The Devil's Daughter Page 4

  “Thank you very much, Bob,” the Marquis added. “You have done admirably.”

  Charles Cavendish glanced across at the desk, and said meaningly:

  “You have been writing, Rick? I hope you have not very much more to do before getting a little sleep?”

  “I have been trying to write one or two letters which I’m sure you would consider all-important,” replied the Marquis, with a rather wry curve to his lips. “But I do not seem to be progressing with remarkable speed.”

  “Then make them as brief as possible.” He laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “After all, you may very well have to consign them to the wastepaper basket. And if you do not “If I do not,” Lord Capel took him up, looking him straight in the eye, “you will see to it that they are delivered?”

  “Of course, Rick.”

  The young officer named Bob, who was wearing one of the most envied uniforms at that time, gazed at him commiseratingly.

  “Wish you wouldn’t do it, Rick,” he said. “Wish you’d see sense. Damn it, man,” throwing out his hands, “there’s so very little point in it! Fellow’s a cad, anyway, and one of these days some one else will put him out of the way if necessary. But not you!”

  Richard Wendover, Marquis of Capel, merely smiled at him, still in a somewhat one-sided way.

  “Have a drink,” he invited, “before you depart.” He assembled glasses on a tray, and poured from a decanter. “At what time will you call for me, Charles?”

  Charles cocked an eye at the window behind a protective curtain of which Harriet was striving to make herself as small and insignificant as possible. She was a little alarmed when he walked to the window and, thrusting aside the companion curtain, glanced upwards at the sky, in which a few inquisitive stars seemed to be already paling.

  “It will be broad daylight in another fours,” he said. “We do not wish to attract attention, so if we call for you in three hours’ time—no; say two and a half—we shall be at the rendezvous in excellent time. Certainly there will be time enough.”

  “And if you need to be bled, Rick,” young Captain Robert Markham said cheerfully, “we have the very man for the job. He will be there to attend to you.”

  “But it is my profound hope that no one will require to be bled,” Charles Cavendish said seriously.

  When they had left the Marquis called to Harriet to come out from behind the curtain. He was pouring a glass of Madeira, and he handed it to her.

  “Drink this,” he said. “I noted that you had been regaling yourself with ratafia, but this will sustain you rather better than that. I am going upstairs to my own room, and I shall write my letters there. I suggest that you make yourself as comfortable as possible in one of the chairs here, and I will see that you are called when Charles and Bob arrive.”

  “But it is all so extremely unconventional,” she protested. “And what will they think when they—when they discover I was here all the time?”

  The Marquis smiled mysteriously.

  “What do men ever think about women? It is because one of them made a modest appeal to me—rather more than any other member of her sex has ever done—that I am setting forth tomorrow in the cold grey light of dawn to avenge what I considered an unnecessary slur on her reputation.”

  Harriet regarded him wide-eyed.

  “But it will do her no good,” she protested. “And if she has only a modest attraction for you...?”

  “Ah, but no woman has ever had even a modest attraction for me before,” he replied, and smiled at her quizzically. “Think what I might have been prepared to do if I had been wholeheartedly in love with her.”

  The evening—in fact, the whole day—had been an extremely unusual experience for Harriet, and she was beginning to feel a little confused ... and by no means certain why she was not insisting on leaving there and then, and finding her way back to Paddington alone—and on foot if necessary. The explanation she offered to herself was her acute anxiety for the young de Courceys, but having had a certain amount of opportunity to reflect she was rather inclined to wonder whether it was nothing more nor less than pure obstinacy on her part that was making her behave as she never would have believed she could ever contemplate behaving.

  She studied the Marquis more dubiously. A few sips of the Madeira had revived her a little, but she was extremely tired, and in the dim candlelight her eyes were no longer focusing as well as they might—or that was her own impression. The Marquis’s face looked pale and grim, and he was leaning rather heavily on the table as if he, too, were tired.

  “You could do no more for any woman than to lay down your life for her,” she said a trifle huskily.

  “Couldn’t I?” He downed another glass of wine in a single gulp, and then poured himself another. “But at least that has its advantages over offering her marriage. I have always eschewed marriage.”

  Harriet regarded him with very wide open eyes indeed. She could not help but decide in her own mind that he was more than a little mad. Indeed, she thought he must be very mad indeed if he could make such a choice between living and dying. At the very least he must be extraordinarily quixotic.

  “I’m afraid I quite fail to understand the rationality of such a statement as that,” she told him.

  He smiled.

  “By that you mean you are not entirely certain I have a rational mind. Well, very likely I have not.” He tilted his glass in her direction. “And what about you, you coppery-haired, green-eyed, extraordinarily intrepid—wench? I find your excessive obstinacy, and the determination with which you tracked me to my lair today, commendable if one regards your activities in a certain light, but otherwise quite irrational. You could have come to tremendous harm if I had been somewhat otherwise than what I am—and very much preoccupied with other matters! Did that never occur to you?”

