Endure My Heart (22 page)

“Yes, we heard it,” Miss Halka answered. I had been figuring out my attitude, and had decided to be haughty with him, as he had disobeyed my orders to leave off chasing Miss Sage. He noticed my cool behavior at once. I could see he wanted to explain away his sins, but with the others present, he could not do the sort of job he did best. He had to be less personal.

“That Crites—what a foolish man! Knocking me out, and tying me up while the smugglers’ vessel landed the stuff beneath his nose at the Eyrie.”

“Crites was here this morning; he is ready to swear it was not landed at the Eyrie,” I pointed out.

“Not while we were there. They waited offshore till they got the signal, and delivered it while we were in the village. Miss Sage has scouts all over the property very likely, and we were spotted. It was certainly landed there, for the whole shipment was discovered on the premises this morning. You
have heard all about Crites’ big discovery by now, I expect?”

“Yes, we hear Miss Lock is to win the reward.” This was one of the major subjects of talk all that day, wondering what she would do with so much money, and whether Miss Simon would now find herself without a nurse-companion.

“She’ll never see a penny of it,” he said with relish. “The reward is for information leading to the capture of Miss Sage. He let Miss Sage slip through his fingers, with his bungling.”

“That is not what the notice said,” I told him, with I suppose a superior smile, as it is nearly impossible not to let it show when one knows she is in the right.

“No, no, that is not the meaning at all. If that were the case, the smugglers would turn in every batch they import, and pick up a thousand pounds. It is more than they make on a haul.”

“The notice said, if I recall [and I certainly recalled, having memorized it], one thousand pounds reward for information leading to the arrest of the smuggler known as Miss Sage, his band
or
cargo.” I gave the precious “or” its necessary emphasis.

“That was not the meaning,” he repeated, pulling out a leather case from his inside pocket, to extract a folded copy of the infamous notice. He read it over carefully, while I watched with infinite satisfaction, seeing his face change from lofty certainty to a questioning frown, to frustration.

Without a word, I lifted it from his fingers, to point out with apparent nonchalance the two-letter word that changed the whole meaning. “‘Or,’ you see. Miss Sage or the cargo. Miss Sage has not been captured, but the cargo most certainly has. I cannot think the government will go back on its word.”

“But that’s not what I meant at all!” he said angrily.
“I
could have picked up a cargo any time these three months…” Then he stopped, with a conscious look toward me.

“You have been involved in this all along?” I asked in a huff that rivaled Rose Marie for acting. “All the while you let on to be a draper?”

“I meant to tell you sooner,” he said. Andrew had opened a book of music and was beating out a rhythm on the air with a pencil. He might as well not have been there, but Edna was listening avidly. She was also watching closely. When Wicklow glanced uneasily in her direction, she took the discreet notion to go and prepare tea, that we lovers might have something resembling privacy to make it up. She would persist in the face of all his duplicity to believe him enamored of me. She said something to Andrew on the way out, and he got up and followed her, murmuring that he would be right back, but of course he would not.

“Mab, don’t be angry with me,” Williams began, with his most beguiling smile in place, the non-greasy one. “You must confess you are relieved I am
not
a draper.”

“It doesn’t matter two straws to me what else you are, Mr. Williams…”

“If you don’t know it already, my name is Wicklow. Stamford Wicklow.”

I don’t know why he omitted the “Sir.” Perhaps it is more stylish not to boast of it. “You are a customs officer, and that is sufficient to turn me against you,” I finished up sharply. “All these months you have been deceiving me, when you know how I feel about the smugglers.”

“We have been through all that,” he said impatiently. “I have given you my word I mean to capture only Miss Sage, and not persecute any of the smaller fish. You agreed to it.”

“I did not agree!”

“You haven’t said a word of objection since the night I—I told you what I meant to do.” He meant “the night I kissed you.”

“The matter has not arisen since then. I thought you had abandoned the idea of this work.”

“You knew Rose Marie showed me through her cellar. You knew why I went,” he reminded me.

This was not easy to explain away, so I ignored it. “Next you will be telling me you mean to diddle Miss Lock out of her thousand pounds,” I said, to change the direction of his thoughts.

