by M C Beaton
“I am the Dowager Lady Blackhall’s lady’s maid, my lady,” she said. “She has instructed me to aid you with your toilette. My name is Carter.”
Susie summoned up her small stock of courage. The thought of having this disapproving woman brushing her hair and helping her into her clothes was too much to bear.
“I am quite used to looking after myself, Carter.”
“I can see that,” remarked Carter.
“Please leave,” said Susie. Susie was so shocked by the maid’s impertinence that it showed on her expressive face.
Carter retreated quickly after choking out a reluctant apology.
Susie gave a sigh of relief when the door closed behind Carter. Then she realized she did not know the time. The sky was now very dark outside. She supposed they would ring some bell or gong for dinner. But then how would she hear it up here at the top of the keep? She plucked up her courage and decided to change quickly and make her own way downstairs.
She chose a golden-brown velvet dinner gown trimmed with bands of sable. It was not fashionable for such a young girl, married or not, to wear fur, but Mrs. Burke had obeyed the earl’s request and had tried to age her daughter.
The neckline was cut low over her bosom. She fastened a string of pearls around her neck and secured a few more pins in her hair, which was piled up on top of her head. Susie had been allowed to wear her hair up at last.
She opened the door to the passage and looked out. It was pitch-black. She walked back and opened the door of her bedroom, steeling herself against the icy blast from the open window, and picked up the candle from beside the bed. She lit it from the fire in her sitting room and, holding it high, ventured out into the stone passage again.
Susie could not remember from which direction she had come. She picked her way slowly along to the left and, after what seemed like ages, felt her way around a corner. A shaft of white moonlight cut across this new passage. She edged toward it.
An embrasure had been cut into the great thickness of the castle wall, ending in a long, thin arrow slit that overlooked the raging, pounding, heaving, battling freedom of the sea.
The keep was perched on the top of a tall cliff. A small winter moon raced through the storm clouds over the glittering, turning water, and Susie stood fascinated, the flame of her candle flaring and streaming in the chill wind. She slowly put it down on a stone niche and moved closer to the arrow slit.
Susie had never seen the sea before, and this first glimpse took her breath away. It was exhilarating. She wanted to shout and sing and dance, but seventeen years of social restrictions would not let her.
She stood there for a very long time, staring at the tumbling water. Something seemed to loosen inside her, and she said aloud, “I hate him. I hate my husband, and I wish he were dead.”
“Don’t you want to be a countess?” asked a mocking voice behind her, and she swung around in fright with her hand to her mouth.
A young man stood looking at her in the moonlight. He was wearing evening dress, which hugged his slim, muscular figure. The moonlight washed the color from his eyes and face, but Susie noticed that his eyes were very long and slightly tilted and his hair was a close cap of tight silver curls. He had a firm but sensuous mouth, which at that moment was curved in a half smile. He looked like something out of Greek mythology, reflected Susie wildly. One of the beautiful, incalculable gods, forever mocking, forever cruel.
“You haven’t answered my question,” he said.
“I was quoting something,” lied Susie. “A line from a school play, that is all.”
“You would make a good actress,” he said in a light, amused voice. “You put so much passion and fire into your lines, I really thought you meant them.”
Susie picked up her candle. “You are blocking my way, sir. I am going downstairs to join my husband.”
“You won’t find him this way,” he teased. “I had better escort you. Allow me to introduce myself. Giles Warden at your service, ma’am. And you, I gather, are Henry the Eighth’s latest.”
“Henry the…?”
“My Uncle Peter. We call him Henry the Eighth, but don’t worry, he doesn’t behead his wives.”
“I don’t think this conversation is in very good taste,” remarked Susie, relieved to find they had reached the top of the stairs, where a lamp was burning on a small side table.
He took her candle from her and blew it out. “No, you are quite right,” he said. “Very bad taste. But you see, you are so very young. I was impertinent. Forgive me?”
