Lace for Milady (6 page)

“Seaview!”

“Hillcrest! It is
my
home, and I shall call it what I wish. I do not plan to leave. In fairness to your invalid aunt, I must tell you you had better find some other cold, windswept, flooded spot for her to recuperate

“Thirty-five hundred,” he said.

For a moment I did not understand him. He went on, “I’ll raise the price to thirty-five hundred. It is a better than fair offer. You won’t match it elsewhere.”

“I don’t intend to sell.”

“It’s my top offer, and more than the place is worth.”

“Why do you offer more that it’s worth?”

“It’s mine!
That is—do you have a pen and I’ll show you what I mean.” Slack got the pen and paper, and Clavering drew up a pie-shaped wedge. His hand moved swiftly and purposefully, the emerald not winking today in the dim light. “This is Clavering land,” he said. “And this is Seaview.” He took a bite out of the end of the piece of pie and decorated it with an S (for Seaview, I assumed).

“This land has been in the family for five hundred years. You can see Seaview is an integral part of my holdings. I wish to restore it. It ruins the outline.”

This must have sounded a paltry excuse, even to himself. “As I mentioned, I have plans for it. It has very meaningful associations, family associations, for me. It was built by my great-grandfather from stone taken from Clavering land, a fallen chapel. Every stone and piece of wood in it has meaning for me. The woodwork, the carved panelling, actually comes from Belview, done by Grinling Gibbons. It means a great deal to me."

“It means a great deal to me as well,” I informed him, unimpressed by his claims of fine family feelings. He was merely greedy, wanted to add another house to his collection.

“What can it possibly mean to you? You haven’t been here above a month. The weather is bad, the smugglers will annoy you, you are cut off from society. There is nothing to recommend the place to any normal person.”

“My aunt lives less than a mile away.

“Another disadvantage, I think?” he asked with a mocking smile.

“Not in the least. I am very fond of my aunt and cousin,” I said blightingly.

“Tell me, did you make good your threat to wring her neck?”

“All families have their little disagreements from time to time. The matter is settled between us.”

“Now, look, you could buy yourself a very fine home in Pevensey for the price I am offering you. A better house than this, and with your own land. You would still be close enough to visit Lady Inglewood, if
that
is now considered an advantage.”

“Why can’t
you
understand I don’t want to sell my house? You just want to set mantraps around Seaview, too, to keep anyone from disturbing your tranquility on those rare occasions when you are home. You will find us unobtrusive neighbours, sir. Don’t fear we mean to pester you."

“I meant to warn you about the mantraps. Lucky you didn’t fall into one yesterday. It is the reason I came, to inform you of them.”

“Very well, I am informed, and will stay out of your spinney.”

“Actually the spinney is safe enough. It is the meadow just beyond that is particularly well trapped. I wish to keep trespassers out of it.”

“You will not be troubled with Miss Slack or me trespassing in your meadow, spinney, or anywhere else.”

“It is because of the Roman ruins, you see.”

“So I have heard.”

“May I know where you heard?”

“My cousin, Lord Inglewood, told me.”

“I see. I don’t know what he might have told you. He is not at all interested in the matter. The fact is, my family chapel was built over a Roman temple. It in turn was destroyed a few centuries ago, and it was only in the fairly recent past that we discovered the temple ruins beneath. I am toying with the idea of having it restored as a temple—many of the original stones are still there. The remainder were hauled off by some fellow who took the notion he would use them for a dry wall, hence the traps.”

I listened with only a small interest to this. I had been thinking for the past few moments I ought to offer the Duke some refreshment. He was an unpleasant and obnoxious man who came here to harass us, but he was a duke, and I did wish to get my lease renewed, so at this point I enquired if he would take a glass of wine, thinking to mention five hundred pounds, as my aunt had suggested.

"The rain’s letting up. I think I’d better be off,” he replied.

“Letting up so soon, is it? I thought that as in the Bible, we could expect forty days and forty nights of uninterrupted downpour. I had half decided to commission an ark and start collecting pairs of the local fauna. The coast is not living up to its reputation. Why, do you know, I think I see a ray of sun trying to push through.”

