“Nick’s cottage is far from here,” interrupted the Squire. “If Nick turned in here, it was because he hoped you’d not see the gates in your rush forward and he could hide in the bushes until you had passed and then find his way home. For it must have been as obvious to Nick as it is to me that you’d mistaken him for somebody else.”
The major gave them both a suspicious look. “I can see that ye stick together here in the West Country,” he sneered. “But that green cloak belongs to Drubbs—of that I’m certain.”
“I know naught of the cloak,” said the Squire. “But the body inside it is certainly Nick Netherbury’s. He’s worked on my estate since before I was born and he’s never been known to dabble in politics.” (Leanings Nick might have, but take action? Never!) “Ask anyone—they’ll bear me out.”
The major cast an uncertain look down at the dead man. It was beginning to seem that he had captured a cloak while his real quarry had eluded him.
“I’m here on commission from Judge Jeffreys himself in pursuit of this traitor Drubbs and his ilk,” he blustered. “And if there are any more of his kind hereabout ye’d be well advised to hand them over now.”
“Rest assured there are none,” said Tom, meeting the major’s gaze squarely. “I’ll vouch for my guests—and my servants.”
“I cannot believe that poor Nick was ever involved in anything,” murmured the Squire, shaking his head. “Nick minded his own business.”
Into his remark intruded the voice of a soldier who was even now searching the body. “The fellow had this on him,” he called out, and tossed a small leathern purse to the major.
Nobody was looking at Clifford Archer just then or they would have seen him change color. He knew that purse! He had left it in a hollow tree at the behest of a blackmailer earlier this evening! He watched in fascination as the major untied the leather thong that held the purse and with slow deliberation counted out ten gold guineas.
“A large sum, wouldn’t you say, for a farm tenant to be carrying about?” the major shot sardonically at the Squire.
The Squire’s face had hardened perceptibly. “I would say so,” he agreed coldly. “And you may well be right. It would seem I did not know Nick Netherbury as well as I thought.”
The major appeared somewhat mollified, but Tom Thornton’s blue eyes mirrored astonishment at Clifford Archer’s sudden renunciation of his lifelong tenant.
But Constance missed that. She was watching Captain Warburton who, now that the crisis outside was over, was hurrying back into the hall.
“I want to go back inside,” she told Ned, and fled after the Captain. ;
Perplexed, but satisfied that he had seen all there was of interest outside, Ned followed her in.
Across the dance floor, littered still with candles and fans and a satin slipper or two and the ominous bulk of the massive iron chandelier with its heavy length of rope, she saw the Captain stride. Back into the screened-off corridor that led to the buttery and the kitchen.
Before she was more than halfway across the floor she saw him come out again. He caught sight of Constance and moved swiftly toward her.
“There was a lady here just now dressed in bronze silk,” he said tersely. “She was standing beside you when I asked her to dance. Have you any idea where she went?”
So Margaret had escaped him!
“I do not remember such a lady,” Constance heard herself say. “But then there were so many...”
For a moment his hard gaze said he did not believe her. Then he turned on his heel and left them, heading again for the front door. She guessed he was going to search the grounds.
Captain Warburton was more determined and a deal more thorough than she had expected him to be. He enlisted the aid of his host, Tom Thornton, explained tersely that one of his guests seemed to have come up missing. Tom was instantly alarmed for with a strange troop of King’s men roving about looking for trouble, a lone lady might well be mistook for a conspirator on such a night.
Someone mentioned “The Masked Lady” and Constance pricked up her ears. “Who is that?” she whispered to Ned.
“She’s a famous agent of the Duke of Monmouth,” he told her. “ ’Tis said she carries messages for him—and could do so beneath the nose of the King himself.”
“Why—why do they call her that?” she asked breathlessly.
“Because none have ever seen her face,” Ned shrugged. “She rides like a shadow along the summer roads and no one knows where she goes to winter.”
But I do, thought Constance with a sudden pang. She goes back to the lonely moors of Devon where she shelters outcasts like herself....
And suddenly she remembered a night last winter on those same cold moors.
She had been fast asleep, dreaming of Dev and the way it had been in Hatfield Forest last summer. In her dream they had just eaten a simple meal of bread and cheese and wine, and now the moon had come up and was making magic of its own through the spreading branches of the Old Doodle Oak and Dev was lying back relaxed upon the grass. How vulnerable he looks, she had thought suddenly. And how dear to me... And she had loosened the laces of her bodice and let her breasts ride free, and hovered over him, tempting him by brushing the crests of her nipples against his cheeks. Dev had laughed and drawn her to him and her young body had descended on his own as lightly as a feather, and she had felt his warm lips burrow in her throat, in the hollow between her breasts, and slide down, down—and felt a wild sweet passion envelop her.
And then from somewhere had come a loud noise and Constance had awakened from reliving in dreams what once she had lived in reality. Confused for a moment, she had looked up at the moon shining hazily in through her window. Not the warm melon moon that had shown down on Hatfield but the cold white moon of wintry Dartmoor.