  “Yes,” she admitted, “it did. But the situation was so serious that I had no other course open to me,” she added, with a simplicity and straightforwardness which seemed to make their appeal to him.

  “Gad!” he exclaimed. “You really are an astonishing member of your sex. Something tells me you would never give up easily, and I believe you would fight like the devil if you encountered serious opposition. Do you enjoy having something in common with the devil, Miss Yorke?”

  “My father was known as Devil Yorke,” she answered.

  “Indeed?” He frowned suddenly, in an effort to recollect. “Was he in the Navy, at the Battle of Copenhagen, one of Nelson’s captains who covered himself in glory during that operation and created quite a stir at the Admiralty for some time afterwards?”

  She nodded.

  “Then I trust he received his proper reward and died full of honours and material benefits?” with a somewhat questioning glance at her shabby pelisse.

  “On the contrary, my lord,” she admitted, “he died a very poor man, but that was not because his country refused to acknowledge what was due to him, but because he had an unerring facility for dissipating wealth as fast as he acquired it.”

  “Which explains the reason why you appear to be a kind of watchdog to the de Courcey family?”

  “In part, it does,” she agreed.

  “But only in part? Don’t tell me you actually enjoy looking after other people’s brats?”

  Without waiting for her answer he flung away to a far corner, took a turn or two about the room, and then returned to his desk and gathered together a sufficient supply of writing materials.

  “Goodnight, Miss Yorke,” he said. “Or, rather, I should say Good morning, since the first cock has already started to crow ... Get what little sleep you can, and be ready to leave the instant I wake you.”

  “And who will wake you, my lord?”

  “My man will receive his instructions before I attempt to forget my troubles in temporary oblivion. I trust you will not find the library chairs too hard.”

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  Harriet passed the remainder of the night in acute
discomfort, sleeping only fitfully, and was finally awakened in the dawn light to find Lord Capel tugging at her elbow. He directed her to a room on the first floor of the house where she could make use of a pitcher of water and some fresh towels; and afterwards a little maidservant, roused by his lordship’s valet, carried to the library a tray of chocolate of which they both partook.

  Then a carriage rolled up outside, and Charles Cavendish alighted and ran up the steps. The Marquis was waiting for him, and he thrust Harriet out on to the steps and urged her to descend as quickly and quietly as possible to the carriage. The two other gentlemen, both muffled to the eyes in many-collared capes, gaped at her in astonishment, but Lord Capel introduced her simply arid curtly as “Miss Yorke, governess to my wards.”

  It became immediately clear that the others suspected some sort of mental derangement where the Marquis was concerned, but not unnaturally they said nothing. Captain Markham, never known to be impolite, and certainly not when the lady had red curls and clear cheeks, accorded her a brief, military bow and then placed her in a comer of the carriage. The others accepted the vacant seats in the carriage.

  Although so early in the day the atmosphere was remarkably clear. There were no dawn mists obscuring the landscape or slowly dispersing clouds concealing the clarity of the morning sky. The latter was palely blue and exquisite, a flush of rose low down on the horizon heralding the approach of the sun. One or two stars still gazed at their reflections in patches of still water, but otherwise the night had passed.

  Harriet had no idea at all of their destination, but it seemed to her that they travelled a remarkable distance in a remarkably short space of time. The streets of prosperous-looking London houses gave place to meaner and far from salubrious streets, and then they were out on a winding road which was bordered by woods and meadows, and finally became a road cutting across a common where the trees stood sentinel-like against the sky. Here, in the shadow of one of these groups of trees, the carriage came to rest, and a little cluster of gentlemen who had obviously arrived before them stood watching as the steps were put down and they alighted from the carriage.

  For the first time Harriet realised that it was very cold. The gentlemen were all well protected against the sharpness of the atmosphere, but her light woollen pelisse felt extremely inadequate as she took up her position beneath a spreading oak, and the dew-soaked grass beneath her feet wet her shoes in no time at all.

  “Whatever you do keep well clear of anything that is happening,” the Marquis warned her, “and do not interfere under any circumstances.”

  After which he left her to her own devices. She realised that from that moment she was banished altogether from his mind, and the stem realities of the business that lay ahead occupied all his thoughts and attention. He did not look precisely pale, but he could have had a little more colour, and the set of his mouth was intensely grim.

  The other little band of gentlemen provided quite a contrast. They were all grouped closely together, surrounding their central figure as if to offer him what protection they could until the very last moment, and that central figure, unlike the

  Marquis and his two friends, appeared to be extraordinarily light-hearted. He was not a tall man, but there was an elegance about him, and when he began to strip down to his fine cambric shirt and breeches the litheness of his movements, and a certain grace which attended them, began to make it clear that whatever else he might be, he would be very nimble on his feet. And although she could not overhear the conversation Harriet quickly realised that Mr. Greville Aintree was delivering himself of a number of smart quips and jokes which had his supporters guffawing loudly at one stage.

  The Marquis, on the other hand, was silent, and neither of his supporters appeared to have much to say.

