Lady Incognita

LADY INCOGNITA

Nina Coombs Pykare

Chapter One

The April sun streaming through the window into the little second-floor sitting room of the house on Arlington Street cast copper glints into the demurely dressed hair of Miss Louisa Penhope. An acute observer would have noted that Miss Penhope’s muslin gown was not quite of the latest fashion and designed for a long life of moderate use.

Miss Penhope, already twenty-four, considered herself beyond the marriage age and therefore did not hold with the fripperies that many younger maidens affected. She was, however, by no means a bluestocking.

Though at the present moment the sunshine had escaped her notice and her clear gray eyes were screwed up in a perplexed frown, those same eyes could, and did, dance merrily with laughter.

Perhaps this was fortunate, for Louisa Penhope was the sole support of two lovable but eccentric aunts and a younger brother and sister, to say nothing of the servants whose presence in the house on Arlington Street was absolutely necessary to the peace of mind of everyone but Louisa herself.

It was this circumstance that wrinkled Louisa’s forehead and caused her to chew reflectively on one knuckle. “It is not going well,” she said to herself, surveying the pages of neat writing that lay strewn on the desk before her. “Something is missing.”

Biting her lower lip, Louisa reread the last sheet.

Reginald Haversham cast a worried look around him. Where in these lowering ruins that breathed their diabolic miasma into the night air, where was his beautiful Bernice held captive?

In exasperation Louisa threw down her pen and rose to pace the floor. It just would not do. Mr. Grimstead, sitting behind his cluttered desk at Minerva Press, would shake his graying head and say, “You got to get more terror in it, miss. We got to give the readers what they want. They want terror. And they expect it from you - from Lady Incognita.”

With another sigh, Louisa stuffed the offending pages back in the drawer of her writing desk and turned the key. She simply could not work anymore at the moment.

Impatiently she moved to the window that looked down into the court behind the house. Ginger, the mother cat, lay purring in the sunshine while beside her six kittens frisked and gamboled. Momentarily diverted, Louisa chuckled. Aunt Caroline’s cats
were
amusing. But then the chuckle faded. Those adorable kittens, as Betsy would call them, required food, just like Betsy and Harry, Aunts Julia and Caroline, Miss Winkstead the governess, Culver the cook, Naomi the maid, and Drimble the butler. All these required food
and
clothing and so many little things that ate away constantly at her small reserves.

Rubbing tiredly at her temple, Louisa forced herself to look on the bright side. At least they had her writing income. Where would they be - all of them - if she hadn’t stumbled on the satire that fateful day in Papa’s library?

Louisa’s memory took her back to that day five years ago when as a frightened orphan of nineteen she had been left with a ten-year-old sister and a five-year-old brother, left with not enough to live on and no knowledge of how to increase it.

Surely the hand of providence had been working when she had stumbled upon “The Age:  A Poem:  Moral, Political, and Metaphysical.” In her dazed condition the satirical implications scarcely seemed to register. What she appeared to have, given into her hand by an act of the Almighty, was a way out of her difficulty. For there, right on the page, were written the words -

From any romance to make a novel-

  The rules so facetiously set down by the unknown writer, Louisa had stringently followed. Fortunately her acquaintance with the lending library which her Mama had used to patronize had made her rather familiar with the romance of terror. And, the subscription being still in force, Louisa had borrowed more to study.

When finally, with screwed up courage and trembling knees, she made her way to the offices of Mr. Lane, Minerva Press, at 33 Leadenhall Street, she could barely manage to speak. But Mr. Grimstead, a rotund, little, everyday kind of man, entirely out of place in a world of ghosts, rattling chains, and ruined castles, had smiled at her kindly and listened to her patiently.

“Well, young lady,” he said, reaching for the parcel under her arm, as though young women regularly appeared in his office laden with manuscripts, “the best thing to do is to read the book. You leave me your direction and I’ll let you know.”

  “Th - thank you, sir,” she stammered. “Oh, sir. Please, sir, my family mustn’t know. It would be too ... too embarrassing.”

Mr. Grimstead continued to smile. ‘I quite understand, Miss Penhope. And if it proves that you
can
write, why we’ll just put another name to them. Now you get along home. And don’t you be upsetting yourself. I’ll have an answer for you soon.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Three terrible days had Louisa spent, in suspended agony, she thought, a wry smile twisting her mouth at her involuntary use of such an inflated phrase. The wait had been agonizing, though, for their whole future hung in the balance.

And then a note had appeared from Mr. Grimstead. Reading it in the privacy of her room, Louisa had fallen weakly into a chair. Mr. Grimstead liked the book, and so did Mr. Newman, the new owner of Minerva Press. They were going to offer seventy-five pounds for
The Dark Stranger
and they would pay as much for subsequent romances.

  And so had begun Louisa’s career as an author. Romance after romance flowed from her pen. And somehow, though at times it was difficult, she managed to keep the family going, including Aunt Caroline, who had joined them just a month after Louisa began writing. Aunt Caroline’s husband, Colonel Pickering, had just departed this world. And with Aunt Caroline had come thirteen cats. Louisa did not care to consider how many cats now called the house at Arlington Street their home.

Just a few months later Aunt Julia, Aunt Caroline’s sister, had come to them. Aunt Julia, whose suspicion of the male half of creation extended to Aunt Caroline’s toms, was a bluestocking whose
raison d’etre
was the new science of phrenology.

Obsessed as she was with the bumps on a person’s head and the knowledge those same bumps were capable of imparting, she would even sometimes consent to feel a male skull.

