Feral Park (62 page)

Late that night when the house had grown quiet, Anna tried to sleep but she could not. Finally she rose to pace the hall and worry about Perry. She was certain that he had slipped away from the Pickler House so that he might come in time for the last dance at her ball. He would appear in the saloon and take her by the hand, and the happy ending she had sought would be secured. But, alas, he did not turn up. Thought Anna to herself whilst wringing her hands together in a near parody of fretfulness, “I fear that something terrible has befallen him. What if he has been taken by gipsies—or even worse, lay cut and slashed by the side of the road by a highwayman!”

Anna was still pacing when she heard the sound of horse hooves upon the gravel sweep and then someone stopping near to the front door and then the ring of the house-bell. Too afraid to move for fear that the visitor was bringing grievous news about the man she loved, Anna stood in her spot and soon was joined by Mr. Maxwell in the hall, dresst in his night robe and holding a candle. “Is that you, Mrs. Lacey?” he directed to Anna.

“No, Mr. Maxwell, it is your mistress, Anna Peppercorn.”

“Ah, yes, I recognise the voice. How late it is for you to be up and wandering about in the dark! I shall answer the door.” Anna’s butler then went to a wall, and as he was patting it, seeking the knob, Anna asked him what he was doing and he replied, “I believe that the doorknob has fallen away.”

“You are not at the door, Mr. Maxwell. You are attempting to open up the wall. I acquit you because it is dark and not because you are going blind. There—the door is over there, just a few feet to your left.”

“Ah yes!” said Mr. Maxwell. When the door was opened, the face of Mr. Groves was revealed in the moonlight. He was wearing his riding togs and a very interesting hat, no doubt of his own construction, which was somewhat like a turban with a beaver affixing it below the chin, and as much as Anna wished to know why he had come, she could not stop looking at the ridiculous headwear until she willed her eyes to avoid it.

“Good evening,” said she.

“Good evening, Miss Peppercorn,” answered the milliner as he took her hand to shake it. “I apologise for the late hour of my calling. I detain you from your rest so that I may tell you that I have spoken with Mr. Perry Alford not above two hours ago and he has asked me to relate to you the following: that he has left this same evening for London.”

“My word!
London
?”

“Aye. It is a bright moon, Miss Peppercorn, even at this wee hour. He dares not wait until the morrow, the business that takes him there being of the utmost importance.”

“And did he tell you the
nature
of his business?”

“He did, Miss.”

“And may I know what it is, or must I worry that he has got himself into some trouble? Gracious God, Mr. Groves, you do not think that he has gone there to procure another phial or dozen of laudanum!”

“He has not and you must depend on it, Miss Peppercorn. He is cured, thanks to Mrs. Pickler, and will not return to it.”

“Please, Mr. Grove, you must come in and sit down and tell me exactly what you know, even if Mr. Alford has forbidden you to speak to me of it.”

“I shall do that very thing. But perhaps we may have some tea? And perhaps one of your grooms—I would suggest the one called Tripp—could stable my horse during my stay.”

Mr. Groves’ requirements were met and Anna even permitted a postponement of their interview for a few moments longer so that her nocturnal visitor could stand at the window and watch Tripp, who was roused from a deep sleep (for had it not been a tiring day for him, rescuing his brother from gaol?)—sparsely dresst—take the horse round back. Anna and her night caller then repaired to the drawing-room where they spoke for half an hour, Mr. Groves saying first that he trusted that the ball went well and Anna responding that it went very well indeed except that John Dray was shot with a pistol, and incidentally that he was, in fact, not a man but a woman, and wished now to be known as Johanna. Other things were told quickly which had put most every thing to rights in Payton Parish, and Mr. Groves sighed and fluttered and gasped to hear all that had taken place and how the parish had been changed in one brief evening whilst he had sat in the back of his shop, slurping soup and sewing a new hat. Now he wished that he had been ugly enough to win an invitation to the Feral Park ball—especially to see how his uniforms were worn!—but at least he was learning each of the particulars whilst the news was fresh. Then he said what Anna had been waiting with growing impatience to hear: the reason for Perry Alford’s sudden late night departure for London— specifically to Lambeth Palace, the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

And Anna could not believe her ears.

