Cressida (21 page)

“And now, Mr. Addison,” she said to herself, with a light in her eye that boded ill for that gentleman when they met, “and
now
we shall see which is the dupe—the young lady you have persuaded to meet you at the White Hart in Welwyn, or yourself!”

To Cressida, impatient for her encounter with Addison, the journey to Welwyn seemed interminable, though the postillions, who were evidently under orders to make their best speed to the rendezvous, kept their horses at the gallop and forebore to take the time for a change at Barnet.

It was therefore not much past seven when they swept into the inn-yard of the White Hart. As they rattled to a halt, Cressida looked out the window of the chaise to see if Addison had been on the watch for it, but he was nowhere in sight. Raising her brows at this lack of ardour —for in the interest of accomplishing a successful seduction he might at least, she felt, have pretended to an impatience he did not feel—she was gathering up her skirts, preparatory to alighting from the chaise, when to her surprise one of its doors abruptly opened and a very large, heavy-set man in a green coat stepped in and sat down beside her. At the same moment she became aware that the postillions had jumped down from their mounts and were apparently engaged in urgently speeding the efforts of a pair of ostlers to put-to a fresh team.

“What—?” she began in astonished indignation, but the heavy-set man interrupted her at once.

“Never fear, miss!” he said, in what she supposed was meant to be an ingratiating manner, although the low accent and the meaningful leer upon his broad, misshapen features were far from reassuring to her. “All’s bowman. The master sent me to see you safe to the end of your journey. ”

“To the end of my journey! But—you can’t mean, to Scotland!” ejaculated Cressida, wondering for a rather disagreeable moment if the man was mad, and making an effort to free herself from the large hand that had clamped itself heavily upon her arm as she made a motion as if to leave the chaise by the other door.

The man chuckled. “Nay, it’s not so far as
that,”
he said. “A matter of half a dozen miles, is all. And you’ll find the master waiting for you there.”

“I wish, ” said Cressida wrathfully, “you will remove your hand from my arm, sir. I should like to leave the chaise—”

“Nay, nay—master wouldn’t like that!” the man said, growing more serious as her struggle to free her arm from his grasp intensified. “You’re to come straight along with me, miss.
That’s
what he said. ”

“If you do not let me go,” she said fiercely, “I shall scream!”—and found herself dragged back on the instant against the cushions, one heavy hand clapped over her mouth, while with the other she was held firmly against a mountainous and muscular chest. At the same moment the ostlers, who, urged on by the postillions, had made good their employer’s boast that a change could be made in no more than ninety seconds at his inn, sprang away from the horses’ heads and the chaise went rattling briskly out of the inn-yard to the road beyond.

Once they had passed the environs of Welwyn and the chaise was bowling rapidly along the high road again,

Cressida found herself abruptly released and her companion grinning over sheepishly at her.

“I couldn’t help it, missy,” he said to her apologetically. “The master said I was to bring you straight away—”

“The master! The master! Who
is
your master?” Cressida sputtered, attempting to set her bonnet, which had been pushed sadly awry by the mauling she had received, at a more seemly angle upon her head.

The man looked at her in surprise. “Why, Mr. Addison, to be sure,” he said. “Beant you love-shotten with him, and he waiting to greet you at the house?”

“Addison!” Cressida caught her breath. So the man was not mad, and had been sent by Addison to escort her —where? To “the house,” he had said, and she remembered suddenly that Addison indeed possessed a hunting-box in this vicinity.

It was his intention, then, she could only suppose, to accomplish Kitty’s seduction there; and for some reason the thought of facing him upon his own grounds, in an isolated country house with only his own servants about—and probably not even many of them, since he was not in residence there at this time—was far less agreeable to her than the idea had been of confronting him in a public inn, with dozens of other persons about and help at hand at any moment if she should require it.

