Love's Way (4 page)

“My dear, with your father there, there is no danger.”

“Papa is never sober for two hours a day. And the way Cousin Jack looks at me. I am so frightened, Miss Barwick.”

It was an unforseen complication, indeed, that Gamble might decide to seduce his little cousin. “Come and have some coffee. We’ll talk it over with Aunt Nora and Edward,” I parried, to give myself time to think.

She read some promise into this that we would protect her. She relaxed noticeably, a smile spreading across her face and her eyes sparkling with pure excitement. She was more vivacious that morning than I had ever seen her, full of stories of her cousin, who was a walking piece of wickedness from her account.

“He arrived at midnight, Miss Barwick! Was there ever such an example of bad manners? Papa was not feeling well, and
I
was hauled out of bed by the servants—at his orders—to welcome him. He was so insulting, looking about at the house with great distaste and always speaking of money, in the most ill-bred fashion. He asked me if I had a beau, and how much money he
had, for I thought it safer to mention Edward in case Cousin Jack should get ideas about me. He said I was outrageously pretty, you see, and looked at me in such a way, as though he were looking right through me with his horrid black eyes.”

“He didn’t touch you—molest you?” I asked sharply.

“I don’t think so. That is—he kissed me, but only on the cheek.”

“What does he look like?”

“Like a heathen. He has skin as brown as tanned leather. He wears English clothing, however. A rather nice blue jacket, which he got in London before coming here. He says he has some trunks coming with presents for me. I won’t accept them.”

“What sorts of presents?” I asked, wondering that she would reject them sight unseen.

“Muslin and some statues—I don’t know what all. He hates Captain Wingdale’s new inn, and threatened to set fire to it. Imagine! He is really shocking,” she concluded, saucer-eyed at such outrageous behaviour. Some secret corner of my heart went out to the man, as he shared my aversion to Wingdale’s architectural monstrosity.

The story was repeated with a few embellishments and a few deletions (most noticeably the kiss on the cheek) when Nora and Edward joined us. I felt this ought to be told to them, and did so, as she was a little shy.

“That settles it then. You must stay here, my dear,” Edward told her.

The three of us looked at him, assuming some roundabout hint of a wedding might be mentioned. Nora and I undertook to give him privacy, each finding an excuse to carry her coffee cup away from the table, but in a quarter of an hour they joined us in the morning parlour, with no mention of any offer having been made.

“I am taking Emily home in the tinker’s wagon. She will pack up her bags and come to spend a while with us, Chloe,” he said.

I was half relieved, for my first wave of pity for the girl had subsided, and I was again thinking how fine it would be if it were Edward who could be our salvation through a good marriage and not myself. Surely if he loved her he would have offered now.

After they left, Nora made a delightful suggestion. “This cousin might give the girl some dowry, to be rid of her,” she said. “The lads often return quite rich from India. If he is one of those Nabobs, he might spare her a few thousand pounds.”

“That would be better luck than we are accustomed to,” I said hopefully.

“If he himself is planning to marry, for example, he would be glad to see her settled. Edward must marry her now, don’t you think?”

“Something must be done. She cannot be expected to live in that hovel with a rake and a drunken father. Neither can she be expected to move in here bag and baggage without a betrothal at least.”

When she returned from the Hall with two straw suitcases, however, she seemed prepared to do just that. I showed her to a guest room, leaving her to unpack her own belongings, for we were not overly supplied with help at the time.

I was curious to get a look at Jack Gamble. To this end, Nora and I piled into the tinker’s wagon and drove into the village, passing Leroy’s place along the way. The servants were taking curtains down from the windows already. The view struck a positive blow to my heart. Wingdale had men out surveying the land, sticking red-tipped sticks into the ground at certain spots. Awash with curiosity, I asked their chief what he was about.

“We’re laying out the new street, Miss,” he answered cheerfully. “The Captain’s going to straighten her out. ‘Make a road straight as an arrow, lads’, he ordered us. These old crinkum
-
crankum paths are wasteful.”