"Come the deluge, you are welcome to berth on
my
yacht, Miss Denver. I have not yet collected my female homo sapiens. I wouldn’t want to set sail without that important species.” He lifted a heavy black brow and arose. “A delightful visit. May I return?”

“Certainly. Any time you find yourself caught in one of our local typhoons, feel free to seek shelter at Hillcrest. You will find no mantraps between the road and the front door. We are not so inhospitable as some of our neighbours.”

“There are no traps in the spinney. You may feel free to ride there, Miss Denver, but I hope you will not ride unescorted, for your own safety. And you really ought to get a tamer mount, too.”

“I like a spirited animal.”

“But can you handle one?” he asked, and looked a challenge at me. Somehow, I had the impression it was the human animal before me we were speaking of, and not Juliette.

“I am not easily cowed, Your Grace. Wilkins will see you out.”

He bowed, rather nimbly for a large hulk of a man, and left.

It was not till he was gone that I discovered a few traces of confusion in his story. How did it come that my house had been built with stones from his fallen chapel, that some of those same stones had been stolen by a neighbour, and still sufficient remained that he meant to reconstruct the temple that had stood there in Roman times? It seemed an overaccounting for them. Then, too, he would get his land back in nineteen years—why was he so anxious to do it
now
that he would pay me more than the place was worth for it? If it was no more than the tip bit off his piece of pie, he could wait nineteen years.

And if he couldn’t wait, why had he not offered the deal to my aunt, who would certainly have jumped at his extravagant offer? No, while the place stood empty he didn’t begrudge the bite out of his pie. What he wished to do was to get rid of
me,
to have no one to disturb him and his mantraps. Did he take me for an interfering woman because I had ridden in his spinney without permission? But he had said specifically he didn’t mind that—I might feel free to ride in it. The more I considered the matter the more confused I became, and the more determined to remain exactly where I was and see what happened. And it was not too long before things began happening.

Chapter Four

The storm’s fury was spent by lunchtime, and by early afternoon the sun was shining. All the bleak greyness was gone out of the day, and the breeze from the windows was refreshing rather than chilling.

“Slack, I’m going into Pevensey to speak to the revenue officer,” I announced. “Will you come with me?”

The question was rhetorical. Slack is an inveterate gadabout. She had on her pelisse and bonnet five minutes before I was ready myself, and I am not a laggard. The road was wet, of course, but to speak of flooding was absurd. In fact, as I noticed the road had a good high shoulder, and as no one else had so much as mentioned spring flooding to me, I assumed it was one of Clavering’s exaggerations to make the place sound unattractive. I soon found the threat of smugglers to have been similarly overstated.

Officer Smith was in charge of the customs in the area, and it was to his little office next door the milliner’s that I sought him out to report the strange sounds heard the night before.

“I can’t think it was smugglers, ma’am,” he assured me. “There is little enough smuggling going forth at this time, and what there is comes in at Romney Marsh up the east coast for the most part. Since the war with Napoleon, smuggling is cut down considerably. A mite dangerous for the lads to be plying the Channel in these perilous times, to say nothing of
landing
in France.”

“You don’t think they might have been using Seaview for hiding their contraband, then? Its having stood empty for a while might have led them to think it a safe spot.” I felt the name Hillcrest might confuse him, because of McCurdy’s. Actually I would have to get  busy and find another name.

“Mercy, ma’am, you’ve been there upward of a month now. If there ever was anything there, it would be long gone. There are plenty of safer places about, abandoned barns or buildings, ditches, hayricks and so on, and plenty of people that are willing to look the other way for the price of a little of the goods. Why, it isn’t in the least necessary for them to risk putting it on occupied land without permission. You, between a pair of lords as you are, are in the safest spot on the coast. You may be sure they’d never land it on Clavering’s doorstep. Seaview is too close to His Grace for them to be monkeying about there. They know he takes a dim view of it. Why, it wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say he does as much patrolling as I do myself. Many’s the time I’ve seen His Grace out in his yacht, in the summer, you know, when he’s in residence at Belview, tailing suspicious vessels. He keeps a patrol on his whole stretch of coast, has men posted to see no one lands. You couldn’t be safer if you were in a church.”