Susie looked up at him, seeing him properly for the first time in the lamplight. His hair was gold, not silver, and his eyes were a light blue. His heavy eyelids curved upward at the corners. He was extremely good-looking in a sensuous sort of Greek god way—that is if you like sensuous Greek gods, which Susie decided she most definitely did not. Witness what had happened to her breathing. It was quite ragged, and surely only people you didn’t like had that sort of effect on your emotions.
“I forgive you,” she said in a chilly little voice as she allowed him to lead her downstairs, wishing he would take his hand from under her arm, since it seemed to make it go numb and her knees go wobbly.
“Has Felicity been bullying you?” he asked pleasantly as they finally reached the hall.
Susie thought for a minute. Felicity had been unpleasant and patronizing, but in Susie’s experience, so were most grown-up people. Susie did not yet feel grown-up herself and regarded everyone over twenty as being a potential parent. “No,” she replied, stealing another look at her companion and trying to decide his age. Around thirty, she guessed, and sighed. That put him definitely in the parent class. He would no doubt start giving her orders along with the rest of them.
The earl was standing in front of the fireplace in the rose chamber. He had somehow managed to change into evening dress, probably when Susie had been standing watching the sea, for she certainly had not heard him moving about his rooms.
The earl glared at his nephew. “Trying to poach on my land already, what?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” drawled Giles, and Susie looked from one to the other, wondering what they were talking about.
Felicity was dressed from head to foot in black velvet ornamented with jet. Although she was a tall woman, the skirt of her dress trailed along the ground behind her, making her look like a singularly healthy ghoul. The reason for this was that Felicity never threw any of her clothes away, and the dress had been designed in her youth to cover a wide crinoline hoop. She had simply closeted the hoop and kept the dress.
“Why did you invite me here?” asked Giles as he accepted a glass of sherry from a footman.
“To put your stuck-up nose out of joint, that’s why,” said the earl, hitching up the tails of his evening coat. “Thought I was too old to marry, heh? Well, I ain’t, and I ain’t too old to father an heir either.”
Giles swung around and studied Susie’s face. Her eyes were wide and innocent. He felt a sudden qualm. Why, I believe she still thinks that babies are found under gooseberry bushes, he thought. Well, she’s in for a nasty awakening.
“It doesn’t matter to me who your heir is,” he rejoined calmly. “I only wish I’d known that that was the so-called urgent reason for hailing me down to this drafty old dump. I’m not mad on titles, old boy, and I don’t need your money, so why am I supposed to get upset?”
The earl stared at him in a temper, his red-veined eyes bulging out of his head.
“You damned sneering pup. I’ve always hated you and that dreary father of yours. Him and his books and manuscripts. Never brought him any money, did it?”
“No,” agreed Giles, “but then I have all the financial genius of the family. I’m really sickeningly rich, Uncle. Why, how funny and red your dear old face has gone, and I swear the wax is melting on your mustache.”
“That’s enough!” snapped Felicity. “I’ll have my hands full enough with Susie without you two quarreling.”
“What’s Susie got to do with it?” asked Giles in surprise.
“She’s got to be turned into a lady,” said Felicity.
“Strange,” murmured Giles, “she looks exactly like one to me.”
Susie threw him a shy look of gratitude. Perhaps that perpetually mocking glint in Giles Warden’s eyes was misleading. Perhaps he was kind.
She had expected the dining room to be a vast place with a mile-long table, but it was, in fact, rather small, almost as small as the dining room at Camberwell. It was one of the keep’s prettier rooms, having a rose-patterned carpet to cover the stone floor and exquisite gold and green tapestries to cover the stone walls. Candles blazed everywhere, and the liveried footmen outnumbered the diners.
The food was reassuringly simple, the earl confining his gourmand taste to someone else’s table. Susie was urged to drink up her wine by her husband but Felicity mercifully put a stop to that.
