Surrender to Sin (12 page)

Cary’s question had not been academic. “How was it? Vespertilian?”

“Vesper…what?” she stuttered.

“Vespertilian,” he said, cupping her chin with his hand to keep her from hiding her eyes from him. “From the Latin
vespertilio
, meaning bat. Was it at all bat-like?”

“No, sir,” she said, staring at him.

“That’s a relief anyway,” he said, releasing her. “Too much tongue? No, don’t answer that. Just tell me you’re quite sure this time that you
have
been kissed.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Excellent. We seem to be making progress.”

“You promised you wouldn’t do that again,” she pointed out, rather belatedly.

“On condition that you went skating with me,” he replied. “If you go skating with me, the promise will go into effect. If not, well, this is what you have to look forward to.”

“That’s blackmail,” she objected. “Either I go skating, which I hate, or you will attack me again, which I also hate,” she added emphatically.

“Attack you! I’ll have you know, that was some of my best stuff,” he said, annoyed.

Polly suddenly opened the door at the foot of the stairs. She looked at them in surprise, and Abigail turned red. “Hullo, Polly,” said Cary, sounding quite normal. “All serene?”

Polly dropped a curtsey and said the old lady was knitting.

“Excellent,” said Cary. “Look in on her from time to time, will you? There’s a good girl. Miss Abigail and I are going skating at the Rose.”

“Look here,” Abigail said angrily. “I don’t skate, and someone must look after Paggles.”

Cary gritted his teeth; it was like trying to persuade a skittish horse to swallow a medicine ball. “I will teach you,” he said cheerfully. “And Polly will look after Paggles.”

“She could fall down the stairs.”

“Polly’s not going to fall down the stairs,” he assured her, and Polly giggled. “And neither is Paggles. Now go and get your cloak, or I shall go straight upstairs and tell Paggles you’re refusing to go. She’ll be very annoyed with Annie-Fanny for hurting Dickie-bird’s feelings in this callous manner. I should hate for Paggles to be upset again. Well?”

Abigail found it impossible to argue in front of the very interested Polly, a weakness he fully exploited. “I will go with you, sir,” she said, “though it gives me no pleasure.”

“Excellent. Who could ask for more?”

“Nor will it give
you
any pleasure,” she warned, “for I really cannot skate.”

“You really cannot skate,” Cary told Abigail two hours later when he was helping her off the ice and back up the bank to the Tudor Rose’s back terrace. The curate, Mr. Temple, jumped up at their approach and offered Abigail his seat. “You’re hopeless,” Cary said bluntly. “I must get you off my ice before you break it.”

“I think your ice has broken
me
,” she complained, gratefully accepting the curate’s chair.

“I don’t mind your falling down ten times a minute, Cousin Abigail,” he said as she panted for breath, “but I strongly object to your pulling me down with you.”

“Serves you right,” she retorted, rubbing her sore ankles through her thick woollen socks. “I wanted to come in twenty minutes ago. Indeed, Mr. Temple, I didn’t want to go on the ice at all, but he badgered me and bullied me until I gave in, the more fool I. He even used my old nurse against me. Was that not unkind of him?”

Mr. Temple scarcely knew how to answer; it was impolite to contradict a lady, but impolitic to cross a gentleman who might one day grant him a good living.

“What is infinitely worse, you’ve given the Misses Mickleby some fatal ideas,” Cary complained. “They are all falling down now in the hopes I will come and pick them up.”

“They are certainly falling down, but it does not follow they are depending on you, sir. They have Mr. Maddox and their brother,” she added, bending down to unlace her skates.

“Let me help you.” Cary was at her feet, pulling off her skates. “We are cousins, so no one can say I’m taking liberties.” Mr. Temple smiled complacently, and, once again, Abigail’s natural diffidence worked to Cary’s advantage; she was too embarrassed to speak. Nor could she create a scene by pushing him away. Instead, she concentrated on the blue-and black-coated figures gliding along the frozen river as he busied himself at her feet.

