My Dear Jenny Page 4

  Chapter Four

  In the next three weeks (for Mrs. Hatcher’s son was nearly well within the first week when the ostler disobligingly fell ill and the quarantine was begun anew), it seemed to Miss Prydd that most of her time was spent in contriving to keep Miss Pellering and Mr. Ratherscombe as far away from each other as possible, and to show that gentleman in as bad a light as possible. In this effort Domenic Teverley was her faithful servant, Peter Teverley her amused conspirator, and the Reverend Mr. Dunham no earthly use at all. The cleric swayed between poles: One day he was so scandalized that he could not bear but that the runaways be married immediately; the next—after a short talk with Mr. Teverley—he was entirely against any sort of liaison between Mr. Ratherscombe and Emily, whom he persisted in referring to as “that poor ruined saint.”

  Jenny—for so she had resigned herself to being called—found that for her part she was more bored than exhausted by the business of playing duenna. While such a pretext was feasible, she hovered over Emily lest she succumb to another attack of nerves. Shortly there existed between herself and the girl such a bond of affection that no pretext was necessary. While lphegenia was careful not to say a word against Ratherscombe to Emily, she was equally careful that the dislike in which she held him was quite apparent. After the first week, Emily broke down and begged to know what Dear Jenny found to dislike in dear, dearest Adrian.

  “My dear Emily, it is hardly for me to say. He is your brother—half brother,” she corrected heartlessly.

  “No, honestly, Jenny. You seem so uncomfortable with Adrian, quite as if he had been unpleasant to you, or.…”

  “It is not for me to say,” Jenny countered. “And I have always had the greatest dislike of tale bearers.”

  “But what could Adrian possibly have done that would bring you to tale-bear?”

  “Nothing, as you see, for I have twice refused to do so, and shall continue to do—”

  “But what?”

  So Jenny, making it obvious that she was reluctant, continued. “He is what my cousins would call a queer nabs. A loose fish!”

  “Oh, no, Jenny, he’s not like that at all! He’s the smallest bit flash, and awfully dashing, and—”

  “All show and no go,” Miss Prydd finished drily. “And although he is your brother, my love, I wonder at his most unthinking conduct toward you in these last few days ... barely an inquiry after you! He’s spent all his time in the taproom drinking Mrs. Hatcher’s punch. I’m sorry to have to say these things to such a devoted sister as you are—and surely sisterly love can surmount a great deal of trying. But I’m not his sister, you see, and these little flaws do appear to me.”

  Picking up some work, she offered to escort her friend down to the sitting room they had secured for their use, and effectively cut off that conversation.

  For his part, Adrian Ratherscombe spent the first week of the incarceration at the inn variously inebriated, very inebriated, and, in Domenic’s dire phrase, four sheets to the wind. During that week it was his custom to rise late, beginning his inroads on the punchbowl by way of breakfasting, and to contrive to convince himself that the delay in their elopement and the dangers to which it exposed them were somehow Emily’s fault. He did not fail to treat her shabbily. However, some time in the eighth day at the inn, his natural canniness reasserted itself with a flare, and he realized that if he seriously planned to continue the elopement—and, heaven only knew, with the marriage!—he had best to preserve Emily’s good opinion. Strangely, when he had been at his most obnoxious she had flown to his defense against the detached distaste evidenced by Miss Prydd, Mr. Teverley, and young Domenic. When he began to exert himself to charm, she began to feel uncomfortable in his company, to note discrepancies in his stories, and generally to feel herself depressed at the thought that they were to be man and wife very shortly. Had the disapproval she met been aimed at her elopement, she would have shortly been re-infatuated, but of course they knew nothing of the elopement, she assured herself, and the attitude she felt was one of affection for her and tolerance of her “stepbrother” for her sake.

