Laura Kinsale (49 page)

Mrs. Lamb snorted. “And after all the trouble I have been to, convincing ma’am that you cherish her!”

“She won’t even see me?”

“Worse, my lord. I’m to find a boy to carry this to the post office.” She waved the note in her hand in such a way that Arden could see Mr. Jocelyn’s name and direction on it clearly. “Of course, it being Sunday, the post office isn’t open.”

He held out his hand. “I’ll take it.”

Mrs. Lamb held the paper back. “Oh, God save me, sir—I’ve meddled far past my place already. What if she were to find out?”

“Mrs. Lamb,” he said gently, “who would blame you for obeying the orders of your employer?”

She hesitated. “Indeed, sir. Indeed,” she said, on a more thoughtful note.

“I have not generally found it necessary to interfere between you and your mistress, but now I do. I will take responsibility for this letter, if you will simply recall who pays your wage.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, smiling as she dipped a curtsy. She handed him the note. “She is most upset, my lord. Those ladies made the afternoon difficult for her, especially that wicked old biddy Lady Broxwood. My sister nursed her son’s little girls, and she is a—well, sir, I should not speak ill of my betters, and I won’t. But she is a tartar. Still, I think ma’am may regret whatever she has said in that letter by morning, and I do hate to send it off so thoughtless.”

“All the more reason to protect her from some ill-conceived folly, Mrs. Lamb. What are husbands for?”

“I’m sure I sometimes wonder,” Mrs. Lamb said. “You’ve near run the poor girl mad, I vow—all she can say of you is that you are a demon, pray, and she can’t decide if you’re beautiful or frightful! Now I ask you if that is a Christian fancy!”

“Beautiful?” Arden asked quickly.

“No doubt you are a well-looking gentleman when you have a care for your appearance,” Mrs. Lamb said, looking him up and down, “though I don’t like to encourage vanity in man nor child.”

“Did she say she thought the djinni beautiful?” he asked.

“These heathen words,” she grumbled.

“The djinni, the demon,” he said urgently.

“She said,” Mrs. Lamb snapped, “that she was the only one who knows.” She turned to go back in. “And as a baptised Christian I will not stand on the stoop discussing such foolery. Good day to you.”

Arden stuck the note in his pocket and bounded down the stairs. He strode rapidly along the street, and when he had turned the corner he abandoned all gentlemanly compunction and opened the letter.

Dearest Mr. Jocelyn,
it said,
I am pleased to accept your proposal. As my situation here has become insupportable, I would be deeply obliged to you if we may be married as soon as arrangements can be made. Gratefully, Z.S.B.

Arden stopped dead in the street.

Then he swore savagely. He took the muddy gutter in one violent stride, stopping traffic with no more than the mad force of his glare.

Zenia stood in her traveling dress, scowling at Mrs. Lamb. The nurse’s stubborn refusal to accompany Elizabeth and Zenia north was the final straw. Since the day Mr. Jocelyn’s answer had arrived, complete with railway tickets and detailed instructions for Zenia to meet him in Yorkshire for their wedding, as he could not come away from his business in Edinburgh long enough to travel back to London, the nurse had lost all her motherly kindness. Though she continued to treat Elizabeth with loving care, once Mrs. Lamb had finally understood that Zenia was not only not married to Lord Winter, but intending to wed another man, she was defiantly unequivocal about the proposed journey north.

“It would be plain murder to take that poor tyke on such a trip! All the way to Yorkshire! In January! When she has all but just risen from her deathbed!” Mrs. Lamb declared. “And on one of those horrid, dangerous railways that are exploding every day! I will have nothing to do with it. I will pack my things this moment if you wish ma’am, but I will not go with you, nor will I put so much as a hairbrush into her little bag to help you to it!”

“I cannot leave her here!” Zenia cried, though Mr. Jocelyn’s letter had strongly counseled her to do just that, for much the same reasons Mrs. Lamb quoted.

“Then I suggest that you reconsider the trip yourself, ma’am. It is monstrous impropriety. It is wicked. If it were not for poor Miss Elizabeth’s sake, I should be long gone from this house, knowing what I know now.”

“There is nothing wicked about my marrying Mr. Jocelyn!” Zenia felt herself on the verge of a hysterical fit. She had been wretched in the time between sending her letter and receiving his reply, alternating between repentance and determination, hardly able to eat for the sick ache of grief inside her. Now that the definite answer had arrived, she was edgy and miserable, afraid that if she hesitated one moment she would lose her nerve.

“It is wicked when you are already married!” Mrs. Lamb tossed her chin up with the haughtiness of the righteous.

“I have told you I am not!”

“You are married in the eyes of God. And you have your little girl to think of.”

“Mrs. Lamb, please! It’s only for a very short time. We must be at the station by ten, or miss the train we are to take.”

“I tell you, ma’am, I am not going. If you must do this unholy thing, then you may leave Miss Elizabeth with me. At least then she won’t have her innocence blackened by her mother’s sins.”

“It is not a sin!” Zenia shouted. “It is
not!”

