Sword to the Heart (Bantam Series No. 13) (19 page)

She handed the letter to Lord Colwall as she spoke, and he took it from her with an expression in his eyes which she could not fathom.

It would be difficult for anyone, he thought, except for some nitwitted scullery boy, not to realise that the envelope was of the thick, expensive vellum used only by himself and Natalia.

He sat looking at the note as if he was afraid to open it.

Ellen moved tactfully away to another part of the room, ostensibly to pat up a cushion and put straight an ornament on a side
-
table that needed no adjustment.

Lord Colwall walked across to the window.

He knew the note was from Natalia and he longed to know its contents, yet at the same time he was afraid.

Why should she have gone away? Why should she have left the Castle?

He thought last night that he had re-assured her and that after she had cried so bitterly against his shoulder the horror of what she had passed through had been expunged.

Now he could not understand why she had disappeared without any warning. If she had wished to return to her parents, surely she would have told him so?

Besides, why should she go on foot? Stage-Coaches stopped in the village once or twice a day, but why would Natalia, with a stable full of every type of carriage at her command, wish to travel by Stage-Coach?

She had been unpredictable, he thought, as he turned the envelope over in his hand, ever since he had married her. He had not realised that he could find any woman so incomprehensible.

He had imagined it would be so easy to manage a young girl, and yet Natalia had defied and confounded him from the first moment of their marriage.

He thought of how he had raged at her the night before last in the Library.

He could see now the startled surprise in her large eyes, the sudden tremble of her lips, and he had known even as the words poured from his lips that she had not understood the reason for his fury.

She had looked so lovely sitting there with her arms around Herald.

She had looked somehow unsubstantial, and yet, as he well knew, she had a will almost equal to his own and a determination that he had been unable to break.

Everything had gone wrong!

His plans had mis-fired. The scheme which he had devised more than three years ago had been completely disrupted by one unsophisticated and inexperienced girl.

And now he knew that she had left him and he was afraid to learn the reason.

It was somehow incredible that he, so decisive, so autocratic, so unbending, should stand with her note in his hand, unable to bring himself to open it and read what it contained!

He was aware that Ellen was waiting and her curiosity was understandable.

Yet he knew it was not curiosity that he himself felt, but an apprehension that was almost like the anticipation of a physical blow.

Slowly, very slowly, he slit open the envelope and drew out its contents.

He had never seen Natalia’s hand-writing before, but he thought he would have known it was hers even if it had lain amongst a hundred others!

There was something beautiful in the way she wrote; in the way she formed her letters. There was an imagination in the curves of the S’s, the tails of the G’s and the Y’s
,
as well as something upright and a little proud in the T’s and the L’s.

Because he was looking at her hand-writing, for a moment Lord Colwall found it impossible to understand what Natalia had written.

There just seemed lines and lines of words that had no meaning, until with an effort he forced himself to read:

“My Lord, I know now I was wrong not to obey Your wishes and become, as You begged of me, Your Wife. I was so foolish that I did not realise until yesterday that my Love would have been enough for us both. Later you might have grown a little fond of Me, but I think I would have been content if I could make You happy.

But now it is too late: when I overheard what Your Lordship said to Sir James, You stressed that your Wife must be “pure and untouched”. I could not stay, loving You as I do, and know that You looked at me with disgust because I can no longer fulfil the second of these Conditions. So, My Lord, I am going away.

I shall not go home and You will not be able to find me. Also I think that where I am going I shall not live very long. Then You will be free again to find Someone who will not fail You as I have done, and who, I pray, will give you happiness and a Son.

Please forgive me, My Lord, for all my faults and failings and thank You for saving me last night. I love You, as I have always loved You, so please sometimes think kindly of Your most reprehensible but penitent

Natalia.”

Lord Colwall read the note through and then, as if the sense of it could not penetrate his mind, he read it again.

Holding the letter in his hand he moved nearer to the window to stare sightlessly out over the great expanse of garden and Park.

