by Candace Camp
“Wait! No, Miss Verrere…”
Neville started after her, but Cassandra had a good head start, and she knew the map of the maze, so she quite easily made her way out ahead of him. Once or twice she heard him calling her name behind her, but she paid no attention. She burst out onto the smooth expanse of the lawn and stopped. Her aunt and cousin were walking along the path leading from the garden to the wide lawn. They looked at her in surprise, her aunt’s eyebrows rising in disdain. Cassandra smoothed down her skirts and walked toward them at her usual brisk pace, hoping that her face would not give away her inner turmoil.
“Really, Cassandra, must you hurry about so?” Aunt Ardis complained as she drew near them. “You always are in such a rush. It is most ungenteel.”
“I am sorry, Aunt,” Cassandra responded automatically. “Good morning to you both.”
She started to pass them, heading back toward the house, but at that moment, Sir Philip burst from the maze entrance, saying, “Damn it, Miss Verrere!”
Both Joanna and Aunt Ardis turned toward him, promptly forgetting all about their inelegant relative. Aunt Ardis’s face underwent a miraculous change, becoming suddenly gracious and welcoming. Beside her, Joanna dimpled and smiled and began to fan herself coyly.
“Why, Sir Philip!” Aunt Ardis exclaimed warmly. “What a pleasant surprise to come upon you.”
“Hardly an unlikely event,” Sir Philip replied drily, “since we are both staying here.”
Joanna tittered as if he had said something unbearably amusing. Sir Philip turned toward her. “Miss Moulton.” He gave her a sardonic look and continued, “I trust that you are feeling better this morning after your nightmare last night.”
Joanna’s mouth dropped open, and she glanced from him to her mother and back. Aunt Ardis was of no help, appearing equally astounded. Sir Philip looked toward Cassandra. She met his eyes with a stony gaze, folding her arms across her chest. Sir Philip started to speak, then stopped. He nodded toward them in a general way.
“Good day, ladies.” He turned and walked briskly away from them.
For a long moment Joanna and Aunt Ardis stared at his retreating form in stupefaction. Finally Joanna exclaimed, “He knew! Mama, he knew!”
“Nonsense. Just hush.” Her mother frowned at Joanna and cast a significant glance toward Cassandra.
“Oh.”
“Please, don’t bother trying to hide anything on my account,” Cassandra told them. “I am quite aware of your scheme to entrap Sir Philip.” She paused and added pointedly, “Obviously he is, too.”
“You told him!” Joanna cried indignantly.
“Joanna!” Aunt Ardis interrupted sharply.
“Well, she knows anyway.” Joanna pouted. “She’s probably been sneaking about listening at keyholes.”
“It is hardly necessary,” Cassandra replied coolly. “Anyone who heard your mother banging on your door and shrieking last night would have had a fair idea what you two were up to. And given the way you were throwing yourself at Sir Philip yesterday afternoon, it was not hard to guess who you were trying to entrap.”
Mrs. Moulton let out a moan of mortification, but Joanna started toward her cousin furiously, shrieking, “Why, you jealous cat!”
Aunt Ardis had the sense to grab Joanna’s wrist and hold her back. “Joanna! Stop it! Right now. I will not have you creating a scene at Lady Arrabeck’s house party. Things are bad enough already.” She glanced around the lawn anxiously, as if she expected the other houseguests to be gathering around and whispering about her. “Do you really think they all believe that we—that Joanna—”
Seeing her aunt’s look of humiliation, Cassandra almost took pity on her. However, she was in no mood to linger here, and she knew that if Aunt Ardis didn’t fear the scorn of the other guests, she would remain at the country estate as long as she could, searching for another prey for her daughter or perhaps even convincing herself that Sir Philip was still interested in Joanna himself. Joanna was, as even Cassandra was forced to admit, an exceptionally handsome woman, and Aunt Ardis was of the opinion that every man swooned before Joanna’s beauty. She never considered that anyone might be repelled by Joanna’s shallow, selfish nature or her silly conversation. It would not take Aunt Ardis long before she began to tell herself that if only Sir Philip continued to see Joanna, he would fall in love with her despite the trick Joanna had tried to play on him.
