by M C Beaton
Nor, for that matter, was Lord Charles.
The scarlet merino gown, with its simple classic lines and modest neckline was a miracle of dressmaking. Instead of clashing with the color of her hair, it appeared to enhance it. The softer hairstyle of loose curls prettily framed her face, making her look like a Botticelli angel.
There was also a subtle air of hauteur about her which disconcerted Miss Sinclair. It did not disconcert Lord Charles, who was shrewder than Miss Sinclair and knew that the new grande dame manner was adopted.
Things went smoothly at dinner. Lord Charles and Miss Sinclair discoursed on the political topics of the day, while Patricia maintained her stately manner but privately thought she would die of boredom.
Trouble did not start until the following morning when Miss Sinclair roused Patricia from a deep sleep and told her to present herself in the schoolroom. Patricia yawned and went back to sleep.
Miss Sinclair shook Patricia awake again, and Patricia threw a pillow at the governess’s head.
Miss Sinclair returned with two chambermaids. Patricia haughtily told them to leave her bedchamber immediately. But Lord Charles had informed the staff in no uncertain terms that Miss Sinclair was to have absolute control of Patricia and that the governess’s word was law. At a nod from Miss Sinclair, the chambermaids tipped the amazed and shocked Patricia out of bed, and then showed every sign of dressing her by force.
Pushing them out of the room in a fury and slamming the door, Patricia scrambled into her clothes after a token wash and presented herself in the schoolroom.
Miss Sinclair looked thoughtfully at the clay roulers in Patricia’s hair and told her to go and remove them. Miss Patterson must present herself in the schoolroom looking neat and fully dressed, not in her undress.
Patricia ranted and screamed that she was mistress in her own house and would do as she pleased. Miss Sinclair simply went out of the schoolroom and locked Patricia in, saying she might stay there until she had come to her senses.
Patricia just could not believe all this was happening. Miss Simpkin came to the door and stood outside, crying helplessly, but hiccupping there was nothing she could do. The hours passed into afternoon. Patricia was hungry and bored.
At last, she forced open the window, which had jammed with the damp, and climbed down the ivy.
Snow was beginning to fall, delicate, glittering, feathery flakes. Patricia shivered and walked along the terrace to let herself in through the french windows of the drawing room.
But there they were, Miss Sinclair and Lord Charles, sitting on either side of a blazing fire, making as pretty and cozy a picture as anyone—other than Miss Patricia Patterson—could wish to see. Lord Charles was reading a newspaper and Miss Sinclair was knitting, her long white fingers holding the steel pins. Her heavy brown hair was wound into a neat coil at the nape of the neck. Her gown was dove gray. She looked the epitome of domestic femininity.
Lord Charles lowered his paper and said something and Miss Sinclair smiled. Lord Charles put down his newspaper, stood up, and threw another log on the fire. Firkin entered with the tea tray and set the silver pot and the pretty blue and gold cups down in front of Miss Sinclair. She smiled on him graciously.
The rising wind tugged at Patricia’s gown, but so incandescent with rage was she that she did not feel the cold. From the terrace she picked up a plant in its heavy stone pot and hurled it through the window.
There was a tremendous shattering of glass. Splinters flew all over the room.
Lord Charles leaped through the giant gaping hole in the french window, seized Patricia, and shook her till her teeth rattled.
He dragged her screaming, yelling, and kicking into the drawing room and then into the hall. He sat down in a carved oak chair, slung her over his knee, took off his thin leather show, and applied it forcefully to Patricia’s bottom.
All the fight went out of Patricia and she began to cry dismally. Lord Charles set her on her feet.
“Now, will you behave?” he roared.
The drawing room door was open. The curtains billowed out about the jagged hole in the window. Firkin and Miss Sinclair stood as if turned to stone. The enormity of what she had done made Patricia begin to tremble.
For almost the first time in her life, she apologized. “I am sorry,” she whispered. “But I am not used to such harsh treatment.”
She stood, shaken, the tears running down her face.
