Slightly Wicked (17 page)

Her aunt gasped and Rannulf was half aware of a few of the other men in the room sitting up straighter.

And then she turned.

She was not Judith Law in any of her guises. Her loose dress had become a nightgown. Her hair had been messed up while she tossed and turned in bed trying to sleep and then sleeping restlessly. Her eyes were open, but they were the strange, vacant eyes of a sleepwalker. Yet her face was so filled with horror and revulsion that it bore no resemblance whatsoever to Judith Law’s face.

Her shaking hands lifted slowly before her face, the fingers spread, looking more like serpents than fingers. She tried washing her hands, desperately rubbing them over each other, and then held them up again and gazed intently at them.

In the play there were two other characters—a doctor and a gentlewoman—to witness and describe her appearance and actions. Their words were not necessary tonight. She was unmistakably a woman in torment, a woman with both feet in hell, even before she spoke. And then she did.

“‘Yet here’s a spot,’ ” she said in a low, dead voice that nevertheless carried clearly to the farthest corner of a room that seemed to hold its breath.

She touched the spot on her palm with the middle finger of her other hand, picked at it, scratched at it, gouged it, her actions becoming more and more frenzied.

“‘Out,
damned
spot! out, I say!’ ”

Rannulf was caught firmly in her spell. He stood close to the door, neither seeing nor hearing anything but her—Lady Macbeth, the sad, horrifying, guilty ruin of an ambitious woman who had thought herself strong enough to incite murder and even commit murder. A young, beautiful, misguided, and ultimately tragic woman whom one pitied to the depths of one’s soul because it was too late for her to go back and apply newly acquired wisdom to past decisions. As perhaps it is
not
too late for those of us who are fortunate enough to have committed sins less irreversible, he thought.

And then finally she heard a knocking at the castle door and became panicked over the possibility of being caught literally red-handed over a murder committed long ago.

“‘Come, come, come, come, give me your hand,’ ” she told an invisible Macbeth, her hand a claw grasping his invisible arm. “‘What’s done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed.’ ”

She turned then and even though she moved only a few steps in the confining space, it seemed that she hurried a great distance, panic and horror in every step. She ended, as she had begun, with her back to the audience.

There was a moment’s complete hush . . . and then loud, genuine, prolonged applause. Rannulf felt himself sag with relief and realized in some astonishment that he was very close to tears.

Roy-Hill whistled.

Lord Braithwaite sprang to his feet. “Bravo!” he cried. “Oh, I say, bravo, Miss Law.”

“Wherever did you learn to act like
that,
Jude?” her brother asked. “I had no idea.”

But she was down on one knee on the floor, her back still toward the room, quickly pinning up her hair and stuffing it beneath her cap again. Rannulf crossed the room and offered her his hand.

“Thank you, Miss Law,” he said. “That was a magnificent performance and a very fitting conclusion to our entertainment. I would not wish to be the one to try following that.”

She was Judith Law again, her face aflame with embarrassment. She set her hand on his, but her head was dipped low as she hurried back to her chair beside Mrs. Law’s without looking at anyone.

Mrs. Law, Rannulf noticed, was drying reddened eyes with her handkerchief. She grasped one of her granddaughter’s hands and squeezed it tightly though she said nothing.

Rannulf moved away.

“But my dear Miss Law,” his grandmother asked, “why at your tender age do you keep all that glorious, beautiful hair covered?”

Judith’s eyes widened in surprise, Rannulf saw when he glanced back at her. He noticed in the same moment that the attention of
all
the gentlemen was riveted on her.

“Beautiful, ma’am?” she said. “Oh, I think not. The devil’s own color, my papa always called it. My mama always described it as carroty.”

The devil’s own color!
Her own father had said that?

