The singing faded away. Had it ever really been a sound outside his own head? Was he getting worse? Perhaps his family would soon be building a Folly for him … Revolted by this lapse into self-pity, he gritted his teeth and decided to have a closer look, just in case there was something more substantial than his erratic mind. He gave a gasp as the song rang out once more, much closer now, and accompanied this time by another voice raised in an unearthly wailing that turned his bones to water.
“Woe, woe, woe, woe.
I will go
And when I’m dead
He’ll hang his head
And wish that I
Am here instead
Woe, woe, woe, woe!”
He hadn’t imagined all that! He felt the blood drain from his face. “Dear God!” he whispered, and stood motionless, quite incapable of taking another step.
The dark walls towered above him. The mournful wind wailed softly and set the branches rustling. The air seemed to have become icy.
An oddly penetrating voice wailed, “Who comes to my tower?”
He sent a swift glance around the clearing. He was quite alone. So there really was a ghost! He knew he was behaving like a spineless coward, but his one thought was to run. He obeyed the impulse, spun about, took a long stride, collided with something, and a piercing screech rang out. The trees seemed to ripple before his eyes.
“Now see what you’ve gone and done!”
The voice came from the ground at his feet. He looked down and relief was overwhelming.
A small girl lay sprawled on her back, looking up at him reproachfully.
“Oh—Jupiter…” he gasped.
Her solemn little face was framed by a lopsided sunbonnet from which untidy dark brown curls strayed erratically. A bent pair of spectacles hung from one ear, and two big grey eyes frowned at him. “I ’spect you’re prayering to be forgived,” she said. “While you’re talking to the angels you better ask my papa to help me. You hurt me. Very bad.”
“I’m so sorry.” He knelt beside her and retrieved the spectacles. “I didn’t know you were there.”
“Yes you did. You heered me singing and comed. I creeped round and hid ’hind you, just a’case.”
She seemed remarkably self-possessed for such a small girl. “Just in case—what?” he asked.
“Just a’case you were bad. Are you bad?” She hooked the spectacles around her ears and scanned him, her head tilting, her face anxious as she awaited his reply.
He thought, ‘She can’t be much more than five or six.’ “I don’t think so,” he answered, smiling at her. “At least, I try not to be. Sometimes, I’m afraid, I don’t try hard enough.”
A moment longer those grave eyes searched his face, then all at once she beamed sunnily. “I know,” she said, sitting up. “When you hasn’t tried hard enough to be good, you have to make ’mends. So I’ll rest here and be brave, and you can mend my toe. But you better wait while I make myself ’spectable.”
She leaned forward, arranging the skirts of her pretty pink muslin frock with great care, then ruining the effect by sticking her foot in the air and directing the beam at him once more. “Mend it now, if you please,” she commanded.
The dress, he noted, was of excellent quality and workmanship, and when he removed her little shoe he found that it also was of fine leather and design.
“You’ve got pretty hands,” she remarked.
“Thank you.” The toe of her shoe was caved in, and her stocking was torn. He set the shoe aside, and touched her foot gingerly.
“Is my toe all broke into hund’eds ’n thousands of pieces?”
“I certainly hope not.” He looked up in alarm. “Does it feel like it?”
“It feels squashed. I shall prob’ly die. And it’ll serve him jolly well right!” She added with a thoughtful nod, “Then he’ll be sorry, and he’ll come to my grave an’ cry buckets’n buckets.”
“Who will?”
“My Uncle Andy. He whipped me with a great club. With spikes onto it. And I din’t do anything very bad, ’cept go near the river.” The great eyes came tragically to meet his, and she appended, sighing, “He’ll beat me again if he finds I’ve goed out ’stead of doing my sums. Don’t you tell him, will you?”
“I think he’s far more like to beat me,” he said bracingly, “for knocking you down.”
She considered that and agreed it was very likely, adding the warning that if Uncle Andy did come, it would be better to run away quick, “’Cause he’s hugeous big an’ fierce as four lions.”
Montclair grinned and wiggled the tiny big toe with care. “Does that hurt?”
“Hidjus. I’d scream an’ have the foggers if I wasn’t so brave.”
Foggers … He suggested dubiously, “Vapours…?”
“Oh, that’s right. Is my shoe full of gore?”