All at once, Lord Charles’s anger left him. He felt sorry for her. It was not her fault she had been so spoiled.
“You may lead a very comfortable and easy life if you will only do as you are told. Miss Sinclair will take you to the schoolroom and there you will begin your lessons. Tea will be sent up to you.”
Lord Charles heard the sound of carriage wheels. “Callers,” he said. “Firkin, put them in the library. Miss Sinclair, take Patricia up to the schoolroom.”
In ten minutes’ time, the Misses Grant and their mother were warmly ensconced by the library fire, eyes shining with excitement as they surveyed this rich and handsome addition to the neighborhood.
“I am sorry Miss Patricia cannot be with us,” said Lord Charles.
The sisters looked at him hopefully, but they saw he had no intention of explaining where Patricia was or what she was doing.
“We are come,” said Agnes, “to see if Patricia still intends to go to the ball at Barminster.”
“When is this ball to be held?”
“In two days’ time.”
“I think,” said Lord Charles, “that my ward is a trifle young to attend balls. She has not yet made her come-out.”
“It is different in the country,” said Mrs. Grant placidly. “It is only the local assembly at Barminster. Everyone goes, even the very young children.”
“Then perhaps I shall escort her myself,” smiled Lord Charles.
Patricia was immediately forgotten in all the excitement this statement produced. Both Emily and Agnes were anxious to cut a dash by securing at least one dance with this most eligible lord. Conversation rattled on happily over the teacups until Mrs. Grant indicated to her reluctant daughters that it was time to leave.
Lord Charles sat for a long time in the library after they had left. The Grant girls were pretty and frivolous and very like Patricia on the surface. He began to feel ashamed of himself. He had never struck a female in the whole of his life, and the more he thought about it, the more he become convinced he had behaved like a monster. Patricia had behaved disgracefully. But there were other ways of disciplining her.
He finally took himself up to the schoolroom where Patricia sat bending a tear-stained face over her lessons.
“I hear there is to be a ball in Barminster,” he said. “I have decided you may attend, Patricia. In fact, I shall escort you myself.”
She looked at him coldly and said, “And to think I was looking forward to it.” Then she bent her head over her books again.
Lord Charles slammed his way out of the schoolroom, all new, kind thoughts about Patricia utterly gone.
Snow fell that day and the next. Lord Charles found himself hoping that roads would be blocked so that he would not have to take that pert minx to the ball.
But on the Friday, the day of the ball, a thaw set in and a watery sun struggled through the clouds. By afternoon, the skies were calm and blue. The roads were clear and there was to be a full moon that night.
When she was not in the schoolroom, Patricia had spent the rest of the time shut up in her bedroom. Lord Charles assumed she was preparing some grand toilette for the ball.
But Patricia was planning revenge.
She did not hate Miss Sinclair, considering her a colorless creature who was merely obeying Lord Charles’s every order. Anyone with more spirit would have felt some compassion for a beautiful pupil condemned to spend long hours in the classroom, thought Patricia, who could not bear to admit to herself that she was actually beginning to enjoy those terrible lessons.
&nbs
p; But Patricia did hate Lord Charles. Now that the shock of breaking the window was over, all her remorse had fled. Lord Charles had struck her, and for that he must be punished.
At first, Patricia toyed with the idea of killing him, but could not really think of a safe method of doing away with him. Growing weary at last with useless plots, she decided to escape into the works of one of her favorite authors, Miss Louisa Sydney Stanhope. The new volumes of her latest work, The Confessional of Valombre, had arrived just that day from the Minerva Press.
Patricia opened the page and plunged in. The first paragraph surely described such a man as Lord Charles Gaunt.
“It was at the close of the festival of St. Fabian, when the last sonorous tone of the organ had ceased, and the pale glimmer of the tape had expired, when nature had sealed the eyes of fanaticism, and even the vigil virgin had ceased to watch, that a stranger paused at the gate of the convent of Valombre…”
The dressing bell sounded and Patricia dropped the book and glanced at the clock in amazement. Time had passed quickly while she had searched her mind for ways of revenge. As she dressed, she now saw Lord Charles as the villain of a Gothic novel. He looked satanic. He had black hair and green eyes. He was pitiless. He had struck her. He was a monster.