“Well,” his grandmother said, smiling, “I would compare it to a gold-tinged fiery sunset, Miss Law. But I am embarrassing you. Rannulf—”

“We have stayed rather late, Lady Beamish,” Lady Effingham said firmly, getting to her feet, “my niece having decided to prolong the entertainment and make herself the center of attention. You have been most kind to her, for which condescension I thank you on her behalf. But it is time we took our leave.”

The carriages had to be brought around and all the extra baggage necessitated by a change of clothes after the garden party loaded up with the valets and personal maids who had come from Harewood. But within half an hour the guests had all been seen on their way and Rannulf was able to escort his grandmother to her room. She was almost gray with fatigue, he saw, though she would not admit as much.

“That was all very pleasant,” she said. “Miss Effingham looks particularly pretty in pink.”

Had she been wearing pink? He had not noticed.

“But she has very little countenance,” she added. “Of course, she has had only her mother’s example to follow, and Lady Effingham has an unfortunate tendency to vulgarity. The girl was flirting at dinner and afterward with every gentleman within range of her, just because
you
were not beside her, I believe, Rannulf. It is regrettable behavior in a young lady I still hope will be your bride. You are pleased with her?”

“She is only eighteen, Grandmama,” he said. “She is just a child. She will grow up, given time.”

“I suppose so.” She sighed as they reached the top of the stairs. “Lord Braithwaite has a comic genius. He can create hilarity out of the most ordinary circumstances and is not afraid to mock himself. But Miss Law! She has the sort of talent that makes one feel humble and honored in its presence.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Poor lady.” She sighed again. “She is beautiful beyond belief and does not even know it. Her father must be a puritanical, joyless sort of clergyman. How could he possibly say such dreadful things of that glorious hair of hers?”

“I daresay, Grandmama,” he said, “he has seen some of his male parishioners getting an eyeful of her and has concluded there must be something sinful about her appearance.”

“Foolish man! It is a dreadful fate to be poor and female, is it not?” she said. “And to be offered the charity of someone like Louisa Effingham? But at least Miss Law has her grandmother. Gertrude is fast coming to dote on her.”

What’s done cannot be undone.
That line she had spoken as Lady Macbeth kept running through Rannulf’s head after he had seen his grandmother to her dressing room and had retired to his own room.

How very true. He could not go back and ride on alone for help after coming across the overturned stagecoach. He could not restore her virginity. He could not erase that day and a half or those two nights when they had talked and laughed and loved and he had been prepared to pursue her wherever she went, to the ends of the earth if necessary.

He could not go back and change any of that.

He had fallen somewhat in love with Claire Campbell, he admitted to himself at last. Not just in lust. There had been more to his feelings than that. He was not in love with Judith Law, but there was something . . . It was not pity. He would have been actively repelled by her if he could do no more than pity her. It was not lust even though he definitely and ignominiously wanted to bed her. It was not . . . He simply did not know what it was or was not. He had never been much of a one for deep emotions. He had colored his world with faint, bored cynicism for as far back as he could remember.

How could he define his feelings for Judith Law when he had no frame of reference by which to measure them? But he thought suddenly of his quiet, morose, stern, always correct, always dutiful elder brother, Aidan, who had taken a commission in the cavalry on his eighteenth birthday, just as it had been planned all his life that he would. Aidan, who had recently married without telling anyone in his family, even Bewcastle, and had then just as abruptly sold out in order to live with the wife he had married only to keep a solemn vow made to her dying brother, a fellow officer in the south of France. Rannulf had accompanied Aidan home from London to his wife’s property on the first stage of his own journey to Grandmaison and had met Lady Aidan for the first time—and the two young children she had fostered.

Rannulf had watched, transfixed, outside the house as the two children had come racing eagerly to meet Aidan, the little girl addressing him as Papa, and he had scooped them up and given them his fond attention just as if they were the most dearly loved products of his own loins. And then he had looked at his wife as she came more slowly after the children and enfolded her in his free arm and kissed her.

Yes, Rannulf thought,
that
was his frame of reference. Just that moment when Aidan had set his arm about Eve and kissed her and looked young and human and exuberant and vulnerable and invincible all at the same time.

