Lovely Lying Lips

by Valerie Sherwood

  Nathaniel Hawley, the girls’ father, was not there either although his son Brad was. But Constance had not expected to see the elder Hawley here, for this was a gathering of the young bloods, the ones for whom Constance served as a go-between, receiving messages at Axeleigh Hall and dutifully passing them along to Tom Thornton at Huntlands.

  And there, looking golden and relaxed, was Tom Thornton himself, regarding her keenly for he knew she had not been invited to this meeting. And Brad Hawley, giving her an uneasy glance, for he shared his sisters’ distrust of a female courier. There was Ned Warburton, whose gray eyes shone as she entered—she wondered if Tony and Ned ever had words over Ned’s participation in these meetings about which he probably knew. There was Jim Stafford, solid and calm, who hailed from Bridgwater and headed the group—his big head swung round to survey her. There was Cart Rawlings, down from Oxford. And a number of other young bucks from Bridgwater and its surrounds.

  And there was one new face, beside Cart Rawlings’s, that looked startled indeed to see her—the face of the newcomer, Chesney Pell, who blew out his apple cheeks and gave his blank face more than ever the look of a fat cherub. Constance understood now why Chesney had been riding alone. Cart Rawlings had ridden on ahead to make sure his Oxford friend would have a welcome.

  Constance, uncomfortable before so many hard stares, avoided Ned’s adoring gaze and came right to the point. “I have not much time,” she said crisply. “But I have a request to make.”

  “Speak,” directed Jim Stafford’s slow deep voice.

  “I do not have any messages today—none have been passed to me, although I expect Galsworthy to come by momentarily, perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow.”

  “Then why are you not at Axeleigh waiting for him?” wondered Stafford.

  Constance’s color rose a bit. “I request that I be sent to some other part of the country—perhaps to London, where I am sure I can be of much use to the Cause.”

  “For what reason?” asked Stafford, who was never one to mince words.

  “For—personal reasons.”

  Significant glances were exchanged. Stafford’s face was wooden.

  “I know the city well,” insisted Constance. “And I could carry messages by coach—”

  “Request denied,” interrupted Stafford.

  “Will you not even put it to a vote?” demanded Constance, a note of rebellion in her voice.

  “Very well, I will put it to a vote. Are there any gentlemen here who approve this singular request?”

  Not a hand was raised.

  “You see?” said Stafford. “We are all of one mind. Go back to Axeleigh, Mistress Constance, and await Galsworthy’s coming.”

  “Galsworthy could as easily stop at Huntlands,” put in Tom. “If Mistress Constance would prefer that?”

  “No, I do not prefer it,” said Constance hastily. “I will be glad to receive Galsworthy and to convey his message to Huntlands.”

  “Nor do we prefer it,” said Stafford heavily. “For your views are well known, Tom, and Huntlands may be watched. Better you receive such messages on the road or by other methods than to have a London agent arriving at your house.”

  “I’ll contact you,” Tom told Constance briefly and she stumbled out, hot with fury.

  If she had been a man, she told herself, they would not have dealt with her request so cursorily! And yet there was a woman courier who carried messages for the Cause all about England—they called her The Masked Lady. Everyone had heard of her and speculated as to who she was. So why should she not do the same?

  To her dismay, Ned Warburton followed her out and caught her by the arm. “Are you mad, Constance? They would never send a woman on such a venture! You would be risking your neck.”

  “It is, after all, my neck,” Constance reminded him shakily. She had made this request in a desperate effort to get away from the Warburton brothers—Ned who besieged her, and Tony who did not. And it had failed. “Let me go, Ned.”

  “Not until you tell me what madness has come over you.

  Are you so eager to leave the Valley that you would risk your life to do it?”

  “I risk my life here,” she said quietly. “We all do, you know that.” She wrenched away and fled down the corridor.

  “Did Mistress Constance tell you why she wanted to go to London?” asked Stafford, when Ned reentered.

