Lovely Lying Lips

by Valerie Sherwood

  There was a barrenness to the place as if nobody lived there.

  Constance, exhausted by her jolting journey, leaned against the door and prayed in her heart that Margaret Archer was still there and that she had not forgotten the letter she had written to Sir John. Or at least that this Perdant woman would know where to find her.

  She gave a start at the creaking sound of a bolt being shot on the other side of the door. It creaked inward into darkness for there was no light at all in the hall. It had been suddenly extinguished.

  Then she felt Will Hedge, who was almost touching her, give a start as well and realized that the dull gleam she could see in the reflected moonlight from outside came from the barrel of a large pistol pointed directly at them.

  “What do you seek at Tattersall by night?” inquired a calm voice. A woman’s voice. It had a purring lilt to it but there was a grim note that gave it force.

  Constance saw that Will Hedge was taken aback by this reception. “Why—I’m here to deliver this young lady who’s expected,” he blustered.

  “Are there others with you?”

  “Only the two of us. Speak up, girl.” Will gave Constance a rough nudge with his elbow.

  Constance found her voice. “I’m Constance Dacey, Margaret Archer’s niece. She wrote to Claxton House about me. I have her letter...” Her voice dwindled away as the cold blue barrel of the pistol remained unwaveringly fixed on them.

  There was a moment of silence. Then the gun barrel swung down. “Clytie,” called that calm voice. “Come down here and bring a light. We know the way but these strangers could break their necks in this dark hall blundering about.”

  So they were to be allowed in, at least! Constance felt almost dizzy from relief. She still could not see the face of the woman who had held the gun on them so steadily, only a tall dim shape as her eyes grew accustomed to the dimness.

  Now a light was flickering down the stairway at the far end of the hall and Constance could see as the light approached that a scared-looking servant girl was holding a guttering candle in a round dishlike holder. Even that gave them no chance to view their hostess for she had already brushed past Clytie.

  “Are—are you Mistress Perdant?” asked Constance in a strained voice.

  “Yes, I am.” And, still over her shoulder, “Bar the door, Clytie, and then bring some brandy. Our guests look as if they could use it.”

  Constance wondered if Mistress Perdant had eyes like a cat and could see in the dark, as Clytie led them toward benches that flanked an oaken table in the center of the room. The long wavering shadows cast by the single candle gave the whole scene an eerie look. Mistress Perdant was just disappearing up the wide Jacobean stairway at the back, down which Clytie had come. Her back was slender and lithe and above it was a great deal of hair piled up in helter-skelter fashion. She moved with a girl’s light step. From the dark above, her voice floated down to them. “Clytie, take their things and bring our guests something to eat. I’ll see if I can rouse Lys.”

  Constance found herself seated in a big, squarish, stone-floored room with exposed crossbeams on the low ceiling above her. To the left of the entrance yawned a huge fireplace with a long plain mantel on which reposed a row of polished pewter plates. There was a heavy paneled door which she guessed must lead to the parlour, another that must lead to the kitchen for Clytie had disappeared through it, and at the far end past the stairway was a door with heavy iron studding which must lead outside. Two small deep-silled windows looked out over the moon-silvered moors.

  Apart from the table and the long wooden benches on which she and Will Hedge sat facing each other, a massive armchair at the head of the table, another at the foot, a large plain wooden sideboard that supported two branched candlesticks and a huge painted cupboard in one corner completed the furnishings of the sparsely furnished room.

  Will had not much to say. He sat with his shoulders hunched, staring fixedly at the candle Clytie had left sitting on the table. They could hear her stirring around in the next room where the moonlight was apparently strong enough not to require a light.

  Constance was silent too—and depressed, for her hopes of finding Margaret Archer were fast fading. She sat with her hands clutched together in her lap and watched as Will fell with gusto on the ham and coarse brown bread and tall tankards of cider that were brought. His eyes gleamed as Clytie brought in a bottle of brandy and set it down upon the sideboard.

