The Paper Princess

by M C Beaton

  The bed seemed to have a tendency to run about the room. He glared up at the canopy, willing the room to stop spinning.

  All at once he was stark, staring sober.

  The will!

  The will was still somewhere in Bessie’s capacious cleavage.

  His mind raced and spun as the drunken room had done only a few moments before.

  And then he gave a deep sigh. What could a bonded servant do about anything? If she survived the journey, which was unlikely, she would be sold. She would not be paid a groat until her seven years of slavery were over. Surely no American was going to listen to a mere housemaid’s babbling about some will. Salt water, or rats, or sweat, or any of the hazards of the journey would probably destroy that paper before Bessie ever reached America.

  Felicity was crossing the hall the next day when she saw a woman dressed in black bombazine standing with her face to the wall.

  “It is I, Miss Felicity,” she said impatiently.

  “You may turn around, Mrs. Jessop.” Felicity thought Mr. Palfrey’s treatment of the servants was disgraceful.

  The housekeeper bobbed a curtsey. “I heard the footsteps,” she said, “and thought it was the master.”

  “Has Bessie left yet?” asked Felicity.

  “Yes, but it’s ever so strange. She did not take a thing with her, and she even left fifteen pounds on her bed.”

  “I gave her that money. I was sorry for her,” said Felicity.

  “You shall have your money back, miss. Mr. Anderson has it in safekeeping. I would not feel sorry for Bessie. She could be lazy and a bit cruel with some of her remarks.”

  “But if she left the money and her belongings, something may have happened to her,” cried Felicity.

  “That’s what I thought. But Mr. Palfrey told me he saw her slipping out of the castle last night, and he says as how one of his silver snuffboxes has been taken.”

  “And did he inform the parish constable?”

  “No, miss. He said he didn’t want any scandal.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Jessop.” Felicity went up the stairs, wondering a little about Bessie’s sudden turn to crime. Then her thoughts moved to her prospective marriage. She felt tired and beaten down, and weary with grief. She had not made any further protest about the marriage.

  A little glowing image of Lord Arthur Bessamy’s handsome face rose before her eyes.

  She gave a resigned shrug. Dashing and handsome and tantalizing men were for more fortunate females. Best put him completely out of her mind. She had not really liked him very much, so it was odd how much the memory of him kept returning to plague her. She would, in all probability, never see him again.

  But Felicity was wrong.

  Chapter Four

  “Got a letter from that old rascal in Devon,” said Mr. Charles Godolphin to his friend Lord Arthur Bessamy.

  Both men were strolling along the pebbly beach at Brighton, having followed the Prince Regent to that famous resort after the Season finished in June.

  “Your uncle?”

  “Yes, him. A most odd letter. He wants me to go there.”

  “Has he decided to leave you his moneybags after all?” asked Lord Arthur.

  “No, he’s going ahead with this marriage. Wants to marry the girl in September.”

  “Miss Felicity Channing is the lady, if I remember correctly. Is she proving difficult?”

  “Well, this Felicity has, quite rightly I think, demanded a look at the goods first, or, to put it less vulgarly, she wants to see her intended.”

  Lord Arthur looked amused. “Do you mean they have never met?”

  “Not even for a cup of tea. Whole thing was arranged by the girl’s stepfather, Palfrey. The mother died last November and one would have thought they’d have waited until a year of mourning was over.”

  “So why does Uncle Baron need Dolph?”

  “He needs me because he says he’s fallen madly in love with the chit.”

  “A chit whom he has never set eyes on?”

  “He’s got her miniature,” said Dolph, “and gazes at it night and day. He says he feels like a lovesick schoolboy.”

  “Touching.”

  “It would be,” said Dolph, stooping down, picking up a stone, and shying it out to sea. “Only trouble is he’s a satyr, a lecher, and a boor. Nevertheless, he wants me there to hold his paw and put in a good word for him with Miss Channing. I am to present myself at Dawdy Manor in two weeks’ time.”

  “My dear Dolph, if you intend to go, you had better set out now. It will take you all of that to get there—with your driving, that is.”

