Beth Andrews Read online

  Rosalind watched as he gently but firmly took hold of Cassandra’s arm.

  ‘Perhaps you had better ascertain first where the room in question might be,’ Richard suggested drily.

  ‘Oh,’ Cassandra told them gaily, ‘I can find my way blindfolded!’

  Since neither gentleman commented upon this, she continued down the hall and presently stopped before a doorway on the right-hand side. Meanwhile, Rosalind was forced by common courtesy to accept St George’s arm as they trailed behind the other two.

  ‘Here we are,’ Cassandra announced, reaching out and opening the door to reveal a large dining-room with a table which could easily seat two dozen people but which was set for only four.

  ‘Amazing!’ Julian cried. ‘One would never suspect—’ He halted abruptly.

  ‘I know every inch of space within these walls,’ she said, not in the least offended. ‘Outside of them, however, I would be quite lost.’

  ‘I believe,’ Rosalind observed, ‘that there are many outside these walls who are quite as lost as you could ever be — with less excuse.’

  ‘Was that remark intended for anyone in particular?’ St George quizzed her.

  They had all reached the end of the table which was laid with fine china and silver. The head of the table was empty, since Mr Woodford was not in residence, so two pairs of place settings faced each other: the men on one side and the ladies opposite.

  ‘For those with a guilty conscience, perhaps,’ Rosalind answered, looking up at him as he pulled out the chair for her to be seated.

  ‘You know, Julian,’ Richard remarked, making his way around the table to his own seat, ‘I have the distinct impression that Miss Powell believes us to be heartless adventurers.’

  ‘Surely not!’ Julian glanced sideways at his co-conspirator.

  ‘Wherever could she have got such an idea?’

  ‘Even here,’ Rosalind informed them, ‘we hear news from town. Mr Richard St George and the dashing Julian Marchmont are noted Corinthians who are not entirely strangers to scandal, I believe.’

  ‘One should never believe all that one hears,’ Richard reminded her sententiously.

  ‘Nor what one sees either.’

  ‘Fortunately,’ Cassandra joined in, ‘seeing can never be believing for me. I am forced to judge by less obvious methods: the cadence of a voice, the touch of a hand, one’s literary taste ... all these can tell much about a person’s character.’

  ‘And have you yet formed an opinion of us, Miss Woodford?’ St George asked bluntly.

  ‘Oh, I am not quite so hasty in my judgements as Lindy is,’ she said, neatly sidestepping his question, and adding, ‘In time, no doubt, I shall understand you both well enough.’

  ‘That is good news indeed,’ Julian said, his voice caressing. ‘It suggests that you expect us to meet again.’

  ‘But of course!’ She tilted her head slightly, as though surprised. ‘You are our neighbors, are you not? Common courtesy dictates a certain degree of social intercourse. Is that not so, Lindy?’

  ‘I fear I am not so well versed in these matters.’ The dragon refused to be swayed. ‘It seems a degree of courtesy not merely uncommon for us, but quite unnecessary as well.’

  * * * *

  Having got through the meal, the quartet repaired to the music-room. By the standards of the abbey, it was a small chamber, perhaps twenty feet square, which contained both a lavishly carved harp and a pianoforte, as well as a number of comfortable chairs — presumably for the benefit of an audience it had never hosted. The walls were hung with tapestries depicting scenes of medieval minstrels entertaining richly garbed courtiers.

  ‘Do be seated,’ Miss Woodford instructed her two guests. ‘Rosalind and I could not let you leave without some form of entertainment. That would be most impolite.’

  The gentlemen did as she bade them, prepared to endure their performance even if they did not actually enjoy it. Miss Woodford went to stand beside the pianoforte while Miss Powell seated herself at the instrument. After the briefest pause, their performance began.

  Deep, dramatic chords sounded from the keys as Cassandra burst into song:

  ‘It was a winter’s evening, and fast came down the snow,

  And keenly over the wide heath the bitter blast did blow ...’