He stood there so long without speaking that Ellen, embarrassed, moved towards the door thinking she should leave him alone.

As she reached it, Lord Colwall said in a voice she hardly recognised:

“Her Ladyship has gone away for a short visit—but she will return. You can be certain of that!”

“Yes, M’Lord. Thank you, M’Lord.”

Ellen curtsied.

She looked at him, his head and shoulders silhouetted against the brightness of the sky. There was something very strange about the look of him.

She had the remarkable feeling that he was a man bewildered and lost in an unfamiliar world.

Then she told herself she was imagining things and she left the room closing the door softly behind her. Lord Colwall was alone.

CHAPTER NINE

Nanny was sitting by the Nursery fire. She was not crocheting nor was she sleeping.

She was waiting.

Every evening for the last week she had sat late after the rest of the household had gone to bed, expecting Lord Colwall to visit her. Now at last she heard his footsteps coming along the passage.

She looked into the fire, her face compassionate, her eyes wise with the knowledge of grown-up people who still remain children in their hearts.

Lord Colwall opened the Nursery door and. crossed the room without speaking to seat himself in the arm-chair on the other side of the hearth.

Nanny made no attempt to rise; she merely looked at him and waited.

After a moment he said:

“Where can Her Ladyship be? I went as far as the Orphanage in Gloucester today, but there was no sign of her there.”

Nanny did not reply and after a moment he went on:

“I have visited every Orphanage in every adjacent town. I was so certain that she would go somewhere where there were children.”

“I also should have expected that, M’Lord,” Nanny murmured almost beneath her breath.

She realised that Lord Colwall had grown thinner in the last ten days.

He had lost, too, his aloof pride which had made him seem as if he stood apart from everyone with whom he came in contact.

‘He now looks human,’ Nanny told herself.

It was a fact that His Lordship’s coldness and impenetrable reserve had been exchanged for an air of urgency, and his expression of habitual cynicism had vanished.

“Did you realise how unhappy Her Ladyship was?” Lord Colwall asked suddenly.

“I knew that she loved you,” Nanny answered quietly.

“How could I ever have imagined,” Lord Colwall asked almost savagely, “that a girl who had seen me once, when she was a child, had been in love with me for three years?”

Nanny smiled.

“‘It was not only your handsome face, Master Ranulf! It was because Her Ladyship is not an ordinary young woman. She’s sensitive, romantic, imaginative, and I’m as sure as I’m sitting here that if she’d not loved you, she would not have consented to marry you.”

“You are right! Of course you are right!” Lord Colwall said. “But I did not understand.”

“And now you do—?” Nanny asked quietly.

“I have to find her—I will find her!” he said harshly.

“When that little boy Timothy was here,” Nanny said, “I used to listen to Her Ladyship telling him stories. The one he liked best and the one Her Ladyship always seemed to want to tell him, was about a Knight.”

She saw the expression in Lord Colwall’s eyes and continued: “There was something in the way Her Ladyship spoke of this Knight which told me he meant a great deal to her. She must have dreamt about him as girls do about someone they love.”

Lord Colwall turned his head to stare into the fire, but Nanny knew he was attentive to every word she said.

“Her Ladyship used to describe to Timothy,” she went on, “the dangerous situations in which the Princess found herself, but always she was rescued just in the nick of time by her Knight.” There was a pause and then Nanny said quietly:

“I’ve a feeling, Master Ranulf, that you have to rescue her in the same way. It’s a test, so to speak. I don’t know whether I am making myself clear?”

“You are making yourself very clear, Nanny, and you are making complete sense. I should be able to find her just as I found her, or rather Herald did, the other night when she was imprisoned in the old Mill.”

‘If you found her then, Master Ranulf, you can find her now. Did she ever say anything which might give you a clue as to where she was likely to go?”

