Mistress of My Fate (24 page)

In my mind I heard each note struck perfectly. When I shut my
eyes, I could see her dainty wrists above the keys. I watched her head tilt and bob as she tapped out a melody. I could hear her sweet lark’s voice trill the words to “Think Not, My Love” and “The Bells of Aberdovey.” The memory of Lady Catherine stood over me, as I once stood over her, turning the pages of music.

Allenham could not have foreseen the consequences of this purchase. He could not have known that, along with the harmonious chords, disquieting memories would also rise from the fortepiano. With each passing day they grew louder and more disturbing. Happy remembrances of her cheerful countenance began to twist into pictures of her lifeless face, and from there darken into the images of my nightmare and the dissonant words of her curses. Soon, even the keys felt too cold to touch. They called to mind the iciness of her dead lips, a sensation my fingers will never forget.

After a week, I could no longer sit at it. It stared at me wherever I stood. It glared at me when I entered the room. With its polished surface, it shone like a coffin in our drawing room. A part of me, that dark place within the human mind that conjures demons, began to wonder if she had not orchestrated the arrival of this gift in some manner. “No, no,” I scolded myself. I would not succumb to such irrational imaginings. My head and heart to-ed and fro-ed, one declaiming reason, the other taunting me with the biting words of her malediction.

At last, unable to bear the sight of the instrument any longer, I asked Bess that it be covered. When at last, on a January evening blown with snow, Allenham asked me if I should like to play, I looked down at my lap in silence.

“I do not play well,” said I, rather limply.

“I believe you play very well,” he encouraged me, “and how will you improve if you do not apply yourself?”

I sighed. “I am afraid I have never been musical. Lady Catherine was far more accomplished.”

In all the months I had been there, neither of us had ventured to
speak one word of the past, fearing it would taint the present, but after the torment of my nightmare and the unsettling appearance of Allenham’s gift, I could hold my tongue no longer. This is not to say that, until this time, neither of us grieved. Oh, what a falsehood I should tell if I did not confess to the burden of remorse we carried. It was cumbersome, to be sure, but to expect us, as young as we were, to live out our days in a state of perpetual mourning was most unreasonable.

“Is it because of her that you do not wish to play?” he asked after a pause.

I nodded. “It reminds me.”

In truth, the sight of the fortepiano called to mind a number of things I had pushed away, not simply the disturbing images of my nightmare. Many shadows had followed me to Herberton, questions I had been too frightened to consider or to mention. Now, by speaking my sister’s name aloud, I had invoked these other fears too.

“George,” I whispered, “is it wrong that we should love one another?”

“No. The love of a man and a woman is never wrong,” he responded in a clear, certain tone.

“No matter what the circumstances may be?”

He looked at me, as if to question why I doubted it.

“Would my father think it wrong?” I asked. My hands had begun to tremble and I gripped them together tightly.

“Lord Stavourley knew only of our friendship, and that he believes to have ended. I wrote to tell him as much when you arrived here.”

It pained me to hear him say that. My heart contracted, and the sharp deception it contained cut into its walls.

Slowly, I shook my head. My mouth held bitter words.

“No,” I breathed. The tears started down my cheeks. “He has seen your letters.”

My beloved turned to me slowly, but as he opened his mouth to speak, we were disturbed by a rap upon the door. His valet entered, short of breath.

“My lord, your attendance at the house is required. A messenger awaits.”

Allenham rose carefully to his feet. His face appeared quite void of expression. He idled for a moment behind his chair, his hands resting at the top of it. His sight was directed towards the window where large feathers of snow floated in the darkness.

“And what has become of them, these letters?”

“My father burned them,” I wept.

He inhaled, somewhat relieved at that news, though his face remained troubled.

“I dare not think…” he began, and then shifted uneasily. He removed his clear, bright eyes from the distant place where they rested and settled them upon me. “We shall never be free from worry, Henrietta, or the fear of consequences.”

He said no more than that, but moved towards the door where his valet stood.

I heard it shut and watched him, with his hat pulled over his eyes, pass before the window and disappear into a swirl of snow and night.