  When the doctor arrived in a hired chaise he went straight up to them and the conversation from that moment on was brief and very much to the point.

  Harriet, who had never expected to experience anything in the least like this in the whole of her life, began to feel distinctly apprehensive. She knew so little of the Marquis of Capel—and certainly nothing that reflected very much in his favour—that it would have been quite untrue to say that she was worried on his account, apart from the awkwardness his demise might occasion to the de Courceys; but she knew absolutely nothing at all about the other man, and it was difficult to be in the least partisan. She only knew that she wished the whole affair over as quickly as possible, and that her wet shoes were not directing a chill right up into the very heart of her being, and that a wedge of geese flying overhead would cease their noise so that she could hear what was going on.

  When the two seconds approached one another and conferred for a short while she realised that she had not very much longer to wait. The Marquis was standing alone by this time, looking aloof and disdainful, as well as very shapely in an altogether masculine manner in his fine white silk shirt, a little open at the neck, with his thick black hair curling crisply in the morning light. He was watching his second pacing out the ground, and he knew that the moment was near.

  The case of pistols had been presented, and each man had accepted and carefully weighed his weapon. Robert Markham had stepped back and joined Harriet in the shade of the trees, but Charles Cavendish was the man who would call the count of ten, then drop the white handkerchief which would signal the moment to fire.

  Harriet found herself swallowing nervously, and her hands were clenched inside her gloves. Beside her Captain Markham was rigidly still. Harriet whispered to him:

  “Do you think they will really try and kill one another...?”

  “S-sh!”

  Harriet felt as if a wave of panic, and nothing less, welled over her. Greville Aintree was smiling complacently right up until the last moment, but the Marquis’s expression was positively murderous. Harriet became convinced that he intended to despatch his man without compunction, and the thought of the smile on Aintree’s face being wiped off in a moment in such a horrible manner brought about such a state of revulsion that, as she realised afterwards, it blotted out all reasoning. Aintree was not even personally known to her, and she thought that if she had enjoyed the benefit of his acquaintance it might have proved a very dubious benefit indeed; but, since he was a fellow human being, and without a doubt he was in the most acute danger...

  She darted forward, as far as she was aware without the least conscious volition, just as the handkerchief was raised aloft and every eye was upon it. By the time it fluttered to the ground the Marquis’s arm had been violently jolted and there were horrified shouts and protests. And then Harriet was thrust rudely: aside and the Marquis’s friends supported him on both sides. The doctor was already kneeling beside the still figure of Greville Aintree, staining the grass, with his blood the prescribed distance away. Aintree’s little group of friends, too shocked to move in his direction, looked as if they simply could not believe the evidence of their eyes.

  And in the clear morning light two puffs of smoke, like balls of morning mist, ascended to the tranquil blue of the sky.

  Harriet covered her face with her gloved hands. What had she done? What dreadful thing had she been guilty of?

  No one was prepared to glance in her direction. They were all too preoccupied, with the exception of the two principals in this affair, one of whom was standing between his friends and staring almost stupidly and quite unbelievingly at the sinister immobility of the man he had intended should walk away from this secluded spot with nothing more than a salutary flesh wound to show for his early rising. And as for the victim, the sprucely dressed gentleman who had betrayed so much cheerfulness—even if it was a little unseemly—such a short while before ... Well, he was beyond taking even the smallest amount of interest in anyone who had witnessed his sudden collapse, let alone anyone who had contributed to it.

  The Marquis spoke thickly between his teeth.

  “I never intended ... Is he dead?”

  Captain Markham replied in very
much the same tone of voice.

  “It’s impossible to be certain, Rick, but I’ll find out, if you’re sure you can manage with Charles’s support only? You’re bleeding like a pig, you know, but I don’t think it’s anything serious—”

  “Devil take you, man, of course it’s not serious!” The Marquis wrenched himself out of his hands with a kind of repressed fury. “Did you think I thought I’d been killed, too, and all because that little fool there refused to obey an order?”

  The sheer malevolence of the glance he cast at the “little fool” in question drove the few remaining shreds of colour out of her face. Nevertheless she tottered towards him.

  “I’m so sorry, Lord Capel! I’m so dreadfully sorry! I really cannot understand what came over me—”

  “Then don’t try,” he advised her icily. “Don’t do anything but stay over there, where I can’t see you.”

  “But you must understand that I didn’t intend—” And then her eyes widened dramatically as they took in the full horror and implication of his blood-soaked sleeve. “But you’re wounded!” she exclaimed, her voice growing a little faint as if the sight of that fine white shirt being so dramatically discoloured was a little too much for her feminine endurance. “You really are badly hurt! You must allow me to assist you—”

  “Stay over there,” he ordered, closing his eyes and gritting his teeth as fiery pains shot up and down his arm. “Don’t come an inch nearer!”

  “But I know quite a lot about dealing with emergencies...” Which was true enough, as her father had more than once arrived home from one of his affrays with a wound which refused to heal, and with which she had had to deal conscientiously. “At least I can staunch the blood—”