Amanda Scott (54 page)

“I could do no less,” he said in his ponderous manner when they had gathered in the drawing room. “’Tis the duty of a gentleman to serve such ladies as pass within his orbit, you know. And how did you like London, my dear Miss Beckley?” he asked, turning his quizzing glass toward Pamela and peering at her through it.

Blushing, she told him she liked London very well. “We did not go about so much as I had hoped,” she added. “Only one dinner party and a musicale, but I met several young people.”

“All handsome gentlemen, I expect,” he said, nodding at the others as though expecting chuckles at what he clearly thought a sally. “And did you approve of them, my dear? I need not ask, you know, if they approved of you.”

Lady Lyford said sharply, “Don’t encourage her, Spenser. Her head is as big as a bell tower already. The lads swarmed round her like bees round a honey pot. And she … Well, the less said about that, the better.”

Pamela swelled with indignation. “I did nothing for which I need apologize, ma’am. Goodness me, we scarcely set foot out of the house, and by the time we began to receive invitations to parties, Marcus was there, insisting we leave, so the only real entertainment we had was the evening we went to Covent Garden.”

“Dear me,” said Sir Spenser, turning his quizzing glass toward the countess. “I do hope you were not caught up in all that riot and rumpus.”

“Well, we were,” she retorted. “Not that we could have known from the outset how it would be, though Marcus would have it otherwise.”

“No, no,” Sir Spenser said loyally. “How could you? I daresay you expected only to be entertained. Such goings-on! I read all about it in the
Times
, you know, and I cannot tell you how much I envy you being part of all that excitement.”

Gwenyth stared at him, unable to imagine Sir Spenser, always precise to a pin and never out of temper, in the midst of the Covent Garden riots; however, the countess seemed to approve of his attitude, for she actually smiled at him.

“A man tried to break into our box,” she said, lifting her chin and looking down her nose. “We soon sent him to the rightabout, I can tell you.”

He nodded. “Only thing to do. Pray, Almeria, you must tell me all about it.”

She complied, and soon talked herself into an excellent humor, dampened only when Pamela attempted to interpose some detail or other that she had forgotten to mention. But Gwenyth frowned at her friend, and Pamela fell silent again until Sir Spenser exclaimed at hearing that Gwenyth had been injured.

“She is all right now, sir,” Pamela said when he looked at Gwenyth in astonishment and expressed his hope that she had not been seriously injured.

“Who is all right?” Jared asked from the threshold of the drawing room. They had not noted his entrance, and since they had not seen him since their arrival, his grandmother greeted him with enthusiasm, declaring that she had not realized he had returned to the abbey.

“I quite thought you meant to be away some time on business,” she said. “You said you could not go with us to town, but had I known you intended to finish your business so quickly, I would have invited you to ride down as soon as it was done.”

He smiled as he bent to kiss her cheek. “Then I would have passed you on the road and got to town to find you gone, ma’am, so ’tis as well I stayed here, is it not?”

“You could scarcely pass us without noticing,” she said, shaking her head. “I am sure the Lyford crest is quite as well-known to you as your own face, and it is painted a foot high or more on both doors of the carriage. And surely you know our livery and our coachman. And he would recognize you too, you know. And truly, if only you had—”

“Yes, yes, ma’am,” he said, laughing. “I ought to have told you that my business would occupy me for only a few days, and had I known as much at the time, I certainly would have done so.”

“I cannot imagine what sort of business you might have had anyway,” she said fretfully.

“Dull business,” he said, “and I was most surprised, for that matter, to learn that you had returned so soon. Surely you did not tell me you meant to do so.”

She snapped, “We did not mean to do so! Marcus would have it that Gwenyth must recuperate at Molesford.”

“Recuperate from what?” Jared inquired, looking at Gwenyth. “Were you ill, ma’am?”

At the same time, Pamela exclaimed, “He would have made us come back anyway!”