There was only one word to describe what he had witnessed.

Love.

He strode impulsively into his dressing room and found his cloak in the wardrobe there. He dug around in the inside pocket until he found what he was searching for. He drew it out, unwrapped the brown paper from about it, and gazed down at the cheap little snuffbox with the ugly pig’s head carved on its lid. He chuckled softly, closed his hand about the box, and then felt almost overwhelmingly sad.

CHAPTER XIV

J
udith returned home in the last carriage with her grandmother, who had been slower than everyone else getting ready to leave and had twice asked Judith if she would be so good as to run back up to the room in which she had changed to make sure she had not forgotten anything. It was very late by the time they arrived at Harewood. All the guests had retired to their rooms for the night.

Aunt Effingham was waiting in the hall.

“Judith,” she said in awful tones, “you will assist Mother to her room and then attend me in the drawing room.”

“I am coming too, Louisa,” her mother said.

“Mother.” Lady Effingham bent a stern gaze on the old lady though she attempted to soften her tone. “It is late and you are tired. Judith will take you up and ring for Tillie if she is not already there waiting for you. She will help you undress and get into bed and will bring you a cup of tea and a draft to help you sleep.”

“I do not want my bed or a cup of tea,” her mother said firmly. “I will come to the drawing room. Judith, my love, may I trouble you for your arm again? I daresay I sat too long in the rose arbor this afternoon. The wind has made all my joints stiff.”

Judith had been expecting the scold that was obviously coming. She could hardly believe herself that she had had the temerity to
act
before an audience—Papa would surely have sentenced her to a full week in her room on bread and water if she had ever done such a thing at home. She had even taken her hair down. She had acted and she had
re
acted to the audience, which had given her its total, undivided attention even though she had not been consciously aware of it. She had
been
Lady Macbeth. The audience had liked her and applauded and praised her. What she had done could not have been so very wrong. Everyone else had entertained the company, not all of them with music. She was a lady. She had been as much a guest of Lady Beamish as anyone else.

Lady Beamish had called her hair glorious and beautiful. How else had she described it? Judith frowned in thought as she climbed the stairs slowly with her grandmother while Aunt Effingham came behind.

I would compare it to a gold-tinged, fiery sunset.

Lady Beamish, though she had perfect manners, was not given to frivolous, flattering compliments, Judith suspected. Was it possible, then, that her hair could be seen that way?
A gold-tinged, fiery sunset . . .

“These earrings pinch me almost as badly as those others,” her grandmother said, pulling them off as they entered the drawing room. “Though I
have
been wearing them all evening, of course. Now where shall I put them so that they will not be lost?”

“Give them to me, Grandmama,” Judith said, taking them from her and putting them safely inside her reticule. “I will put them away in your jewelry box when we go upstairs.”

Horace was in the room, she saw at a glance, sitting on the arm of a chair, a glass of some dark liquor in his hand, swinging one leg nonchalantly and looking at her with insolent malice. Julianne was there too, dabbing at her eyes with a lace-edged handkerchief.

“Are you feeling better, Horace?” Grandmama asked. “It is a great shame you were indisposed and had to miss dinner and the entertainment in the drawing room afterward.”

“Indisposed, Grandmama?” Horace laughed. “It was the indisposition of boredom. I know from past experience how insipid evenings at Lady Beamish’s can be.”

Judith, her stomach knotted with revulsion, tried not to look at him or hear his voice.

“It was a horrid evening,” Julianne said. “I was seated half a table away from Lord Rannulf during dinner, yet he did not protest the seating arrangement even though he was in his own grandmother’s house. And I
thought
Lady Beamish was promoting a match between us. I daresay he persuaded her to keep me away from him. He does not like me. He is not going to offer for me. He did not even applaud my performance on the pianoforte any more than he did Lady Margaret’s even though I played
much
better than she did. And he did not call for an encore. I have never been so humiliated in my life. Or so wretched. Mama, I hate him, I
hate
him.”

