by Joan Smith
Chapter Sixteen
It was somewhere close to noon before a slovenly dame unlocked my door and placed a mess of potage on the floor in a cracked bowl. By that time I had long since got out of my ropes and had been banging on the floor, walls and shouting through the broken window, all without a single sign of reaction from anyone, I might add. I began firing questions at her, but observed that her surliness was due as much to intoxication as ill humor. She had been swilling gin since breakfast, to judge from the reeking odors coming from her mouth and her haphazard manner of looking around. She did not appear to notice that I had slipped my bindings. Not a helpful word did I get out of her, nor was there anything in the room to use for a weapon. She was so large and rough looking that I didn’t quite dare tackle her empty-handed.
Kitty had somewhat better luck, perhaps because Miss Grafton was there to help her. It was about an hour later that I heard a soft tapping at the door. I had no notion of replying, as I thought it would be my jaileress, and I preferred her to open the door to ascertain I was still within, on the off chance that I might manage to fell her. The bowl of potage, still on the floor, was a possible club. I was hungry, but not quite that hungry. The taps were soon followed by whispered words. “Beth—Beth, is it you?”
Who would ever have thought I would be happy to hear Kitty Empey’s voice? But I was. I bounded to the locked door and began shouting excited questions to her.
“Hush! Be still—you’ll be heard,” she said, very much in her old domineering way. “We’ll try to get the door open. Lorraine has a key she took from another chamber door. It might fit.” There were already the clicking sounds of this expedient being tried, and before long the door opened with a squeak. Kitty and a young girl dressed in black stepped in, the former looking very much like herself, except that her gown was the worse for wear, and her complexion had either suffered or she had been wearing rouge for the past several years. This latter was by no means impossible. I had often suspected it.
“Well, what have you to say for yourself?” was her first remark upon seeing me in what I am convinced was a worse predicament than her own. The indignities of the past day must have been evident on my person.
I was too relieved to reply in kind. I threw my arms around the old witch and hugged her, placing a kiss smack on her mole. She disentangled herself brusquely and pushed me away.
“You must be Miss Grafton,” I said to the other, a pretty, bright-eyed young lady, greatly disheveled, with jam stains all down the front of her gown—or some messy substance, anyway.
Kitty performed very solemn introductions, as though we were in a polite saloon. With a commanding look to Miss Grafton, Kitty nudged her forward to perform a curtsy.
“Now then,” Kitty said, the important preliminary over with, “I expect our first business is to escape. We aren’t likely to have such a chance again. Dobble has gone with Uxbridge somewhere, and only the slattern is here protecting us. She was three sheets to the wind when she brought lunch, and is likely completely insensate by now. At least she didn’t come running when we broke through the panel of the door. Fortunately our door was one of those cheap ones with a thin panel inset, and by bumping it with the end of Lorraine’s bed, we managed to break through it. I heard you screech to wake the dead, Beth.”
Funny I hadn’t heard them, but I had no idea of the size of the house, nor its construction. “Gather up your things and let us be off,” she commanded next.
There was nothing to gather except my bonnet. My cape and shoes were on me for warmth. My gloves lost somewhere. We went together down the attic stairs, along a long, dark hallway to the far end of the house, past about eight bedrooms, to get their cloaks and bonnets, then ventured, one behind the other, Kitty in the lead, down the main stairs to the ground floor. All was silent. The front door was locked, but from the inside with a sliding bolt. We went out, made a dash down the stairs, down the driveway, into a complete wilderness. The house was a summer home, set on the banks of a creek that was probably honored with the name river. There wasn’t a single sign of human life anywhere around us, but there were carriage tracks, leading to a road we assumed. We took off down it as if our lives depended on it, as they did for all I knew. We were considerably frightened of meeting a carriage coming up the road, and a carriage on this road could lead to nowhere but our prison. We met no vehicle of any sort before reaching the main road about a mile farther on.
Kitty, who has the nerve for anything, hailed up the first decent looking coach that passed and talked our way into it. She wore her good fur-lined pelisse and her hat had withstood the ravages of incarceration better than my own or Miss Grafton’s. With her high-handed manner, she got us all taken into Newport, which happened to be where the gentleman was going.
I thought it would be the constable’s office we headed to, but Kitty said the inn, and it was to the inn that we went. I had recovered sufficiently to be wondering how we should pay for this luxury, but knew Kitty would manage somehow. She ordered up a private parlor and a bottle of wine. She then turned on me with the wrath of Jehovah to demand an accounting of my part in ‘this infamous affair’ as it was henceforth known in her interminable accounts of it. “I’ll stay away from the police till I hear what you have been up to,” she informed me. “I have no desire to have John’s name dragged through the mud.”
After all we had been through, she hadn’t changed a whit. She was still Kitty, determined to rule me and the world with an iron hand. She had not been tardy to get Miss Grafton under her thumb, I noticed. She did treat the girl more gently than she ever treated me, but it was a gentle tyranny, nothing else. It was Lorraine’s possession of persons lofty enough to be termed ‘ancestors’ that accounted for it. There was an earl lurking somewhere there on the mother’s side of the family tree, it turned out. My own predecessors were not mighty enough for her, featuring numerous army officers and the like on Papa’s side. Somewhat better on my mother’s, but I took after Papa.