Three days later Mrs. Taptoe returned to Payton Parish from her trip to Southampton, accompanied by her son Maurice Taptoe, who was handsome and amiable and well-mannered (although he had lived in America where course manners are prevalent), and who spoke at length of his fifteen years of adventure upon the high seas and upon the rugged soil of his adopted country, the riveting details of which one generally finds only in books. Although he had escaped being eaten by cannibals, Maurice confessed that he had been once forced to eat a man himself to prove that he should be deemed an eater and not an eatee, although it was only a toe, and the nail was spat out.

Seeing Maurice brought Anna to recall the day he left, when she had stood at the window with Mrs. Taptoe and watched him wave and then be gone, and it had brought back in recollection those words, spoken by the mother, which Anna could not until this moment pin down: “Bid your brother goodbye, Anna.”

For Maurice Taptoe was, you see, Anna’s half-brother.

“Was this why you hated him so much, Papa?” asked Anna of her father, when it was all out. “For something that could not possibly have been his own doing?”

“Indeed not,” said Mr. Peppercorn. “The thing for which I have had difficulty acquitting your brother has been his judgement of
me
, and his judgement of his mother, and the fact that he felt it incumbent upon himself to abandon that loving mother and remove himself from a father who, whilst he did not reside under the young man’s roof, was nonetheless equally loving and supportive—to depart from his parents for perhaps the remainder of their lives to punish them for his very existence. I could not understand it, daughter, and over time I grew to loathe
his
loathing of us. Mrs. Taptoe tells me that he is changed. I hope that this is true.”

Whether or not
this
was true (and in the end Maurice Taptoe turned out to be quite a changed man and loving in every way), there was something else that was
most certainly
true, and that was the fact that the relationship between Henry Peppercorn and Maurice Taptoe was the very secret which neither Mr. Peppercorn nor Mrs. Taptoe, nor Mrs. Dray, nor her confidante-daughter Gemma could disclose to Anna. It was later that Anna learnt what evidence had sat in Mr. Peppercorn’s private library cabinet that was subsequently removed after Gemma had seen it (and thus was not there for the benefit of
Anna’s
discovery): little baby boots with Maurice’s name stitched into them, which had been taken out by Anna’s father when it had become known to him that the prodigal son was to return to Payton Parish. Though Henry Peppercorn’s feelings about his son had been disagreeably coloured by the young man’s ill treatment of his mother and father, there was sufficient affection remaining within the heart of the father to give the little boots to Betsey so that they should be buffed to high lustre and then offered in a pristine condition to Maurice upon his return, in memory of his happy childhood in the parish.

And they were indeed given. And Maurice Taptoe wept to hold them, but then, to lighten the mood, attempted to put them on his big feet, whilst everyone laughed.

A very small part of Anna wondered what it should be like were Maurice
not
her half-brother—if, indeed, there should be any risk to her attachment to Perry Alford, but then she caught herself and self-admonished: he
was
, in fact, her half-brother, and what is more, she was to marry Mr. Alford, for this is why he went to Lambeth: to secure a special license from the Archbishop for that very purpose! The reason for the haste was simple: not knowing that Mr. Maurice Taptoe was Anna’s brother, he regarded the man as a rival for the hand of his beloved, and hoped that by obtaining the special license and securing approval from the father to marry, all difficulties would be obviated
before
Maurice’s arrival and there should be no impediment to his asking, wooing, and winning Anna in totality.

Upon his return to Payton Parish, Perry Alford was told by Anna’s father the whole truth about Maurice. “My dear Mr. Alford!” marveled Mr. Peppercorn, having been interrupted whilst in the midst of a backgammon game with his fiancée Georgiana Younge (and some playful nibbling of the ear that went on betwixt the throwings of the dice), so that he should be asked a very important question, “you may
certainly
have the hand of my daughter, for I know how dearly you love each other, and your impecuniousness is of no consequence to me, and at all events, Maurice Taptoe should pose no threat to you, though he once ate a man’s toe, for attachment between Anna and the young man is an impossibility.”

