Chapter Eight

 

So Miss Dresden had every reason in the world to be upset just before she disappeared. But it still did not explain the kidnapper’s note, nor the pearls. Haven held back the pearls for the moment, not ready yet to divulge his possession of them. There would be time enough after he questioned Varens’s stable man. The baronet, turned away once again by a pink-cheeked Rachel, who haughtily stared out the window instead of at her importunate suitor, strode from the parlor after sketching a distracted bow to the other ladies. Haven lingered in the parlor for a moment to reassure his mother that he would get to the bottom of the whole case, though how he would he still did not know. When he strode out to the stable to collect his mount it was to see Varens, already mounted, meeting up with Pamela, who had, it appeared, just come back from one of her solitary gallops.

“What-ho, little cat,” Varens said, grabbing Pamela’s reins as she trotted past him, riding astride in breeches on a groom’s saddle, face flaming. “No word for your old friend Colin?” The baronet’s voice was sharp and cutting.

He was likely still smarting from his dismissal from Rachel’s presence, embarrassed, Haven thought, that it was such a public refusal. What did he expect, approaching her yet again when she had already refused him? And in front of company, no less. Idiot. And just how blind could the looby be? Pamela was clearly over the trees in love with him, and yet Varens saw her only as more child than woman, treating her with the casual, familiar affection of a man for a little sister. Getting a good look at his sister’s garb, he could really not blame Colin. She was dressed in disreputable old breeches, a shirt of his, and a coat he had cast off at the age of fifteen. She looked like a stable hand, not a young lady of impeccable birth, nor a future wife.

“Let go of my reins, you cow-handed sapskull!” Tassie reared as Pamela jerked her reins from the baronet’s hands and smacked at him with her crop.

“Spitfire,” Colin said, shaking his hand and laughing as he saw the red stripe she had left across it.

His cheeks were still flamed with crimson and there was a hectic light in his eyes. He felt it so deeply every time Rachel was rude to him, and yet he persisted.

“Have a good gallop, child?” he asked Pamela.

On her dignity, drawing herself up to her full height, negligible as it was, she said, “I have been visiting.”

“Not dressed like that, I hope,” Colin said, real shock in his voice. “Do not tell me you let anyone see you looking like a groom!”

“I went to see Mary Cooper,” she retorted.

“Oh, good,” Colin sighed. “Just Mary. Rachel would not be able to hold her head up if her sister was seen in town looking like a such a guy!”

Pamela, tears starting in her large, gray-green eyes, whirled Tassie and trotted off into the stable without another word. Colin, pulling on his riding gloves, stared after her, puzzled. “What’s wrong with your sister, Haven?”

“What is wrong with you, you insensitive clod?” Haven strode into the stable, but Pamela had handed her horse off to a stable hand and tore past her brother toward the house, a mixture of rage and mortification on her pretty, narrow face.

She had been to Mary’s. Haven stared after her as she stormed up to the Court and was admitted through the enormous wood doors to the great hall by the new butler. Should he follow her and find out what, if anything, she said to Jenny about him? Was the game up? Had she let spill that Gerry Neville and Lord Haven were one and the same?

If that was the case there was not a thing he could do about it this moment anyway, with this disappearance of Miss Dresden on his mind and conscience. Of all the times for this to happen, it would be just when he met a woman who made his blood pump and his heart melt! He longed to fly up over the hills to Mary’s cottage just to see Jenny again, but duty called and he must answer. He shrugged and accepted his saddled mount from the towheaded stable boy and joined Colin.

 

• • •

 

At Corleigh, Varens’s estate, a tidy modern manse made of gray stone quarried nearby, Haven headed directly for the stable, made of the same uniform stone cut into square blocks. Varens had handed off his horse to a groom and left his guest to go up to the house. He had already explained to Haven that he would leave the questioning to the viscount; his worker might not respond if he felt he was being cornered. Haven found his way through the dim confines of the musty stable and approached the stable manager, a young man named Joshua Jones. He was working on some leather tack, oiling it and rubbing it with a cloth.

He nodded as Haven approached, respect in his eyes. No one especially warmed up to the viscount, but neither did they prevaricate with nor deprecate him. Another groom approached and Haven handed the reins of his mount to him.

“Your name is Jones, I believe,” Haven said. He put out his hand and the other man shook it and ducked his head again. “Sir Colin has told me you saw an incident behind the Swan the night the young lady disappeared,” he said, after reminding the fellow of the night and the fact that a Miss Jane Dresden had disappeared.

The man nodded smartly. “Stepped out ta take a piss an’ saw it all, milord.”

“And?” Haven prompted.

He shrugged. “’Twere a plump girl, carn’t say as I know which o’ the barmaids it be, for ’twere shadowy in th’yard, ya know. Dark hair, though, milord, an’ wearin’ a dark dress wiv a white bodice, loik all the bar wenches wear.”

“What happened?”

Jones shrugged again. “’Twere two fellas, one as I reckernize as one o’ t’owd ones,” he said, meaning one of the older locals. “They was a’graspin’ her, an’ the one, he were a’tryin’ to give her a kiss, like. She were strugglin’ an’ I sed summat—don’t hold wiv forcin’ no wummin to anythin’—an’ the wench, she tore away and off she goes, hared off out o’ the yard.”