“No. But a hurt can be just as painful even if it doesn’t bleed. I think you’re very brave, and I really am sorry for being so clumsy.”
She giggled. “I was trying to fright you. I was ’tending to be the Fury. I ’spect you’ll say I din’t fright you. Grown-ups always do. But”—she giggled again—“you should have seen your face!”
“I think you’re a rascal, miss,” he said with a twinkle. “And you see what happened because you played a trick on me. You might have been really hurt when I knocked you down.”
“I is really hurt,” she declared indignantly. “You stamped all over me with your grown-up feet. Did you fall down too?”
She was looking at his knuckles, which had become skinned when they’d connected with his cousin’s jaw during their battle yesterday.
“Something like that.” He straightened out the toe of her shoe. “May I replace your dainty slipper, madamoiselle?”
She looked at him wistfully. “When you hurt someone you’re s’posed to kiss it better.”
He at once obliged. She sighed rapturously, and gave him permission to replace her shoe, and after he had been instructed not to buckle the strap so tightly that her poor foot couldn’t “breathe,” she allowed him to help her stand up and to brush the twigs and dirt from her dainty frock.
“Thank you,” she said politely, and tucked her hand trustingly into his. “You can come and see my special place if you like.” She turned back to the bleak tower. Montclair frowned and hesitated. She tugged impatiently, then pushed up the spectacles which had slipped down her infinitesimal nose, and peered up into his face. “I’ll help it,” she said. And before he realized what she was about, she’d pressed a kiss on his damaged hand.
He stared at her, touched.
“Don’t be sad,” she said kindly. “You’ll be all better, quick as a bird. Only look at me!” She stuck out her foot and wriggled it so vigorously that she lost her balance and Montclair, laughing, had to restore her.
“I like your face,” she told him with the open candour of childhood. “You’re not so han’some as my Uncle Andy is, and I really p’fer my gentlemen to have golden hair. But yours curls a bit, and you’ve got d’licious eyes when you laugh only they’re a bit lonely inside when you don’t.”
Montclair gave her a rather startled glance, but she was prattling on artlessly.
“Mama says eyes are ’portant, you know, and that I must choose my friends by their eyes, so I’ll have you for a friend, if you like, and then you c’n be happy.” Her lips drooped. Suddenly, she was incredibly forlorn. “I’m lonely too. I hasn’t got any little friends.”
“Well, you have a new grown-up friend,” he said, bowing low.
She gave a delighted laugh and clapped her hands joyously.
With an answering grin he asked, “Why have you no little friends?”
“When we lived in London, the children next door laughed at me ’cause I’m—read-ishy, or something.”
“Bookish, perhaps?”
“Yes. That. It’s ’cause I wear specs, the Bo’sun says. So I throwed ’em away. But Uncle Andy found them.”
“And did he beat you with that great club again? He must be a wicked man.”
“No he’s not! He’s the bestest uncle what I ever had!” She scowled at him fiercely, saw the twinkle in his eyes and giggled, her small face becoming pink. “Oh, you’re teasing. Did you know I made that up a teensy bit? He din’t really beat me. But he did spank me. Not ’cause I hid my specs, though. He said he quite und’stood ’bout that, and that the other children were jealous, that’s all. But”—she sighed, despondent again—“they’re not really.”
“But you can wear your—er, specs now that you’ve moved away, is that it?”
“No. I weared them there, too. I can’t see to read ’thout ’em.”
She seemed awfully young to be able to read. He stared down at her sad but resigned little face, intrigued by its mixture of solemnity and childishness. “How old are you?”
“Oooh! That’s rude,” she said, cheered by this evidence of faulting in the man she thought rather scarily splendid. “I asked the Countess Lieven how old she was once, and Mama made me beg pardon.”
‘The Countess Lieven.’ Then her family must be of the Quality. He could well imagine the formidable countess’s reaction to such a question, and his lips twitched. “Your mama was quite right. And I beg your pardon.”
She beamed at him and imparted, “I’m six in December.” She again tugged at his hand. “Come on.”
Resisting, he said, “Now that we’re friends, I must warn you. You shouldn’t come to the Folly. It’s a bad place.”
“No it isn’t! It’s a nice place. And it’s not folly!”
“That’s what it’s called, Mistress—er … I think we haven’t been properly introduced, have we? May I present myself? My name is Valentine.”
