Annabelle

by Beaton, M. C.

  “What do you know of love?” said the Captain, slumping down in an armchair and holding his aching head in his hands. “Don’t like to get personal, Varleigh, but all you know is what you pay for. I’m crazy out of my head with love for Annabelle. She’s everything a woman should be—feminine and kind and good—except,” he added wryly, “when she’s hitting me on the head.”

  Lord Varleigh looked at him in silence, two spots of color burning on his thin cheeks under his tan. The Captain’s remarks had struck home—“all you know is what you pay for.” He compared Lady Jane’s vulgar, sensuous, rapacious greed with Annabelle’s delicate virginity and was overcome with a wave of fear for her welfare.

  “We must not stay here bandying words,” said Lord Varleigh. “She may be wandering through Chiswick, and God knows what evils could happen to her this time of night.”

  “You’re right, egad!” cried the Captain, staggering to his feet. The room swung round, and he sank back in his chair again with a groan. “You’ll need to go, Varleigh,” he said. “But I put you on your honor as a gentleman. Swear you will present my case to Miss Quennell fairly. Tell her I did it because I love her. Swear!”

  “You have my word,” said Lord Varleigh quietly. “If I should not return, you will know that I have found her.”

  He swung himself into his carriage outside the Creedy mansion. Frost was rimming the grass, glittering like diamonds under the pale light of a thin, new moon. He was about to set off when his eye was caught by what seemed to be a scrap of material lying under the shrubbery.

  He got down and walked towards the bushes. There was a flash of white and the material disappeared. Must be a rabbit, he thought and was about to turn away when his sharp ear caught the faint sounds of quick, frightened breathing. He pushed back the bushes and bent down. The chalk-white, tearstained face of Annabelle Quennell stared up at him.

  “Come out,” he said gently. “It’s all over now. I will take you home.”

  He helped Annabelle to her feet. She was shivering with cold, and her thin muslin dress was plastered to her body in a way that would have delighted the eye of her rakish godmother.

  “Let us go in first and tell Captain MacDonald you are safe.”

  “No!” squeaked Annabelle. “I won’t. I won’t go back there!”

  “Very well,” said Lord Varleigh. “I shall go myself and tell Captain…”

  “No!” cried Annabelle again, clutching his arm. “Don’t go! Please don’t leave me. Take me away from here!”

  Lord Varleigh saw that she was nearly hysterical. Best to get her away.

  He helped her up into the carriage, wrapped her tenderly in a large bearskin rug, and apologised for the fact that she had to travel in a high-perched phaeton on such a cold evening.

  “Oh, cease the gallantries,” snapped the ungrateful Miss Quennell. “I don’t care if I have to go home in a wheelbarrow.”

  Lord Varleigh looked at her in some amusement. She had lost her bonnet in the bushes, and her masses of redgold hair were cascading down on her shoulders. As she sat huddled in the bearskin, she looked to Lord Varleigh like a cavewoman whose husband has just failed to kill a saber-toothed tiger for the cooking pot. He told her so and received a small snort of disgust in reply.

  After several attempts to engage his companion in conversation, Lord Varleigh gave up the effort and sprang his horses instead, leaving Chiswick behind in a cloud of dust.

  When he turned in at the villa in Kensington Gore, it was to find the house in darkness. No worried Lady Emmeline was waiting up. Horley, roused from her slumbers, said acidly that her ladyship had to watch her health and not sit up waiting for inconsiderate folk to come home with the milk. She got severely reprimanded by Lord Varleigh for her insolence.

  A sleepy footman lighted the fire in the library and produced a tray of tea things. Lord Varleigh had stated he had something of importance to say to Miss Annabelle Quennell on the matter of love, and Miss Quennell found herself suddenly wide awake and rather breathless.

  Annabelle, still wrapped in the bearskin rug, warmed her damp slippers by the fire and turned a glowing face up to Lord Varleigh. He leaned his arm along the mantelshelf and looked down at her thoughtfully.

