Kissed by Starlight (31 page)

“The girl’s right. Stop your ranting my lady, and let us consider what is to be done about the children. I’ve seen them often enough — awful-looking crew by and large — et they seem healthier and happier under your tutelage, Felicia, than I have ever known them. What are you feeding them?”

“Mostly fresh milk and rough-grained bread with a boiled egg for tea.”

“Sensible girl. Most sensible. If she’ll add a scrap of bacon and a vegetable or two, I should say you’ll see them all live to grow up. Don’t like the sound of that littlest one’s chest, though. Bit of a rattle.”

“Yes, we noticed it. Mary says her very own cousin heard the same sound in her first son’s chest. She bound a plaster of comfrey and juniper to his back. The boy was cured in three days, though it later died of something else.”

“Hmm...well, if judiciously used, I don’t see why it shouldn't cure....”

Lady Stavely broke in with something akin to a scream. “Never mind the chest of some beggarly brat! It’s what we are to do with her. Surely your first concern, Doctor, must be for these children’s precious souls? Leaving them in her care would be the same as leaving them asleep under a upas tree! Sooner or later the poison will seep into their blood — all the more quickly due to their own infamous mothers.”

She fished a handkerchief from her capacious pocket and made a charming play of blowing her nose. From the window, Sir Elswith said, “Bravo, my dear lady. Girl’s a harlot — recognized it at once.”

Doctor Danby snapped, “From your vast store of experience, sir, no doubt!”

Felicia had not been given time to put on her stays after Blaic had jumped out the window. Her body felt light and easy beneath her bodice. She smiled to think that she really was a loose woman, in every sense of the word.

Sir Elswith ignored the doctor. Swinging his leg over the low sill, he stepped into the room, ducking beneath the overhanging sash and grunting a little with the exertion. “No sign of the blighter. Seems to have known what was good for him and vanished.” He snorted. “Can’t say much for his technique, Felicia, my lass. Feller didn’t even trouble t’take his boots off.”

“Didn’t he? I hadn’t noticed.”

Sir Elswith’s slightly protruding eyes seemed to goggle even more at this brazen statement. Felicia couldn’t be bothered to give him any more of her attention, though he burbled and chuffed like a cooling kettle for some little time.

When the others had shown up, Felicia had whispered to Blaic that he should escape immediately. Under the compulsion of the Law, he had done so, seizing his coat and leaping through a bedroom window, which, fortunately, had been open. Lady Stavely had screamed, Sir Elswith had raced downstairs, and the doctor had stuck his head out of the window to say, “By God! He’s made it clean away. I should have expected a shattered ankle as the very limit.”

Now Lady Stavely said, “You are entirely right, Sir Elswith. There’s nothing else to be done. Felicia must leave here at once.”

“I beg your pardon?” Felicia said angrily.

Lady Stavely turned her chilling stare on her stepchild. “You can hardly expect me to continue to allow your residence here. We Stavelys cannot permit our name to be besmirched by seeming to condone your scandalous behavior. I told you when you left Hamdry Manor that I would do nothing to protect you if your evil blood rose. Well, it has. You must leave.”

“Come now. Let’s not be hasty,” Doctor Danby said.

Lady Stavely hardly glanced at him. “Once word of this afternoon reaches the good people of Tallyford...”

“I don’t see why it should,” Felicia said, “I don’t intend to mention it to anyone.”

Sir Elswith chuckled vulgarly. “ ‘Magine your ‘friend’ has already taken care of that. Those low fellows don’t care who’s about when they boast of their conquests.”

“Blaic won’t tell anyone. He doesn’t know of anyone to tell.”

“Don’t hoodwink yourself, m’dear. He’s probably already in the taproom, tellin’ the tale.”

“If he isn’t,” Doctor Danby said, glaring scornfully at Sir Elswith over the top of his glasses, “I’ll wager you’ll be willing to fill in for him.”

Lady Stavely said, “
I
shall certainly make no secret of your transgressions! For years I have told my confidants that you would one day prove my contention about you — namely, that you are the same as your mother. Now you have proved my case, and all those who derided me must know they were wrong and I was in the right.”

Felicia could well believe Lady Stavely would trumpet her vindication to the four corners of the earth. She turned toward Doctor Danby. “What do you suggest I do?”

The small man sighed. “Go away. There’s nothing else for you to do.”