The three plump, rosy-cheeked Mickleby girls so closely resembled one another that Abigail could not tell them apart, though she knew they were called Rhoda, Ida, and Lydia. Rhoda was the eldest. Hector Mickleby was their brother, and Mr. Maddox was his friend from Magdalen College. Both boys were nineteen and neither could hold a candle to Cary Wayborn.

“Feet hurt?” Cary inquired solicitously. Without waiting for a reply, he began rubbing the balls of her feet through her ugly black woollen socks.

Abigail closed her eyes in acute embarrassment, her face scarlet. “Stop it,” she whispered through her teeth. “What will Mr. Temple think?”

“What are you implying? He’ll think your feet hurt.”

Happily, the curate’s attention was engaged elsewhere. “There goes Miss Rhoda,” he said gaily, as a female Mickleby sat down hard on the ice, carrying Mr. Maddox with her. The other two sisters fell in a heap at their brother’s feet, their skating blades flashing in the sun. Hector did not enjoy handling his giggling sisters half as much as Mr. Maddox did; he skated away with his arms behind his back.

“Oh, Mr. Wayborn, do come and help us!” cried the two abandoned girls in chorus.

“Do, please, sir,” urged Hector, skating near to the bank.

“I cannot leave my cousin unattended,” Cary told him, holding Abigail’s boot for her.

“I will look after Miss Smith.” Mr. Temple and Mr. Mickleby spoke at once.

Abigail felt her usual panic at the prospect of being left among strangers.

“Can you not spare me, Cousin?” Cary teased her. “You seem alarmed. Now, don’t scowl at me,” he instructed. “Rather, say, ‘I can spare you passionately, sir, and just as long as you please.’
That
would be putting me in my place. She’s a queer, quiet little thing,” he told Hector and the curate. “You’ll have to compose her side of the conversation, as well as your own. She will not match wits with anyone.”

Though he doubted that skating with Miss Ida and Miss Lydia would give him any pleasure, Cary had no qualms about leaving her with the two gentlemen. She’d be perfectly safe, and after an hour spent in such tepid company, she’d be more appreciative of himself.

Hector grinned at Abigail. “You needn’t fear matching wits with me, Miss Smith! Nobody thinks I have any.”

“The landlady here is famous for her clangers, if you’re hungry,” Mr. Temple said, giving the younger man a look of disapproval. “It’s a local dish, a large pastry stuffed on one side with a meat filling and on the other with fruit.”

“Hard as a door-knocker, too,” added Hector.

Absurdly grateful to them for trying to make her feel at ease, when all Cary did was tease her, Abigail agreed to the simple meal. “And a half-and-half to wash it down, I think.”

“Miss?”

She looked up to find the waiter staring at her. “Half mild and half bitter,” she explained.

“You heard her,” said Hector, snickering. “I’ll have a pint of ale as well. Mr. Temple?”

The curate hesitated. He’d never been the sort to drink ale. He certainly had never drunk ale with a lady. Still, he had no wish to offend Mr. Wayborn’s cousin…

“He’s thinking about it,” Hector observed derisively. “A curate can’t be too careful.”

“Yes, all right. Pints all around!” said Mr. Temple, growing red in the face.

The landlord came out to them in person. Scowling, he set a pewter cup on the table.

“That’s the littlest pint I’ve ever seen,” Hector objected.

“It’s a
lady’s
pint, Master Hector,” said Mr. Sprigge banging down their clangers and ale.

“What do you suppose they’re talking about?” Lydia Mickleby asked Cary, holding his arm tightly. At seventeen, she had little conversation herself, and tended to fill any awkward silence by speculating about other people’s conversations.

Cary glanced at the happy little group on the terrace and frowned. Evidently, the two younger men found Abigail as appealing as he did. “They seem so interested that I can only suppose they are talking about
us
, Miss Lydia,” he said lightly. “Shall we eavesdrop?”

With a Mickleby on each arm, he skated closer to the bank, where frosty reeds sheltered them from the conversationalists. “It’s ice cold,” Mr. Temple was complaining.

“I think it’s quite good cold.” Cary recognized Abigail’s voice.

“My teeth are chattering,” Hector complained. “I’m changing to hot cider. Waiter!”

