“Your mother was Irish,” he guessed brightly.
“Somersetshire.”
“Grandmama?”
“And one grandfather—Somerset. Papa’s parents were from Bodmin. That’s in Cornwall.”
“You’re a pretty thing, even if you are no belle of County Meath.”
The Irish place name reminded me of Megan, his English wife, and I barely refrained from shuddering as he put his hand on my arm. For all his lighthearted gaiety, I felt the fleshy warmth of his fingers upon my cold arm underneath my shawl. I thought of those fingers tightening upon a weapon to strike Megan Sedley Kelleher. I knew it was unlikely that so irresponsible a man would ever rouse himself to a pitch of desperation or fury during which he would destroy a human being, but all the same, I disliked soft hands.
I once knew a boy with just such soft hands whom I caught drowning small animals. Thanks to the stick of broomstraws I carried at the time, neither the boy nor his hands was able to do anything lethal for weeks to come. When he drowned in a bog the next year in an attempt to do the same to his small brother, I did not mourn. I removed Patrick Kelleher’s hand from my person in a way that left no doubt of my sentiments.
“Come, acushla, you’ll be shaming the very tongue of my Irish mother, throwing me off like that, and me but helping you to mount the Hill of Maidenmoor.” Nonetheless, he understood my rebuff and behaved like a gentleman from there on as he persisted beside me. I compared his probable exaggerated attempts to match my stride up the steep cobblestones, with the typically aristocratic arrogance of Sir Nicholas Everett yesterday and found, to my surprise, that I had just the merest hint of a sneaking admiration for that detestable baronet. Sir Nicholas, as I recalled, strode along in his own way, lifting me over obstacles when necessary but never making a nuisance of himself by buzzing about me with pantomimed suggestions of my overpowering vigor. I could not but feel that I was behaving in a most unfeminine way. I detested being made to feel so, and I said as much when we approached the Owl of York tavern.
“Master Kelleher, think you would do well to fortify yourself with your friends in that public house. I am persuaded your County Meath ancestors would expect it of you.”
He made me a pitiful little grimace, begging my sympathy. “Not I, ma’am. And not alone, certainly. They’d have the scalp of me like the Red Indians. Shall I tell you why?”
“Please do not,” I said hastily. “I am aware of—of what is said.”
“And yet you allow me to share this little stroll in your company. You must be the only person in this benighted town beside my niece, Elspeth, who thinks me innocent.”
“Really, you are behaving absurdly. I am not responsible for those who share the street with me.” The lovely crispness of the morning, which I had admired a short while before, had crept in between the wide mesh of my shawl, and I was growing colder by the minute. I wanted to hurry on back to a warm breakfast at Sedley House, but I was less than halfway up the hill, and my pace had been so rapid that it would not be possible to continue with equal haste. At that propitious moment we came opposite the Owl of York, which was exuding its steamy warmth and camaraderie to all who passed.
“Do come in, pretty Kate. Be my protectress. Give me consequence by your company.”
What as Irish wheedler he was! But it was not flattering to be called the protectress of a suspected murderer who was surely of twice my proportions.
“I cannot possibly. I am awaited at Sedley House.” Even as I spoke, I thought of the cold, silent house as it had been when I left it a little while ago. Mrs. Sedley always slept late, because of her discomfort and broken slumber. As for her granddaughter, I had rather enter a lion’s den with Patrick Kelleher than sit at table with that rude young woman.
Patrick read my thoughts rather neatly. “You’ll not be telling me you prefer the cool, cutting tongue of my niece, Elspeth?”
“She is your friend, sir. You had best be grateful.”
“Grateful to further orders, my lass. Do come. See? The hostess is beckoning to you.”
I peered in beyond the passage, to where a pair of china lamps burned at either end of the taproom, and saw how the light glinted off the red-gold hair of the tavern mistress. She was a short woman of thirty or so and must once have been beautiful. She was still exceedingly pretty. It did not seem to me that she was beckoning, but she was certainly staring at me, and suddenly the street where I stood seemed to catch the full blast of the mist-laden wind off the moors.
