Never Call It Love (4 page)

He
felt as if a metal band had tightened around his throat. There was no mistaking
her meaning. To him, she had been at most like a young sister, and he had
believed her feeling for him to be of the same order. Now, for the first time,
he realized what impossible longings had swelled her young heart, perhaps even
as she said, "It is kind of you, Patrick, to speak of me to fine people
like the Cobbins," and, "Yes, Patrick, I think Thomas Cobbin is a
very seemly young man."

Again
the swollen lips stirred. "I... did wrong. But I did not want to shame you
before the Cobbins by being late. That is why..."

The
whispering voice ceased. The blue eye turned vacant. He reached a hand to the
thin wrist. No beat of life against his fingertips. He put his hand down under
the sheet and rested it just below the small left breast. No sign of breathing
or of heartbeat.

The
doctor said stiffly, "Perhaps it would be better that I, a physician, ascertain..."

Not
answering, Patrick turned away from the cubicle
and stared at the floor. After a
moment the doctor said, "This young woman is dead." Patrick was aware
of the man's movements as he drew the sheet up over Anne's face.

"You
say, Sir Patrick, that she was your ward?"

"Yes."

"Then
you intend to make arrangements..."

"I
will pay for the coffin. Her aunt will accompany the body to Ireland for
burial."

He
himself would not be standing in the churchyard in her native village when
Anne's body was lowered into the ground. Now he had urgent business here. He
strode back through the wards. You won't go unavenged, Anne, he promised
silently. Someone will pay for your death.

In
the hospital courtyard he entered the waiting carriage. "Where is the
nearest place to hire a mount?"

"That
would be Gorman's, sir, just off the Strand."

"Take
me to my lodgings first." He would have to tell Maude Reardon the news.
"Then take me to Gorman's."

It
would mean riding half the night. But by morning he would know the first thing
he had to find out—whether or not young Montlow was still at Oxford.

The
small side parlor at the Hedges was warm and peaceful, its silence broken only
by small domestic sounds—the snapping of the fire in the grate, a faint rustle
as Elizabeth Montlow turned the pages of her book,
and now and
then, whenever the embroidery thread knotted, an annoyed exclamation from Mrs.
Montlow.

Now
and then Elizabeth glanced up from the page to enjoy the dim reflection of
firelight and candle flame in the long glass doors opposite. Beyond them she
could see, bathed in the blue light of early evening, the brick terrace with
its rose trellis. The espaliered rose vine was bare now, but no matter. Just as
she enjoyed the other seasons here in the country, she enjoyed the winter
months. In leafless winter you could see the basic shape of things, the low
rock walls hemming in brown fields, and the inverted-heart shape of beeches
against the sky, and the meandering branches of that rose vine out there.

Sighing,
Mrs. Montlow laid her embroidery hoop on the rosewood stand beside her wing
chair. She was a slender, pretty woman of forty-odd, with graying blond hair,
blue eyes, and almost doll-like features. "Three more weeks," she
said.

Even
if her mother's gaze had not gone to the portrait above the fireplace,
Elizabeth would have known what she meant. Three more weeks until Christopher
came home for the Christmas holidays.

Elizabeth
too looked up at the portrait. Christopher had been eleven when John Montlow,
as one of his last extravagant acts, had commissioned Sir Joshua Reynolds to
paint his son. In the portrait, Christopher, wearing a red velvet suit, stood
with one hand resting on the head of a half-grown mastiff. His other hand held
his plumed red hat. His seraphically handsome face, framed in pale
shoulder-length curls, looked at the viewer with a smile that would have melted
the stoniest heart, let alone the proudly fond ones of his mother and sister.

"I'm
afraid last Christmas was dull for him," Mrs. Montlow said. "This
year we must bid our neighbors to a party." She added discontentedly,
"Those few who are here, anyway."

Recognizing
one of her mother's almost daily complaints over the fact that they had not
gone into town for the season, Elizabeth said nothing.

