The Penwyth Bride (The Witch's Daughter Book 1) (14 page)

My heart began to drum over the echo of Roger Penwyth’s voice.
I’ve had some news . . .
He had looked so ill when he told me this.

From over by the teacart, Lady Penwyth gave a brittle laugh. “I would take no notice of our sad relation, for surely it was another one of his oddities. He probably stood under the miller’s water wheel to sketch an interesting tumble of rock.”

“No, it was something more,” Mrs. DeVere said thoughtfully. “He looked . . . broken, if that is the correct word. His eyes . . . they were quite blind to the world.”

“Roger marches to his own drummer, to be sure,” Sir Grover said as he threw the dice. “As my wife has said, I would pay him no mind.”

“And he has nothing to be broken-up about,” Damon put in, resentfully downing another gulp of wine. “Roger is as rich as the Godolphins, if tavern gossip is to be believed, though he doesn’t spend any of his money properly. Barely owns a decent gun or servant.”

An uncomfortable silence fell, broken eventually by the rattle of dice and the resumption of the backgammon game. Lady Penwyth poured the tea, and the subject of Roger was dropped. I could well believe that he had lost himself over a sketch if it involved one of his cranes, but to sit in church soaked to the bone was quite strange, even for Roger.

Unwillingly my imagination pictured Roger with his shirt plastered to the lithe power of his body. Without warning, a coil of heat uncurled in my belly. I shuddered, wanting none of the feeling and to disperse it, I smiled boldly at Damon.

Quickly suppressing a look of startled surprise, Damon rose with a flick of his lace cuffs. He strolled over to the divan and pointedly drew up a chair next to my knee. Ignoring Mrs. DeVere’s upraised brows, he devoted three-quarters of an hour to my amusement.

I allowed him to make me laugh and to flirt. He was a gamester, a connoisseur of women, and self-consciously aware of himself . . . everything to which a young gentleman of fashion aspired. The attention he paid me was nothing more than another gamble, a hedge-bet that I could secure his future.

I knew all this. Perhaps it was my inexperience with men, perhaps it was the low value I placed upon myself, or perhaps something else--a long suppressed recklessness--that responded to his audacity. Whatever it was enthralled me and made me almost forget Roger Penwyth and his eyes lit by perilous desires.

I blushed, I simpered, I admired. I was so amused by Damon’s drawling witticisms that my sides ached from laughing, and when the DeVeres rose to say their goodbyes after drinking tea and eating Lady Penwyth’s rich iced plum cake, I hardly heard them.

We followed them out to the front portico, where a very pretty landaulet drawn by matched bays waited. Mrs. DeVere gave me an amused look before she pressed her cheek to mine in farewell. I stood next to Damon, waving as they drove away at a spanking pace.

“What a charming lady Mrs. DeVere is,” I said as they disappeared.

“Miserable hag,” Damon murmured, holding his wrist out for my hand as if we were a married couple.

My breath caught as my fingers touched his wrist. “Why do you say that?” I managed. “She is elegant and interesting. Mr. Henry DeVere seems devoted to her.”

“It defies reason. She’s a beggar and brings nothing to his estate. He was a simpleton to be cozened into marriage by a pair of fine eyes.”

I must have looked stricken, for he hastened, “The reason I dislike Mrs. DeVere is that she is an inveterate gossip and malicious to boot. She never misses the opportunity to blacken me to my mother, who now thinks that I’m the devil reborn, no small thanks to her.”

I frowned. “I thought her most tolerant in her opinions.”

Damon patted my hand on his wrist. “She’s allaying your cautions and gaining your trust so that she may drain you of gossip to use against you if she chooses. Oh, I’m not saying that she isn’t witty, but I would have a care around Annabel DeVere.”

He gazed down at me with such tender concern that the thrill I felt beginning in my knees had worked its way up to my stomach. “Whatever you say, Damon,” I replied breathlessly.

He grinned and bent his head close to mine as if to whisper in my ear.

At the same moment, I heard a scuffle and a quick intake of breath. We turned to see the maid Jenny skitter around the corner and down the stairs in a flurry of skirts.