She swept into a rather wobbly curtsy. “How de do? That’s what my Bo’sun says.” She lowered her voice to a ‘manly’ growl, repeated, “How de do?” then laughed merrily. “Just like that.”
“Is your Bo’sun a sailor?”
“Yes. Well, he was a long time ago. He sailed with my gran’papa for hund’eds of years, but now my gran’papa’s moved up to heaven so the Bo’sun lives with us an’ keeps asking Starry to be his missus but she won’t. I’m P’scilla. I c’n say my name now, ’cause my tooth growed back. Last month I couldn’t say it right, and everybody laughed when I tried. D’you want to see? It’s bright and new!” She halted, holding up her face and opening her mouth wide.
He admired the small, pearly new tooth and told her that they all looked very nice. “I expect you clean them every day.”
“Yes.” She sighed. “But they don’t grow much. I wish they were bigger. Like Wolfgang’s. His are pointed. I asked my Uncle Andy to file mine into points, and he said he would, but Mama wouldn’t let him. An’ Starry—she lives with us—Starry said everyone would think I was a Fury. And Furies are drefful bad creatures, you know. ’Sides, Mama said I wouldn’t be able to chew jam tarts if my teeth was all made into sharp points, and I saved a special place in my tummy for jam tarts. So I ’spect I better not have pointy teeth.”
“I agree,” said Montclair, and reserving his musician’s curiosity as to the naming of Wolfgang, took up his branch once more and asked, “Where do you live, Mistress Priscilla?”
“In London.”
“Do you stay with relations, then?”
“Oh yes. But we won’t be here long.”
“Don’t you like the country?”
She considered this, then said judiciously, “I been looking it over. It’s pretty, but there’s a awful lot of it.”
“Very true. But you shouldn’t go looking it over all alone, child.”
“I don’t. Wolfgang was with me, else Mama wouldn’t let me go out. He’s my ‘fierce an’ ’vincible guard dog,’ Uncle Andy says. Wolfgang the Terrible he calls him ’cause Wolfgang ’tacks anyone who comes near me.”
“He sounds terrible indeed.” Montclair glanced about, wondering with a touch of unease if Wolfgang was as antisocial as Soldier, or whether he was another figment of this extremely bright little girl’s obviously fertile imagination. “Where is he?”
She glanced around, then called shrilly, “Wolf … gang…!”
Almost at once there was a rustling in the undergrowth. “Here he comes,” said Priscilla fondly.
Wolfgang plunged into the clearing, then paused, scanning Montclair with ears alert and eyes unblinking. “Stand very still, Mr. Val’tine,” whispered the child. “An’ p’raps he won’t bite you very bad!”
Montclair, who had instinctively tightened his grip on the branch, regarded ‘Wolfgang the Terrible’ in silence. The dog was white with liver markings. His eyes and ears were large, he was about seven inches tall at the shoulders, and he probably weighed in the neighbourhood of ten pounds. He advanced on Montclair without marked hostility although the ratty tail did not wave a greeting. Montclair saw the somewhat protruding dark eyes fixed on the stick he held. He tossed it aside, and Wolfgang took three quick leaps to the rear. Dropping to one knee, Montclair called, “Here, Wolfgang. Come, old fellow.”
Wriggling, the dog inched forward. His ears flattened themselves against his head, and his tail was wagging so fast that it was almost invisible. He licked Montclair’s outstretched hand, then flung himself down and presented his stomach for inspection. ‘A fine guard dog you are, sir,’ thought Montclair, troubled, as he caressed the small head.
Priscilla, however, who had watched this meeting with her hands tightly clasped and an anxious look on her face, gave a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness he likes you,” she whispered. “He can be dreffully awful!”
“I’m sure he can.” Montclair stood up, took her hand tightly in his, and led her among the decaying slabs to the very edge of the pit. “Do you see her?” he whispered.
Her eyes very wide, for she had not dared venture this close, Priscilla adjusted her spectacles, peered downward, and whispered back, “No. Who?”
“The Fury. She lives down there, only she comes out if she hears little girls. Especially little girls who sing. She likes the taste of them.”
He felt the small hand tremble, and she shrank closer against his leg.
“A real—Fury?” she whispered. “Is she bad and wicked and ugly?”