“What is the point in pouring good vintage wine down the throat of an untutored girl,” she declared. “It’s wasted on her.”
It was to be one of Felicity’s few maxims with which Susie found herself in total agreement. She thought the wine tasted like vinegar and had preferred the sweet taste of the port she had had earlier in the day.
Felicity turned her tormenting, restless attention to Giles. “And what about you?” she demanded. “When are you getting married again?”
Susie flinched. Married again? Were they all bluebeards?
“I’m not,” said Giles calmly. “Once was enough.”
“Did she die?” asked Susie sympathetically.
“No,” said Giles. “She ran away to the South of France with an elderly colonel, who, I believe, beats her soundly every day.”
“How horrible!”
“Not really,” said Giles, looking amused. “I must have driven her mad. I treated her like spun glass and wrote poetry to her and brought her flowers and told her she was an angel from Heaven.”
“But any woman would adore that,” said Susie wonderingly.
“Not really,” said Giles, helping himself to potatoes from a dish held by a footman. “She said I made her sick, so she rushed from my extreme to the colonel’s extreme. She is happy in her way. Do not be sorry for her.”
“I was feeling sorry for you,” said Susie boldly.
He smiled into her eyes in a slow, caressing way. “There is no need, I assure you. It was a good lesson. I look at all women with the eyes of reality now. Even very pretty girls like yourself.”
“You’re all stupid,” said Felicity. “A woman should be a companion to a man. Your father and I, Peter, used to hunt together and discuss the problems of the estate together. He had no secrets from me. We were pals.”
“What about Flossie Hagger down in the village,” said the earl cruelly. “You mean he didn’t even keep her a secret?”
Felicity turned red. “I knew about that, but it is a lady’s first duty to turn a blind eye to her husband’s peccadilloes.”
“Here that, Susie?” said her husband, laughing.
But Susie did not know what they were talking about.
At last it came time for the ladies to retire to the rose chamber and leave the gentlemen to their port.
There was a long silence after they had left. The earl toyed with his cigar cutter and thought of the pleasures of the night to come. There was nothing more exciting, he reflected, than making love to a girl in that bed beside the open window. It had been a long time, but he could almost experience the erotic thrill of the cold air on his naked back and the warm, struggling, and protesting girl underneath. Pleasure would surely be doubled this time, for he had bought a new interior spring mattress from Peel’s in the Tottenham Court Road in honor of his wedding night.
Giles toyed with his glass and thought very uncomfortable thoughts. Never, he reflected, had he seen a girl so naive and so innocent. He wished his own rooms were on a different floor. He wished he could escape, but the servants had told him that the roads were blocked.
“Go easy with her, Uncle,” he said at last. “She’s so very young.”
The earl looked at his nephew doubtfully. There had been a time when he, the earl, had almost had Farmer Bligh’s youngest, but Giles had stepped in and threatened to horsewhip him if he so much as laid hands on the girl. The earl knew that Giles’s slim figure was deceptive and that his beautifully tailored evening suit covered a formidable mass of muscle and sinew. What if he should interfere with tonight’s pleasures?
Then Giles himself gave the earl an idea. “Where did you meet her?” Giles asked.
The earl had a brain wave. He tapped the side of his nose and grinned. “Stage door of The Follies,” he said.
“What? Are you trying to tell me that that beautiful, innocent creature is a chorus girl?”
The earl nodded gleefully.
“Then why marry her?”
“Blackmail,” said the earl. “I had her when she was a minor, see? I may not have been the only one, but her parents found out and made me sign a paper saying I would marry her when she came of age.”
The earl lay back, watching with amusement the rare expression of shock on Giles’s face. Of course Giles would find out the whole thing was a tissue of lies, but by that time he should have had a few nights fun and that was all that mattered.
“She’s a brilliant little actress,” observed the earl eventually, breaking the silence. “More than me has fallen for that butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth act. Why, ask Chalmers! He would have married her himself if he could have.”