There was nothing for it, however, but to brazen the matter through, for quite obviously there was no way in which she could now avoid that meeting with him. She accordingly leaned back with what composure she could against the cushions and tried to think what she would say, which was fatal. The more she thought of the approaching scene, the more convinced she became that she had chosen quite the wrong way in which to handle the matter, and her only consolation was that, if she had had an extremely unpleasant shock in finding herself being carried off against her will from the yard of the White Hart, Addison was certainly going to face one equally disagreeable when his henchman delivered her, and not Kitty, into his clutches.

She had not long to wait before that moment arrived, for, as the man in the green coat had predicted, the chaise had gone less than half a dozen miles when it turned off the high road into a rough lane, over which it jolted uncomfortably for several minutes before arriving at a pair of lodge gates, whence a short drive led to a house set about so thickly with trees that it was almost invisible from the lane.

Up this drive the horses were now turned; the chaise came to a halt before the front door of the house; the man in the green coat jumped out; and Cressida, rejecting as useless the idea of bribing the postillions to whip up their horses and drive her back to the White Hart, found herself assisted by the man in the green coat to alight. With one hand tightly clasping her arm he then urged her up the steps to the door, which was immediately opened for them by a person—she could not think him a butler—quite as villainous-looking as her companion, who tipped the latter a wink, gave her a broad leer, and then jerked his head in the direction of a door opening on the left of the hall.

“In there,” he said; and without more ado the man in the green coat, still grasping her firmly by the arm, brought her across the hall and through the open door into a comfortable library, where Addison sat at his ease, perusing the latest copy of the
Racing Chronicle.

At the sound of their footsteps he glanced up, putting aside his journal with a lazy, prepared smile upon his lips. But the next moment that smile had disappeared abruptly from his face, to be replaced by an expression (alas for his vaunted reputation of never allowing any event, no matter how disturbing or unusual, to overset the bored calm of his manner!) of utter astonishment.

“You!” he ejaculated, in an incredulous and, indeed, quite stupefied tone. “But—but where is—?”

“Where is Kitty?” she finished it for him coolly, her spirits rising rapidly at the sight of his discomfiture. She trod further into the room, freed now from the grasp of the green-coated man, who had prudently retreated into the hall, and confronted him with a slight and, she hoped, convincingly mocking smile. “My dear man, did you really believe that Lady Con and I look after her so poorly that she could go jauntering off in post-chaises without our being aware of it?” she continued. “What an innocent you are, after all! You have been bubbled, you see! Kitty, unfortunately for you, is safe in Mount Street, and, even more unfortunately, you, I fear, will soon be the laughingstock of London! A totally ridiculous situation to find yourself in—is it not?—having laid such elaborate plans to lure Kitty into your net, and then finding I am come instead! I am sure all our friends will be highly diverted when I tell the tale to them!”

She paused, glancing at him interrogatively for response to this sally; but what she saw made her take an involuntary step backward, and the smile suddenly faded from her lips. She had seen men in a fury before, but never one from whose eyes there blazed such malignant hatred that she felt it ought to have scorched her where she stood.

It was at that moment that she became aware that the house was very still, and it was borne in upon her forcibly that in all probability the rogue who had brought her there and the one who had met them at the door were its only occupants, beyond Addison and herself. She was no coward, but the alarming conviction abruptly began to grow upon her that, in taking Kitty’s place in that post-chaise waiting in Bruton Street, she had done something not only foolhardy but decidedly dangerous as well.

Somewhat to her surprise, however, Addison, instead of rounding upon her in violent terms, or doing even worse, merely turned his back upon her and, walking away from her across the room, took up a decanter that stood upon a tray on a table. Splashing some of its contents into a glass, he set it down and raised the glass to his lips; then he put the glass down as well and turned to her again.

“Remiss of me!” he said, in a dry, grim voice. “Would you care to join me in a glass of madeira, my dear?”

“No, thank you!” said Cressida, very much relieved to find that the social amenities were still to be observed between them. “In point of fact, ” she went on, “I should like nothing more than the use of a carriage and horses to take me back to the White Hart at once. It is growing late, and I dislike travelling in the dark.”

