Joan Smith (19 page)

“Emily told me to let her know if she could help me.”

Mollie said, “We’ll drop in on her after dinner.” I knew Mollie must be hungry after her busy day, and put the pasta on to boil. My dinner was a success. Strangely, we didn’t talk much about Arabella and Raventhorpe. Mollie offered to help with the dishes, but I made her sit on the sofa while I put them to soak. When I returned, she had called Emily. We were to see her at eight-thirty.

Chapter Twenty

Emily was waiting for us. Sensing some drama, she had dressed in a floor-length gown of mulberry hue, garnished with long ropes of pearls that were surely fake, though they looked real. She looked regal, like a dowager from a Regency novel.

“Come in, come in,” she chirped merrily.

We followed her to the same comfortably shabby parlor where she had served me tea, and we took up our places. “I have been wondering,” she said, peering at me with brightly curious eyes, “has the locket worked for you?”

“Like a charm.” I lifted it to show her I wore it constantly. “I’ve been wondering why you lent it to me, Emily”

“Oh, come, my dear,” she chided gently. “We both know Arabella wanted you to have it, and you wanted it, too. There must have been a reason."

“Emily is clairvoyant,” Mollie said. “She just knows these things. We all come to Emily when we run a cropper in our psychic lives. She’s a miracle, no question.”

I cleared my throat and said, “As a matter of fact, it has worked miracles for me.”

“I knew it!” Emily crowed. “The name could not be a mere coincidence. Your full name is Arabella, isn’t it?”

“No! My name is Belle Marie Savage.”

“But you must be some kin to her. Belle is not a common name for your generation. Why, I cannot think of a single woman my own age with the name. It has been out of style forever.”

I realized I didn’t know anyone else with my name. “I was called after my aunt,” I explained. “How could I be related to Arabella? I’m not even English. I’m from the States.”

“I know where you are from, dear. I’ve been dredging through the family records. One branch of Arabella’s family went to America after the war, in 1820. They settled in the colonies.”

“I have no relatives called Comstock, as far as I know. My mother’s maiden name was Dalby. Eve Dalby.”

“There you are then!” Emily smiled. “Arabella’s grandmother was a Dalby before marriage. And her first cousin, Albert, emigrated to America. I’m sure I saw an Eve in the records, too. You are obviously related to Arabella, and to me. Isn’t that nice?”

A sense of wonder seized me. A woman I had never heard of, a whole ocean and centuries away, had found me, and reached out to me. In spite of the years separating us, the connection moved me profoundly. We were kin; some trace of Arabella’s blood flowed in my veins, mingling with that of past generations, a living link between us. How natural that she should sense the kinship when fate placed me at Chêne Mow—sister calling to sister. It had been in the stars from the beginning of time that I should come here to rescue her.

“That is why Raventhorpe chose you, when we called up his spirit at the séance," Emily explained. “He sensed that trace of Arabella in you.”

“You know what is strange,” I said, “is that I have seen Raventhorpe, yet I feel my story is coming from Arabella, and I have not actually seen her.”

“The locket,” Emily said with a shrug. “But that is not why you are here. Mollie said something about the desk.”

“Belle thinks there’s a secret compartment,” Mollie explained, and explained also why we wanted to find the note, if there was one there. I told Emily the whole story, about Arabella being murdered by her uncle and Robinson.

Emily said, “I never believed for a moment that Raventhorpe killed her. I could see him killing William in a fit of jet black jealousy, or Sir Giles for that matter, but certainly not Arabella. Shall we go to the desk?”

We went, huddling together like conspirators, to the apple green desk with the flowers painted on the front, and the porcelain knobs. I walked forward and reached out for the small right-hand drawer. My fingers were trembling. There wasn’t a sound in the room. Even breaths were suspended as I reached out and drew the drawer toward me. It did not come out as far as the middle drawer had. This seemed auspicious. There was some sort of catch holding it partly closed.

“Tap the false back of the drawer,” Emily suggested. She and Mollie had advanced to look over my shoulder.

