Lady Anne 02 - Revenge of the Barbary Ghost, page 20
She grunted, having trouble with the lock. “The authorities must suspect Puddicombe, for he is clumsy in his machinations,” she continued, bending down and peering at the lock more closely. She then fitted the key straight in and turned it. “I think they will replace him soon, and they’ll move in some sea support to try to clean up this area. I will be long gone, my lease given up and moved, with Edward, to somewhere safe and snug, across the ocean to Canada!”
“Pam, your fiancé … how did he die?”
She turned, her breath caught in her throat. “An excise man’s bullet. I was living in rooms in St. Ives at the time and was not here, of course. Anne, it was terrible! Micklethwaite himself carried his body up to this house, he told me, but it was too late.”
Cold with foreboding, Anne said, “Are you sure it was a revenue bullet, and not one of Micklethwaite’s?”
“He’d have no cause, Anne!” Pam said, pulling the heavy padlock off the latch and setting it down on the stone floor. The flickering light of the lantern showed her expression, a willful one of defiance. “It was an accident, pure and simple. It had to be! Puddicombe’s men were having to make a show of their work. They caught some other smugglers the next night. Poor Bernard; he was just in the wrong spot.”
Anne held her tongue, unconvinced, as she followed Pam down the tunnel, stepping carefully as the tunnel narrowed. She shivered, but followed her friend until they came to another padlocked door.
Pam took another key off her chatelaine and fit it to the lock of that door. When she opened it, the sudden rush of cold salty air set Anne back on her heels, and the increase in sound, a weird echoing of the crashing waves, made her clap her free hand over one ear. Pam laughed. “This is how it will be done!”
Anne held up her lantern and followed her friend down the tunnel, which widened into a cavern.
“We’ll not go all the way tonight; I can feel that the wind is up, and the tide, too. The water at high tide doesn’t quite reach this cavern, but if waves wash in, it doesn’t affect goods stored in the tunnel, as long as we bring them far enough along. If you felt it as we walked, the tunnel descends toward the sea, slightly.”
“I noticed. Is the whole tunnel man-made?” Anne asked, putting out her free hand to touch the rough wall, holding up her lantern and gazing around.
“Not all, just from the cellar of Cliff House to that door we just passed. This part to the beach is natural cave and passage, a deep fissure in the rock that was lengthened by some long-ago smuggler into a tunnel to Cliff House. We land the goods on the beach below—this cavern comes out on the rock face down about fifty yards from the crevice Marcus used for his Barbary Ghost trick—then the goods will be moved along this tunnel until we get them to the other side of the door. We lock it securely, and the goods are safe. The next few nights, we move the goods out, through the house.”
“What about Mrs. Quintrell and Lynn … and Alice?”
“No one in Cornwall notices things they should not. It is the way here.”
“Risky, Pam, very risky. Too many eyes and ears.”
“This is how we effected the smuggling until you came to stay with us,” Pam said, defiance in her voice.
“And spoiled your plan.” Anne was stricken by a sudden thought. “If I had not come to stay with you suddenly, and without warning, St. James would not have died! He wouldn’t have been on the beach and would not have met his awful fate.”
“Anne, it was not your doing, for I believe it would have happened just the same, no matter what,” Pam replied, a catch in her voice. She took Anne’s arm and squeezed it to her. “God had his hand in this. Edward and I will leave England now, with no ties to bind me. I’ll take him to Canada, and there he can become anything he wishes. I have been suffocated in this societal prison, without my baby! But I don’t know if I could ever have left England if Marcus had lived.”
“Pam, Marcus said he helped you because your penury was his fault, and he had to make up for it. What did he mean?”
She sighed. “I suppose it doesn’t hurt to speak of it now. St. James speculated with our family money, the bit that we had, and lost almost all of it.”