“Gee-up, Belle,” I urged our mare, in an effort to refrain from blistering the man with my tongue. Straighten out the road indeed! This charming road that had been set out centuries before, to give a traveller the best views of our fells and dales and tarns. The man was a monster! Next he would be razing the mountains to the ground to give us a nice flat plain, all in the name of economy and modernization.

We saw nothing of Jack Gamble in the village. His arrival was known, discussed, conjectured upon wildly, but no one had seen him yet. Nora purchased some moss green netting materials, and I a marmalade pot to replace one broken recently at home. What was lost had been of Waterford crystal, beautifully shaped. What took its place was a plain white porcelain, at six shillings and tuppence. It was indicative of our falling fortunes. I wager Wingdale had Waterford crystal on his table.

It was a frustrating, unsatisfactory day from all points of view. The evening was perfectly wretched. Edward was off to a poetry meeting at Rydal Mount. As soon as he left Emily found herself too tired to sit with Nora and me, but went to her room to sulk. “Maybe I should go home,” she said on her way out the door, to punish us for Edward’s defection. “They must be wondering where I am, in any event.”

“Did you not tell them?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“I told Cook,” she called back over her saucy, flouncing shoulder.

Anyone but a yahoo must realize we could not virtually abduct the daughter of Carnforth Hall without there being some repercussions. While I debated with Nora the relative niceties of asking Emily to write or of writing to her father myself, the front knocker pounded. There was some peremptory quality in the sound that intimated the knocker was no servant, but an angry gentleman. I was virtually certain it would be Jack Gamble.

I knew from Emily more or less how he would look, but being accustomed to such tame men about the house as Edward and Tom, nothing had prepared me for my first sight of him. The instant he strode into the saloon the air seemed to crackle as though he emanated an electrical charge, like the ebony bars Edward used to rub with cat fur and apply to pith balls when he was a boy scientist. Mr. Gamble was as black as those ebony bars, too. Black hair, black eyes, black jacket, skin not a whole lot lighter. He filled the doorway and gave the impression a moment later of filling the room, though he was not one of those enormous, barrel-chested men. He was tall, broad-shouldered, tapering to a trim waist.

“Good evening,” he said grimly, glancing around with a lively but careless interest, hardly letting his eyes linger longer on Nora and myself than on the well-worn sofa.

“One of you is Miss Barwick, I assume?” His voice was loud, buzzing with arrogance.

“I am Miss Barwick,” I admitted, rather wishing I were not.

“I’m Jack Gamble.”

“I am happy to make your acquaintance.”

“Charmed,” he allowed, in a bored voice.

“This is my aunt, Mrs. Whitmore.”

“Charmed again.”

“Won’t you have a seat, Mr
.
Gamble,” I suggested. My heart was hammering with excitement and guilt, after having just learned of Emily’s manner of leaving home. My voice came out firm enough, however. If he said charmed once more, I meant to jump up and show him out of the charming door, guilty or no.

“Thank you. I have come to see Mr. Barwick. Is he in?” He sat down with a haughty posture, head and shoulders back, and crossed one leg over the other.

“No, sir, he is out this evening.”

“When will he be back?”

“Late, but if you have some business to discuss,
I
run Ambledown,” I said, knowing the business at hand was Emily.

“Indeed! Extraordinary,” he said, his dark brows rising an inch while he regarded me with amusement, in the spirit of one admitting to a lowering curiosity in a blue dog or a flying pig. “Is that done nowadays, for
women
to run an estate?”

“I have just told you it is done here, Mr. Gamble.”

“Quite, but is it done anywhere else?’

“No, I am unique in that respect,” I answered, piqued at his derision. “Have you come about Emily?”

“I am here to take her home,” he answered, trying to make it sound as though she had been passing a social evening with us, no more.

Nora, the coward, said she would go upstairs and tell Emily he had come. Such was the effect he had on people. Nora had been the most insistent all day that Emily
must
stay with us for the meanwhile. What I had seen of the man thus far, including his bold eyes that examined a lady far too closely, did not incline me to change our plan. Quite the contrary, one cringed to think of that poor girl in a house with
him, unprotected by any reliable chaperone.

“Emily wishes to remain with us for the time being. She left word with the servants to that effect, I believe,” I told him, wishing she had left word with her father.