  Stiff with tension, Constance was able to swallow hardly a mouthful. She kept wondering when her hostess was coming back. Apparently never. They finished and Clytie, who had stood staring curiously at them as they ate, turned as a disembodied voice from the dark stair landing above said, “Pour out a goblet for me and another for the girl and give the bottle to the cart driver. He can take it with him to the loft over the barn. ’Tis the only extra room we have. Show the girl to the room above this one.”

  “D’ye want me to make it up for her?” asked Clytie.

  “No. Lys and I have already done that.”

  Will rose. He did not look at all perturbed at being relegated to the barn to spend the night. In a household that seemed to be entirely female, he took it for granted that a male stranger would not be bedded down in the main house. With a nod to Constance, he went out and Clytie threw the bolt behind him, picked up both goblets and beckoned to Constance.

  They went up the stoutly built Jacobean staircase into a second floor with low sloping ceilings. Constance had to duck as she followed short stout Clytie into what was to be her bedchamber.

  Clytie, who had the goblets in one hand and the candle in the other, opened the door with her foot and set both goblets and candle down in the deep sill of the room’s one small window. She departed without comment and Constance walked to the bed. She was desperately tired.

  “Pick up the candle and let me see you,” commanded a voice from the door and Constance realized with a start that her hostess had come in cat-footed and was standing in the doorway behind her.

  Obedient to that command, Constance picked up the candle and turned, holding it so that the light played over her face.

  It played over her hostess’s face too as she advanced and Constance almost missed a step.

  In the flickering light, she found herself looking into a pair of beautiful green eyes that regarded her steadily from beneath an alabaster forehead and a great mass of flame-colored hair. A generous flexible mouth and a strong jawline rose above a pale column of throat and a dazzling white bosom against which gleamed a golden locket suspended by a delicate gold chain. But across her cheekbones were deep scars—a single flaw upon an otherwise devastating beauty.

  She could not have been past her early twenties—Constance guessed her to be twenty-two. And her umber-hued gown of heavy French pile velvet, its bodice worked with a filigree of silver threads, while worn, was so fashionable that it astonished Constance to see it here on these barren moors. She moved with complete self-confidence and her regal bearing would have become a queen.

  “Do not look so startled,” said Mistress Perdant dryly. “ ’Tis only the remnants of the smallpox you see upon my features.” Her voice was bitter. “I would rather the Black Death had claimed me instead and been done with it—’twould have been better than this. Had I been a Catholic born, I would have shut me in a convent to live out my years, but since I am not, I have found me a prison of my own making here on this desolate moor.”

  “I—I was not startled,” faltered Constance, not knowing whether she should look at those scarred cheeks. The sight of those scars in the moonlight had been a shock in a face otherwise so beautiful.

  “Nonsense, of course you were,” said the tall woman briskly. “Mine is a face that takes getting used to—but you will come to disregard it in time.”

  “In... time, Mistress Perdant?” Constance was bewildered, for why should this stranger take her in?

  “Yes. ‘Perdant’ is the name I took to cloak my identity when I left Somerset.”
Her voice had a bitter edge to it. “ Perdant is a French word. It seemed appropriate. I am Margaret Archer.”

  Constance felt her breath leave her. Margaret—at last! But Margaret Archer had taken another name for herself and Constance knew enough French to know what that name was. She called herself Margaret Perdant now—Margaret the Lost.

  “You have a beautiful face,” mused Margaret. “And you say you are my brother Brandon’s child?”

  “No—you said it. I have your letter.” She held it out.

  “Here, give me the candle.” Margaret glanced at the letter. “Yes, I wrote this.” She surveyed Constance up and down. “You do not look like my brother,” she said at last. “Indeed you resemble your mother. I liked her.”

  Constance would have spoken but her throat closed up. It was the first kind word she had heard spoken about her mother since her father’s death. Her tear-filled eyes spoke her gratitude.