They retreated back the way they had come, and Pam locked the tunnel door. They went back to the cellar and Pam locked that door too, pulling the dusty carpet down over the door, concealing it completely. She moved her lantern, setting it up on a high shelf that held preserved jars of fruit and vegetables. She then put both hands on Anne’s shoulders. “I need your help for this,” she said, a great seriousness on her ghostly pale face.
“For what?”
“I should not ask, but you said you wanted to help. The night we do this, will you come down from this end and unlock the door and direct the dispersal of the goods in the tunnel, while I am outside on the beach, directing the landing?”
Anne’s stomach convulsed, and she hesitated. It was wrong, she thought, to go against the government, but more than that, it was dangerous. Not even her father’s position could get her out of trouble if she was caught, and she would bring untold shame to her family.
“I have no one else to turn to now that Marcus is gone.” Pam’s eyes welled with tears. “And no one else I trust, as I trust you.”
“I’ll do it,” Anne said, putting aside her doubts and surrendering to an overwhelming need to help her friend.
Pam, weeping, handed her the padlock keys. “Thank you, thank you,” she said, throwing her arms around her friend and hugging her close.
Later, Anne sat at the window in her room, frayed nerves not allowing her to sleep. Irusan stretched out on her lap, flexing his claws and hooking them into her skirt fabric over and over. Mary had come in and gone out several times, tidying, cleaning, arranging, but finally she crept in and sat down on the edge of Anne’s bed, saying, “Milady, you’ll no deceive me. Something is wrong.”
“There are a lot of things wrong.” She trusted Mary utterly, and told her what she was planning to do to help Pamela.
As could have been expected, her maid protested vociferously. “That’s madness! I’ll no stand by and let you cast your lot in with thieves an’ cutthroats!”
“Shush!” Anne said, casting a worried glance at the door. “I’ve not given Lolly enough wine tonight that she’s sleeping soundly. I’m saving that for when I need her to be somnolent.”
“At least let me help, milady!” Mary said, her voice clogged with emotion.
“This time, you must not help me,” Anne said, using a tone she seldom took with her maid. “I’ll lock you in, if need be. Mary, you have a son. If we were caught, I wouldn’t be able to protect you. You’re a servant and a Catholic; how do you think you would be treated? When do you think you would next see your son?” she scolded. “I’d never forgive myself if you and Robbie were parted.”
Mary hung her head, but did not protest again. Finally, after a few minutes’ silence, she raised her face. “Then at least tell Lord Darkefell. Let him help you,” she pleaded. “He’d do anything for you, milady.”
Anne sighed, wondering if that was true. Would he do something so dishonest, so unlawful? Would he put himself at so much risk? It didn’t matter, she would never let him, for he, too, had people depending upon him. If he died, his brother John would take over the title, and John had no head for all of the business required of a marquess. Innocent lives would suffer.
But more pragmatically, she had another reason for leaving him out. “I promised Pam I wouldn’t tell him. Help me out of my dress and then go to bed, Mary. And sleep. The landing won’t happen right away, you know. Anything may occur before that. Never borrow trouble, my nanny used to say.”
“Wise woman,” she said, Scottish gloom tainting her tone with foreboding. “But we’re not borrowing trouble,” she continued, her eyes wide, as she undid Anne’s gown and unlaced her stays. “We’re seeking it out, hunting it down, and demanding that it descend upon us.”
Anne laughed. “Now that sounds like my Mary,” she said, picking Irusan up, gently, and putting him on her bed. She gave her maid a gentle shove toward the small dressing room she and Robbie were using as a bedchamber. “Go to bed. Sleep.”
Mary carried her clothes but turned and gave her mistress one long, hard look before closing the door behind her.
Sixteen
The next day dawned stormy and miserable, but Pamela left early to visit Edward, taking advantage of Anne’s offer of Sanderson and her carriage. She was going to tell Mrs. Gorse that within weeks she would be taking her son to their new life together. Lolly was again teaching Robbie, for it seemed that they were at an especially difficult part of his lessons, English grammar, and Mary, anxious for her boy to move ahead in life, wished him to have the benefit of such a patient teacher as Anne’s companion. Beneath Lolly’s fluffy exterior beat the heart of a tyrannical governess.
