Devil Water (38 page)

Charles nodded. He was already dressed in a plain dark suit, with plain linen, and a brown tie-wig. The hat Alec gave him was plain too, without lace. The clothes were suitable for a petty lawyer, or law clerk. They went down another flight of stairs, into a warren of common rooms, private cells, and little courtyards. They waited near the great gates, talking of the weather in low tones, until the handbells jangled throughout the debtors’ prison, and the wardens began to bawl out, “Time! Time! All outsiders to leave!”

“Remember, sir,” said Alec. “Rob is waiting near the Saracen’s Head.”

Charles nodded again. They watched until the crowd of departing visitors was thickest, then Charles slipped into a place in the queue. He held his breath while he stopped to check out with the gateward. Though he knew his escape had not yet been discovered, for the great alarm bells had not rung from the criminals’ side.

“Name?” said the gateward, glancing negligently at a scrawled list.

“John Thompson,” said Charles. “Who for?” mumbled the gateward. “Alec Armstrong. I’m his lawyer.”

Some debtor’s pretty sweetheart pushed up behind and the gate-ward, eying her with relish, said “Pass” to Charles, who took several careful steps through the tiny open gate and out onto the street, where he needed all his self-control not to run. As it was he walked very fast, and crouched to minimize his height. It was snowing a little; he felt the cool wet flakes on his face with a kind of ecstasy. He passed St. Sepulchre’s, which began to ring ten o’clock. He reached the Saracen’s Head beyond. Its multipaned bow windows shed light on the street, and he saw Rob lurking there, done up in muffler and cap, his nose pressed to the window, as though he longed to enter the cozy inn.

Rob saw Charles from the corner of his eyes, let him pass, as they had agreed. Then, since there was nobody about, except a beggar and a muffin man, he caught up with him. “Na tr-rouble?” he asked.

“No,” said Charles. They crossed the Fleet Bridge, and were accosted by two whining, ragged whores. “Not tonight, my beauties,” said Charles with a loud excited laugh. “But here’s something to keep the cold out!” and he gave them each a shilling.

“Care-reful!” said Rob sharply, when the whores had gone. “Such as
you
seem, divven’t fling awa’ siller like that!” While he spoke there was a din far behind them, the frenzied jangling of bells, shrill whistles and the rattle of a huge alarm from Newgate tower.

“Blessed Mary,” Charles whispered. “They’ve found out!” Then he was silent, as Rob steered him through alleys, and tiny cross streets until they reached the Oxford Road. Here to the North it was still open country, and no other pedestrians dared brave the dangers of frozen ruts and footpads on a dark winter’s night. Rob, who had superb vision, besides having studied this route often, never hesitated. At last they turned left into Hanover Square, and paused while a coach and four went past them, then they slid into the Earl of Lichfield’s half-finished house, where Rob picked up the lantern he had left there earlier. They went down to the basement, and Rob started to unlock the door of the wine cellar. But the door swung open, and a tall gray cowled figure stood inside looking at them. Charles, who was panting, strangled a cry. The hair prickled on his scalp, and he crossed himself.

“You needn’t fear,” said the figure softly. “You’re safe, Radcliffe. I am Lichfield.”

“A monk,” whispered Charles incredulous, his flesh still creeping.

“No, no,” said the Earl. “Only for a masquerade. You’ve done well, lad,” he said to Rob. “Now leave us alone. I’ll give you orders later.”

At the Haymarket Opera House, Betty sat despondently in a box, resting her chin on her hand and watching the masked dancers gyrating below. Frank had been sitting beside her until just now, when he had left her with Mrs. Walpole and Sir Wilfred Lawson while he went to find a glass of punch. Betty’s nausea had passed, but her head ached and she wondered how long before it would be safe to go home, and how she was then to find out what had happened to Charles. She turned to what she thought was Frank returning, and saw that instead it was her brother who slipped into the cushioned chair. “I wondered where you’d got to, George,” she said, then added in a whisper, “Have you heard anything? Oh, do you think it’s all right?”

Under the cowl the eyes seemed to glitter through the black mask, and the monk, leaning very near her, whispered, “Yes, darling. ‘Tis all right.”

Betty’s head jerked up, she peered closer, saw a cleft chin, and the beginning of a scar pucker on the right cheek. She swayed, and caught at the railing. “Don’t you dare swoon!” said the voice in her ear. “Get us out of here quickly.”