“Something she said?” Lord Colwall replied. “I did not think of that. I was only so convinced in my own mind that because the little orphan-boy meant so much to her, she would go to him, or to another like him.”

“There are children in other places besides Orphanages,” Nanny said.

“Yes, of course there are,” Lord Colwall agreed, “but how can I start looking for the sort of place that Her Ladyship would have heard about? And why should she have said that I would not be able to find her and that she thought that where she was going, she would not live very long?”

“Her Ladyship said that?” Nanny exclaimed incredulously.

“Yes, she wrote that in the note she left for me,” Lord Colwall answered.

“It must be a place then, that she had heard about,” Nanny murmured.

“Or she has read about!” Lord Colwall ejaculated suddenly.

There was a light in his eyes that had not been there before. He rose quickly to his feet and pulled at the bell which hung beside the chimney-piece.

“I remember, Nanny,” he said, “that when I came down to dinner the night before Her Ladyship left, she was reading the newspaper as I entered the Salon. I asked her if there was anything of interest in it, and after a moment she spoke to me of further riots of the farm labourers and the measures to be taken against them.”

“That need not have been all that she read,” Nanny remarked.

“No, of course not,” Lord Colwall agreed.

There was silence and Nanny knew he was deep in thought.

Again she appreciated the fact that the expression on his face had changed a great deal since Natalia had gone away. His jaw-line was sharper and she knew by the dark lines under his eyes that he had not slept much.

There was no doubt that he was suffering, but the fact that his emotions stifled for too long had now escaped his control improved rather than detracted from his looks.

‘He has come alive again,’ Nanny said to herself, ‘and that’s the truth
.
’

The door opened and a footman stood there who was obviously surprised at seeing His Lordship.

“You rang, M’Lord?”

“Bring me the newspapers for Wednesday, November tenth,” Lord Colwall said.

“Very good, M’Lord.”

The man had turned to obey him before Lord Colwall asked sharply:

“They will not have been destroyed?”

“Oh no, My Lord. The newspapers are always kept for a month in case Your Lordship should require a back-number.”

“Then get them for me immediately.”

The footman shut the door, Lord Colwall walked across the room to lay his hand on the piebald rocking-horse. He stroked its mane absent-mindedly.

And then he said in a voice in which there was no mistaking the pain behind the words:

“How can she look after herself? She is so inexperienced, so innocent. She has no knowledge of the world, and Ellen tells me she took no money with her.”

“No money?” Nanny ejaculated.

“Perhaps a pound or two. That is all.”

“Then how will she manage, M’Lord?”

“Do you suppose I have not thought of that?” he asked.

His voice was hard as he continued:

“I have been torturing myself night after night, imagining her in some dangerous situation, being insulted or hurt, crying for help, and my not being there to rescue her!”

There was agony in Lord Colwall’s tone now and almost instinctively, as if he were still the child she had nursed when he was a baby, Nanny’s hand went out towards him.

He did not see her gesture as he was still standing looking at the rocking-horse.

“It is all—my fault!” he said in a low voice.

As if she realised she must save him from his own despondency, Nanny said almost briskly:

“You’ll find her, Master Ranulf. I’m sure of it. You must just use your brain and think where she could have hidden herself. I can’t believe that Her Ladyship would deliberately do anything dangerous or foolish. She’s too much sense for that!”

“But she does not know the evil and the dangers that lie in wait for someone as lovely as she is,” Lord Colwall said hoarsely.

“We can only pray that God and his angels will protect her,” Nanny said.

“—or her Knight,” Lord Colwall murmured beneath his breath. The footman brought the newspapers and put them neatly folded on a table which stood in the centre of the Nursery.

Lord Colwall crossed the room eagerly towards them. He picked up
The Times.
Then he said:

“I am almost certain it was the
Morning Post
Her Ladyship was reading when I entered the Salon.”

He took the newspaper in both hands.

“Yes, here is what she must have read about the new penalties imposed by the Government on rioters.”

