by M C Beaton
Joe swung round scratching his head. “There was no call for ee to do that,” he said, blinking stupidly at Constance who flung herself into a chair and began to weep miserably. The poker had made not the slightest dent in his thick skull.
Joe put the basket of food on the table. “I thought ee was a reasonable mort for all ee’s mad,” accused Joe. “But to hit a man with a poker ain’t fair.”
Almost sulkily, he turned and walked from the cottage, carefully bolting the door behind him, indifferent to Constance’s sobs.
After a long time Constance dried her eyes and settled back again into her usual mood of quiet resignation and despair. There was no clock in the cottage, so all she could do to measure the hours on a sunless day such as this was to wait and wait until the gray light faded to black, heralding the end of another weary day.
Usually she retired to bed as soon as darkness fell but this evening, for some odd reason, she felt as restless as the wind outside. The night seemed alive with strange noises. There were often noises of various wild animals, foxes, weasels, rabbits pursuing each other in their endless hunt, and the sudden hoot of an owl. But the scurryings outside seemed to hold a breathless menace. Almost as if people were scurrying around the cottage, thought Constance. There was also an increasingly strong smell of lamp oil, and she carefully trimmed the lamp and then sniffed at it but it seemed to be burning brightly enough. Joe had returned that evening to bar the shutters of the window of the living room as he did every evening, not trusting to the iron bars across the windows alone.
If I ever see him again, thought Constance for the hundredth time, conjuring up a picture of her handsome husband, not one word of criticism will I utter. Not one harsh word. Only please let him find me.
The scurryings outside ceased, the wind died down, and the night was very still.
Then she heard the sounds of horses’ hooves.
There was a creak of carriage wheels and the confused sound of voices.
“Help!” screamed Constance, louder than she had ever done before.
There came an answering shout, and the rapid sound of footsteps hurrying over the hard, frozen earth outside the cottage.
“Well, where’s the key, man?” demanded a well beloved voice.
“All in good time, me lord,” said Joe Puddleton’s voice. “I got un right here.”
My lord!
Hardly daring to hope or breath, Constance ran to the cottage door. There was a maddening fumbling at the lock, and then the cottage door swung open.
Lord Philip Cautry flanked by Peter Potter and Joe Puddleton stood on the threshold.
“Is there anyone else with you?” asked Philip.
Constance shook her head and took a faltering step forward. Philip moved to meet her and caught his wife in his arms.
“So she was a lady after all,” said Joe wonderingly. “Better than a raree show, this is.”
“Turn your back, man!” cried Peter. “Turn your back!” as Lord Philip bent his head to kiss his wife.
Lord Philip’s servants waited outside in his carriage, ready to dash to his rescue if need be. But all at the cottage seemed quiet. The coachman and the two grooms were feeling sleepy and tired, and wished his lordship would get on with it and let them all go home.
They did not see the dark figure of Bouchard, creeping up along the hedgerow.
In the next minute, a huge firecracker sparked and exploded right under the horses’ hooves. The terrified animals reared and plunged and then bolted in headlong flight. At the same time, Bergen slammed the cottage door shut and rolled a large rock, which he had ready for the purpose, against the low door so that it wedged under the latch, holding it shut. He lit a torch and stood ready and then turned a white face to Bouchard who had come running up. “I c-can’t do it,” he stammered. “Not all of ’em. I can’t!”
“Let me,” snapped Bouchard with a grim impatience worthy of Lady Macbeth telling her husband to screw his courage to the sticking place. “I had banked on that fool Evans being with him. We must finish this work and speed back to London and see if we can stop his mouth.”
She seized a torch and applied it to the brushwood soaked in lamp oil which she and Bergen had piled against the walls of the cottage a bare half hour before Lord Philip’s arrival.
With a satisfying roar, the brushwood went up, the long flames licking at the overhanging thatch.
