Timewatch (10 page)

And then there was Dan, not really her type, but an intriguing man, competent in his own way—look how he had taken charge on the yacht and defused that bomb—but not someone she would ordinarily have been interested in. Not that she was really interested, just … intrigued.

He was so different from Charles, who had led her to believe that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, and then left her because he said she was having trouble fully committing herself to him. But she was 29 years old, not some silly teenager prone to gushing over a man.

To be honest, though, she did find it hard to trust men. Sometimes that puzzled her. She had never had reason to distrust the men in her life—not her father nor the boyfriends she had dated. So what was wrong with her?

Some other time she'd try to figure it out. It was getting late. Wearily, she undressed and climbed into the old-fashioned four-poster bed that some Victorian lady might have slept in.

Just before she fell asleep, a face swam into her mind. “Susanna,” she murmured and fell into the dreaming dark.

CHAPTER 11

Clutching the piece of paper in her hand, Susanna looked up at the gabled wooden house and shivered in the cool breeze. This was the right address. Would Aunt Arabella receive her kindly? After knocking and waiting a few minutes, a young woman in a plain brown dress and white cap opened the door and looked suspiciously at her.

“I am here to visit Lady Arabella. Please tell her that it is her niece, Susanna Morgan, who begs to speak with her.”

“She don't live here no more,” said the girl.

“Do you know where she lives now?”

“No.”

The servant began closing the door.

“Please, I must know. I have journeyed a long way to see her.”

With a note of glee in her voice, the girl said, “Cromwell's men took her—to the Fleet Prison, the butcher's boy said. Now a good Puritan owns this house. So be off with you.”

So even Aunt Arabella's position in society had not saved her from the persecution of Catholics that was taking place now all over England. How must she be faring, locked up in that grim stone tower built on an island in the Fleet River, a place of pestilence and disease and reeking of the rotting carcasses that the slaughterhouses dumped into the river! And where was her father?

Suddenly, the sulphur- and smoke-laden air seemed overpowering. Susanna longed for the pure air of the countryside, not this pestilent place where the foul stench of overflowing privies and cesspools—each house was built over one—assaulted her senses. She must return to the inn where Alf had dropped her and decide what to do. Wearily, she turned away.

“Miss Susanna.”

A tall, well-set-up young man in the livery of a junior footman was standing on the basement steps and beckoning urgently at her.

“Miss Susanna?” he called again.

“Yes, and you are?”

“Fletcher, miss, one of Lady Arabella's footman—that is, until the present lot barged in,” he said indignantly. “They kept the staff on and so I stayed,” he said apologetically.

Walking over to him, she said, “I remember you. You are the son of one of my father's tenants and had just begun working for her ladyship. The day I arrived and took tea with her, you dropped a whole plate of biscuits.”

“And you were bending down to help me pick them up …”

“When my aunt bade me stop. I don't know what shocked her the more, your dropping the biscuits over her expensive Turkey rug or my trying to help you.”

A pleased smile spread across the young man's face as he smoothed back a lock of his carrot-red hair. He dug into his pocket and brought out a much-crumpled piece of paper on which she saw a hastily scrawled address in her aunt's handwriting.

“Lady Arabella feared that Cromwell's men were coming to get her, so she wrote this address and told me to give you this if she was taken.”

“To the Fleet?”

Fletcher nodded. Tears gleamed in his eyes. “She treated me good, never a bad word to anyone.”

“Whose address is this?”

The footman shrugged his shoulders. “A friend was all she would say.”

“Thank you, Fletcher. I appreciate your loyalty to her ladyship.” She dug out a coin and gave it to the young man, who accepted it hesitantly and then burst out, “If I could ever be of service to you, Miss Susanna …”

“You already have.”

But she would not throw herself on the mercy of a stranger. Not until she had exhausted all other means of support.

