Annabelle (13 page)

Lord Varleigh looked at her in some amusement. She had lost her bonnet in the bushes, and her masses of redgold hair were cascading down on her shoulders. As she sat huddled in the bearskin, she looked to Lord Varleigh like a cavewoman whose husband has just failed to kill a saber-toothed tiger for the cooking pot. He told her so and received a small snort of disgust in reply.

After several attempts to engage his companion in conversation, Lord Varleigh gave up the effort and sprang his horses instead, leaving Chiswick behind in a cloud of dust.

When he turned in at the villa in Kensington Gore, it was to find the house in darkness. No worried Lady Emmeline was waiting up. Horley, roused from her slumbers, said acidly that her ladyship had to watch her health and not sit up waiting for inconsiderate folk to come home with the milk. She got severely reprimanded by Lord Varleigh for her insolence.

A sleepy footman lighted the fire in the library and produced a tray of tea things. Lord Varleigh had stated he had something of importance to say to Miss Annabelle Quennell on the matter of love, and Miss Quennell found herself suddenly wide awake and rather breathless.

Annabelle, still wrapped in the bearskin rug, warmed her damp slippers by the fire and turned a glowing face up to Lord Varleigh. He leaned his arm along the mantelshelf and looked down at her thoughtfully.

“My dear Miss Quennell,” he said, suddenly feeling very old and pompous, “it is sometimes hard to recognise real love. So much nonsense is talked about love and so much nonsense is written about it that it is sometimes hard to recognise the real thing.”

But I recognise it, thought Annabelle with a start of surprise. She watched his handsome, high-nosed face as
he looked down into the blazing fire. I’m in love with him, she thought. I’ve been in love with him since that dreadful night at the opera.

“Now, the Captain is really very much in love with you,” said Lord Varleigh. “I would have punished him for his mad behavior today otherwise.”

He stopped and looked down in surprise at Annabelle. One minute her face had been glowing and tender and the next it was almost contorted with fury.

“Captain MacDonald … loves
me
. Don’t be so naïve, my lord. The Captain wishes to force me into marriage because my godmother has promised him money an’ he marries me. And you
drivel
on about love. You know nothing of the matter yourself, sirrah!”

It was the second time that evening that Lord Varleigh had been accused of knowing nothing of love, and he was beginning to become irritated.

“I am convinced the Captain’s motives were not mercenary,” he said stiffly.

“If you are in love with someone,” said Annabelle with a maddening air of weary patience, “then you neither frighten them or hurt them. I am tired of sitting here talking nonsense, my lord, and I wish to go to bed.”

He gave her a cold bow and walked towards the door.

Moved by a sudden impulse, Annabelle called after him. “Forgive me, my lord. I did not mean to sound so harsh. I am shaken and upset. I have endured the most horrible evening of my life. I am in no mood to hear of love from anyone.”
Except you
, muttered a treacherous voice in her brain.

He smiled at her and came back and took her small hand in his long fingers and turning it over pressed a light kiss on the palm.

“I understand and accept your apology, Annabelle
Quennell,” he said lightly and bowed his way out.

Annabelle sat for a long time with the hand he had kissed clenched, curled up into a fist. She felt very, very homesick for the rectory and for her father’s kind face.

Lord Sylvester Varleigh could now persuade himself that he had thoroughly attended to his duties as a landlord. Since the evening of Annabelle’s rescue, he had retired to his estates and had overseen extensive repairs to his house, his forms, and his tenants’ cottages. Now, he had to admit to himself, he was frankly bored with his own company.

His boots left a line of black footprints across the frost-rimed grass. A red sun was shining low on the horizon. Piles of hay put down for the deer lay about under the trees of the park, and blackbirds crossed and crisscrossed the frosty grass in their search for worms, leaving long lines of black arrows.

His home, Varleigh Court, was spread out behind him with its square turrets and gray walls, and the thin lines of smoke from its many chimneys rose straight into the metallic blue of the early morning sky.

He had to remind himself he had not been completely alone. There had been some good hunting days and duty calls on the local county. But he had known them all since he was a hoy, and he now wondered why he should
feel so alone and set apart from their well-ordered lives and families.