“No,” I said, and reached for the knob. I turned it to the right. I had to push quite hard, for the mechanism had become rusted from age. With a little squawk, the knob turned, and the false back fell forward, revealing a pile of letters tied together with a faded blue satin ribbon. Emily emitted a strangled gasp and reached for the letters. Legally they were hers.

Was it mere haste or forgetfulness that had caused Arabella to leave her billets-doux behind when she fled from Chêne Bay? Or had destiny guided her hand, leaving this clue to be unearthed later? Emily took the letters back to the morning parlor and shuffled quickly through them. She opened the first and read it silently to herself. “Yes, they are from him,” she said, smiling at what she had read. “Love letters. Very touching. You must take good care of them, Belle.”

Then she handed them to me with a ceremonious nod, and I accepted them in the same manner, as though we were ambassadors exchanging honors. Mollie made vociferous objections, as well she might. Emily let her read the first one, then took it back and gave it to me, with a conspiratorial smile.

“You will decide how much of them is for public perusal,” she said.

“You mean I can take them home?”

“Take them and give them a good read, then bring them back. They are quite valuable, I should think. Now, was there anything else?”

Mollie mentioned digging up the grave in the spinney. “Henry will be glad to help,” Emily said. “He takes a keen interest in Arabella. His ancestor painted many of the family portraits at Chêne Bay, including Arabella’s. As to the disinterment, the police must be notified first.”

“We needn’t call it a disinterment,” Mollie said. “As far as the authorities know, we are just digging a hole in a spinney to plant a tree. You don’t need permission for that.”

“You
are
clever, Mollie,” Emily said.

Meanwhile I was on nettles to get home and read the letters. We declined an offer of tea, and as soon as politely possible, I suggested that Mollie and I should be going. Emily, kind soul that she was, did not detain us.

When we reached Chêne Mow, Mollie had work to do at home and left without coming in. I took my precious letters inside, locked the door, and went to the deal table to study them.

It didn’t feel right. It seemed there should be some sense of ceremony. I decided to read them by candlelight, as Arabella would have read them, all those years ago. There were candles in a drawer in the kitchen, and I arranged them in holders on the table. It still felt wrong. I glanced down at my jeans, and suddenly knew what was the matter.

I went upstairs and changed into my blue dress. With a thought of the portrait of Arabella at Chêne Bay, I added a white shawl around my shoulders. In the shadowed mirror, I looked a little like her. It was easy to believe we really were distant cousins. I arranged my hair as Arabella wore hers in the painting, letting a few strands tumble forward. There—that was more or less how Arabella looked when she read her love letters.

I smiled at my own folly. I was pretending I was her, Arabella. When I read those tender love letters, I wanted to pretend they were written to me, that Raventhorpe was pouring his heart out to me. That he loved me, as I had come to love him.

Was there ever such a fool, falling in love with a man who had been dead for nearly two centuries? I went below, drew a chair up to the table, and opened the first letter.

Chapter Twenty-One

The paper had become sere and yellowed with age. I carefully opened the first letter and gazed at the handwriting. It was the same script I had seen in my mind’s eye when I wrote of Raventhorpe’s last note to Arabella: a fluidly elegant script, with flourishes.

I read:

May, two of the morning, and I have just left you, Arabella Comstock, after a most indiscreet rendezvous. I do love indiscretion, don’t you? It adds a certain
je ne sais quoi
to the most mundane of meetings. Throw in a scenic waterfall, a beautiful young lady, a forbidding guardian, and I shall soon find myself in love—whatever
that
may mean. I have always considered love a sort of amiable madness, a temporary euphoria, like winning a lottery.

I wondered how Arabella had reacted to that “temporary”

He rambled on for the better part of a page in the same light vein, more or less mocking himself and love. In the next letter, he was replying to Arabella’s objections. As I expected, she had quizzed him about that “temporary.” He replied bluntly, “I do not ascribe any unusual meaning to the word. I mean impermanent, transient, passing. Not forever.” There was a warning for her, and a challenge!

It seemed she had also objected to “most mundane of meetings.”