  “You look tired,” observed Margaret. “We will talk tomorrow. Meantime you’d best get some sleep. We rise early here on the moors.” She set the candle down and swept out, calling a good-night over her shoulder.

  But for all her jauntiness as she closed the door behind her, when Margaret reached the dark hallway where she could not be observed, she reeled for a moment against the plastered wall and fought back a dry sob. She had been her usual calm, collected self while she was talking to this violet-eyed stranger who looked so crushed by life—but she had fled the room because her eyes were wet.

  After a moment during which she steadied herself, she hurried to her own bedchamber and crossed to the window. And then, with both hands pressed to her mouth, she stared out across the moonlit moors and caught herself just in time. For she had almost given thanks to a God she no longer believed in for sending her this troubled child of destiny—for sending her someone to love. Almost—but not quite.

  Tattersall House,Dartmoor,

  Devonshire, England,

  Autumn 1683

  Chapter 17

  In the days that followed, Constance was to find herself in a house without mirrors and to learn that Margaret Archer never walked outside on rainy days when she might glimpse a reflection of her scars in the puddles, and that the inside shutters were always closed before night turned the windows into dark mirrors to mock her. And that no one outside Tattersall House had ever seen her face, for when she went abroad—even to the nearest village—she wore a riding mask.

  A woman less lustrous might have reconciled herself to those scars, but Margaret, who had got them at the height of her blazing beauty, could not.

  “ ’Tis a strange name—Tattersall,” Constance ventured.

  Those brilliant emerald eyes considered her mockingly. “An appropriate name, for all in tatters was the way I found it. Rags of curtains blowing behind broken panes, shutters banging on broken hinges, doors that were stuck either permanently shut or permanently open, latches that would not latch, filth everywhere. I have made some changes,” she added dryly.

  Constance gave an awed look around her, for although Tattersall had about it a spartan barrenness, it gave little evidence that it had ever fallen upon hard times. Spotlessly clean it was, from its well-scrubbed floors with their carpet of fresh sweet-smelling rushes—the kind used even in palaces in the Old Queen’s time—to the shining pewter platters and tankards winking from the big plain cupboard.

  As time went by, Constance came to see Margaret more clearly. There was a small chest of gold coins beneath her mattress—Constance had stumbled on it when she was making the bed. Wealth... but Margaret the Lost chose not to use it, nor to wear any of the fine clothes that were packed away in lavender in the great chests. In the days when she had been beautiful Margaret Archer who swept everything before her, Constance knew Margaret had worn those clothes. Although some of them, Clytie whispered, had never been worn at all: they were for her trousseau.

  Once a year, Clytie told her, that trousseau was taken out and shaken and aired and packed away again in lavender—along with Margaret’s lost dreams.

  “Do you never go anywhere?” she once asked Margaret. She was studying as she spoke the well-worn riding boots, the handsome velvet and broadcloth riding habits and—surprisingly—the amber silk ball gown that hung in Margaret’s press. These clothes seemed different somehow from the treasured trousseau in the big chests. They were handled casually and, obviously, worn..

  The amber silk ball gown especially had made her wonder.

  Margaret gave her a shadowed green look. “On occasion,” she said vaguely. “In summer.”

  Clytie had told her that Margaret was often gone for long periods in summer. Constance could not help asking, “Do you go back to Somerset?” For she had a terrible vision that must be brushed away—a vision of Margaret, masked, prowling the countryside, finding masqued balls where she could slip in and dance a measure and then go her lonely way, remembering....

  Margaret shook her head. “Never. For I’ve no wish to be reminded of the old life. I’ve given up my heritage and chosen to live here at the end of the world. Such”—her voice hardened—“was the will of God.”

  “Does no one come here?”

  “Seldom.”

  “Don’t you even go to church?”

  Margaret’s face hardened. “I have forsaken God. No”— she gave a short laugh—“that is not quite true. He has forsaken me."