“There will certainly not be a reward of one thousand pounds paid for the cargo. They might give her a hundred, as a token.”

“They will pay her a thousand, if I—she has to go to the highest court in the land! Oh, such a shabby trick! The poster said ‘or’ cargo.” I was still holding the paper, and pointed it out again as I handed it back to him.

“You seem mighty familiar with the poster,” he said.

“Who is not, by this time? I have been reading it carefully, thinking there was not a doubt in the world that Miss Lock would win the reward. There can be no other logical interpretation put on the wording of it.”

“We’ll see,” he said, and shoved the thing into his pocket. “Never mind Rose Marie. I want to talk about us.”

“There is no
us
to talk about, Sir Stamford. There is only you, a customs officer, and me a confirmed enemy of the customs men.”

“You don’t seem to be such an inveterate foe of Crites,” he said, looking at me with a calculating eye. “It was you who hinted him to the Eyrie, if I am not mistaken.”

This nearly knocked the breath out of me. How could I go on proclaiming myself a staunch foe of revenuemen, after that piece of chicanery? I think, as I look back upon it, that was the first moment Wicklow began to suspect me. Our eyes met, and for a fraction of a second so short it hardly happened at all, there was accusation in his regard, and an acknowledging guilt in mine. A fleeting thing, no more, but very powerful. A seed is a tiny thing, but may grow to any size.

In a heartbeat I recovered and answered in a light, dismissing way. “Oh, Crites—you could tell him the time and place of a shipment and he would not catch them. I had not an idea in the world the Eyrie was actually used. With Miss Simon in residence, how should anyone think of it? Merely I was sending him on a wild-goose chase, teasing him, if you like.”

The flash of accusation was long gone from his eyes, but my weakness of heart continued till I saw how he accepted my excuse. There was no suspicion left when he asked, “I wonder if
she
could be in on it, Miss Lock?”

“She would hardly have reported finding the stuff in her cellar in that case,” I laughed gaily. With relief really, that I had shimmied my way out of a tight corner. “She wouldn’t dare risk their vengeance, if she were working with them.”

“The reward might have been inducement enough.”

“As you are on terms with the woman, why don’t you ask her, next time you are looking about her cellar?” I asked sweetly.

“I’ll do that, but meanwhile, let us get back to us.”

“Don’t you think we have discussed enough grammar for one night, Sir Stamford? We have been through the meaning of ‘or,’ and the lack of any meaning in ‘us,’ as it relates to you and me. While you go on with this business, I will not see you. As a suitor I mean,” I added, as literally not seeing him at all in the town was of course impossible.

“Don’t put me in a corner, Mabel. I was sent here to do a job. As an officer, it is my custom to finish what I start.”

“You should be more careful of what you start.”

“So I should. I admit I have not the relish for the job I had when first I came. When feelings enter into it—I refer to my sympathy for the poor people hereabouts—it is difficult to be objective. Still, Miss Sage is none of these poor, simple people. He is exploiting them, as surely as the government is mismanaging the matter. It is not Porson, as I first thought. I managed to get him drunk one night and he hasn’t a notion who it might be. And it isn’t Elwood Ganner, though I shouldn’t be surprised to learn he used to have a hand in it. He has certainly got a very fine houseful of valuables, and a bigger bank account than even his municipal bribery can account for, but there have been no large deposits regularly for some time. He has been replaced by someone artful enough to do his banking elsewhere. It is not Lord Aiken for he isn’t here often enough to see to the details. But it's someone of that sort. Some greedy, clever scoundrel, lining his pockets while the poor take the risks and do the work. I’ll find Miss Sage, and when I do, you will feel differently. You’ll see what sort of a person it is you’re defending so staunchly.”

“You won’t give it up, in other words?” I asked, cutting through all his rodomontade, and disliking his description of myself as a greedy scoundrel very much. The “clever” did not sit so poorly.

“I won’t. And I won’t give you up either. You’ll see. You’ll see I’m right.”

