Annabelle (19 page)

Had Annabelle joined in the fun? Not she! That uppity miss had said quietly that Mary was very cruel and had pointed out that Mary herself was wearing Annabelle’s hand-me-downs and that had immediately spoiled a delicious gossip.

If Annabelle had not been so high and mighty, she could have been wed even now to the Squire’s son, Tommy. But not Annabelle, thought Mrs. Quennell savagely, looking out to where her eldest daughter was weeding the kitchen garden.

She would give Annabelle extra household chores to cool her pride. It would also leave Mary and Susan with fashionable white hands.

She would have been surprised to know that Annabelle welcomed all extra work. All Annabelle craved was to fall exhausted into bed at night and sleep so heavily that no dreams of Lord Varleigh should have a chance to torment her brain.

She looked ruefully down at her hands as she paused in her weeding. They were rough and red and her nails were cut very short. An old yellow cotton dress of Mary’s was hitched up round her shabby boots, and a straw hat that had seen better days shaded her head from the sun.

A familiar gray head bobbed along beside the hedge, and Annabelle drew in her breath with a sharp hiss of superstitious alarm. Mad Meg!

The gypsy woman came ambling up the path, smiling with delight at seeing Annabelle again and smelling quite frightfully. Annabelle’s instinctive recoil as Meg approached did not disturb the old gypsy one bit. She was used to ladies recoiling from her and put it down to some kind of genteel attitude rather than a normal reaction to her overpowering odor.

“I don’t want my hand read, Meg. Not now,” pleaded Annabelle. “I’ll give you something just the same.”

“’T won’t do, missie,” said Mad Meg, shaking her filthy locks. “Meg never took money from a lady for nothing.” Her old eyes suddenly looked sharply at Annabelle. “Here! What did I say last time, missie, when I was come over all funny?”

“I c-can’t remember,” lied Annabelle.

I really am a very weak character, thought Annabelle as Meg firmly grasped her hand and began her eye rolling and twitching act. I can’t seem to be able to get people to take no for an answer.

“I see a tall, handsome military gentleman,” crooned Meg. “He is going to enter your life soon. He is coming closer and closer…”

At that moment a smart travelling carriage came to a stop outside the entrance to the rectory gates. Annabelle cast it one terrified glance, wrenched her hand from Meg’s, and fled in a flurry of yellow faded skirts over the stile at the far side of the garden and across the fields.

Meg sulkily watched her go. “Now what did I say?” she muttered. “They say old Meg’s touched in her upper works but I think that there Miss Quennell’s the one who’s mad!

S
OME
ten minutes later Lord Sylvester Varleigh was feeling that he had never suffered from such an excess of gentility in his life. He was seated on a stiff upright chair in the rectory parlor and was warding off an onslaught of cress sandwiches, Bath buns, jellies, cold ham sandwiches, and fruit cake which Mrs. Quennell, Mary, Susan, and Lisbeth kept circulating in front of him while he held onto a cup of tasteless tea and wondered what on earth had happened to Annabelle.

He had already called on the rector at his church in the village and had gained that gentleman’s permission to pay his addresses to Annabelle. The rector had urged
him to go to the house where he would join him later. Lord Varleigh had been impressed by the rector’s gentlemanly and scholarly air and had liked him immensely.

He had to admit wryly to himself that the vulgarity and pushing ways of Mrs. Quennell and her three other daughters had come as something of a shock. Mary and Susan were quite openly flirting with him, and the little one, Lisbeth, had asked him point-blank how much money he had. Not one of them appeared to grasp the fact that it was Annabelle he wanted to see, Annabelle of whom he had thought unceasingly since he had received that startling letter from Lady Emmeline.

He had realised that the Captain had been lying all along. Therefore it followed he had lied about Annabelle’s teasing.

He had travelled to Brussels himself to bring about the downfall of Captain MacDonald and had arrived amid the hell and carnage which was the aftermath of Waterloo. Colonel Ward-Price had told him stiffly that Captain MacDonald had been killed in action, and Mrs. Ward-Price had burst into tears and had called her husband “cruel.” It was all very strange, but Lord Varleigh had been too relieved to learn that the threat to Annabelle’s life had been removed to enquire too closely into the circumstances of the Captain’s death.

He wondered now as he looked from under his heavy lids at the company in the rectory parlor whether he could bear to have such in-laws as these. Then he shrugged. His home was large enough to conveniently lose them among its many rooms should they come on a visit. Then he realised with a queer little wrench that he had not yet seen Annabelle nor knew whether she would marry him.

“We have a small society here, but very select for all that, my lord,” Mrs. Quennell was simpering. “Perhaps
your lordship is acquainted with the Bracecourts or the Chomleys or…”

“Is
that
a member of your select society?” said Lord Varleigh maliciously. The elfin locks and grimy face of Mad Meg had appealed above the sill, and she was mouthing and gesticulating.

“Of
course
not,” shrieked Mrs. Quennell, rising and striding to the window which she jerked open. “It is only some dirty gypsy woman. Go away. Shooooo!”

“I’m worried about missie,” croaked Mad Meg. “Miss Annabelle saw the carriage and she ups and runs away. Her has gone over the fields, frightened out of her wits.”

“Where?” demanded Lord Varleigh, and before Mrs. Quennell had realised what he was about to do, he had edged past her and climbed over the window sill and into the garden.

“Over there,” said Meg. “Over the stile and across them fields.”

Lord Varleigh tossed her a piece of gold and strode off in the direction the gypsy had indicated.

Mad Meg lovingly pocketed the gold somewhere in her rags and crept off to see if she could rob a few eggs from the hen house. It looked as if the Quennells were about to become rich and would therefore surely not notice the lack of a few eggs!