Bergen stood back, shivering despite the heat of the fire. He could imagine the terrified captives inside, running helplessly from flaming wall to flaming wall, and then their bodies crackling and sizzling like a pig turning on a spit over the kitchen fire. As he felt the bile rising in his throat, he remembered he had forgotten to wedge the back door. And that great lummox called Joe had the key! He turned to tell Bouchard. That lady was standing with her arms folded, and a grin and awful smile of satisfaction on her face. “I shan’t tell her,” he thought beginning to edge away.
Bouchard caught the movement and swung round and stared at the white, twitching face of the ex-butler. Bouchard herself felt no more than a heady excitement at the deed she had just done. The fear and disgust she saw on Bergen’s face meant only one thing to her—betrayal.
She drew a cumbersome pistol from the folds of her long drab coat, and with as little pity as certain of her countrywomen, some decades ago, had watched the heads roll from the guillotine into the basket beneath, she raised the pistol and shot Bergen through the heart. And as the man swayed and stumbled, she raised one servicably-booted foot and kicked him so hard that he fell back into the roar of the fire just as the roof collapsed.
The halloos and cries of Lord Philip’s returning servants spurred her to flight.
At the back of the cottage, Constance, Philip, Peter and Joe huddled on the damp grass beside the river, and watched in awe as the cottage roared and blazed.
There was nothing they could do but watch. There was no way through the thick hedges at either side, and the river behind them was swift and deep.
Philip held Constance close, his heart full of gratitude for their escape, for the stupidity of their would-be murderers in failing to secure the back door.
At long last the flames died down and the anxious faces of the servants could be seen through the blackened ruins of the cottage on the other side. The cottage was too far away from the village for anyone to have seen the flames and to have come to help put out the fire.
Joe Puddleton finally picked his way through the ruins and found an iron bucket and carried it back to the river. He filled it with water, and then returning to the burned house, began to soak a path across the scorching rubble so that his new aristocratic friends could make their way out.
Peter finally led the way with Philip carrying Constance in his arms behind him. “Mind your step, me lords,” said Joe bowing low and elevating Peter to the peerage. As he bent, his large eye fell on what appeared to be a hand sticking out from under a beam and a pile of rubble. “’Ere!” he said slowly. “’Ere’s a corp.”
He began kicking away the rubble. “Let me get my wife out of this first,” snapped Philip, but it was too late. Joe’s massive foot had turned aside the debris to reveal the scorched and blackened face of what was still disgustingly recognizable as Bergen.
The coachmen and the grooms eagerly helped their master out into the front garden.
“It was that there lady’s maid, my lord,” cried the coachman. “She must have been the one. Set a firecracker under our horses feet so that they bolted. When I’d calmed them down and ridden back, we saw her escaping. We saw her face in the flames.”
“Bergen and Bouchard,” said Philip slowly. “Well, Bergen’s dead but Bouchard still lives, and I’ll get that hell-witch if I have to search the length and breadth of England.”
Constance felt numb and stunned by the horrifying events of the night. She clung onto her husband, staring up repeatedly at his face as if he was some dear ghost who would surely vanish at cockcrow.
“W
hat did you do with Evans?” asked Philip of Peter Potter as the coach rumbled back to London. Constance had fallen into an exhausted sleep.
In the flaring light from the carriage lamps, Peter’s face took on an almost guilty expression. “Well, you know,” he said reluctantly, “Your sister can be quite a formidable lady.”
“What has that to do with it?” demanded Philip, holding Constance’s slight body against his own as the carriage lurched and swayed over the frozen ruts of the road.
“I was going to lock him up… you know… when you went off to get your traveling carriage… but Lady Eleanor appeared out on the street and began to screech and demand to know what was going on. So I told her. So she says the scandal Mr. Rider will have to suffer will be too much if I hand him over to the authorities, so she insists that Evans be taken back into the house and locked in his room until you return.”
“Fool!” said Philip bitterly.
“I say, don’t be like that,” said Peter, feeling that his friend’s acid tone was poor repayment for his night’s help.
