The Exploits & Adventures of Miss Alethea Darcy (30 page)

“Paying a visit to her sister; what could be more normal or less worthy of gossip?”

Alethea was beginning to look more hopeful. “Georgina is just as likely to let everyone know that I fled to Paris to escape from Napier.”

“A letter from your father will quell any desire she may have to say such a thing; all she has to do is to keep her mouth shut.”

Alethea had moved over to stand beside one of the long windows that overlooked the quay beneath and the canal, wide and sparkling in the sun. She turned the handle to open the door and stepped, blinking, into the sunlight.

Titus heard a commotion below, and stepped forward to pull Alethea away from the window. He fairly pushed her back into the room and then looked over the edge of the balcony.

Straight into the enraged, upturned face of Norris Napier.

Lady Hermione, appraised of what had happened, swept into action. “Napier is doubtless come to visit me, to find out if I know where you are, Alethea. I shall receive him in the salon, and he may say what he chooses—I shall deny everything.”

Alethea was numb with apprehension. Titus's sighting of Napier had unnerved her completely, bringing back as it did so many memories of unhappy times. And now, she told herself, just when she was in the most danger, her courage had deserted her. She felt almost that it would be better simply to await his arrival, that it was in vain to try to escape from him.

Figgins was having none of that. “Miss Alethea, rouse yourself, this is no time to fall into a melancholy.”

“No, indeed,” said Lady Hermione. “This is time for action. You are to change at once back into your breeches and boots.”

“He will know me, whatever I wear.”

“He will not, for he shan't see you,” said Titus.

Lady Hermione took no notice of Alethea's dismal words. “Titus, you are to escort them to England; no, no buts, or ifs. You will travel on your yacht.”

“My yacht?”

“Yes, she lies at Livorno, you told me so. Take a chaise to Leghorn, and sail at once for England.”

“Is that wise?” asked Titus. “Scandal piled on scandal, if ever—”

“Don't you come the prig now, Titus. Let them behave with circumspection, which they are well able to do, and no one need ever know; Alethea has taken risks enough, what is one more? And she must return to England as swiftly as ever she can, so that Napier is left looking the fool with his belief that he saw her in Venice.”

“He will be on my heels, wherever I go,” said Alethea.

Titus was becoming impatient. “You have given him the slip before, you shall do so again. Go with Figgins, and while Lady Hermione makes him welcome, we shall be away.”

He addressed some words in rapid Italian to one of Lady Hermione's servants, and stretched out a hand to Alethea. “Up, and go quickly to your chamber to change back into your breeches,” he said.

His energy was infectious, and Alethea found herself coming out of the hopelessness that had overwhelmed her. Still, she hesitated. “I think, if he encounters me while I am in men's clothes, it will make matters worse even than they are.”

Figgins propelled her out of the room. “That isn't possible, Miss Alethea, so don't you go fretting about it.”

Voices in the hall below. Napier's like a knife, cutting through the servant's words of enquiry, demanding to be taken at once to wherever in the house Lady Hermione was to be found. Indeed, he could work out for himself which room to go to, for he had seen people just this minute, on the balcony.

Alethea darted back inside the door. Then, as Napier, despite his protests, was ushered into the salon below, she and Figgins fled upstairs.

The salon door was closed. Lady Hermione was speaking in a quiet way; Napier's replies sounded barely civil as Alethea, Figgins, and Titus crept past on the stairs and descended into the hall.

The gondola was waiting, bobbing up and down in the wash from a barge that was passing by with a large bronze statue of a man on a horse lashed down on deck.

Titus handed Alethea in, then Figgins. “Sit on that side, if you please. Keep your heads well down and your face shaded by that hat, Alethea.”

“Must we go past him? Cannot we go the other way?”

“No, this way is better. He will not be expecting to see you, and I need to go this way. I shall have to stop to collect my man and to arrange for a chaise.”

“He will follow us, all the way to the Alps and beyond,” said Alethea desolately as she sat on one of the black stools the gondolier provided for his passengers.

