Amaryllis

by M C Beaton

  The ballroom disappeared in a blur as he swung her around in his arms.

  Lady Warburton stood under the musicians’ gallery and watched, as if turned to stone. She saw the soft light in the Marquess’s eyes as he looked down at Amaryllis, saw him bend his fair head to murmur something, saw Amaryllis blush. The dance ended, and for a moment the Marquess and Amaryllis were lost to view as couples promenaded and chatted before the next dance.

  And then Lady Warburton saw Lord Donnelly walk toward a tall curtained embrasure of one of the bays of windows. He raised his hand and lifted the curtain. For one brief moment, Lady Warburton was afforded an excellent view of Amaryllis Duvane being ruthlessly kissed by the Marquess of Merechester before Lord Donnelly flushed and left the curtain drop.

  “Well,” came the voice of her husband in her ear, “that is very much that.”

  “Get Donnelly,” hissed Lady Warburton, “and bring him to the drawing room.”

  For once Lord Donnelly proved to be as angry as the Warburtons. He had been dazzled by Amaryllis, he had almost made up his mind he was in love with the vixen, only to find her panting in Merechester’s arms.

  “What are you going to do about it?” snapped Lady Warburton, gripping her fan so hard the sticks snapped.

  “It’s not the Middle Ages,” said Lord Donnelly sulkily. “I can’t kill her.”

  “I could,” said Lady Warburton viciously. “My poor, poor Cissie. This will break her heart.”

  For once, Lord Warburton took over.

  “Look here, Donnelly,” he growled. “I’ve sunk a mort o’ money in this ball. It won’t hurt me to pay more. There’s a small fortune for you if you get rid of Amaryllis Duvane. Take her away tomorrow and marry her, ruin her, or lose her for all I care. But it must be made to look as if she’s jilted Merechester again. Do you think he knows her handwriting?”

  Lord Donnelly shrugged. “I would guess if he ever did, he’s forgotten. She won’t come willingly. What have you in mind?”

  “Go back and continue to flirt with her as if you don’t know there’s anything going on,” he said slowly. “Then tomorrow we’ll waylay the maid with her morning tea and put a good measure of laudanum in it. James will help get her out the back way.

  “You, my dear, must write a note to Merechester supposedly from Amaryllis telling him you were only playing with his affections and it’s Donnelly you love. As for you, Donnelly, I’ll pay you half now and you can come back and claim the other half when you have shown us that we need never see Amaryllis Duvane again.”

  “Or, on the other hand,” said Lady Warburton smoothly, “if we are to see her again, she is to return in a suitably humble and grateful frame of mind.”

  “It’s easily done,” grinned Lord Donnelly. “But what a minx that is! Here’s my poor self almost on the point of doing the honorable thing. There’s nothing to it, provided you keep James quiet, put the landanum in her tea, and make sure that note sounds convincing.”

  The three conspirators returned to the ballroom.

  Amaryllis and the Marquess, reassured of their love for each other, had laughingly agreed to play their parts until the morning, and Lord Donnelly found Amaryllis more than ready to flirt with him. Cissie had noticed nothing amiss and was proudly led into supper by the Marquess.

  At last the ball was over and Amaryllis was free to return to her room and dream. Cissie and Agatha were well pleased with the ball, and Cissie chattered sleepily to her mother as she was being made ready for bed about how enamored of her the Marquess had seemed.

  Lady Warburton smiled indulgently and privately vowed to stay awake for what was left of the night to compose a suitable letter to Lord Merechester.

  Amaryllis felt she had been asleep only an hour when she was awakened by the jangle of the curtain rings as the curtains were drawn back to reveal a cold, frosty morning.

  James, the footman, set a tray beside the bed.

  “What are you doing here?” demanded Amaryllis crossly. “Where is Betty?”

  Betty was the housemaid who usually brought Amaryllis her morning tea.

  “Betty’s got the cold, miss,” said James, “but she prepared your tea herself and hopes you will drink it, because it is a special brew.”

  “Very well,” said Amaryllis. “What time is it?”

  “Seven o’clock, miss.”

  “Seven o’clock!” exclaimed Amaryllis. “Do you not think you could have let me lie a little longer, since I did not go to bed until five?”