  “Hoping you would drive me,” said Dolph.

  Both men came to a stop. The sun was setting, and a sea gull called mournfully over their heads.

  Lord Arthur gave a slight shrug. “Why not, my friend? Why not? Nothing at all amusing has happened to me since I was last in Cornwall.”

  Although it was quite cool within the thick walls of Tregarthan Castle, Mr. Palfrey was sweating profusely. He had just endured a terrible scene with his stepdaughter.

  He had arranged a meeting for her with the baron, he had sent her measurements to London’s finest dressmaker so that she might appear to advantage in the baron’s eyes—and then he had commanded her to dye her hair brown, hoping to make her look as much like that miniature of Maria as possible.

  And Felicity, who until that point had been meek, crushed, and biddable, with the one exception of demanding to meet her intended, had thrown back her head and let rip. She told him what she thought of him. She accused him of destroying her mother’s health. The Holbein he had lately purchased would have repaired the tenants’ cottages on the whole estate and have left plenty to spare, Felicity had raged.

  The whole unsettling scene had brought all Mr. Palfrey’s fears about Bessie rushing back. What if Bessie had shown that will to the captain or to anyone on board? The cunning captain would soon see the value of it. Why had he not killed her?

  But Mr. Palfrey realized that, although he did not mind a rap if she died on board of cholera or typhoid, he could never bring himself to directly take away another’s life.

  And those jewels! He was weary with searching the castle from cellar to attic. There was a long portrait in the morning room of the late Mr. Channing’s mother. She was in court dress and had a diamond tiara on her head and a fine diamond collar about her neck.

  Where were the Channing jewels?

  He was so upset, he decided he would have to brave the baron’s possible fury. The marriage settlement had been signed. Surely the baron would not back out of the marriage just because Felicity had red hair and was not precisely handsome.

  All his worries swirled about his head and settled down to focus on Felicity. With that redheaded jade out of the way, he could begin to lead an orderly and carefree life. He had not worried so much about Bessie for some time. It was Felicity’s vulgar scene, which had rattled him so much, and brought all the fears rushing back.

  Felicity, on the other hand, felt better than she had since her mother’s death. That scene, that angry release, had brought all her confidence rushing back. She rode out with Miss Chubb, contemptuously dismissing the escort of a groom as “one of Mr. Palfrey’s more harebrained ideas.”

  After they had gone a little way from the castle, Felicity slowed her pace to an easy amble and told Miss Chubb all about that splendid confrontation. “I know red hair is not fashionable,” said Felicity, “but to ask me to dye it!”

  “He is very anxious for this marriage to take place,” said Miss Chubb.

  “Pooh! It will not take place should I take this baron in dislike.”

  “Have you thought,” said Miss Chubb cautiously, “that should you decide not to marry the baron, and tell Mr. Palfrey about those jewels, he might simply claim them. He has every legal right.”

  “John will swear to the codicil.”

  “John Tremayne cannot read or write and has already sworn he did not sign anything
. And Bessie has disappeared.”

  Felicity frowned. Somehow, she had always regarded those jewels as an investment, as a dowry, as a trump card to slam down in front of her stepfather. How could she have been so naive?

  Of course, she could take the jewels and run away. But what respectable jeweler was going to buy gems from a slip of a girl? And an unrespectable jeweler would belong to the criminal class and would no doubt pay her only a fraction of their worth.

  “If I were a man!” she cried suddenly to the uncaring summer sky.

  She thought of Lord Arthur Bessamy. He had probably never known what it was like to be pushed around in the whole of his pampered life. That was what gave him his great air of arrogance and command. That was why he chose friends of a lesser type of man, thought Felicity, her lip curling in contempt as she remembered the gentlemen who had stared at her through their quizzing glasses and had dismissed her as a bumpkin. Lord Arthur was no doubt as bad as Mr. Palfrey—only happy when in the company of toadies. She wished for a moment that she could see Lord Arthur again so that he might not go happily into his dotage without knowing how much she utterly detested him.

  And yet… and yet, was he so very detestable?