He suddenly stopped. That was it. Families!

All the country houses he had visited had echoed with the yells and cries of children, and the rooms had been filled with groups of relatives from close cousins to aunts twice removed.

He, himself, had few relatives, and most of them were elderly and lived far away in other counties.

Lord Varleigh was suddenly beset with that malaise which attacks even the most sophisticated Englishman in his prime—the sudden and awful desire to get married. Not to anyone in particular, but to some well-bred faceless girl who would fill his nursery with healthy sons.

He would give a house party, he decided, and invite at least three suitable girls. He turned abruptly and walked back to the Court. Cards must be sent out and bedrooms aired. He sent for the housekeeper, butler, and groom of the chambers and issued rapid instructions as if he were preparing for a military campaign. And flowers. He must have flowers. In all the rooms.

His ancient housekeeper, Mrs. Meany, shook her head afterwards and confided to the butler that my lord showed all the signs of a man about to be leg-shackled. “They always asks for flowers,” she said, “and then ‘fore you know it, you’re preparing the wedding breakfast.”

He then went into his study and started to compose a list of names. The guest list must be carefully worked out so that the girls he planned to look over would not guess they had been invited for that purpose. He would invite Lady Amelia Bunbury, a dashing redhead of impeccable lineage, along with her parents. Then there was pretty little Mrs. O’Harold, an entrancing widow, and the Honorable Caroline Dempsey, a buxom blonde with
rather protruding teeth. An excellent horsewoman, she in fact looked rather like a horse. He went on scribbling busily while the frost melted from the grass and the red sun changed to gold.

Annabelle Quennell? Why not? And the Captain, of course. Captain MacDonald would see that he had kept his word and was doing his best to further the course of true love. And that old wretch, Lady Emmeline. He began to look forward to his house party immensely. He would propose to the lucky girl, get married after a decent interval, and then after another decent interval would have a noisy, healthy son to scamper along the stately corridors and bring some life to the old house.

“A
N
invitation to Varleigh Court,” cried Lady Emmeline. “Marvellous. We shall go of course.”

“Yes, Emmeline,” said Annabelle, bending over her sewing to hide the look of pleasure on her face.

“I am bored with rusticating here,” went on Lady Emmeline, “and Varleigh Court is vastly comfortable. He has invited Captain MacDonald as well, he says. How kind!”

How could he? thought Annabelle bitterly. After that night of fear and violence at Chiswick, she could hardly bear to look at the Captain. Lady Emmeline had dismissed the whole episode. It was, she said, exactly what she would have expected a red-blooded man like the Captain to do. As it was, Varleigh’s meddling interference had saved Annabelle’s virtue, so now they could all be comfortable again.

Annabelle tried to be pleasant to the Captain to please her eccentric godmother. She had hopefully expected the doors of the villa at Kensington Gore to be barred to him after his behavior at Chiswick. But Lady Emmeline
seemed more pleased to see him than ever.

Lady Emmeline had grown increasingly eccentric. She had taken to wearing fur eyebrows and only seemed to remember to put one on at a time so that it looked as if she were carrying a hairy caterpillar around on her forehead. She had taken to wearing patches and a powdered wig to remind her of her youth, and she often talked and chatted to long-dead acquaintances with such vivacity that Annabelle feared for her reason.

Distressed by the Captain’s frequent visits, worried and embarrassed by her godmother’s eccentricity, and saddened because she no longer saw Lord Varleigh, Annabelle had written to her mother, begging to be allowed to return home, but her plea had only promoted a long letter from Mrs. Quennell. The rector’s wife exclaimed over Annabelle’s ingratitude and reminded her eldest daughter that it was her Christian duty to marry well and provide her younger sisters with husbands.

A visit to Lord Varleigh’s home would be exciting, if only in a painful way. At least I shall see him, thought Annabelle and then chided herself for loving a man who showed only an avuncular interest in her at the very most.

Madame Croke had paid Annabelle generously for her designs, and Annabelle had hoarded the money carefully in case the strangeness of her present surroundings should one day prove too much for her. Surely her
own mother
would not turn her away if she arrived on the doorstep of the rectory.