  “Lady Warburton is anxious to see you as soon as you are dressed, Miss Duvane,” said James, sidling toward the door in that furtive way of his.

  “Oh, very well,” said Amaryllis crossly. Then the full beauty of the day flooded in on her. This was the day she would leave the Warburtons forever.

  James went out and quietly closed the door.

  Amaryllis sat up in bed and sipped the tea, grimacing a little at the taste. Betty must indeed be ill to put so much sugar in it.

  Suddenly, she began to feel dizzy and ill. Her limbs felt like lead. Her last thought as she tried to struggle out of bed was that the tea had been poisoned.

  After half an hour had passed, Lady Warburton came cautiously into the room. It took her another half hour to get Amaryllis’s limp form into clothes and bonnet. Then she put her head around the door and summoned Lord Donnelly, who was waiting in the passage.

  Lord Donnelly had elected to carry Amaryllis down the backstairs himself, not trusting James to do the job properly, and saying since Amaryllis weighed practically nothing, he would not need any help.

  He slung her over his shoulder. James was sent on ahead to make sure the stairs were empty.

  Lord Donnelly carried her easily down the stairs. He had just got outside the side door with her when Mr. and Mrs. Giles-Denton, who were addicted to early-morning walks, turned a corner of the building. Before they noticed him, Lord Donnelly had placed Amaryllis’s feet on the ground, had clasped her in his arms, and was to all intents and purposes kissing her passionately.

  “Dear me,” said Mrs. Giles-Denton, appalled. She and her husband promptly turned about and escaped from this shocking scene as fast as they could.

  “Good,” muttered Lord Donnelly. “They’ll tell Merechester. Now he’ll have to believe she went willingly.”

  The Marquess of Merechester reread the note signed “Amaryllis Duvane.” It had been a very clever piece of work on the part of Lady Warburton and had been the result of several drafts.

  “Dear John,” he read, “By the time you receive this, I shall have left with Lord Donnelly. We are eloping. I am sorry I misled you as to the nature of my Affections. I was sorry for you and did not want to hurt your pride again. But I cannot go on with this Pretense and yet I am too ashamed of myself to stay. Please forgive me. Amaryllis Duvane.”

  He rose grimly and went downstairs, the note crushed in his hand. It could not be true. It must be some plot of the Warburtons.

  Mr. and Mrs. Giles-Denton were in the hall, taking off their coats. “I do not understand the fast behavior of young ladies these days,” said Mrs. Giles-Denton, catching sight of the Marquess. “Hugging and kissing outside the backstairs for all to see. Disgraceful!”

  “Servants must be allowed some sort of life,” said the Marquess, making to move past.

  “No servant, Merechester,” said Mr. Giles-Denton, “but people of a quality who ought to know better—that Lord Donnelly and Miss Duvane.”

  The Marquess turned quite white.

  Lady Warburton swept into the hall, clutching a carefully dampened handkerchief in one hand and a letter in the other.

  “This is terrible,” she cried. “Amaryllis has left me a letter to say she has eloped with Donnelly.”

  “There was no reason for her to elope,” said Mrs. Giles-Denton. “She is not some silly young girl but a mature woman, well past the age of folly.”

  “There was every reason,” said Lord Warburton heavily. He came up to join the gr
oup and put a heavy hand on the Marquess’s shoulder as if arresting him. “This is a sad blow. They have taken all my poor wife’s jewelry.”

  Lady Warburton looked at her husband in open-mouthed admiration. Before this, she had never credited the man with having any imagination at all.

  The Marquess turned on his heel and strode away. Lady Evans and Sir Gareth came down the stairs demanding to know the reason for all the fuss.

  Into Amaryllis’s bedroom strode the Marquess. He opened the closet. All her clothes hung on their hangers. He jerked open the drawers of a bureau and frowned down at the neatly ironed and darned underthings. The bed was unmade, and a cup and saucer lay on the floor beside the bed where they had fallen. He slowly picked up the cup and sniffed at the dregs, his face suddenly sharp with anxiety.

  He ran lightly down the backstairs and turned off into the kitchens. “Who took up Miss Duvane’s tea this morning?” he asked the cook, Mrs. Palmer.

