Annabelle

by Beaton, M. C.

  “I’m surprised at you, Annabelle,” said the Captain reprovingly. “Allowing a fellow like Varleigh to kiss you like that! He’s always sitting around kissing girls at parties, but it’s usually women like Lady Jane, not respectable debutantes. He must think you art fast.”

  “He d-doesn’t…I d-didn’t…,” stammered Annabelle, while all the time her mind raced and raced. Lord Varleigh had not said he loved her or wished to marry her. The fact that he had said he missed her did not add up to a proposal of marriage. She felt cold and betrayed and miserable. What did she know of this social world anyway? A world where lip service only was paid to the moral code and the only crime was to be found out.

  She dismally became aware that the Captain was skating her off towards where the river wound away through the trees and that her skates were following him with all the mindless action of a clockwork toy.

  She was too confused and upset and miserable to notice that he was leading her very far away from the party indeed.

  The flat frozen river grew narrower and narrower and darker and darker as the trees almost met overhead, the moonlight sending their skeletal shadows crisscrossing across the ice.

  Annabelle tugged at Jimmy’s large hands in a sudden attempt to free herself. He seemed like a large stranger, and she began to wonder whether she knew him at all. He finally stopped and spun her round to face him. She could not make out his expression as his face was in the shadows of the overhanging trees.

  “I’m sorry about this,” he said in a serious voice. “Emmeline left you all her money, you see. She won’t live long. I decided I was wasting my time trying to kill her. Now, if you had married me, as your husband I would have had control of your fortune. But you wouldn’t. Not you. But you had the luck of the devil. First Varleigh drags you from that shed and then that poor bitch Caroline took the bullet that was meant for you.”

  Annabelle wrestled desperately and futilely in his arms. “Th-this is one o-of y-your mad jokes,” she stammered wildly.

  “Joke!” he laughed, giving her an almost absent-minded little shake. “That’s a good one. I’ve never been more serious in my life.”

  “You killed Caroline,” whispered Annabelle, ceasing her struggles as the full enormity of what he was saying penetrated her frightened brain.

  “Quiet, while I tell you. I must tell you,” he went on in that calm, serious voice. “I watched you very carefully. Thought we were going to tie the knot after all. Then you said I made you sick. Now you shouldn’t have done that, Annabelle. That was naughty, especially when a man has every dun in London banging on his knocker.

  “So I broke into Emmeline’s lawyers’ office and read the will. If you die, I’m next in line to inherit. And why? What a joke! The irony of it! You were to get the money for saving the old girl’s life when I was trying to kill her. Rich, isn’t it? But for that, you wouldn’t have seen a penny of it once you had turned me down.

  “So now you’ve got to die. I hope you understand, Annabelle,” he went on in an earnest, almost boyish voice. “I’ve got my reputation as an officer and a gentleman to consider.”

  “What are you going to do to me?” whispered Annabelle.

  “This,” he said.

  He gave her a sharp push. She catapulted backwards across the ice and tumbled headlong into a jagged hole of black water.

  “Nicely done. Very nicely done,” said the Captain appreciatively as Annabelle’s bonnet disappeared beneath the water. “I thought Id never be able to hack through that ice in time.”

  He moved slowly forward on his skates. Annabelle’s pathetic little hand emerged and scrabbled at the jagged edge of the ice. Almost lazily he pried it loose with the toe of his skate.

  “I hope she’s not going to take too long,” he muttered to himself. “It’s demned cold.”

  Once again Annabelle surfaced and let out a watery scream, and the Captain sighed with impatience. Then he swung round with an oath as he heard an answering cry and heard the hiss of skates racing towards him across the ice.

  Lord Varleigh came speeding towards him with all the velocity of the bullet that had killed Caroline Dempsey. The Captain put up his fist, but Lord Varleigh had gained double his strength through fear and rage. He dodged under the Captain’s guard and planted the best flush hit of his life right on the point of the Captain’s chin.

  Captain Jimmy MacDonald hit the ice with an almighty crash and lay still.