Addison, who had again raised his glass to his lips upon her refusal of the wine, drank off its contents deliberately before he set it down once more upon the table.

“As to that,” he said then, in the same carefully controlled voice, “you need be under no apprehension, my dear Cressy. You will not be travelling to Welwyn or anywhere else until it is full light again. In short,” he continued, regarding her fixedly, with a slight, disagreeable smile upon his lips, as she made a gesture of incomprehension, “you are spending the night here, my love. After all, it is only fair play—is it not? You wished to take Kitty’s place. Very well: you may take it. May I suggest that you now remove your bonnet and make yourself comfortable? You must be hungry after your journey, and there is an excellent cold collation laid out in the dining room. ”

Cressida had frequently read the words in romantic novels,
His (or her) blood ran cold,
but she had never before experienced the peculiar sensation thus described, and had been rather inclined to believe that no such sensation existed in real life.

She now realised her error. Her blood might not actually have become appreciably chilled in her veins at that moment, but she most certainly felt as if it had, and it was not at all an agreeable feeling. If it was now Addison’s intention to accomplish
her
ruin instead of Kitty’s, she realised, she was in a most precarious situation. The house was an isolated one; the servants—probably hired for the occasion out of some low tavern in Tothill Fields —would assuredly do nothing to thwart their master’s intentions; and she was utterly without means to summon anyone else to her aid. Her only recourse, she saw, lay in her tongue, and she now summoned up all her wit to make use of it to good purpose.

“Don’t, pray, be absurd, Drew!” she said to him in her most bored London drawing-room manner. “You must know I have not the least taste for melodramatic games! I shan’t deny that your cold collation tempts me, but I am sure the White Hart sets a very good table, and I am persuaded that I shall arrive there in half an hour behind any horses you have in
your
stables—”

“My dear Cressy, you mistake me.” Addison, well in control of himself now, spoke evenly, but there was still a dangerous glitter in those cold grey eyes. “I am playing no game—or, if I am, it is one that you have begun yourself. It will desolate me, I assure you, if you have no taste for finishing it, but, really, my dear, that scarcely signifies now. There is only one way, you see, in which I can be sure that you will remain silent on the subject of this disagreeable little incident and that is by making quite certain that it will be no more to your advantage than to mine to bring it up in Polite Society. I do not think, dearest Cressy, that you will greatly care to publish the tale of
my
discomfiture when I am able to cap it with a charming story of my own of how you spent the night here with me, and departed in the morning with— shall we say?—your virtue slightly more tarnished than it was when you arrived. ”

He paused, gazing at her with an expression of smug, expectant satisfaction upon his face. Cressida, her lips compressed, merely regarded him warily. It was clear to her now that the tack upon which she had begun would accomplish nothing: Addison, having hit upon what was—she was obliged to admit—an infallible scheme for ensuring her silence, was certainly not to be discountenanced or shamed into letting his advantage slip through his fingers.

But would he really, she asked herself almost incredulously, carry through such a cruel and entirely despicable plan merely to save himself from embarrassment? She remembered Dolly Dalingridge’s relation of Prince Puckler-Muskau’s appalled comments on the utter vindictiveness of an English dandy faced with social obloquy—unjust, to be sure, when applied to a good-humoured man like Alvanley, unlikely even in a Brummell, who could be ruthless but also had a kind of cold, intact pride that would have made him turn in disgust from such a revenge as this.

But Addison—Addison, she decided, looking into that handsome, self-satisfied face with a clarity of perception that was heightened by her danger, was capable of doing exactly what he had threatened. To a man who prized his position in Society as highly as he did, ridicule was a kind of death, and to free himself from that fate he would undoubtedly go to almost any length. The fact that she despised him, and had for years been at few pains to hide it, would merely lend spice to his conquest.

She made a sudden entirely instinctive decision, turned round, and ran to the door.

It opened at once as she turned the knob, but as she rushed through it she found herself confronting a large and very solid obstacle—the man in the green coat.