“Very bad. And very ugly. She does cruel and awful things to children who come here alone.”
A pause. Then she quavered, “Wolfgang wouldn’t let her. He takes care of me. He’s braver than anything!” She thought, then added reinforcingly, “He could bite the King, I ’spect.”
“Perhaps he could. But the King is only a man. The Fury is a witch. A wicked witch with no heart and a big hairy wart on the end of her nose. So I want you to promise me you will never come here again, Priscilla. As one friend promises another.”
She looked up at him, her eyes very big behind the spectacles that made her face seem even smaller. The sunbonnet slipped down to cover her left ear. She asked, still in that hushed whisper, “Isn’t you ’fraid of the Fury?”
“Yes, I am. She must be asleep or she’d have heard us and pulled us both in there. That’s where her cooking pot is. Down at the bottom.” The child was beginning to look quite pale with fright and he thought he’d made his point, so drew her back. It was more important that she get safely to her family than that he see the Henley woman today. He sat on the blocks again and discovered that a sharp stone had worked its way into the boot sole under the ball of his foot. “I’ll just get this out,” he said, pulling off the boot. “Then, I’ll take—”
A sudden gust of wind sent a branch tumbling into the pit. Priscilla heard the scraping rattle and jerked around, pale with fright. “She’s coming!” she screeched, and was off, her frock flapping. Wolfgang the Terrible scampered after her, uttering the high-pitched howls Montclair had heard when the child was singing.
He sprang up, started to run after her, but trod on a rock and swore. Hopping, he turned back for his boot. “Wait! I’ll take you home!” he shouted, but she had already vanished into the trees.
Undoubtedly Mistress Priscilla had known the benefits of upbringing and a rather surprising amount of education. Pulling his boot back on, he racked his brain trying to think whom the child and her mama visited, and decided her ‘Uncle Andy’ must be Major Anderson, whose fine big farm was located about a mile east of the Longhills boundary. He began to run in that direction, calling her. It was too far for her to walk alone, even with the protection of the fierce and invincible guard dog.
* * *
“It is quite the most wicked thing I ever heard of,” declared Mrs. Edwina Starr, extracting Welcome from the blankets and slipping a hand mirror between the sheets.
Susan had just piled those sheets onto the now immaculate shelf in the linen room, and she watched her diminutive companion/cook/housekeeper uneasily. “I think he is a very young cat, Starry. He’ll learn in time.”
“Time is what he may not have, does he persist in forever being where he shouldn’t.” Mrs. Starr looked grimly at the little tabby who had walked in with them when first they arrived at Highperch Cottage and had since shown no inclination to leave. “But I was not referring to that particular creature, Mrs. Sue.” She took a blanket from the chair beside her with marked suspicion in her bright hazel eyes. “No Christian landlord should permit such a creeping, oozing, smelly bog to lurk about the village where little ones play. And him the Squire and a Justice of the Peace besides! A fine justice he dispenses! This blanket needs to be patched. He should have drained that bog long ago! He must be a bad man! A very bad man!”
“He most certainly is. I think I may have seen him whilst I was at Longhills—or at least, the back of him. From what I could tell, he was berating Miss Trent because she does not wish to wed him.”
“Hah! Who would, I should like to know?” Mrs. Starr shook out another blanket and sniffed it, her dainty little nostrils twitching so that she looked like a busy rabbit. “I only wish I had been here when his wicked friends or servants or whatever they were dared lay their hands on you and break dear Master Andy’s head!” She paused, her brow wrinkling with renewed indignation at the very thought of such dastardly behaviour. In her mind’s eye she still saw Andrew as a pale, silent eleven-year-old, crushed by the death of his father and bewildered by the impending loss of his mama. When Captain Tate had asked her to care for his daughter’s orphans she had agreed eagerly, and had lavished upon them all the love she would have given the children denied her when her young husband was killed in the same great sea battle which had ended the life of Lieutenant Hartley Lyddford. Andrew had been sickly as a child, and her tendency to fuss over him had not diminished when he grew into a robust and well-built young male animal full of pride and energy.
“Only to think of it fairly makes my blood boil!” she went on. “And all that wicked violence over a house which his evil lordship obviously never sets foot in, else it would not have come to such a sorry pass! Which reminds me, Master Andy found a dreadful dark painting he thinks might be better than that one hanging in the withdrawing room. The frame is quite nice and if you don’t object, it might do was it cleaned. I shall set that lazy George Dodman to it so soon as he comes home.”
