by M C Beaton
“Mama!” whispered Cassandra in despair.
Lord Eston was suddenly sorry for her. “I shall be honoured to dance with Miss Blessop,” he said.
“There was no need to be kind,” said Cassandra when her mother’s attention was elsewhere. “I think kindness can be a sort of insult,”
“Would you rather I was downright rude?” asked Lord Eston curiously. “Would you rather I said I would see you in hell first?”
Cassandra’s eyes lit up with amusement for the first time that evening. “Something like that,” she said, “then this sorry farce would be at an end. I think I would like to be a spinster like my Aunt Letitia.”
“Why? Spinsters have a miserable time of it.”
“So do wives,” said Cassandra, “when they are forced to marry a man they do not like.”
“Miss Blessop, I would never marry a lady who did not want me.”
“Now how would you know?” asked Cassandra. “She could be threatened by her parents into looking as if she liked you.”
“Miss Blessop, ladies swoon with delight when I approach them.”
The hazel eyes studied his handsome face for a moment. “Yes, I suppose they would. You have a title and you are rich and you are not precisely an antidote.”
“Alas, what can I say to move your heart?”
“Oh, tell the truth and admit you could not give a rap were my heart moved or not.”
“When I first saw you, my blunt angel, in that … er … unfortunate pink gown, that might have been the case. But you see, I happen to find freckles very seductive.”
Cassandra’s hand flew to her nose. “Are they still there? Mama’s maid has been bleaching them for days.”
“Tell her to leave them alone.”
“You know, you are making fun of me.”
“In a way. You are so blunt. Cannot you flirt?”
“I am very bad at it.”
His eyes caressed her. “I would teach you.”
Cassandra shrank back in her chair. “Ah, you are determined to see if you can bring a blush to my cheek.”
“Something like that. I apologize.”
Old Sir Gerald Trust on Cassandra’s other side claimed her attention and she turned away with relief, and to her mother’s fury continued to talk to Sir Gerald for the rest of the meal.
Lord Eston found himself torn between pity for Cassandra and admiration, pity because she was forced to sing to him after dinner and she sang badly, admiration for her bluntness and honesty.
Miss Tonks sat making plans. No doubt Honoria would wear those diamonds to the Herefords’ ball. Now the ball was in two days’ time. She would watch and wait and as soon as those diamonds were taken out of Honoria’s locked jewel box, she would dive into the room and steal them.
A shadow crossed her face. Honoria would immediately have the house searched. Miss Tonks’s brow creased with worry. She could dart out and hide them in the grounds. But then … but then … all the servants would fall under suspicion, and that could not be allowed to happen.
But all her moral scruples about stealing from her sister had vanished. For this had once been the family home. This drawing-room had been a pleasant welcoming place, not like it was now, new and glittering. Honoria had taken everything, as she always had, and put her stamp on it.
At least I didn’t marry Edward Blessop, as I thought I might have done before Honoria took him away, thought Miss Tonks. I never thought he would turn out so weak and rabbity, but that is probably Honoria’s doing. She drains the life out of everyone who comes near. Unless Cassandra escapes, she too will become dull and quiet.
The evening was at last at an end. Miss Tonks slipped away to her “cell,” noticing with some surprise that the fire had been recently built up and was still burning brightly. She was just about to get ready for bed when Cassandra entered her room carrying a small pile of books. “Do you like novels, Aunt?” she asked. “This one is excellent. It is Lady Penelope’s Revenge. Most exciting.”
Miss Tonks took the volumes. “Well, it is most kind of you, my dear. I do not think I have ever read a novel before.”
“Why not?”
“Your mother and I had a very strict governess who frowned on novels, and then, of course, when I came to live on my own in London, I had not … had not … the … er … time.”
Miss Tonks had been about to say that she had not even had enough money to pay a subscription to a circulating library.
“I shall try these, dear,” she went on. “What do you think of Lord Eston?”