Frowning down at the dirt floor, Haven kicked at a pebble with the toe of his dusty riding boots. “Not Miss Dresden, certainly,” he said finally. “The clothing alone . . . it is the common outfit of all the barmaids, as you say. What did the men do?”

“Went back inta the Swan, they did, an’ me too, after my piss.”

“You didn’t try to find the girl?” Haven shoved his hand in his pocket and fingered the pearls, a talisman, he almost felt, of the missing Miss Dresden.

“Na, she were foine,” the man said, tossing aside the bridle he had been working on and picking up a bit. He inspected it for rust, then started rubbing it until it shone. “Not e’en roughed up, I’d say.”

Haven put one foot up on the boarded wall of an empty stable and leaned on his knee. He picked up another bit and turned it over and over in his gloved hands. He had noticed one thing the fellow had glossed over. “You say you recognized one of the men. Who was it?”

Jones looked uneasy. He stared down at the bit in his hand, scraping at a minute blemish with his filthy fingernail. “’Tweren’t no harm meant, milord. Ol’ Billy just thought o’ his pecker an’ saw a likely wench.”

Anger boiling up within him, Haven threw down the bit. Jones jumped back a bit, but resumed his work with a determinedly unconcerned demeanor. But his hands were trembling.

Haven straightened, towering over the stable hand. “You said the girl was struggling and that you don’t hold with forcing women. Was that not enough to make you confront old Bill, or follow the girl to see if she was all right?”

“Ol’ Billy just thought o’ persuadin’ the mort to a little slap an’ tickle, loike. ’E woulda given her summat for her trouble.”

“Persuading is not holding down and taking your pleasure,” he thundered. Haven was beginning to feel concerned for the barmaid. He would go back to the Swan, track her down among the three or four Joseph Barker employed, and make sure nothing had happened to her and that she knew she need not be afraid of the customers. Lesleydale was his jurisdiction and he would have no woman mistreated, nor even “persuaded” if that was how the local men thought of it. “You did not get a look at the other man?”

“Na.” Jones spat into the dust and wiped his mouth. His uneasy glance touched on the viscount but slid away again. “’Twere darkish, milord, wiv the shadows in th’yard, an’ ’twere gettin’ cloudy besides; I didna see naught. ’E follered Billy back in, anyways.”

Making one last effort, Haven said, “You’re sure this girl was a barmaid? She could not have been the young lady we are looking for, the one who disappeared?”

“Na! Th’mort were a barmaid, right enough.”

Haven thanked the man; Jones had been helpful to the extent he could be. Reluctantly he realized that he had to go up to Varens’s house, for the baronet had invited him to come up for a brandy after questioning Joshua Jones. It was not that he did not appreciate the hospitality; Sir Colin was a fine man and a good neighbor. And though the baronet was younger than Haven by several years, the two men still shared many of the same values and a dedicated love of the land, and of Yorkshire in particular.

However, visiting Varens meant dealing with Miss Andromeda Varens, his elder sister. She was Haven’s contemporary, and so she should have stood in the same light as a sister, but Miss Varens most emphatically did not view him in a brotherly manner. He slogged up to the house, stood staring up at the tidy façade for a moment, then sighed and surrendered to the inevitable.

Barley, the ancient and crabby butler, announced him at the parlor door and shuffled off with muttered expletives, the severity of which grew steadily more vinegary as the years passed and the ancient retainer aged. Just as Gerry had feared, there was Andromeda, on her dignity, sitting straight-backed and resplendent in her faded purple silk. She had refurbished the dress and now wore a matching turban, but Gerry remembered it from a ghastly local assembly many years before when Andromeda had led everyone there to believe that that was the night he was finally going to ask for her hand. The air of expectancy in the room that evening had been palpable even to him. All of the local gentry was there and there were hints and gentle jests at his expense that he did not understand until Andromeda cornered him in the card room of the assembly hall and attempted to squeeze out of him an offer for her hand.

It had been a close call and it still gave him the shivers. The thought of a lifetime of staring at Andromeda across the breakfast table gave him the cold shudders. He advanced across the room grimly and bowed over her hand. Since their mother had died three years before, she had steadily increased her “lady of the manor” behavior until now she was somewhat of a joke among the local gentry as being more queenly than even Queen Charlotte. And she still, quite clearly, had hopes of him.

“Lord Haven, how pleasant,” she pronounced, her enunciation resembling faintly the strangled, unintelligible accent she had copied years before in her first and only London Season. She had not taken and her father had vowed not to throw good money after bad, stating baldly in his Yorkshire-broad accent, Th’lass is a moite tooched, it seems, an’ no lad wants a addle-brained mort t’wife. Andromeda continued, “We have not seen you for some time, my lord. We had begun to think you did not like us anymore.”

Startled, Gerry at first thought she had finally truly descended into madness, using the royal “we,” but then he realized, at a shrug and rolled eyes from Colin, that the baronet never told his sister when he visited Haven Court.

