Relief washed over me with such intensity that I realized I had been digging my fingernails into my palms for the past two hours. “Where have you been?” I demanded.
“Do not fly at me, I pray you, Miss Crawley,” he said, shaking the rainwater off himself all over the room, its contents and its occupants, like a large, wet dog. “I give you both my apologies for being so late. I had my reasons.” Although he was ostensibly speaking to me, his gaze was fixed on Miss Vincy, and he did not so much as glance in my direction during the following exchanges.
Since it seemed clear that he was not going to tell me those reasons, or at least not at present, I enquired after our clothing and other effects he had promised to bring.
“Oh, I forgot them,” he said. “Well, nothing is to be done about it now, I suppose. Are you ready? Miss Vincy?”
I was opening my mouth to berate him for this cavalier attitude, but something about the steadfast way in which he refused to look at me was unsettling.
“Is something wrong?” I asked, in a gentler tone.
“No, not at all,” he informed the top of Miss Vincy’s head. “Or rather, that is to say, yes, very much so. I’ve had a devil of a quarrel with Boring, and I intend to clear out as soon as I’ve delivered the two of you.”
“Clear out!” we cried in unison. Miss Vincy, remembering her sleeping son, hushed us, and the ensuing conversation took place in whispers.
“But you and Lord Boring are such great friends!” murmured Miss Vincy.
“No longer,” retorted Mr. Fredericks. “If I didn’t think duels were nothing but a waste of good ammunition, I swear I’d . . . Never mind. I’m off, and that lot at the Park can manage without my assistance.”
“But . . . but where will you go?” I asked, feeling as tho’ an arrow had pierced my heart.
At this, his eyes shifted to mine for one brief moment, and I feared I may have allowed my emotion to appear in my voice.
“Doesn’t much matter, does it?” Then he bent his gaze once again on Miss Vincy.
“Well? Are you ready or not?” he said, and his tone was so savage that we gathered our shawls and bonnets and climbed into the coach in a meek silence.
19
SO BRIEF WAS OUR drive that we scarce had time to settle ourselves, trade puzzled looks, and consider how to debate the matter, before we jerked to a halt, the carriage door was wrenched open and Mr. Fredericks was handing me out into the side yard of the castle.
He was still not looking at me.
I caught his sleeve in a firm grip.
“Mr. Fredericks, I pray you,” I said earnestly. “Can you not see that you are frightening me? What is amiss between you and Lord Boring? And how does it affect me, or the ones I love? For I can see that it does,” I added, when he made as if to wave this away.
“I assure you—” he began, but I interrupted him.
“Whatever it is that you are about to assure me of will not do. Come, Mr. Fredericks, we have become friends, I hope, over these past weeks. Please pay me the compliment of treating me as a rational being, as you always have done.”
The sky, overcast and storm-tossed since dawn, darkened abruptly to a greenish gray. The horses tossed their heads and nickered uneasily. With a suddenness that made it seem as though someone above us on one of the castle parapets had upended a barrel of water over our heads, it began to rain very hard indeed. Mr. Fredericks uttered an outraged sputter as rivulets of water coursed down his neck.
“What the deuce do you mean by keeping us standing here in this downpour, madam?” he demanded. As if cued by his exclamation, a flash of lightning flickered on the horizon, followed almost immediately afterwards by a deafening roll of thunder. The moat, already high, was now at flood stage.
“I mean to get the answer to my question, sir,” I replied, much relieved to hear him relapse into his usual tone of familiar incivility, “and I will, even tho’ the waters of the North Sea rise up and drown us where we stand.”
Audibly grinding his teeth he said, “Oh, very well. I only learned of his betrothal to that long drink of vinegar, Miss Charity Winthrop, this morning. I told him it was a disgrace, when—”
C-r-r-ack! Bang-bang-crash!
Simultaneous with this stupendous noise, a white-hot finger of fire leapt from a cloud to that easternmost castle’s turret, which overhung the cliff. I clapped my hands to my ears, thus losing my grip on Mr. Fredericks’s sleeve. He took the opportunity to steer me towards the castle gate.