Cassandra wrinkled her brow. “He is all very well, but suitable for someone very fashionable and witty, I think. I would dearly like some man who would be a friend. But Mama will go on and on about Eston and so I have made up my mind. I shall give Eston the most horrible snub at the Herefords’ ball, and then even Mama won’t expect him to speak to me again.”
“She will be absolutely furious,” said Miss Tonks.
“I don’t care. Eston don’t want me, but he won’t do anything to show it because … because I think he’s kind, and so Mama will go on and go on pushing me in his direction unless I do something about it.”
“You will be severely punished,” said Miss Tonks.
“Pah. I have a good mind to run away and stay with you in that poky little room Mama says you have. But I must not stay talking to you, for if Mama finds me here, she will blame you for my bad behaviour. She always has to have someone to blame.”
When she had left, Miss Tonks wearily sat down at the toilet-table and reached up to take the bone pins out of her hair. There came a scratching at the door and she heard her brother-in-law’s voice say tentatively, “Letitia?”
“Come in,” she said, turning about.
Mr. Edward Blessop sidled in. “Are you comfortable?” he asked.
“Yes, Edward. Thank you.”
“Shouldn’t put you in a room like this,” he mumbled.
“I agree,” said Miss Tonks. “But as you can see, I have a fire for the first time and that is extremely comfortable.”
Edward gazed at the ceiling. “Thought you was looking extremely fine tonight.”
“Thank you.” Miss Tonks looked at him a trifle sadly. How she used to dream of him and long for the very sight of him. It all seemed very odd now.
“So all’s right and tight, hey?”
“Yes, Edward.”
“Going to the Herefords’ ball?”
“Of course not. I have not been invited and you know very well Honoria would not dream of including me in the family party.”
“You know, Letitia,” he said in a rush, “you may think you are hard done by, you may think you have a poor time of it, but, demme, money isn’t everything!” And with that, he scampered out of the room.
Poor man, thought Letitia, and yet he brought it on himself. Why did he tell me that? Was he trying to tell me he married Honoria for her money? And yet at that time, I fully expected both Honoria and myself to inherit equally.
She washed and undressed and climbed into the narrow hard bed and picked up the first volume of Lady Penelope’s Revenge after adjusting a pair of spectacles on the end of her long thin nose.
The adventures of Lady Penelope seized Miss Tonks’s attention by the throat, particularly the chapter where Lady Penelope dressed up as a highwayman in order to get those dreadful letters back from the wicked Count Orlando.
She finally fell asleep with a dreamy smile on her face, the candle beside the bed guttering in a pool of wax.
Miss Tonks awoke and blinked in surprise at the little maid who had set a cup of hot chocolate beside her bed and who was now drawing back the curtains. She had never been treated to such service before during her visits. The reason, although she did not know it, was that her adventures in London had given her a certain town bronze, which the servants, who were as snobbish as their masters, had recognized. So from being “poor old Miss Tonks” of previous visits, she had graduated to “that poor lady what doesn�
��t deserve the treatment she gets.”
So she sipped her chocolate gratefully and watched a footman come in with kindling and coals to make up the fire. She had nearly finished her chocolate when she was struck with the Great Idea. It came to her in a blinding flash. There was a way she could get those diamonds, a way that would not involve blame falling on the servants.
She would dress as a man, get a pistol from somewhere, hide in the bushes near the road on the eve of the ball and hold up her sister’s coach!
Chapter Two
Poverty is the mother of crime.
—MARCUS AURELIUS
CASSANDRA FOUND her aunt later that day in the morning-room, diligently cutting up old linen sheets and hemming them for handkerchiefs.
“Why do you not tell Mama you will not do such menial work?” demanded Cassandra.
“Because I should be sent packing,” said Miss Tonks calmly, “and it suits me to stay. Tell me, Cassandra, how goes young Edward?”
“He appears to be leading an exciting life in the navy. Ah, that I were a man!”