“There, there, dearest,” her mother said soothingly. But it was clear her mind was on other matters than her daughter’s distress. Her bosom appeared to swell to twice its size as she turned on her niece. “Now,
Miss Judith Law,
you will kindly explain yourself.”

“Explain myself, Aunt?” Judith asked as she seated her grandmother in her usual chair by the fire. She would not be cowed, she decided. She had done no wrong.

“What,”
her aunt asked, “was the meaning of that vulgar spectacle you made of yourself this evening? I was so ashamed I scarcely knew how to keep my countenance. Your poor uncle was speechless all the way home in the carriage and shut himself into the library the moment we returned.”

“Oh, dear me, Cousin,” Horace said, sounding mildly amused, “whatever have you been up to?”

But before Judith could form any reply to her aunt, her grandmother spoke up.

“Vulgar, Louisa?” she said. “
Vulgar?
Judith bowed to persuasion as all the other young people did to entertain the company. She acted out a scene, and I have never witnessed finer acting. I was amazed and delighted by it. I was moved to tears by it. It was by far the best performance of the evening, and clearly everyone else—
almost
everyone else—agreed with me.”

Judith looked at her grandmother in astonishment. She had never heard her speak in half so impassioned a way. She was actually angry, Judith could see. Her eyes were flashing and there were two spots of color in her cheeks.

“Mother,” Aunt Louisa said, “I think it would be best if you stayed out of this. A
lady
does not take her hair down in public and draw everyone’s attention her way with such . . . theatrics.”

“Oh, tut, tut,” Horace said, lifting his glass in Judith’s direction. “Did you do that, Cousin?”

“A lady
does
take her hair down at night,” the old lady said. “When she goes sleepwalking she does not take the time to pin it up first. Judith was not herself tonight, Louisa. She was
Lady Macbeth.
It is what acting is all about, immersing oneself in the character, bringing that character alive for an audience. But I would not expect you to understand.”

Judith was amazed that her grandmother did.

“I am sorry if I displeased you, Aunt Louisa,” she said. “But I cannot apologize for offering some entertainment to the company when both Lord Rannulf Bedwyn and Lady Beamish urged me to do so. It would have been impolite to be coy. I chose to do what I thought I could do well. I do not understand why you feel such an aversion to acting. You are like Papa in that. No one else this evening appeared to be scandalized. Quite the contrary, in fact.”

Her grandmother had taken one of her hands in both her own and was chafing it as if it were cold.

“I suppose, Judith, my love,” she said, “your papa has never told you, has he? Neither he nor Louisa could quite forgive your grandfather for what he had done to them, and they have both run from it all their lives. Though neither of them would even
have
life if he had not done it.”

Judith looked down at her with a frown of incomprehension.

“Mother!” Aunt Louisa said sharply. “Enough. Julianne—”

“Your grandfather met me in the green room at the Covent Garden Theater in London,” the old lady explained. “He said he had fallen in love with me even before that, when he saw me acting onstage, and I always believed him even though all the gentlemen used to say that or something similar—and there were many of them. Your grandfather married me three months later and we had thirty-two happy years together.”

“Grandmama?” Julianne was openly aghast. “You were an
actress
? Oh, this is insupportable. Mama, what if Lady Beamish discovers the truth? What if
Lord Rannulf
does? I’ll die of shame. I swear I will.”

“Well, well,” Horace muttered softly.

Her grandmother patted Judith’s hand. “I knew when I saw you as a child,” she said, “that you were the one most like me, my love. That hair! It so horrified your poor papa and your mama too, suggesting as it did a flamboyance unfitted to a child from the rectory—and suggesting too that you might have inherited more than just that from your scandalous grandmama. When I watched you tonight, it was like looking at myself almost fifty years ago. Except that you are more beautiful than I ever was, and a better actress too.”