  Lord Varleigh seized a dead branch from the bank and, lying flat on his stomach, muttering prayers and curses, he edged towards the hole. Annabelle, making a last desperate effort, felt the branch somehow with her numbed fingers and held on. Sliding right up to the edge of the hole and praying that the ice would hold, Lord Varleigh slid his arms into the water and under her armpits and then held cm like grim death while he hallooed and shouted for help. His arms were rapidly turning numb with the cold and Annabelle had fallen unconscious—he hoped—and was swaying limply in them, her head just above the icy water, looking as white and as pale as the indifferent moon above.

  Just when he felt he could stand the strain no longer, he heard the blessed sounds of answering shouts. Soon he was surrounded by a crowd of guests and footmen. Willing hands helped him to support Annabelle, ropes were brought to tie up the Captain, and ladders were brought to place across the hole. All the while Lady Emmeline teetered and squawked, “It can’t be true. Not Jimmy. It can’t be true.”

  Annabelle was wrapped in blankets, hot fiery drinks were poured down her throat, and slowly her large eyes fluttered open.

  The watching members of the ton gave a great sigh. Was it relief? Or was it disappointment?

  After all, it would have made a far better piece of gossip had she died.

  Chapter Twelve

  On the same evening a more international drama was taking place.

  At the Congress of Vienna the tinkling sleigh parties drove nightly home from the Wienerwald, and the music of a succession of balls, concerts, tableaux vivants and masques kept the reelected statesmen in their powdered wigs and silk-covered calves too busy to pay any attention to the threatening rumors from France.

  On March 7 while Vienna prepared for another great ball and the Czar of All the Russias spent a pleasant afternoon judging which of two ladies could dress the quickest—one managing the process in a minute and a quarter and the other in a minute and fifty seconds—a courier arrived at Metternich’s house with dispatches from Genoa. The Chancellor was too tired from the exhausting combination of business and revelry to open them directly.

  After resting for a while on his couch, he felt once again strong enough to deal with affairs of state. And he opened the dispatch.

  Napoleon had escaped from Elba. The Sovereigns of Europe, assembled in Vienna, had been too busy to pay attention to that one ever-present threat. And they had let the Corsican ogre escape from his cage.

  IN Berkeley Square, while Annabelle Quennell tossed and turned in a feverish sleep upstairs, Lord Varleigh paced Lady Emmeline’s drawing room and dealt with a diplomatic problem of his own.

  Lady Emmeline had hysterically protested that Annabelle’s near drowning had been an accident. Lord Varleigh’s servants had placed the bound Captain in Lady Emmeline’s cellars while their master tried to make the Dowager Marchioness see sense. Lord Varleigh did not know of the Captain’s other attempts at murder or that he had been responsible for Caroline Dempsey’s death. He only knew that Captain Jimmy MacDonald, for some inexplicable reason, had tried to stop him from rescuing Annabelle. In his opinion the Captain should stand trial for attempted murder.

  Lady Emmeline wept and pleaded. She had no son of her own, she said. Jimmy was like a son to her. She would die if anything happened to him.

  In despair Lord Varleigh sent a footman to rout out the Captain’s Colonel.

  Colonel James Ward-Price was a clever man on the field of battle and incredibly stupid in peacetime. He loved and admired Captain Jimmy MacDonald as standing for eve
rything the perfect soldier should be. Lord Varleigh could not have sent for a worse judge.

  The Colonel insisted on hearing Captain Jimmy MacDonald’s version of the story.

  The Captain was led into the room with his hands behind his back. He looked as if he were about to face a firing squad and he indeed thought the game was up.

  The first glimmer of hope he had was when Lady Emmeline rushed to him and threw her pudgy arms round his great body and smeared rouge and gray powder on his chest. She was weeping and exclaiming over his bound hands and blaming Lord Varleigh for his “inhuman treatment.”

  Then his Colonel ordered the footmen to unbind him and told him in a kindly gruff voice to sit down and tell them what it was all about because Miss Quennell was in a heavily sedated and feverish sleep.

  That sulky, brooding, almost childish look that Lord Varleigh remembered came over the Captain’s face and he leaned forward in the chair provided for him, his hands on his knees and began to talk earnestly.