So Cassandra said flatly, “I am sure that they found it quite as peculiar as I that you were shouting outside Joanna’s room last night. It didn’t help that Joanna opened the door and told you that ‘he’ was not there.”
“You see?” Aunt Ardis exclaimed, rounding on her daughter. “I told you that you should not have said that. Anyone could have heard you. Why didn’t you think?”
“I suspect that Sir Philip must have heard her, too,” Cassandra added, hardening her heart to her aunt’s piteous look. “He was probably coming down the hall when you enacted your tragedy in Joanna’s doorway. No doubt he heard it all, and since he alone would have known for certain that it was he whom Joanna had invited to her room, he would have realized instantly what was going on.”
“I didn’t invite him,” Joanna protested, not very convincingly.
Cassandra did not reply. She merely cast her a look of patent disbelief that made Joanna screw up her face unattractively.
“Well, you needn’t think he is interested in you,” she huffed at Cassandra, “just because you managed to get him to walk with you in the maze. He would never have any interest in such a bookworm.”
“No doubt you are right,” Cassandra replied calmly. “As it happens, we met by accident in the maze. He seemed unable to find his way out, and I had to tell him.”
Joanna sent her a smug gaze. “You know nothing about men, Cassandra. No man likes to be told what to do.”
“How unfortunate, since so many of them seem in dire need of it.”
“Girls, please!” Aunt Ardis snapped, drawing attention back to the truly important issue—her own discomfiture. “This is not helping at all. We need to think what to do. I cannot bear to remain here with everyone staring at us and thinking that we—that you—”
“Engineered an incriminating rendezvous with Sir Philip Neville?” Cassandra suggested crisply.
“Really, Cassandra, you have a most unlady-like bluntness. It is very unappealing.”
“I’m sorry, Aunt Ardis,” Cassandra said with a noticeable lack of regret. “I am sure it must be a very trying situation for you. Perhaps we should leave.”
Aunt Ardis looked a little surprised, but a moment’s consideration had her nodding. “Yes, that’s the thing. We shall go back to Dunsleigh, and soon everyone will have forgotten this.” She frowned. “But what shall I say to Lady Arrabeck? I must not offend her.”
“Blame it on me,” Cassandra said cheerfully, knowing that was the plan most likely to please her aunt. “Say that I have been taken ill. I will go straight back to my room now, saying I feel poorly. This afternoon you can tell Lady Arrabeck how wretched I am and that I insist on returning home. Tell her you worry about me. Tell her I’m frail or something.”
“You are as healthy as a horse,” Joanna objected contemptuously.
“Lady Arrabeck doesn’t know that.”
“You don’t look sick. You look positively robust.”
“I shall do my best to look wan. Unless, of course, you would rather act the invalid.”
Joanna considered the matter, thinking of the appealing picture she would make, pale and fragile, leaning on her cousin for support as she made her weak way out to the carriage. Or she might even have to be carried out by one of the footmen—that handsome one she had seen in the hall yesterday, perhaps. Her lips curved up in a smile. “Yes, I think that would be best. It would be much more natural for Mama to be conce
rned about her daughter, anyway. Here, Cassandra, give me your arm.”
She put her hand through Cassandra’s arm and drooped against her. Cassandra stifled a sigh of irritation at her cousin’s dramatics, reminding herself that she would do almost anything to get out of this place and away from the odious Neville. She started slowly back toward the house with Joanna. She refused to think about the way that Sir Philip had ruined all her plans. All was not lost. She would go home and continue her search for those letters, and then…and then somehow she would figure out a way to find the Spanish dowry on her own.
CHAPTER FOUR
JOANNA ENTERED INTO her deception with such enthusiasm, applying white powder to her face for an interesting wanness and lying in her darkened room emitting effective groans and sighs, that it was all Cassandra could do not to slap her. Naturally, with Joanna “weak” in her bed, it fell to Cassandra to pack for both of them. She wondered darkly if her lazy cousin had taken that fact into consideration before she offered to play sick. It was the middle of the afternoon before Cassandra managed to get everything together and stowed away in their carriage, interrupted as she was by her aunt’s often contradictory orders.
