Black Rainbow (18 page)

Megan tried to feel angry and offended. Sam had no way of knowing she was already promised to another man; but
the difference in their stations was great enough to give her legitimate cause to resent his offer. Yet the simple dignity of his speech made it impossible for her to be indignant. She tried to soften her refusal.

"I am flattered and touched, Mr. Freeman, truly I am. But I am engaged to someone else."

He had not expected an immediate acceptance, but he had not anticipated a final blow to his hopes. The healthy color drained from his face, leaving it as gray and rigid as stone.

"I'd not want you to break a promise," he said slowly. "If it's a promise from the heart, and not some outworn word, from childhood maybe, that you've no mind to now. . . ."

The situation had become very uncomfortable. With some notion of ending it quickly and cleanly, leaving no room for forlorn hopes, Megan said, "I am to marry Mr. Mandeville. So you see—"

"Him!" The word exploded like an epithet. "Him, with his pride and his vanity? Oh, my little dear, he hasn't the wit to see your worth; he thinks to deceive you and shame you. . . ." And he caught the astonished girl into a close embrace, pressing her head against his heart.

Megan's initial protest was muffled in the folds of his rough jacket. Her attempts to push him away were totally ineffectual; she might as well have been pressing against a stone wall. Finally she managed to turn her head enough to make her voice heard.

"How dare you! Let me go this instant."

Sam obeyed so promptly that she lost her balance and would have fallen if he had not taken her by the shoulders.

"I know it's hard for you," he began.

"It's a lie," Megan shouted. "I love him and he loves me —and we are going to be married—and— Look here. Look at this, if you don't believe me."

She tugged at the gold chain around her neck and succeeded in drawing from under her bodice the ring it held. She had worn it next to her heart night and day since
Edmund gave it to her. The sapphire sent out a sullen blue spark, as if echoing her angry defiance.

The ring, or her rage—or both—convinced Sam. Instead of letting her go, his fingers tightened till she winced with pain.

"So it's true. You'd marry a villain like that—a man without kindness or caring. Oh, but he's a gentleman, isn't he? It's jewels and fine clothes and warm living you want—what do you care that they are paid for with blood? 'Twill be a fitting match—pride and vanity with greed and selfishness!"

He pulled her roughly to him and kissed her on the mouth.

His lips were hard and chapped. The painful grip of his hands was no embrace, but an angry assault. He let her go as suddenly as he had taken her. She stumbled back, one hand nursing her bruised lips, the other groping for support. It found a bare branch, whose thorny surface scratched her palm through her thin kid glove.

"Wait," Sam said hoarsely. "I never meant— Let me tell you—"

When he put out his hand she fled, staggering and stumbling, expecting at every moment to be seized and held. When she reached the top of the hill she had to stop; her stays were too tight, and every breath stabbed like a knife. Looking apprehensively back, she saw he was nowhere in sight. He had retreated, like the coward and bully he was.

Her bonnet had come off and was hanging down behind, held only by its strings. She bundled her hair into its net and put the bonnet back on; then walked slowly toward the gate, her hand pressed to her aching side.

Edmund would rave when he heard. He would see to it that Sam lost his job at the mill; he might even want to charge him with assault. Megan made a wry face. No, she would not tell Edmund. She didn't want to speak of it to anyone, or think of it again. The incident had been disgusting and degrading. The very thought of it made her feel contaminated.

But she couldn't help thinking about it. Again and again the memory returned, so vividly that she seemed to feel again the burning pressure of his lips on hers and the bruising strength of his arms.

Jane was the first to notice her abstraction. "Why, Megan, did I see you shiver just now? Come nearer the fire. You look quite pale this evening."

"I trust you have not taken cold," Edmund said. "You ought not have walked so far today. After this, take the carriage."

"I have not taken cold; I am only a little tired," Megan answered.

A short time later, when Jane left the room on some errand or other, Megan went to Edmund and sat down on a hassock at his feet. "I am out of sorts tonight," she murmured. "Can you guess why?"

"If I knew, I would take steps to make it right," Edmund said, caressing her curls.

Megan switched to French. Things sounded so much more elegant in that language. "I love you so much, Edmund. I want to belong to you, completely. How much longer must we wait?"

They were married three weeks later, in the village church, with half the county in attendance and the conventional crowd of loyal tenants outside. One face was conspicuously absent; but Megan had not expected he would attend.

Jane put
down her pen and pressed her fingers against
her aching eyes. Her head ached, too. That was what happened if you were foolish enough to pour over columns of crabbed figures by lamplight. If only she had more time! But the account books must be back in the countinghouse before morning. She would not have been able to get them if she had not forgotten to give Edmund her extra set of keys.

She was almost certain Mr. Gorm, the new manager, was embezzling money. However, her examination of the books had failed to uncover definite evidence. Gorm's accounting system was unfamiliar to her—but then, she thought humbly, she had never learned the proper way, only the old-fashioned methods that had satisfied her father.

She had protested when Edmund mentioned that he had decided to replace Bert Osborne. Bert had been with the firm since her father's time. She could not imagine the place without his tall, stooped figure bent over the desk in the
outer office. Admittedly he had become a little absent-minded in recent years, but if she kept a watchful eye out for neglected entries, there was no problem. Honesty and dedication were rare qualities, as Edmund would one day learn.