Well, I thought, what harm can come of it? I will tell Father and Mama when I go home, and they will understand. Beside all else, I can demonstrate in this manner how competent I am to handle such awkward occasions.
I allowed myself to be ushered into the passage, which was so steamy after the brisk weather of the street that I found my nose and upper lip suddenly perspiring.
I soon saw and heard it clearly demonstrated—not that I was competent to care for myself, but, on the contrary, that Patrick Kelleher had lied to me when he had said that all the village and everyone in the public house believed him guilty of murder. Quite different was the truth. He seemed obviously a well-known and popular figure in here, at least with those who greeted him. Various black-clad men and women clapped him on the back, made as if to cuff him, and asked if he was going to drink them all under the rail.
“Jassy, set up a rumfustian for the lad and his bonny lass,” commanded a big fellow, hammering on the rail for the attention of the red-haired woman. She glanced from Patrick to me, her tawny brows raised. I did not feel comfortable under that look or in my present situation. In the general greetings, I could see that I was presumed to be some female whom the Irishman had acquired, heaven knew where!
This was bad enough, but I began to be increasingly sure that the red-haired tavern mistress was an intimate of Patrick Kelleher and, absurdly enough, as it seemed to me, was jealous of my arrival in his company. Yielding to his taunts and coaxing had been a bad mistake on my part. I must find a way out that would not place me in an even more invidious position.
“It really is growing late. I am expected elsewhere,” I lied, begging pardon of the big men who surrounded me and appeared to overpower me without intending to be more than friendly.
“Come, love. Here’s to your bonny dark eyes!” boasted one of the huge, grinning workmen as he took a swallow of some heavy brown spirits and smacked his lips. It was like seeing a huge pink cavern open up before me and then become sealed again, and I felt myself more and more uneasy. I knew their good intentions, but when they pressed upon me their own partially full goblets and mugs, commanding me to “drink and take the chill off,” I knew I must get out of here rapidly. However much I might observe in such a place, I must not drink any of the piratical potions. There would be no explaining that to Father!
“If you please, I must go. Please let me by.”
Teasingly, the men closed ranks as Patrick laughed at my plight, not understanding my lack of experience in such places.
“Jassy, where’s a warming pan for our pretty captive?” he called to the red-haired woman, who turned her back to us, then, a minute later, faced us, leaning over the taprail with a smoking mug. I could see that I should get nowhere by opposition, so I took the mug and made a furtive attempt to edge around the chief barriers to my departure. But there was more joking, in which I saw that the red-haired tavern mistress did not join.
I was growing more uneasy by the minute and tried to keep tight rein upon my nerves, for I knew that panic, a shameful emotion to me, would only precipitate gossip and might perhaps reflect upon my hostess, Mrs. Sedley, as well.
The crowd was milling about in such a way, and the room was so thick with smoke and steam and the smell of heated spices, that I had not yet looked behind me to see if there was an easier way to leave through the back of the room. I was envisioning disaster but not physically, for I suspected that at their worst these men and the scattering of females were only teasing, raising their own
spirits before the long, hard working day ahead. But the gossip about this whole episode would make my presence impossible in Maidenmoor, not to mention what it would do to the opinion of me held by Mrs. Sedley, who would certainly pour out the whole story to Mama in a letter. Sir Nicholas Everett had said she was the busiest gossip in the riding.
Sir Nicholas! I shuddered to think how I should sink even lower in his haughty dark eyes. The thought of his cutting disapproval was so intense as to be painful, for I did not like to sink that low in anyone’s opinion, even that of the surly, authoritative aristocrat.
I turned, holding the untouched mug crushed against my bosom, and tried to see over the broad, black-clad shoulders of my noisy gallants. It was as if my fear of disgrace in the eyes of Mrs. Sedley or Sir Nicholas had magically conjured up the worst of my fears; for the man himself was gazing down at me, having quietly made way through the crowd, apparently after witnessing my humiliation, which I was sure he had enjoyed.