Damon released my hand with an indulgent smile. “Perhaps you and I should have a care as well. Gossip spreads like sewer-water below stairs as well as above.”

“But there is nothing to gossip about,” I protested.

A russet brow rose wickedly. “Perhaps we should give them something, then.”

He picked up my hand and pressed a fervent kiss to it.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The late summer sun had finally released its hold on the day when Susannah slunk into the parlour to face the wrath within.

I excused myself when I saw her creep to the supper tray, driven by hunger, her eyes downcast to hide guilt and intoxication. Damon gave me a nod of understanding as I rose to get out of the way of the oncoming storm. He looked as if he would like to follow as I left the room, but consideration for Susannah bound him to stay while she endured the rage boiling on Lady Penwyth’s face. For all his faults, Damon loved his sister, and that gave hope that he was not irredeemably gone in selfishness.

Darkness reached out at me as I entered my chamber. The window had been left open to receive whatever cooling drafts the hot August night would bring. Angry voices from the family filtered up through the floorboards, but I let the words fade into dissonance while I lit a rushlight, and sat at the dressing table to remove my necklet of pearls.

Jenny hadn’t bothered to tidy after she had dressed me earlier. Absently I gathered ribands, velvet ribbon chokers, and garters, while the fragrance of wild garlic and honeysuckle called, wafting in on a welcome breath of air. The plants tried to coax me to come outside, and the elm seconded the request--I’d been neglectful--but I shut them out. Instead I began to gaze at stars as big as walnuts while I dreamed about Damon.

I envisioned his handsome face moving closer to mine . . . now our lips pressed. I could feel his hands, taste his skin . . .

I frowned. The picture in my head was changing; the face grew nebulous and shadowy. I tried again: Damon, russet hair glowing under its layer of powder, eyes laughing. The mist swirled and through it the eyes I could see were not amber, but green, gleaming like a cat’s, hypnotized by mine. Hands drifted silkily over my body . . .

I jerked, scattering a box of hairpins over the floor.

Clumsily I sank down on my knees to pick them up, panting as I tried to shake the tingle that ran from breast to cunny. If I had not known better, I would have thought someone was trying to ensnare me in a spell.

A door slammed below, followed by stifled sobs and hurrying feet. Profound silence settled on the house, the kind that no servant dared break.

The pins had scattered in a wide arc. As I sought and found each, it gradually came upon me that the silence was
too
encompassing. All at once I realized that I had not heard any rustlings or chirpings from Pretty Peter.

My eyes flew to the birdcage. It was empty.

Pins forgotten, I rose and slowly approached the cage. A whimper forced its way past my teeth.

Pretty Peter lay at the bottom on a mound of sand and suet. His head twisted backward, and he stared vacantly.

###

They were Crying the Neck as I buried my murdered canary.

“Ha . . . ha . . . har!” the field hands bellowed. The Cornish Cry was only slightly different from the Cries I had listened to in the North. They were bringing in the last sheaf of corn from the harvest and would trudge to Sir Grover’s front door with the sheaf leaking its final vestiges of life. Sir Grover would watch importantly, handing out the penny bonus with an air of good condescension.

Usually I enjoyed the Crying, for it was a harbinger of my Quiet Time. The plants would go to sleep, and their whispers would silence gradually, leaving me in peace. But today I could summon no joy as I sat beside my pet’s grave. I had laid him under a hawthorne shrub in the walled garden, where the thorned bush would discourage foraging animals from digging up his body.

Hatred had killed Pretty Peter. His neck had been viciously wrung between two angry hands, and with a shudder I wondered if I had been found out as a witch. Pretty Peter’s murder would be a potent warning from those who hated my kind. And I could not complain without exposing myself to more torments. It was a lesson I had learned early on in life.

I stayed away from the family that day, undone by grief, joining them for evening supper with muted appetite. Susannah ate gingerly as well, nursing a bruise on her cheek the size of Lady Penwyth’s palm. Damon was supping with those demanding friends in Hayle, and his parents discussed the possibility of enlarging their traditional harvest largess into a Revel.