  This canzonet by Pinto, ‘The Distress’d Mother’, had been chosen specifically by Rosalind for its subject matter. Its tale of an unmarried woman and her child, abandoned by her lover and her family to wander the streets and watch her babe die in the cold, was both morally and emotionally affecting. Rosalind looked up occasionally from the music to watch the two listeners.

  ‘Oh! cruel was my father ... And cruel was my mother ... And cruel is the wint’ry wind ... But crueller than all, the lad that left my love for gold.’

  For once, Rosalind almost blessed Cassandra’s blindness. She had no notion how she might appear to her audience, with not a trace of the constraint of the trained professional. Her voice was clear and pleasing without being overpowering, but, as she imagined to herself the scene and felt in her heart the young girl’s pain, which the composer had so eloquently expressed, she almost seemed to become the victim which the song portrayed. Her face mirrored her sorrow, her hands clenched together as though chafed from the fictitious snowy night. The accompaniment — alternating from agitation to resignation — exactly suited the words. Finally, the last lines of the song died softly away:

  ‘She kissed her baby’s pale lips, and laid it by her side,

  Then rais’d her eyes to heaven, then bow’d her head and died.’

  There was a moment of absolute silence. Rosalind’s hands fell away from the pianoforte into her lap. Then, as if belatedly remembering their duty, the gentlemen broke into applause.

  ‘Remarkable, Miss Woodford!’ St George was the first to speak. ‘Quite remarkable.’

  ‘A most … unusual … choice of music,’ Julian contributed in a somewhat stilted tone.

  ‘And Miss Powell’s playing was as fine as ever I heard in any London salon.’

  ‘Do you think that a compliment, Lindy?’ Cassandra asked, the sombre mood of the music falling away from her.

  ‘I am sure our guests have slept through worse performances,’ Miss Powell said.

  St George laughed. ‘I think I may speak for us both, ma’am,’ he responded, ‘when I say that you commanded our absolute attention from the very first note.’

  ‘Now,’ Cassandra said, turning her back on the men, ‘it is Rosalind’s turn to sing.’

  ‘I am burning with curiosity to learn with what she will choose to entertain us.’

  Rosalind met his challenging look with an equally direct stare. Meanwhile, Cassandra glided over to the harp.

  Julian reached out to guide her toward the instrument, ‘Let me help you, Miss Wood—’

  ‘There is no need, sir,’ she interrupted him, stopping momentarily and looking in the general direction of his voice. ‘I need no guide.’

  ‘No piece of furniture is ever moved more than an inch from its position,’ Rosalind elucidated, for the benefit of the two strangers.

  ‘I believe Rosalind measures the entire household each day with a special tape,’ Cassandra teased her companion. ‘But I fear it is very tedious for everyone to be so careful about the placement of every table, chair and vase in such a large house.’

  ‘It is no great hardship.’ Rosalind shrugged, though the other girl could not see this gesture.

  ‘No doubt it is even a pleasure,’ Julian said softly, ‘since it is a labor of love.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Rosalind frowned at him. He seemed so genuinely touched. How vile these men were!

  ‘But let us hear Miss Powell’s song,’ St George reminded them of their original intention.

  ‘It is quite different from my own,’ Cassandra admitted, seating herself at the harp and touching the strings with long, delicate fingers.

  ‘I have neither the voice nor the temperament
for something so romantic.’

  Nevertheless, the first notes struck by the harpist were strong and sure. The words by Bunyan were as direct and forceful as the lady who sang them:

  ‘Who would true valor see,

  Let him come hither!

  One here will constant be,

  Come wind, come weather.’

  Different indeed, and one might have expected a louder and more percussive instrument than the harp. But somehow it seemed peculiarly fitting. Had not David, the warrior poet, also played the harp for Saul when that monarch was plagued by an evil spirit? Perhaps Rosalind presumed that her song would have a similar effect on the spirits of these two polite intruders, and drive them away from her own domain....

  Chapter Seven

  Later that evening, after the gentlemen had bid them goodnight (promising, however, to visit them again as soon as they were able) the two women could not but revisit the evening in a lengthy tête-à-tête which kept them from sleep for some hours. Closeted in Cassandra’s bedchamber, they had already discarded the finery assumed for their guests and were clad only in their loose-fitting sleeping gowns.