  Miss Prydd’s letter to Emily’s home was sent, and a reply received very shortly. The letter, full of tearful gratitude and a mother’s thanks, begged Iphegenia to continue in her excellent fashion, and to inform them when a coach might be sent to collect Emily and, if she wished, herself, for the trip back to London. The letter was signed Elizabeth Pellering. Jenny had long since learned that Emily’s papa was a member of the House of Lords and took it, in the child’s disparaging words, “quite dreadfully serious.” Feeling that Emily’s departure in the Graybarr coach would take considerably more fortitude than she had to muster, Jenny reported the contents of the letter to her cabal: Mr. Teverley and his cousin, Mr. Dunham, reverend conspirator by default, and Mrs. Hatcher. The landlady had become part of their plots when she had threatened, within Mr. Teverley’s hearing, to dun Miss Pellering for Mr. Ratherscombe’s tavern bill. Once she had been apprised of their surmises regarding Emily and Mr. Ratherscombe, it was all they could do to keep her from storming straightaway to the taproom to upbraid the villain for his crimes. She was finally brought to an appreciation of a subtler tack, and came to delight in frustrating Mr. Ratherscombe’s flirtations and in embarrassing him as often as she found convenient.

  Each of the conspirators acted in his own way to further their work on Emily’s (unknowing) behalf. Miss Prydd was her friend, her confidante, and, as Adrian Ratherscombe had reason to know, an unobtrusive gooseberry. Mrs. Hatcher was more obtrusive—delightedly so, for she had the advantage, as Domenic put it, of being able to bluster with offended dignity if Mr. Ratherscombe so much as hinted that she was where she was not wanted, to the great amusement of the invalids, who would call out cheers from their sickroom. Domenic had early appointed himself Emily’s most willing slave, and spent endless hours amusing her with games and conceits. She was mostly too distracted to notice, or to voice her gratitude for his cheer, but from time to time she would look up, and make the world into heaven for Dom by saying softly, “Thank you, Dom. You’re very good to me.”

  “But Domenic is so young!” Emily insisted later to Iphegenia,

  “He’s two years older than you, my love.” Miss Prydd replied evenly. “And of course, he’s not seen as much of the world as, say, your stepbrother has. But when Dom has a little town brass, I fancy he’ll do very nicely. He’s old for his years and has a nice set of manners. Only think of his wasting all last evening playing fox-and-geese with me, when I know he had far rather be talking with you.”

  The unvoiced fact that Adrian Ratherscombe had spent that same evening glaring at the bottom of his oft-emptied tankard was not lost on Emily. Nor was Miss Prydd’s absolute, obtuse refusal to discuss her hint about Adrian.

  But even with the unflagging attention showered on Emily by her protectors—attention for which she thanked them prettily, and which she regarded as her due—the time was bound to come when she must face Adrian Ratherscombe alone. During the first week of their incarceration at the inn, Emily’s chaperones were comforted by the fact that Mr. Ratherscombe was mostly too inebriated to ingratiate himself with her. Once he had, through his punch-fuddled haze, grasped the extent of the conspiracy to foil him, as well as the danger of treating Emily too cavalierly, he began at once to mend his fences. One morning before breakfast Emily left Jenny amidst piles of hairpins, combs, and brushes, struggling to bring order to her unfashionably long hair, and slipped downstairs for a breath of air. Adrian, who had been lounging in the hallway, saw the opportunity and followed her into the kitchen garden.

  “At last, Emmy, at last!” he breathed. “Without those cursed interfering—well, I beg your pardon, but how can I feel else when their presence—your friends!—keeps me from holding you!”

  He uttered this in a tone that would have credited a country player, letting the vibrant tones of his voice drip with meaning. Emily permitted herself to be embraced passionately, wondering why t
he entire procedure was so curiously flat.

  “Oh, Adrian,” she breathed at last. It was, after all, very pleasant to be cuddled before breakfast in the early morning sunlight, and, after all, she was in love with him, and he with her, and they were eloping together. “Good heavens.” She opened her eyes and her head snapped up with a force that almost demolished Mr. Ratherscombe’s carefully wrought neckcloth.

  “Emmy?” Ratherscombe was wakened from the pleasant contemplation of his own powers of persuasion.

  “My God, Adrian, do you realize that we’ve been eloping for nine whole days? I’m ruined! Oh, heavens!”

  Ratherscombe stared at Emily dumbly as she dropped, regardless of her dress, to the dusty bottom step of the kitchen garden to sit, staring at the dirty pathway.

  “But my love...” Ratherscombe began tentatively.

