The LadyShip (21 page)

It was Alice, the strapping, round-faced kitchen-maid.

She appeared at the head of the stairs holding a candle in
one hand and a book in the other. She was yawning, but
this act was left uncompleted when she became aware of
Clarissa, hissing at her and making frantic motions with her
hand.

“Is there something wrong, miss?”

Clarissa regarded the maid consideringly. She stood a
good head taller than Clarissa and had a somewhat vacuous
cast of countenance, but the book in her hand indicated
that she could read—not a common accomplishment in
serving-girls—and it was therefore probable that she was
not so dull-witted as she looked. Furthermore, Clarissa saw
that the book was Mrs Radcliffe’s
A Sicilian Romance
—
which decided her firmly in favour of enlisting Alice’s assis
tance in lieu of the treacherous Mrs Judson’s.

“What is your name?” Clarissa asked her.

“Alice, miss. How may I serve you?”

Clarissa, pulling Alice into her room and closing the door
softly behind her, told her, “I am being abducted!”

Alice’s reaction to this confidence was a vast improve
ment on Mrs Judson’s. Her eyes widened, and she breathed
thrillingly, “Oh, miss, how wonderful!”

“Oh, no, how can you say so?” Clarissa uttered tragically. “No one has suffered as I have!”

Alice, keeping Mrs Radcliffe’s heroine in mind, begged to
reassure the young lady on this point, but Clarissa, refining
her approach, said, “I am alone in the world—an orphan
cast upon the mercy of kind strangers such as yourself. The
person who brought me here—I cannot call him a gentle
man—is carrying me off to be married to an odious old man
who wants only my fortune!”

Although a great reader of romances, Alice had a stubbornly logical mind, and she now asked irrelevantly why miss would spend the night in such a modest inn when she
could afford to travel in the first style of elegance.

“Because this is an
abduction!
” Clarissa repeated exas
peratedly. “He—that fiend—does not wish to call attention to his crime. Besides, he thinks I will be safe in this lonely place—but I know there is a sleigh in the stables, and I am
determined to escape in it!”

Clarissa was rapidly being carried away by her own imag
ination if not yet by the waiting sleigh—and for every cavil
that Alice raised, she contrived unanswerable inventions
until even Alice was quite carried away by Clarissa’s pas
sionate sincerity—not to mention her golden beauty,
which was quite as exotic to the scrubbed-faced, mousey-
haired Alice as Clarissa’s fictions. Yes, there was a sleigh, Alice confirmed, and she knew how to hitch the horses to it
and to drive it, so that there would be no need to wake the ostler—but where would miss go in it?

“To my True Love in—in Northampton!” said Clarissa,
trying to remember precisely where they were at the mo
ment. She was relieved to hear Alice say that was no great
distance and she could therefore drive miss and be back be
fore anyone knew she was gone. So grateful was Clarissa to hear this that she recklessly promised to make Alice her abi
gail if she would come away with her, but Alice, perhaps
recognising that assisting in one brief adventure might be less taxing than a lifetime of looking after a volatile mistress, declined with thanks and said she would go now and
hitch up the sleigh.

Reassured by Alice’s stealthy passage back down the hall
to the stairs, Clarissa closed her door, piled her baggage up
next to it in readiness, and went to the window to see if she
could see the stables from there.

Alice, meanwhile, was creeping, as inconspicuously as a large and somewhat ungainly girl could, past the kitchen to
wards the outside door. A faint glow of light came from the
kitchen, but she knew that a lantern was habitually left
hanging there overnight and thought no more about it. It
was imperative, Clarissa had insisted, that they make haste,
and Alice had been so overcome by Clarissa’s appealing
green eyes, that she had not thought to question her on that head—which was just as well, for Clarissa herself had no
very clear idea of what she was going to do once having es
caped the inn, except that it would teach Ned a much-
needed lesson if he were to suffer a few hours’ worth of the
anxiety she had expended on his behalf!

“Here, girl! What are you up to?”

Alice jumped at the unexpected sound of her mistress’s voice, gave a little squeak, and being considerably less in
ventive than Miss Dudley, hesitated for a heart-thump
ing moment before replying, “Just putting the cat out,
ma’am!”

“Oh?” said Mrs Judson, arms sceptically akimbo. “And
where is the cat? In your pocket?”

“No, ma’am—outside! I’ve just put him out!”

“In that case, there’s no call for you to go skulking about
here as if you were up to no good, is there? Bolt the door
and get yourself to bed.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Alice said, doing as she was told and
sidling past her scowling employer and up the stairs again.
She hesitated at the top, but seeing that Mrs Judson was fol
lowing close behind, she continued on up the narrower
staircase to the top-storey staff quarters, telling herself that
she would return when the coast was clear.

Mrs Judson, meanwhile, continued quietly down the
passage to Miss Dudley’s room and paused. She did not
need to see the sliver of light under the door to tell her that
the young lady had not abandoned her absurd scheme to
run away from that darling young Mr Bennett. Alice’s com
plicity was easy to read in her guileless expression—and
besides, Mrs Judson had herself put out the cat not ten second
s before Alice came tiptoeing past her. She waited for a
moment, and then heard a light footstep on the other side
of the door and an eager voice whispering, “Alice! Is that
you?”

Mrs Judson chuckled softly, jangled the ring of keys out
from her petticoat pocket, and with one of them quickly
locked Clarissa’s door from the outside

Lord Vernon deduced
from Miss Bennett’s stricken ex
pression that his question had been indelicate; that it had hit the mark was also evident. He was contrite enough,
however, not to press her for an answer, and instead em
barked on an apparently irrelevant reminiscence about one of his late wife’s less successful charities.