“Get inside!” he said, raising his voice over the boom of thunder. “You’ll be fried like a sausage on a stick if you don’t get under cover.”
“So will you and Miss Vincy,” I retorted. “You can’t keep driving in a storm like this. You must put the carriage in the stables and wait it out.”
“We’ll be—”
Our quarreling was interrupted by a dreadful grating, rending sound. We turned in unison, and saw.
The waters of the moat had, as Mr. Fredericks had predicted, burst through their restraining walls and now poured in two fountains down the cliff face towards the sea. The land that jutted out over the sea and held up the east wing of the castle began to move. From a solid mass it liquefied, resolving itself into thousands of rocks and clods of earth which abruptly . . . disappeared. We heard a noise like a roaring waterfall as it fell, then a great crash as it hit the beach below. After an interval, a cloud of airborne dirt mushroomed up, to hover over the castle and rain mud down upon us.
A good third of the castle’s eastern wing hung over the abyss, unsupported.
Someone was screaming. I turned to my companion with a word of reproach on my lips.
“Good Gad!” he said, his face white (tho’ liberally bespattered with filth) in the lurid light. “Stop that squawking, Miss Crawley,” he added. “Haven’t our eardrums been insulted enough already?”
I, squawking? I, I—I opened and closed my mouth several times in rapid succession, but nothing came out.
C-r-r-r-ack!
“There she goes,” said Mr. Fredericks softly.
I shifted my gaze from his visage back to the castle.
“No!”
A dark line had appeared on the castle walls where it hung out over the cliff, running from top to bottom. The mortar bonding the stones disintegrated and fell in a fine shower of powder. The entire eastern wing of the castle shimmered, sagged, and then crumbled, tipping the easternmost portion with the lightning-struck turret over into the sea.
To my everlasting shame, the first words out of my mouth, when once the reverberations of this second crash had faded, were: “We just paid to have that roof repaired!”
Miss Vincy leaned from the carriage to cry, “Oh Althea! Your mother and sisters and your little brother! The servants! And how dreadful if someone were on the beach below!”
I gasped in mortification. What a monster of parsimony and avarice I was! How could I have thought of pounds and pence before human lives?
“Well, as to that,” said Mr. Fredericks, “I’ll warrant no one save the three of us would be foolish enough to be out of doors in this weather, so I doubt anyone was on the beach to be injured. However, we’d better determine the whereabouts of the rest of your list and see what the damage is.”
We were spared this exertion, however, by the eruption over the drawbridge of every inhabitant of Crooked Castle, from Mama and Prudence (Charity, we discovered, was visiting her fiancé’s family at the Park) to Greengages and the little scullery maid. Only young Tom, the kitchen boy, was injured, having been struck by a falling stone. He was carried out, much enjoying the attention, and the general belief seemed to be that he was suffering from a severe bruise rather than a broken bone.
The lack of injuries was less surprising than it seemed. The east wing was a cold, damp place in this weather. We rarely used it in the best of times except for Mama’s and my bedrooms. Since it was early afternoon, no one had any reason to have been in it, those two rooms having been tidied
hours earlier.
The household milled around in the castle yard, reluctant to reenter the building until some sense of the present and future danger could be gained. As we counted off noses, ensuring that all were present and accounted for, our neighbors began to appear, in twos and threes.
The violent storm soon cleared out, leaving a pale blue sky and a smell of damp vegetation. We were therefore able to conduct our business in the open air, portioning off our servants to various houses in the area. Greengages was to go to his daughter, who lived in the village, Cook to her sister, and so on. The vicar, Mr. Bold, was good enough to busy himself in the matter and soon all were assured of a hot meal and a bed.
Miss Vincy was now in the awkward position of wishing to insist that Mama, Alexander, Prudence, and I join Charity at Gudgeon Park, while being herself a guest and unable to do so. Mr. Fredericks had no such scruples.