“Not a bit of it,” said Titus. “Now, take care to appear quite at your ease.”

“Can you see him?” whispered Alethea, not daring to look up.

“He is standing on the balcony, addressing himself to Lady Hermione with some vehemence. How fortunate, his being there at that exact moment when I stepped out on to the balcony, so that we knew he was on your trail. Now, you may be easy, we are past him; he looks after us, he notices nothing, he has gone back to haranguing Lady Hermione.”

“He was bound to turn up, he will be like a bloodhound, following every trail. It is enough that Lady Hermione is Alexander's mother. I dare say he called at Camilla's house as well, and he will pursue any acquaintances I might be supposed to have in Venice.”

“Think no more about him,” said Titus. “We have got clean away. Now all we have to do is get out of the country. And don't I just hope that Lady Hermione will introduce him to the bishop.”

 

Titus Manningtree's yacht lay at Livorno, or Leghorn, as the English less euphoniously called it. He had sent it on to Italy when he had disembarked after crossing the Channel, and it had lain there after a leisurely passage, with the crew awaiting further orders.

The captain of the vessel, a young ex–Royal Navy officer who had been sent ashore on half-pay after Waterloo like so many of his colleagues, and had taken up private service, was enjoying himself. He liked the climate, he had the pleasure of the company of any number of ravishingly pretty females, both respectable and not so respectable, and he found the Italian wine and food quite delicious.

He was in his quarters, taking a nap after a night of merrymaking, when a sudden energy coursing through the yacht roused him. A knock sounded on his cabin door. “Mr. Thorogood's duty and compliments, sir, and Mr. Manningtree has just driven alongside in a coach and four. A prime team, and sweating like Lucifer himself had been driving them, and Mr. Manningtree looks in a black mood and he's got a young gent with him and that Bootle with a face like a wet weekend, and they're all coming aboard.”

By the time he had delivered his breathless message, Coletree was pulling on his coat and diving on deck. There was an end to his idyll, here was trouble on the way if ever he saw it, and no chance to so much as say good-bye to any of his new friends.

“Are you ready to leave, Coletree? Are all the crew aboard?”

“In half an hour, sir,” he said, thanking God internally that he took his master's standing instructions to always be ready to sail quite literally.

“We are going back to England,” Mr. Manningtree said. “Have a cabin made ready for my guest, Mr. Hawkins. His servant will share his cabin.”

Which was unusual, but not for Coletree to question. England! Well, that wasn't so bad. The cricketing season would be in full swing, and his mother and sister would be pleased to see him, as they always were.

“As fast as you can,” Mr. Manningtree added. “There's not a moment to lose.”

 

The winds were favourable, so much so that the yacht was set to make a record passage across the Mediterranean. Heeling right over, a fine show of sails white against the brilliant blue sky, the water creamed along her side as the vessel surged through the warm sea. And day after day, Alethea lay in her small, stuffy cabin, wishing she were dead. After the first few days, she staggered, at Titus's insistence, into the fresh air on deck, and managed to swallow a morsel or two of food, an infallible cure for the seasickness, the officers assured her.

With disastrous results.

Figgins plied her with watered wine, wiped her brow, and fanned her burning face. Her own momentary queasiness had soon passed, and she couldn't understand why her mistress was taken so mortal bad. She dosed her with laudanum, which soothed Alethea's retching, but brought her troubled dreams.

Titus came down to sit with her, sending Figgins on deck for air and a rest, although it wrung his heart to see Alethea so pale and in such distress, tossing and turning from the effects of the opiate and muttering incoherent sentences. It seemed to him that she was afraid all the time of Napier, feared that he was there, would come through the door at any moment and haul her back to the caged misery of her marriage.

Marriage, he thought to himself as he took his own paces round the deck. What a pitfall it was, what a torment when it went wrong, as it so often did. He paused to stand beside Figgins, who was leaning over the highly polished rail and gazing at the brilliantly clear water.