  “Missishness,” said Ned in a hoarse voice. He stalked back to his seat and sat down. “Pure damned missishness!” Meanwhile Constance, hurrying back to the great hall, found Pamela drinking tea with Helena and Dorothea.

  “Ah, green tea?” she said in a quick attempt to divert their attention from what had taken her so long.

  “No, bohea,” said her hostess, offering her some of the fashionable drink.

  “We are lucky to be living in England, where tea is drunk,” laughed Pamela, reporting something she had heard from Tom. “For I’m told that in the Colonies they know not what to do with it and throw the liquid away and eat the tea leaves! And in Salem—which is said to be somewhere near Boston—they butter and salt the leaves to make them tastier!”

  Helena gave her slow majestic smile but young Dorothea almost choked on her tea as she collapsed with laughter. “In Boston, Father tells me, they eat the coffee beans as well!”

  Fresh from her recent rebuff, Constance sat silent and sipped her bohea. Dev had once told her that since tea was so expensive, the smugglers often added foreign matter such as floor sweepings to it, but she would not tell her hostess that. For a treacherous moment she thought of her old lost dreams, of how she and Dev had planned to be off aboard ship to America—and perhaps, she thought whimsically, to eat coffee beans in Boston!

  “Thank you, Dorothea, for telling me what should go into a tansy,” she remembered to say.

  “Yes, I too would very much like to know.” Pamela inclined her head forward. “You were both gone long enough to make one and here you come back separately!”

  “Oh, I stopped to speak to Melissa,” improvised Constance easily and Dorothea gave her a wondering look. Constance’s aplomb was a matter of frequent and violent discussion among the Hawley sisters, all of whom resented the fact that she could go into that closed-door meeting, while they could not.

  They chatted some more and then Pamela rose. “I am sure I smelled snow in the air as we rode over,” she said. “ ’Tis time we were getting back.”

  They said their good-bys and left on horses that were miraculously already waiting. Constance guessed that someone in the tallet loft upstairs was not only watching but listening and then signalling to a boy outside.

  Pamela was so incensed that she entirely missed the remarkable appearance of horses no one seemed to have called for.

  “Can you imagine Melissa not even coming in to greet me?” she demanded hotly. “Even though I was there to invite them all to our Twelfth Night Ball!”

  “Oh, did you invite them?” asked Constance indifferently. “I thought you’d threatened not to?”

  “Of course I invited them. They’re my neighbors!” Pamela looked scandalized. “Whose horse is that being led out by a groom?” she asked suddenly, craning her neck the better to see. “Why, it’s Satan! Tom must have been there all the time. That was why Melissa didn’t come out—she was too busy talking to Tom! And there’s Ned’s horse too and—why, there are more of them! That last horse—is that Captain Warburton’s big stallion Cinder?”

  The big horse belonged to Jim Stafford of Bridgwater but Constance didn’t want talkative Pamela to know that.

  “Come away,” she urged. “If the Hawley girls are keeping their lovers under wraps, let them!”

  The word lovers, she realized instantly, had been an unfortunate choice, for Pamela turned on her, crystal blue eyes blazing.

  “Tom is not Melissa Hawley’s lover!” she cried passionately. “And don’t you dare say he is!” She gave Angel such a nudge with her knee as to send the startled mare off at a gallop. They were
out of sight of Hawley Grange before Constance could catch up.

  “Pamela,” she cried in real consternation, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “Oh, yes, you did!” snapped Pamela. “Do not try to cozen me. You are always making little digs about Tom. ’Tis Ned you should be worrying about.” Her voice rose indignantly. “Couldn’t you see he’s calling on Helena Hawley behind your back, and Tom is only taking him where he wants to go as a good host should!”

  So that was how Pamela had rationalized her discovery that Tom and Ned were callers at Hawley Grange. Perhaps it was for the best. “Ned means nothing to me,” she told Pamela tranquilly.

  But Pamela wasn’t listening. Her voice stormed on. “And all that talk about tansies and people running in and out and Melissa never coming out at all—I never saw such a house of secrets in my life!”