A fortnight later, her situation had worsened; her money was almost gone. When she had applied for jobs as a servant, she was told each time that she needed a reference, but who would furnish her with one? Jacob had left and her brother had gone to stay with him in Amsterdam. Her former neighbors in Norfolk were Protestants, who would certainly not vouch for her, and even if they were so willing, a reference from a Catholic would bring a world of trouble down on both them and her. Since she had little skills in needlework, no one would hire her as a seamstress.

She was about to go upstairs to her room in the inn when the innkeeper's wife, her beefy arms planted on her ample hips, blocked her way.

“I wants me money now,” she said in a loud voice, jutting out her pudgy jaw.

Susanna drew her shawl more tightly around her and said stiffly, “I will have it for you tonight.”

“Now,” said the woman, holding out a grubby hand.

“I don't have it now.”

“Then I'll sell yer clothes, the fancy ones yer got upstairs.”

Little did the woman know that she had already sold them, except for one gown, her favorite russet-colored one, the hue of the ripe apples in her father's orchard. “I could work for you in the inn,” offered Susanna.

The woman gave her an incredulous look. “Yer hands. Soft as a baby's bottom they be. Yer never done a day's work in yer life!”

Susanna's protestations died on her lips as the innkeeper came and stood beside his wife. “Best you go now,” said the innkeeper in a gruff but kind voice.

Staring at the couple, Susanna left without a word. In a daze, she walked down the narrow street, barely managing to avoid coaches bowling rapidly along and wagons heaped high with produce from the country. A lady of ample girth, her face adorned with beauty patches of stars and crescents, was borne in a sedan chair carried by two stout fellows, who nimbly avoided piles of refuse. Ragged street urchins darted back and forth among the clot of pedestrians. A chimney sweep carrying brooms, and his apprentice, who could not be above the age of five, hurried past a girl with a tray slung around her neck, who was monotonously calling out, “Pins, straight pins.” Above the din, a man's strident voice could be heard: “Brooms, good brooms.”

Panic seized her. Where was she going to go? What was she going to do? A man bumped into her. When she whirled about, a young dandy in stained breeches and doublet, coming out of a tavern, swept off his tall hat and leered at her. She shuddered and began to run.

Out of breath, she stopped and shrank against a grimy wall. Her hand clenched the paper with the address that the footman had given to her. It was the only avenue of help left.

She hailed a hackney and, after climbing into it, gave the address of her destination to the driver, a burly man huddled in a stained coat missing several buttons. He grunted at her and whipped the horse into a fast walk, that seemingly being the fastest pace the poor creature could go.

They arrived in an affluent part of London, where stately houses stood near the Thames. The hackney drew up with a flourish to the address that Aunt Arabella had written down. Susanna paid the driver with her last few coins, and, her heart beating wildly and her mouth dry, she knocked at the front door.

A footman dressed in scarlet livery with gold buttons marching down his waistcoat opened the door. “Whom may I say is calling?” the footman asked from his superior height of six feet.

Summoning an air of confidence and wishing that she had worn her best gown, Susanna replied, “I am calling at the request of my aunt, Lady Arabella, who bade me contact her friend.”

The footman wrinkled his forehead; then his brow cleared as he asked, “Would you mean Lady Hastings?”

“Indeed, the very one,” said Susanna, guessing that the lady must be her aunt's friend.

“Come in. I will see if she is at home. And you are?”

“Miss Susanna Morgan, niece to Lady Arabella.”

A few minutes later, a small plump woman wearing a finely wrought lace collar over the bodice of her bottle-green gown entered the room. Lady Hastings looked keenly at her and then dismissed the footman. “Come into the library,” she said as she led the way into a large room with books filling shelves that reached to the high ceiling. Upon thick carpets of a rich burgundy hue stood elaborately carved furniture and chairs covered in velvet. A new style of clock, taller than she was, its pendulum majestically swinging back and forth, stood in a corner.

Indicating that Susanna should sit, Lady Hastings demanded, “Now tell me why Arabella sent you here. Is she well? I have not heard from her for several weeks.”