  A housemaid bobbed a curtsy and said that James, the footman, had insisted on taking it up, and since she had so much work with the extra house guests, she had let him do it.

  “Get James!” ordered the Marquess, no longer looking handsome and elegant but large and threatening. Servants scurried this way and that, but all reported failure. James was nowhere to be found.

  The Marquess made his way back to the hall, where everyone was now assembled.

  Felicia threw herself at him, screaming, “Wasn’t it howwible of Amaryllis?” Cissie and Agatha also clutched at him, howling out the iniquities of Amaryllis Duvane.

  The Marquess shook them off.

  “I have reason to believe that Miss Duvane was drugged and taken forcibly from this house.”

  A babble of voices greeted this. “Nonsense!” said Lady Warburton, louder than the rest.

  The Marquess threw her a look of contempt and shouldered past them all to the door.

  “Where are you going?” shrieked Felicia and Cissie in chorus.

  “I am going to find my fiancée,” he said quietly, “and no matter what has happened to her, I am going to marry her. I will see you in court, Warburton.”

  He marched out and slammed the door on the shrieks and exclamations.

  Joseph Chalmers came running after him. “Is there anything I can do, John?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said the Marquess, “find that footman, James, and thrash the life out of him until he tells the truth. He had a hand in this plot.”

  When his hunter was saddled up, he set off down the drive of Patterns at full gallop.

  He only slowed his pace when he was well out on the road. The Warburton coachman had told him that Lady Warburton’s light traveling carriage was missing, although no one had seen it leave. He would not find them, thought the Marquess, if he continued to ride madly off in what might well prove to be the wrong direction.

  By dint of asking and questioning everyone he came across, he found a light traveling carriage had been seen heading for the London road.

  A farmer told him if he cut across the fields to the west, he could take miles off the journey. Hoping the good-natured farmer had not misled him, the Marquess set off across the fields, his large hunter, Brutus, taking the fences and walls as if following hounds.

  At the first toll on the London road, he got news of them. A gentleman driving a traveling carriage with closed curtains had passed an hour before.

  The Marquess thanked the tollkeeper and rode grimly on. He would have continued headlong on the London road had not prudence caused him to slow and ask a farm laborer sitting on a wall by the side of the road for news of the carriage.

  After an agonizingly long time, the laborer creaked into speech and gave the information that a traveling carriage had swung off from the London road at the crossroads and had headed toward the town of Bannington.

  Tossing him a coin, the Marquess set off again. He had ridden many miles, and his horse was tired. It was late afternoon, and the winter’s day was growing dark. But if his poor Brutus was flagging, then it meant that Donnelly’s horses would be tiring as well, and he would no doubt be searching for an out-of-the-way posting house to change his team.

  A noisy yellow sunset was lighting up the underside of great purple clouds, heralding a stormy night ahead. Twilight was already playing tricks with the Marquess’s tired eyes. At times he would spur on his horse to greater efforts, sure that he saw a carriage ahead, only to find it was a large rock or an overturned cart.

  Gradually houses began to appear on either side of the road, rushlight and candlelight flickering in the gathering dusk. With a great sigh, a cold wind rushed across the barren winter fields, sending brown and yellow leaves spiraling down on the road in front of him.

  And then all at once, around a bend in the narrow road, stood a posting house called the Prince of Wales.

  It was a small hostelry, but looked well-kept and prosperous with its red brick walls and gleaming white shutters.

  An ostler came running up.

  “Has a traveling carriage stopped here recently?” asked the Marquess. “A carriage driven by a gentleman with a young lady inside?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the ostler. “The lady was mortal sick. The gentleman was all for changing the horses and going ahead, but Mr. Chisholm, that’s landlord, that is, he said it would be a crime to force the lady to go on without rest.”

  “Take my horse to the stables,” said the Marquess, dismounting, “and see that he is rubbed down and fed and watered.”

  The ostler led the tired horse away to the stables, and the Marquess strode into the inn, his hunting crop held in his hand.

  Mr. Chisholm, the landlord, recognizing a member of the Quality, bowed low and began a lengthy catalogue of the amenities and menu of his establishment.