“I suppose he took all his clothes with him.”
Cassandra looked at her aunt in surprise. “Not all. There are some of his old duds left in his room. His shooting clothes, hunting clothes, things like that. Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know,” said Miss Tonks. “I often ask stupid questions.”
Cassandra smiled at her and sat down next to her. “Give me a sheet. I may be a dreadful singer, but I am very good with a needle.”
They stitched away in amicable silence until Cassandra said, “Does it not strike you as odd that your parents left all to my mother and virtually nothing to you?”
Miss Tonks sighed. “I have thought and thought about that. How could I have offended them?”
“Could it not be that they left all to Honoria as the elder but naturally expected her to look after you better?”
“I suppose it was something like that. Are you looking forward to the ball?”
“Of course not. It’s all going to end up in the most frightful row.”
“At what time do you set out?”
“Why?”
“I like to know things like that. Silly things.”
“We are supposed to be there about nine, and so I suppose we will be there about nine-thirty so that we can make an entrance without being too vulgarly late. I shall actually be wearing a pretty dress, too, and not that pink fright.”
“And your mama will be wearing her diamond necklace?”
“Not only that, Aunt Letitia, but her diamond tiara.”
“Ouch!”
“Did you hurt yourself?”
“No,” said Miss Tonks in a trembling voice. “The needle slipped.” The tiara as well, she thought.
“Do you have many highwaymen or footpads around here?” asked Miss Tonks in what she hoped was a casual voice.
“No, it would be too hard for a villain to get away with anything. Everyone knows everyone else in the country.”
“But surely with those diamonds, the coach should be guarded on the road to the Herefords.”
“It is only a few miles to the Herefords and tomorrow is to be a full moon.” Cassandra grinned. “I know what it is. It’s Lady Penelope. You’ve got highwaymen on the brain.”
“Perhaps.” Miss Tonks stopped sewing and fixed a dreamy look on her face. “Did I ever tell you I was septic, Cassandra?”
“Heavens, have you the plague?”
Miss Tonks frowned. “Perhaps that is not the word. I know what is going to happen.”
“Psychic. Or, as they would say in Scotland, the second sight. Dr. Johnson and Mr. Boswell travelled to the Hebrides to try to find proof of the second sight. Do you mean you can actually tell what is going to happen?”
“Not exactly.” Miss Tonks primmed her lips and held a square of sheet up to the light to examine her stitching. “More a feeling. I keep seeing a highwayman.” And that, thought Miss Tonks, might in a way buffer Cassandra from the shock of seeing her family held up.
Poor old thing. Got windmills in her cockloft, thought Cassandra inelegantly.
Later that day, when Cassandra had gone out on calls with her parents, Miss Tonks slipped quietly into young Edward’s room holding a laundry bag. Into it she put a coat and breeches, stockings and square-toed shoes. In a press, she found a large slouched hat. Now all she had to do was hope the clothes fitted somehow and find a mask. She then raided Cassandra’s room and discovered a black velvet mask and tucked that into the laundry bag as well.
She returned to her room. There was no key to the door, so she wed ged a chair under the handle and tried on the clothes. They fitted her slim, flat-chested figure excellently, but they did more than that. She felt like another person, bold and strong and wicked. It was such a pity she could not have a horse. Even if she could get one from the stables, Mr. Blessop would be sure to recognize it. She undressed and put the clothes away and hid the bag under her mattress and then put on a warm cloak and went out, ostensibly for a walk but really to find the best place to lie in ambush.
She reached the end of the drive and then walked along a country road. There were high hedges on either side, rimed with frost. The day was very still and cold, and ice in the puddles cracked under the iron rings of the pattens on her feet.
The servants had told her that the Herefords’ place lay west. Two miles from Chapping Manor, she found the exact spot. There was a bend in the road where the hedges on either side were extremely tall and thick, although devoid of leaves. She did a few practice stand-and-delivers until she felt as good an actress as Mrs. Siddons. Now back to the house to look for some sort of gun.