He looked down the page and then he gave an exclamation. “Nanny!” he said urgently, ‘listen to this!”

“ABNORMAL DEATH RATE IN WORKHOUSES
”

“
In answer to a question in the House of Commons the Home Secretary agreed that last year’s deaths in Workhouses all over the country were considerably above normal. It was due
,
he explained, to a new fever as yet unidentified, which had resulted in a sudden increase in mortality among workhouse dwellers of all ages. Children had of course accounted for the majority of the deaths
,
although there was also a large increase of mortality amongst the aged. There was little that could be done about it
,
but the Charity Commissioners and Poor-Law Administrators were keeping close watch on their local Workhouses
.
”

Lord Colwall finished reading the report aloud. Then he said with a sudden light in his eyes:

“I had forgotten that there are children in the Workhouses. Tomorrow morning I will start a systematic tour of every one that is within a range of thirty miles.”

“Do that, Master Ranulf!” Nanny exclaimed.

“Shall I go first to Hereford?”

“I have a feeling,” Nanny answered, “although I may be wrong, that if Her Ladyship is hiding from you, she would not hide in Hereford where you have so many meetings. Also she might easily be recognised by one of the friends who came to your wedding.”

“No, of course not. That is sensible,” Lord Colwall replied. “And the Stage-Coach could have taken her to Malvern, or Worcester or any of the towns the other side of the hills. I will start first thing in the morning.”

He threw the newspaper down on the table.

Then he walked to the fire-side and did something he had not done for very many years. He bent down and kissed his old Nurse on the cheek.

“Thank you, Nanny,” he said.

The Workhouse was an ugly, bare building, built of grey stone with barred windows. There was a court-yard in front of it and a high wall with heavy gates, spiked on top, which Lord Colwall knew would be locked at night.

They were open now to allow his curricle, drawn by two horses, to pass through.

The gate-keeper was a very old man with white hair, quivering hands and bloodshot eyes that were running with the cold from the wind.

It appeared to Lord Colwall that the man’s clothing was far from adequate for the duties he carried out.

His Lordship drew his horses up outside the somewhat forbidding entrance and handed the reins to the groom, who had jumped down from the small seat on the back of the curricle.

Without waiting, as he usually did, for his servant to knock at the door, Lord Colwall himself raised the knocker and rapped sharply.

At first he thought his request for attention had gone unnoticed. Then he heard slow, shuffling feet and the door was opened by another old man, so bent with age that his nose seemed to be halfway down his chest.

“I wish to speak with either the Mistress or the Master of this Workhouse,” Lord Colwall said in a commanding tone.

The old man made a gesture which invited him in and he walked through the doorway into a paved passage.

The place smelled strongly of unwashed bodies, old age and drains, which Lord Colwall found very distasteful. The old man shuffled ahead of him and opened the door of a room.

It was obviously the private Sitting-Room of the Keepers of the Workhouse. It was furnished without taste, but there were faint touches of homeliness about it, including a fire burning brightly in a well-polished grate.

A door in the opposite wall opened and a woman came in. She was large, middle-aged and had an aggressive, authoritative manner which made Lord Colwall dislike her on sight.

She had however either been told that her visitor was important or she had seen his curricle outside, for there was an almost ingratiating smile on her thin lips as she said politely:
“Good day, Sir. What can I do for you? Are you a County Inspector, by any chance?”

“I am not,” Lord Colwall answered. “I am making private enquiries as to whether you have recently employed or admitted a young woman to these premises.”

He saw the look in the Mistress’s eyes before she spoke, and ejaculated:

“You have!”

“I am not accepting, Sir, that you are right in your surmise concerning the presence here of the person you seek,” the Mistress answered. “The inhabitants of this place come and go, and I assure you it is extremely difficult to find assistants.”

“But you have found one,” Lord Colwall said.