Susan helped her refold the apparently acceptable blanket and set it aside to be sprinkled with powdered alum before it was put into the storage chest. “The Bo’sun has been working very hard, Starry,” she pointed out placatingly. “Between helping Deemer with the horses and doing most of the gardening, to say nothing of his work with the barge, the poor man scarce has time to breathe.”
“Señor Angelo helps also.” Mrs. Starr sniffed disparagement. “One might think the Bo’sun ninety-five and being starved into his grave to judge by his glummery!”
“If he is sometimes downhearted, I suspect one does not have to look very far to find the cause,” said Susan with a teasing smile.
Her companion, who at eight and thirty was still a very pretty little lady, blushed and changed the subject hastily. “From what the woman in the grocer’s shop had to say—her being a proper tattle-monger you understand—the whole estate has been let go to rack and ruin since the old lord died. Like the flood, for instance. It seems there was a bore tide two years back that caused it all, and it was months before the water was pumped out of the catacombs under the church, no matter how the Village Council begged and pleaded with his lordship’s steward.”
“Is that how the swamp came to be?”
“So they say. Half the hill behind Longhills itself came down on the old family chapel, only because a lot of trees on the hillside had been damaged in the great storm the year before and no one at Longhills lifted a finger to have them tended and replanted. Thirteenth century the chapel was, and one whole wall smashed in and windows broke that are irreplaceable works of art. The villagers call it justice, and do not grieve about it, you may be sure!” She pulled the mirror from between the sheets and scanned it with suspicion.
Susan said indignantly, “Well, I think it dreadful that works of art such as that should be lost because of carelessness or pennypinching. The Montclair chapel is famous, and really belongs to England more than to the family. Martha cleaned out this cupboard on Tuesday, Starry. It is quite dry, I’m sure.”
“It is not the cupboard I question. Aha! Just as I thought! Mist on the mirror! See there! The sheets are damp. Natural they would be, coming down the river on that nasty boat of Master Andrew’s.” Mrs. Starr tugged at the neatly disposed pile. “All have to come out again and be aired, just as I thought. Every blessed one! No! Don’t you touch them, dear girl. You’re all over cobwebs! And you must be fairly worn out. Go downstairs and make yourself a cup of tea, do!”
Susan hesitated, but she really was rather tired, and the thought of a cup of tea was heavenly. Having won a promise that her devoted retainer would soon join her in the kitchen, she made her weary way to the stairs.
* * *
Montclair’s wrath built steadily as he limped up the drivepath. Having grown up in a house where a small army of servants eliminated dirt before it dared settle, where two full-time maids did nothing more than arrange fresh flowers every day and it was the sole task of three lackeys to clean the silver, he had no comprehension of the amount of time it could take three women to set to rights a house that had stood gathering dust for several years. It appeared to him as if his beloved old cottage had been taken over by a band of gypsies. The front terrace was littered with boxes, rolled-up rugs, sad-looking articles of furniture, and a large and battered child’s doll house. The Henley woman and her unpleasant clan, he thought angrily, had lost no time in desecrating the house with their rubbish. Lord only knows what it would be like inside! They likely had pigs settled into the withdrawing room!
Fuming, he hurried up the steps. The front door was open, and he marched inside. The main hall was cluttered and deserted. He swore softly, and stamped through the chaos, up the two steps and into the upper hall.
A maid halted, halfway down the stairs, and stared at him. He thought her inordinately tall; almost as tall as himself. Her apron was a disaster, her grimy mob-cap hung askew, and many wisps of dark hair had escaped it to straggle untidily about her dirty face. She clutched a dustpan and brush in one hand, and a broom in the other, and she was evidently as dim-witted as she was slovenly, because she made not the slightest attempt to address him, but stood there perfectly still, gawking at him.
Frozen with dismay, Susan saw a slim young man gazing up at her. She received a swift impression of attractively tumbled black hair, a pair of rather stormy-looking but remarkably fine dark eyes set in a pale face with a firm nose and chin, a high intelligent forehead, and a grim but shapely mouth. He was dressed with expensive good taste but without ostentation, and aside from the fact that for some peculiar reason he was carrying a sturdy branch, he was undeniably a gentleman.
