Mademoiselle At Arms (15 page)

Departed? ‘Tchah! I suppose the vicomte threw him out?’

Watching the fellow’s face, Everett felt his suspicion
growing. Was the man debating whether or no to tell the truth? A grimace played
about Valade’s mouth and the general waited, maintaining his own rigid pose.

‘It is, you understand, that Monsieur Charvill did not—how do
you say in English?—having an eye to an eye—’

‘Didn’t see eye to eye with the Vicomte Valade? That I can
well believe.’

‘It was so,’ said Valade, becoming a trifle more fluent. ‘And
that Suzanne, the sister of my cousin the vicomte, must choose between Monsieur
Charvill and her brother. For a pity, she has chosen to remain, and it has been
her death.’

‘Slaughtered with the rest, was she?’

Despite his hatred of the woman who had caused so much grief,
the general found he could not rejoice as he wanted to. Brewis had told him the
Valade family had been victim to wholesale murder, and a twinge of compassion had
wrung even his deliberately hardened heart. Well, let him be honest. Had this
not been the case, he must have refused even to see his Frenchified
granddaughter.

‘Monsieur Charvill,’ pursued Valade, ‘has left the chateau,
and since we have heard from him nothing at all, but for the letters to his
daughter from Italy.’

‘But two letters,’ put in the woman. ‘And if he is dead I
know not.’

A question leapt into Everett’s head and he recalled the
letter to the Abbess. ‘Was this when Nicholas commended you to this Abbess?’

‘But, yes. Papa has sent me to be
religieuse
.’

 Fury rippled again. ‘That rascally knave sent you to become
a French nun?’

Looking positively terrified, the girl nodded dumbly.

‘Dolt! Muttonheaded oaf! Why the deuce couldn’t he have sent
you home?’

Valade cut in at that. ‘Monsieur Charvill thought perhaps
that his daughter would find not a welcome.’

‘Tchah! Better a doubtful welcome here than a confounded
French convent. The fellow is little better than a lunatic. How the deuce did I
ever manage to father such a brainless nincompoop? A nun, for God’s sake! A
confounded Catholic nun. A granddaughter of mine!’

The idiocy of this notion stuck in his craw and he could
think of nothing else for a moment.

‘Pardon,
milor’
,’ said Valade, ‘but Monsieur Charvill,
he was not at fault. Not entirely.’

‘I find that difficult to believe,’ snapped the general,
jerking to and fro as his agitation mounted.

‘As I have said, it was a quarrel between the vicomte and
Monsieur Charvill. The vicomte has, he say, enough
femmes
in his hands. He
will not provide for the daughter. He is the one who has said that she must go
to the convent. Monsieur Charvill, he has not the means to choose different.’

‘Hadn’t the wit, you mean.’

‘Also madame his wife—’

Charvill’s gorge rose. He’d borne mention of the woman’s
name. But that title he would not endure.

‘Don’t dare call her that to my face.’

Both Valade and the granddaughter gazed at him blankly. Then
Valade—was the man as big a fool as Nicholas?—tried again.

‘Suzanne, if I may say, had also not the choice. One would
say she could try to—to prevent that her daughter will go to the convent. But
the vicomte has said that his sister may remain, but that the daughter must go.
Even the love of a mother does not sway him.’

Abruptly, the niggling doubt that had been plaguing Lord
Charvill came sweeping to the surface. Mother? Suzanne Valade, her mother?

With deliberation, he spoke. ‘Do you tell me that my
disreputable son had the infernal insolence to pass you off as that whoring
Frenchwoman’s daughter?’

His answer was in their faces. His anger gave way to grim
humour and he thrust towards them, leaning heavily on his cane.

‘Typical. Hadn’t the stomach to admit the truth, had he? I’ll
lay any money he labelled you with some foul French name as well. What was the
name on those marriage lines you showed me?’

‘M—Melusine,’ stammered the woman, her countenance yet
registering shock.