“I was left empty-handed when the last batch of children of over six years old were taken to the factories,” the Mistress said, and her tone suggested that she thought Lord Colwall was finding fault. “Heaven knows, the little varmints weren’t much help, but at least they could work better than those I’ve left.”

“I am not suggesting that in seeking an assistant you were doing anything wrong,” Lord Colwall said evenly. “I merely wish to know who she is. What is her name?”

“I thought there was something strange about her,” the Mistress remarked viciously, “the moment I saw her, and I says to myself: ‘You’re either in trouble, or a run-away apprentice
.
’ And that’s the truth, Sir, isn’t it?”

“I wish to see this girl,” Lord Colwall answered. “Is she small and fair?”

“You can see her, Sir, and welcome,” the Mistress said. “I suppose as usual I shall be left to do everything for myself. How can one woman cope with what we have in now? Three loonies; fourteen old people all getting on for eighty; four tramps and ten children. Ten! I tell you, Sir, it’s too many!”

“I wish to see your new assistant,” Lord Colwall said, interrupting the flow of complaints which he felt might go on endlessly.

“She’ll be up on the top floor with the children,” the Mistress replied. “I can’t get her away from them, though I have told her again and again that I need her help downstairs with the decrepit and senile.”

As she spoke the woman led the way out into the passage and started to climb the narrow stairs which led to the top floor of the Workhouse.

Lord Colwall had a glimpse of a room bare of furniture except for a few chairs, with two spinning wheels standing unused in the corner. The occupants were huddled around the walls, some of them sitting on the floor.

“Is there no heating?” he asked sharply.

“Heating?”

The Mistress turned her head to look at him incredulously.

“Where do you think the money comes from for that sort of luxury? The Parish provides for only the bare necessities and that’s too good for most of them as is in here.”

She spoke almost venomously and continued to climb the stairs, holding up her skirts with both hands.

The top floor was little more than a garret. The gabled windows that opened on to the tiled roof had several panes of glass broken in each of them. One or two of the apertures had been stuffed with rags.

There was a row of beds, some of them tied up with string, and on each there was one thin, tattered blanket.

At the far end of the room all the children were clustered in a little circle, except for one child who was lying on a bed.

The children were chattering and did not hear the Mistress approach, sailing down the centre of the room like a ship in full sail with Lord Colwall behind her.

Then as he neared them he could see that they were standing around a slender figure who was kneeling on the floor beside a bucket. She was scrubbing.

“Gray!”

The Mistress’s voice, harsh and ugly, seemed to echo round the garret.

“How many times must I tell you not to do the work which that lazy little Letty should do? I told her to scrub the floor after she made a mess of it, and scrub it she shall! Get her off that bed and give her the brush, or I’ll beat her into doing what she’s told.”

Natalia straightened her back and looked up at the Mistress who was now towering over her.

“Letty is only four, Ma’am, and she is feeling ill.”

“She’ll soon be feeling a good deal iller if she doesn’t do what I’ve ordered her to do!” the Mistress replied sharply. “And here, Gray, is someone to see you. I don’t suppose you expected your past would catch up with you so quickly.”

The woman spoke spitefully and now Natalia saw Lord Colwall.

Their eyes met and neither of them could move.

She was very pale, and it seemed to him that she had grown so thin that the skin was stretched taut over her bones.

Very quietly, almost as if he were afraid he might frighten her, Lord Colwall said:

“I have come to take you home, Natalia.”

She rose to her feet and he saw that she was wearing a rough apron of sacking over her black dress; her fair hair was dragged back from her forehead and pinned into a bun at the nape of her neck.

She put the large scrubbing-brush she held in her right hand into the bucket of water and set the bucket against the wall. As she moved it, Lord Colwall saw that her hands were red and sore.

“There’s no use putting that bucket aside,” the Mistress said sharply. “Letty! Get off that bed and finish the floor and the rest of you children move out of the way, or it’ll be the worse for you!”