The whirling kaleidoscope around her steadied and settled down. She took a deep breath, and said in a loud natural voice, “George, it’s so warm. I feel faint again. Would you take me home? When my husband returns, you’ll tell him I’ve gone out with Lord Lichfield, won’t you?” she said to Mrs. Walpole, who interrupted her flirtation with Sir Wilfred long enough to say, “Yes, Lady Betty. Certainly.”

The Roman matron and the tall monk quitted the box and in the corridor they found a throng of masked revelers who were surging to and fro, either towards the dance floor or the refreshment rooms. “The coach is below by the entrance,” said Charles holding her arm firmly.

She could not speak again. They descended the theater steps and she preceded him into her brother’s coach.

Charles muffled his mouth with his hand and told one of the footmen to direct the coachman to drive slowly along the river for a while.

“Won’t they think it strange?” said Betty faintly.

“No,” said Charles. “They think I’m the Earl, and that he’s drunk. He played his part well, earlier. For which I’ll bless him all my life.” In the darkness of the coach he put his arm around her. “He knows what love is, Betty, and he’s given us this time together because he’s found me passage on a sloop which sails from Rye to Boulogne on Saturday.”

“Saturday,” she repeated. “‘Tis after midnight now. Charles, that’s
tomorrow!”
She turned her cheek on his shoulder and began to weep.

“I’ll stay if you want me to, Betty,” he said in a grave voice.

“No!” she cried. “Not hid in that cellar, not in danger. Of course not -- but oh Charles, I love you so. I can’t bear -- and yet now I have the thing I wanted most in life. You’re
free!”

“Almost,” he said, then taking off his mask and hers, he tried to see her face. “Dear heart,” he said half laughing, “had Lichfield not warned me, I’d never have known you in that wig.” He passed his hand gently over her head and removed the wig. “So now I can see your bright hair even in the darkness.” And he bent and kissed it. She raised her face and put her arms around his neck.

An hour later the Lichfield coach drew up at the Lee door. Betty darted out and ran inside. Frank was waiting, full of wrathful bewilderment, and Betty was constrained to invent a story quickly. She said that her brother’s coach had thrown a wheel in some rut, and there had been a natural delay. She pled that Frank should help her up to bed at once, and indeed she looked so wild-eyed and disheveled that he was alarmed.

The Earl’s coach proceeded to Hanover Square, where the cowled monk entered the unfinished house, murmuring to a footman that he had a fancy to see what the workmen had done that day. “S’truth,” said the footman to the coachman, “ ‘is lordship must be tipsy as a goat, or mebbe ‘tis a young lydy’s meeting ‘im in there.”

“And none o’ your business, any’ow,” said the coachman crossly.

He and his horses were tired, and these whimsies tonight were unlike his lordship’s usual consideration.

Yet it wasn’t three minutes before the cowled monk came out again, and said he wished to go home.

Charles remained alone in the wine cellar, not yet daring to rejoice over freedom, still in a wretched turmoil at the parting with Betty, unable to think, or indeed feel any more emotions except one. Betty had promised that she would try to send Jenny here on the morrow to see her father once before he left. During the rest of the long night, Charles was obsessed with longing to see his child.

TEN

On the morning of July 16, 1723, Jenny was standing by the harpsichord in the front parlor of the Hackney School for young gentlewomen. Miss Crowe hunched over the instrument playing Italian trills in a singularly British and thumping manner, while Jenny struggled through an aria by Buononcini with only the faintest notion of what she was singing. Now that Italian music was the rage in London, it had naturally been added to the curriculum of this fashionable school. Jenny suffered as she obediently trilled and quavered, while trying to ignore Miss Crowe’s frequent blunders.

Jenny had a natural ear, and a true silvery voice which had lately begun to deepen and lose its childishness. She was thirteen, and the exceptional beauty which had been hers as a small child was reappearing in a new form. Her flaxen hair had turned to a pale cowslip gold, her gray eyes had lengthened and were set off by long brown lashes. Nature had endowed her with a vastly becoming black mole on her left cheekbone; it enhanced her transparent white and rose skin. Her lips were voluptuously full. Too full, really vulgar, Jenny thought them, quite unaware of the coquetry they added to the wistfulness of her enchanting smile. Her second teeth had come in perfect, and were a piece of luck she owed to her mother and the generations of plain-living Border farmers from which Meg sprang. This Jenny did not know, nor that the cleft in her square little chin came from her father, as did the long delicate fingers and the proud tilt of her head. In fact Jenny knew nothing about her parentage. She was called Miss Lee.