"We'll
hang greenery in the large parlor, and hire a small orchestra."

"Not
an orchestra, Mother. Perhaps we could hire Mrs. Wells to play the spinet for
dancing." Mrs. Wells, an impoverished gentlewoman, lived in the nearby
village of Parnley, and supported herself by giving lessons in music and
drawing.

"There
you go, Elizabeth! I realize we must economize. But sometimes it seems to me
you are actually tight-fisted."

Elizabeth
kept silent. It was best, Dr. Farnsworth had warned her, to allow her mother these
occasional explosions of discontent. Opposition might bring on one of those
terrifying times when Mrs. Montlow, lips turning blue, gasped for breath.

"Things
were so different when your father was alive. We kept two carriages then, and
four horses. Every time I see the carriage house standing empty out there, I
feel like weeping."

Elizabeth
ventured mildly, "Father left debts. They had to be paid." It was
only after his death that they had learned it was borrowed money that had
supported his family's style of living. Even now a small indebtedness remained.
From quarterly interest earned by the twenty thousand pounds left in trust for
her, Elizabeth had gradually reduced that debt.

At
least her father had never borrowed against that twenty thousand pounds.
Sometimes Elizabeth wondered about that. Had he foreseen that someday his
daughter would be responsible for making sure that his widow lived in modest
comfort, and that his son received an education?

Perhaps,
too, that was why he had provided her with
more than the usual female education.
From her tenth year until her seventeenth, when her father had died, private
tutors had taught her history and mathematics.

Mrs.
Montlow sighed. "Yes, the debts. I've never understood how that happened.
But then, I'm not clever like you."

If
she was "clever," Elizabeth thought somewhat grimly, perhaps it was
because she'd had to be.

With
one of lightninglike changes of mood, Mrs. Montlow said, "And, Liza, I'm
grateful that you're clever. What would Christopher and I do if you were not?
And I do understand about not going into town this winter. Christopher's
college expenses come first. Who would have dreamed they would be so
high?"

They
were high indeed. By almost every other post, he requested money. Always the
reason he gave seemed legitimate. A spark from the grate in his room had set a
small fire, which, before it was extinguished, had destroyed not only expensive
books but also his best greatcoat, left drying before the hearth. Someone—he
suspected a charwoman—had stolen his last allowance. His good friend, Lord
Stanley's son Geoffrey, leader of the "smartest set" in Christopher's
college, had suggested that each of his friends contribute a pound toward a
party at an inn in Oxford village. He was sorry to ask for money so soon again,
but he knew that darling Mama and dearest Liza appreciated how much the
friendship of people like Lord Stanley's son might mean to his future....

Mrs.
Montlow never doubted her son's letter. Elizabeth sometimes did. True, she
adored the brother, almost six years younger than she. From his infancy onward,
no one in the household had been able to resist his beauty, his winsome smile,
his way of clambering on laps to demand kisses. But there were other things she
could remember, like that kitten, when Christopher was eight....

It
had been a shock to fourteen-year-old Elizabeth to come into her small
brother's empty room and see the golden kitten dangling from a table by a
length of cord. She had removed the looped end of the cord from around a paperweight
and taken the kitten's still-warm body onto her lap. She had just finished
untying the other end of the cord from around the tiny animal's neck when she
looked up, to see Christopher standing in the doorway.

He
had rushed toward her, tears welling in the great blue eyes, and asked what had
happened to Marigold. When told his kitten was dead, he buried his face on
Elizabeth's lap, his pale curls mingling with his pet's golden fur, and sobbed
out that he'd been trying to teach Marigold to walk on a leash. After he left
the room, the kitten must have gotten up on the table and then jumped off, with
the loop in the cord catching around that paperweight.

He
had raised his tear-wet face. "You won't tell Father or Mama, will you,
Liza? I don't want them to know what a bad, careless boy I was. Promise me,
darling Liza. We'll just say we don't know how Marigold died."