  “Eloping is one thing, but I never thought we’d be at it so long! Good heavens, we shan’t be received in town at all after this. And poor Mamma will never forgive me—she’ll never recover from the mortification! Oh, my goodness, what are we—what am I to do?”

  Ratherscombe cleared his throat awkwardly. “But Emily, my rose, surely you knew—you understood when you consented to our elopement—that the world would disapprove ... call us fools. Ah, but love, the world forgets its scandals, and will forgive two people in love....’

  “I was prepared to give up the world,” Emily said aggrievedly, “but it does seem hard when I have barely been to Almack’s more than three times!”

  Ratherscombe had restored her to her original place. He took her hand to draw her to her in his arms, cheek close with hers, as he gestured grandly toward their future, which appeared to be hidden just behind the woodshed, next to a crabapple tree.

  “Think of our life together! Think of our love, burning through time forever, pure and fine!” Abandoning the future, Mr. Ratherscombe applied himself to matters at hand. Emily, giving herself to the slightly dulled glory of his kiss, thought obligingly of the future, and decided that perhaps their love was worth all—even missing attendance at Almack’s for the rest of the season. (Surely their exile from the ton would not last longer than that!)

  This scene might have lasted through several more kisses, and quite a few grand speeches, but for the sudden appearance of Mrs. Hatcher, bearing a deep pan full of soapy water. With calculated mis-aim she tossed the water from the pan, neatly missing Emily and entirely destroying the finish on Ratherscombe’s boots.

  “Damme, I might have known it!” he howled with rage. “No sooner do I get a moment to consolidate my ground, when one of those damned interfering—”

  “Oh, sir!” keened Mrs. Hatcher. “Oh, sir, sir, how ever did I come to do such a thing? Oh, come, sir, let’s have them, and I’ll put my Micah to work on them straightaway. Oh, sir, you’ll catch your death of cold standing there in the dew. And you, Miss Emily, standing out in the sun without so much as a sunshade! Next you’ll be freckling for sure, and then what’s to do I’m sure I don’t know!”

  Blithely ignoring the venomous glare of Mr. Ratherscombe, Mrs. Hatcher bustled the two of them inside, and Ratherscombe, forced at least to change his boots, gave up hope of any further tête à tête that morning.

  Miss Prydd’s only comment was that Emily had certainly gotten a lovely color from her little walk.

  In the next several days the couple found very little opportunity to be alone, but Ratherscombe began to work to retain Emily’s good graces, and not all Mrs. Hatcher’s bumbling, Jenny’s disinterested opinions, or Peter Teverley’s hard stares—not even Domenic’s bristlings and moonings—could totally diminish the effect of his siege on her doubts. There was no question that, had it been possible to turn time backward, Emily would have undone the elopement and her ruination. She had been thinking wistfully of weddings at St. Margaret’s, and Venetian Breakfasts, and dancing until morning. But Adrian had tactfully pointed out to her that the die was cast, and ruination was certainly her fate. In which case, what choice had she but to marry him?

  When Dr. Wibberley announced to the company that, barring relapses and new outbreaks, the quarantine should be lifted in a day or two, Emily felt no more than mild apprehension; she was prepared for her fate. Ratherscombe caught her eye with a look of arch, loverlike significance, and she blushed and nodded, entirely missing Jenny’s exit from the coffee room.

  “I hate to make you courier again, Doctor, but if you’ll give me a moment?” Jenny drew him aside as he entered the hall and, taking a half-finished note from her reticule, completed it rapidly, signed it, reread it, sanded it, sealed it, and handed it to the doctor with her thanks. “I must owe you a great deal in postage—” she began.

  “Not in the least. Mr. Teverley informed me long ago that he would pay the frank on all the letters sent by you and the young lady.” The doctor’s tone suggested that he thought all this very irregular. So did Iphegenia, but when she suggested as much to Teverley he scoffed her scruples into extinction.

  “My dear Prydd” —he had, much to her dislike, taken to addressing her so, abbreviated, he said, from Miss Prydd-whom-l-may-not-call-Jenny— “I paid postage on your notes purely as a part of our conspiracy. I assure you I am not trying to compromise either you or Miss Pellering.”