However, finally Joanna, wrapped in a blanket, was carried down the stairs and out to the carriage by a burly, graying footman and carefully bestowed within, and Cassandra and her aunt climbed in after her. Lady Arrabeck’s daughter came out to graciously bid them farewell, and a few moments later they were wheeling at a smart pace down the drive and through the open iron gates of the estate.
“Whew!” Joanna pushed the carriage rug from her lap. “Get this thing off me. I’m sweating like a pig.”
Cassandra noted that perspiration was, indeed, making little rivulets through her cousin’s white powder. However, she said pacifically, “You put on a wonderful performance, Cousin.”
Joanna scowled. “Why did that awful old footman have to carry me down?” She was thoroughly disenchanted with the whole charade. “And no one was there to see us leave.”
“Lady Patricia,” her mother reminded her. “It was a very nice gesture, I thought.”
Joanna snorted. “She’s only the spinster daughter.”
“And so will you turn out to be, if you make many more mistakes like yesterday’s!” Aunt Ardis snapped.
“I! I made the mistake?” Joanna turned on her mother wrathfully. “It was you who came pounding on my door too early! You couldn’t wait, and it chased him away!”
“I came when we had agreed I would! He didn’t arrive on time, that’s what happened.”
“And that is my fault?”
“Yes. He wasn’t eager. You didn’t enchant him. He should have hurried to your room, and instead he dawdled.”
“I did everything I could think of! I smiled and flirted and pretended I was interested in those silly old writers he kept talking about, when I had never heard of them. I even left the lace fichu out of my afternoon dress.”
“Yes, and leaned over to pick up your fan several times,” Cassandra put in drily. “I noticed that.”
“You see. Even Cassandra saw what an effort I made,” Joanna said, oblivious to her cousin’s sarcastic tone. “The man was stone. I finally had to kiss him in the conservatory before he became at all amorous.”
“You were too fast and loose,” Aunt Ardis decided. “You made him suspicious. That is why he was lurking around, listening.”
Cassandra sighed and turned her face to look out the window, trying to ignore the bickering between her aunt and cousin and think about what she was going to do now. Despite her brave thoughts earlier, she was close to despair over Sir Philip’s rejection of her proposal. She had had such high hopes for him, had built all her schemes around his agreeing. She had been prepared for him to be difficult to deal with—he was, after all, a Neville—but she had counted on the Neville taste for accruing money to make him see the sense of their cooperating to find the dowry. It had never entered her mind that he would reject the story altogether, that he would term it a fabrication and dismiss her as a naive fool. And never in her wildest dreams would she have foreseen that he would be more interested in kissing her than in finding a treasure!
Her cheeks warmed a little even now at the thought of his mouth on hers. She had never dreamed that such kisses existed, let alone that she could turn to hot wax inside because a man did such unthinkable, immodest things to her.
Sternly she pulled her mind away from such thoughts. She ought to be working on a way to get the Spanish dowry without his help, not mooning around about him. Cassandra felt uncharacteristically like crying. Normally she was a very equable person; she liked to think of herself as calm, decisive and strong. But the thought of not being able to recapture the treasure that the Verreres had lost so long ago was almost too much for her. From the moment she had started reading Margaret Verrere’s diaries, she had realized that the dowry was the way out of her family’s problems. She had been counting on it to take her brothers and sister and herself out of her aunt’s house.
She had seen in Sir Philip’s eyes that he knew of the decline of the Verrere fortunes, but she doubted that he knew the full extent of it. Their father had died virtually penniless. She had had to sell off much of the furniture in the house to pay off his debts. She had even, heart breaking inside her chest, had to sell many of his precious books. Worst of all, she and her siblings had had to move out of Chesilworth, their ancestral home. It was a noble hall, but very old, and the years had not been kind to it. Repairs had been neglected, not only by her father, but also by his father and his grandfather before that. The west wing had been closed off ever since she could remember, because they had no money for the extensive repairs needed there. Even in the central and east wings, there were several areas where the roof badly needed to be replaced. Air leaked in around windows; floorboards were loose or bowed; almost all of the draperies were moth-eaten. Only people who loved it as much as her family did would have remained there.