Her heart gave an odd little jump. She thought despairingly, ‘Oh, I am filthy! Whatever must he think?’ and started to snatch off her mob-cap.
In her confusion she quite forgot that she held a full dustpan in that hand …
Stalking towards her, Montclair received the full benefit of a cascading pile of dust, cobwebs, and debris. He uttered a shocked cry and reeled back, his eyes painfully full.
“Oh, my heavens!” Aghast, Susan ran to help him. “Here, let me brush your coat!” Briskly, she began to wield the brush, which was unhappily full of cobwebs.
“Woman—desist!” roared Montclair. “By Gad! You’re a full”—he gasped—“a full-fledged…” Uttering an explosive sneeze, he tripped over a croquet mallet. “Disaster!” he finished, prone.
Susan threw one hand to her cheek and moaned faintly.
Snatching out his handkerchief, Montclair sat amid the rubble and sneezed. Between sneezes he strove not very successfully to chastise the lunatic. She watched him, seemingly completely undismayed by the fact that her thick hair now hung in a straight dark curtain past her shoulders with only one comb on each side holding it back from her face. Her eyes were very wide and her lower lip hung down. He brandished his handkerchief at her and tried to speak, only to sneeze again.
“I do apologize,” said Susan, recovering herself. “I didn’t hear you knock.”
She spoke in a cultured voice that surprised him. ‘Probably the family idiot,’ he decided, clambering to his feet and trying to dislodge a timber that seemed to have invaded his eye. “The front door was open,” he snarled.
“So I see.” Susan continued to the foot of the stairs. “I am sorry that there was no one here to receive you. Everyone is gone out. You see, a little girl is lost.”
Irritated by her impertinently familiar manner, he stared at her, and, sneezing again, wondered if she referred to Priscilla.
‘How cross he is,’ thought Susan. He really was very good-looking and he had every right to be vexed by such a welcome. Contrite, she went on, “I suppose you must think it very dreadful. But Priscilla is astoundingly clever for her age and has a great deal of common sense in—”
So Priscilla did live here. What a pity. “A small child should not be allowed to go out alone,” he interpolated sharply, “clever or no.”
Priscilla had slipped away again whilst they were all so caught up in the flurry of making this funny old house fit for human occupancy. Heaven knows, she had told the child repeatedly that she was not to go out alone, but Priscilla was lonely, poor dear mite, and such a dreamer. She’d probably imagined Wolfgang into the gigantic hound she’d thought he would become, and thus decided she was not ‘out alone.’ The young man looked haughty and condemning, and Susan began to bristle. Who did he think he was, to force his way into her home and then lecture her about her own child?
“I am perfectly aware of that fact, sir,” she said defensively. “But I scarce think this peaceful English countryside swarms with monsters and werewolves and the like!” Still, he was right, and it was good of him to be concerned, wherefore she relented, smiled, and prepared to explain.
Mrs. Henley, thought Montclair, would do well to hire better-trained servants. He had not so much as been asked for his card or his identity, and this Madam Dementia was apparently in the habit of standing about chatting with her mistress’s callers. He should not be surprised, of course, but her cavalier attitude toward Priscilla’s absence infuriated him. “You appear to find the loss of a child amusing,” he said sternly.
“Amusing!” echoed Susan, her smile fading.
“One reads in the newspapers every day,” he went on, “that some poor helpless innocent has been stolen to be sold into a lifetime of slavery and degradation. It is not to be wondered at when half the time their scatter-wit parents—”
“Oooh!”
“—are too busy frippering about where they’ve no business being, and paying more heed to their coiffures and their cards than to their offspring! And furthermore, my good girl—”
“I am not your good girl,” she flashed, sparks of wrath appearing in her big grey eyes.
“One might think you’d be ashamed to admit it,” he said sardonically, advancing to shake a finger under her elevated nose.
Her breath momentarily snatched away, Susan prepared to give this insufferable intruder the blistering set-down he deserved, but she was too late.
“Furthermore,” he swept on, noticing despite his frown that this odd creature had quite pretty eyes, “there may not be monsters or werewolves as you so facetiously point out, but there are places in my woods that are—”
“In your woods?” she interrupted, stiffening. “Pray, who are you, sir?”