  ‘Once more you must be my eyes, Lindy,’ Cassandra told the older girl. ‘I know what I heard, but what did you see?’

  Rosalind drew a deep breath, trying to summon the images which had been so vivid earlier. The details began to return to her as she recited them.

  ‘At first,’ she said, looking not at Cassandra but at the canopy above the bed, as though it were a painted screen upon which she saw the events depicted, ‘all was as I expected. They were both smiling and ingratiating: eager to please and to convince us both of their admiration.’

  ‘That much I gathered from their conversation,’ the girl beside her said. ‘Tell me something which I do not know.’

  ‘Our little concert was the crowning moment of the evening,’ Rosalind admitted.

  ‘How did Julian look?’ Cassandra asked.

  Julian? Rosalind turned her head and gazed at the other girl. She did not know which disturbed her most: the ease with which Cassandra used the gentleman’s Christian name, or the fact that it was so hard to blot out the image of Richard St George and focus on the younger man. But she must remember everything and relate what she could.

  ‘Never did I so strongly wish that you could see!’ Rosalind smiled in spite of herself.

  ‘Nor did I!’

  ‘While you sang,’ she said, warming to her theme, ‘young Master Marchmont became increasingly agitated.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Rosalind actually chuckled at the memory. ‘He squirmed in his seat as though he were sitting upon hot coals.’

  ‘And so he should have. However did you manage to keep from going into whoops?’ Cassandra joined in her laughter.

  ‘That was not quite so difficult.’ Rosalind sobered. ‘I merely had to look from him to his companion.’

  ‘Who was not so affected, it seems?’

  ‘He might have been a wax figure by Madame Tussaud, for all the emotion he displayed.’

  ‘Because he did not display emotion, it does not follow that he did not feel it,’ Cass said reasonably, but Rosalind was not to be mollified.

  ‘He is a heartless libertine, steeped in vice.’

  ‘Now you sound like a bad novel.’

  Rosalind reached out and gave her a playful pinch on the arm in protest, which produced a squeak of surprised laughter.

  ‘You take this all much too lightly, Cass.’

  ‘Don’t be such a hypocrite, Lindy,’ her charge reproved her. ‘You are enjoying this quite as much as I am.’

  ‘I own that it gave me pleasure to watch your Julian tonight,’ she confessed. ‘As your song progressed, so did the color in his face. At first he actually paled when he realized the nature of the piece. Then he went rapidly from rose pink to apple red and seemed not to know which way to look.’

  ‘How delightful!’ Cassandra cried. ‘And I suppose he is, by right, “my Julian”: My fool, to toy with as I please.’

  ‘Beware, Cass,’ Rosalind warned, alarmed by her air of self-assurance. ‘These men are no fools — particularly St George.’

  ‘Oh, you can take care of him.’ Cassandra shrugged, apparently quite unconcerned.

  ‘I wonder.’

  ‘Do not fret, Lindy dear.’ For a moment their roles were reversed, Cassandra becoming the reassuring — almost motherly — figure. ‘You may be able to see, but there are some things which I can sense that you do not.’

  ‘And you sense that we will emerge victorious from this match with two masters in the art of flirtation?’

  ‘Unlike my namesake, I hope that I can prophesy something better than doom and disaster.’

  ‘Is this prophecy, or merely wishful thinking?’

  Cassandra stretched and lay back on the pillows with her head cradled in her hands.

  ‘It will not be long before we find out, will it?’

  Rosalind frowned at her, unwilling to trust entirely to her young friend’s sanguine expectations. She knew that their opponents were formidable indeed.

  ‘At least,’ she spoke her thoughts aloud, ‘Julian seems to retain some remnants of a conscience.’

  ‘Which St George does not?’

  ‘If his conscience is not dead,’ Rosalind suggested, ‘it has been asleep for so long that he has probably forgotten its existence.’

  ‘If you cannot awaken it, Lindy, then I fear Mr Richard St George is indeed lost.’