I did not call
our
meeting mundane, shrew! Naturally any meeting between such incomparables as you and I must be ultra-mundane.
Ça va sans dire.
I do hope you speak French? How can one hope to carry on a romantic correspondence in English? Total comprehension reveals the paucity of our imagination and the tawdriness of our desires. We require the obfuscation of a foreign tongue to shroud our meaning in glamour. According to Henry V of France, one confers with men in French, with horses in German, and with ladies in Italian, so I ought to be writing in Italian—but I fear that would provide too much in the way of obfuscation.

According to all the rules of polite society, I really ought not to be writing at all to such a young miss. Going to be fifteen next month! Good God! You are an infant! Why can you not look your age, and save me from temptation? That guardian ought to order you to put your hair down and your skirts up, like a good little girl.

In the next one he addressed her as “My dearest Arabella,” and wrote:

No French at all?
Quella honte!
(For shame!) I daresay you have been wasting your time sewing and reading the Bible, when you ought to have been learning more useful arts—like flirting, and waltzing, and speaking French. Flirting and waltzing are innate to young ladies; they will come soon enough without effort. As to French, I have made a list of phrases required in polite society. You may ignore them, with the exception of
on dit,
for if our meetings should be discovered, we would be in some danger of becoming one of those pestilential things, “they say.” Who are these
ons
who will forever be finding wickedness in all one’s harmless pleasures? Is the whole world populated with Mrs. Grundys?

The words you will require are as follows: love—amour; my darling—mon
cher;
always or
forever—toujours;
I love you—je
t’adore
(to be used only with the greatest discretion, i.e., to Lord Raventhorpe);
argent—money;
and most important of all, yes—
oui
. The above words can be combined in sentence form, e.g.
“Ah oui, mon cher amour, je t’adore.”
This evening we shall practice the appropriate gestures to accompany the words, and perhaps teach you a new one. Or perhaps not. Nearly fifteen! Egads.

As I read on through the letters, the bantering tone gradually became more serious.

You want to hear it in English? Very well then, I love you. Or if this be not love, then I am extremely ill of an undiagnosed disease, for I can neither eat nor sleep nor pay the least heed to business. I actually paid my tailor yesterday, and I have not had his bill above three months. If I cannot have you soon, I shall take to poetry, and make a demmed fool of myself. Once a man has fallen into poesy, the only cure is an early death. There is something just a little ludicrous in an aged poet, all passion spent, rhyming on, don’t you think? Truly, though, Belle, you are fifteen now, and therefore in your sixteenth year. Is that too young? Cleopatra was a queen at that age. At least I think it was Cleopatra, though it may have been a queen of France.

He wrote in a lighthearted vein about the everyday occurrences of his life, telling her of a tumble he had taken from a horse.

Not satisfied with throwing me to the ground, the bleater lifted his head and uttered a whinnying laugh at my expense, while the village looked on, convulsed in laughter. I was forced into a grimacing smile, too, for I would not satisfy my audience to fly into a pelter in public like a comic actor in a second-rate play, which was what they expected of a Raventhorpe. But I have had the last laugh. I sold the brute to Mr. Hopkins (weight 285 pounds). That will teach the boiler to make sport of me. May his spine bend under the weight of his new burden, then he will miss me, and the bushels of apples I fed the ingrate.

There, now I have revealed one of my less attractive sides to you. Do you still think me kind and generous? The little locket was not generosity, it was my way of staking a claim to you, as I cannot yet put a ring on your finger.

There was a postscript. “You are not to go drawing any parallels between my treatment of recalcitrant horses and recalcitrant ladies. I have never sold Hopkins a lady in my life. I am in too much awe of his wife. She weights 290 pounds.”

With a smile I put the letter aside and lifted another. The date showed me some time had passed since his last letter. I wished I could know what had happened at their meetings in the interval. It seemed the offer of marriage had been made and accepted.

He wrote:

My darling Belle:

How time drags when I am away from you. If every day is to last a month, we shall be old and gray before you are mine. How fine it would be if the next eight months would flee quickly, and Time save its lagging gait for after we are married. Then I would have no objection if Time should stand still. But it never does when I am with you. I fear that I shall awake one morning, expecting to see my young bride by my side, and find an elderly dame with gray hair, and myself too feeble to love her as I would like. Our lives will have flitted by while we blinked.