  He had kindly treated them to wine and had not turned a hair when she had said she was a tailor’s apprentice. Damn Lord Arthur. Every time she thought of him, she became upset. Better to think of the baron.

  Felicity, in her mind, had turned Lord Dawdy into a genial sort of fatherly man, a bluff, rough traveler who would no doubt be content to have her company during his declining years. Miss Chubb had, unwisely, done nothing to explode these dreams, thinking sadly that it was as well Felicity used her imagination to resign herself to her fate.

  “Gad! Is this the place?” Lord Arthur slowed his team to a halt on a ridge and looked down in awe on Dawdy Manor.

  It had started life as a single-storied Tudor dwelling. One hundred years later, a prosperous ancestor had tagged on a second story, much higher than the bottom one and with large windows ornamented with fussy stonework. It made the bottom of the building look as if it were slowly returning to the earth, an impression heightened by the vast quantity of ivy that clung to its walls.

  “That’s it,” said Dolph. “Drive on, there’s a good chap. I’m mortal sharp-set.”

  Lord Arthur began to wish he had not come. He sensed bad cooking and worse drains waiting at the end of the road. It was folly to indulge a whim, to run off to Cornwall because a certain Freddie Channing and his peculiar uncle had sparked his curiosity and imbued the whole of the duchy with an air of novelty, which he now thought it probably did not possess.

  “If your uncle is as clutch-fisted as you say he is,” said Lord Arthur, “and keeps country hours, then you will not have any dinner until four in the afternoon, and it’s now only twelve noon.”

  It transpired that Lord Arthur was right. To Dolph’s plaintive request for food, the baron replied sourly that they should have stopped for something to eat on the road. This business of luncheon was newfangled nonsense, and he would have nothing to do with it. But they would only have to wait a couple of hours to break their fast. Tea would be served at two o’clock when Miss Felicity arrived with her stepfather.

  “It is as well I have arrived ahead of time,” said Dolph. “Three days early, in fact.”

  “Decided I didn’t need your help,” said the baron. “Anyway, you don’t like me, and you’re only here because you hope I’ll leave you something in my will.”

  “Yes,” agreed Dolph with what his friend, Lord Arthur, considered a singular lack of tact.

  But the baron seemed not in the slightest put out. He fished in his pocket and pulled out a miniature. “Here,” he said, “cast your peepers on this beauty. That’s my Felicity.”

  “Very beautiful,” said Dolph. He glanced up at Lord Arthur to see his friend’s reaction and was surprised by an odd sort of look of—could it be disappointment?—on that gentleman’s face.

  “Is it possible to have a tankard of something wet, baron?” asked Lord Arthur. “The roads were dusty, and I’ve a devilish thirst.”

  “There’s water outside in the pump,” said Lord St. Dawdy ungraciously. “My housekeeper will show you to your rooms, and I’ll see you back here at two o’clock.”

  While they waited for the housekeeper, Lord Arthur studied his host. He was a wreck of a man. One swollen leg, encased in bandages, was propped up on a footstool. He wore a grubby stock and an old-fashioned chintz coat covered with wine stains and snuff stains. He had a large round head covered in a Ramillies wig, a relic of his youth that had not been powdered or barbered for some time and had lost a great deal of its curl. Wisps of it fell about his bloated face, which was covered in angry red pustules.

  The housekeeper, a thin, old, bent woman, dressed entirely in black except for an enormous starched cap, finally arrived and led them up a shallow flight of uneven stairs to their rooms.

  Lord Arthur hoped the ceiling of his bedchamber would prove to be a little higher than those in the rest of the house, because he was tired of stooping, but it proved to be as low-ceilinged, sloping-floored, and dark as the rooms downstairs.

  The air was stuffy and stale, and smelled of a mixture of bad drainage, damp, and woodsmoke. He walked over to the mullioned window and wrenched at the catch until he managed to open it. Warm, sweet air floated into the room on the slightest of summer breezes. He leaned his elbows on the sill and looked out.