  Constance had known one:

  Tattersall.

  Part One

  The Gallant Lie

  Upon her breast, she wore a golden locket,

  She wore it to remind her she had once been loved by him

  And come what may, she'll always wear that locket

  To sear her heart with memories of all that once had been!

  The Road to Devon,

  Autumn 1683

  Chapter 16

  Constance would never forget her introduction to Tattersall House in Devon.

  To London she had gone by coach and it had not seemed at all the fairy-tale town of her childhood. The streets had not changed much, but the faces were different. Strange, unfriendly. And at her inn there she coughed from the smoke of the sea coal, for only the rich could afford to burn wood these days. Constance did not care—her whole world was smoky with her loss, for with Dev gone her life seemed cast into darkness. She thought of him bitterly—and she thought of him all the time. She was thinking of him, hating him, when at dawn she took a westbound coach.

  And far to the north, just rising at a “safe” inn outside Peterborough, the man the road called “Gentleman Johnny” rose from his bed and stared yearningly out the window toward the south where he believed Constance lay in slumber. In the next room Gibb and his new light-of-love, Nan, lay sleeping. For Candless had been hanged for murder a month ago and Nan had passed on to other hands. Dev was glad for Gibb, knowing he had always fancied her. And Nan was a loyal-enough wench—she had tried to be loyal to him, but he had rejected her loyalty. For, fight it as he would, he knew now that his heart had never wavered from the velvet-eyed girl he had left at Claxton House—and now left again at a quiet little farmstead in Essex.

  It hurt his heart to think that he had lied to her, but had he told her the truth she would either have left him or demanded that he take her with him—and that would have exposed her to all the dangers of the road. And Dev, a man of wit and imagination, was not insensible to those perils. It had made cold sweat break out on his forehead to think that he and Gibb might be shot down and Constance seized by the nearest ruffian for his plaything. Or that she might be seized and mocked and hanged beside him. These were for him recurrent nightmares.

  Now he could devote himself single-mindedly to his “profession”—a profession at which the best shot in the North Country had a certain talent. He would come back to her with the spring, he promised himself. He would manage to put money away, no matter how difficult it was. He would garner enough to give them a real start in America. Together. And Constance would have all of her three wishes—a home, children, a husband who would be there when she waked.

  This, he swore to himself as the sun rose over England, would be his last season on the road.

  He could not know that Constance had seen him ride away with Nan and Gibb and put the wrong construction on it.

  Of such small things are disasters made....

  For unknown to him, Constance had already left her safe resting place. She was off with tax collector’s gold to launch herself on a journey that would take her as near to hell as she could ever imagine....

  Back in Essex, indeed she had frantically counted that gold as she tried to make coherent plans. She would go to America! No, she did not have enough money for that. She would go seek out Aunt Margaret in Devon—she had enough money to go there. Perhaps Aunt Margaret had not received her letter, or perhaps she had and her answering letter had gone astray. Yes, that was where she would go—Devon!

  Through a bitter sleepless night in Essex she had made her plans, and left—over the protests of the kindly farm couple with whom Dev had left her—by dawn’s first light.

  From London her stagecoach wended its way through Surrey and Hampshire, into Dorset and finally into Devon. They spent a night in storied Winchester where, six hundred years before, the Conqueror’s son had ridden for the Treasury—and claimed a kingdom. They tarried briefly in Southampton where tall ships took eager-looking settlers to America, and in Dorchester, with its great Roman amphitheater rising from the chalk. They crossed the Avon and the Stour and the Frome. They came within sight of the dark escarpment of the Blackdown Hills and crossed the River Exe at the great cathedral city of Exeter. Constance was impressed by the gardenlike beauty of the Devon countryside where late summer lingered into autumn, lush and pleasant and green.