She
had promised.

Now
she brushed the thought of the kitten aside. There was no point in dwelling
upon that, or on the other things, such as the print of an engraving she had
found, crumpled up on the floor of his clothespress after his last visit home.
It had been a print of a naked woman cowering on a floor with a man standing
over her, cat-o'-nine-tails in hand. As she crumpled the print and carried it
downstairs to toss it on the side-parlor fire, Elizabeth had tried to tell
herself that perhaps many young men passed such pictures around among
themselves.

Mrs.
Montlow was again complaining of their lost season in town. "It is just
that the country in winter is so dull for me."

Elizabeth
realized that. Her mother did not ride, took
little pleasure in reading, and
regarded with puzzled dismay her daughter's habit of taking walks over the
muddy countryside in all but the worst weather. Little wonder that she wished
herself in London, whirling from "morning coffees" to afternoon whist
parties to evening balls, where, even though her weak heart no longer permitted
her to dance, she could enjoy the music and the sight of richly dressed people
moving gracefully beneath blazing crystal chandeliers.

Elizabeth
did not miss at all the morning coffees, exclusively feminine gatherings where
the talk was of clothes, approaching marriages, and rumored adulteries of those
not present. Because she often won, she found the whist parties less
unpalatable. But she disliked seeing the feverish look on the face of some
player trying to recoup a heavy loss. And sometimes there were repellent
episodes, such as that of one afternoon last season, when she had suddenly realized
that a dowager duchess at her table had been cheating. Elizabeth had said
nothing. The duchess was almost three times her age, as well as the party's
hostess. But apparently the duchess had seen knowledge of her cheating in those
clear gray eyes, because, to Elizabeth's relief, she received no more
invitations to whist parties at that particular house.

Elizabeth
did enjoy the balls, though, because she loved dancing. No matter that she
found most of her partners, from callow youths to grandfathers, laughably
artificial with their languid airs, their drawled compliments, their often
rouged faces. There was still the joy of moving through the figures of the
dance.

Once
in a while at those London balls she had met a man that attracted her. Notably,
there had been that tall, dark-haired man, Sir Patrick Stanford, whom she had
met at Lord and Lady Armitage's house last season. He had not been handsome in
the conventional sense. His dark face, with its high cheekbones, strong nose,
and square
jaw, had been too rugged for that. Nor had their brief conversation over
glasses of punch been anything of consequence. He had commented on her
complexion, if she remembered rightly. But she had liked the way he had moved,
not with the languid saunter now fashionable in London, but with an
outdoorsman's easy grace. She had liked his coat and breeches of dark green
velvet—rich enough, but less flamboyant than the pink and blue and silver
brocades worn by the other men. And she had liked an impression she had somehow
gained, a sense of some sort of depth and seriousness in him.

There
had been something else, too. As they chatted, his dark gaze had traveled from
her face to the curve of her breasts, revealed by her square-necked ball gown.
She was used to such glances. A woman who followed the current mode in dress of
course expected that men would look at her almost bare bosom. But she was not
used to the odd thrill his gaze sent along her nerves.

Even
though she had already given her affections elsewhere, she had hoped for almost
three days that he would call at their Kingman Street house. Then, over a whist
table, she learned something she had not known before. He was an Irish baronet,
with lands on the southeast coast near Cork. After that, convinced she had been
wrong in her impression of him, she no longer wanted him to call. She had heard
how the titled Anglo-Irish obtained the money with which they tried to outdo
their English counterparts each London season, buying rich clothes and throwing
away vast sums at the gaming tables. More avaricious than English landlords,
they kept subdividing their lands into smaller and smaller strips, so as to
obtain rents from more and more tenants. Left with little land to cultivate,
the average Irish peasant and his family lived off the potatoes he grew. All
other crops had to be sold to meet the rent.