  The Marquess cut the catalogue short by holding up his hand for silence.

  “A lady has been brought to this inn against her will,” he snapped. “Where is she?”

  The landlord stood with his mouth open and then vouchsafed that a lady was in the best bedroom upstairs and the gentleman who had brought her was in the tap.

  The Marquess walked into the tap with the landlord at his heels.

  Lord Donnelly was lounging by an open window, tankard in hand, looking dreamily out at the inn garden. He had decided that when Amaryllis was fully recovered, he would tell her the truth. That way she could not return to Patterns. The idea of having an attractive female companion with him on his future adventures appealed to him strongly. Of course, she would be angry and furious, but what else could she do? The idea that Amaryllis might take the lot of them to court never crossed his mind. Women were the weaker sex and would no more dream of taking a matter to law than they would of running for Parliament.

  It was pleasant in the inn, listening to the soft burr of the local people’s voices and the crackling of the fire. The air was growing chill, and he was just debating whether to close the window when his Celtic mind sensed an air of menace directly behind him.

  Lord Donnelly twisted his head and saw the large bulk of the Marquess of Merechester looming in the doorway of the tap.

  He gave him one startled look and then dived headfirst through the window, tumbling over on the ground like an acrobat and plunging into the darkness of a small wood beside the inn.

  The Marquess leaped through the window after him, but as he was broader in the chest than Lord Donnelly and his shoulders became stuck in the window frame in the process, valuable time was lost.

  The Marquess returned shortly, knowing it would be almost impossible to find Donnelly in the dark. He asked to be shown to Amaryllis’s room while the landlord sent for the parish constable and organized a search party.

  The landlord’s wife, Mrs. Chisholm, whispered to him as she led him up the narrow inn stairs, “I looked in on the lady, my lord, a little while ago and she was sleeping like a lamb.”

  “If she is still asleep, I won’t disturb her,” said the Marquess, “but I must assure myself
that all is well with her before I join the search for that villain.” The Marquess had already given the landlord and his wife a brief outline of the plot against Amaryllis.

  He went into the low-ceilinged bedroom. Mrs. Chisholm left, closing the door behind her.

  Amaryllis lay asleep on top of the bed. The Marquess pulled up a chair to the head of the bed and studied her sleeping face. There was a faint pink in her cheeks, and she seemed to have suffered no ill effects from whatever drug had been given her.

  But rage against Donnelly consumed him. He was about to leave and join the search party when Amaryllis suddenly opened her eyes. She looked for a long moment at the Marquess in a dazed kind of way, and then memory came flooding back.

  “John!” she cried, struggling to sit up against the pillows.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and cradled her in his arms.

  “I feel dizzy,” said Amaryllis faintly, putting a hand to her head. “Oh, there was something in the tea. Then Lord Donnelly was bending over me in some carriage. I tried to stay awake. I tried to scream but no sound came out. He. . . he laughed and said I might as well get accustomed to the sight of him, because he was taking me away. Then I think I must have fainted.”

  “It is all right now,” murmured the Marquess. “Your morning tea was drugged. The Warburtons are behind this. Donnelly escaped. You must let me go, my love, for I mean to thrash that scoundrel.”

  Amaryllis clutched at him. “Don’t stay away too long,” she begged. “What if he should return while you are absent?”

  “I will post a man outside your door, my sweeting.” He kissed her mouth very gently.

  Amaryllis watched him go. Fear kept her awake for some time after he had left, but then the lingering effects of the drug began to affect her and she plunged once more into a deep sleep.

  The Marquess and the search party scoured the woods and the surrounding roads and fields throughout the night, but could find no trace of Lord Donnelly.

  Unable to sleep, the Marquess, in company with the local magistrate and two of the parish constables, traveled to Patterns.

  The house guests had left. There were only the Warburtons to deal with. They were very convincing in their shock and amazement that they could be accused of such gothic behavior as arranging for the drugging of Amaryllis Duvane and her subsequent abduction by Lord Donnelly. Lady Warburton was magnificent. Tears trembling on her lashes, she produced her empty jewel box, explaining that she had had every reason to call the authorities herself but had not done so out of fondness and concern for Amaryllis.