  “Look, it’s like this. There’s no use me trying to say I haven’t behaved badly because I have. Annabelle had just told me finally that she was going home and didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I had seen her earlier kissing Varleigh and taxed her with it. She laughed in my face and said Varleigh was another rake and she had been leading him on just in order to tease him but that it didn’t matter anyway because she was quitting London and she would never see him again either. Seems she’s got a tendre for some chap in Yorkshire and she prefers him to all of us.”

  “Go on,” said Lord Varleigh. His face was very white.

  “Well…she fell backwards into this hole in the ice. I was as mad as fire with her, and I thought I would let her have a dunking to teach her a lesson. Then right at that moment, you arrived on the scene, Varleigh, and I was jealous of you. I could still see you and Annabelle kissing and caressing in my mind’s eye. Oh, God!” The Captain groaned and buried his head in his hands. There was a shocked silence.

  Both Lady Emmeline and Colonel Ward-Price were convinced that he was telling the truth. Lord Varleigh thought that if he weren’t, then it was a consummate piece of acting.

  But Captain Jimmy MacDonald had just remembered that the broken window and deed box would be discovered in the morning when Lady Emmeline’s lawyers returned to work—hence the realistic groan.

  The Colonel cleared his throat. “Don’t take on so, my boy,” he said, placing his hand awkwardly on the Captain’s shoulder. “You behaved disgracefully, of course, and apologies are certainly the order of the day. But I don’t think any of us in this room could find it in his or her heart to prosecute. I … what is it, man?”

  An officer had bustled unceremoniously into the room and handed him a sealed letter. The Colonel broke it open and gave an exclamation.

  “Napoleon has escaped!” he said. “He is even now believed to be in France marshalling his troops.

  “Come, my boy,” he said, helping the Captain to his feet. “Your duty is clear. You will fight for your country once more. I am sure, my lord, you would not wish to see one of England’s finest soldiers in chains at a moment like this. Come, my lord, you have served with distinction yourself!”

  Lord Varleigh looked thoughtfully at the Captain. After all, all the criminal riffraff of the taverns and gutters would once more be marching to war as well. Most of them were better employed on the field of battle.

  “Very well,” he said.

  “I say … thanks awfully, old man,” said the Captain boyishly. “I can’t…”

  “You must not see Miss Quennell again,” said Lord Varleigh, “or communicate with her in any way.”

  “Of course. Of course!” cried Captain MacDonald, jumping up and wringing Lord Varleigh’s hand enthusiastically.

  “Come, my boy,” said the Colonel. “We have work to do!”

  Lady Emmeline clung to the Captain, crying and sobbing and had to be pried loose.

  For the hundredth time the old lady wondered if Annabelle realised the prize she had let slip through her hands.

  What a man!

  Chapter Thirteen

  The brave soldiers marched to war, and one of them at least went away with a light heart.

  Captain Jimmy MacDonald could not believe his luck. The lawyers had obviously not reported the break-in to Lady Emmeline. Now the prospect of a glorious battle and possible promotion lay in front of him. And when it was all over, there would be plenty of time to seek out Miss Quennell and put a period to her irritating existence.

  Lord Varleigh sat in his town house and listened to the fifes and drums and trumpets of the soldiers. He himself had seen enough of the horrors of war and had fought bravely in the Peninsular Campaign. But it was not the sound of the marching armies which depressed him so. It was MacDonald’s remarks to the effect that Annabelle had only been teasing when she had let him kiss her so warmly.

  Women were the devil! Heartless, fickle, and avaricious. At least Lady Jane had only wanted his money to play with. Annabelle Quennell had wanted his heart, and she had very nearly managed to secure it. Damn her! He would never see her again.

  And, Annabelle, weak and listless after her fever, tossed and turned on her bed and wondered why Lord Varleigh had not called or even left a message.

  For the first time Lady Emmeline was beginning to find Annabelle a bore. With her splendid looks faded with her illness and her listless air, Annabelle no longer fed Lady Emmeline’s aging spirits with her air of ebullient youth. Lady Emmeline dreamed frequently of the handsome Captain and sighed pleasurably over his outrageous behavior. If she had been the one who had been kidnapped and taken to Chiswick … ah, then, what a different story! As Lady Emmeline entered into another bout of prolonged eccentricity, she once again dressed herself in debutante clothes and greedily studied all the cases she could where an older woman had married a younger man.