“So you forgot all about us once you got off to London with those rackety Mayhewses,” she suggested, delighted to think she had the whip in her hand.
I told my story, of which she believed less than a tenth, I think. But for the fact that I ended up in that attic, even one tenth would not have been credited.
The telling was interrupted by a million questions.
“How does it come the Mayhewses have not been enquiring for you?” she demanded.
“I told them I would stay as long as it took to get the matter concluded.”
“They can’t have thought it would take a month!”
“They probably have been enquiring. They would not have thought of enquiring at Wickey, however.”
“Who is this Sir Ludwig you speak of? I never heard of him. Sounds like a foreigner to me. Does your family know him, Lorraine?”
She shook her head in a negative. “Nobody in other words, and you putting up a month with a bachelor. Upon my word, I don’t know what the bishop will have to say of this.”
A request to hear her side of the infamous affair diverted her tirade. She was dying to get it licked into a shape that featured her as a heroine. A few details changed over later tellings, but this is the gist of it, as it first came from her lips. Lorraine was not allowed to say a word except an occasional corroboration of a minor detail.
“I gathered details of mismanagement of the Grafton’s estate—you know, about the sales and forgery,” she began in media res, the beginning familiar to us all. “My first plan of broaching my information to Morley awaited his return, but when Uxbridge came as bold as you please to snatch another painting from the wall for selling, I forbade it. He had got a piece of paper from that idiot Morley giving him permission, carte blanche, to do whatever he wished with the collection. So I had to tell him who I am,” she announced, as though she were a queen at least. “I told him quite frankly I meant to call in a magistrate to look into the infamous dealings he had engineered on behalf of the estate. He said,
‘Go ahead,’ bold as you please, but I could see he was shaken. He later that same day sent me a note requesting me to go to his home, only in Shaftesbury, you know, a few miles away, and we would ‘work out a satisfactory solution.’ I thought he meant to return the money he had stolen in exchange for my not pressing charges, as if I would be put off so easily! But that was not his meaning at all. Nothing of the sort. The rogue implied, when I got there, that I was to receive a share of the profits. That was his original intention, to silence me with money. I was never so insulted in my life. He had a very wrong idea of my character, and so I told him. Then what did the bold man do but threaten me. He meant to be rid of me before Mr. Morley got home—kill me, or do I hardly know what. He trussed me up in ropes and threw me into the cellar. Such a filthy hole I never saw in my life! But Lorraine,” she smiled benignly on this rich possessor of ancestors, “had come with me. He didn’t know that. She had gone on to the shops in Shaftesbury for half an hour and was to pick me up after at Uxbridge’s place. He found himself at point non plus when Lorraine landed at his door asking for me. He hadn’t intended harming her, for he knew she was too highly placed in Society, cousin to Lord Baxford—an earl. He tried to be rid of her, but she sensed something wrong and refused to leave. Indeed I had been a little leery of going alone, and mentioned it to her, as a precaution. Not that I had thought he would sink to outright violence with a lady. Lorraine stood firm and refused to leave. When she began to threaten having in the police; there was nothing for it but to chuck her into the cellar as well. I don’t know what he thought to do with us, and neither, I think, did he. He took on a good deal more than he bargained for, without knowing it. Lord Baxford would see to his destruction if other people did not consider it worth their while.” Need I say, the other people were myself?
“He realized, I suppose, that he would be the first one to fall under suspicion, and got us packed out of his house in the middle of the night, both drugged. He put the stuff in coffee, just as he did with you, Beth. It was the only bite we had all that day, and we were hungry and thirsty enough to drink it. I’ll never take coffee again unless I see it poured into my cup with my own eyes. We hadn’t a notion where we were. I never knew, all these days, we were on a small island—had no idea we had crossed water at all. He gave us a dose large enough to knock out a horse. It’s a mercy we weren’t both dead. We have been treated perfectly wretchedly. I haven’t been out of my clothes since the day we were abducted, the first of December, and it is now—well, I’ve lost track of when it is, but I suppose it must be January.”
“January the sixth.”
“Hardly more than a month—it seems years. I’m sure this gown could stand up and walk by itself. And yours too, Lorraine. A dozen times a day I asked him what he meant to do, and threatened him with all sorts of horrid reprisals if he touched us, and all the time I was waiting for you to come and rescue us. But it is exactly like you to go losing your memory at such a time. I never heard of anyone else ever doing such a thing. It is very odd, too, that Morley made no efforts to find us. I’m not half convinced he is innocent.”
I mentioned Morley’s assorted efforts, which she whisked aside as nothing with one bat of her hands. “The man is an imbecile, if not worse. The only thing that inclines me to believe him innocent is his stupidity.” All this without having thus far made his acquaintance.
“I wonder how Uxbridge tumbled to it I was involved in the affair? It must be he who attacked me at the chapel.” Thus far, I saw no way in which he could know it.