  The garden was a wilderness, but wild roses tangled and tumbled over everything in a riot of color. On a little rise to his left was a “ruin,” one of those picturesque follies built in the last century when it was fashionable for the host to ask his guests, “Would you care to promenade to my ruin?” It had originally housed a hermit, one of the locals whom the late baron had paid with a lifetime’s free ale to sit in it and look wise and ancient. The hermit had died of a liver complaint and had never been replaced.

  It seemed that the baron did not have menservants, for when Lord Arthur, finding no bell, shouted out into the corridor for washing water, an old chambermaid eventually appeared, bowed down under the weight of two brass-bound cans. Lord Arthur relieved her of her burden and asked for towels. She looked frightened and puzzled and then said she would try to find some.

  “What on earth does the baron use when he washes?” demanded Lord Arthur, half-amused, half-exasperated.

  “The master only washes at Michaelmas and Martinmas,” said the maid slowly.

  “But when he washes his face?”

  “Well, most times, me lord, he jist uses the bed hangings.”

  She came back after about half an hour with two paper-thin towels and a bar of kitchen soap. Lord Arthur cursed himself for not having brought his own valet. His Gustav, an energetic Swiss, would at least have bustled about and seen to his master’s comfort.

  He made a leisurely toilet, changing into a blue morning coat with plaited buttons, buff skin-tight trousers, and hessian boots. His deft fingers molded a snowy cravat into the Oriental, and he brushed his thick black hair until it shone with blue lights.

  He heard the sound of horses’ hooves in the distance and went back to the window and looked out.

  At first he could see nothing but a moving cloud of white dust on the sunny road. Then he could make out an open carriage with two occupants driven by a coachman with a liveried footman on the backstrap. He heard Dolph clattering down the stairs, but he stayed where he was, watching the carriage as it turned in through the gates and began to bowl up the drive. The gentleman passenger appeared, as it drew closer, to be a fussily dressed man with a petulant face. The lady held a parasol, so he could not see her face.

  The carriage rolled to a stop beneath his window. The footman hopped down from the back, went round, and opened the carriage door and let down a small flight of steps and assisted the lady to alight. She held up the skirts of her flounced muslin gown, exposing one delicate ankle to Lord Arthur’s gaze.

>   She furled her parasol, then stood and looked about her.

  Lord Arthur caught his breath. For this young lady was not the fashionable beauty of the baron’s miniature. She was slim, dainty, and very young—definitely under twenty, he thought. She was wearing the very latest thing in “transparent” hats—that is, a wide-brimmed frivolity of stiffened gauze through which her red hair gleamed like living fire.

  With a feeling of excitement, Lord Arthur turned from the window and made his way downstairs.

  “He is a bad landlord, this baron,” said Felicity, stabbing the dry earth with the point of her parasol. “If he is as rich as you claim, why does he not put some money into his estates? He must be almost as clutch-fisted as you are yourself. But at least, Mr. Palfrey, it is only your tenants’ houses you let go to rack and ruin. Lord St. Dawdy treats his tenants with equal unconcern, but also, unlike you, prefers to live in a slum.”

  Mr. Palfrey turned pink with outrage.

  “Guard your tongue, miss. Oh, if only you had dyed your hair.”

  “My dear stepfather, is it not well over time that you told me why you wanted me to dye my hair brown?”

  Mr. Palfrey looked sulky. “I sent the baron Maria’s miniature.”

  Felicity started to laugh. “Choice,” she said. “Very choice, Mr. Palfrey. You have indeed gone and shot yourself in the foot. Let us go in and get this charade over with. I am relieved I am not what the baron expects. For I would not be married to a miser.”

  “You will behave, d’ye hear,” hissed Mr. Palfrey, “or I will have you whipped.”

  Felicity paled slightly before the venom in his eyes and face. Then with a toss of her head, she moved before him into the darkness of the house.

  The old housekeeper held open the door of the drawing room. Felicity went inside. Two gentlemen rose to meet her. The third remained sitting.

  Felicity recognized Lord Arthur immediately. Her eyes, a polite blank, her face guarded, she curtseyed and then looked hopefully at Dolph—for surely her fiancé could not be that disgusting old wreck by the table.