“When I went to her house, I was told that she had been sent to the Fleet.”

Lady Hastings drew a quick breath and exclaimed, “So Cromwell has struck again! That presents a problem. And what of you, Miss Morgan?”

Susanna felt her eyes fill with tears. With as much dignity as she could muster, she explained briefly what had happened to her and Jeremy.

“So you have nowhere to go?”

“Yes.”

Lady Hastings pursed her lips as she looked meditatively at her and said, “You may stay with us, but I warn you to say nothing of the fact that you are Catholic. My husband, Lord Hastings, is a member of Parliament. He suffers me to practice my religion in secret but has commanded me not to inform others of my religion.

“I will tell him that you are my niece from a distant branch of my family who has fallen on hard times. Yes,” she said brightening, “your family's estate has been sequestered and you had nowhere else to go. That is close enough to the truth to be believable and will explain why you have brought no clothes.”

It was a clever idea. She had known of several families whose estates had been seized by local committees who were now able to settle old grievances. Sequestration was Parliament's way of cutting back the power of the Royalists to support the king, and was especially appealing when Parliament kept the rents and incomes of these very same Royalists.

“You must be hungry. I will order some refreshments and have a room prepared for you.” Then, frowning at Susanna, she added, “I will provide you with some gowns. What you are wearing may have been suitable for the country, but not here in London.”

“Thank you, Lady Hastings. I appreciate what you are doing for me. I would not have come here unless I had nowhere else to go. I would not be a burden. If I could be useful in some way …”

“Perhaps you may be,” said the countess, eyeing Susanna speculatively.

Booted feet came clumping down the hall. The door to the library was thrown open by a servant. The countess sprang to her feet. “Lord Hastings, may I present my niece, Miss Susanna Morgan. She is come lately from the country where her parents have died and left her in dire straits. As her only living relative, she has appealed to us for help.”

The count was a querulous-looking man with a long nose and the petulant face of one who was perpetually dissatisfied. Of indeterminate middle age, he leaned heavily on a cane, which she perceived was more useful than ornamental, as his legs dragged when he walked.

“A niece, you say.”

“From a distant branch of my family,” continued her ladyship.

Lady Hastings seemed to have no qualms about lying and did it so smoothly that no one would know that she was less than honest in attributing kinship to a woman whom she had met only moments ago.

“If it pleases you,” Lord Hastings said, turning to his wife and giving her an irritable look. Then, bowing to Susanna, he said, “Welcome to my house, Miss Morgan.”

“Thank you, my lord.”

The next day, Lady Hastings's maid brought Susanna an armful of clothing, which consisted of shifts and gowns that had been cleverly mended—her ladyship's castoffs. But she was a pauper now and could expect no more, thought Susanna bitterly, even though she acknowledged to herself that the gowns were finer than any she had ever worn.

The week passed slowly. Susanna spent much of the time alone in her room thinking of Jeremy. Had he reached Amsterdam safely? Was he staying with Jacob? When would she see him again? An ache filled her heart. How she longed for her father and Jeremy, for the safety and security of her own home, not this stranger's house, however grand it might be.

She saw little of Lady Hastings, except for those few days when the weather was fine and they could stroll about the garden. Peppering Susanna with questions about her family and about her religious convictions, her ladyship took in everything and missed nothing. Of herself, she revealed little.

Dinners were exceedingly dull. Lady Hastings would prattle on about their two daughters and their husbands and children, while without fail, Lord Hastings would complain about everything from the inadequacies of the servants to the vagaries of the weather.

On the night before everything changed, Susanna dreamed that she was delivering a present to someone. Her feet dragging, she felt so tired, so lost. Nothing was familiar. When she looked down at her hands, they were empty, the present gone.

Then, as dreams do, things changed abruptly. A dark shape was pursuing her. She tried to run but was powerless to move her legs. A hand clapped her on her shoulder. She struck out at the entity, waking suddenly to find herself chilled to the marrow of her bones and entangled in the bedclothes.