Miss Hartwell's Dilemma (23 page)

Miss Tisdale insisted on going to church again on Christmas morning, just because she liked to sing carols, she claimed. Afterwards they hurried home to dress. Mrs. Vaux had decreed that the new gowns were to be worn to the vicarage.

“They are much too fine for such an occasion,” she said privately to Amaryllis, a martial glint in her eye, “but it will impress Augusta, and Tizzy’s spirits will be supported by knowing she is dressed to the nines.”

On the short walk to the vicarage, Miss Tisdale’s spirits showed no signs of needing support. Amaryllis was amazed at the jaunty bounce in the steps of her staid governess. The smile that had rarely been seen, even when she was amused, now rarely left her face. And all this had been wrought by the knowledge that one gentleman at least found her attractive enough to marry.

Amaryllis had never lacked for suitors. She knew her aunt, in her day, had also been much sought after. Amaryllis had never considered how utterly lowering it must be to be ignored by the male sex.

Impulsively she slipped her arm through Tizzy’s and whispered, “I am so happy for you!”

As soon as they were shown into the vicarage’s parlour, Mrs. Vaux sat down beside Augusta Raeburn and engaged her in serious conversation. Amaryllis exerted herself to ensure that their tête-a-tête was not interrupted, not a difficult task since Mr. Raeburn and Miss Tisdale showed no interest in anything but each other. If she had not been so fond of Tizzy, she would have found it amusing to see the plump vicar and the lean governess smelling of April and May like any youthfully handsome couple.

At last dinner was announced. With a smug smirk on her face, Mrs. Vaux accepted Mr. Raeburn’s arm to lead her into the dining room. She stood on tiptoe to whisper in his ear, and he beamed.

The meal went better than Amaryllis had imagined possible. The conversation was cheerful and Miss Augusta actually addressed a remark or two to Tizzy. The golden-brown turkey was stuffed with fragrant herbs; the plum pudding ignited in a satisfactory blue blaze of brandy.

As the parlourmaid bore off its remains to the kitchen, the vicar rose to his feet and proposed a toast to his betrothed. Without a murmur of protest, Miss Raeburn joined in raising her glass to the health and happiness of the beaming Miss Tisdale.

When Mr. Raeburn sat down, Mrs. Vaux stood up. “I have an announcement to make, too,” she said. “Augusta has agreed that when I retire from the school, she will come and live with me.”

Amaryllis looked at her aunt in surprise. There was not the least shadow of uneasiness on her face, so it must be that she was now quite in charity with the vicar’s sister. If it was really what she wanted, it was certainly a perfect solution to a number of problems, and vastly easier than turning the school into a Bedlam.

Amaryllis had her own good news to impart, but decided to save it until they had returned home though the dark, quiet streets. As they reached the top landing on their way to their bedchambers, she stopped them.

“Tizzy, Aunt Eugenia, wait a moment,” she said. “I have something to add to your sweet dreams. I brought the accounts up to date yesterday. By June, if we do not suffer some dreadful calamity in the meantime, there will be over two thousand pounds in the emergency fund. Tizzy shall have a dowry of seven or eight hundred, and Aunt Eugenia the same to set up her new home in luxury.”

With bright eyes and vowing they should not sleep for planning how to spend such a windfall, they trotted off to bed. Amaryllis went wearily to hers, smiling at their pleasure. Half her own share would be her wedding gift to Tizzy, the other half a housewarming present for her aunt.

When she married Bertram, such a paltry sum would be neither here nor there.

Chapter 17

For a week it rained, and then the weather turned cold again and it snowed. Confined to the house, Amaryllis thought with longing of the library at Wimbish as she tried to concentrate on next term’s lesson plans.

At last the sun came out, pale in a sky of the palest blue. Even at noon it had no warmth to melt the white carpet that scrunched under Amaryllis’s boots as she walked briskly into the village, enveloped in her warmest cloak. Small boys with red cheeks and noses were throwing snowballs in the streets, and a snowman was under construction in the churchyard.

She went into the Bell to see if there was any post. A mail coach had gone into a ditch on the Braintree to Cambridge road the day before, but today it had come though. There was a letter from America.