“I would think it about time you enquired. My name is Montclair. I have come to see your mistress.”
Montclair? Susan stood rigid. So this was the hard-hearted lord of the manor! And he had dared, he’d dared to march in here and add insult to injury! She’d scatter-wit him!
“Horrid!” she squealed, flailing her mob-cap into his face. “Wretch! Loathsome—viper!”
Retreating with stunned incredulity, Montclair seized the mob-cab and wrested it away.
Having suffered one assault at the hands of his men, the widow was not about to be abused again, and rapped her brush smartly over his head.
“Ow!” he cried, and involuntarily recoiling from madness, promptly tripped over the steps to the lower hall and went staggering back.
Susan followed, flailing at him vigorously. “How dare you send your beastly creatures here to try and frighten me?” Whack! “How dare you—”
Off balance, Montclair made an abortive snatch for the brush, which eluded him and landed a telling blow on his ear.
“Ow!” he repeated, backing away in horror from this frenzied apology for a housemaid.
“Breaking into our house—” she shrilled, her arm flying.
“Your house?” he gasped, ducking. “It is—yike!—my house! And—Ouch!”
He could imagine few things more disgraceful than for a gentleman to engage in hand-to-hand (or -brush) combat with a female, and striving rather unsuccessfully to protect himself, retreated across the entrance hall, and beat a hasty and inelegant exit.
The side of his forehead hurt, his ear felt on fire, and he had given his elbow a fine crack when he fell. Glaring ragefully at the virago in the open doorway, he shouted, “You may tell your mistress she will be hearing from me!”
“One can but hope it will be from a great distance,” she riposted. A thought struck her. “And furthermore, if you cared a scrap for your country you would take more care of your windows!” The door closed with a bang.
It was a clear confirmation of his suspicions. “Good God,” whispered Montclair, rubbing his elbow and backing away. “She’s short of a sheet all right! Poor creature…”
Susan whipped the door open once more. “And I am the mistress of this house!” she announced, then threw his branch after him, and slammed the door again.
She was the notorious trespassing Mrs. Henley? That tall, dirty woman with her mass of straight hair and her horrid dustpan was the creature Imre Monteil had come near to mooning about and had spoken of as ‘the bewitching widow’? Montclair gave a contemptuous snort. It followed! Monteil was just the type to admire what any reasonable man must only find appalling!
He had come here with an open mind, he thought aggrievedly, and not only had he been disgracefully abused, but the creature had for some reason become annoyed. There was small point in trying to talk to her now. Well, he’d been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, but from this point on Ferry could deal with her. Serve her right!
Making his disgruntled way to collect his branch, he reflected that it was small wonder poor little Priscilla wanted for friends. Very likely the parents of any possible playmates were well aware that her mother was a raving lunatic. A strong raving lunatic, he thought, tenderly feeling a lump above his right eye. He was mildly surprised to find that the mob-cap was still in his left hand. He stared down at it. Egad, but he’d been shocked when the wretched woman had flung it into his face. Recalling the rage in those wide grey eyes, he grinned. She’d admitted she was not a “good girl.” He’d scored there. Of course, she in turn had called him a horrid wretch and a loathsome viper. Hmmn … He stuffed the cap into his pocket and took up his branch.
The wind was getting colder and grey clouds were mingling with the fluffy white ones. He walked faster. He’d be lucky to get home before it rained. Jupiter, but this had been a crazy day! First, the repellent Monteil; then, Soldier and his stupid bone; that Spanish idiot in the woods; little Priscilla—poor babe. And to cap things off nicely, the virago-ish Widow Henley. It would be miraculous did he reach Longhills without being captured by cannibals and boiled in oil!
Leaving the Highperch drivepath, he struck off across the meadows, and was starting down the rolling slope when he came face to face with three people. One was the Spanish idiot; the second was a tall, darkly handsome young fellow, carrying a small girl piggyback. So the child was safe, thank goodness!
Priscilla gave a squeal. “Mr. Val’tine!”
The little group halted. The Spanish idiot muttered something darkly and glowered at him. The tall young man set Priscilla down and asked, “You know this gentleman, scamp?”
“Yes,” she trilled. “That’s the man who hurt me in the wood!”
Montclair’s day continued true to form.