Harriet left the bed and approached the window. What, oh, what, she asked herself, had she done to justify her involvement in such a situation as this? And then she recollected that a man was probably already dead because of her, so there certainly was a very great deal of justification.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
The landlady brought her tray of tea and some wafer-thin slices of bread-and-butter, which Fetcham had thoughtfully ordered, and Harriet managed to accept the tray from her and keep the door only partially open so that she could see very little of what was happening in the candlelit room until she had successfully closed it again. She felt very sure the landlady would have entered the room with eyes bright with curiosity if only she had been granted the least chance to do so, but Harriet was too well aware of the dangers of the situation, apart from its unorthodox aspect, to permit her any such opportunity.
The Marquis slept for another couple of hours, and then lay awake and watched her drowsily for perhaps another hour, after which he slept again, until a clock below in the hall chimed the hour of midnight. And immediately its chimes had ceased, she heard the rumble of wheels in the street below, and a carriage drew to a halt outside.
Fetcham let himself into the house and climbed the stairs with the utmost caution. It was hardly likely that the landlady, or any member of her family, would be about at that hour, but nevertheless the manservant entered the room with a finger to his lips, and Harriet understood immediately that they were to leave at once. But she cast a glance at the somnolent figure in the bed and experienced a purely feminine reaction. He was sleeping so peacefully, and in the candlelight his thick black eyelashes lay on his cheeks in such a manner that an illusion of such complete helplessness was somehow created despite the length of his limbs and her heart contracted because they had to disturb him.
“Muts we?” she asked. “Would it not be better to wait until morning? Or, at least, for a few more hours?”
But Fetcham shook his head.
“No, miss. That woman down below ain’t in no wise to be trusted, and we’ve got to be gone. Apart from which, Cap’n Markham wouldn’t want to be involved in this sort of thing, and, as his lordship agreed with me, the sooner we get down to Hollowthorne the better. There we can lie low until the smoke blows over, as you might say.”
“Very well.”
Between them they aroused the Marquis, and between them they got his cloak wrapped round his shoulders, his curly-brimmed beaver hat set well down over his shapely dark eyebrows, and his hessian boots drawn on. The Marquis groaned as they moved him unavoidably from time to time, and protested at last that he could dress himself. But due to the quantity of blood he had lost he was ridiculously weak, and his efforts merely threatened to delay them. Harriet cast a glance somewhat wildly round the room, and espying the brandy bottle and the glass beside it fetched him a fortifying but not particularly generous dose of the fiery spirit. He sent her a grateful look.
“Thank you,” he said. “And now I’ll have another!”
Harriet glanced quickly at Fetcham, and he nodded.
“It won’t hurt him,” he said. “We’d better take the bottle along with us.”
It was as well that they did, for by the time they had got the Marquis down the stairs and out of the house and into a comer of the carriage which was waiting for them, Lord Capel was threatening to faint dead away. In fact, he was unconscious as they drove away, and recovered to find himself lying with his head in Harriet’s lap and Fetcham regarding him uneasily from the gloom of the opposite seat.
Bright moonlight was pouring into the carriage, and the Marquis’s face was so white that there was one moment when Harriet was almost convinced that that proud and arrogant spirit of his had already deserted his handsome and completely limp body. But when she called his name sharply—and she could never afterwards completely understand why she called him “Richard”—he opened his eyes and smiled up at her languidly, and apologised for leaning all his weight against her.
“If you’ll give me a heave into my corner I’ll be all right,” he said. And then he asked with faint interest: “Where are we?”
“Crossing Wimbledon Common, my lord.”
The Marquis smiled peculiarly.
“If I were a Catholic I’d cross myself,” he said. “I expected to leave this place in fine fettle this morning, instead of which I’m being virtually smuggled out of the country.”
“Not out of the country, my lord,” Harriet contradicted him. “Only to Hollowthorne, where you can recover your strength.”
“And where my brother Bruce will ask a damn fool lot of questions, and preach at me if he thinks it necessary—there was talk of his embracing Holy Orders before he went into the Army and got mowed down at Waterloo. You’ll find he walks with a limp that will never allow him back into the Army.”
“I’m so sorry,” Harriet said.
“Oh, you don’t need to be sorry! He’s had his fill of the battlefield, and will probably end up hurling admonitions from the pulpit.”
“Is he married?” Harriet asked.
“‘Lord, no!” He glanced at her quickly, and in a faintly speculative manner. “Come to think of it, you and he would deal famously together! You’ve both got that ‘holier than thou’ air occasionally, and you’re both devilish determined when the mood takes you. And although he ain’t much of a woman-chaser, I do seem to recollect he likes red hair.”
“My hair is not red,” Harriet protested, not because it really mattered very much just then, but because in her opinion it was no more than the truth. And it was not the first time he had made reference to her carroty curls. “It is a shade I prefer to describe as chestnut.”
The Marquis laughed outright, which proved he was feeling slightly better.