Annabelle could not help dreaming of Sylvester Varleigh. His high-nosed aristocratic face had replaced the square, tanned face of her dream lover. She had never daydreamed much before, but now she found herself imagining all sorts of delightful adventures which would
end in Lord Varleigh leading her to the altar. But apart from the presence of Lady Jane Cherle, there was her forceful and pushing mother to consider. The proud Lord Varleigh would surely not ally himself with any girl with such a mother.

She assured herself it was harmless to dream of him— an innocent pastime, no more. At times she could almost convince herself that she had forgotten what he looked like.

It had never entered Annabelle’s dreams that when she arrived at Varleigh Court, there would be other
young
ladies present.

It was therefore with a feeling that she wryly identified as pique that she found herself in the company of three very young, attractive ladies on her first day at Varleigh Court.

Despite Lord Varleigh’s precautions and the presence of many other guests and many small children, the three young ladies had quickly realised that they were “on trial” and discussed their prospects with Annabelle almost before she had had time to remove her hat. Several of the young gentlemen had already made a book, and the odds were in favor of Lady Amelia Bunbury with Mrs. O’Harold running a close second. To her chagrin Annabelle was considered “spoken for,” and the three ladies eagerly demanded her advice on the best way to entrap their elegant host.

Annabelle had at last the young female companionship for which she had craved but not at all in the way she had wanted. Lady Jane was not present and that should have at least been a blessing, but on the contrary it depressed Annabelle immeasurably. She was disappointed in Lord Varleigh. By the time her trunks were unpacked, she had convinced herself that she did not
love him one bit. He was no better than the rest of them. Marriage, in his mind, was obviously a business proposition.

In the following days the rather tedious life-style of an English country house in winter took over. The gentlemen went out shooting or hunted while the ladies gossiped, practised attitudes, netted purses, read, and yawned. Only in the evenings did the great house come to life after a long and elaborate dinner when childish games like Hunt the Slipper or Blind Man’s Bluff were played, followed often by some dangerous romp which degenerated into cushion throwing and wild chases through the formal suite of entertaining rooms on the first floor. Mrs. O’Harold was nigh suffocated with a cushion held over her face by the dashing Lady Amelia and the pretty little Irish widow had struggled to her feet and retaliated by emptying the contents of a fruit bowl over that young lady’s head.

Captain MacDonald showed an alarming tendency to become increasingly boisterous. The men hailed him as a capital gun and the ladies smiled and simpered and congratulated Annabelle on having secured such a flower of English manhood for a suitor.

Annabelle was hardly allowed to exchange more than two words with her host. He had only to enter the roc and he was immediately besieged by three young ladies and their hopeful parents. Annabelle contented herself with watching him from afar and deciding that she did not like him one little bit. She was quite sure that most of the time Lord Varleigh was not aware she was in the house.

She would have been very surprised to know just how mistaken she was. Lord Varleigh was heartily wishing he had never invited Annabelle Quennell. How could he
possibly decide which lady would suit him best when Annabelle was glowing with beauty on the other side of the room? Returning from a long day’s hunting, the Captain had spoken to Lord Varleigh at length of his undying passion for Annabelle and his hopes of marriage. Lord Varleigh had been moved to utter a few words of caution. Annabelle Quennell could not be
forced
into marriage. The Captain had hurriedly agreed but before he had turned his face away from Lord Varleigh to look across the barren wintry fields, Lord Varleigh had noticed a strangely childish, sulky, and stubborn look on the Captain’s handsome face.

A
NNABELLE
had been used to rising very early in the morning in Yorkshire and she still found it impossible to lie late in bed. it was a relief to rise and get dressed and escape from the house for a solitary promenade in the icy gardens, made more formal looking by the steely grip of winter.

Her walks often took her as far as the pimping shed where an old Yorkshireman, Heckley, cut the faggots for the many fires of Varleigh Court. The pimping shed was comfortably redolent of all the woody smells of pine and birch and apple, and it was comforting to Annabelle to sit there listening to Heckley’s homey burr and the crisp thwack of sharp ax on wood.