“It is more customary for a lady to leave word with the
family
when she plans an extended visit, ma’am. Her father is not aware of her plans.”

“Nor of anything else at this hour of the night, I fancy.”

He looked startled at my plain speaking. He had heard nothing yet. I would, if necessary, put my feelings into Anglo-Saxon that no one could pretend to misunderstand.

“Does Lady Emily come here often?” he asked.

“Very frequently. Hardly a day passes that we do not see her.’’

“To spend the
night
in a bachelor’s house, I mean.”

“No, sir, this is the first time.”

“Is there a particular reason for it?”

I was becoming annoyed with his probing eyes. I stared back at him, assuming the boldest countenance I could to match his own. “You would know more about that than I. She expressed the wish
not
to stay at home at this time. We invited her to join us.”

“We’ll see what she has to say for herself,” he decreed, then leaned back, crossed his arms, and said not another word till Nora re-entered the room. This was not done in thirty seconds, nor even in three minutes. It was a long time the two of us sat, silent as stuffed owls—he staring around the room, I following his eyes till I became bored with it. Then I took up a ladies’ magazine and flipped through it, showing him I could be as rude as he, despite having had no opportunity of learning international bad manners outside the country.

“Emily has the headache,” Nora said in a timid, apologetic way as soon as she came back.

“Let me get this quite clear,” Gamble said, uncrossing first his arms, then his legs to allow him to lean forward in what he thought was an intimidating manner, with one hand on a hip, the other on his knee. “Am I to understand you have encouraged the girl to run away from her home because of my
presence
in it?”

Nora began making tch’ing noises in her throat from sheer nerves. I would about as lief have faced the Spanish Inquisition as that glowering face, but I regarded him coldly.

“No, sir, you are mistaken in thinking she needed any encouragement. It was entirely her own idea.”

He accepted this home truth without so much as a frown or glower. “The gudgeon,” he said angrily. He stood up abruptly. I looked fearfully to the stairway, wondering how to bar his ascent. There was not a doubt in my mind that he meant to go up and fetch her down by force. “I shall be back for her tomorrow afternoon. Pray ask her to have her things packed.”

“No, I can’t do that,” I said.

He cocked a quizzical eye at me. “Meaning?”

“I would feel morally culpable to send her back, under the circumstances.”

“You will find yourself
legally
culpable if you disobey her father’s orders,” he retaliated pretty sharply. “If it is my dangerous presence that sends her fleeing for safety, I shall take up residence at an inn till a chaperone can be found.”

“I expect you would be perfectly comfortable at Wingdale Hause,” I suggested.

“Is that the half-timbered monstrosity I saw last night on the main street of town?”

“That’s it.”

That earned me the blackest scowl yet. “Good evening, ma’am; Mrs. Whitmore,” he said in a tight voice before stomping to the doorway. He stopped and looked over his shoulder back into the room where the two of us were staring after him, haggard from the visit. At least I don’t imagine I bore up under it any better than Nora, whose face was the colour of ash. “Nice to be back home,” he said in accents of heavy irony; then he stalked out.

“Do you know, Nora, I don’t think Mr. Gamble will be giving Emily any dowry,” I prophesied, then laughed one of those giddy, overcome-with-emotion laughs that erupts at wakes and funerals and other awful, inappropriate occasions.

“Lud, she’ll be lucky if he doesn’t give her a thrashing,” she agreed. “It
does
look bad for him, her darting off as she did.”

“He should not have frightened her to death then, should he? I must own I would not suggest she return, now that I have met him.”

“Good gracious no. I would as soon trust a fox with a chicken. I don’t know how you had the nerve to stand up to him. Edward will have to marry her now.”

Edward seemed like slim protection from Jack Gamble, but I was too tired to argue. Emily came slipping down to make sure he was gone, then went back up to her room. I waited up till nearly midnight for Edward to come home. Nora retired an hour earlier. I told him of the visit, asking, “What do you plan to do about the situation?”

You are aware by now it was not my hope to urge this particular match on him, but I did mention it obliquely. His response surprised me. “We are in no position to marry at this time, Chloe.”