Slowly Natalia took off her apron and hung it on a nail. Then she turned to one of the beds and picked up her cloak which had obviously been used as an extra covering.

She put it round her shoulders and as she did so the children began to cry:

“Don’t leave us, Miss! Don’t go away! Ye said ye’d stay!”

Their voices, shrill and protesting, rang out as they surged around her, hanging on to her cloak and her hands, their faces turned up to hers, their bodies pitiably thin under the rags they wore for clothes.

“I have to go now,” Natalia said gently, “but I will come back to see you, I promise you I will.”

“Ye promise? Ye promise? Ye won’t forget?”

“No, I can never forget!”

Natalia disentangled herself from their clinging hands without looking at Lord Colwall. He stood watching her, in his elegance incredibly out of place in the cold barren garret.

As if something was happening which she did not understand, the Mistress turned angrily on the children:

“Get on with your work, you lazy little varmints! You’ve no right to be standing about doing nothing. You’re paupers. Work, or you don’t eat! This place is called a Workhouse and that’s what it has to be, or I’ll know the reason why!”

Lord Colwall saw Natalia wince at the woman’s roughness, and then with a little helpless gesture as if she knew she could do nothing about it, she pulled her hood over her head and walked down the room towards the stair-way.

She did not wait to hear what Lord Colwall said to the Mistress, but proceeded through the front door and saw the curricle waiting for her outside.

Blindly, almost as if she were walking in her sleep, she stepped into it, and by the time Lord Colwall had seated himself in the driving-seat and picked up the reins, the groom had covered her with a fur rug.

“You will not be too cold?” Lord Colwall asked, as if they were setting out on an ordinary drive from the Castle. “I ought to have brought a closed carriage, but I knew that I could travel faster in the curricle.”

“I am ... all right,” Natalia answered.

They were the first words she had spoken to him and he heard the tremor in her voice. He said nothing more, merely busying himself with driving as swiftly as horses could travel back around the hills to the Castle.

There was, he thought, nothing they could say to each other with the groom within hearing. In fact Lord Colwall knew that what was of primary importance was to get Natalia home.

He had been deeply shocked by the pallor of her face and her emaciation. She had grown so thin that it seemed as if she might float away in the mist and be lost to him forever.

It was with a sense of relief that he saw his home high above the trees, and soon they were climbing the long drive.

He drew up outside the front door and pulled the horses to a standstill.

The Butler ran down the steps to assist Natalia to alight.

“Welcome home, M’Lady.”

“Thank
...
you,” Natalia answered.

Her voice was very low, and now as she reached the hall she allowed her cloak to be taken from her, and almost automatically she walked towards the Salon.

A flunkey opened the door and she moved over the thick carpet towards the fire.

She had almost reached it when she heard the door close and turned to see Lord Colwall advancing towards her.

For a second he saw a sudden light in her eyes, and then as he drew nearer it faded and was replaced by an expression which he knew was one of fear.

She looked at him, made a little inarticulate sound and slipped down onto the floor at his feet.

He picked her up in his arms, and realising that she was unconscious he carried her from the Salon, across the Hall and up the stairs.

As he passed the Butler, he said sharply:

“Send for Nurse.”

But when he reached the landing outside Natalia’s bed-room, he found Nanny was there waiting for him and beside her was Ellen.

“You’ve found Her Ladyship! You’ve found her!” Ellen exclaimed ecstatically.

Lord Colwall did not answer. He carried Natalia into the room and set her down on the big four-poster, laying her very gently against the lace-edged pillows.

She looked so white, so frail in her black dress, dingy and dirty and so different from the elegant creation it had once been.

“Is she all right, Nanny?” he asked and there was a note of desperate anxiety in his voice.

“I think she’s fainted, Master Ranulf,” Nanny answered. “Leave Her Ladyship to us. We’ll get her into bed and, judging by the looks of her, she needs something to eat.”

“I will go and speak to the Chef,” Lord Colwall said, as if glad to be able to take some action.