A sense of déjà-vu seized her and she turned, half expecting to see Lord Daniel waiting impatiently for the innkeeper to finish serving her. The long, low room, lit up by sunlight reflected from the snow outside, was empty but for a couple of old men in the chimney nook, warming gnarled hands at the fire.

She paid the landlord the postage due, put her father’s letter and a couple of others in her pocket, and stepped out into the white street. Though she was eager to see what Lord Hartwell had to say, there was nothing like the emotion that had overwhelmed her upon receipt of his first communication in six years. He could not have received her most recent letter yet, so he would have no comment on her prospective marriage.

She went on to the draper’s to purchase some ribbon and thread for her aunt before turning back towards home. As she passed the churchyard, she noticed that the snowman was now adorned with a red and white muffler. It looked suspiciously like one she had recently seen about the vicar’s neck, and she was not surprised when Mr. Raeburn waved to her from the church porch.

“Good day,” she called, waving back, and pointed to the snowman, adding, “I see you take seriously your duty to clothe the naked.”

He nodded sheepishly as he joined her and begged her not to tell either his sister or his betrothed.

“Though it was much too gaudy for a clergyman,” he pointed out. “I found it in a box of clothes given me for the poor, and, bless my soul, I could not resist it.”

When she reached home, Amaryllis went up to the drawing room to read her letter. There was a fire there, and she would be alone since Tizzy and Aunt Eugenia were spending a great deal of time at the vicarage these days.

Lord Hartwell was proud of his daughter’s enterprising spirit in opening a seminary for young ladies. He had known that whatever she chose to do, she would do it well. However, there was no need any longer for her to struggle to make a living. His hardware emporium was so successful that if she joined him she might lead a life of leisure. There was no stigma, he assured her, in having a tradesman for a father. The Americans were much more sensible about such things, and she would be able to enter such society as Philadelphia provided without a qualm.

She was tempted. To run away from her uncertainties, to discover a new land, new customs, new faces, to be reunited with her irresponsible but beloved Papa—was this what she wanted? Experiencing a confusion of thought and feeling, she sat gazing into the fire until Mrs. Vaux bustled in, full of chatter and bearing an invitation to dine at the vicarage.

There was no opportunity that evening for Amaryllis to consider her father’s offer. When they came home from the vicarage, she bade her aunt and Tizzy good-night and went into the drawing room to find his letter. Daisy had built up the fire in expectation of a cold night, so Amaryllis sat down by the banked grate and pored over his words, trying to read between the lines whether he really wanted her to join him.  The house fell silent and still she sat there musing.

She was half asleep when a sudden dull thud roused her. For a moment she thought she was dreaming, then there was another thump, and another. The sound came from the direction of the window. She opened the curtains a crack and looked out.

There was a full moon. Trees and bushes stood out in sharp relief against the white snow, and shadows showed blackest black in contrast.

Beneath the window, two of the shadows were dancing. As she looked down, puzzled, one of the dancing shadows stooped, straightened, and threw something towards her. Snow splattered against the glass, startling her. Pulling her shawl close about her, she opened the casement a few inches.

“Miss Hartwell! Help! Oh please, ma’am, come down and let us in!”

Louise! And no doubt the other shivering shadow was Isabel, dragged into who knew what scrape by her madcap  friend.

“I’m coming,” she called, then closed the window, and ran down.

Louise was excited, Isabel weeping, both girls shaking too violently with cold to be able to explain their presence. Amaryllis hurried them to the kitchen, opened the stove to let out a glow of warmth, and set a kettle on top to heat water for chocolate. She helped them out of their pelisses and hugging them to her pulled them close to the fire.

“It’s Papa!” blurted Isabel as soon as her teeth stopped chattering for long enough. “Up at the castle. Please, you must help him!”

“At the castle?”

“We were kidnapped,” announced Louise in portentous tones. “It was the first time we’d been out in ages, because of the weather, and we were riding through a spinney and two men jumped out and pulled us off the ponies.”

“They wrapped rugs round our heads so we could not call for help, and they put us in a carriage.”

“I could not breathe so I fainted.” Louise sounded as proud of herself as if she had done it deliberately. “So did Isabel. When we woke up we were in the castle, in the Minstrel’s Gallery, all tied up. We shouted and shouted but no  one came.”