What a pusillanimous creature is woman! Why didn’t I lay it on the line. Give it up, or else. Then he would have had to give up laying siege to me, in at least one of my incarnations; either Miss Sage or Miss Anderson. I sat with my lips closed, pouting. I was afraid to push him to the extreme, afraid he’d give up Miss Anderson. “And that, my girl, is that!” he concluded, in a very firm, masculine and possessive way.

“I am sick to death of this tiresome business,” he proceeded in quite a different tone. “Of more importance to
us
is a new shipment of muslin that I have got in at the shop. I have set aside a couple of ells for you. I want you to start preparing your trousseau.”

This was carrying dalliance too far, to be actually urging me to set up a hope chest, and he engaged to Lady Lucy. He frowned, and went on, “Why are you looking at me in such a way?”

I realized then that some of my shock was showing, that I had my lower lip hanging in amazement. “Surely it is the custom for an engaged lady to prepare her linens against the day she finally marries. I hope it won’t be too long,” he went on.       “Is it that the groom does not usually concern himself so closely in the amassing of the domestic wares? But as a sometime draper, you know, I have become interested in such matters. And really we will need an awful lot of things. Oakvale, my ancestral home, is pretty well stripped of goods and chattels. Anything that could be carried away was sold to settle the mortgage when my father died. It was the only way I could hold onto the land and home. We’ll build it up again. You are an excellent manager, and I am a hard worker. Please don’t exclude me from all the shopping. I have already picked out a tea set and bought it from the traveler last time he was around. I have it packed in my apartment this minute.”

I pictured us having tea in the morning from it. “A white ground it is, with blue flowers that just match your eyes. Shall I bring it over next time I come?”

“That—that would be lovely,” I managed to get out.

“It will, won’t it, Mabel? I can hardly wait. Ah, here is Miss Halka with
her
tea tray,” he added, then said not another word about trousseaus or tea sets, or Miss Sage either. He stayed for three quarters of an hour, had tea, with a warm, secret smile over the cup at me, took a polite leave and left me totally confused.

Chapter Eighteen

The next days
were such extremely busy ones, I hardly know where to begin reciting them. First, and most gratifying to me, there was the matter of Rose Marie’s reward, which, as I believe I said, was to be split even-steven among all the gentlemen. A circular came down from London that there was no reward for the capture of the cargo sans Miss Sage. The cargo, at this point, sat in the stableyard at the inn. If they meant to withhold the reward, Miss Sage meant to redeem her cargo.
Ça va sans dire.
Plans were in the process of formation, of which you shall hear more anon. But first we meant to try for the reward.

With a little help in composition from myself, Rose Marie posted off a reply, not only to the president of the Board of Trade, who would have filed it in a wastebasket, but with copies to the more prominent newspapers in the city—the
Gazette,
the
Post,
the
Morning Herald,
the
Chronicle,
as well as the
Pilot,
the
Star
and the local news sheet, the Salford
Sun,
which only comes out once a week. This name is supposed to contain a jocose reference to our weather, which leads me to conclude the weather has changed since the paper was named, for we get plenty of sun nowadays.

I learned something I had not known before. Newspapers, like people, have politics. It was possible to judge their politics (the papers’, I mean) by the coverage they gave Rose Marie’s case. The Tory sheets (the
Post
and
Herald)
consigned us to page three or ignored us entirely. The Tories were in office at the time (aren’t they always?) and did not wish to embarrass themselves. The Whigs, most especially the
Chronicle,
granted us a central position on page one. As to the Salford
Sun,
there was very little news of any other sort carried that week. Not that it is Whiggish; Ganner is a Tory, but he does not actually
own
the paper, and did not feel the matter reflected on himself at all, so let Sandy Blair print it up in a manner to entertain the local population.

The
Chronicle
even went so far as to send a reporter down to Salford to get the details. Rose Marie, worrying (unnecessarily, I think) that she would be recognized, claimed illness and sent Mr. Hunter to me. He was a very nice sort of a gentleman, well bred and very interested. It was he who informed me as to newspapers having politics. I played up to him a little to ensure good coverage for our case, and had more success than I ever thought.