“And then? Shall I starve in a ditch for everyone’s convenience?”

“You have what your father left you. Begin again elsewhere. In Cornwall, perhaps, or even Wales. Somewhere.”

Felicia glanced at Lady Stavely. Would she now admit that Mr. Ashton had made off with her funds? It struck her suddenly that Lady Stavely did not know of her unfaithful lover’s death. She could not tell her. To do so would only add another suspicion of witchcraft to her already difficult situation.

Lady Stavely’s lips were pressed together tightly. She unfolded them enough to say, “Yes. You have your inheritance, as well as the money I gave you before you left Hamdry.”

“That is all gone.”

The older woman snapped, “If, in your extravagance, you have ruined yourself, it's no  one's blame but your own."

“I spent it on the children’s needs, as you can see if you will trouble to examine the ledger. Which returns us to a point you all seem to have forgotten: The children must be cared for!”

Doctor Danby took a turn about the room. “My wife told me yesterday that her sister is coming to live with us. She is a respectable widow of forty-four years. Her only child is grown and gone to America. I do not see why Amelia should not, for the time being, take up residence here until such time as another directress might be found. She is a very levelheaded creature.”

“Most suitable,” Lady Stavely said, bowing a trifle in the doctor’s direction. “A solid widow without encumbrances is the very person I should have chosen in the first place!”

“But there is still no money!” Felicia exclaimed. “You may bring in all the widows you like, but you cannot run the asylum without funds.”

“No money?” The doctor and Sir Elswith exchanged glances. “The scoundrel,” Sir Elswith growled. He stepped closer to Lady Stavely and possessed himself of her gloved hand. “There, now, m’dear. Don’t trouble yourself. There’s many another in the same boat.”

“I’m sure I don’t know to what you are referring, sir,” Lady Stavely said, tugging free.

“That wretched fellow Ashton has defrauded some of the best families in the county. Justice Garfield is attempting to trace the blackguard even as we speak. They’ll find him, arrest him, and force him to hand back all that he has stolen. Rest assured, madame. In the end he will hang.”

Lady Stavely staggered to a chair and sat down blindly. “You...you know?”

“A plausible fellow like that has wormed his way into the good graces of half a dozen ladies. I never trusted the dog. Poor Viscount Stavely was probably too ill at the end to see through him.”

Felicia wondered if that was true. Her father had never taken a great deal of interest in money matters so long as there were sufficient funds to pay for his pleasures and his charities. She wondered, and supposed she always would, whether her father had encouraged Palamon Ashton to ensnare Lady Stavely, if only by his own inattention. She did not for an instant suppose that her father had expected them to become lovers or to join in defrauding the orphanage. To be honest with herself, she thought he would have cared more about the orphanage than about the disgrace to his honor. If he had never loved Lady Stavely, as Clarice supposed, would not it be a relief to have her attached to another man?

Felicia, moved again to pity for her stepmother, said, “I hope you aren’t too unhappy about Mr. Ashton. He was —

“Kindly don’t speak to me,” Lady Stavely said sharply. “You will go to your chamber and prepare to leave at once.”

A few minutes later, alone for the first time since Blaic had walked in the door, Felicia straightened the tumbled counterpane. She could not regret the touch of Blaic’s hands or the strange sensations he had awakened within her. She loved him, and it had seemed right to give herself to him. If only they had not been interrupted!

Perhaps it was better this way. She had, after all, to live in this mortal world. A woman who had lost her virginity outside of marriage had only one course open to her, and that, Felicia vowed, was a road she would never take. Her mother had been a romantic, looking always to replace the love she’d found with Stavely, a love forbidden by their families and their respective stations in life. Felicia had found that love at nineteen; she would not make the mistake of thinking she could find it again.

As she began to lay out her things on the bed, a knock sounded at the door. Mary opened it slowly, peering around the edge. “An’ here she is tellin’ the world how you be cry in’ with the shame of it!”

“Who, my stepmother?” Felicia shook her head. “She is a woman who believes people should behave as they do in novels. I have nothing to weep for. Next she’ll expect me to lie down and expire in shame.”

“Here, let me do that,” Mary said, taking a shift from Felicia to fold it more neatly. “Indeed, you have nothin’ whatever to be weepin’ over. Zo the pleasingest young man in all Devon be makin’ love to ye, an’ why not? Any’un with half an eye could see he be zo fair and far gone in love....Tis jealous she is!”