“If only I could invent a way to serve it cold on a hot summer’s day,” sighed Abigail. “I swear I could earn a million pounds.”

“A million pounds,” Hector scoffed.

“Yes, indeed, Mr. Mickleby,” said Abigail. “Sometimes it’s the littlest things that bring in the highest profits. Take my Christmas wrap, for example. When I was about ten, we had a bit of wallpaper left from doing over the summer breakfast room, and I used it to wrap the Christmas presents. That’s where I got the idea. Very inexpensive paper, just to wrap presents in, with pretty designs. The very first year it was on the market, we turned a profit of a thousand pounds, and that’s
after
Papa bought the paper mill outright. The next year we were up to five.”

This was the longest speech Cary had ever heard her utter, and that it was delivered to two lesser mortals annoyed him considerably.

“F-f-f-five thousand pounds?” stuttered Mr. Temple, who was paid the handsome sum of thirty pounds per annum for making sermons and visiting the sick.

“Then this past year, I went ’round to all the London shops, and sold them the idea of offering a gift-wrapping service. Only a penny more, and the clerk wraps your package for you, right there in the shop. Of course, they bought the paper from me. I quite doubled my profits.”

“You mean ten thousand pounds?” screamed Hector.

Cary had heard enough. He allowed Ida and Lydia to draw him away. He was going to have to speak to his “shy” cousin about telling such outrageous whoppers before her lies spiraled out of control. Ten thousand pounds, indeed!

But first, he was going to have to kiss her again, promise or no promise.

In the meantime, he had no objection to linking arms with Ida and Lydia to keep them from falling on the ice. The two girls idolized him, and, after being rejected by Vera and by Abigail, he needed to be idolized. As they chattered on, he skated with his eyes half-closed, enjoying the sound of their breathless female voices without attending to a word they said.

“Mr. Wayborn?”

“Yes, Miss Ida?” he murmured contentedly.

“It’s Lydia. Where’s Hector going with Miss Smith?”

Cary’s eyes popped open. Abigail had disappeared from the terrace. He looked around and saw Hector and Mr. Temple on the snow-covered bank across from the inn. They were leading Abigail away from him, uphill, and Hector was carrying a huge serving platter.

“What’s he doing with that tray?” cried Lydia.

Leaving Rhoda in the care of Mr. Maddox, Cary and the two younger girls hurried back to the Rose to change their shoes. According to Mr. Sprigge, the other members of their party were going up to the top of the Cascades, a local beauty spot, and they meant to slide down the icy stone steps on Mrs. Sprigge’s pewter tray. Mr. Sprigge became exercised on the subject of trays. “If anything happens to that tray, sir, Mrs. Sprigge will not be best pleased. And then there’s the bill—! Drinking like there’s no tomorrow, they were,” he grumbled.

After settling the bill with a shilling, Cary skidded across the river towards the opposite bank. Ida and Lydia ran after him, calling in thrilled voices, “Are we going to slide down the Cascades, too, Mr. Wayborn?”

“Certainly not,” he snapped, pushing his way through the frozen reeds and up the bank.

In fashioning the Cascades, Art and Nature had combined in a marriage of dubious felicity. Once, the river had run placidly over the top of a little prominence, then down a long, gentle slope that gradually flattened out behind the Tudor Rose, until the water scarcely could be observed to run at all. Then, in the last years of the eighteenth century, the natural state of things had been judged too tame for real beauty. Turbulence had come into fashion.

In keeping with the new sensibilities, the little prominence had been transformed into a sinister cliff by the addition of a very large cut stone that resembled a step. Six more “steps” had been added on the way down, creating a dramatic series of frothy waterfalls.

The falling water was icebound now, the dark, giant steps coated in ice.

Cary could see Abigail and the two men nearing the top, struggling up the incline in the heavy piles of snow. He shouted to them, waving his arms, and Abigail waved back, her butterscotch hair standing out vividly against the pearly frost that surrounded her. He watched in disbelief as Hector Mickleby, with his unkempt chestnut hair falling into his eyes, began arranging the huge pewter tray on one of the steps. Unable to run uphill in the snow, Cary bounded up to them in a series of clumsy leaps.