From somewhere a shutter was banging. That must be what had awakened her. But even as she turned over to go back to sleep, she heard a horse neighing outside—a horse neighing where no horse should be. Fearful lest the closed stable door had blown open and the horses gone a-roaming on this bitter night, she jumped up. Shivering in her wrapper, she ran to the window.
It had begun to snow and against the rugged backdrop of the granite-topped tors, softened by moonlight, she saw a man alighting from an exhausted horse. And as she watched, she saw Margaret come from the house and lead the horse toward the stable while the rider disappeared inside.
Constance had stood there, puzzled. For all that Margaret was so brave and so competent, she nevertheless reigned over a household of women and even her large pistol would perhaps be no match against a roving brigand. Constance waited a bit, then quietly let herself into the hall. Below her the man, whose white face she could glimpse but dimly in the light of a single candle below, was speaking. She caught only the end of his remark “—to have a care for yourself,” before Margaret said sharply, “But you’re ill. Here, Gates, let me bring you some spirits.”
“I’m well enough, just cold,” mumbled Gates. “ ’Tis yourself must watch out.’ ”
“Nonsense. Who’d look for me here? Off with your boots, Gates, and dry your feet by the fire. Hot broth and hot rum will bring you round!”
This, plainly, was no brigand but someone Margaret knew. Someone she called Gates. Feeling she had intruded on something she was not meant to hear, perhaps some tie with that past Margaret both cherished and dreaded, Constance beat a hasty and silent retreat.
The next morning the door to the bedchamber across from hers which had heretofore stood open was closed. When Constance tried it, she found it locked.
And so was the stable.
“Where is our guest?” she asked Margaret casually at breakfast when the servants were out of earshot.
“Guest?” Margaret looked surprised.
“Yes. I heard a horse neigh last night and looked out to see you letting him into the house.”
“Oh, that fellow. He brought a letter from my brother at Axeleigh. He breakfasted early and went on his w
ay.”
“The door across the hall from my bedchamber is locked,” remarked Constance. She looked up to see Margaret regarding her with a bland steady gaze.
“A bird flew into it and broke the glass. I have locked the door so that it will not blow open and chill the house before I can get it fixed.”
That window, Constance knew, was above an overhang and difficult to see from ground level.
“Cook says the stable door is locked too.”
Margaret shrugged. “It occurred to me that if there were strangers about, one of them might steal the horses. I’ve locked the stable for the time.”
She does not wish me to see Gates, Constance had thought at the time. Or perhaps she does not wish Gates to see me. And she had let it pass, listening as Margaret told her things her brother had written about Axeleigh and the winter balls that enlivened life there.
The next morning the stable door was again unlocked and the bedchamber door stood open as always. When Constance remarked that the window had been fixed, Margaret said casually that she had some skill as a glazier. Constance had prowled around the house but there was no sign of the stranger or his horse. Even the hoofprints a departing horse would have left had disappeared under a fresh fall of snow.
Now she realized that some desperate message must have been borne by the lone rider across the winter moorlands—borne to The Masked Lady. How coolly Margaret had carried it off! Even she had not really suspected anything except that possibly Margaret did not wish her brother in Somerset to know that Constance was her houseguest.
She felt suddenly hurt that Margaret had not told her about this wild other aspect of her life—her dangerous work as a courier for the Duke of Monmouth. Perhaps Margaret had not wished to involve her in it.
But what Ned had told her kindled a newfound admiration for Margaret—cool, resourceful Margaret pounding the summer roads on behalf of a Cause she believed in. She wished Margaret had confided in her, so she could have helped her.
During the search, with everyone out of the house, the Squire found time to have a word with Constance in a corner of the deserted hall.
“It has occurred to me—too late, after I had already introduced you to Ned as Constance Dacey—that you might have preferred to use your mother’s maiden name of Cheltenham here. If that is your desire, we could still—”
“No,” Constance interrupted. Her delicate jaw was set and the gaze she turned on the Squire was a stubborn one. “Hammond Dacey might not have been there at my conception, but he was there at my birth. He saved my mother from shame, he cared for me as his own, he was the father I knew in my childhood. To me he was a true father and I’ll keep his name.” And wear it proudly, proclaimed those deep and steady violet eyes.
Clifford Archer felt respect for his newfound ward growing in him. “And if Hugh Dacey finds you and makes public the facts?” he asked bluntly, for Margaret had written about Constance’s fear of Hugh.
“Then if you feel shamed by my presence. I’ll disappear—as I did from Claxton House,” she told him defiantly.
He admired her now. She must have taken after her mother, he decided, for his brother Brandon had had none of her fire. Lethargic was the word he would have used to describe Brandon, who was slow to start, but once started refused to be stopped—a trait that had led him to his death.
“I wish I had known your mother,” the Squire murmured. “I think we would have been good friends. But it was Margaret who knew Anne, not myself.”
“Indeed you would have been good friends,” said Constance warmly. “For my mother was brave and beautiful.” And frightened of the blows the world might deal her small daughter....
“We should not linger in here,” the Squire told her. “We should go out and join the search party. I take it you have disclaimed knowing the lady in the bronze dress?”
Constance gave an emphatic nod. “I hope she is—all right,” she said haltingly, and for a moment her bleak expression betrayed how heartsick she was over Margaret’s plight.