“He is in love with me, isn’t he, Mary?”

“Iss, fai! Clean off his head with it, indeed.”

“That’s what I thought,” Felicia said. “Can you bring me a valise to put these in?”

“Oh, aye.”

They worked awhile in silence. Then Mary said, “It’s this way, Miss Felicia. I be stayin’ here. ‘Tisn’t fair to the children if we all go off an’ leave ‘em. There’s been far and away too much leavin’ of ‘em, an’ if I stay ‘twon’t be zo hard on ‘em.”

“That’s very good of you, Mary. I wish ...”

“Now, then,” Mary said, her cheeks pink, but moving more quickly, having said what she had intended to. She clicked her tongue. “I couldn’t leave the little ones, will or no. I’ve got that fond of ‘em you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Yes I would. I hate the thought of going. I felt that I could make a difference in their lives and now, like a fool, I ruined what I had only just begun to build. How could I be so blind!”

“Now then,” Mary said, a trifle fiercely. “You can come back in a few weeks. You take that young man and go into Cornwall. ‘Tis a heathenish place by all I heard, but ‘twill do well enow until you’m married.”

“Married?”

“What did you think? He’m waitin’ down by t’shed with a horse ‘n’ cart. Don’t ask how he come by it, but there he be waitin’. The children be waitin’ too, with flowers. Don’t be disappointin’ ‘em by showin’ that face, neither.”

Felicia was certain Mary was wrong. Blaic would not marry her — she was a mortal. Even when he’d said he wanted to take her away into the Other Realm, he’d said nothing about marriage. However, she realized that this was probably the best tale she could tell the children. They’d been most interested in the mechanics of Miss Dravoget’s wedding, and not merely because it represented the departure of a woman they’d heartily disliked. If they believed she was going away to marry Blaic — whom they liked a great deal — it would lessen the blow of another change. If only Lady Stavely wouldn’t spoil things....

“Oh, her? She be a-layin’ down with a bottle o’ zmelling zalts and a headache. If you’m tippy-toe down them stairs quiet like zome mouses, you’m get clean away and no’un the wiser. When you come back married, even her won’t have nothing evil left to zay.”

Chapter Seventeen

Long after dark, Blaic pulled on the reins along a street where the only light was the moonlight shining on the puddles. Felicia spoke from the corner of the gig, where he had believed her to be sleeping. “Where are we?”

“I’m not sure. The signpost was blank.”

“You don’t know? I would have thought...”        “Many things have changed in six hundred years, Felicia. I’m trying to accustom myself to them, but the location of every insignificant town has not been among my studies thus far. I’ve had enough difficulty with the lists of your kings and your wars.”

She dropped the hood back from her face as she peered out into the night. Blaic caught his breath anew at the sight of her. The moon washed the rich color from her hair so that she was a pen-and-ink portrait. Yet nothing could wipe away the vitality that lived in her eyes and face. Though a deeply peaceful mortal, she had an interest in the world that would make her beautiful even when an old, old woman. “Well, it looks clean at least,” she said. “Won’t you see if there’s room for us?”

Off to the left as he entered, he heard the noise of a busy taproom. To his right he saw a deserted dining room, while straight ahead a set of stairs rose to the second floor. Felicia was right: The place was spotlessly clean, though he did not know how she’d been able to tell in the dark.

He glanced down at himself. His linen was awry, his coat wrinkled, and his boots none too clean — hardly an appearance likely to impress an innkeeper ready to turn questionable persons from his door. Blaic passed his hand over his sleeve, feeling the rough homespun change into a good broadcloth, and gave his boots a flick with the linen handkerchief that materialized between his fingers. A brief tug at his unruly hair and he saw reflected in the arriving innkeeper’s eyes the prospect of a bourgeois gentleman.

“Good evening, sir,” the man said, rubbing his hands together as he bowed. “What may I have the pleasure of doing for you?”

Sometime later, Felicia sighed with sated delight as Blaic poked up the flames in the stone fireplace in the dining room. “I was hungrier than I thought.”

“So I see. I hope you found everything to your taste, Mrs. Gardner.”

“Thank you, Mr. Gardner. I did.” She had an unexpected dimple by the corner of her mouth when she was being mischievous. It had been all Blaic could do to keep from staring at it when it had made its first advent. He’d thought he knew her well, yet she could still surprise him.