Louisa smiled. With such aunts it was fortunate that Betsy, now fifteen, and Harry, now ten, were healthy, reasonable children. A little spoiled, perhaps, because she herself had been too busy writing to see to them properly.

Winky, as Miss Winkstead was familiarly called by her charges, was a devoted governess, though perhaps a little lenient. But then again, thought Louisa, no harm had been done to the children.

  In a few years Betsy would be ready to come out. Louisa twisted her handkerchief somewhat nervously between her fingers. She must finish this romance - get Reginald and his Bernice through all the torments and wickedness and once more in each other’s arms. If she did not, the future she was thinking of would not materialize.

It was fortunate that the public had taken so well to Lady Incognita’s romances. The
ton, so
she had heard from several of Aunt Caroline’s friends, was all agog to learn
who
the lady really was. This, however, Louisa hoped devoutly, would never come to pass.

Straightening her shoulders determinedly, she returned to the writing desk and unlocked the drawer.  It was difficult keeping everything locked up this way but it was for the best. Aunt Caroline, perhaps, would not care that her niece was that terrible Lady Incognita; Aunt Caroline had a loving heart. Betsy and Harry might be excessively pleased to claim Lady Incognita as a sister. But Aunt Julia would be deeply shocked at the portrayal of the males who made their dashing way through Lady Incognita’s romances.

  Of course, Louisa had not wanted to put her own name to the books. That would mean the end of respectability among the
ton.
In spite of the efforts of several of Aunt Caroline’s old friends to persuade her, she had little to do with the most fashionable elite. Not yet. But she did not want to lose her respectability. For when Betsy came out, a respectable background would be a necessity.

Betsy would make the proper marriage that had been denied
her,
Louisa thought, taking up a fresh pen with a sigh. She had been so busy providing for them all - and the years had passed so quickly.

Now she was beyond the marriageable age and, though she appreciated the freedom of movement that her advanced years gave her, sometimes she was afflicted with a terrible yearning, for exactly what, she wasn’t sure.

This yearning, she had finally come to realize, attacked her most heartily when she was busy bringing together her harassed hero and heroine. It was then that something indefinable within her insisted that she, too, should be provided with a hero. And this she told herself, in the face of what she firmly believed, that no heroes actually existed!

  It was just such an attack, Louisa felt, that was keeping her from accomplishing the customary number of daily pages. Heroes, she told herself, with a shake of her chestnut head, were only creatures  of one’s imagination.  Nowhere did such dark, dashing, courageous, incomparable men exist. She knew that quite well. And yet, irrationally, her foolish heart kept insisting that
she
wanted such an unattainable figure. A figment of her own imagination!

With another sigh Louisa returned to the present problem of Reginald. How in the deserted ruins of this eerie abbey was he to recover his beloved Bernice, held prisoner by the wicked monk?

Part of her problem, Louisa realized some time later, was with the abbey. She had down Reginald, the tall, dark courageous hero who would follow his Bernice anywhere in the face of the most horrendous evil. And Bernice, whose chestnut hair and gray eyes were very like Louisa’s own, certainly was a living character complete with tear-filled eyes, heartfelt sighs, and palpitating pulses. Even the villainous monk, Columbo, with his squat, dwarfish figure and his beady black eyes that gleamed evilly as he locked the tormented Bernice in the damp old cellar under the deserted abbey, even he seemed a living evil.

But the abbey would not take life. How, she asked herself with a rueful smile, could she describe a gloomy and sinister ruin, exuding the very breath of evil, if she had never seen one? The ruined abbeys that she
had
seen had seemed quiet peaceful spots, their time-worn stones covered with moss and it was difficult enough to conjure up nights as black as the inside of a cloak and a villain whose heart held absolutely no compassion when the sun was shining cheerfully through the window and the happy voices of the children at play with the kittens drifted up to her through the open window.

With a determined frown she searched under the stack of papers and pulled out the copy she had made so long ago.

From any romance to make a novel. Where you find:

A castle put A house.

A cavern put A bower.

A groan put A sigh.

A giant put A father.

A blood-stained dagger put A fan.

Howling blasts  Zephers.

A knight  A gentleman without whiskers.

A lady who is the heroine  Need not be changed, being versatile.

Assassins Killing glances.

A monk  An old steward.

Skeletons, skulls, &c. Compliments and sentiments, &c.

A magic book sprinkled with blood. A letter bedewed with tears.

Mysterious voices  Abtruse words.

A secret oath  A tender hint accompanied with naiveté.

A gliding ghost  A usurer or an attorney

A witch  An old housekeeper.

A wound  A kiss.

A midnight murder  A marriage.

The same table of course answers for transmuting a novel into a romance.

Louisa’s eyes glided over the familiar page. She had the monk and the ghost. Perhaps it was time to think of assassins or a wound or skeletons and skulls. She picked up the pen.

  
Reginald, though a brave man, found his courage wavering. The darkness of the night lay like a funereal pall over his quivering senses. The very air seemed threatening, heavy and difficult to breathe, as though it too imbibed the evilness of this satanic ruin and wished to poison him. Tangled vines and bushes grabbed at his clothing as he moved slowly along, feeling his way by the damp ivy-covered stones of a low wall. The creepers that entangled his feet and legs were surely only creepers, not the minions of that satanic monk who lusted after the innocent Bernice. Or so at least Reginald told himself firmly. But the sweat stood out on his brow and the hands that touched the rough stones were also wet.

An eerie silence prevailed, as though no living creature dared venture into this diabolical region. The spirits of the damned seemed to hover in the air as Reginald moved toward, inch by careful inch. Somewhere in this hellish darkness lay the entrance to the prison in which his beloved Bernice languished. He must find it.