“Oh, Grandmama,” Judith said, squeezing the plump, ringed hand beneath her own. Suddenly so much of her own life made sense to her.
So much.

“Well, I will not stand for it, miss,” Aunt Louisa said. “You have shamed me and my young, impressionable daughter, before houseguests I selected from the very cream of society, before Lady Beamish and the son of a
duke
who is courting Julianne. I would remind you that you were brought here by the kindness and charity of your uncle. You will remain here for the next week, when I will need you to tend to your grandmother. Tomorrow I will write to my brother and inform him that I am severely displeased with you. I daresay he will not be surprised. I will offer to take one of your sisters instead of you. This time I will ask specifically for Hilary, who is young enough to learn her place.
You
will be going home in disgrace.”

“Tut, tut, Cousin,” Horace said. “After only a week.”

Judith should have been feeling relieved, even euphoric. She was going
home
? But Papa would know all about the acting at Lady Beamish’s. And Hilary was going to have to come to take her place.

“If Judith goes, I will go too,” her grandmother said. “I will sell some of my jewels, Judith. They are worth a fortune, you know. We will buy a little cottage somewhere and be cozy together. We will take Tillie with us.”

Judith squeezed her hand again. “Come, Grandmama,” she said. “It is late and you are upset and tired. I’ll help you up to your room. We will talk in the morning.”

“Mama?” Julianne wailed. “You are not paying any attention to
me
! You do not care about me either, I daresay. What am I going to do about Lord Rannulf? I
must
have him. He almost ignored me this evening and now he may find out that I am the granddaughter of an
actress
.”

“My dearest Julianne,” her mother said, “there is more than one way to catch a husband. You will be Lady Rannulf Bedwyn before the summer is out. Trust me.”

Horace smiled nastily at Judith as she passed his chair, her grandmother leaning heavily on her arm.

“Remember what I said,
Cousin,
” he said softly.

         D
uring the following week Rannulf spent his mornings, sometimes the afternoons too, with his grandmother’s steward, learning some of the intricacies of the workings of an estat
e. He was surprised to discover that he enjoyed poring over account books and other business papers quite as much as he did riding about the home farm and tenant farms, seeing for himself and talking with a number of the farmers and laborers. He was careful about one thing, though.

“I am not offending you, Grandmama?” he asked her at breakfast one morning, taking her thin hand with its almost translucent blue-veined skin in his own and holding it gently. “I am not giving the impression that I am taking over as if I were already master here? I wish, you know, that you would live another ten years or twenty or longer.”

“I am not sure I have the energy left with which to oblige you,” she told him. “But you are brightening my final days, Rannulf. I did not expect this, I must admit, though I
did
expect that you would learn quickly and do a creditable job here after my time. You are a Bedwyn after all, and Bedwyns have always taken their duty seriously no matter what else one might say about them.”

He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it.

“Now, if I could just see you well married,” she said, “I would be entirely content. But
is
Julianne Effingham right for you? I so hoped she would be. She is a neighbor, her grandmother is one of my dearest friends, and she is young and pretty. What do
you
think, Rannulf?”

He had been hoping she would change her mind about pressing the match on him. At the same time he knew she would be bitterly disappointed if he did not marry soon.

“I think I had better keep on going over to Harewood each day,” he said. “The house party will be over in another week. There is the ball still to come. I promised you I would seriously consider the girl, Grandmama, and I will.”

But the trouble was, he discovered as the week progressed, he could not like Miss Effingham any better on closer acquaintance. She still pouted whenever he neglected to dance attendance upon her every hour of every day and still tried to punish him by flirting with all the other gentlemen. She still prattled on about herself and her various accomplishments and conquests whenever he was in her company and tittered at his flatteries. She bored him silly. And of course her mother made every attempt in her power to throw them together. They always sat beside each other if he was at Harewood for dinner, as he was most evenings. They always rode together in a carriage whenever he joined any of the numerous excursions to places of interest. He was always called upon to turn the pages of her music.