  * * * *

  Having retired from the field with their ranks in temporary disarray, the gentlemen in question were at the lodge attempting to assess the degree of damage and to discuss a strategy for the next stage of their campaign. No augury of impending doom seemed to trouble St George. He was more merry than Julian remembered to have seen him in some time. Unfortunately, his merriment was chiefly directed toward Julian himself.

  ‘The look upon your face was beyond price.’ Richard was both relaxed and deliciously mocking as he gently derided his friend.

  ‘I knew not which way to look,’ Julian confessed. ‘It was as though she were singing that awful song to me.’

  ‘No doubt she was.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  St George warmed a glass of brandy in one large, well-manicured hand. He seemed absorbed in contemplating the color of the liquid before consuming it.

  ‘Tonight’s performance was carefully orchestrated, stripling.’

  ‘Orchestrated?’ Julian repeated, mystified. ‘How so?’

  ‘Those two songs were specially chosen — I suspect by Miss Powell — to discomfit us, if possible. Failing that, they were at the very least a declaration that our beautiful dragon is well aware of what we are about.’

  ‘And Miss Woodford?’

  ‘Those two are as close as sisters, I would imagine.’ St George’s eyes narrowed. ‘There is very little that they do not share.’

  ‘So they both know that we are playing a deep game.’ Julian slid down in his chair, resigning himself to defeat. ‘Our position is hopeless then.’

  ‘Do not be so eager to surrender, little general,’ St George cautioned.

  ‘But how can we succeed, when our quarry is aware of our plans?’

  ‘There is always a weakness in even the most carefully constructed defence.’ The older man was calm and unconcerned by the difficulty. ‘In this case, I fancy it is the same weakness which led to the cat’s demise.’

  ‘Which cat?’ Julian was even more at sea now.

  St George chuckled. ‘The one which was killed by Curiosity.’

  ‘Oh!’ The light broke upon his friend. ‘You believe that they are curious about us, since they are unused to any male companions beyond Mr Woodford and a few servants.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘But they are hardly encouraging,’ Julian argued. ‘Miss Powell seems to have taken a strong dislike to you from the very first, and I am only surprised that she has not ba
rred us from the house.’

  ‘But the fact is that she has not.’ Richard’s mouth curved slightly in something like a smile, but more deadly. ‘She may be repelled by what she believes me to be, but she is fascinated nonetheless.’

  ‘I still cannot forget that song.’ Julian shook his head. ‘I felt like the most vile creature alive — the worst felon yet unhanged.’

  ‘Which is precisely what Miss Powell intended.’

  ‘And what did she intend by her own performance?’

  ‘That,’ St George said, ‘was in the nature of a thrown gauntlet, or I am much mistaken.’

  ‘A declaration of war?’ Julian suggested.

  ‘A challenge which I am eager to accept. She is a wench all fire and spirit — a delightful dragon indeed. But I shall tame her.’

  Julian’s brows drew together as he examined his friend’s countenance.

  ‘I very much fear that this battle may become our Waterloo.’

  ‘Take a lesson from Wellington, young Julian,’ St George counselled. ‘He always chose his battlefields very carefully.’

  ‘You delight in riddles, sir,’ Julian protested.

  ‘Thus far,’ Richard explained carefully, ‘we have fought only on the enemy’s field and on their terms. We need the advantage of having them on our own ground and on our terms.’

  ‘Get them away from the abbey?’ Julian was astonished. ‘It is like a fortress from which they never dare to venture out.’

  ‘Nor do they allow anyone in. And yet,’ St George reminded him, ‘we have breached the walls.’

  ‘But we are ignoble fighters, using a ruse to deceive them.’

  ‘One does what one must.’

  ‘I still do not see how we can accomplish it.’

  ‘On our own, we cannot,’ Richard acknowledged.

  ‘Then how?’

  ‘We must send for reinforcements.’

  * * * *

  The very next morning, St George closeted himself in the oak-panelled study which served as an office and library for the relatively small, twenty-room lodge. He wrote carefully, considering each word before dipping his quill. Even so, he discarded several sheets of paper before he had something which he felt was suitable for his purpose.