“It's like there's another world down there,” she said, pointing at a group of brightly coloured fish darting about in their deep and salty domain. Figgins had gone brown in Venice from the sun, and was now deeply tanned. Skinny, wiry as a cat, Titus thought, and she'd taken, barefoot and momentarily carefree while Alethea slept, to joining the younger members of the crew skylarking about the rigging.

He'd been alarmed at first, fearing she might fall, but Coletree had watched her with an expert eye, and said reassuringly that the young man was like a monkey, just the sort he'd liked having on a ship when he was still in the navy.

“Salt of the earth, sir, or maybe we should say salt of the sea; those are the men that saved our skins, and protected our country's freedom, over and over again.”

Not quite, Mr. Coletree, Titus said to himself, but again he returned to the vexing question of how both Figgins and Alethea coped so extraordinarily well in a world entirely restricted to the masculine half of nature.

Titus had noticed before that normal notions of rank were suspended at sea, and a division was drawn instead between the seamen and officers, in charge and in their element, and the passengers, mere landlubbers. He could have a conversation with Figgins that would have been impossible on land.

She, too, was willing for once to let her guard down. Titus wasn't aware that she had decided quite some time ago that he was one of that rare breed, a man who might be trusted.

She had told Alethea as much, sitting beside her for long hours, talking to her about anything that came into her head, not sure whether Alethea heard a word of what she was saying. “For all his hot temper and anger, he's not got a trace of that Napier nastiness in him. He sits with the ship's cat curled up on his lap, reading a book written all close, tickling puss under the chin, gentle as you please. And he's civil to the men on the ship, never a harsh word. He doesn't like to be crossed, and he hasn't got enough to keep him occupied; well, that goes for most of the gents in this world, but he's a man you can rely on.”

She pushed back a strand of Alethea's dark hair from her troubled brow.

“Just as well, circumstanced as we are. You can see why Lady Hermione entrusted you to his care; she's a wily one as is alive to every suit, she wouldn't stand for no nonsense from anyone.”

 

“Is Mr. Hawkins feeling any better?” Titus asked Figgins.

She shook her head. “No, and won't be until she's safe ashore, and even then, I think her spirits are so wore down it's no surprise if she doesn't stay low. For she's in a rare tangle, and no way out of it that she can see, or no way that isn't going to mean a way of life she's no fancy for.”

“Why did she marry Napier?” Titus's voice was bitter. “How came she to make so great a mistake? Why did her family permit it?”

“He was charming and handsome and all over her, and oh-so-keen on her music; that's always been the way to win her favour, and all her parents could think about was her little brother, and no blame for that, for his life was despaired of at one point. And tongues were wagging about her and Penrose Youdall, that everyone thought she was going to make a match of it with, only he upped and married a little dab of a creature which his mother had picked out for him.”

“Penrose Youdall?” A wave of jealousy swept through Titus, so intense and so unexpected that it took his breath away. He controlled himself, although his knuckles, grasping the rail, were white and taut. “She cared for him?”

Figgins shot him a quick, knowing glance.

“Deep in love with him, she was, like girls are when they first meet a young man they can fancy.”

“You are a cynic, Figgins.”

“I don't know about that, since I don't rightly know what it means. But I do know how it was between Penrose and her, and I knew from the start it wouldn't do.”

He grasped at the straw. “Not do? Why not?”

“He wasn't up to her weight, that's why. He was four and twenty, and still under his mother's thumb. Oh, he was dazzled by her, he fell in love with her just like that. You see her now, worn out and thin, but she's a beauty, Mr. Manningtree, too tall and too unusual for some men, but the kind of girl to break hearts. Only it was the other way about, he broke her heart.”

“Curse the fellow, I hope his wife makes his life a misery.”

“No, he'll do well enough with her, they deserve each other, those two. Ordinary, that's what he was, when you peeled away the good humour and high spirits and lively talk, and that'll be gone before he's thirty.”

“He sounds a dead bore.”

“He wasn't to my mistress, for she'd never have given him the time of day if he had been, but it's what he'll become.”

“So she married Napier on the rebound.”