A
NNABELLE
lay on the grass three fields away from the rectory and stared up blindly at the great white clouds sailing across the sky. What was the Captain saying to her family? And Annabelle felt no doubt that the arriving carriage had contained the Captain, coming hard as it did on the heels of the gypsy’s prophecy. Annabelle more than anyone knew how plausible the Captain could be. But it was useless to lie here like a frightened rabbit. She would do better to seek out the help of the Squire
who was also the local magistrate. Now if Lord Varleigh had only been a
man
instead of a tinsel figure…

A shadow fell across her face, and she looked up and saw Lord Varleigh looking down at her.

Annabelle gave a shocked exclamation and jumped to her feet. “Oh, I’m so frightened, Sylvester,” she cried, so thankful to see him, so overcome with emotion that she did not pause to wonder what the elegant lord was doing in the wilds of the Yorkshire moors. “The gypsy told me a military man was coming, and I was so sure it was Jimmy and … and …”

Her large eyes filled with tears and her mouth trembled as the full impact of the shock she had received finally hit her.

“Captain MacDonald is dead. He died in Brussels,” said Lord Varleigh quietly.

“Ooooh!” Annabelle let out her breath in a great long sigh of relief. “I can hardly believe it. I kept dreading the day when he would come back into my life, wheedling and cajoling and being boyish and saying it was all a mistake.
You
know.”

“I know
now
,” said Lord Varleigh grimly. “But I was just as fooled as you. I would never have guessed had not Lady Emmeline written me a letter explaining all. When I realised that Jimmy had lied about the attempts on your life, then I realised he must have been lying about … well, what he said about you.”

“What did he say?” asked Annabelle, trying to smooth down her shabby yellow dress.

“He said you had been teasing me and laughing at me when you let me kiss you. He said that you had a tendre for some local lad. It’s not true. Is it … Annabelle?”

She looked up at him, suddenly shy.

A summer wind whipped across the field, rippling and turning the long green grass.

Lord Varleigh looked infinitely more handsome and more remote than she had remembered. He was dressed more for a London salon than for the country in a coat of Bath superfine, buff waistcoat, fawn breeches, glossy hessian boots with little gold tassels, and an intricately tied cravat. He was carrying a cane in one hand and a curly brimmed beaver in the other.

Annabelle looked down at her own dress and blushed. What must he think of her?

“I asked you a question, Annabelle,” he said, gently watching the lift and play of the wind and the sun in the tangled curls of her red-gold hair.

“No. I-I w-wasn’t teasing,” stammered Annabelle, studying a crack in her boot with intense interest.

He put a long finger under her chin. “Will you marry me, Annabelle Quennell?” he asked in a quiet emotionless voice.

“Yes,” whispered Annabelle, looking shyly into his eyes and waiting longingly for him to take her in his arms.

But he only gave her a very sweet smile and transferring his hat, cane, and gloves to the one hand, tucked her hand through his other arm and began to lead her gently back across the fields while Annabelle stumbled happily along beside him, dizzy with excess of emotion and pure happiness.

She then had a sudden qualm. What did she really
know
of this remote aristocrat? Just look how Jimmy had fooled her over and over again. Perhaps it was all because of Lady Emmeline’s money.

She could not bear to wait any longer or to be tactful. “I asked Lady Emmeline to cut me out of her will,” she said abruptly. “I trust I am no longer to receive any of her money.”

Lord Varleigh looked down at the top of her head.
“I am not marrying you for your expectations, you know,” he said in that old, familiar mocking voice. “In fact, you have none. Lady Emmeline’s fortune is in the hands of her husband.”

“Her
husband
.”

“Yes,” replied Lord Varleigh indifferently. “She married her footman a month ago. Any more worries?”

“None at all,” said Annabelle with a happy sigh—too happy to be surprised at the news of the odd wedding. But there was
one
left. Why did he not take her in his arms?

They had come to the stile which led to the rectory garden. Lord Varleigh jumped neatly over it and held out his hand politely to help Annabelle over.

She stood at the top of the stile, looking down questioningly into his eyes, her own wide and troubled. What she saw there nearly stopped her heart.

“It’s true then … you do love me,” said Annabelle in a wondering voice.

“Of course, you silly goose,” he replied with some exasperation. “Do you think I travelled all this way simply to take tea with you.”

He gave her hand a little jerk and she tumbled headlong into his arms, and Lord Varleigh kissed Miss Annabelle Quennell ruthlessly, furiously, and passionately and then, pulling her down onto the soft grass under the stile, proceeded to kiss nearly every other part of her that he had always wanted to. He had meant to behave himself like a gentleman until after the wedding, he remembered vaguely, but he pushed the thought aside and gave himself up to the enjoyable pleasure of behaving very badly indeed.

“M
R
. Quennell! Mr. Quennell!” screamed Mrs. Quennell, staring out into the garden as if she couldn’t believe
her eyes. “Annabelle is behaving shockingly. I would never have believed such a thing. Oh, my vinaigrette! I have the vapors.”

The rector looked out of the window, and a small impish grin played about his lips before he hurriedly turned away. He stopped his three younger daughters in their tracks as they were about to make a concerted rush to the window.

“I have just prepared my sermon for Sunday and I feel sure it would do you all good to hear it,” he said. “It concerns loving thy neighbor as thyself. Pray be seated.”

And seemingly oblivious to the furious glances of his wife and daughters he jerked down the window blind, lit the lamp, and commenced to read at great and boring length.

Mrs. Quennell was deeply shocked. She would never understand her husband!

Never!