“If you have finished your rumfustian, we are awaited elsewhere, I believe. Come.”
With a meekness that astonished myself and would have astonished Papa. I gave the mug into his waiting fingers and he set it back in the red-haired woman’s hand, lifting it over the heads of those men and women in the way. The red-haired woman said quite audibly, “Ah! So that’s the way of it!”
I did not like this insinuation, and I held back almost instinctively at Sir Nicholas’s typical attitude of command, especially since it appeared that Patrick Kelleher had seen my difficulty at last and was cuffing villagers out of the way in the friendliest manner to reach me.
“So you’ll be favoring His Worship, me dear. That’s the doing of the old dragon, as you’ll find. And more. What’s said of me may be true of our squire.”
I assumed this was his tasteless form of a joke, but Sir Nicholas ignored it and reached for my arm.
“Don’t be tiresome. Come along, Kathleen.”
I had not given him leave to use my first name and resented it more from him than I would have minded Patrick’s use of it, for the Irishman was a free-spoken man whom one need not take seriously.
Patrick grinned, but I saw that his tawny eyes were very still, unreadable, as he and Sir Nicholas gazed at each other over my head, and I remembered with a chill that both men had loved Patrick’s dead wife, Megan Sedley Kelleher. Was it possible that Patrick’s “tasteless joke” had been a hint to me of the baronet’s guilt in the awful crime that others laid to Patrick himself? I had a strange, crushed sensation entirely foreign to me, as though I did not know which way to turn for help.
Sir Nicholas left me no such problem. When he took my reluctant, resisting arm, I noticed how quickly everyone dropped away from me, once my connection with him was discovered. I noted too that there was in their manner more than the respect normally accorded to the local squire—there was a scarcely hidden fear, a hesitancy to touch him. Or perhaps that was only my fancy, for I had just learned, through Patrick’s barbed joke, that when I said “good day” to the Irishman and went out with Sir Nicholas, I might still be walking with a murderer. It was easy enough to dismiss the Irishman’s accusation as an old jealousy, but these men and women in the Owl of York shared a common fear of the aristocrat, and their sharing of it spread it to me. From all I had heard and observed of the men of Yorkshire, it would take something rather astounding and fearful to produce in them any terror, much less a sense of the superiority of the squire over the workman!
Once we reached the cobblestones and what I conceived to be the cold safety of the moorland wind, I said, with an attempt at recovering my self-assurance, “I was just leaving when you spoke, but in any case, thank you. Good day.”
It was hard to keep any dignity with this man. Before I could leave him—and this was something I did at his chosen time, not mine—he managed to enrage me all over again.
“You are undoubtedly the most foolish child I have encountered in a lifetime of foolish females!”
“Indeed!” I said, drawing myself to my full height and looking up at him with what he afterward told me was a good deal of murderous fury. The difficulty was, I could not think of anything bad enough to say to him after that first “indeed” except to add another, ending a trifle lamely, “Well, indeed, sir!”
To my complete chagrin, he laughed aloud at this, uncovering to me an entirely new facet of his personality and one I was to find much more dangerous. This grim aristocrat with the bitter dark eyes could find amusement in the world. It was not surprising, however, that his amusement came at the cost of another person’s discomfiture. And I had to recall that vigorously; otherwise, I would have observed, to my own defeat, that when he did smile, he was even more handsome than the impossible man I had first met in the Hag’s Head. It is always confusing to be so undone by one’s dearest enemy!
“Come along up to Mrs. Sedley’s, like a good girl, and do not put me to the trouble of rescuing you another time—not, at least, today.”
But as we walked, I was already thinking hard, trying to imagine some way of disconcerting him. One idea, perhaps a trifle drastic, occurred to me. I could give serious consideration to the purchase of the Hag’s Head. That would avenge me and in fine style!
I became so obsessed with this delightful method of infuriating him that by the time we reached Sedley House and I saw Meg Markham waving to me to hurry, could be civil and pleasant to the aristocrat, not letting him suspect what was in my mind.
