younger gel. Lots of fire there.”
“Miss Emily Anstey is a minx,” said the earl coldly. “I like my ladies to behave like ladies. Do you know she had the temerity to waylay me at this inn and tell me that neither I nor her sister was in love.”
“Can’t say I blame her for that. She had the right of it.”
The earl poured himself a glass of punch. He suddenly remembered his arrival at The Elms. For a few brief, glorious moments, his return had been all he had ever dreamed it would be. That was what he had dreamed of all these long years. Not revenge. Warm lips, pliant body, surging senses.
When he had taken Mary for a drive, he had reined in his horses and taken her in his arms to kiss her. She had trembled at his touch, and her lips had been very cold, and her whole body had seemed to shrink from him. Damn that minx, Emily. Had it not been for the warmth of her response, Mary’s withdrawal would have seemed the natural response of a virginal lady.
“She’s a doxy!” he said savagely.
“Not Miss Anstey!”
“Never mind. It was someone else. The wedding is tomorrow. The guests are all here, and I’ll just have to go through with it.”
“You can’t go through with it!” Emily Anstey said passionately, on the eve of the wedding.
Her sister raised a tear-stained face from the pillow. “I must.”
“He doesn’t love you,” said Emily firmly. “Mr. Cummings does.”
“Oh, don’t. Oh, that I had never known. Go away, Emily.”
“Listen!” said Emily urgently, edging closer to her sister on the bed. “Do you remember two years ago when we played that trick? I put on a brown wig, and you a blond one. We went to the assembly as each oth
er. We fooled everyone, even Mama and Papa! I will go tomorrow as you, and you will go as me. He will marry the wrong sister, and since I will make my vows as Mary Anstey, the marriage will not be legal, and he will be so shocked he will go away and never see us again. I read such a thing in Lady Jane’s Dilemma. She was to marry….”
Mary sat up in bed and stared wide-eyed at her sister. “I have never heard of such a criminal idea,” she gasped. “Peregrine would shoot me. Now, leave me alone this instant and don’t let me hear you talk such fustian again. No! Not another word.”
Emily went to her own room and sat in a chair by the window, watching the patterns the rushlight made on the ceiling.
Somehow the marriage must be stopped. Now just suppose she, Emily, managed to drug Mary. While Mary slept, she could put the blond wig on her head and go downstairs in the brown wig, pretend to be Mary, and say that Emily was so ill she could not attend the wedding. That dim, myopic cousin, Bertha, would be delighted to be elected bridesmaid.
The earl would be furious with her, would take out his wrath on her, but he would not blame Mary. So Mary could then marry Mr. Cummings, because after the disgrace, papa would let Mary marry anybody. Thank goodness no one had heard of her visit to the earl at The Green Man.
Emily began to plot and plan. It was no use drugging Mary now. She might have slept off the effects by the morning. Better to take her her morning chocolate. Emily groaned. She found it very hard to wake up early even at the best of times.
“Then you will just have to sit up all night, miss,” Emily told herself severely. “By morning, you will look every bit as wan and pale as Mary.”
A picture of the earl’s furious, arrogant face rose before Emily’s eyes, and she shuddered. But Mary must be saved at all costs. Mary had suffered enough and should suffer no more.
Setting her lips in a stubborn line, Emily lit the candles, picked up a romance, and prepared to wait out the night.
It was a blessing that the Anstey sisters’ lady’s maid was new to the job. Their former lady’s maid had recently retired with a good pension. The current one, Felice, a black-eyed French girl whose sole interest in life seemed to be the second footman, dressed her charges in an efficient but impersonal way, and, Emily was sure, had never studied them closely enough to tell them apart.