“Fiddle faddle,” retorted the countess, as Gwenyth, in an undertone, attempted to put Jared in possession of the bare facts of their visit to Covent Garden. “If you think, miss,” Lady Lyford went on severely, “that anyone but you would have returned with Marcus, had it not been for Wynnefreda’s thinking her duty lay with Gwenyth rather than with me, you much mistake the matter. Ah, here is Marcus now, and not before time, I must say, sir. You might have considered the fact that others are hungry.”

“I beg your pardon, ma’am,” the earl said quietly. “I was delayed and certainly knew better than to come down to dine in all my dirt.”

She did not respond, but noting the butler’s entrance at that moment to announce that dinner was served, she stood and held out her hand to Sir Spenser to take her in. Since he was speaking to Pamela, who was smiling up at him, the countess found it necessary to speak his name sharply before he looked at her and saw that she was waiting for him. With another smile at Pamela, he hurried to escort her, leaving the others to follow in what order they pleased.

The earl was quiet during the meal, leaving conversation to the others, and although he escorted Sir Spenser to join the ladies in the drawing room afterward, explaining that Jared had had letters to write, he soon made his own excuses, and left them listening to Pamela play upon the pianoforte.

Gwenyth, finding that his mood strongly infected her own, pleaded her aches and pains in order to leave before the tea tray had been brought in. Intending to retire early, she rang for Annie to plait her hair and help her into her nightdress, then dismissed her and lay in her bed with the covers pushed off, pretending that it was cooler in the darkness.

Through the open window she could see the moon rising over the eastern Chilterns, at first no more than a glow, then a brilliant halo outlining a small section of the crest. The halo grew larger, rounded into a half and then a full bright orb, lighting her room, setting shadows to dancing. Gwenyth got out of bed and moved to the window to look out.

At the bottom of the garden, the moonlight touched the water of the Thames, making it look as though an artist had outlined its ripples with silver. There was no traffic on the river. A nightbird called, but other than that the stillness was absolute for several minutes. Then she heard a horse’s whicker, low and muted, from the direction of the stables. The air at the window was cooler than it had been earlier, but still warm enough so that she was not chilled in her thin lawn nightdress. Indeed, she was still hot, and looking at the river, she remembered the evenings before, when she had watched the gentlemen going down to swim. The water would be blissfully cool. Just thinking of it made her feel her bruises more than ever.

Swiftly, before she could change her mind, she tugged off her nightdress and donned her shift, a simple morning frock with a drawstring bodice that she could fasten herself, and a pair of sandals. Then, snatching up a towel from her washstand, she slipped out of her room, down the corridor to the rear stairs, and out through the east-wing door. Walking rapidly downhill toward the garden, she glanced back over her shoulder to see if anyone was watching her. The windows of the east wing, except for the earl’s library, were all reassuringly dark. And no dark figure watched her from the library window.

She could see the garden path clearly in the moonlight, and soon she was running, holding her skirt in one hand, her towel in the other, down the brick path to the beaten ride beside the river. There was better cover farther along, where the trees came down near the river, but it was also darker there. She decided that if she hunkered down to remove her dress, the willows and other shrubbery along the bank at the bottom of the garden would provide her with sufficient concealment.

In minutes, her dress was folded beside a shrub, her sandals sitting next to it with her towel. Glancing about again, she noted that the trees which formed such an admirable backdrop for the abbey by day looked like towering black walls at night, obscuring the lines of the house. What was to be admired was the river, silvery and alive in the moonlight, whispering to itself as it flowed past the abbey grounds. Barefoot, in her shift, she waded carefully through the willows into the water, testing the current as she went, feeling for obstacles beneath the surface.

The Thames was a good deal cooler than she had expected, as chilly as ever, in fact, despite the weather, and the mud on the bottom squished between her toes. There was more silt here than in her little cove or, indeed, in her rivers at home. She had bathed from the machines at Barmouth, and the sand there had a tendency to move in a similar fashion beneath her feet. The feeling was not altogether unpleasant, but a moment later the thought of the creeping, crawling things that might inhabit the mud sent her splashing toward the center of the river.