Chapter 18

Allenham did not return to me that night. I went to my bed and awaited him. I let the candle burn down to its nub before extinguishing it and then rolled over in the darkness and wetted my pillow with self-pity.

I awoke in the morning to find no sign of him. I enquired of his movements from Bess as she dressed me, but she claimed to know nothing more of them than I. I sighed. He had never before been so long at Herberton.

I passed the morning as I might if he were there alongside me. I sat at my artist’s table with my back to the fortepiano, that spiteful, uninvited guest whose presence I now abhorred, and worked upon a still-life painting of winter berries. Beyond the window lay a perfect, untrammelled bed of snow, the sky still rolling with angry grey clouds. There were no telltale footprints, no sign of hoof marks outside the cottage.

By the time the servants had lit the candles, an hour before dinner, I had begun to fret. I put my paints away and took a book beside the fire. I could not even recall which story it was that I read, for none of the words penetrated my heavy thoughts. I listened to the snap of wet wood in the flames, hoping those sounds would soon be the accompaniment to the squeal of moving door hinges, but this did not come to pass.

I ate, my knife and fork scratching against the porcelain in the silence. I looked to the window where the snow had resumed its downward progress. An entire day had passed since my love had set out for Herberton. Surely whatever business this was could not occupy him for so long, I thought. I called to Bess and asked again if she had heard
any news of Lord Allenham. “None,” she replied, for she had spent the entire day with me.

I stood at the window for most of the night, until my eyes wished to close. “I am certain I shall find his lordship here in the morning,” I cheerfully announced to Bess as she helped me into my nightdress and cap.

“Yes,” she agreed in that way that servants have when they mean to please.

But I went to my bed in another mind, full of dark thoughts, growing ever more anxious that my revelation was the cause of his absence. I twisted amid the sheets and then began once more to weep.

On the second morning, I found myself truly distressed. Indeed I felt so ill with worry that I could eat nothing. Bess brought me a hot dish of chocolate to sip, but it smelled, to me, burnt and rancid.

“I shall send a note to the house,” I stated. My maid removed the chocolate and brought instead some writing paper, pen and ink.

“Pray, my lord, I do not wish to trouble you,” I wrote, deciding it was best to write in a formal manner, now vastly cautious of betraying myself upon paper, knowing what misfortune might come of it, “but the household desires to know when we might expect your return.” I signed it “H. Lightfoot.”

I sealed it and passed it to Bess, ordering it to be brought up to Herberton immediately.

My maid set out through the frost-painted orchard in her cape and returned the following hour.

“Did you see him?” I queried anxiously.

“No, madam. The housekeeper took it from me.”

“And what did she say?”

“She examined it, madam, and placed it in her pocket.”

“You directed her to bring it him, did you not?”

“Of course, madam.”

I stalked my sitting room like a cat, moving from one corner to the next, hoping there would come an answer, listening for the sound of shoes in snow. I waited hours; two, three, four, perhaps more. The sun began its downward slant, but no word came.

Another meal was prepared and served. This I devoured, for my nerves had raised my hunger. When I finished, I called for Bess.

“Something is not right,” I said to her, my voice quavering. “You will take another message to Herberton. I insist that you place it directly in his lordship’s hand.”

I drew out another sheet of paper and penned the same words I had committed to ink earlier, and then sent Bess abroad with a lantern.

She returned to me, and when she took down her hood I saw the apprehension in her features.

“Oh madam,” she said, wide-eyed, “I did as you requested. I asked to see his lordship but Mrs. Shirley would not permit it.”

“How so? Why would she not permit it?”

“I do so beg your pardon, madam, but she forbade it and took the letter from me. She said there was no need for urgency and it was not my place to demand an audience with him and whatever message I bore would be brought to him by herself, madam,” Bess rattled.

“But what reason did she give?” I demanded.

“None but that. I do so beg madam’s pardon.”

I failed to sleep that night. I could not lie still. My mind tumbled with questions. Had I driven him away? Had some accident befallen him? My dear Allenham would not have left me here with no word from him to explain his absence. He would sense my distress and wish to assuage it. No, no, I told myself, I felt it in my heart, this was not right.