Anne, restless after a sleepless night and conscious that this morning was St. James’s funeral, tried to read, though she could not attend to the book’s lines, nor remember what she read, then ate a solitary luncheon. Lolly was still wholly occupied with Robbie’s lessons, much to the child’s vocal dismay.
After the midday meal, Anne paced the terrace for a while, but the weather drove her indoors after half an hour. The day dragged on in dreary monotony, and finally she knew she needed to do something or she’d go mad from boredom. Donning a cloak, she waited until Mrs. Quintrell was occupied and slipped down to the cellar with a lit lantern. Keys in hand, she stole through the cellar to the tunnel door, pulled the heavy rug aside, coughing a little at the dust, and unlocked the padlock. She pulled the door open as quietly as she could, slid into the tunnel, and pulled the door closed behind her, hoping if Mrs. Quintrell did come down to the cellar for something, she wouldn’t come so far.
She held the lantern up. The tunnel was scary even in the daytime, but if she was going to help Pamela with one last smuggling run, then she was going to do it right. She wanted to know where and how this tunnel erupted into the cliff face, but it was certainly quicker and more sheltered to approach it from the tunnel side than it would be to go all the way around by the beach.
The tunnel was longer than it had seemed the evening before; light from her lantern shimmered, illuminating only about ten feet ahead. She walked carefully, keeping an eye out for creatures, warm or cold-blooded. As she crept down the tunnel, she was plagued by fretful thoughts.
What did she want to do with her life? Was she destined to become simply a wife and mother, another in a long line of maternal vessels dedicated to continuing a noble lineage? She wanted more for herself, but what?
Though she felt strongly about the ills that plagued their society and the measures she believed were necessary to produce a more just world for them all—Catholic emancipation, the abolition of slavery, improved legal rights for abandoned or mistreated women—she did not feel called to help the many who were already fighting for change. Everything she had to say had already been said by more eloquent men and women. She attended church, but was not especially religious, so “good works” through the church did not appeal. She provided money for a few projects, including a dame school near Harecross Hall and a refuge for women whose husbands had abandoned them or perished, but when she went to them to help, she only managed to interrupt the hardy women she had hired to do the actual organizing and labor. She left the schemes in their capable hands and provided advice and money. If the first went unheeded, at least she knew the second was always useful.
She read widely, and not just male writers, finding obscure works by Mary Astell and the even more obscure works of Aphra Behn interesting in the light they shone on feminine abilities, but she was no writer herself. Letters were necessary on occasion, but she had not the gift of talking infinitely on unwise things, as many women did, or deeply on one thing, as some women did. Was she no more than a butterfly, then, flitting through life, touching on flowers, sipping nectar, to leave no lasting impression once she was done and gone to whatever lay beyond the veil? Should she just marry Darkefell, enjoy his lavish attentions, and when those faded—as inevitably they must—content herself with children and the limited sphere afforded her as a female?
She put out one hand and touched the rock wall of the tunnel, trailing her fingers along it as she walked, like the gray ghost of the sad woman who was said to haunt Harecross Hall. The spirit, a lady from the time of Queen Elizabeth whose lover pushed her down some stairs and broke her neck, after breaking her heart with another woman, walked the halls on the anniversary of her murder, people claimed. She had never seen it, but then, she didn’t believe in ghosts.
Her thoughts returned to marriage and the marquess. The idea of marriage to such a man, one for whom she felt some irritated affection, and much heated desire, was fascinating. And yet, Darkefell would surely not be faithful in marriage, not after the first rush of affection and glow of sexual attraction had faded, as it must, with time. And it would break her heart into a thousand bleeding pieces if he wed her, bedded her, and then went off and found pleasure with another woman.
She stopped, hand out against the chill stone. Why would it hurt so badly if he abandoned her?