  So it was that when the Graybarrs’ traveling coach arrived on the morning they were to quit the inn, Emily and Jenny were in their room, busily packing bandboxes and talking. Jenny, by way of priming her friend for a return to London, asked questions about that city and sighed loudly over the fact that there would be no one in London to show her how to comport herself—cheerfully forgetting Maria Bevan and several other former school friends who would have been delighted to condescend to an old acquaintance.

  “I do wish I might take you to Almack’s with me,” Emily began, crumpling a pretty muslin into a ball and shoving it into one of her boxes.

  “Lord, Emmy, not that way!” Jenny snatched the gown back, folded it properly with a length of tissue, and bestowed it again in the bandbox. “Well, perhaps when you have returned from your aunt’s house—well, by this time she may well have recovered from her illness—you can do so,” Jenny suggested blandly.

  Emily, conscious that once in London her friends would be apprised of her ruin, stared weepily out the window and did not reply.

  Then she saw the coach.

  “Good God,” she breathed.

  “My dear, what is it?” Jenny asked, unaware that the coach was in the yard.

  “My parents—their barouche—how did they know I was—good heavens!” She turned to Jenny. “You have betrayed me! You wrote to them—”

  “It seemed the action of a friend.” Jenny said simply. “I thought that if you were having second thoughts about—um—visiting your aunt, you might at least like to have the choice of returning to your family. Also, my dear, I could not think it wrong to tell your people where you were, since they must have been so very worried.”

  “But you don’t understand!” Emily began desperately. “I must go with Adrian!” She sat heavily on her side of the bed and began to weep.

  “Well, according to your mamma, they have put it all over town that you have spent a fortnight with your aunt—what was her name? The one who lives near Ripon?”

  “My aunt Judith?” Emily spluttered.

  “So you see, you’re not ruined in the eyes of the world, and we here have done our best to insure that you were well chaperoned with your—um—stepbrother.…”

  “Adrian was right? There was a conspiracy?” Only the beginning of amazed relief in Emily’s voice now.

  “So you see, you need only go with Mr. Ratherscombe if it is truly what you want. Of course that will be a scandal, for while your family might be able to explain a fortnight from town, they cannot help if people put two and two together when you return to London as Mrs. Ratherscombe.”

  “Mrs. Ratherscombe?” cried Emily in alarm. “I never thought of—Mrs. Ratherscombe. Why, it makes me sound as if
I were someone’s mother.”

  Confounded by this unconsidered blow, and by the sudden possibility of a reprieve, and the possibility of returning to London in honor, albeit to a thumping scold from her mother, Emily sat in silence and thought.

  Miss Prydd finished her own packing and was just tidying up Emily’s jumbled box when a knock on the door announced Kate Hatcher, the landlady’s daughter.

  “Doctor’s here, ma’am, miss.” She aimed a curtsy somewhere between the two of them. “‘E says you can go when you wish, and Mamma asked if you wanted Micah to put them bags on top of that coach what’s come.”

  “Yes, please, Kate,” Jenny said simply. The girl bobbed again and left.

  “Your Mamma said that I might ride with you to London and stay until I can reach my friends,” said Jenny.

  “Oh, famous! Then I shall show you the ropes, and you shall see some of the city as we ride, and you can—oh, dear, what am I to tell Adrian?” Emily had gone comically from pleasure to despair.

  “I suggest,” Miss Prydd said as Micah Hatcher entered and began to gather trunks and bandboxes, “that you simply say you’ve reconsidered the elopement, and have decided to return to London. And that he may call on you there and, perhaps, woo you in more ordinary fashion. Certainly no gentleman can take exception to that.” She refrained from adding that, in her opinion, Mr. Ratherscombe was not a gentleman at all.

  “Certainly Adrian will understand,” Emily agreed without conviction. “Where have I put my pelisse?”

  All their bags had been loaded on top the coach, and hot bricks and coach rugs made ready for the journey. This commotion brought Mr. Teverley and Domenic, and finally Adrian Ratherscombe, into the courtyard.

  Jenny, shaking her head at Domenic, whispered to him, “She’s coming to London, never fear. But we must give her a moment’s leave to tell him so.”