Abigail was already seated on the tray when he got there, having painstakingly inched her way across the slippery step on her hands and knees, but Cary caught Hector before the young man could join her. He could tell at a glance that the boy was drunk.

“Have you all gone mad? You’ll crack your silly heads open like plover’s eggs.”

Abigail looked at Cary in surprise. “But I have gone down the chutes in the Park, sir, in a toboggan, and those are
much
steeper than this.”

Cary’s surprise was not less than hers; he’d formed the idea that Hector had foisted this harebrained scheme on her, but she seemed a more than willing participant in the madness. Vera was right. Abigail was shy, but by no means timid.

“I did say I thought it was a bad idea,” whispered Mr. Temple, mopping his face with his handkerchief. He seemed to be drunk too, and suffering from the worst effects of inebriation.

Abigail at least appeared sober. “Indeed, madam?” Cary asked her. “Did you go down the chutes on a bloody great tray?”

“No, of course not,” Abigail calmly replied. Sitting on her platter, she felt quite safe from him. This time,
he
seemed to be the one discomfited, and she took pleasure in the rare reversal. “But, for heaven’s sake,
Paggles
went with me. It’s not at all dangerous, I assure you.”

Cary grimly took in the frozen scene. The Cascades went down nearly twelve yards, then came the long, icy ribbon of frozen water slanting downhill. It looked like suicide to him. He wondered what Abigail would do if he ordered her to get off the tray and walk back towards him. Assuming she obeyed, she would probably slip, and break her fool neck on the steps. “Go and get a rope,” he told Mr. Temple, just as that gentleman turned his head to one side, and vomited.

“Are you afraid, Mr. Wayborn?” Abigail exclaimed in astonishment.

“I’ll go down with you, Miss Smith!” Hector cried recklessly. “I am not afraid.”

“No,” said Cary, shoving the boy aside. “I’ll go.”

“It was my idea,” Hector sulked.

“The lady is my cousin. You can take your sisters down, if you like.”

“You can take my sisters, sir,” Hector sniffed. “I’ll take your cousin.”

“I can certainly go alone,” Abigail said quickly. “It is what I intended.”

Cary set one boot onto the icy step. Hector had placed the tray on the third step from the top, the widest of the seven steps. It was a far from safe feeling to be standing on iced stone.

“You’d better crawl, sir,” Abigail advised him.

Cary did not reply, but concentrated on his steps as he inched towards the tray. They all watched as he crossed the ice, not breathing until he took up a position behind Abigail on the tray. Abigail scooted forward to give him room, drawing her knees up to her chest. One of his knees appeared on either side of her, and she saw that the right leg of his trousers had split to show one brown knee. She had not realized how very cold it was until she felt his warmth suddenly mold itself to her body. He seemed to fit her exactly. She felt his breath on her neck and, unable to endure such intimacy, she pressed her cheek to her shoulder; but he merely moved his head to the other side.

“An English gentleman,” he said in her ear, “never crawls.”

She made no reply but squirmed as he slid his arms around her waist, his fingers splaying just beneath her breasts. In response to her movements, the tray slid a few inches forward, skimming across the wet, icy step, and she went perfectly still.

“How do you like Temple and Young Mickleby?” he asked, snuggling against her. “They’re drunk as lords, both of them. The curate and the squire’s son.”

“They can’t be,” she scoffed, looking at the two men on the bank. Mr. Temple was down on all fours like Nebuchadnezzar, and Hector was jeering him mercilessly. “Mr. Temple only had four pints, and Mr. Mickleby switched to cider.”

“You’re not counting the half-pints. I’ve seen the bill. Indeed, I’ve
paid
the bill.”

“I drank the ladies’ pints,” said Abigail. “And I shall pay the bill.”

“Don’t argue with me, Cousin, not when we’re about to die.” Cary laughed softly. The sound made the hairs on her neck stand up. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he muttered.

“It’s perfectly safe,” she protested. “You’ll see.”

He squeezed her waist. “It is
not
safe. We’re going to die. Kiss me for luck?”

“Certainly not,” she gasped.

