Beggar Bride (35 page)

Her heart beats faster and faster until its pounding shakes her body.

So far she hasn’t dared let herself dwell on Fabian’s reaction to their disappearance. Oh, at first he will be beside himself with worry, everyone will be, their faces will appear on posters throughout the land, Fabian will probably appeal on TV.
Mysterious disappearance… child of fortune… son and heir of one of the oldest and most prestigious British families goes missing…
and all that. No doubt, hefty rewards will be offered. But the only photographs in existence are pictures of Ange and Archie, nobody ever bothered to snap the nanny or the driver, and they were both careful to avoid being accidentally caught in any casual camera shot and the Ormerods don’t believe in video cameras. Billy and Tina’s descriptions will bear no resemblance to the people they will quickly change into. Tina, so tarty, so jazzed up in her nylon frills and her spiky heels, her eyes almost lost under layers of gaudy make-up, and Billy, not the smart young driver/handyman known to the Ormerods, but a rather scruffy, long-haired loser in faded jeans and tatty old trainers.

As far as Ange is concerned her transformation will be even more amazing than either Billy’s or Tina’s. From a glamorous, expensively groomed member of the aristocracy, she will turn into the downtrodden, poorly dressed, snaggle-haired Cinderella of yesterday. The perfect disguise. No one could possibly connect these two entirely opposite images.

The public, no doubt—or those publicity seekers who always do—will come forward with various sightings, all of which will be a waste of police time.

Mediums will gaze into crystal balls.

The newspapers will set reporters on the fugitives’ trails.

Gradually, after some time, everyone will realise the extent of the scam and Fabian’s despotic rage, pitiless, ruthless, will be fearsome to behold. Bank accounts will be scrutinised, residential homes will be raided as the law attempts to identify the elusive Aunty Val and the terrible truth will dawn. But they will never trace the money, moved on a regular basis from building society to building society, from bank to bank and back, from post office to giro, from hole in the wall to wallet and purse, yes, much of it ending up as cash hidden in a whole set of Gladstone bags. Since they first arrived at Hurleston laundering the money has been a full-time occupation and one at which all three of them have become very experienced.

Perhaps, in time, Ange will drop Fabian a line explaining…

‘I’m going to take some of these bags down the back stairs to the car,’ says Billy. ‘Let’s hope I’m not spotted.’

She is well away, lost in her thoughts. Ange gives a violent start, she is very afraid, and eager to leave the confines of Hurleston as quickly as she can. She must keep busy. True, they are escaping, but the only real escape from an unreal situation like this one is death. ‘Well that’s that,’ she says with a sigh of relief, closing a bulging suitcase. ‘I reckon we’re just about ready.’

‘I love you, Ange,’ says Billy with a kiss. Sometimes his love is so overwhelming that he feels compelled to touch her. ‘And I love you too,’ says Ange, in a rush.

A sickly jolt of fear.

Tina is ashen-faced, breathless, Archie hanging over one arm like a doll, Petal dragged, weeping, behind her.

Tina…?’

‘He’s gone… they’ve taken him…
’

‘Who?’

‘I dunno,’ she cries, dry-eyed, desperate, ‘God help me, I dunno. Some lunatic covered my eyes…’

Together Ange and Billy, incredulous, shout out, ‘Jacob? What happened?’

‘I searched the whole bleeding place, we searched, didn’t we, Petal? Look at her legs, all scratched and smeared with blood. But he didn’t cry out, we listened but we couldn’t hear him…’

‘When?’ shouts Billy.

‘Just ten minutes ago, on the river path.’

Billy is gone, out of the room like lightning with a draught behind him, everything else forgotten.

Ange grips Tina’s hand. She is quivering uncontrollably. ‘Stop! Stop babbling, tell me slowly what happened? Who took him? Why would anyone take Jacob anywhere?’

Tina sniffs, wipes the back of her hand over her sticky nose. She’s had some time to think about this, all those desperate minutes as she flogged back up the endless stairs to the nursery, fighting for breath with lungs parched and shrivelled, fighting for sanity itself. Her voice is no more than a tortured whisper.
‘They must have thought he was Archie.’

