Love's a Stage (4 page)

“But what was the second?”

“I beg your pardon?” he said, sending his sweet smiling glance to her.

“The second reason you followed me.”

He looked, if not precisely surprised, then a little curious; he studied her face as if to revise a prior impression. His eyes were bright and kind as he said:

“Miss Atherton, surely you must know.”

The wind’s mischievous fingers had loosened her bonnet strings. She retied them rapidly as she walked.

“Well, I don’t. And as we’ve been walking along, it occurs to me to wonder why you would want to spend your time helping strangers around the streets, because I can see now, even if I did not at first, that you are quite a brilliant man.”

It was his turn to be amused. “
Thank
you, Miss Atherton. You honor me too much. Do you know, though, that if you continue in that vein, I will find myself revising my previous estimate on the size of your hamlet downward. Hasn’t anyone ever tried to seduce you?”

Seduce. She knew the word, of course, but it had previously played so minute a part in her vocabulary that she was forced to think a moment to recall its meaning. She gasped when she remembered and said simply:

“No.”

“That’s quite an oversight on somebody’s part.” A crowded street corner was not the setting a man of his vast experience would have chosen to make a declaration of desire, nor was a bald statement of fact as likely to produce a successful result as were patience and attentive intimacy. To have ignored her direct appeal for an explanation, though, would have amounted to a deception alien to his nature.

A grin touched his lips as he noted they had arrived almost at the ornamental porch that marked the entrance to Miss Isles’ apartments—at least, when she demanded the return of her case, she would have only a short space to carry it. “Miss Atherton,” he said gently, “I would like to be more than friends with you.”

Frances’ young life had been devoted to Duty and Service. She was Assistant Mother to eight younger siblings, confidante and soul mate to her Papa and aide-de-camp to her unworldly, domestically inclined Mama. Excepting her brothers, the only young men Frances knew were the fishermen’s sons from her village, any one of whom would have been too shy to woo the Parson’s lovely, intelligent daughter. There had been no proposals, proper or improper, in Miss Atherton’s life; and while she might daydream in modesty of the former, it had never crossed her mind that she might ever be in a position to receive the latter. So unexpected was the declaration that Miss Atherton was not completely sure of his intention until he said helpfully:

“Yes, Miss Atherton, I meant precisely what you think I meant.”

To say that Frances was shocked would have been greatly to understate the case; in fact, she was astonished. She had never been encouraged to think of herself as pretty. As a result, she did not, and it came as a surprise to her that she could somehow have inspired those sentiments in any gentleman, particularly one who, it was quite obvious, could hardly have suffered from a lack of feminine companionship. Her incredulous surprise, however, was soon trampled by a flaming wrath.

“I suppose you think,” she said dangerously, “that because I
allowed
you to talk to me on the street you can insult me!”

Capped in her shabby brown bonnet and cloaked in her puritanical morality, she had for him the quaint charm of a delightfully apt cliché. They had reached Miss Isles’ building, so he set her case on the low porch before the door and took Miss Atherton’s flushed cheeks leisurely between his palms, forcing her to look into his sparkling green eyes.

“Never, Prudence,” he said, with what Frances regarded as an odious tranquility, “is it an insult to tell a woman that you find her so attractive that you would like to . . .”

Miss Atherton stopped his words by clapping her mittened hands over her ears in a gesture rendered unfortunately inefficient by the oversized contours of her bonnet. She removed her face from his hold with so forceful a back-step that if it were not for his steadying hands on her shoulders she would surely have fallen.

“It is always,
al-ways,
” she said furiously, “an insult unless preceded by a marriage vow.”

Releasing her shoulders, he walked to the heavy oak door and held it open for her. Miss Atherton marched past and found they had entered a narrow hall lined with marble wallpaper in yellows and browns. An interior door lay to the right of the entrance, and a wooden open-newel stair lit by a single lamp led to an upper landing. He lifted her case inside the threshold and shut the outer door behind them.

There was both rueful self-knowledge and compassion in his smile as he said, “That’s one game I don’t play, Prudence. I doubt if I’ll ever be able to make that type of commitment to a woman. Honestly, sweetheart, there’s very little chance I’d marry you.”

Miss Atherton came to a full rolling boil. “Well, there is
NO
chance that I would marry you!” She stormed to the door like a tidal wave and pounded against it with her fist.