“Women!” he exclaimed. “How full of conceit they are! Even you, who could be mistaken for a daughter of the vicarage if we didn’t know you were the devil’s daughter! But at least you can’t deny that your eyes are as green as a cat’s.”
“It depends upon the particular breed of cat,” Harriet replied with a good deal of stiffness. “I have known cats with eyes that were certainly not green, and even on one occasion blue.”
The Marquis smiled at her good-humouredly, and Fetcham, who considered his master was talking too much, urged him to remain as still as he could and not make unnecessary inroads on his strength. The valet’s eyes were forever on the moonlit road over which they were travelling, and Harriet at last sensed that it was because he was apprehensive of highwaymen. Normally the Marquis never travelled without an armed escort, but on this occasion it had been impossible to arrange for such an escort at short notice, owing to the necessity for absolute secrecy. Knowing that the coachman on the box was elderly, Fetcham was decidedly uneasy. But Harriet, unaccustomed to such a luxurious form of travel, found the smart pace at which they progressed curiously exhilarating, in spite of her anxiety for the Marquis.
The road wound like a ribbon beneath the stars, at one moment shut in by towering groves of trees, the next bathed in brightest moonlight with gorse bushes growing beside the way lifting their pale flowers to the width of the sky. There was very little that moved apart from themselves, for the birds were all nesting under the eaves of sleeping cottages, or in shrouded hedgerows, and in silent meadows there was only the play of light and shadow. Water gleamed, and dusky thickets held strange menaces ... And occasionally a light flickered under a sloping roof. A church clock showed up palely against the luminous night behind it.
One of the carriage windows was partially open, and the scent of cool grass came in. Harriet inhaled-it with a feeling of great pleasure, thinking strange thoughts concerning the circumstances under which she was travelling—she who had never travelled like this by night in the whole of her life before.
What a contrast it was with the ordered routine of Lowthan Hall, with the problems connected with Verbena’s limited wardrobe, with Robert’s return to Oxford, with Cook
’s arguments with the butcher. A wounded Marquis was lying against the fat squabs of an extremely luxurious carriage, a silver-mounted pistol in a velvet-lined holster very close to his hand, undoubtedly there in case the valet’s uneasiness should prove to be justified and a gentleman of the road should put his head in at the lowered window. But even the thought of anything like that happening didn’t seriously disturb Harriet. She decided that she was beyond being disturbed by minor happenings of that sort, particularly as she was unencumbered by anything in the least valuable, and she very much doubted whether even the Marquis had more than a few guineas in his purse, since his preparations for this journey had been of the very slightest. Fetcham, it was true, might have made more careful preparations, but a great deal had been expected of him in a short time and it was doubtful.
Nevertheless, Fetcham was anxious. In between watching his master’s face his eyes returned constantly to the road, a pale ribbon over which the horses raced while the coachman on the box exhorted them to greater efforts as he understood it was virtually a matter of life and death. But Harriet, after such a day, and with the Marquis’s blood still staining her gown, was grateful for such a miraculously smooth and apparently effortless means of travel.
Fetcham had hoped they would find it unnecessary to break their journey for a change of horses, but in the early hours, with Lord Capel in a somewhat peculiar state between sleep and unconsciousness, he decided that they had no alternative but to come to rest in the yard of a little tucked-away inn. The coachman hammered on the door while the manservant descended and prepared to enter into necessary discussion when the landlord made his appearance, and Harriet bent over the Marquis. He looked up at her in a glazed way, and she explained to him gently that they had decided they must, if it could be arranged, allow him to rest at the inn. He was in no condition to continue the journey, and it was only when this seemed to penetrate to his intelligence that he uttered a husky but violent protest.
“Hell and damnation, no! We must proceed! We cannot be far away...”
But the valet returned to the carriage with the landlord in tow, and as Fetcham was plainly not in any mood to argue with his master, and that master had not the strength to resist, they lifted him between them—with the help also of the coachman—out of the carriage and into the diminutive inn parlour.
Candlelight flickered; the landlord’s wife, in a voluminous nightgown, with her hair escaping from a cap that had slipped sideways on her head and was hanging down her back, got down on her knees in front of the cold hearth and re-kindled a satisfying blaze, and his lordship was ensconced in the corner of a hard settle while a bed was prepared for him upstairs. More brandy was brought—a very excellent French brandy on which no dues had ever been paid, and which the Marquis would have appreciated very much if he had been capable of appreciating anything just then—and Harriet stood by to make certain he did not fall off the settle on to the hard floor of the parlour if overcome by weakness. She had made the discovery that his wound had opened up afresh, with the loss of a great deal more blood, and from the blueness of his lips he was in very dire straits indeed.
She whispered urgently to Fetcham that a physician must be fetched. Fetcham agreed immediately and said that he would see to it that someone from the inn was sent to fetch one. Then the landlord’s wife, attired somewhat sketchily in more normal garments, appeared and announced that the room upstairs was ready, and the awkward little procession upstairs began. Harriet, who followed behind automatically, found herself addressed by the landlord, who hung back for the purpose, as “my lady”, and assured that the noble lord, her husband, would receive nothing but the most excessive attentiveness in his humble hostelry, and that she herself could be provided with a bed in a corner of the room if she decided that it would be better for the invalid to occupy the main bed alone, since he was in such a delicate condition.