“Haven is a busy man. Runs a larger concern than ours, Andy.” Varens poured two glasses of brandy and offered one to Haven, who took it gratefully, tossed it off in one long, fiery draught, and held his glass out for another. Colin, a humorous look on his plain face, continued. “Between the sheep and the crops, well, what’s a man to do?”

“Leave it to his farm manager,” Andromeda Varens said haughtily, giving her brother a look. “Do not call me Andy,” she hissed, sotto voce. “It is common and vulgar.” She stood and glided across the room toward Haven.

He was trapped, he realized, for the time being anyway. As long as Colin did not desert him, he would be fine. Andromeda was a good-looking woman—tall, good hair, a long handsome face—but her coy attempts at flirtation with Haven and her possessive manners toward him more than put him off, they gave him nightmares. He truly did not want to offend her—as children they had been very good friends and had shared many famous larks—but he had no intention of ever putting himself in a position with her where she might endanger his bachelorhood.

She put her hand on his arm and steered him over to the wall, where she indicated a large painting. “Do you think this a good likeness, my lord?” She thrust her arm through his and settled her angular body close to his sturdy, powerful frame. She simpered coyly, and batted her lashes. On a younger, prettier woman the attempt at flirtation might have been charming, but it was absurd coming from her. He liked her far better when she was just being herself, but that was seldom anymore.

He stared up at the painting, hardly seeing it at first in his panic. Why did women do this? It was exactly what he disliked most, the predatory demeanor and calculating coyness that made of every conversation a tribulation to him. His gaze cleared gradually, and he looked up at the painting. It was rather large, especially for the space it inhabited, but it was good as far as style went. It was of a lovely young woman with dark eyes, gorgeous skin and a beautiful, regal, ineffably sad expression. Her lips were dewy and slightly parted and she gazed off into the distance, toward a folly on a distant hill in what appeared to be the countryside near Richmond or Surrey. She was dressed in a fine gown of purple silk—

He glanced over at the woman beside him. She was tall enough that her eyes were almost even with his. “Who is it?” he blurted, absolutely puzzled as to whom it could resemble. He felt her stiffen and recoil.

“It is me!” Her voice was a reedy wail.

Panicked, Haven turned to see Colin convulsed with laughter.

Holding his stomach and barely keeping from spilling his brandy, he choked out, “Told you it didn’t look a bit like you, Andy! Too beautiful by half!”

Haven shot him a minatory look, but the man was now positively doubled over with gales of laughter. Andromeda, mortified and offended, had jerked her arm out of Haven’s and stood trembling, staring up at the painting and then glaring at Haven. “Did you not recognize the subject?”

Caught, Haven knew he ought to lie. Some social mendacity was clearly called for, but all he could think to mutter was, “Painter fellow didn’t catch your, uh, your expression. Your, uh, your commanding presence, Miss Varens.”

It was the best he could do and it was not enough. An expression of pained fury crossed her face and her cheeks reddened, two ugly blotches coloring her high, sharp cheekbones. “I think it a remarkable likeness,” she said, her accent clipped and her words dropped like individual pebbles into a lake.

“Then you ought to get a new mirror,” Colin said ruthlessly.

Andromeda turned on her brother and said, “You would not know a decent likeness from a . . . from a pig trough!” With that odd statement, she whirled and left the room, taking with her all the tension, the very air behind her drained of all unease.

Haven dropped into a chair, wiping the cold sweat from his brow and downing his second brandy. “Colin, that was cruel and indescribably unkind.” He would never say such a thing to his own sisters, not even Rachel, whom he did not understand and often could not abide.

“As if you were better! ‘Didn’t catch your commanding presence’! No lady wants to be thought commanding! She sees herself as another Lady Frances Webster,” he said, naming an infamous tonnish beauty, reputed to be mistress to Byron at one point and the Duke of Wellington himself at another.

“Why would she want to see herself as that woman?” Haven said, shaking his head. “Lady Webster is a byword for her affairs! I swear, Colin, there is no understanding women, I’m convinced . . . at least, women of our own class.”

Colin gazed at him curiously. “Why the exception, old man? Found a wench to your liking?”

Flushing with irritation, Haven could not help thinking of Jenny, contrasting her gentle, sweet voice and shy manners with Miss Varens’s self-conscious gentility, angular looks and rapacious pursuit of him. What a life, when he could not have what he wanted! And why, because she was a lady’s maid? She was more lady than many of the women he had met in his disastrous Seasons cruising the London marriage mart.

“You have, you old dog,” Colin said, sitting down in a chair and leaning forward. He grabbed the decanter from the table and poured them both another glass of brandy, the color in his face suggesting the liquor was starting to have its expected affect. “Tell me who she is. Have you sampled her wares yet? Is she good?”

“It’s not that kind of . . . she’s not that kind of girl,” Haven said angrily, setting his newly filled glass aside. Even Varens sometimes was intolerable, it seemed. He stood and said, “I’m going to go back down to the Swan and try to find out what really happened. I have not yet talked to the chambermaids who served Miss Dresden and Lady Mortimer. So long, Colin. My best to your sister. Tell her I am sorry . . . or . . . or something. Anything.”