Diverted, he watched her for a moment, then said, “Miss Isles lives upstairs, Prudence.”

Frances stopped her assault on the door and saw with painful embarrassment that it was opening. A tall man wearing a red silk dressing gown stepped into the hallway. The man was in his early twenties; and while his looks were not the show-stopping extreme of the man with the golden hair, they had caused flutters in the heart of many a young lady. His hair was brown and curled in the classical manner; his blue eyes were intense and alive. He studied Frances curiously before the blue eyes lit up in a smile.

“Come in!” he said enthusiastically, making an expansive gesture of welcome.

Miss Atherton suddenly remembered that this person was a “young relative” of her detested escort. She turned in one space, snatched her case, and began to bump it, one step at a time, to the second floor. The man looked puzzled and ventured:

“Did I say something wrong?” It dawned on him that there was a third party present. “David! Hello!” He indicated Miss Atherton, who was halfway on the climb to her aunt’s door, the suitcase rhythmically hitting each step as she went. “A friend of yours?”

The noise of her suitcase obscured the words of Landry’s reply.

“Oughtn’t we to be carrying her case for her?”

“I wouldn’t try if I were you,” was Landry’s amused rejoinder. “You’re likely to get it back in your face.”

Chapter Two

Miss Atherton was admitted to the apartments of her great-aunt Miss Sophia Isles by a hefty and rather deaf maid in a lacy bibless apron. After several loud repetitions Frances succeeded in making known her name and her wish to see Miss Isles and was shown promptly to a parlor hung in pastel-blue damask. It was a small room, rendered smaller by a large, hot fire in the carved marble hearth and by a hotchpotch of surplus furnishings. Silver cloth–upholstered settees, piecrust tea tables, and tripod stands bearing porcelain fruit dishes littered the cramped space in such abundance that Frances was forced to thread her way gingerly to a seat. She had nearly a half hour to recover from the hateful conduct of the dissipated Mr. David before Great-Aunt Sophie appeared at the parlor door.

“The only thing worse than arriving during dinner,” Aunt Sophie remarked as she entered, “is arriving while one is dressing for dinner. Which one of the Atherton brood are you?”

“The eldest girl, ma’am. Frances.” Frances had beheld her great aunt on only one previous occasion, nine years earlier, but her memory of that time was vivid, and she could see that her aunt was little changed. Miss Atherton was too well reared to offend the dignity of a fellow being even in her thoughts by applying so demeaning an adjective as “fat,” but she couldn’t suppress a recollection of her graceless brother Jim saying Aunt Sophie was as big as a haystack and had more chins than a Greek chorus. The lady thus alluded to was clad this evening in a bright-jonquil dinner gown, and sailed across the furniture-packed room with the smooth, flowing motion of a flower-bedecked man-of-war entering a harbor filled with fishing boats. Contrary to every expectation of age and fashion, her hair was worn long and straight, and the flowing brown locks, white at the temples, were accented by the addition of a single daffodil tucked behind one ear.

Frances continued, “’Tis very nice to see you again, and looking so well! I apologize for the inconvenience, but there wasn’t time to let you know that I was coming. Last night I decided that this was the right thing to do, and early this morning I boarded the public stage!”

“What you want, then, Miss Frances, is tea. You’re white as a mainsail.” Sophia reached behind her and took in hand a speaking funnel and clearly enunciated the single word:

“TEA!”

The maid was entering the room carrying a painstakingly arranged dish of peaches. She looked at her mistress, puzzled.

“I thought I gave you the key,” she said.

Aunt Sophia shook her head, pointed at Frances, and said with careful articulation, “She’ll have some tea,” and took a pantomime sip from a cup. The maid replied with a sapient look and hurried from the room. Aunt Sophia nodded with satisfaction.

“That’s Henrietta,” she confided, gesturing toward the disappearing maid. “She’s a gem.” The settee groaned as Sophia sat next to Frances. “Here you are with your dressing case. Run away from home?”

“It’s nothing like that, Aunt. I’ve come to help Papa.”

“Help him?” replied Sophia. “You mean someone’s finally going to persuade him to take the university chancellorship that your uncle, Bishop Ambarrow, has been trying to convince him to accept these twenty-one years?”