‘I knew it.’ The snaking suspicion rolled through his mind
again. ‘And you come to me, thinking yourself half French, and expect me to
take you in. What is it you’re after? Money, I suppose. Don’t you know I
disinherited the rogue?’

‘This we knew, milor’,’ said Valade. ‘Also that it was that
you did not wish the French connection.’

‘And your precious vicomte didn’t wish for the English one,’
said Charvill, acid in his voice. ‘They eloped. But he didn’t marry her. Not
then. Too damned chickenhearted to confess to me he’d run off with the woman. If
I’d known, there would have been a different story.’ Bitterness rose up as he
looked at the female. ‘And you, my girl, if you’d been born at all, would have
been just what you think you are. Half French.’

The woman shrugged helpless shoulders, looking to her husband.
‘André?
Que dit-il
?’

‘My wife does not understand,’ said the fellow, frowning
deeply.

‘Of course she don’t understand,’ snapped Charvill irascibly.
‘Been led up the garden path by that confounded rapscallion. Your mother, for
what it’s worth to you—for there’s nothing for you here, by God!—was the woman
I chose for Nicholas. An Englishwoman. Good-looking girl.’ He looked the girl
up and down. ‘You don’t favour her, bar the black hair. Don’t favour your
father much, either, if it comes to that.’

It had not before occurred to him, but this realisation
fuelled the general’s growing conviction that he was being imposed upon in some
way. How would it serve Nicholas to keep the truth from his daughter? A tiny
thread of disquiet troubled him.

‘But this Englishwoman,’ asked the man Valade, his puzzlement
plain to see, ‘who was she?’

The question irritated Charvill. ‘What are you, a nincompoop?
She was Nicholas’s wife, of course. His first wife. Married the other and ran
off after Mary died.’ His eyes found the girl again, and he added rancorously, ‘Giving
birth to you. Couldn’t face me with what he’d done, the miserable blackguard.’

The crack in the iron front widened a little, and the general
was obliged to clamp his jaws tight against the rise of a pain too well
remembered.

‘Might have forgiven him,’ he muttered under his breath, ‘if
he hadn’t taken the babe.’

At this, the fellow Valade burst into unwise speech.

‘
Sapristi
. Then Melusine is in truth your
granddaughter. Yes, yes, you do not like the French, and so this English lady
here, she is altogether your flesh. It is that you cannot refuse her sanctuary.’

The girl held out her hands. ‘Ah,
grandpére
.’

Fire enveloped Charvill’s mind and he brought up his cane,
pointed like a musket. ‘Keep your distance! You dare to tell me I cannot refuse?’
He glared at the girl. ‘Do you think I could endure to hear you prattling your
abominable French in my ear day by day? Enough to drive me straight into my
grave. I’ll give you
grandpére
!’

‘But
milor’
—’

‘Pardon!’

No longer master of his actions, the general lurched forward,
waving his cane. ‘Get out! Out, I say! Think I want another miserable cowardly
good-for-nothing wastrel on my hands? Begone! Out of my house!’

He drove them to the door, grimly satisfied when the girl’s
nerve broke.

‘
Ah, bah
, it is enough,’ she cried, and turning, ran
out of the room.

Valade stood his ground, holding the doorjamb, and facing up
to the general. Charvill’s fury was burning out. He stopped, panting hard,
slamming his cane to the floor to make use of its much-needed support.

‘Well?’ he uttered between heavy breaths. ‘Still—here? Wasting
your—time. Get nothing out of me. Try your luck with Jarvis Remenham—if you
will.’

A sudden frown sprang to the fellow’s face. ‘You said—who?’

‘Remenham. Maternal relations. Kentish family. Find them at
Remenham House—if you can.’ A gleam of rare humour slid into Charvill’s chest. ‘For
my money, you’ll not get much out of old Jarvis either. He’s dead.’

Creeping along the dark narrow passage, with lantern held
well ahead to keep her step steady on the uneven stones—and to warn her of the
advent of rats—Melusine kept her long petticoats fastidiously clear of the dirt
with an efficient hand, a habit she had learned in the convent.