As in most country houses, there were guns all over the place, but Miss Tonks wanted something more portable than a fowling piece or blunderbuss. At last, in a drawer in the library, she found a box containing a pair of duelling pistols and took one. She had no intention of priming it. She could only hope that the sight of a masked man with a pistol would be enough.
Perhaps had it not been for Lady Penelope’s Revenge, combined with her sister’s more-than-usual crustiness and bad temper that evening, the spinster’s heart would have failed her, but somehow taking the diamonds became as much a way of getting even with Honoria as keeping the hotel in funds, and before she fell asleep, there was the fantasy world of the novel to bolster her courage.
The day of the ball started quietly enough and then the house became a hive of activity as Honoria began her massive preparations.
Miss Tonks was instructed to take her evening meal on a tray in her room and she accepted the slight gladly. She kept glancing nervously at the chipped marble clock on the mantelpiece. The noise of its ticking seemed to become louder and louder as the moment for her to take action approached.
For one terrible moment, terror seized her by the throat as she fumbled her way into Edward Junior’s clothes. But the minute they were on, she could feel that strange change of character coming over her again. She pulled the slouch hat down over her eyes, slipped the gun in one capacious pocket and the mask in another, opened the window, thankful for once that her room was on the ground floor, and slipped away through the glittering frost-covered shrubbery.
She made her way to the garden wall and climbed over, relishing the new freedom from corset and skirts. Even her walk had altered as she strode down the road. Miss Tonks was beginning to swagger.
She did, however, wish the moon were not so bright nor the frost so glittering. She felt as if she were walking across the centre of a stage.
But soon the road became dark as she reached the chosen stretch where tall hedges blotted out the moon. A fox slid across the road, making her jump. She climbed up the bank and stood in the shadow of the hedgerow and waited.
Cassandra, almost pretty in a gown of white muslin edged with a gold key pattern and with white silk flowers in her flaming hair, waited impatiently for her mother.
But Honoria Blessop was battling with a “di
vorce” corset, that latest of corsets which actually separated the breasts. She would not believe it was too small for her, would not believe that she had put on weight since it had been sent down from London two months ago, and so three maids pulled and pushed and sweated to try to get her folds of flesh into it.
Cassandra decided to go and show her Aunt Letitia her new gown. But when she pushed open the door of Miss Tonks’s room, there was no one there. Miss Tonks’s gown that she had been wearing that day was flung across the bed, as was her petticoat and corset. Deciding at last that her aunt had changed into something else, Cassandra searched the house and then asked the servants, but no one had seen Miss Tonks.
Miss Tonks was jolted out of her dreams by the sound of jingling harness in the distance and the thud of iron-shod hooves on the frosty road. She said a hurried little prayer and went and stood in the middle of the road, slipped on her mask and held the duelling pistol out in front of her with both hands.
She had chosen her place so that the carriage would turn the bend of the road and see her, but leaving enough of a straight stretch between her and the bend for the coachman to stop his horses.
The coach was very near now. The glitter of a carriage lamp bobbed round the corner like a searching eye.
Miss Tonks closed her eyes and held out the duelling pistol in a firmer grip and shouted, “Stand and deliver!”
“Whoa!” shouted a masculine voice. Horses plunged and then horses were still.
“Stand and deliver!” shouted Miss Tonks again.
“Do you know,” said a lazy voice, “I don’t think I will.”
Miss Tonks’s eyes flew open. She let out a gasp and then sat down in the road and burst into tears. For facing her in a racing curricle and holding a long pistol was Lord Eston.
Lord Eston climbed down and unhitched a lantern from the side of his curricle and approached the sobbing figure. He stooped and took the pistol out of his assailant’s nerveless hand and then untied the strings of the mask. The blotched and tearful face of Miss Letitia Tonks looked up at him.
“Playing games, Miss Tonks?” he asked.