“Mr. Majendie is away,” said Amaryllis, unable to think of any sensible comment to make. “Have you any idea who the men were?”

“They talked some funny language,” Isabel said. “It wasn’t French. They came back after a while and we heard them talking but the only word I understood was Winterborne. Then they went away again and it got dark.”

“Isabel was frightened,” said Louise, “but I told her it was only an adventure and her Papa would come and rescue us, and he did.”

“Not for ages. And now he is stuck there instead of us,” wailed Isabel.

“He came creeping up the stairs and he cut the ropes and we were just going to escape, only when we got down to the hall we heard the men talking down by the front door. Lord Daniel told us to hide in a corner and to come to you if we managed to get away, then he went up the stairs again, only noisily this time, and when he got right to the top of the castle he shouted out and the men came running up and as soon as they went past us we dashed down and ran all the way down the hill and through the village till we got here.”

“No one answered the door, but Louise is so clever, she thought of throwing snowballs when we saw a light in a window. Oh please, will you help Papa?”

“Of course,” said Amaryllis, her mouth dry, “though I expect he is perfectly all right.” She did not believe her own words. The kidnappers could only be the Spaniard and his servant, and remembering the ugly look on Don Miguel’s face and his obscure threats, she trembled for Lord Daniel.

“You must go up and wake Miss Tisdale,” she went on steadily, though her mind was in a whirl. “She will take care of you, see that beds are made up.” She kissed Isabel. “Don’t worry, my dear. I’m sure it is all a misunderstanding, but I had better hurry all the same.”

Pulling on boots and cloak, she rushed out into the icy street and ran towards the village. She thought of trying to wake some of the village men to help her. It would take time, and more time to persuade them of her need. She dared not wait.

The hill up to the castle was slippery. She felt as if she were in one of those nightmares where one slides two steps back for every step forward, but urged on by dread she struggled up the slope.

The moonlit keep towered over her, indifferent to her fears as it had been indifferent to the men who died bloodily in its shadow centuries ago. She turned the corner, raced up the stair, and, heart in mouth, stepped through the arched doorway and into the darkness of the Guard Room.

Another stair was on her left. Was it her imagination, or was the faintest of faint lights emerging from the stairwell? Straining her eyes she moved towards it, feeling for the wall.

She stiffened at a sound behind her. Before she could turn something hard poked her in the back, and a threatening voice spoke words she could not understand. Under the relentless pressure of what she assumed to be the barrel of a gun, she mounted the spiral on shaky legs and emerged into the Banqueting Hall.

Don Miguel was pacing the floor, his excited voice and the click of his heels covering the sound of her arrival. He held a pistol in one hand. In his gaudy clothes he reminded her of a beautiful but deadly snake she had seen once in an illustrated book about India.

The pistol was pointed at Lord Daniel. Seated on an upturned basket, he lounged against the wall. He wore a look of boredom, but his face was pale. She could see the strain about his eyes, fixed on the Spaniard.

The servant behind her spoke and both gentlemen gaped at Amaryllis with identical expressions of horror as she moved towards Lord Daniel.

“Isabel?” he asked, his voice unnaturally loud in the sudden silence.

“She is perfectly safe.”

“Thank God. You should not have come.”

“I hoped I might help.” She shrugged helplessly and tried to smile. “I am ill prepared to deal with such an emergency.” Feeling her lower lip quiver, she bit down on it fiercely.

He stood up and took a step towards her.

“Stop!” barked Don Miguel.

Lord Daniel threw him a look of distaste. Then he bowed to Amaryllis and indicated the basket.

“Pray be seated, Miss Hartwell.”

She sat down with what dignity she could manage. He stood beside her, leaning against the wall, his left hand on her shoulder. She felt warmth and strength flowing into her from the contact and glanced up at him, but he was looking at the Spaniard.

“Well?” Lord Daniel asked sardonically.

Don Miguel had recovered from the shock of her appearance. His pistol as well as that of his manservant were pointed unwaveringly. His first words were in Spanish. The servant nodded and went back down the stairs. Then Don Miguel addressed his prisoners with a sneer.