I sat at the edge of my bed and listened to the nothingness of night.

He had received a vow from me that I should never venture to Herberton when I knew him to be there. I had given him my word; I had made a promise. I recalled the sight of his hardened features when he begged me; he feared I should put us both in danger. I gripped my head as it howled with frustration. “No, he has not deceived me, it would not be possible,” I calmed myself. “His love is true.” The only deceit had come from me. “Oh!” I cried out miserably. “I have wrought this!”

Having convinced myself of my wrongdoing, I determined to rectify
it, though I might incur his further displeasure by doing so. I had given my promise and now I must break it. (Where the logic was in this, dear friends, I am sure you cannot fathom, but to a lovelorn girl of seventeen in the middle of a restless night, it had all the reason of Aristotle in it.) I resolved that if his lordship did not appear by morning, I should set out after him.

Sure enough, another morning broke with no further sign of my beloved. I called for Bess, in fact, I shouted for her, which is something I had never before done. In my echoing tones, I heard the shrill cry of my sister; her angered voice rang from my lungs. I clapped my hand to my breast, startled at the force within me.

Bess had brought breakfast, which I turned away. I could not stomach it.

“I am going up the hill, to Herberton,” I panted. My heart was racing. “Dress me. Quickly.”

I do not know what time of the morning it was when I set off through the frozen rows of sleeping apple trees. The sun sat low and thin on the hazy horizon. I struggled through the snow, my breath coming hard and vaporous in the cold, but even this could not slow my steady climb. I recalled that it was not many months earlier that I had mounted this hill. I thought about from whence I had run and the terror of that flight. Herberton had taken me in and it felt as much to me a home as ever did Melmouth. But, reader, I had grown too comfortable. I had forgotten that I was but a guest, and there upon his lordship’s sufferance. While I had become accustomed to ordering my own household at Orchard Cottage, I held no sway at Herberton.

I fairly ran the final lengths to the house, so eager was I to see Allenham and bring to an end this disagreeable episode. I thought I might mount the steps to the entrance, but fearing I should make myself conspicuous to any visitors, thought better of it and went round to the side and through the rustic. It was to this same place that I had come in October and it felt as if I might relive that familiar scene once more.
However, on this occasion, I strode through the doors with as much command as his lordship himself. Rather than cowering at the prospect of my encounter with the chatelaine, fear had emboldened me. I asked to speak with Mrs. Shirley directly.

She approached me from down the corridor, as she had on the day of my arrival, but when she recognized my face, I noticed her demeanour sharpen.

“What may I do for you, miss?” she enquired in a voice that matched my imperious manner.

“I must see his lordship,” I responded firmly.

“I am afraid that is not possible,” said she, “for his lordship has gone to London.”

I stared at her blankly. This, I had not expected. My face, along with all my strength, began to tremble.

“When… when did he depart?” I asked.

“Three days prior.”

“Three days,” I echoed.

“I am afraid so, miss. You are too late for him.”

“But… when shall he return?”

“This I do not know. A dispatch came. He left in the dead of night.”

I did not know what to make of this.

“Has he left no instruction for me, no letter?”

“No, miss, he left none.”

“Oh,” I breathed. I felt suddenly as if I were a child, as if I were alone, and very much all at sea. “What… shall I do?”

Why I asked that dragon of woman this, I cannot say; surprise and my own weakness led me to it.

“I do not know, miss. It is no business of mine to say.”

She folded her arms and regarded me with impatience. At that time, I was still too ignorant of the world to recognize that Mrs. Shirley had the measure of me. She knew precisely who I was and what I had become. I was so young, so fresh, and his lordship so powerfully
handsome, as to leave her in no doubt. Her shrewd eyes had observed me come to the house in that hurried, flustered way before. Although I had not seen her since that first day, she would have understood well enough what had transpired in his lordship’s apartments. She also would have known that I now lived as Allenham’s mistress in Orchard Cottage. Indeed, she would have had knowledge of all this long before I made my reappearance, sporting fur and a swagger.