  “My dear Miss Quennell,” he said, suddenly feeling very old and pompous, “it is sometimes hard to recognise real love. So much nonsense is talked about love and so much nonsense is written about it that it is sometimes hard to recognise the real thing.”

  But I recognise it, thought Annabelle with a start of surprise. She watched his handsome, high-nosed face as he looked down into the blazing fire. I’m in love with him, she thought. I’ve been in love with him since that dreadful night at the opera.

  “Now, the Captain is really very much in love with you,” said Lord Varleigh. “I would have punished him for his mad behavior today otherwise.”

  He stopped and looked down in surprise at Annabelle. One minute her face had been glowing and tender and the next it was almost contorted with fury.

  “Captain MacDonald … loves me. Don’t be so naïve, my lord. The Captain wishes to force me into marriage because my godmother has promised him money an’ he marries me. And you drivel on about love. You know nothing of the matter yourself, sirrah!”

  It was the second time that evening that Lord Varleigh had been accused of knowing nothing of love, and he was beginning to become irritated.

  “I am convinced the Captain’s motives were not mercenary,” he said stiffly.

  “If you are in love with someone,” said Annabelle with a maddening air of weary patience, “then you neither frighten them or hurt them. I am tired of sitting here talking nonsense, my lord, and I wish to go to bed.”

  He gave her a cold bow and walked towards the door.

  Moved by a sudden impulse, Annabelle called after him. “Forgive me, my lord. I did not mean to sound so harsh. I am shaken and upset. I have endured the most horrible evening of my life. I am in no mood to hear of love from anyone.” Except you, muttered a treacherous voice in her brain.

  He smiled at her and came back and took her small hand in his long fingers and turning it over pressed a light kiss on the palm.

  “I understand and accept your apology, Annabelle Quennell,” he said lightly and bowed his way out.

  Annabelle sat for a long time with the hand he had kissed clenched, curled up into a fist. She felt very, very homesick for the rectory and for her father’s kind face.

  Chapter Nine

  Lord Sylvester Varleigh could now persuade himself that he had thoroughly attended to his duties as a landlord. Since the evening of Annabelle’s rescue, he had retired to his estates and had overseen extensive repairs to his house, his forms, and his tenants’ cottages. Now, he had to admit to himself, he was frankly bored with his own company.

  His boots left a line of black footprints across the frost-rimed grass. A red sun was shining low on the horizon. Piles of hay put down for the deer lay about under the trees of the park, and blackbirds crossed and crisscrossed the frosty grass in their search for worms, leaving long lines of black arrows.

  His home, Varleigh Court, was spread out behind him with its square turrets and gray walls, and the thin lines of smoke from its many chimneys rose straight into the metallic blue of the early morning sky.

  He had to remind himself he had not been completely alone. There had been some good hunting days and duty calls on the local county. But he had known them all since he was a hoy, and he now wondered why he should feel so alone and set apart from their well-ordered lives and families.

  He suddenly stopped. That was it. Families!

  All the country houses he had visited had echoed with the yells and cries of children, and the rooms had been filled with groups of relatives from close cousins to aunts twice removed.

  He, himself, had few relatives, and most of them were elderly and lived far away in other counties.

  Lord Varleigh was suddenly beset with that malaise which attacks eve
n the most sophisticated Englishman in his prime—the sudden and awful desire to get married. Not to anyone in particular, but to some well-bred faceless girl who would fill his nursery with healthy sons.

  He would give a house party, he decided, and invite at least three suitable girls. He turned abruptly and walked back to the Court. Cards must be sent out and bedrooms aired. He sent for the housekeeper, butler, and groom of the chambers and issued rapid instructions as if he were preparing for a military campaign. And flowers. He must have flowers. In all the rooms.

  His ancient housekeeper, Mrs. Meany, shook her head afterwards and confided to the butler that my lord showed all the signs of a man about to be leg-shackled. “They always asks for flowers,” she said, “and then ‘fore you know it, you’re preparing the wedding breakfast.”