“Chalmers is very wealthy. Why didn’t she accept him and release you from your promise?”
“Chalmers ain’t got a title,” said the earl, “and my Susie had a mind to be a countess.”
Now, Giles Warden had certainly known his uncle to lie. But he could not believe that his uncle would have the imagination to think up such a whopper as this. And Susie was not in the room. Seeing Susie through the distorting glass of the earl’s imagination, Giles seemed to realize that all her innocent ways were the result of low cunning.
He felt depressed and sick.
“I shall not join you in the drawing room,” he said wryly. “Have a good night.”
“I shall, my boy,” said the earl, grinning. “Oh, indeed I shall!”
A bare half hour later Susie crept shivering into bed. She had tried again to close the window without success and, although a fire was burning on the hearth, the room was unbearably cold, and the bed was pushed up against the window. As she huddled down under the blankets she realized the room was still lit by two bright oil lamps. She would need to crawl out and extinguish them.
She was just reaching to turn down the wick of the first lamp when the door from her husband’s quarters opened and the earl bounded in.
He was stark naked.
Susie stared at him in terror. The only male nudity she had ever seen was a statue at the Royal Academy, and the muscular marble figure had worn only a fig leaf. But that handsome stone creature left her unprepared for the reality of a naked, hairy, middle-aged man with a peculiar appendage like a pump handle sticking out from his body.
“Come here!” said the earl thickly, stretching out his arms.
Susie shrank away from him, and then the pursuit began in earnest. She fled toward her sitting room, but the earl got there first and locked the bedroom door and threw the key out of the window.
Susie ran hither and thither about the room, pursued by her gleeful husband, who was uttering noises like battle cries.
He made a dive and nearly got her, and she jumped onto the bed and was bounced off again by the excellent spring of Mr. Peel’s mattress and landed in a sobbing heap on the floor.
“Tally-ho!” yelled the earl, leaping high in the air and landing feetfirst on the bed with all his weight. His heavy bulk turned the bed into a veritable trampoline.
The steel springs uncoiled with a tremendous thrust and, before Susie’s terrified eyes, t
he naked earl was catapulted straight out through the window.
“By Jove!…” were the last words he said.
In no time at all, there was a sickening crrruuummp! from the courtyard below.
Susie was a very wealthy widow.
Chapter Four
The Earl of Blackhall was buried unwept, unhonored, and unsung, not in Westminster Abbey but in the family vault in the small churchyard in the village with the senior Lady Blackhall, Susie, and Giles the only relatives in attendance. The roads were too blocked with snow to allow any of the earl’s other relatives to visit his graveside, even supposing they had wished to, for he had alienated the lot of them long ago.
The older servants, who might have mourned the passing of their lord, quickly dried their tears on learning that the earl had left all his vast fortune to his upstart wife, who was no better than she should be.
The servants who had been present when the earl had been telling Giles of Susie’s disgraceful background had believed every word, and the grim murmur of “murder” could be heard whispering along the castle walls.
Giles was also troubled. He could not get the memory of Susie staring down at the sea and wishing her husband dead out of his mind.
He was almost relieved to return from the funeral and find the presence of a burly police inspector accompanied by the village constable waiting for him. Giles was now the Earl of Blackhall, and although he had not inherited the late peer’s money, the castle and its grounds and land were now rightfully his.
The inspector introduced himself as a Mr. Disher. Giles led the policemen into a small library on the first floor of the keep and asked them their business.
Mr. Bertram Jones, the village constable, sat in a chair in the corner and took out a large pristine notebook and licked the stub of his pencil.
“Well, it’s like this, my lord,” said Inspector Dasher awkwardly, removing his hard bowler and resting it on one plump knee. “We’ve been receiving anonymous letters about Lord Blackhall’s death. Now, as you know, Dr. Edwards signed the death certificate and said it was an accident. But in view of these here letters…”