“No? Shall we go down together then, and meet our Maker?” Not waiting for a reply, he leaned hard forward, holding her tightly against his body as the tray slid and bumped its way down the steps, swerving this way and that. Abigail shrieked as they sailed off the last step and landed with a jolt on the smooth ice track winding down to the broad, flat river.

Cary buried his head in the side of her neck as the tray slid down the long, smooth decline, gathering speed until it slammed into a curve. She felt him gripping her body tightly between his knees, then they were out of the curve and shooting across the icy surface of the river. The tray came to a gentle stop not ten yards from the Rose’s back garden.

“Well, I’m damned,” Cary whispered softly. “Nobody died, after all.”

“I told you there wasn’t any danger,” said Abigail.

“Don’t tempt fate,” he told her. “Just because we didn’t die this time, doesn’t mean it’s safe. We’ll certainly be killed the next time.”

Abigail laughed out loud. “The next time?”

Mrs. Mickleby, the squire’s wife, had braved the snow to call upon her new neighbors at Tanglewood Manor. Her ancient brougham had foundered in the snow half a dozen times, but each time the footmen had managed to free the wheels, and the lady’s determination to see Mrs. Spurgeon was so great that she scarcely felt the inconvenience.

Mrs. Spurgeon immediately set her most pressing concerns to rest. The London widow was precisely as loud, as abrupt, as large, as old, and as ugly as any mother could wish. For her second day in the country, Mrs. Spurgeon had chosen a primrose yellow gown and a long brunette wig. She looked like an aging Louis Quatorze. In short, she was not the sort of widow to tempt either Mr. Wayborn or Mrs. Mickleby’s own foolish son Hector. Indeed, one wondered in what way this imposing female had ever tempted Mr. Spurgeon.

In an instant, therefore, Mrs. Spurgeon secured all her good will, but the ravishing Mrs. Nashe was not so fortunate. To Vera the squire’s wife was hostile, but, as she lacked both consequence and wit, her repeated attempts to crush Vera could inflict no lasting harm. Indeed, not even the digs and demands of Mrs. Spurgeon could penetrate the pretty nurse’s serenity.

“More tea, Vera.” “A pillow for my back, Vera.” “Do crack these chestnuts for me, Vera.” “You are very dull today, Vera. You have not spoke two words together. Mrs. Mickleby must think you a half-wit.”

Such treatment might have excited Mrs. Mickleby’s pity had not Vera’s placid calm been interpreted by the squire’s lady as smugness. When Vera poured out the tea, she seemed quite the mistress, not merely of the teapot, but of Tanglewood Manor itself.

“Do you like birds, Mrs. Mickleby?” Mrs. Spurgeon asked her guest.

Mrs. Mickleby enthusiastically indulged herself on the subject of goldfinches.

“Bring Cato,” Mrs. Spurgeon instructed Vera. “Miss Smith is not here to upset him. Bring his perch. Cato is an
ara macao
,” she informed Mrs. Mickleby. “A scarlet macaw. I’ve taught him to eat with a spoon.”

“But who is Miss Smith?” Mrs. Mickleby inquired, puzzled.

“My dear Mrs. Mickleby,” said Mrs. Spurgeon, “I hardly know
what
she is, so it’s not fair to ask
who
. I expect my son found her through an agency.”

“Oh, it is a servant you mean,” exclaimed Mrs. Mickleby in relief.

“If she is a servant, she’s a very bad one,” said Mrs. Spurgeon stoutly. “She went out very early—before I was even out of my bed—and I’ve not seen her all this morning. Vera tells me Mr. Wayborn took her ice skating at the village inn.”

Mrs. Mickleby’s alarm was awakened by this intelligence. Mr. Wayborn was a gentleman. He would not go skating with a mere servant, but he might take a paid companion; many such people were gentlewomen driven by poverty to find respectable employment. Such a woman might be forgiven for seeking to escape her enslavement by making an advantageous marriage. Indeed, Mrs. Mickleby
would
have forgiven Miss Smith, had she not already settled on the gentleman as an ideal son-in-law. As it was, she tried Miss Smith in absentia and convicted her of being a conniving and artful adventuress.