Daphne

Title Page
Dedication
MISS BAILEY’S GHOST
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
About the Author
Titles by M. C. Beaton
Copyright

ONE

Lady Godolphin was suffering from a bad
conscience
. The comfortable travelling carriage bearing herself and young Daphne Armitage bowled smoothly along the summer roads of Berham county.

Daphne had been staying in London with her sister, Annabelle. Although she had just turned eighteen no plans had yet been made to bring her out, her father, the Reverend Charles Armitage, being in funds and therefore, for once, content to let his latest marriageable daughter age slightly before rushing her off to the altar.

But Daphne had met and fallen in love with a very beautiful young man at one of Lady Godolphin’s parties and an engagement seemed in the offing. The man of her choice was Cyril Archer, famed in London society for his youth, beauty, and total lack of brain.

Lady Godolphin now felt uneasily she should have thrown a spoke in that particular wheel.

The elder Armitage girls had all married
men
, handsome, dashing, virile
men
, not empty-headed preening coxcombs. Minerva was comfortably wed to Lord Sylvester Comfrey, Annabelle to the
Marquess
of Brabington and Deirdre to Lord Harry Desire.

It was not as if Daphne had much in her cockloft either, reflected Lady Godolphin sourly. It was just that the vicar would not, she was sure, look on Daphne’s choice with any warmth. Furthermore, Mr Archer was comfortably off, but hardly rich.

And Charles Armitage would no doubt blame her, Lady Godolphin, for having been instrumental in introducing Daphne to Mr Archer.

Lady Godolphin was a distant relative of the Armitages and had been much involved with the three elder girls’ marriages. She was fond of all the Armitage girls, but could not help feeling Daphne had turned out something of a
disappointment
.

She had no
character
.

From being a mischievous hoyden she had turned into a dazzling beauty, utterly wrapped up in her own appearance.

A sudden ray of hope shone in Lady Godolphin’s brain.

‘Does young Archer hunt?’ she asked.

Daphne was studying her own reflection in a steel mirror which she had drawn out of her reticule.

‘Oh, no,’ she said vaguely. ‘He detests blood sports.’

‘Lor’!’ said Lady Godolphin gloomily. ‘Well, men are all a lot of follicles, anyways. I’ve given them up myself. I started at Lent and kept on goin’.’

‘Yes?’ said Daphne, adjusting a curl.

‘And paint too.’

‘I had noticed,’ said Daphne with rare animation. Privately she thought Lady Godolphin looked a great deal younger without her customary mask of
blanc
and rouge.

Lady Godolphin looked like a well-scrubbed bulldog. Her heavy face was creased with worry and her mouth turned down at the corners.

‘Are you not happy that I have found a suitable young man?’ asked Daphne at last, putting away the mirror.

‘Well, I am, and I amn’t. Fact is, he’s a bore. That’s what bothers me.’

‘He has delicate and sweet manners and he loves me,’ said Daphne with unwonted severity.

‘Oh, ah. I just don’t know what Charles is going to say.’

‘Father? Oh, father never notices me.’

‘I wouldn’t say that. He always said you were the beauty o’ the bunch.’

‘I know
that
,’ said Daphne with seemingly awful vanity.

Lady Godolphin leaned forward and jerked down the glass. The scent of wild thyme and marjoram wafted into the carriage on the hot summer air. Clouds of thistledown drifted and clung and drifted
again over the deep green meadows by the river. The hedgerows were a riot of colour with purple and yellow vetch, yellow-headed wild parsnip and white clover. A flock of woodpigeons squabbled noisily over the still-orange rowan berries and brightly coloured butterflies performed their erratic dance in the sleepy air.

Lady Godolphin’s eyes began to close. She was worrying over nothing. She wasn’t a terribly
close
relative of the Armitages and she had already done more than enough for the other girls. Daphne was as empty and silly as Mr Archer. But Lady Godolphin sleepily remembered Daphne when she and Diana used to get up to all sorts of mad capers; a Daphne animated with wild, blown hair, flushed face, and no care for her clothes whatsoever.

Soon her mouth fell open and she began to snore.