Harriet said “Oh, no!”, in hasty and horrified accents; but a diversion was created, which she afterwards lamented, when the Marquis had actually been deposited upon the bed and he refused absolutely to allow anyone to undress him. He insisted that they leave him alone and allow him to sink into a kind of semi-drunk, semi-exhausted sleep. Not even Fetcham could prevail upon him to give ground in this matter, so Harriet was allowed to place a-distinctly rough blanket over him to ensure that he did not take cold, and while the others withdrew she sat beside the bed in anticipation of meeting the doctor and offering him as likely an explanation of what had occurred as she could think up in her present condition of numb weariness.
She had no doubt that Fetcham felt the need to refresh himself in the downstairs parlour, and she did not blame him. But for the first time it struck her that this was a situation which was likely to get alarmingly out of hand if she did not exercise the utmost discretion and caution in dealing with it. Her own part in the whole sorry affair was reprehensible enough, but as Verbena de Courcey’s governess she had to take extreme care that her reputation as a young unmarried woman was not in any way “blown upon”, as she felt certain the Marquis himself would have phrased it. And already the landlord of the inn had addressed her as “my lady”, because she had not been sufficiently alert, either mentally or physically, to correct such a misconception the instant she crossed the inn threshold.
She should have corrected him at once, of course. But she had not done so. She was not entirely certain in her own mind why she had not stated in her own clear voice, and most emphatically, that she was Miss Harriet Yorke, and that she was merely accompanying the Marquis ... Accompanying a wounded Marquis, in the middle of the night, and with no tittle of reason for doing so apart from the fact that she herself was responsible for his condition; and apart from everything else between them they had succeeded in depriving another man of his life...?
Her head drooped, and by the time the doctor arrived, dragged unwillingly from his bed, but decidedly curious despite his many protestations, she had fallen so fast asleep that no one could wake her. Between them the landlord’s wife and a little maidservant attached to the inn got her on to a pallet bed in a corner of the room, but were quite unable to remove her clothes because of a complete lack of co-operation on her part.
This was something to feel profoundly thankful for when she awakened the following morning and discovered that the room was full of brilliant sunshine and the Marquis was lying watching her from the pillows of a vast four-poster bed, the curtains of which had not been drawn. The Marquis’s face was wan, and the expression in his eyes was perplexed, but he conjured up a slightly twisted and decidedly amused smile as he recognised how complete was the horror which overtook her as she struggled up on her pallet and realised that they appeared to have passed the night—or what little had remained of it—in the same room.
“I trust you are feeling more refreshed?” the Marquis enquired, his smile broadening as she put up her hands to her disordered hair and sought to do something about it. “You have the happy facility for sleeping like a baby when life becomes too much for you, and I’m afraid that yesterday was altogether too much for you!”
Harriet struggled to her feet and tottered to the side of his bed.
“And you, my lord?” she asked. “How are you?”
“Very much as you would expect after being dealt with by some local doctor. I gather that the fool actually bled me—what do you think of that?”
“Oh, no!” she exclaimed.
“With the result that I am as weak as a kitten. But it does seem that my fever has abated slightly.”
Mechanically she placed a hand on his forehead, and was relieved because it was no longer hot and dry to her touch.
“It does seem that you are better, my lord,” she told him. “That is to say, a little better ... But I should have spoken with the doctor. I fully intended to do so.”
“Instead of which you fell asleep. And now the landlord and his wife have both decided that you are my wife, and your pitifully small amount of baggage has been brought up here
and you are expected to wash and dress in this room. You cannot possibly object, because there is no other room available—”
“But there must be!” she gasped. “I must have a room of my own!”
“That, I’m afraid, is quite out of the question. This is a very tiny, a very remote, inn, and mine host and his good woman have put themselves to considerable trouble to allow us the use of this room. I suspect that it is their own, and they are probably encamped somewhere up among the rafters.”
“Then I, too, can be encamped among the rafters. I cannot possibly wash and dress in this room with you, my lord!”
“Poppycock!” he exclaimed, as she examined her bloodstained dress with horror. “If you imagine I shall take an excessive amount of interest in your ablutions—and, by the way, that can with the coarse towel over it contains hot water, or did an hour or so ago!—then you must be very simple, Miss Yorke, for not even the most beauteous damsel with the most delightful and engaging curves could arouse my interest at the moment. I am in a bodily state which puts such pleasures entirely out of court. Besides, there are curtains which we can pull if you will lend me your assistance.”
But, afraid lest he should do himself some damage by raising himself on his pillows, she hastened forward and insisted on pulling the curtains herself. She allowed herself to show some gratitude for his consideration, and added that she would be as speedy as she knew how.
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