This villain, this fantasy of a cruel monster, was very comforting and much more reassuring than any real-life guardian who had struck her in a temper because she had smashed the drawing room window.
She had altered a ballgown for the occasion, removing most of the bows and frills which she had realized made it overfussy. Her ensemble consisted of a simple underdress of straw silk with a white gauze overdress embroidered with gold. A gold tiara studded with large topazes was set among her curls and a topaz and gold necklace was clasped around her neck.
When she finally joined Lord Charles in the drawing room, it was to find him cross at her tardiness, and he looked more like the villain of her fantasies than ever. She shivered with Gothic fear and Lord Charles asked her testily if she were cold.
He was wearing a black evening coat and black silk breeches. His long white waistcoat was embroidered with silver, and diamonds sparkled on his fingers, in his stock, and on the buttons of his coat.
Lord Charles was tempted to tell Patricia to go upstairs again and put on jewelry more suited to a girl of her years, but she looked so scared and downcast that he had not the heart to criticize her.
Their arrival at the assembly caused a small sensation. As she removed her mantle in the cloakroom, Patricia was besieged with questions about Lord Charles. All the ladies declared him to be divinely handsome, which the cynical Patricia translated in her mind as “divinely rich.”
She was surprised that some of the girls of her age kept insisting that Lord Charles was the most good-looking man they had ever seen. He was so very old, thought Patricia, quite in his dotage, and steeped in dark sin, she reminded herself.
Patricia was soon surrounded by a court of admirers when she entered the ballroom. Among them was the handsome captain who had looked at her through the window of the pastry cook’s.
He was only about twenty, and had thick, curling brown hair and a roguish eye. She danced with him twice and then let him lead her into supper.
The captain’s name was Peter Oxford. He flattered her with compliments and said he hoped to ask her guardian for permission to call on her.
“He will never give permission to you or any other gentleman,” said Patricia sadly.
“I am of a good family!”
“That is not what I meant.” Patricia avoided Lord Charles’s reproving glare, glad he was on the other side of the room, and drank a huge gulp of wine.
“Then what is the matter? Does he want you for himself?”
Patricia remembered a delicious novel she had read the year before, when a wicked guardian had tried, in order to gain her fortune, to force his ward to marry him. She drank some more wine.
“Alas,” she said, lowering her voice to a dramatic whisper, “I am afraid he does. He tyrannizes me, and only this week he… he beat me!”
“An angel like yourself? I shall call him out!”
“He would never meet you,” said Patricia sadly. “He would report you to your commanding officer.”
“Coward!”
“He is insufferably arrogant. Only see how he stares at me, his eyes full of venom.”
The captain looked across the room and met the cold, green glare of Lord Charles Gaunt.
“Gad’s ’Oonds! He looks like the devil. My poor Miss Patterson.”
Patricia drank more wine. “I cannot escape,” she said. “There is no one to help me. He has engaged a sort of woman jailor. Most of the time I am kept locked in the schoolroom.”
“Monstrous! You are not a child.”
“I am nineteen,” said Patricia, quickly adding three years to her age. Her head swam pleasantly with the wine she had drunk. She was enjoying her story. It was quite like living in a book.
The captain had drunk a great deal himself. He was bewitched by Patricia, by her huge pansy eyes, by the creaminess of her skin, and by the odd color of her hair.
“I would snatch you away from him!” cried the captain.
“But if I marry without his consent, I do not get a penny of my fortune until I am twenty-one.”
“Two years to go,” thought the captain. “A fortune and all this beauty!”
Aloud, he said, “I have my pay and an allowance from my father. We could marry. The married people in my regiment always have comfortable quarters.”