“Mrs. Winthrop, Miss Crawley, and Master Crawley, as well as Miss Winthrop, will all be housed at Gudgeon Park,” he announced.
I gathered breath to point out that he was no longer in a position (if he ever had been) to dictate who would or would not be housed at the Park, and to protest that I would be much happier to be accommodated at Yellering Hall, but remembered that it was shut up and the servants put on board wages while the Throstletwists visited their son and daughter-in-law in Hull.
“Yes, Althea, really you must,” murmured Miss Vincy. “With the engagement between Miss Charity and Lord Boring, you are soon to be closely connected with the family at the Park. It would look odd if you did not go to them under the circumstances.”
Mama concurred, and, as Lord Boring and the Marquis appeared on horseback and made the invitation official, it was so decided. I insisted on going into the stricken castle in order to retrieve a few items of a personal nature for myself and my relatives, spurning Mr. Fredericks’s advice on the subject. I had gone for two days without an opportunity to refresh my costume and did not propose to continue in the same manner for yet another day, no matter how risky the venture. Since it was my and my mother’s bedchambers that had tumbled into the sea, I purloined one or two things from Charity and Prudence’s room to make up the deficiency.
We all crowded into the carriage and were soon splashing down the road towards the Park. Being under the impression that I would be in company with Lord Boring for the first time since he proposed to Charity, everyone eyed me with expressions ranging from avid curiosity (Prudence) to sympathy and concern (Mama and Miss Vincy). While it was true that I had rather not be obliged to stay at the Park just now, I did not wish anyone to believe it was an especial grief to me, rather than simply embarrassing. I therefore forced myself to smile, and observed that it certainly was good to have kind neighbors when disaster struck.
Doubtfully, they agreed that it was.
“And we shall be able to see Charity in all her glory,” I added. “What a handsome baroness she will make, will she not?”
None of them answered. They simply looked at me. I was only sorry that Mr. Fredericks, being outside on the box driving, could not witness my performance.
Mrs. Westing could not in common humanity avoid receiving us with some pretence of concern, and she paused in one of her eternal games of patience long enough to see to it that we were given rooms.
“When you are come down again we shall play a little faro,” she proposed, with an acquisitive gleam in her eye.
“I feel we are being marked down as a pair of likely gulls in a gaming club,” I whispered to Mama as we mounted the stairs. “Thank goodness it is well known that we have no money to lose.”
“Hush,” murmured Mama, trying to repress a nervous laugh. “I am afraid your last remark is more true than ever. Oh, Althea, whatever shall we do?”
She was right, of course. Our future did look grim. There would be a huge bill for repairs to the castle, always assuming it could be repaired. And we had lost the Baron, and Charity’s fortune, in one stroke.
“Never fear, dearest,” I said, giving her a quick hug. “I shall think of something; I always do.”
Mama and Alexander were to share a room. I, at Miss Vincy’s invitation, was to move into her quarters. I was pleased to do so; I remembered what Mr. Fredericks had said about her leaving soon, now that she was not to marry the Baron, and I knew I would miss her dreadfully.
Prudence and Charity would sleep in the same room. Poor Prudence! Soon she would lose her sister and confidante to marriage. Once Charity became a permanent part of the Park household I doubted she would spare much time for her sister, or for her erstwhile best friend, Miss Hopkins. However, Prudence did not appear to be at all cast down. She had asked for her collection of memento mori and her pens, paints, brushes and some paper to be brought from the castle, so she did not mean to be idle. Since my patient, whom she believed to be Mrs. Bowden’s grandchild seemed unlikely to die, thus providing a fit subject for her talents, perhaps she could turn them to a lighter subject and do something to commemorate her sister’s engagement.
Surprisingly, when we went downstairs again to join the others, we found Mr. Fredericks glowering in a corner of the sitting room and there seemed to be no immediate expectation of his departure. The subject was not raised, nor did Lord Boring go and speak to him, seeming, if anything, a little nervous in his presence. Mrs. Fredericks on the other hand was her usual imperturbable self, bustling about and offering refreshments. It occurred to me for the first time to wonder whether she would stay on if her son left.