“Sarah, you see, was forever picking up strays of one
kind or another. They generally turned out well enough—if
you like one-eared cats about the house and broken-down
screws rescued from an overloaded brewer’s cart eating up
the oats in your stables—but sometimes even she had to
agree that the case was hopeless. One young devil in her or
phanage, I recall, was particularly wild, but Sarah thought
that if she took him into the house and treated him kindly,
he might be tamed. He couldn’t be, of course, not being a cat, but it cost us a hysterical housemaid and a set of lost
silver-plate before Sarah admitted defeat and turned the vil
lain over to the magistrate.”

“It was generous of Lady Vernon to make the attempt,”
Elinor said. She was beginning to have a vivid picture of
what her ladyship must have been like—and why Lord Ver
non had loved her as he had.

“Aye—she always believed nothing ventured, nothing
won. What’s more, she persistently maintained that the ef
fort was as important as the result.”

Elinor smiled at Lord Vernon’s sincere, if transparent, ef
fort to effect in her a satisfaction with her bleak hopes. She could have told him—but did not—that she had long con
sidered herself fortunate in having loved Marcus Allingham
in spite of the hopelessness of her love. Had he asked her,
however, if she were satisfied with that, she would have said that not even an incurable romantic such as he was
could be happier with the dream than with the reality.

She said, rather, “One must do what one can, even at the
risk of failure.”

“But have you, my dear, done all you can? Or have you
been afraid to tempt fortune?”

Elinor opened and closed her hands in her lap, staring down at them with a frown. “It is not a question of fear,
Lord Vernon, but of—of eligibility.”

“You must not take my animadversions on Marcus’s
character quite so seriously, Miss Bennett—he is not nearly
so fixed in his ways as you may think. Indeed, he is the only
man I know whose friends and relatives are eager to see
him married solely so that he will not become set in his hab
its. You said yourself that you do not think him precisely a
plodder.”

“There is a considerable chasm, my lord, between being
willing to run a little risk, and being prepared to accept al
most universal condemnation for one’s actions. It takes a strong man to run counter to tradition and family loyalties.”

“I know of men who have done it,” Lord Vernon said,
with a remembering look. “I think I know one when I meet
him.”

“Nevertheless,” Elinor said, hoping she sounded more
resolute than she felt, “the question need never arise. I cer
tainly will not put it to the test.”

There was a light in Lord Vernon’s brown eyes that even
in the dim light of the coach told her she could not depend
on him to respect her resolution.

“You may not be obliged
to, my dear,” he said provokingly, but when she looked a
question at him, he assumed an air of innocence and would
not explain himself. When he returned to the subject of Eli
nor’s plans for her sister, she knew he had not forgotten his
object.

“Is Miss Lucinda as contented to remain at The LadyShip
as you are?” he asked.

Elinor hesitated at this. “You make it sound less a virtue,
my lord, than a kind of—of inflexibility—to be contented
with one’s lot.”

“Not so bad as that, but I do not see it as unblemished
virtue, either—witness my constant, if futile, efforts to ef
fect even the smallest deviation in Marcus’s routine. But
you are leading me from my point, Miss Bennett—what I
meant was, is your sister happy at The LadyShip?”

“My sister knows no other life.”

“Do you?”

“Well, no, but I believe that when she has seen a little
more of the world, she will be better qualified to choose the
life she wishes to lead. I have had no such choice.”

“Do not speak as if you were eighty years old, Miss Ben
nett. You may yet be able to see something of that world
you are so intent on sending your sister out into. And if you
will forgive my mentioning what must be evident to every
one but you, my dear girl, it is you and not Lucy who be
longs on that larger stage. She does not wish it. You, on the
other hand, simply do not acknowledge it.”

Elinor was conscious of a tightness in her throat and tears
stinging the backs of her eyes, and knew the reason. Lord Vernon, besides being most uncomfortably perceptive,
spoke to her as she had hoped Ned would and as no one
had for years, even Lucy. It was as if she had been alone for
all that time, despite the many well-intentioned people
who surrounded her at The LadyShip, and had suddenly re
discovered an old friend. He spoke to her heart, but from
her long lack of such caring sympathy, she could not imme
diately answer him.

He seemed to understand this, and said
no more on the subject, turning instead more lightly to the
admirable features of their vehicle and remarking on the
fine mahogany panelling on the inside of the doors and ex
ploring the multitude of little compartments over their
heads and beneath their seats, until he had coaxed her back
into something like her former self-assurance. It was at this
point that he raised the leather shade covering his window
to glance out and then turned to grin at Elinor.

“Do you know, Miss Bennett, I believe we are about to
be snowbound after all.”

“Oh, surely not!” Elinor exclaimed, but even as the
words left her lips, she felt the coach come to a sluggish
halt. They had been moving at a steadily slower pace for an
hour, but Elinor had scarcely noticed this, being absorbed
by Lord Vernon’s devastatingly accurate observations.
Now she was brought back to a consciousness of their situ
ation when Lord Vernon opened his door and she could
see that the sides of the road had been narrowed by drifts to
a mere country lane. The prospect ahead was even less
hopeful, as they could plainly see when Mr Allingham had
jumped down to open Elinor’s door and they all stood in the roadway surveying the white-blanketed countryside
around them.