Sheri Cobb South (15 page)

‘“old on a minute,” Mr. Brundy interrupted this fascinating narrative. “Did she tell you why she decided to dub ‘erself me sister?”

“Oh, I almost forgot the best part,” said Sir Aubrey, his grim expression momentarily dispelled by a smile. “It seems that you, Ethan, are a depraved seducer of innocents, wielding your vast fortune as a weapon against the defenseless.”

“What?”

“You will be glad to know, however, that your character is not utterly beyond redemption. Miss Crump was convinced that you would draw the line at incest.”

“Was she, now? I must remember to thank ‘er!”

“No, Ethan, I beg you will not mention it to her. After all, her ludicrous reading of your character was colored by her recent experiences with her employer.” He paused, frowning at the golden liquid in his glass. “Is it any wonder that I wish to rescue her from such a life?”

Mr. Brundy, understanding the question to be rhetorical, did not vouchsafe a reply.

“I suppose if her father is well-born enough, such a marriage would not be despised, but what if he isn’t? I wasn’t exaggerating by much when I said it would kill my mother to see me make a misalliance. And who could blame her? I’m a Tabor, dash it all, related to the Inglewoods on the distaff side! I owe something to my heritage. I would’t expect you to understand, not coming from the same background, but I have to think of my heir, and
his
heir.”

Mr. Brundy, unimpressed, shook his head in disbelief. “I’ll never understand the Quality. You’ll marry women you don’t like, all so you can ‘ave children ‘oo are twice as ‘igh in the instep as you are!”

“I must say, those are fine words, coming from a man who married the daughter of a duke!” retorted Sir Aubrey.

“No, but I’d already decided to marry ‘elen even before I knew ‘oo she was. If you’ll remember, I didn’t know ‘er father was a dook until you told me.”

Sir Aubrey gave a bitter, humorless laugh. “I seem to be an expert at arranging your love affairs, don’t I? Was it only a month ago that I was telling you how to achieve your own ends and still look like a hero?” He embarked on his third glass of brandy, but stayed the glass halfway to his lips. A light slowly dawned in his gray eyes, and he put the brandy down untasted. “Ethan,” he said with great deliberation, “I think it is necessary that I leave you for awhile.”

“Is there any chance,” Mr. Brundy asked hopefully, “that you’ll be taking your mum with you?”

Chapter 12

You men have such restless curiosity! JANE AUSTEN,
Northanger Abbey

After extracting a promise from Mr. Brundy not to confront Polly with her misdeeds, Sir Aubrey departed Brighton the next morning. Travelling alone in his high-perch phaeton drawn by two showy chestnuts, he accomplished the fifty-mile journey to London in rather less than the usual five hours, and within half an hour of his arrival in Town presented himself at Minchin’s Book Emporium. He entered that establishment just as another customer was leaving, and as a result narrowly avoided a collision. Immediately he remembered a similar incident in this very doorway, when a petite young woman in a frumpy bonnet and a dowdy stuff gown had barrelled into him on her way out. She had looked up at him for only a fraction of a second, but as if it had happened only moments earlier, he suddenly recalled with startling clarity tear-filled blue eyes set in a heart-shaped face framed by red-gold curls. Good God! It had been Polly! He strode briskly up to the counter, more impatient than ever to settle his business with Mr. Minchin.

“Good afternoon, sir. How may I be of service to you?” asked an apple-cheeked shopgirl, bobbing a curtsy.

A crisp white apron covered her dark stuff gown, and a frilled mob cap performed a similar service for her dark curls. Sir Aubrey thought of his Polly similarly attired, and resolved from this day forward to treat shopgirls with more kindness than had previously been his wont.

“The bestowal of such a smile is surely the greatest service any man might ask for,” he replied, and had the satisfaction of seeing the girl fairly beam with pleasure. “Is Mr. Minchin in? I should like to have a word with him.”

“I’ll inquire at once, Mr.—?”

“Sir Aubrey Tabor.”

“Yes, sir.”  After bobbing another curtsy, the blushing shopgirl hurried across the room to tap on a door at the rear. It opened a crack, and a feverishly whispered conversation ensued, the only part of which Sir Aubrey could distinguish was his own name. A moment later, the door closed again and the shopgirl returned, self-consciously smoothing the skirt of her starched apron.

“Mr. Minchin will be happy to see you, sir,” she said somewhat breathlessly. “If you will follow me, please.”