She had tried in vain to follow Gorm's system of balancing expenditure against income; also the figures for the past quarter seemed to be missing. Yet the mill must be making money, Edmund spent it lavishly enough. He was generous, too, always asking her if she wanted an increase in her household allowance. Remembering the days when she had known to the penny precisely how much she had to spend and where it came from, she sighed and reached for the pen.

It was useless. She had neither the time nor the skill to understand the accounts, and even if she had, they represented only a fraction of the information she needed. Edmund's personal accounts, the estate records, breakdowns of wages and salaries—there was no way she could get her hands on these, and without them she was helpless. The last item was the one that worried her most. She had a nagging sense of something badly wrong, though the total paid out for wages in the last year was the highest she could remember.

She had deliberately stayed away from the mill since Edmund took over its management. It had been a mistake, her offer of working with him until he learned the business; she might have known it would offend his masculine pride. But she had maintained a covert contact through Sam, and some of the things he told her worried her a great deal. Of course one had to make allowances for Sam's prejudices; he had become a fiery radical of late, and although she had a certain sympathy with that position herself, she had been shocked by some of the quotations he hurled at her. She feared Mr. Knightly had been recommending dangerous books to his star pupil. That man Engels, for instance. . . . And where had Sam gotten his ideas about trade unions? They were no longer illegal, but some employers would instantly
discharge a man who tried to organize his fellow workers.

Now even that tenuous contact was gone. Sam had left the neighborhood several months earlier, without so much as a word of good-bye. He was working in Birmingham, so the report ran. His departure increased Jane's feeling of isolation and helpless ignorance; desperation had finally forced her to the degrading expedient of stealing—there was no other word for it—the account books.

Winter scratched at the window with sleety fingers. It would be a nasty ride in such weather, over the hills and into the teeth of the wind that rattled the barren boughs like dry bones. She knew she had better get it over with, but instead of rising she slumped lower in her chair. The bitter unseasonable cold was a physical reflection of the desolation that blighted her spirits. It was hard to believe that April was already here.

One year ago, almost to the day, she had climbed the hill and watched the black rainbow arch over Grayhaven. "A purely natural phenomenon, scientists say...." But the dark glamour of the sight had affected her strangely, and she had felt a shock of superstitious terror when the slender girl's figure had materialized out of the night. The People of the Hills could bring good luck or the reverse. Some said they were the spirits of the heathen dead, who had lived before the birth of the Saviour; not good enough for Heaven or wicked enough for Hell, they lingered on, shrinking and fading. More often than not the wishes they granted had a way of twisting and turning on the recipient, just as Megan's coming had signaled the end of peace and happiness at Grayhaven.

Jane pushed the unkind thought away. She truly loved her sister-in-law, and scornfully discounted the malicious whispers about penniless girls who captured wealthy men. Megan adored her husband—sometimes to excess, Jane feared. She had been delighted when Edmund announced his intention of marrying the girl for whom she had come to feel the affection of a sister. Not only did it remove the
danger of the Astleys, but it proved Edmund had not been corrupted by pride. He chose to marry for love.

But even there. . . . Only yesterday Megan had come to her room in floods of tears, having just discovered that her hopes of becoming a mother had been shattered again. Administering the sisterly pats and hugs appropriate to such distress, Jane had said soothingly, "But, my darling girl, it is early days yet. You have plenty of time."

"Do you really think so?"

Jane suppressed a smile. "I am a mere spinster, of course, and should not have opinions on such matters; but I really do think so."

"I know I am being silly." Megan wiped her eyes. She had the knack of crying without the usual disfigurements of swollen eyes and red nose. Tears only made her blue eyes look bigger and softer, and her wet lashes, stuck together in starry points, appeared to be an inch long. "You are such a comfort, Jane. Only—Edmund wants a son, so much."

Jane could not deny it. He had begun speaking of his plans for the as yet nonexistent child immediately after his marriage, with a solemn gravity that had given his sister considerable amusement. It was all part of Edmund's harmless snobbery, this wish for a son and heir to carry on his name.

She did not mention this to Megan, but consoled and teased her back into her usual sunny spirits. Now, in the dull solitude of pre-dawn darkness, even that unimportant incident seemed a portent of trouble to come. The wind had dropped to a steady moan that sounded like Megan's desolate weeping.

With an effort, Jane forced herself to move. She had little enough time as it was; the mill opened at six. And she was talking herself into a fit of depression, sitting here and imagining trouble where none existed.

She put the account books into an oilcloth bag that would protect them from a betraying trace of damp. Edmund would have exclaimed in horror if he had seen her; she wore
a pair of his old trousers, shortened and retailored by her own hands. Riding astride was much easier; besides, the costume reduced the chance that she might be recognized. When she had tucked her hair up under a cap like the one the millhands wore, she looked like a little boy.

The trickiest part of the adventure was getting out of the house unseen. However, she was now the only one on this corridor. Edmund and his bride occupied his old room, and Lina had been relegated, greatly against her wishes, to the former nurseries. Edmund did not share his sister's views on the training of the young.

Jane took the precaution of covering her trousers with a long cloak before she crept out of her room. To think that she had come to this in the space of a single year—stealing like a thief, disguised and apprehensive of discovery, through the halls of her own home.

The following
week spring burst through the bonds of winter like a freed prisoner. Some of Edmund's new plants, unsuited to Midland winters, had succumbed to the cold, but the common country blossoms were undaunted by weather. Snowdrop and crocus and primrose duly made their annual appearance, and Jane decided life was not as dreary as she had thought.