Ange is stunned into silence by a wondering despair. ‘You mean…’

Tina is almost screaming now. She is as ugly as sin, like a wild old witch weaving menace in her spells.
‘Get with it, Ange!
Jacob didn’t wander off, he’s not hiding somewhere in the woods for a laugh, being naughty. Fucking hell, some mad sex fiend didn’t jump out of the bushes, hoping someone would happen by with a couple of kids to choose from! This was deliberate, Ange, they must have planned it, followed me, judged their moment to push me down, they covered my face but I kept on screaming and then Jacob was gone…’ She holds out a scarf, a disgusting, dirty thing, hand knitted. Ange puts her hand to her mouth and tries to back away, she doesn’t want to know or hear any more of this. ‘They tied this round my eyes, by the time I’d got it off there was no sign. I couldn’t even tell the direction!’

‘Billy will find him.’ Ange feels as if she’s asleep. Everything is waving before her, voices booming and echoing. She holds her head higher determined not to believe… this is repellent. ‘Don’t worry. Billy will find him.’

What’s going on? Tina is shaking her hard and somewhere nearby a child is crying.
‘They’ve kidnapped him, Ange,
they’ve taken Jacob away and we might never, ever see him again. Once Fabian realises it’s the wrong boy he’s not going to pay any ransom…’

What’s this? Ransom? What is Tina saying? What has made Tina jump so quickly to this conclusion? Tina goes on jabbering like a raving nut. ‘We’ll have to tell them everything, the police will have to know the truth, they’ll find out everything that’s happened…’

‘Shut up, Tina! Shut up! Just sit there, and don’t speak.
Shut up!’

Oh my God she must think. She must think slowly and clearly. She musn’t allow hysteria to affect her thinking now. Not with Jacob’s life at stake.

The way Jacob was grabbed, the way Tina was blindfolded, what she says seems horribly reasonable, bearing in mind the indecent kind of money Fabian is so often reported as enjoying. Damn the sodding newspapers. Damn them,
damn them!
‘Unpack. Everything. Just how it was.
Right now,’
barks Ange, almost unaware of what she is saying or where her thoughts are coming from.

Tina doesn’t stop to ask why. The unpacking is far easier, more swiftly accomplished than any of the packing had been, all done in deep shocked horror. Soon everything is back in its place, a little untidy, and the two women themselves look as if they’ve been through a hedge backwards, but they’ve done it.

‘I hope Billy won’t…’ puffs Tina.

‘Billy will do what is best for Jacob,’ says Ange in an agony of suspense, pulling the frightened Archie into her arms. The child feels fragile, almost breakable, and she is sweating in an agony of fear. People can be so terribly cruel, to children, to animals… you read… Obviously the letters from Aunty Val were merely a warning, a warning they didn’t heed soon enough.

But where
is
Billy, sod it, where the hell has he got to? He won’t find Jacob if Jacob’s been taken by experienced crooks. What a waste of time when they ought to be calling the law…
why does Billy always act so impulsively?
This is all her fault, if Ange hadn’t been so greedy, so ambitious, so ruthlessly hankering after a fine life, Jacob would be safe now, here in her arms where he ought to be, instead of a terrified victim—she can’t let her thoughts take her any further. Not yet. Not ever. Not till he’s back.

One thing is for certain. They must never let Fabian know that the missing child is not Archie, safe and warm and loved in the nursery, but merely the handyman’s son.

Ah yes. A come-uppance, Eileen Coburn would call it, Ange has got her come-uppance at last.

A
TRAGEDY WAITING TO
happen, that’s what Fabian calls it when he finally arrives at Hurleston, drawn and exhausted after his last-minute flight from the States. His head looks heavy in his hands, but still his suit is immaculate and his blue-and-white striped shirt is crisp, businesslike. ‘I should have taken precautions, oh God, why didn’t I take precautions?’

His father, Evelyn, tries to console him. ‘Nobody’s to blame for this, Fabian old sport. No one. Only those devilish swine…’ blood rushes to his papery face, his old blue eyes water, he smashes a fist into his open palm and it’s obvious he has hurt himself, made frenzied by helplessness, by age and infirmity. His leg is giving him gyp today. You can get an idea what Lord Ormerod would do to the ‘filthy scum’ he talks about, if he got the blighter in the sights of his twelve bore. And it wouldn’t be a quick death either.

Fabian arrived home in the early hours of Sunday morning and all night long they waited, gathered round in the great hall at Hurleston, the phone on an ancient slaughtering block of solid oak doing as a coffee table, in the centre of the circle of chairs.

From above the fireplace a moth-eaten stag looks down on them sombrely between much super-glued antlers. Suits of armour stand hollow sentinel at the turns of the grand wooden staircase which wends its way up to the minstrels’ gallery above.