“You have been most kind, Sir Nicholas. I hope to repay you one day.”
“I’m sure that you do!” he said with the grim smile I remembered from yesterday and had wondered at then.
Now I thought I understood a little of its grimness. He had loved someone who had been murdered. Or he had murdered someone whom he loved...
CHAPTER SIX
Meg said confidentially, “Old Missus is pretty upset, ma’am. She’s a mind for making you known to her granddaughter. And then, seeing you with Sir Nicholas again, she’s that feared you’ll be stealing the heart of him from Miss Elspeth. It did no good, me pointing up the feeling ’twixt you and Sir Nicholas.”
I said, “Really? What did she say to that?”
“She said any woman with eyes in her head would know good silver from dross.”
“And which is the baronet?”
Meg chuckled. “Miss Kate, you are the one! You’d not be knowing the thoughts hereabouts. If it wa’nt for the whispers, many’s the lass would throw her cap at Sir Nicholas. Him being that handsome! And rich, which is even better.”
Fearing he would hear us, I paused and looked over my shoulder, but he was far up the street, already on the verge of great Heatherton Moor. In another few minutes even his formidable figure would be swallowed in that vast, dun-colored sea. “What are the whispers, Meg?”
Her elbow jogged me painfully. “Could it be His Worship that popped Miss Megan on the head and then set fire at Hag’s Head?”
This confirmation of Patrick Kelleher’s hint was rather horrible and lascivious. I wondered why people, especially women, got such wet-lipped pleasure out of reciting such stories.
I said stiffly, “A silly tale, surely, if he loved Mrs. Kelleher. I should think he would more sensibly kill her husband, in order to win her.”
Meg shook her head at my naive idea.
“It wouldn’t be Sir Nicholas, to be doing such things the way of sensible folk. Him with his dark temper and his dark doings at the Hag’s Head.”
I was fairly perishing to know what “dark doings” the magistrate and justice of the peace was about at the Hag’s Head, but I was ashamed to show my interest, and I departed on this tantalizing note and hurried up the stairs to Mrs. Sedley’s bed-sitting-room.
My hostess was sitting up in her large white-testered and frilled bed, looking at me a trifle grimly, although she motioned me to a place at the little drum table beside the casement windows. The other place was taken by Elspeth Sedley, immaculate in her pink-sprigged rou
nd gown, her exquisite complexion enhanced by the ribbon of pink holding her high-piled curls. If I felt my reception by Mrs. Sedley was cool, the greeting from her granddaughter was indeed frigid.
“Grandmama prefers to dine at correct hours, Miss Truro.”
“Miss Bodmun,” I corrected with my largest and, I am sorry to confess, my falsest smile. “You have the wrong town.”
“When a place is out of England, I take little interest in it,” Elspeth retorted, carefully buttering a scone with a precision that I might have envied in anyone else.
Since Cornwall was at that time of my life a part of Britain, though yet separated from England, I could find nothing sufficiently biting to say in return and took seat opposite Elspeth, still smiling for all I was worth. Not from me would she learn how her words and manner stung me or that I had not been informed of the change in breakfast habits this morning.
It was Mrs. Sedley who broke the difficult silence, with a soft, wistful glance at her granddaughter, by murmuring, “Now you have seen her, is she not worthy to be Lady Everett? She has all the femininity and all the careful rearing to support such a position at Everett Hall.”
“Oh, Grandmama! You promised you would not mention him this morning,” Elspeth complained, but I saw her glance up the street after Sir Nicholas, and I suspected I had her to thank for the talebearing about my second walk to Sedley House with him. I could not guess whether she disliked and suspected him, as she seemed to, or whether this was a mask for a quite different emotion.
“But dear,” Mrs. Sedley persisted, stiffly and absently rearranging the dishes of breakfast eggs, tea, and ginger moogin on her tray, “I have it on the very best authority that a certain distinguished personage will be making an offer for you within a fortnight.”
While Meg Markham served me, I listened and wondered how much of this was true and how much the mere product of Mrs. Sedley’s fond dreams.
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