  He then went into his study and started to compose a list of names. The guest list must be carefully worked out so that the girls he planned to look over would not guess they had been invited for that purpose. He would invite Lady Amelia Bunbury, a dashing redhead of impeccable lineage, along with her parents. Then there was pretty little Mrs. O’Harold, an entrancing widow, and the Honorable Caroline Dempsey, a buxom blonde with rather protruding teeth. An excellent horsewoman, she in fact looked rather like a horse. He went on scribbling busily while the frost melted from the grass and the red sun changed to gold.

  Annabelle Quennell? Why not? And the Captain, of course. Captain MacDonald would see that he had kept his word and was doing his best to further the course of true love. And that old wretch, Lady Emmeline. He began to look forward to his house party immensely. He would propose to the lucky girl, get married after a decent interval, and then after another decent interval would have a noisy, healthy son to scamper along the stately corridors and bring some life to the old house.

  “AN invitation to Varleigh Court,” cried Lady Emmeline. “Marvellous. We shall go of course.”

  “Yes, Emmeline,” said Annabelle, bending over her sewing to hide the look of pleasure on her face.

  “I am bored with rusticating here,” went on Lady Emmeline, “and Varleigh Court is vastly comfortable. He has invited Captain MacDonald as well, he says. How kind!”

  How could he? thought Annabelle bitterly. After that night of fear and violence at Chiswick, she could hardly bear to look at the Captain. Lady Emmeline had dismissed the whole episode. It was, she said, exactly what she would have expected a red-blooded man like the Captain to do. As it was, Varleigh’s meddling interference had saved Annabelle’s virtue, so now they could all be comfortable again.

  Annabelle tried to be pleasant to the Captain to please her eccentric godmother. She had hopefully expected the doors of the villa at Kensington Gore to be barred to him after his behavior at Chiswick. But Lady Emmeline seemed more pleased to see him than ever.

  Lady Emmeline had grown increasingly eccentric. She had taken to wearing fur eyebrows and only seemed to remember to put one on at a time so that it looked as if she were carrying a hairy caterpillar around on her forehead. She had taken to wearing patches and a powdered wig to remind her of her youth, and she often talked and chatted to long-dead acquaintances with such vivacity that Annabelle feared for her reason.

  Distressed by the Captain’s frequent visits, worried and embarrassed by her godmother’s eccentricity, and saddened because she no longer saw Lord Varleigh, Annabelle had written to her mother, begging to be allowed to return home, but her plea had only promoted a long letter from Mrs. Quennell. The rector’s wife exclaimed over Annabelle’s ingratitude and reminded her eldest daughter that it was her Christian duty to marry well and provide her younger sisters with husbands.

  A visit to Lord Varleigh’s home would be exciting, if only in a painful way. At least I shall see him, thought Annabelle and then chided herself for loving a man who showed only an avuncular interest in her at the very most.

  Madame Croke had paid Annabelle generously for her designs, and Annabelle had hoarded the money carefully in case the strangeness of her present surroundings should one day prove too much for her. Surely her own mother would not turn her away if she arrived on the doorstep of the rectory.

  Annabelle could not help dreaming of Sylvester Varleigh. His high-nosed aristocratic face had replaced the square, tanned face of her dream lover. She had never daydreamed much before, but now she found herself imagining all sorts of delightful adventures which would end in Lord Varleigh leading her to the altar. But apart from the presence of Lady Jane Cherle, there was her forceful and pushing mother to consider. The proud Lord Varleigh would surely not ally himself with any girl with such a mother.

  She assured herself it was harmless to dream of him— an innocent pastime, no more. At times she could almost convince herself that she had forgotten what he looked like.

  It had never entered Annabelle’s dreams that when she arrived at Varleigh Court, there would be other young ladies present.

  It was therefore with a feeling that she wryly identified as pique that she found herself in the company of three very young, attractive ladies on her first day at Varleigh Court.

  Despite Lord Varleigh’s precautions and the presence of many other guests and many small children, the three young ladies had quickly realised that they were “on trial” and discussed their prospects with Annabelle almost before she had had time to remove her hat. Several of the young gentlemen had already made a book, and the odds were in favor of Lady Amelia Bunbury with Mrs. O’Harold running a close second. To her chagrin Annabelle was considered “spoken for,” and the three ladies eagerly demanded her advice on the best way to entrap their elegant host.