“I’m sorry, Peter,” said Lord Philip wearily. “I’ll talk some sense into Eleanor’s snobbish head as soon as I get Constance safely home. Bouchard is still somewhere about. I don’t think she will try to harm Constance now, but I would like my wife guarded at all times just the same. We shall take Constance with us to Eleanor’s,” added his lordship with singularly masculine insensitivity. “She should have a chance to tell him to his face what she thinks of him.”
“You can’t do that!” cried Peter, outraged. “Think what the poor girl has been through. She should go straight home and into bed with a hot posset.”
“Fustian,” said Philip coldly. “Constance is not one of your milk and water misses. Did you not notice how remarkably well she looked despite her imprisonment?”
Peter shook his head as if in disbelief, but fell silent.
A red dawn was bathing the cobbles in a fiery light as the coach wearily pulled to a stop outside Lady Eleanor’s mansion.
Constance awoke with a little cry of fear and then smiled sheepishly as she looked up into her husband’s face. “Oh, it will be so lovely to be home,” she sighed.
“We’re not going home just yet,” said Philip gently. “Evans must be delivered into the hands of the authorities, but I am sure you would like to give him a piece of your mind first.”
“But I did,” wailed Constance, “give him a piece of my mind, that is. Every time I saw him!”
But Lord Philip was cursed with the demon of nagging jealousy. Constance had looked so well, so beautiful when he had found her. He did not realize that Constance had simply worked hard on her clothes and on her appearance to keep up her morale, and to encourage her hopes of him finding her. Philip simply wanted to see her face to face with Evans. After all, what had gone on in that secluded little cottage? Evans had had a very beautiful young girl in his power for quite some time. And Evans was surely a man like any other under that rabbit-like facade.…
He paid no attention to Constance’s sleepy protests, but roused the sleeping servants and climbed up to the top of the house to Mr. Evans’s rooms, after having secured the key from the butler.
He took a candle from a small table in the corridor outside, lit it, and held it up. He handed the key to Peter who inserted it in the lock and slowly and cautiously opened the door.
“Now, Evans…” began Lord Philip, striding into the room and holding the candle high.
From a hook on the low ceiling dangled what was left of Mr. Evans. He was dressed in his full court uniform, and the candle sent sparks and prisms of light from the jewels of his buttons onto his sad and swollen face. The secretary had hanged himself with the pretty, lilac silk sword sash. His little black pumps with their brave gold buckles swung a bare inch above the floor.
There was a sigh and a moan from behind Lord Philip. He swung round. Brave Constance who had endured so many trials and tribulations with such fortitude had finally had too much.
She had fainted dead away.
Chapter Fourteen
Constance had contracted a feverish cold and had been confined to her bed for a fortnight.
The body of Evans had been quietly removed and quietly interred. The Cautry family had suffered enough scandal, and, after all, with the exception of Bouchard who seemed to have disappeared into thin air, the rest of the participants in the plot were dead.
Lord Philip Cautry’s pride had toppled from a great height. He looked back on his behavior that terrible evening and thought he must have run mad. To have found Constance again, to have been able to hold her in his arms again, only to become unreasonably jealous and subject her to the dreadful sight of the secretary’s suicide, was beyond belief. He was not even fit to touch the hem of her gown. He went quietly and sadly about his home, questioning the physician closely after that man’s daily visits, but not daring to visit the sickroom himself in case the sight of his monstrous bullying face gave his delicate wife a relapse.
Anxious and worried, Peter told him he was behaving like the veriest fool going to such extremes, to which Lord Philip had crossly answered that Peter was ill-suited to talk of fools, parading, as he was, around London with that curst cat.
Peter had developed a fondness for the kitchen cat. It was bad enough, said Lord Philip, to have Frederick “Poodle” Byng driving about with his poodle beside him and Lord Petersham breaking out in a rash of brown—brown clothes, brown carriage and brown horses, and all for the love of a Mrs. Brown—without his best friend making a cake of himself by squiring about the kitchen cat.