“Papa would never willingly leave Beachy Hill! His work is there, among his people. Only . . . Aunt, can it be Uncle Ambarrow hasn’t told you what’s happened?”

“I never go next or nigh the Bishop unless I’m tricked into it. Haven’t seen him in a year.”

“Then you can’t know,” Frances said, her hazel eyes serious. “Papa is in the King’s Prison at Bristol!”

“Your father, the saint? Short of boring someone to death with a sermon, I can’t imagine what he could have done!”

“It was a plot, Aunt, a wicked, wicked plot! You know about the smuggling along the coast? Men came from outside the village to Beachy Hill, bribing the villagers to use their fishing boats to carry smuggled goods. It was dreadful—good, honest fishermen we’d known all our lives—filled with greed, corrupted! Papa began speaking against it from the pulpit and organizing the villagers to stand firm against the bribery. I think he might have won, too, only the smugglers’ leader, whom they call ‘the Blue Specter,’ organized a false charge against Papa.”

Sophia had been searching for a likely grape in the dish held up by a bone china shepherd at her elbow. She found one, and said, while taking a bite:

“What’d they do?”

“They hid a hogshead of smuggled brandy in the pulpit.”

Aunt Sophia chortled, nearly choking on the grape.

“We,” said Frances stiffly, “could not find it humorous. It caused the Preventives to arrest Papa.”

“Don’t bristle at me, child. It’s no tragedy. No one could possibly believe such a thing of your father! My advice to you is to go to your Uncle Ambarrow. He’ll see to it that your papa is released.”

“We’ve written to Uncle Ambarrow . . . oh, thank you.” The maid came bearing tea—and also an enormous platter of sweetcakes, cheese, honey biscuits, and cold meats. Frances stared at the mountain of food. “Aunt, are you expecting company?”

“Dining out. Eat your tea, dear, you’re thin as a rail. I never did understand how Richard managed to feed nine children and half the lazy wastrels in the community on the miserable portion he gets from the Church. You were saying about your uncle?”

Frances, selecting a piece of white cheese from the bewildering assortment, continued.

“We wrote to Uncle Ambarrow immediately, and he says he will help, but appeals take time, and we must have patience. But I don’t have patience!” Frances leaned forward earnestly. “It would be intolerable to sit idly by while Papa is in prison, especially now that we have learned the identity of the Blue Specter.”

Sophia was concentrating on delivering the correct measure of tea leaves to the pot of steaming water so her only response to this dramatic announcement was a placid “Oh?”

“Yes! Thursday last, Joe and I . . .”

“Joe?” Aunt Sophia stretched a needlepoint tea cozy around the pot.

“My brother, the one who is sixteen.”

“Doesn’t he go to school?” interposed Sophia.

“Yes, Aunt, he goes to Eton,” answered Frances, as patiently as she was able. “But he’s home, of course, because of Papa. Anyway, Joe managed to discover that there was to be a smuggling run last Thursday night, at the dark of the moon, which is what the smugglers prefer! There’s only one good place to land when the tide is in, so Joe and I hid there and watched the men unloading their illegal cargo.”

“My, how resourceful of you little dears,” said Sophia impassively.

“When one has lived on the coast all one’s life . . .”

“Quite, quite. Go on with your story. Did you see the Blue Rascal?”

“The Blue Specter, Aunt. Yes, we did! He appeared from behind a gorse bush as quietly as his name, wearing a dark mask. He talked with the fishermen for a while, perhaps giving them orders. Then they left and he melted into the night, but this time Joe and I were following him! Not so close, mind you, that he would hear us. Not knowing the area so well, he carried a shuttered lantern. We stayed in sight of its glow . . .”

Sophia placed another plump grape carefully in her mouth. “I think I saw this once in a play.”

Frances had the grace to smile. “One cannot arrange to remove
every
trace of melodrama from one’s life, Aunt Sophie! You mustn’t think I’m a hoyden; in times of crisis, one is called to extreme measures!”

“So it would seem. What then?”

“At the hill’s crest was the Blue Specter’s horse, tethered to a ragged pine! Before the man could mount, he dropped something into the tall weeds and had to unmask and open the lantern cover, the better to find whatever it was. We could see his face clearly through Joe’s spyglass!”