Daphne studied her sleeping face for a few moments. Then that elegant young lady stretched her arms above her head and yawned, gave her ribs a good scratch, and popped her feet on the seat opposite as she slouched back comfortably.

Without a spectator, Daphne’s beauty ceased, as far as she was concerned, to exist. For her, beauty was an armour which you donned before facing the gaze of even your nearest and dearest. Beauty, Daphne had found, excused everything from lack of dowry to lack of intelligence. So long as she looked beautiful and smiled prettily, then she did not need to exert herself in any way. Beauty meant you were loved by one and all.

Only look how poor little Diana got nothing but the rough edge of her father’s tongue because she
would
hang around the stables and kennels, wishing out loud she could have been born a boy.

The sun sank lower in the sky and flocks of rooks sailed towards the woods. The sky paled to a greenish colour, then violet, then purple. One by one, the lights went on in farm cottages, flickering smears of yellow against the heavy glass.

Houses began to appear on either side of the road as they neared the county town of Hopeminster. They rattled through the quiet cobbled streets and out onto the road which led to the village of Hopeworth.

Daphne was at peace with the world. No longer would she have to dread a Season, or that her father should suddenly find himself out of pocket and hasten to marry her off to the first man with money. Cyril Archer suited her perfectly. He was a beautiful counterpart to herself. He never said anything startling or clever; in fact he rarely said anything at all. He had kissed her before she left, a chaste kiss on the brow.

But he did seem to sail like some beautiful angel fish through that mysterious world of the
ton
, that world of shibboleths and taboos. It was as if he had been born in the middle of Almack’s and cut his teeth at the opera. By instinct rather than intelligence did he manage to be socially correct at all times, weaving his way deftly through the saloons of the west end of London like an elegant dancer in an elaborate quadrille.

‘Or Theseus in the Labyrinth,’ said Daphne unconsciously speaking aloud.

‘What!’ said Lady Godolphin.

‘I didn’t know you were awake,’ said Daphne, straightening her spine, and placing her feet neatly, side by side, on the carriage floor. ‘I said like Theseus in the Labyrinth. In Crete, you know.’

‘Your grammar is awful,’ said Lady Godolphin, shaking her head so vigorously that her turban fell over one eye. ‘
Thoses
in the laburnum, not Theses.’

The carriage suddenly lumbered to a halt.

‘We can’t be there already!’ exclaimed Lady Godolphin. She stuck her head out of the window. ‘What’s to do?’

‘Don’t know, my lady,’ came the coachman’s voice, ‘but we’d better get out the pistols. Lights bobbing on the road ahead. Hope they ain’t highwaymen.’

‘Not near Hopeworth,’ said Daphne calmly. ‘Papa would not allow it.’

A faint halloo echoed from down the road.

‘Someone’s walking towards the carriage, my lady,’ came the coachman’s voice.

Lady Godolphin put a hand in the pocket in the door of the coach and pulled out a serviceable horse pistol.

‘Don’t be affeart, Daphne,’ said Lady Godolphin, her jowls quivering. ‘They shan’t touch us. Oh, for Heaven’s sake, wench! Stop fiddling with your bonnet.’

‘I am persuaded it is something to do with Papa, or something that he knows of,’ said Daphne with
what Lady Godolphin considered an air of absolute bovine stupidity.

There was the sound of voices and a head appeared at the carriage window. Lady Godolphin raised the pistol in both hands, closed her eyes tightly, and fired. Daphne knocked her arm up and the ball buried itself in the roof of the coach.

The window of the carriage was down. Daphne put her head out and said gently to the figure lying flat on the ground, ‘It is all right, Papa. Lady Godolphin took you for a highwayman.’

The vicar of St Charles and St Jude struggled to his feet and crammed his shovel hat, which had fallen off, onto his head again. His squat figure trembled with outrage.

‘Be damned to you, ma’am,’ he gasped. ‘You nearly sent me to my Maker!’

‘It’s your fault,’ said Lady Godolphin, as much shaken as the outraged vicar. ‘If you would behave more like a parson than a … than a …
thing
. Parsons is in their churches, not cavortin’ around the middle of the road.’