It was an ill-favored beast with a dusty striped coat and an insolent green eye. Kept to its proper position of keeping down the population of rats and mice in its master’s kitchen, it was all very well. But sitting in Peter’s carriage with a brass collar around its neck, it was making its master an object of ridicule.
But Peter and his cat seemed oblivious to remarks and stares alike. The cat had not yet been blessed with a name and became known in London Society as “Potter’s Familiar” and some wag circulated a poem in its honor:
“Potter’s Familiar is seen in the Park
Potter’s Familiar at Almack’s is found
Potter’s Familiar is seen after dark
At the Opera, in jewels, exquisitely gown’d.
What female can hope to capture the heart
Of a fellow whose life is all for—a Cat!”
Peter and Philip strolled into Lord Philip’s mansion one foggy afternoon and found Constance lying on a chaise longue in the drawing room. She looked very pale and ethereal.
“My constant companion,” murmured Lord Philip bending over her head. Constance’s face took on a closed, tight look and he drew his hand away, thinking he disgusted her. Constance had merely resented the term “companion” which had such unhappy memories for her. Peter’s cat lazily climbed onto her lap by dint of pulling itself up her thin muslin dress by all of its claws.
Philip strode forward and picked it up by the scruff of the neck and dropped it on the floor, where it lay with its tail lashing and its green eyes glaring through the bands of fog that lay in layers in the stuffy air of the dark room.
“Leave the cat alone,” said Constance, with a slight edge to her voice. “It is only behaving naturally, after all. Or did you expect it to make a bow first and leave its calling card?”
“Oh, if you want the curst fleabag, then have it!” said Lord Philip reaching out a hand for the cat, which promptly scratched him, and then climbed its way up Peter’s long body to crouch on his shoulder.
Peter looked hopefully from one to the other of the married pair. What they needed, he decided, was a good row to clear the air.
But Constance remembered her vow to be a meek and obedient wife, and at the same time Philip felt like a boor and became extremely solicitous and courteous. The married couple then proceeded to talk over the tea tray as if they were strangers meeting for the first time at some court
function.
“My sister is giving a musicale,” said Lord Philip at length. “I told her you would not wish to go. Her house must hold very sad memories for you, and you should not go out in this weather. You still look very frail.”
“Thank you for your concern, sir,” said Constance meekly. “But I should like very much to go. I am feeling much stronger and I think some amusement would do me good.”
“But…” Lord Philip began to protest while Peter hopefully pricked up his ears. To Peter’s disappointment, Lord Philip only stood frowning for a few seconds, and then said in a mild voice, “Very well. I will tell my sister to expect us. Remind me to ask Masters about how to go about hiring you a lady’s maid…”
“I already have one,” said Constance. “Had you visited me when I was unwell, my lord, then you would have noticed her.”
“I did not visit you in your sickroom,” said Lord Philip testily, “because I feared my face would bring back too many painful memories.”
“I have no painful memories of you,” said Constance. “But I often wonder what became of Bouchard. When I look out of the window, I seem to see her.”
“Do not worry,” said Peter, “Bouchard left the country long ago, I’ll be bound.”
Bouchard had in fact managed to be put ashore in France by a smugglers’ boat operating out of Devon. The villainous captain had demanded a great deal of money for the journey, but Bouchard estimated she still had plenty left and promised herself a night at the best inn in Boulogne. Then she would make her way to Paris and return to her old employment as lady’s maid.
But rich as she felt herself to be, Bouchard presented a sorry appearance when she walked into the comfortably furnished entrance hall of the Homme Qui Rit at Boulogne.
The crossing had been rough, and her clothes were stained with salt water. Her battered bonnet was askew on her head, and she carried only one bandbox.
Drooping with fatigue, Bouchard could hardly take in the rough treatment of the landlord. “On your way,” this individual said, “We’ve no room for the likes of you.”