‘
Parbleu
, I hope that I do not have many more times to
come in this way to the house,’ she muttered fretfully.

‘What, miss?’ asked Jack Kimble from behind her.

‘This journey I do not like,’ she said more loudly. ‘And if
it was not for that
imbecile
of a Gérard, who has put his soldiers to
watch for me, it would not need that I make it.’

‘Even if they militiamen weren’t there, miss,’ cautioned her
cavalier, ‘you couldn’t go marching into the house open like. That there
gatekeeper would’ve called them out again.’

‘Ah yes. He will be sorry when he knows who I am,’ decided
Melusine with satisfaction.

There was some justification for her annoyance, for
negotiation of the secret passage demanded either a stout heart, or a desperate
one. The original passage, Martha had told her, had led only from an upstairs
room to one downstairs. But the Remenhams in the days of Charles the First,
with the need for an escape route from Cromwell’s increasingly victorious
forces, had cut a trapdoor through its floor into the cellars below, and thence
hewn the long rough passageway that led underground right outside the boundary
of the estate. The entrance was concealed between two huge boulders within a
clump of trees, and was now so overgrown that no one who did not know of its
existence could ever hope to find it.

Even Melusine, armed with special knowledge, and the
enthusiastic assistance of Jack Kimble’s strong arm, had taken almost half a
day to locate the place. She had known that Remenham House would be deserted,
for Martha—released, as she had carefully explained to her charge, by her vows
to God from servitude and obedience to Nicholas Charvill, a mere mortal—had
begun a correspondence with a friend of her youth, Mrs Joan Ibstock, née
Pottiswick. That good woman, although astonished to hear of Martha’s conversion
to Catholicism and embracing of a religious sisterhood, responded with the news
of Jarvis Remenham’s death.

Martha had been careful to make no mention of Melusine, and
did not reply to Mrs Ibstock’s enquiry about the fate of the little babe. When
she confessed all this to her charge, telling the now grown up babe that there
was no hope in the world of establishing any claim, she very soon discovered
her mistake. Rebellious and resentful, Melusine decided there and then that she
would do exactly that, come what may. Once in England, she made all haste to
visit Remenham House.

On that first occasion, the delay in locating the entrance to
the secret passage meant that she had to wait until morning to make her search.
She had been obliged to spend the night in that fateful bedchamber, the
faithful Kimble—who had foraged at a nearby inn, bringing back a large pie and
a jug of porter for his mistress—guarding the door outside. In the early hours
of the morning, unable to bear the suspense any longer, Melusine had ventured
to explore the mansion, the lantern she had brought in hand, commenting to
herself all the time on the state of the place and the difficulties of her task,
and having no idea of the consequences she was bringing on herself thereby.

To her intense disappointment, she discovered that all papers
had been removed from desks and cupboards. Not the most stringent search,
conducted all morning, turned up one solitary sheet. There was nothing to
replace the all important letter from her father. But she found an unknown lady’s
discarded garments, and selected some of those that she tried on, sending
Kimble off down the secret passage to load them onto the horse she had borrowed—unbeknownst
to its owner—from Father Saint-Simon. Kimble had bedded the animal down at the
local inn. And then she had been disturbed by the eruption into the room of
Major Gerald Alderley and his companion, Captain Hilary Roding.

On this second excursion, forewarned, she would use no light
and keep as quiet as a mouse, she vowed, and thus refrain from attracting the
attention of the militia at the gates. Arrived at the secret door, she grasped
the lever that opened it and placed the lantern on the floor.

‘This we will leave. I do not wish that the soldiers there
will see it shine.’

A panel slid open and she stepped into the relative light of
the little dressing-room, Kimble close behind her. Coming from the gloom of the
passage, even the corridors seemed sufficiently illuminated for them to see
their way. And the bedchamber, for which Melusine instantly headed, was almost
bright.

‘That is good. There is light enough from the sun,’ she said,
relieved.

‘What are you after this time, miss?’ asked Jack.