“And why do you say this, Mr. Peppercorn?”

“Because Maurice Taptoe is my son.”

“Can this be true?”

“Depend on it. I fathered the both of them, and marriage between the two would, therefore, be illegal, and even if it were not, it should still be highly undesirable, the possible product of such a union being a creature not unlike my own dead wife whose father and mother were also brother and sister. One acquits the two, in this case, however, for it was laudanum that was drunk at a family fête which clouded their judgement and caused them to couple in unfortunate incest. It is always a good idea, at all events, to excuse one’s parents for their imperfections.”

“And was this why your wife was put into the Stornaway Asylum—because of the shame of her parentage?”

“Not entirely,” said Aunt Drone, standing in the doorway and having overheard mention of her sister from the corridor. “You see,” said she, stepping inside, “after the child was born, everyone in the family except for the infant and myself came down with putrid fever and promptly died and I was sent off to live with a kind neighbour, and my baby sister was placed in a nursery cell in Stornaway.”

“But all has turned out well in the end,” said Anna, now standing at the door herself, “for my legal mother was given a good home by my father, and this is why he should be forgiven for siring children hither and yon, for he could not have a child by his own wife, nor even take her to bed. Papa, you must tell me, though, if there be other children within or without the parish whom I may some day meet and discover are my half-sibling.”

Mr. Peppercorn fixed his eye upon the floor and then he looked up at the ceiling and then he looked bravely into his daughter’s quizzical face and said, “I confess, Anna, that there is one other.”

Gasps filled the room of sufficient suction, it seemed, to empty it for that moment of all the air within.“And do we—do we know her?”Anna stammered.

Mr. Peppercorn nodded. “She is, in fact, present in this very house.”

Anna sat. “I feel, Papa, as if my head has suddenly been taken off the neck and tossed about so that I am in a dizzy-daze from the flight from one mischievous hand to the next!”

Aunt Drone calmed her niece with a soothing hand to the brow.

Mr. Peppercorn resumed his confession: “There was a servant who worked here for a time, a beautiful woman of African extraction who had escaped from a slave ship and whom I offered succour and then employment and finally,” (with a blush,) “my pego. With her I fathered an adorable little girl with brown skin.”

“And does this girl, whom I must now assume to be grown to womanhood, know that you are her father?”

Mr. Peppercorn shook his head. “But perhaps it is time finally to tell her. It is right that she should know who is her sister and who is her brother. Anna, please call Umbrous Elizabeth into the room.”

Over the next three months there were a great many weddings in Payton Parish, such as to keep Mr. Nevers very, very busy. The first was the joining of Anna to Perry Alford, whose special license from the Archbishop of Canterbury had been purchased for Perry by a generous and sympathetic Miss Godby. Permission was readily granted by the Archbishop, for he was no supporter of Lord Godby, whom he found to be injurious to the kingdom and to every citizen therein. The Primate was most happy to facilitate nuptials for the woman who had promoted the marriage of Felicity Godby and John Dray (not knowing at the time of the granting of the license that Mr. Dray was a woman) because such an act of beneficence would draw Lord Godby’s ire, and this was perfectly amenable to the Archbishop, who, in this rare instance, could foresee no retaliatory consequence.

As for Johanna Dray and Felicity Godby, there was no marriage to annul, for legally the two women had not been wed but had merely said the words, the ceremony being supposititious, but when Lord Godby learnt that his daughter had
attempted
to marry a woman he hastened to Payton Parish with his deputies and his hounds but could not find Felicity to seize and drag back home, for she had left with her lover Johanna for the United States of America, specifically for Boston, which Maurice Taptoe had told her was a fine city from his experience, and so Felicity Godby and Johanna Dray settled there and were perhaps the source of the phrase “Boston marriage,” wherein two women in intimate friendship live and keep house together and eschew men, except for those who do odd jobs and groom the horses.