  Annabelle had at last the young female companionship for which she had craved but not at all in the way she had wanted. Lady Jane was not present and that should have at least been a blessing, but on the contrary it depressed Annabelle immeasurably. She was disappointed in Lord Varleigh. By the time her trunks were unpacked, she had convinced herself that she did not love him one bit. He was no better than the rest of them. Marriage, in his mind, was obviously a business proposition.

  In the following days the rather tedious life-style of an English country house in winter took over. The gentlemen went out shooting or hunted while the ladies gossiped, practised attitudes, netted purses, read, and yawned. Only in the evenings did the great house come to life after a long and elaborate dinner when childish games like Hunt the Slipper or Blind Man’s Bluff were played, followed often by some dangerous romp which degenerated into cushion throwing and wild chases through the formal suite of entertaining rooms on the first floor. Mrs. O’Harold was nigh suffocated with a cushion held over her face by the dashing Lady Amelia and the pretty little Irish widow had struggled to her feet and retaliated by emptying the contents of a fruit bowl over that young lady’s head.

  Captain MacDonald showed an alarming tendency to become increasingly boisterous. The men hailed him as a capital gun and the ladies smiled and simpered and congratulated Annabelle on having secured such a flower of English manhood for a suitor.

  Annabelle was hardly allowed to exchange more than two words with her host. He had only to enter the roc and he was immediately besieged by three young ladies and their hopeful parents. Annabelle contented herself with watching him from afar and deciding that she did not like him one little bit. She was quite sure that most of the time Lord Varleigh was not aware she was in the house.

  She would have been very surprised to know just how mistaken she was. Lord Varleigh was heartily wishing he had never invited Annabelle Quennell. How could he possibly decide which lady would suit him best when Annabelle was glowing with beauty on the other side of the room? Returning from a long day’s hunting, the Captain had spoken to Lord Varleigh at length of his undying passion for Annabelle and his hopes of marriage. Lord Varleigh had been moved to utter a few words of caution. Annabelle Quennell could not be forced into marriage. The Captain had hurriedly agreed but before he had turned his face away from Lord Varleigh to look across the
barren wintry fields, Lord Varleigh had noticed a strangely childish, sulky, and stubborn look on the Captain’s handsome face.

  ANNABELLE had been used to rising very early in the morning in Yorkshire and she still found it impossible to lie late in bed. it was a relief to rise and get dressed and escape from the house for a solitary promenade in the icy gardens, made more formal looking by the steely grip of winter.

  Her walks often took her as far as the pimping shed where an old Yorkshireman, Heckley, cut the faggots for the many fires of Varleigh Court. The pimping shed was comfortably redolent of all the woody smells of pine and birch and apple, and it was comforting to Annabelle to sit there listening to Heckley’s homey burr and the crisp thwack of sharp ax on wood.

  As she left Heckley one morning to return to the Court and join the others for breakfast, she reflected ruefully that she felt more at home with this old Yorkshire servant than with any of her fellow guests. With a little sigh she pushed open the door of the breakfast room … and stood still in dismay. Very few of the guests were there, but seated triumphantly at the head of the table, spearing grilled kidneys with great relish, was Lady Jane Cherle. Was it not odd, she was telling her small audience, that her carriage pole should snap just outside the gates? But Sylvester would be delighted to see her.

  Sylvester Varleigh, who entered the room some few minutes later, did not seem in the least ecstatic. His well-bred face was like a mask as he listened to Jane’s voluble explanations. Lady Amelia, Mrs. O’Harold, and the Honorable Caroline Dempsey bristled like so many well-groomed cats.

  Caroline was the first to move into the attack. “It seems too convenient of your carriage pole to break precisely outside my lord’s gates, dear Lady Jane,” she said with, an awful smile. “In my case I should be at a loss to know what to do. So imposing to arrive uninvited, but then I am positively hidebound by the conventions. So silly, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” said Lady Jane with great unconcern.