There was only one answer. Her heart pounded. Damn her stupidity! Despite her intentions, despite leaving Yorkshire like a coward, despite every attempt to remain cool and detached, she had fallen in love with the man. It was more than the faint “irritated affection” she had just called it; it was love, adoration, a veritable flood of emotional attachment.
She took in a deep, trembling breath, her first as a woman in love. And yes, acknowledging it had changed her subtly. Some questions in her heart were answered so swiftly as the time between one breath and another. Would she ever fall in love? she had wondered. Yes, completely and fully, for Darkefell filled her mind with amorous thoughts and her body with amorous longings, but beyond that, his mind, intelligent without being scholarly, satisfied her in ways no intellectual ever could.
There was a precipice between like and love. She had not seen it, and fell before she could stop herself. She loved him.
She approached the tunnel door ahead, beyond which lay the cavern and ocean, as if she were an automaton. She had the key in her hand, and saw the lock, put the lantern down on the floor of the tunnel, her mind turning, her head spinning with new thoughts, new wonderment. She was in love. Had she ever felt thus before, the gladness at seeing him, the need to hear him say her name, the rush of pleasure when he did?
Never. Never with any man in her life. He was the one.
The roar of the ocean beyond the door filled her ears, and she fit the key into the lock, turning it, the heavy padlock snapping open and falling from the hasp. She swung the door open and picked up the lantern. When it shone down the tunnel, she did not expect to see Lord Darkefell.
“Tony!” she gasped.
He grinned and held up his lantern, too. In his other hand he had a crowbar. “Well, hello. This is an unexpected pleasure, my dear lady.”
Anne saw Osei come up behind Darkefell, and tried to assemble her face into an expression more suitable, but she still gawped and babbled.
The marquess gazed at her steadily for a long moment, then turned to his secretary and said, his tone casual, “Osei, be a good fellow and leave us alone? Take the crowbar away, since I will have no use of it.”
The secretary bit his lip, smiled, met Anne’s gaze over Darkefell’s shoulder and shrugged. “Very good, my lord. Shall I assume that I am to go back to the inn?”
“Yes. Do just go away.”
Anne, with the new discovery of her feelings raw in her heart and her mind, stammered to the marquess, “Where did you come from? Why?” Her heart felt like it was going to burst from her chest, and it left her feeling queasy and faint. “Mr. Boatin,” she called out to him, beyond Darkefell. Her voice rattled with desperation. “You don’t have to leave.”
“But I do, my lady.” The secretary bowed, picked up the crowbar, and turned to go, then turned back. “My lord, shall I order your supper at the inn?”
“Just go away,” Darkefell growled, staring into Anne’s eyes.
She looked away from his searching stare. Once they were alone, with the roar of the ocean in her ears and her lantern flickering, she met his gaze and said, uncertainly, “I should go back.”
“No, you’ve come this far—come all the way.”
Her heart pounded. Their words, the dual meaning threading through them, left her feeling sick and light-headed. But she let him walk her the rest of the way down the tunnel until it opened into the natural cave and she could see, through the cleft opening, to the gray sky and tossing ocean beyond. A single seagull sailed the briny blast of wind, wheeling and arcing in the sky, a dark, elegant V against the slate-tinted clouds.
Darkefell took off his coat and laid it on a rocky outcropping near the cavern mouth, but far enough back that they didn’t get sprayed by the waves or blown on by the wind. “Sit, you don’t look well,” he said, yanking off his neckcloth and tossing it aside, as if the constriction was annoying to him.
“Thank you very much,” she said, her tone as tart as she could manage, while her gaze wandered to the narrow V of skin revealed by his shirt. A curl of dark chest hair peeked from the gap in the snowy white linen.
He cast her a quizzical glance as she settled herself on his jacket.
Something had changed between them, but he couldn’t figure out what. He stood for a moment, undecided, then walked to gaze down the tunnel. “May I assume that this tunnel comes up somewhere in Cliff House?” he asked, then looked back at her.