“It was the Duke of Clavering who suggested to me the noises I heard might be smugglers,” I told him.

“Did he do so? That surprises me, for if anyone knows how unlikely it is they’d come in at Seaview, it is His Grace. Still, he has a kind of a mania about them. Sees smugglers in his sleep and imagines them around every corner."

“He felt that as Miss Slack and I have no man about the house, except for the servants, of course, they might impose on us.”

“Ah, well, they’d never harm a lady in any case, so you’ve nothing to fear. They’re not vicious at all. They will have their little joke. Once stuck my head into a rabbit burrow and drove a T stake between my legs to prevent my getting out, but that’s the worst I’ve heard of them doing recently.” This sounded bad enough to me.

“I’ve kept my eyes open, and I’d say since catching the fellows last week, there’s only one ship operating here nowadays. And it isn’t a regular one either. But I keep a sharp eye on it, you may be sure. I’ll stop in next time I’m out Seaview way and have a look around. But there’s nowhere there to hide it. You haven’t a real farm, just your bit of a barn for the horses, with no big ricks nor a good deep ditch nor a thing. You’ve no fuel house, no potato graves, apple-loft and your hedgerows is only three yards long. Why, it would surely be found if they were foolish enough to try to hide it there. Let me know if you have any more trouble, but it seems to me your noise was no more than a couple of poachers.”

“They would not poach Clavering’s land, all trapped and posted as it is.”

“No, not Clavering’s. People steer a wide path of Belview. It was your cousin’s place I was thinking of. Inglewood is considered fair game. Gets more than its share, because of no one daring to set a foot on Clavering’s land. It might be they were running from Inglewood and got a scare by Clavering’s warden. They’d be at pains to hide their bag—might have chucked it under some bushes or whatnot at your place.”

“I suppose it might have been that,” I said, dissatisfied. “But it was the
grate
that made the racket, and that suggests someone right
in
the house."

“It’s odd, surely. If you find out what it was, let me know, and in any case I’ll stop around next time I’m out that way."

We returned home, had a call from my aunt before dinner to enquire into the grate and to be assured that it was only the house settling. She suggested it was the first fire of the season that accounted for it, with the metal chimney-lining expanding, and it was a clever idea except that the fire hadn’t been lit. Still, she talked it down as nothing, and in the end I felt I had been rash to go dashing into town speaking of smugglers. She confirmed Smith’s story that she had never seen a sign nor heard a word of a smuggler along our coastline, due to Clavering’s patrols. She laid to rest as well my fears of spring flooding and six months of steady rain. The road had flooded once twenty years ago for a few days, and never since. It had been raised a foot at that time, and resurfaced since, so Clavering’s dire warnings were intended only to frighten us.

“He is extremely disagreeable, Priscilla. You don’t want to have a thing to do with him,” she added.

This surprised me, for the Claverings were a very old family of impeccable, indeed illustrious, lineage. And he was a duke; this should have appealed to her love of old and mighty blood, tinged with gold, too, to judge by his lands and home.

“He never has a soul to Belview,” she said next, which explained the acid remark. He had nothing to do with her, so to save face she said she had nothing to do with him.

“He has been here twice,” I pointed out, and watched her bridle.

“He only wants to get Seaview from you. He might have told
me
he wanted to buy it. I would not have been averse to selling it to him.”

“He has upped the price to thirty-five hundred,” I had the exquisite joy of telling her. She was desolate now that she had never approached him. I could see her writhe in chagrin.

“I’m sure it’s worth every penny of it. Naturally I made a very good price for my own niece.” The thing was done, and the only way now was to accept it with good grace and prate of generosity.

“What can he want with it?” she asked. “To pay thirty-five hundred pounds, and it is to revert to him, the
land,
I mean, in nineteen years. I think he must have run mad.”