‘And you should’ve told me you were coming,’ said the vicar. ‘Carriage can’t get through. You and Daphne will need to get down and walk. There’s a gurt hole in the middle o’ the road.’

‘I sent a letter,’ said Lady Godolphin.

‘Oh, is that what it was?’ said the vicar, looking uncomfortable. ‘Never opened it. Thought it would be full o’ female chit-chat. Get down. Get down. Tell you about it on the road home.’

Wheezing and puffing, Lady Godolphin climbed down from the carriage, followed by Daphne.

‘John Summer’ll come over the fields with the hand cart and take your trunks to the vicarage,’ said the Reverend Charles in an abstracted way. He seemed to have recovered quickly although he was plainly worried about something. ‘The coach and your servants can return to Hopeminster, ma’am,’ went on the vicar. ‘Come along. Step lightly. No time to waste.’

Puffing and demanding explanations, Lady
Godolphin
with Daphne in tow followed him down the road. Both women were, however, struck speechless by the sight that met their eyes.

A group of labourers from the village had broken up a deep channel right across the road. The resultant pit was filled with ditchwater and was being carefully covered with turf and dust.

‘Hunting has driven you mad,’ exclaimed Lady Godolphin. ‘I thought you considered it
Sacker-lodges
to kill reynard by any other means than hunting the beast down with an expensive pack o’ hounds. But now it seems as if you’re trying to trap the animal. Well, let me tell you, foxes don’t go jauntering down the Hopeworth road. They keeps to the fields. They …’

‘It ain’t for the fox,’ said the vicar heavily. ‘It’s for the bishop.’

‘Lud!’

‘He’s coming early in the morning for to pay me a visit. He’s going to ask me to give up my pack.’

‘Not Dr Jameson,’ said Lady Godolphin,
remembering
that the bishop usually kept as well away from Hopeworth parish as possible.

‘New bishop,’ said the vicar tersely. ‘Dr Philpotts. Sent word. Said huntin’ wasn’t fit for a member o’ the church.’

‘But the poor man will break his neck!’

‘Not he,’ said the vicar. ‘But it should make him think twice about goin’ further.’

‘It is a very
deep
pit, Papa,’ ventured Daphne.

‘Don’t criticize things you know nothing about,’ said the vicar. ‘Not the sort of thing for girls or ladies to get exercised about.’

Lady Godolphin realized she was too tired to argue. Her feet ached. She never really had
understood
country life anyway. No need to refine too much on it and exhaust oneself by making a scene about nothing. For all she knew, country vicars regularly dug pits for their bishops.

‘How did you fare in London?’ asked the vicar, turning his attention to Daphne.

Lady Godolphin squeezed Daphne’s arm as a signal that it was not a very opportune time to talk about Mr Archer.

‘Very well, Papa,’ said Daphne demurely. ‘I was much admired.’

‘Not right for you to say so,’ grunted the vicar. ‘How goes Annabelle?’

‘Well … I think,’ said Daphne cautiously.

‘So she should be. Finally got that son she craved.’

‘Yes,’ said Daphne, shaking her head slightly as if
to shake loose uncomfortable images of Annabelle absorbed in the welfare of her squat, ugly baby boy while her husband did not seem able to look at the child.

‘And Minerva? And Deirdre?’

‘Gone to Brighton, as you know, with the
Fashionables
, Papa. London was very thin of company. How are the little girls?’ asked Daphne, meaning
seventeen
-year-old Diana and sixteen-year-old Frederica, her two younger sisters.

‘Diana needs some teaching as to how to go on. She’s run wild. And Frederica’s sadly off in looks. Need to do something to bring them up to the mark.’

‘That’s all he ever thinks when he thinks of us girls,’ thought Daphne dismally. ‘We must be beautiful – the
beautiful
Armitage girls. Our value on the Marriage Mart must be kept high.’

Bravely, in order to turn her father’s thoughts from her younger sisters, Daphne plunged in with, ‘I am about to become affianced, Papa.’

The vicar stopped stock still and glared at Lady Godolphin’s fast retreating back.

‘Who to?’

‘Cyril Archer.’

‘
Mr
Cyril Archer.’