The nurse’s eyes widened. Zenia heard herself with shock; Lady Hester’s vicious temper in her voice.

She drew a sharp breath, shaking. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. But we must go.”

Mrs. Lamb’s lower lip tightened obstinately. At that sign of balking, Zenia felt violence surge through her, a mad desire to grab the nearest object and hurl it against the wall.

“All right,” she gasped, afraid that she would lose control of herself. “All right, you may keep Elizabeth here. But you may not let Lord Winter call on her. And he must not take her anywhere!”

“He is her fa—”

“He has no right to touch her!” Zenia cried. “If I come back and she is gone, I’ll make certain you hang for it. I will see you hung for the abduction of my child, do you understand me? I will see you hung!” Her voice was echoing back from the open door and the stairwell. She gripped her hands together and stood still, striving for command of her temper. “Do you understand me?” she asked, in a steadier tone.

“Yes, ma’am,” Mrs. Lamb said, visibly cowed. “I believe his lordship has left London, in any case.”
 

“How do you know that?”

The nurse curtsied, her eyes cast down. “I believe he said so when he last tried to call here, ma’am, and you would not see him.”

“Good,” Zenia said. She found that her breathing had become more regular. “That is good. I will feel easier then. I know that you will be responsible with her.”

“Oh, yes, ma’am. I promise we will go along quite as we always do.”

“I shall not be gone above four days.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Mrs. Lamb said meekly.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“Does your gentleman have family at Whitby?” asked one of her carriage companions, a stocky man with a heavy northern accent and work-hardened hands that seemed at odds with his new silk hat, which he kept dusting with his handkerchief.

“I’m not certain,” Zenia said. She spread Mr. Jocelyn’s letter on her lap, verifying for the hundredth time that she was to take the train from York to a place called Grosmont where he would meet her. The corner of the paper shivered with the smooth rock of the railway carriage. Of course the letter said that she was on the proper train, in the neat handwriting of the secretary who had initialed the page at the bottom—no surprise, since the railway guard in York had taken her ticket, the last of the ones Mr. Jocelyn had sent, read it, smiled and showed her the correct carriage. “He does not mention it, but I am to get down at Grosmont.”

All three of the gentlemen laughed. “That you will, ma’am,” said the sea captain. “For the rail ends there. You must take a coach on to Whitby. There’s little enough at Grosmont but a quarry. Whitby is at least a port town.”

This brought about a friendly argument as to the merits of life on land or on sea, while Zenia looked out upon the wild moorland country with her lips pressed together in doubt. She had been traveling two days, hurled along by the new locomotives at thirty and even forty miles an hour. She was glad she had not brought Elizabeth, for it would have been impossible to rush between trains and eat and sleep sitting up in carriages with her daughter, but it meant there was no one at hand to hearten her as the comforting towns and fields and woods rocked past and fell away, transforming to this bleak, snow-dusted wasteland.

It reminded her strongly of the desert. Cold as it was, it was empty like the desert: the little train climbed out of snug valleys onto rock-strewn hills, the steam of its exertion flitting past her window. Compared to some of the big engines of the greater lines in the south, this one had seemed rather like a chuffing animal, a living elephant-like creature lifting its smokestack as if it were a thick trunk toward the sky. Zenia had felt rather inclined to give it a kind word and a pat, although she knew by now that everything about a train was covered with soot and cinders.

There was only one first-class carriage. At first she had been uneasy to see that her companions in it were all male, as she had found that by traveling alone, she was open to disagreeable advances from some gentlemen, but these three had turned out to be kind and friendly, without undue familiarity. Besides the captain, the others were a supervisor and an engineer at mines, not highly polished men, but very much inclined to treat her with anxious respect. One had already offered to take her to his mother at Egton Bridge, where Zenia could wait in case her “gentleman” was not at Grosmont to meet her.

She sincerely hoped that he would be. There was no set of return tickets—why this lack had not previously occurred to her she did not know—only that once she set out, the demands of the tickets and trains and their pell-mell schedule had compelled her forward with a kind of momentum of their own.

It was slowing now. Even this train was slower, as if it were in no hurry to reach anywhere before dark, though the clouds hung low and gray with impending snow.

“Look at that fellow,” the captain said suddenly.

Zenia turned with everyone else, looking out past a brief hail of cinders as the train swung around the curve of a hill.

“By George,” said the supervisor. “What is it, a gypsy?”

On the far side of a desolate hollow, a horseman brought his mount to a halt at the top of the rise. Against the leaden sky, he was a brilliant mark, in loose robes of scarlet and gold and turquoise blue, with a dark cape that drifted out in the wind. His horse was pale white, as brightly adorned, with long red tassels on its bridle and a tail that dusted the snowy ground.

“Must be a gypsy,” the captain said. “What a magnificent animal.”

The train rolled on, the figure lost to sight so suddenly that Zenia was hardly even sure that she had seen it. But her heart was pounding.

It was a gypsy,
she said to herself. She bit her lip. “If you please, sir,” she murmured, “what is a gypsy?”