“But husband,” Lady Penwyth said between bites of rabbit stewed with figs, “Cakes and cider have always been sufficient before. If we hold a Revel, think of the expense! The common folk would expect us to continue the same level of liberality next season, and then the next. It is always difficult to scale back charity without opening the door to their ungrateful grumbling. And our neighbors will not thank us for making them look mean in comparison.”

Sir Grover wiped the corners of his mouth precisely with the starched damask napkin. “The election will then be over and the entire Hundred can complain as much as they like,” he said, pulling a handsome silver toothpick from his waistcoat pocket. “I plan to show Lord Sidney that I can bear the expense of public service. No one wishes to sit in the Commons with a closed-fisted man.”

“Of course we must maintain our place in the district. But a Revel means having such a mix’d multitude tramping through one’s yard, one’s kitchen . . . the servants will be quite drunk afterward. Susannah, pray silence your sniveling!”

Susannah shot a resentful glare at her mother before wiping her nose on her sleeve.

She kept her eyes on her plate with sullen determination, allowing me to study her as I pleased. I wondered suddenly if it were
she
who had murdered my bird as a warning to keep my mouth shut about her excursion out into the moor to meet her lover.

“I know it will be a nuisance,” Sir Grover agreed in a rare moment of sympathy for his wife’s distresses, “but it will be worth it. Hermitage generosity will be the talk of the Hundred going into winter.”

“But will it be remembered between now and the June election?”

The sleek, vulpine expression deepened. “I will make certain it is.”

Lady Penwyth sighed. “Then I suppose I should make no more objections. Susannah, I vow your blubbering rivals that of the ‘tween maids!”

She threw her daughter a handkerchief in exasperation.

###

A Revel, in Cornish parlance, meant a public entertainment where the generosity of the host was matched by the rapacious appetites of the guests. Sir Grover indeed had decided to treat the district from high to mean. It was easier, he explained without a trace of self-consciousness, to secure support from those who liked you personally, than it was from those who did not. He had learned his lesson, he said, at the last election.

And so no expense was spared, despite Lady Penwyth’s squeaks about economy and prudence. The storeroom was emptied of hogsheads of last October’s ale and enormous wheels of the famous Penwyth cheese. The cotes burst with capons ready to slaughter, and a great razor-backed pig with evil teeth rooted for mast behind the sheds, unaware of its fated appointment with an outdoor spit.

The morning of the Revel I stared out the window, the paper garlands I was making for the head table crumpling in my lap, and tried not to think of my canary nourishing the dirt under the hawthorn shrub. I had brought Pretty Peter with me to Cornwall to protect him from the malice of the Great House’s servants who saw him as a witch’s familiar. And I had been unable to protect him after all.

I felt attenuated, as if my skin were too small for my insides. Grief and guilt had sharpened the feeling, and I struggled against the occasional welling up of my affinity.

Longingly I gazed out the window, wishing I could go to the safety of the walled garden for release, and hoping I could keep my affinity contained until after the Revel.

###

At about noontide, waggons started to choke the drive leading toward the Hermitage. Throngs of folk too poor to own a conveyance swarmed past the bottleneck, eager to find a gap in the crowd surrounding the long trestle tables filled with the good produce of Sir Grover’s home farm. Lady Penwyth’s cook and her little kitchen maids had worked themselves into exhaustion to produce seven joints of mutton, accompanied by innumerable ‘starry gazy’ pies with pilchard heads peeking out from the crust like a grotesque audience.

I moved among the rows of tables, goggling at the strange dishes. In a snatched moment, Nanny patiently explained some of the odd Cornish names and ingredients for the most peculiar: figgy obbin, which looked like a congealed mess of currant pudding; fuggan, a lumpy cake smelling of seared plums.

“We don’t have no saffron cake, more’s the pity,” Nanny lamented, “it be bad luck to eat it outdoors, and Lady Penwyth don’t want no one tramping inside unless expressly invited.”