“To the ends of the earth,” declared Sir Aubrey, making the girl giggle.

She tapped on the door once more, and this time it was thrown open wide to reveal a tiny room cluttered with books and papers. The only pristine surface in the chamber belonged to a wooden straight chair, a circumstance which led Sir Aubrey to believe that the stack of books piled haphazardly onto the floor beside it had been hastily removed for the express purpose of offering him a place to sit. A wasted effort, he decided, sneering disdainfully at the pinched little man who had answered the shopgirl’s knock.

“Come in, Sir Aubrey, come in!” gushed Mr. Minchin, waving his noble guest into the cramped and cluttered hole. “Do sit down! What may I do for you today?”

Ignoring the man’s offer of a chair, Sir Aubrey waited until the girl had withdrawn, then closed the door and leaned languidly against it.  “I am looking for information, Mr. Minchin.  I understand you recently had in your employ a young woman by the name of Crump.”

Mr. Minchin removed his wire-rimmed spectacles and laid them on the desk, his expression perfectly blank. “Crump? I’m not familiar with the name.”

Sir Aubrey smote his brow in a gesture of self-reproach. “No, no, of course you are not! You would have known her as Miss Hampton—Miss Polly Hampton.”

Mr. Minchin’s rather beady eyes bulged, and he shuffled through the papers on his desk with trembling fingers. “Miss Hampton? Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I hired Miss Hampton in March, but was obliged to let her go after only four months. A pretty little thing, but intolerably lazy.”

“What can you tell me about Miss Cr—Hampton’s background? You say you hired her in March? Was she newly arrived in London at that time?”

“With all due respect, Sir Aubrey, I can hardly be expected to recall in minute detail the affairs of everyone who seeks employment from me!”

“No doubt you are right.” Sir Aubrey withdrew a golden guinea from his pocket and weighed it idly in his hand. “Pity, that.”

“Of course, I could be wrong,” began Mr. Minchin eying the coin greedily, “but I seem to remember Miss Hampton mentioning a village called Littledean, in Leicestershire. It seems she was raised by the vicar there.”

“How fortuitous for me that you should remember,” drawled Sir Aubrey, flicking the coin to the bookseller.

“As I said, her performance here was far from satisfactory. I hope you were not looking to hire her as a maid of all work?”

“You may be easy on that head, Mr. Minchin,” Sir Aubrey assured him. “I have no intention of hiring Miss Crump—Miss Hampton, if you prefer—as a maid of all work.”

“Only the horizontal kind, eh?”   Mr. Minchin asked knowingly, as his somewhat hunted expression yielded to a curious blend of relief and lasciviousness. There was, in his opinion, only one thing a man of Sir Aubrey’s stamp might want from a girl like Polly Hampton. “Well, she’ll be a dainty armful, I’ll grant you that. I once considered her for that position myself, but she wouldn’t have me. No doubt she was holding out for bigger game.”

“You seem to be laboring under some delusion as to Miss Hampton’s character,” observed Sir Aubrey, studying the bookseller beneath lazily drooping eyelids.   “Allow me to enlighten you.”

Every trace of indolence vanished in an instant. With his left hand, Sir Aubrey grabbed the luckless Mr. Minchin by the cravat; with his right, he delivered a punishing blow to the now-terrified bookseller’s nose. Mr. Minchin crumpled to an inanimate heap on the floor, gushing blood from his abused proboscis. After giving the heap a nudge with his booted foot to assure himself that his victim yet lived, Sir Aubrey opened the office door to find a goggle-eyed shopgirl staring at him in horrified fascination.

“Mr. Minchin has decided to take a nap,” Sir Aubrey informed her. “He should awaken shortly very much the wiser.”

And with that prediction, he betook himself from the shop.

* * * *

The following evening found Sir Aubrey in the village of Littledean, where he stopped to spend the night at a hostelry bearing the ambitious appellation of The Royal Arms. As most such establishments claiming royal patronage tended to be far more ancient than this red-brick structure, his curiosity was piqued. When the innkeeper placed a bowl of stew and a large tankard of home-brewed ale on the table before him, Sir Aubrey jerked his thumb in the direction of the window, through which the red-and-gold sign could be seen swaying in the summer breeze.

“The Royal Arms?” he remarked, inviting the innkeeper to explain.

“Aye, ‘twill be twenty years ago this October that His Royal Highness the Duke of Clarence occupied this very room. Sat right there before the fire, he did,” added the innkeeper, pointing to the fireplace.