  “But surely—”

  The flame-haired woman held up an imperious silencing hand. “If you would live here,” she said, “you must not try to change me. I walk a precipice and just beyond is the abyss. Life is not easy for me.”

  But in a way Tattersall’s odd life-style was strangely comforting, for it kept Constance’s mind off Dev and all that she had lost.

  Only at night did memories really plague her. For the white moon that shone down on the wastes of Dartmoor was the same white moon that had followed her down the Great North Road, the same white moon that had cast soft rays through the branches of the Old Doodle Oak in Hatfield Forest.

  Somewhere that moon was shining down on Dev—and Nan. Always Nan.

  That was what hurt most. It was bad enough that Dev had lied to her, pretended to be leaving for America when in truth he was taking to the road again—but to have done it with a woman! And that woman Nan! Hot tears stung her lashes at the thought of him and she waked panting from dreams in which he held her in his arms and ran his hands along her naked body and stirred her to passion. She would lie there in her bed and let the hurt seep through her whole body and turn her face into her pillow to stifle the sobs.

  They rose early at Tattersall and when the weather was fair often roamed the moors on foot. Margaret could identify every wild flower, every weed, every herb. There were two milk cows which the servants—plump Clytie and tall reedy Lys—milked, and a sow with a brace of pigs. Staples arrived in a cart. And once a month a letter was brought by a rider across the moors and Margaret locked herself in her room to read it and stayed there for hours and hours.

  They never went to church. As far as Margaret was concerned, God’s domain did not include Dartmoor.

  Constance felt a deep sympathy for Margaret and a very real bond grew up between them. She told Margaret how Hugh had threatened to take her by force and Henriette had helped her to escape in a wicker trunk.

  “And you came directly here?”

  Constance hesitated. She could not bring herself to speak about Dev—the wound was still too fresh. Someday perhaps, but not yet. “Yes,” she said steadily. “I came directly here.”

  “And a blessing to me you have been,” smiled Margaret. “For you accept me for what I am—not for how I look.”

  Constance had grown used to Margaret’s scars by now; they did not trouble her. “Can you be so sure the world would not?” she challenged.

  “Yes,” sighed Margaret. “I am very sure. The world would not.”

  Constance’s young heart went out to her.

  As she spoke, Margaret�
��s tall beautiful form stood in the center of the room washed by the light of Dartmoor—a fitful light for a storm was coming. She spoke quietly as if she were recounting something that had happened to somebody else. “They told me I was lucky the disease had not cost me my sight,” she remembered. “Lucky it was not the ‘black pox,’ which would have carried me away in a day or two, but instead the ‘discrete’ type which left so many areas of my skin free from eruptions. And how fortunate that the outbreak in Bath had been one of the mildest known, and how providential that my doctor, before the marks could spread below my cheeks, found red stained glass and put it in all the windows and hung red drapes about, which, he insisted, kept the rest of me from being permanently scarred. Lucky! What was I supposed to do? Greet my lover like poor Queen Elizabeth greeted her suitors, with half an inch of permanent makeup plastered on my face?” Her veil of reserve had been ripped away and Constance stared at her, spellbound. “At last I knew what I must do. I must arrange to ‘die’ and yet not die. My fate would be ever to hover beyond the range of vision of those I loved—always outside the windows looking in. And so it has been since.”

  Constance’s violet eyes were wet. She was glad that Margaret had turned to the window, to study the wild sky and the distant moors across which lay Somerset and all that she had loved....

  The servants, Constance had learned, were both unfortunates that Margaret had taken in. Clytie had been a battered teenager, indentured to what she fiercely termed “a monster.” Margaret had made her acquaintance when Clytie had been knocked into the street in front of Margaret’s horse. Margaret had climbed down and picked up the weeping Clytie—and promptly bought her articles of indenture. Clytie would have a home at Tattersall House as long as she cared to stay.