  “ ’Twill change—the look o’ things,” one of her companions on the stagecoach, a rotund linen draper, warned when she exclaimed on the sleek fat cattle and smiling country girls they passed. “For you tell us you’re headed for Dartmoor and that’s a different kettle of fish altogether!”

  And different it was. She could feel that difference as well as see it when—in a hired cart, for which she had bargained sharply now her money was running low—they climbed by stages to the great plateau, some fifteen hundred feet high, that formed the wild interior of southwest Devonshire. The wind seemed to catch them as they came into the bleak wild country, and it whipped her cloak about her and seemed about to tip the cart over. Here in Dartmoor were sudden morasses and dangerous swamps, from the reeds of which great flocks of wild birds flew up in alarm at their passing. Twice in the distance she saw thundering herds of wild ponies that disappeared over the horizon. Her driver. Will Hedge, had had good directions to Tattersall House at the last inn and he bore toward it steadily, winding between the high tors, those sloping heights that rose about them crested fearsomely with huge boulders, great granite masses, broken and strange, that loomed fiercely against the sky. Once, when fording one of the many streams that seemed to be everywhere about, Constance looked up and shivered. For looming a thousand feet above her atop the great granite tor to her left was a gigantic pile of stones that resembled nothing so much as a craggy Stone Age giant staring out sightlessly forever toward the far-off broken coastline with its rugged cliffs and sandy beaches. Although she did not know it, she was riding along the easternmost heights of a broken chain of granite heights that extended south to the Scilly Isles and there sank into the sea. From this fantastic moorland spilled all of Devon’s major rivers—the Dart and the Teign and the Plym flowing southward into the English Channel, but the Taw and the Torridge winding north to empty into the storm-lashed North Atlantic.

  A sudden red sunset glowed across the moors as they neared their destination, turning the morass nearby the color of blood. Night fell over them suddenly and the man riding beside her muttered beneath his breath for he had thought to find shelter sooner than this and not flounder by night over this difficult and dangerous terrain.

  “We’ll have to stop,” he sighed, reining up. “At least until the moon is bright. The horses can’t see where to put their feet and they could step into quicksand or a pothole easy as not. A body could be lost here and never found.”

  “But look,” cried Constance. “Isn’t that a light?”

  “Where?”

  “Over there. See? In the shadow of that great tor—don’t you see it?”

  “It do be a light,” agreed her companion, squinting. “And most likely ’tis our destination for there’s nothing
else but Tattersall House on these moors for miles around, I’m told. But we’ll wait a bit till the moon is brighter nonetheless. Better to arrive late than not to arrive at all. Ye did say ye were expected, didn’t ye?”

  Constance nodded. She was afraid to tell Will Hedge that they had trekked all this bumpy way on a wild chance. If he discovered she was not expected he might refuse to go farther, and turn back. Or become angry and leave her here.

  “Then,” he grunted, “Mistress Perdant won’t mind rising up from her bed to greet ye.”

  Perdant, thought Constance. She must be Margaret’s housekeeper. Yes, of course that would be it.

  The moors suddenly looked very dark.

  Beside her Will Hedge was rambling on about the days when he had been pressed into the navy and flogged for not saying “sir.” Constance hardly heard him. He was still grumbling about it when they started up again and made their way over a moor silvered by moonlight toward that distant flickering light.

  Constance kept hoping it would not flicker out. Her raveled nerves were not up to keeping up this desultory conversation about matters nautical.

  Her tension increased as the light grew closer and steadier, beckoning to them like a beacon across the infinity of moorland that stretched ever away.

  She half expected a castle, strange and tall like the massed rocks atop the high tors, pointing like accusing fingers at the sky—but such was not the case.

  Tattersall House was a weatherbeaten, half-timbered building, two stories in height with a thatched roof. It clung to the moorland as if it had taken root in the reddish soil and might sprout yet another story in the next growing season. The windows were small with heavy wooden shutters and the door on which they pounded with an iron knocker that echoed hollowly was strong and weathered. A low stone wall ran from the building like a windbreak down to a couple of outbuildings.