“He never stayed here!” said Sir Aubrey in skeptical accents, his gaze taking in not only the fireplace, but the entire room. Although it was clean enough, there was nothing in its somewhat stark appearance to recommend it to royalty.

“Well, no, not overnight,” admitted his host with some reluctance. “He was visiting Lord Littledean for the hunt, so naturally he stayed at the big house with his lordship. But after the hunt, they stopped by here, and His Royal Highness finished off two tankards of my best home-brewed. That’s why we call it The Royal
Arms,”
he explained, “on account of he was lifting ‘em so free.”

Declaring his host a veritable font of information, Sir Aubrey went on to inquire as to the direction of the church, and what time he would be most likely to find the vicar at home. Having been advised on this head, he went upstairs to his room, eager to pursue his quest upon the morrow. Accordingly, he arose early, partook of a hearty breakfast prepared by the innkeeper’s buxom wife, and set out on foot toward the church. This proved to be a very ancient building crafted of gray stone in the Norman tradition, with a smaller dwelling behind which Sir Aubrey assumed (correctly, as it proved) to be the vicarage. He strode up the shrubbery-lined path and knocked on the door, and was just congratulating himself on his progress when he suffered his first setback.  For the black-garbed clergyman who answered Sir Aubrey’s knock appeared to be several years the baronet’s junior, and far too young to have reared Polly as a daughter.

“Are—are you the vicar?” asked Sir Aubrey, startled out of his usual
savoir-faire.

“Indeed, I am Reverend Townsend,” said the young man, stroking his rather long chin and regarding his visitor curiously through mild blue eyes framed by wire-rimmed spectacles. “How may I help you, Mr.—?”

“Sir Aubrey Tabor, of Tabor Hall, Somerset,” said the baronet quickly, offering his hand as he remembered his manners, “I’m sorry to trouble you, Reverend. I was looking for—but it appears I have been misinformed.”

“Perhaps so, but if you will tell me whom you are seeking, I shall do anything in my power to assist you.”

Having travelled so far, Sir Aubrey decided he had nothing to lose. “I was told the vicar of this village had taken in an, er, orphan and reared her as a daughter. As the young lady is now almost twenty years old, you are far too young to be the man.”

Enlightenment dawned in the vicar’s eyes. “Ah! You are thinking, no doubt, of the previous vicar. Reverend Jennings. He passed to his reward a month ago, and I have only since then acquired the living here. His widow has gone to live with her sister in Northampton.”

Sir Aubrey thanked the vicar for the information, then returned to The Royal Arms to prepare for yet another day’s journey.   But even as he set his horses’ heads toward Northampton, he wondered if he were bent on a wild-goose chase. Even if he found Mrs. Jennings, it did not necessarily follow that she would furnish the name of Polly’s father, even if she knew his identity. Which, wondered Sir Aubrey, would be worse: to be unable to find him, or to discover him to be someone unworthy of the Tabor connection? Damn Lord Camfield, the old lecher! Why couldn’t he have been her father, like he was supposed to?

With such melancholy thoughts to accompany him, it was little wonder that by the time Sir Aubrey reached his destination late that afternoon, his spirits were drooping considerably. Stopping at a posting-house, he surrendered his winded team to the ostler and went inside in search of refreshment and information. When the former was delivered by a rotund serving-woman swathed in a voluminous white apron, he broached the subject of the latter.

“Have you any knowledge of a Mrs. Jennings, relict of a Leicestershire vicar, who arrived about a month ago? I believe she has been living with her sister since the death other husband.”

“Aye, she be the sister of Miss Whitfield. Live in Wembley Cottage, they do.”

This information was delivered in a voice which, Sir Aubrey thought, he might have heard all the way from Brighton and thus spared himself the trip. Thus, it was not surprising that it caught the attention of another serving-wench, this one younger and eager to attract the notice of the handsome and obviously well-breeched stranger in their midst. Perching her tray on one generous hip, she sidled up to Sir Aubrey’s table and awaited her opening as the older woman gave him directions to Wembley Cottage.

“Just follow the main road past the church, till you come to a lane leading right. Follow it until you reach the end, and  then—”

“It’ll take him all day to reach Wembley Cottage that route,” the younger woman chided the elder, then turned the full force of her charms on Sir Aubrey. “Now, if you was to ask me, I’d tell you to turn before you get to the church, and take the footpath through the spinney.”