But after her father’s death there was not enough money to pay even the skeleton crew of servants necessary to keep the great house running. Her family had had to leave Chesilworth and go to live with their aunt and uncle, only a few miles away in the village of Dunsleigh. The pain of leaving their home had been bad enough, but the humiliation of living on their aunt’s charity was a constant thorn in Cassandra’s side. Uncle Barlow, their mother’s brother, was a pleasant man whom they all liked, but he was rarely at home, spending as much of his time as he could in the village or in London or off hunting with his cronies. Cassandra was sure it was his wife’s shallow, venal nature that kept him away.
Aunt Ardis was a grasping woman who resented the presence of her husband’s impecunious nieces and nephews almost as much as she enjoyed lording it over them. She had never liked her husband’s sister, Delia, a vivacious butterfly of a woman who had outshone Ardis herself at every turn. Her aunt never ceased to complain about the extra expense and trouble Cassandra and her siblings entailed, just as she never hesitated to meddle in their affairs. She characterized Cassandra as a plain, mousy bluestocking of a girl, her sister Olivia as far too bold, and her brothers as young hellions badly in need of manners. She made sure that everyone, both inside and outside the home, was aware of the great sacrifice she had made in taking them in.
Joanna considered Cassandra’s quiet plainness an excellent foil for her own beauty, and she did not mind her being there as long as her own comfort was not disturbed. Crispin and Hart, Cassandra’s twelve-year-old brothers, however, were another matter. They were noisy, messy nuisances who teased her and disturbed her rest. But most of all she disliked Olivia, who at fourteen was already turning into a real beauty and a future threat to Joanna’s dominance of the small social scene in which they moved.
More than anything else in the world, Cassandra wanted to get her family out of that household and return to Chesilwo
rth. Her uncle was the boys’ and Olivia’s guardian, and she was sure that she could talk him into letting her raise them on her own if only she had a proper house in which to live and enough money to feed and clothe them. The Spanish dowry, she knew, would provide that money. The dowry represented freedom for all four of them—and now Sir Philip had carelessly trampled all over her hopes of attaining that freedom.
“—not that great a catch, anyway.” Cassandra’s mind came back from her gloomy thoughts at the sound of her aunt’s voice mentioning Sir Philip Neville again. She looked at her aunt in some surprise.
“What do you mean? I thought you said he was one of the best catches in England,” she reminded her aunt innocently.
Aunt Ardis frowned, thinking that the girl had too good a memory. “Oh, he would be a feather in any girl’s cap,” she admitted. “But he doesn’t have a title, you know. In that respect, even Lord Benbroke surpasses him.”
“Lord Benbroke is almost sixty years old and suffers from gout.”
“Yes, Mama,” Joanna put in quickly. “Not Lord Benbroke. I just could not marry him.”
“I didn’t mean that you should marry him, only that he had a title and Neville doesn’t. And I am sure that there are those more wealthy than he.”
“I have heard that Richard Crettigan is quite the richest man in the country,” Cassandra offered.
Aunt Ardis looked shocked. “Richard Crettigan is a…a merchant!”
“Yes, and from Yorkshire, too. Can you imagine listening to that accent all your life?” Joanna shook her head in dismay.
“But it must be comforting to know that at least there are other options for Joanna.” Cassandra returned her aunt’s and cousin’s suspicious gazes blandly.
“I have heard,” Aunt Ardis said loftily, ignoring Cassandra’s comment, “that Sir Philip is a libertine.”
Cassandra’s stomach tightened. “A libertine? Who said so?”
“I heard it from Daphne Wentworth, who told me it was common knowledge all over London. Of course, that whey-faced Teresa of hers had made no bones about setting her cap for him, and Daphne no doubt wanted no competition. Still, Mrs. Carruthers was sitting right there when she said so, and she agreed that he had a certain reputation.”