  By the time Annabelle was well enough to venture downstairs, she was met with a chilly reception. In Lady Emmeline’s mad mind Annabelle was now a rival for the Captain’s affections.

  That’s why I wasted all this time and money on the chit! thought Lady Emmeline with a rare burst of sane honesty. I’m in love with Jimmy myself!

  Annabelle’s quiet request that she should be allowed to go home was met with enthusiasm by her hostess. Arrangements were made for Annabelle to use Lady Emmeline’s travelling chariot but no mention was made of any money to be given to her for her journey. Annabelle could only be glad that she had had the foresight to furnish Madame Croke with a whole folio of spring designs.

  Annabelle quickly recovered her glowing looks and good health but that only sufficed to add fuel to Lady Emmeline’s growing dislike and jealousy.

  One day shortly before Annabelle was due to journey North, Lady Emmeline had abruptly ordered her to go to Bond Street and had furnished her with a shopping list and the reluctant Horley as escort.

  Lady Emmeline watched until Annabelle’s sickeningly jaunty bonnet had turned the corner of Berkeley Square and then ordered her town carriage to be brought round. The Dowager Marchioness was going to pay a visit to her solicitors, Messrs. Crindle and Bridge. Annabelle Quennell with her missish airs should not have her money. It should go to Captain Jimmy one way or the other. If the Captain married her—oh, blissful thought! —then he would have her money anyway. And if she died … Lady Emmeline looked round the sunny streets from the darkness of her carriage and shuddered. Impossible thought! She felt as if she would live forever.

  Mr. Robert Crindle, the senior partner, did not look as honored and delighted to see the Dowager Marchioness as he usually did. In fact, thought Lady Emmeline in surprise, he looked furtive and guilty.

  No matter. “I want to see my will,” said Lady Emmeline.

  Mr. Crindle put his chalky nails together and sighed. “Then you have heard,” he said. “A most regrettable incident. I did not report it because I thought it was some felon searching for jewels. Some of these uneducated criminals se
em to think we keep our clients’ jewels in our deed boxes.”

  “What on earth are you drivelling on about?” snapped Lady Emmeline.

  Mr. Crindle gave an even deeper sigh. “So you did not know after all. But I had better tell you just the same. Someone broke into this office on Wednesday night and cracked open the box containing your documents. Whoever it was left the copies of your ladyship’s will lying crumpled on the floor, but mark my words, the fellow was looking for jewels. Of course I reported the matter to the Runners and I…”

  His voice faded in Lady Emmeline’s ears as her old mind worked furiously. One thought piled on top of the other. Annabelle’s insistence that Jimmy had been trying to kill her so he could inherit. Annabelle’s fevered babblings about the death of Caroline Dempsey. Annabelle’s horror of learning that the Captain had been forgiven. Annabelle’s scream that they had all gone mad. All put down to the feverish ramblings of a sick girl. And now this! That Wednesday had been the night of the skating party. What she was thinking was dreadful. It could not be true!

  “… left no clues,” went on Mr. Crindle’s voice, suddenly breaking into Lady Emmeline’s tortured thoughts, “except this. It shows the felon must have been robbing other places earlier in the evening.”

  He held out something which winked and glittered in the dim light of the musty office. Lady Emmeline stared at it and bit back an exclamation.

  It was the diamond stickpin she had given Jimmy as an engagement present.

  “Enough of this matter,” Mr. Crindle was saying. “Did you wish to alter your will, my lady?”

  “Yes,” said Lady Emmeline hoarsely, getting unsteadily to her feet. “Leave the lot to m’parrot. See you about it another time. Not well. Not well at all.”

  Lady Emmeline sat helplessly in her carriage, bitter tears cutting through the paint and powder on her cheeks. If only she were a man! She wanted revenge. She thought of the way the Captain had led her along and fooled her and groaned aloud. She prayed for a quick and merciful death for herself and a long and painful one for the Captain.