“I hope so too,” sighed the Squire. “Come, we must hope for the best.”
Together they went outside.
The search party found a torn snatch of bronze silk trimmed in copper lace caught on the branches between Huntlands and Axeleigh. They found a bronze satin dancing slipper lost among the tree trunks. And on one outthrusting twig a tangle of flame-red hair that Tony Warburton, who found it, touched with gentle fingers.
But they did not find the wearer.
By now—with everyone having disclaimed any knowledge of the vanished lady—there was considerable interested muttering about The Masked Lady, whose name was a legend along the English highroads. Could it really have been she? people asked each other excitedly. After all she had arrived from nowhere—masked—and disappeared as mysteriously as she had come!
They came to the conclusion, the perplexed men who put their heads together and tried to piece it all out, that unknown to all of them Nick Netherbury had been carrying the golden guineas to Huntlands for a purpose—to place them in the hands of the radiant masked beauty who would spirit those coins elsewhere for the Cause. And that The Masked Lady, realizing Netherbury was dead and the gold confiscated, had either escaped or been carried off by those who wished her harm.
Only Constance and the Squire knew better.
The practical realization that it was already too late, that whatever was done was done and Margaret—whatever her destination—was already far beyond their reach, did not influence Constance in the least. All her being urged her to rush to Captain Warburton, whom Margaret loved so much, and blurt out that even now his lost love might be dashing to the Cheddar Gorge to hurl herself over.
But something even stronger than her fear for Margaret deterred Constance. It was a bond forged between the two women during the long months they had spent together, a bond both lasting and deep. Its links were forged of respect and admiration and something else that went deep—comradeship, the lonely times they had shared together on the forbidding moors of southwest England.
She would not betray Margaret. She could not. Not even though Margaret died of it.
For Constance that was an evening of nightmarish speculations. She envisioned with a caught breath a Margaret in flight, bright hair flying, catching on twigs and jerking her head back, a Margaret who scattered bits of torn lace as she ran, leaving them behind her in the summer woods along with her hopes and dreams. In her mind she saw Margaret trip over a root, lose a slipper and run on in her silk-stockinged feet.
And she saw her—and as she envisioned this, Constance’s eyes were closed and her head bent—brokenhearted, leaping onto her horse and heading for the Cheddar Gorge and oblivion.
Her Uncle Clifford was not of that opinion.
“Unless Tony got a look at her face, I don’t think she’d throw away her life,” he mused. “For Margaret’s a strong woman, she’s got a firm grip on the world, she has. And I don’t think Tony saw her face. Do you? Look at him over there with the others.”
Constance turned toward Captain Warburton, frowning down at the lock of hair and the bit of bronze silk and copper lace in his hands. He looked bemused, worried—but not shocked. As he surely would have looked had he stripped the mask from Margaret’s face and realized she was here—and alive.
Constance drew a deep shuddering breath and turned away. “I hope you are right,” she told her uncle fervently. “And if you are right, then I should leave immediately, for I might be able to catch up with Margaret on the road.”
“No, you are not to follow her. She would not wish it.” His voice was very firm and he took possession of her hand as if he felt she too might bolt. “Margaret brought you north to me and here you will remain.” He held up his hand when she would have spoken, but he kept his voice low lest the others, clustered around the piece of cloth and the slipper, hear him. “Come away,” he urged. “I will take you home to Axeleigh and we will talk more about it. It may be some time before Pamela
returns—she is off searching the woods with Tom Thornton.”
And even as they spoke, a sobbing Margaret, her world snatched back so briefly and now lost again forever, was digging her heels into the flanks of her horse and riding hard for Dartmoor. And as she rode, the events of the night wheeled around and around in her mind as the planets circle the sun—ever spinning by.
She had danced again with Tony—all her life she would have that to look back upon. She had seen admiration in his gray eyes and kindling desire and she had felt her woman’s body melting under his hot gaze. She had felt his warm breath upon her cheek, she had felt his demanding mouth upon her own—and even through the lace of her velvet mask, it had been all that she would ever ask of heaven.
And then he had snatched at the mask and simultaneously all hell had broken loose behind them in the great hall. But even as his fingers closed upon the black velvet and lace of the mask, Margaret had made her move. As she had so often rehearsed it in her mind on the long ride up from Devon, her gesture was as swift and as instinctive as his own and matched it by a fraction of a second. Even as the mask cleared her face, her arm was thrown across it, shielding it as had the black velvet.
And Tony Warburton—who might in that moment have swept her shielding arm away and seen her face at last—had harkened to the screams and crashing and shots from behind the screen wall. And he had done automatically what natural gallantry and a life of danger had trained him to do. He had whirled, pushing the lady with the shielded face behind him toward safety, and with a muttered “Stay here,” had bolted toward the trouble in the hall.
Margaret had turned and run in the other direction, and found her way outside by the same door through which she had entered Huntlands. She told herself she was glad, glad he had not seen her face. For if he had, he would have felt constrained to follow, constrained by guilt and not by love—and she could not have borne that.
She ran half blinded by tears, and hoped that her directions, so carefully given, had been followed.
Lovely Lying Lips Page 28