Everyone’s here except Nanny Tree and her man, up in the nursery with the children. Lord and Lady Ormerod, Maudie and Nanny Barber, Fabian, Ruth Hubbard, Simon Chalmers, Angela and Honesty and Detective Inspector Julius Evans. It is like something out of an Agatha Christie novel. The meddlesome twins don’t bother to disguise the fact that they’re in their element here, they’ll be centre stage, real drama queens, when they get back to The Rudge next month.

In the highest chair, looking dwarfed and wasted before all that ornate carving, sits Inspector Evans, hot from headquarters at Exeter. His men continue to comb the grounds, to drag the lake and trawl the river, although, as Nanny Tree has pointed out time and time again, ‘We were nowhere near the river, Archie didn’t run off on his own,
the poor little mite was deliberately grabbed!’

It’s a good thing the force were called at once so they could make an early start. ‘And that is why we are leaving our options wide open at this stage,’ says Inspector Evans sagely. ‘No publicity just in case this is, as we have to suspect, a matter of unlawful appropriation. As we all know, Sir Fabian is strongly inclined to play along with the kidnappers if a demand of some kind is received…’

‘Anything,’ moans Fabian, flanked by a distraught Ruth Hubbard, and Simon Chalmers who sits erectly, waiting for orders, eager to be of help. ‘Anything just as long as we get Archie back safely.’

Lady Elfrida, of fighting Prussian stock, has been eager to take the offensive right from the start.

‘But what d’you mean by the offensive, old horse?’ Evelyn asked in exasperation, his spaniel at his feet, sharing the anxious vigil. ‘How the hell can we take the offensive if we don’t know who the scoundrels are?’

Angela seems to think the whole appalling ordeal has been organised by Ffiona, but Honesty tries to point out, ‘She couldn’t possibly, Angela, please believe me! Mummy is barmy. Far too disorganised and silly to undertake anything like this. She can’t even clean her fridge until the damn thing can’t breathe for the mountains of ice round the ice-box. She can’t even properly work the washing machine, she keeps it at the same temperature for everything she puts in—wool—so nothing gets clean. I’d swear on my life that Mummy had nothing to do with this and I’m quite surprised that you think so.’

Angela, pale and weak, eyes red and puffy from crying, still urges, ‘But she’s so bitter, she’s so angry…’

‘Yes, but not so she’d do anything like this!’

‘Lady Henderson-Ormerod is being interviewed even as we speak,’ says Inspector Evans calmly. And Honesty blanches. It is six thirty on a Sunday morning, what on earth did the detective find, knocking Ffiona up at a time she is unaware exists save in books and documentaries?

Honesty found her interview, with a man called Powell, disturbing. There was so much she had to hide… so much.
Even from herself?
She’d been as shocked as anyone to hear of Archie’s disappearance, there wasn’t even a stab of joy, no secret elation, on hearing the terrible news. All she could think of was that poor little boy—she didn’t know him that well but all the same, he is a sweet little thing—lost and frightened with people who might be unkind to him. She was so relieved when Fabian got home, some childhood instinct told her that now everything was going to be all right, Daddy will take charge, Daddy is sensible, Daddy knows what to do. She was unprepared to see Daddy crying. It was almost the worst thing Honesty had ever seen in her life.

Daddy didn’t cry when Helena died, Pandora remembers, or, if he had, he’d done it in private which was a much better way to go on. Men shouldn’t cry. Giles cried, Giles, the dope who had come with his father, Rufus, all those years ago, no doubt to gloat over his future inheritance. Well, Tabby and Pandora did not give him the chance to gloat, they made his visit a misery, pushed him out in the punt having removed the bung and the oars, and then he cried. Apparently the jerk couldn’t swim. It shocked them both. And now here is Daddy doing the same thing, and in front of other people as well. They won’t pass that little piece of information on to Lavinia or Courtney.

They squeeze together on the old oak rug-box beside the empty fireplace, waiting for something to happen.

It is in this hall that serious matters like births and deaths are digested. In this dark and sombre room even in summer the sand-filled draught-excluder is laid along the bottom of the door to silence the moaning of the wind. Soot patters down on the unlit grate. A trailing branch of ivy taps against the windowpane.

They had all sat round, more or less like this, after Clayden brought them the terrible news that Helena had been found. They sat round waiting for the police to go and bring her body back. Silent, biting her lips till they bled, Tabby found it hard to repress her laughter, she shook and sweated in fear that it might overcome her, the fact that their mother, so gentle, so adoring, would never talk or walk or laugh again, hadn’t dawned that early on. The whole situation of waiting just seemed so hilarious. It was awful and they’d never have been forgiven if they’d started giggling. That knowledge made matters worse.