Patricia sobered slightly. All at once she saw how to revenge herself on Lord Charles. If she ran away with this young man, Lord Charles would be shamed and humiliated. Furthermore, it would be wonderful to be married to a handsome young captain who would pet her and fuss over her. Patricia saw the captain as a sort of masculine combination of Miss Simpkin and Nanny Evans. It would be fun playing house. She would entertain his friends. She would be the toast of the regiment. The Prince Regent would get to hear of her beauty…
“We could run away,” she said lightly.
The captain prided himself on being a man of action. “Why don’t we run away now,” he said. “We could rack up at some inn. I’ll go back to my barracks for a day or two until the fuss dies down and we can be married by special license.”
“Now?” said Patricia, her eyes very wide.
“Why not?” he grinned. “Now or never, I should think, from the furious look on your guardian’s face.”
Patricia felt elated and breathless. Good-bye to lessons. Good-bye to humiliation and being treated as a slave.
“Yes,” she said. “I will marry you. But how do we leave the ballroom without his following us?”
“Spill some wine down your gown and dab at it and make a fuss. Then excuse yourself as if you are going to go and clean it. Get your cloak and meet me outside. I’ll leave the minute Lord Charles takes his eye off me, which he surely will once you have left.”
Patricia jerked her wine glass and spilled it on the gauze of her gown. She jumped up with a little shriek and started dabbing at herself with a napkin.
“Now look what she’s done,” said Lord Charles crossly to his supper companion, Miss Emily Grant.
“Soda water is the best thing to remove a wine stain,” said Emily. “Oh, she is leaving to go to the cloakroom. I shall go and help her.”
“You are very kind, Miss Grant,” said Lord Charles. “Give her a message from me, pray. She is to drink no more this evening.”
Eager to please, Emily hurried off.
Patricia was not pleased to see her. In fact, she looked furious.
“What do you want?” she asked nastily. “Has Lord Charles sent you to spy on me?”
“I only came to help you,” said Emily. “He wants you to stop drinking wine. He told me to tell you so,” she added with a toss of her head.
“Why do you not mind your own business,” said Patricia, desperate to have her gone. Sh
e realized she had never liked the Grant girls. They were relative newcomers to the county and the gentlemen were apt to be very silly and spoony about Emily and Agnes, calling them beautiful and nonsense like that. The fact that Patricia’s nose had been decidedly put out of joint by their arrival did not occur to her.
She flicked a curl in the mirror and said maliciously over her shoulder, “Go back to Lord Charles. You should suit very well. He is old and you, dear Emily, are dull.”
“Oooh! I hate you!” Emily stormed out of the cloakroom.
No sooner had she gone than Patricia snatched up her mantle and slipped out to the front of the inn where the captain was waiting.
“Let us go, Miss Patterson,” he said gaily. “Our life together has just begun!”
Three
Deborah Sinclair gave a little sigh. She studied her reflection thoughtfully in the glass. She was, she decided, quite a fine-looking woman. Her nose, which others of lesser perception and gentility might condemn as being a trifle too long, was, in fact, she decided, an outward manifestation of her inward good breeding. Her slightly prominent eyes were large and blue, not a vulgar bright blue, but an interestingly pale color.
Her waist was trim and her bosom generous. She raised her skirt an inch. Her ankles were slim and neat enough to please the highest stickler.
She had hoped Lord Charles might have asked her to attend the ball as chaperone. But he had seemed to think his own presence enough.
She had been surprised to find that Patricia was an apt pupil. The girl had an amazingly retentive memory.
She could not help hoping that Patricia would behave badly at the ball. It would be pleasant if Lord Charles sent for her on his return and asked her advice.
She decided to ring for tea and cakes and pass the long evening reading some improving work.
She pulled the bellrope.
Down in the kitchen, Firkin looked up from cleaning the silver and glared at the row of metal bells on the wall.
“Governess’s room,” said James, the first footman.
“Let her ring,” said Firkin sourly.
Mrs. Miles, the housekeeper, threw him an anxious look. “Better see what she wants,” said Mrs. Miles, “or she’ll go whining to his lordship.”