When the water was up to her waist, she remembered the possibility of being seen from the abbey and quickly, with a fleeting glance over her shoulder, submerged her body so that only her head was above the water. The shock of the cold robbed her of her breath, and for some minutes she remained where she was, gasping, but once the initial shock passed, she found the water’s temperature to be very pleasant. Her bruises seemed to have vanished, and she felt no pain.

The current made itself felt now, pushing and tugging at her body, but it was gentle and didn’t frighten her. She thrust her arms forward, put her face down between them, and lifted her feet, floating, letting the current take her where it would, rolling onto her back a moment later to watch the moon. Only when she felt the sharp chill of the water against the back of her head and the heaviness of her plaited hair did she wonder what Annie would have to say if her hair was still damp in the morning. Not that it mattered. At the moment, Annie’s feelings didn’t matter to her in the least. She was too intoxicated by moonlight and the moving river to care about consequences. She felt weightless, and the solitude, after spending the greater part of the past two days cooped up in a coach with three other women, was blissful.

She was sorely tempted to remove her shift. That thought and the accompanying mental image of a passerby’s reaction upon seeing her floating naked on the Thames doubled her up, gasping with suppressed laughter and choking as she swallowed a mouthful of water. When she regained control of herself, she swam a few strokes with the current; then, discovering that she had drifted nearer the Oxfordshire bank than her own and had moved much farther downstream than she had meant to, she began swimming at an angle with the current as her father and brothers had taught her, so as not to fight its full force with every stroke.

The current was inconvenient rather than troublesome, for there had been no rain for several months and the river was lower than normal. Then, too, the Molesford lock and its counterparts at Streatley were closed. But even as she began to congratulate herself that she would make landfall near the bend in the river and thus not more than half a mile from where she had started, she heard a muffled creaking sound and a thump downriver and felt the water undulate around her. Knowing at once that the lock had been opened, she stroked harder, well aware that she could not follow her instinct to fight for shore, that to fight the powerful surge would be dangerous, perhaps even fatal.

The chill of fear nearly paralyzed her when she remembered the river at Streatley, foaming and boiling beneath the bridge after the lock had been opened. Telling herself that with luck she would not be swept into the white water below Molesford lock, that the waters above would not become such a vicious torrent, she forced herself to concentrate on swimming. Still moving at an angle, but having to fight the current to keep her direction as the water moved faster and faster, drawing her with it, she stroked as hard as she could until, hitting something slimy in the water, she jerked her hand away instinctively and overset herself, submerging.

Losing control, she was carried along for several moments, thrashing and twisting as she fought for the surface and tried to regain her balance. She was nearing the bend and knew the lock was just beyond. Her mind worked rapidly. She knew, for the information had formed part of her father’s lessons, that the water on the inside of the curve, the Berkshire side, ought to move more slowly than the water on the outside and that it ought to be shallow there, as well. She began feeling with her feet, trying to find bottom and at the same time to keep what control she had of her movements, to keep moving at an angle, however small, toward the bank. The fear of being seen by the men at the lock gave her great motivation, greater strength. She was in her shift, after all, not a presentable sight.

As it happened, she found bottom with her knees before she managed to touch with her feet, which proved to be singularly unmanageable in the swift current. Grabbing at the weeds of the riverbed with her hands, she took in a large mouthful of water, but she knew she was safe. She was a short distance past the bend in less than three feet of water. Seconds later, she was leaning against the overhang where the river had eroded the dirt away, her body, up to her shoulders, still in the water. She did not dare stand up to get out for fear of being seen and also because she did not at the moment trust her legs to support her.

How long she remained sitting there, gasping, waiting for her thudding heart to regain its normal rhythm, she had no idea, nor was she aware of when she first began to hear voices. They came from the direction of the lock, not more than thirty yards away from her now. The roar of the river had eased, and the voices carried distinctly over the water to her sharp ears.

“Get that gate shut proper now,” a man said. “Old Nat’ll be fit to be tied if you split another paddle.”