“I told him,” she informed me. “Threatened him a dozen times that Mrs. Knightsbridge, widow of Mr. John Knightsbridge of the Knightsbridge Museum in Edinburgh was my niece-in-law, and would be looking for me. He must have pieced two and two together and figured out who you were when Morley spoke of having met you at this Gwynne person’s home. Uxbridge left us in the Dobbles’ keeping for weeks at a stretch. He was away more often than he was here, but we had no way of knowing what he was about. He was afraid you’d suddenly remember who you were, and come looking for us. I told him you were well aware of all his goings-on, and were in fact at that very moment in London documenting his forgery of the Giorgione. I daresay he couldn’t believe his luck that you had lost your memory, but he would want to get ahold of you in case it came back to you. You were a positive menace to him.”
“Did you know he sent a ransom note in your name? Miss Smith’s name, I mean?”
“It was my own idea,” she answered, smiling triumphantly. “He didn’t know what to do with us. We could have died of boredom in that ramshackle house with the Dobbles browbeating us if I hadn’t taken a hand in it. The idea of getting a good sum for us pleased him, and it pleased me that he was getting more deeply into crime. The law would take kidnapping more seriously than a disappearance. Then too, the delivery of the money I hoped he might mismanage in a way that could lead the police to us. I even told him a sum that could be easily raised, so that Morley would get on with it at once. Ten thousand?” she verified.
“Exactly.”
“I didn’t realize he had put my name on it. Forgery—there is another crime to his list. If he doesn’t hang for this there is no justice in the land.”
Somehow, I was beginning to entertain a sliver of pity for Mr. Uxbridge.
“For all we know, it may have been the idea of ransom money that led him to kidnap you in the end. You didn’t know who you were, but I knew, and gave him a slightly exaggerated idea of your worth, to make him treat us with respect. Yes, as he was dipping a toe into kidnapping and ransom, he probably thought he might as well get something for you while he was about it. I daresay that jack dandy Soames you hired to handle the museum while we were away hasn’t done a thing in Edinburgh, after not hearing from us in a month. And I told him I would be in touch at least once a week. You might much better have left it in Ivor’s hands.”
The last name caused a face to pop into my head, and a feeling of revulsion. Ivor Knightsbridge, John’s nephew (thirty-eight), who stood to inherit the whole if I married, but as I had made no move to do so, he was trying his hand at courting me himself. Not that he cared for me at all. He would infinitely prefer I marry someone else. I was too forward to please him. He alternately dangled after me and urged me on Mr. Soames, a highly romantical young fellow lately graduated from Oxford, and looking about for a career for himself. The fact of my being rich and in a position to give up a good piece of the world for him appeals to his sense of the dramatic. He quite regularly suggested an elopement, but as he hasn’t a feather to fly with, nor would I have if I succumbed to his petitions, we only carried on an à suivre flirtation, vastly annoying to the relatives. They all worry about my petticoats, not only Ivor.
“I wonder what he meant to do after he got the money,” I said.
“Go to France,” she answered readily. “I convinced him he would be safe there, and with the ten thousand pounds he could have a very comfortable sort of existence. I had to make him believe he would get away safely, or he’d have taken into his head to kill us after he got the money. I convinced him British justice would let a kidnapper off, but cross the sea to apprehend a murderer. I daresay there is a grain of truth in it. He thought so in any case.”
I don’t like Kitty. I have to try very hard not to hate her at times, but I grant her a begrudging respect, bordering even on admiration. Poor Mr. Uxbridge went beyond his depths when he tangled with that vixen.
With our story all sorted out in a manner that freed me of criminal prosecution, Kitty was ready to call in the law. She strode to the doorway of the parlor to open it and call a servant, just as two gentlemen came pelting into the hallway. It was Sir Ludwig and Mr. Williker. I wonder what she thought when I ran forward and threw myself into Ludwig’s arms. No better than she expected of me, I daresay.
Chapter Seventeen
I forgot in my first joy of seeing Ludwig that he thought me a reprobate. I think he forgot it, too, for Kitty was treated to the view
of a quite abandoned embrace, which fueled her lectures for the next several weeks. She was soon into the hallway, pulling us bodily apart from each other, and enjoining me to some semblance of behavior, if I could ‘control my lust’ till I was alone with my ‘paramour.’ I can’t think what it was she read that gave her such a vivid vocabulary. The only books ever seen in her possession were of the most edifying and sanctimonious, usually recommended by her relative, the bishop.
Ludwig was glowering at me even while he clutched at my hands, wishing, I know, to demand an explanation and berate me, but put off by my woeful appearance and the total lack of abasement that would naturally follow the sort of behavior he imputed to me. To hide our shame from the onlookers who were gathering in open doorways, Kitty hustled us into the private parlor and closed the door, with a hard stare at those ill-bred enough to try to overhear matters that were none of their concern.
“And this, I take it,” she said with a sneer to Kessler, “is the person with whom you have been living since you say you lost your memory.”
“Who the devil is she?” he asked, in much the same voice.
“Kitty,” I told him, and giggled in mingled relief and appreciation of our mutual predicament.