She had recently overheard a conversation which clarified many obscure taunts about her birth. She discovered that the school thought her to be a bastard of Colonel Lee’s who had been charitably reared by Lady Betty Lee. Jenny was hurt by the discovery of this theory, which she knew to be false, though she had no means of refuting it.

The memory of that eerie visit to a cellar in Hanover Square, more than six years ago, had greatly blurred. But there
had
been a strange man in the cellar, a tall, fair-haired man who kissed her many times, and told her that he was her father, and who gave her a gold ring with a crest on it -- a bull’s head, Jenny thought the crest had been, though she was not even sure of that now. Lady Betty had put the ring away when she saw it, saying it was too big, and must be kept until Jenny was grown. The man who said he was her father had tears in his eyes when he said farewell, or had he? Much of the memory was mixed up with dreams which came later. Yet Rob certainly had been in the cellar too. It was he, and Lady Betty, who forbade her ever to mention this mysterious visit. Nor had she. Strongest of all the emotions aroused that evening, was fear and the awareness of danger. Danger to do with the strange man whom Rob and Lady Betty were for some reason trying to help.

Jenny now understood, of course, that there must have been an escape, and she had heard of the wicked Jacobite Rebellion, but saw no connection. The Lee household and the school were so entirely Whig and Hanoverian that Jenny was unaware there
could
be any other viewpoint.

“Miss Lee!” said Miss Crowe sharply, banging out a chord. “Pay attention!”

Jenny jumped, and brought her wandering eyes back to her teacher’s fat, purplish face. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said. “I just saw Mr. Byrd’s coach draw up,” she indicated the window, “and was wondering whether he had brought Evelyn a birthday present.”

“I expect you’ll find out in due time,” Miss Crowe snapped. “Now the trill again. Fa, sol, fa, sol, fa, sol. . .”

Jenny took a breath, opened her mouth, and warbled, but she went on thinking about her friend, Evelyn Byrd, and Evelyn’s great secret.

Jenny was flattered by Evelyn’s confidence, pleased by the intimacy which had lately developed between them. Evelyn was sixteen this very day, and might well have ignored a child so much her junior. But Evelyn was not like the other girls. She was taller and thinner, and at times beautiful in a moody, intense way they didn’t admire, though Jenny did. Also it might be that she was drawn to Jenny because neither of them had a conventional background. In this school, which accepted only the daughters of landed gentry or nobility, the position of both Jenny and Evelyn was somewhat equivocal. Jenny’s exact parentage was in doubt, though the Earl of Lichfield and Lady Betty Lee’s influence had assured her admission. While Evelyn’s widowered father, though reputedly wealthy and well connected, was after all a kind of rustic foreigner -- or so the school deemed one actually born in the Colonies.

“Time’s up,” said Miss Crowe clapping her music shut, “and I trust you do better tomorrow. Now go to your French lesson, then the dancing master, after that two hours of plain sewing. Miss Simpson says you made a frightful botch of the last linen she allotted you.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Jenny and swallowed. “Please, ma’am you -- you haven’t forgotten that I am permitted a half holiday today, with Evelyn?” she asked anxiously. “You know she’s going to a musicale at Lord Peterborough’s. Mrs. Strudick said I might go.”

“Indeed!” Miss Crowe said. “
I
don’t feel you’ve earned any favors.” But she did not dare gainsay the headmistress, whom she thought deplorably lax where Jenny Lee was concerned. Mrs. Strudick positively made a favorite of this little baseborn nobody. Miss Crowe cast a baleful glance at the girl, resenting the rose and gilt coloring, the slender budding body inside the white aproned and cuffed brown serge schooldress. “If you go,” she said, “you will arise at five tomorrow and finish all your sewing before prayers.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Jenny, curtseying and wondering why Miss Crowe never seemed pleased with her. It was her first intimation of feminine jealousy, though it was not to be the last.

After her dancing lesson, Jenny found Evelyn impatiently awaiting her in the bedroom they shared. “Hurry, Jen,” said Evelyn. “Father’s in a pet.”