I supposed she would. Mr. Fredericks had said that they were not destitute at his father’s death, but their establishment in London cannot have compared with Gudgeon Park, and once he left his cousin’s employ he was unlikely to be able to support her. In any case, her sister and nephew depended on her to organize their lives and run their household. Charity, I felt sure, would be only too happy to relinquish any and all duties to such an amiable and accomplished housekeeper, whose services could be retained for the cost of her meals and a few hand-me-down clothes.
Mrs. Fredericks made what seemed to be a special effort to welcome me, no doubt out of sympathy for my destitute state, bereft both of home and suitor, and I appreciated it.
“Ah, my little mermaid,” she said. “Wet again! Come here into the conservatory and I will comb and dry your hair.”
I sat upon a stool at her knee and she tended to my hair as gently as my mother would have done. Meanwhile, I thought about her son. What would happen to him? Not for the first time I regretted the lack of an inquisitive and sophisticated male relation who could have enquired about the specifics of Mr. Fredericks’s financial standing in the world. If only he had even a small independence! In that case. . . Why, in that case, I believe I would have done everything in my power to make him love me. It was therefore best I did not know—no small independence would rescue my family now.
He had quarreled with Lord Boring because His Lordship had become betrothed to Charity. Most likely that meant that he had wanted and expected his cousin to marry Miss Vincy. I sighed. Certainly he was fond of her, and she of him.
Would he marry Miss Vincy, perhaps fulfilling the same post for her father that he had for Lord Boring? If so, I would not see him again, or not for a great many years, at least, as the Vincys lived in London.
Looking through the conservatory door, I could see him in the dark corner where he sat, moodily stabbing at a small hole in the Axminster carpet with the end of a walking stick.
Normally when we visited at the Park he was busy working, only to be seen striding towards his office in the rear portion of the house with untidy masses of paper protruding from his pockets, or else holed up in that chilly, cheerless cubbyhole, scribbling away, sending messenger boys with missives to the London post. Now he sat and did nothing, while we all studied him out of the corners of our eyes.
For I was not the only one stealing a look at him from time to time. When Mrs. Fredericks had finished braiding and putting up my hair we rejoi
ned the party in the drawing room. I soon realized that with the exception of his mother and my mother the rest of the assembled company was watching him. Lord Boring did, with a worried frown. Mrs. Westing watched him also, and even Charity—yes, I was sure of it—even Charity cast nervous glances in his direction.
Yet he sat on, sublimely unaware of all this covert attention, poking away at the hole in the rug. At last, unable to bear it, I got up and took his stick away from him.
“This carpet at least is not a copy, unlike our tapestries,” I said to him in an undertone. “Pray do not destroy it.”
He looked startled, and his eye fell upon the mischief he had wrought. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m good for nothing today.” And he got up and asked his mother in a low voice to have some bread and cheese sent up to his room in lieu of dinner.
Once he had retired I gradually realized that the focus of attention in the room had shifted. I could not be mistaken. All through dinner, all through a lengthy game of faro, which we played for pennies, as Mrs. Westing declared herself unable to enjoy a game in which no money at all was hazarded, all through the long hours until we could excuse ourselves, clutching the few farthings that remained to us, and retire to our borrowed chambers, yes, all that long time, the entire household, both guests and hosts, was now watching me.
20
THE NEXT MORNING I escaped any further scrutiny by coming downstairs very early, leaving a note behind me on my pillow to explain that I had gone back to the castle to view how it had weathered the night. Then I crept out of doors without being seen by any of the servants. Fido and I walked swiftly down the drive.
As is often the case after a powerful, destructive storm, it was an achingly beautiful day. Even so late in the summer, I could still hear the occasional skylark singing, and the fields were speckled with red poppies. I saw as we walked along that ours was not the only family to have suffered damage, spying downed trees and once-tidy farmyards turned to boggy marshes. The farmers were hard at work already, sawing up limbs and adding to their woodpiles for the winter.
Keeping the Castle Page 16
