‘I know it’s absurd,’ replied Cedric frankly. ‘But you should have thought of that before you started jauntering about the country in this crazy fashion. There’s nothing for it now: you’ll have to be married!’
‘I won’t!’ Pen declared. ‘No one need ever know that I am not a boy, except you, and one other, who doesn’t signify.’
‘But my dear girl, it won’t do! Take it from me, it won’t do! If you don’t know that, I’ll be bound Ricky does. I daresay you don’t fancy the notion, but he’s a devilish fine catch, you know. Blister it, we were looking to him to bring our family fortunes about, so we were!’ he added, with an irrepressible chuckle.
‘I think you are vulgar and detestable!’ said Pen. ‘I have got a great deal of money of my own; in fact, I’m an heiress, and I have a very good mind not to marry anyone!’
‘But only think what a waste!’ protested Cedric. ‘If you are an heiress, and you can’t stomach the notion of marrying Ricky, for which I won’t blame you, for the Lord knows he’s no lady’s man! – a hardened case, m’dear: never looked seriously at a female in his life! – I suppose you wouldn’t make shift with your humble servant?’
‘Your conversation, my dear Cedric, is always edifying,’ said Sir Richard icily.
But Pen, instead of being offended, giggled. ‘No, thank you. I shouldn’t like to marry you at all.’
‘I was afraid you wouldn’t. You’ll have to take Ricky, then: nothing else for it! But you’re too young for him: no getting away from that! Damme, if I know what maggot got into your heads to set you off on this crazy adventure!’
‘You are labouring under a misapprehension, Cedric,’ said Sir Richard. ‘There is nothing I desire more than to marry Pen.’
‘Well, of all things!’ gasped Cedric. ‘And here was I thinking you a hopeless case!’
‘I am going to bed,’ stated Pen.
Sir Richard moved across the door to open it for her. ‘Yes my child: go to bed. But pray do not let Cedric’s artless chatter prejudice you! For addle-pated folly I have never met his equal.’ He possessed himself of her hand, as he spoke, and lifted it to his lips. ‘Pleasant dreams, brat,’ he said softly.
She felt a lump rise in her throat, achieved a tremulous smile, and fled, but not before she had heard Cedric exclaim in tones of the liveliest surprise: ‘Ricky, you ain’t really in love with that chit, are you?’
‘I think,’ said Sir Richard, closing the door, ‘that we shall be more usefully employed in discussing the circumstances which brought you here, Cedric.’
‘Oh, by all means!’ Cedric said hastily. ‘Beg pardon! No intention of prying into your affairs, dear boy; not the least in the world! Now, don’t get into a miff ! You know how it is with me! Never could keep a discreet tongue in my head!’
‘That is what I am afraid of,’ Sir Richard said dryly.
‘Mum as an oyster!’ Cedric assured him. ‘But that you of all men, Ricky – ! That’s what beats me! However, no concern of mine! What’s all this you were telling me about Bev?’
‘He’s dead. That seems to be the most important thing.’
‘Well, it’s no good expecting me to pull a long face over it. He was a bad man, take my word for it! What was he doing in this spinney you talk of ?’
‘As a matter of fact, he went there to meet me,’ said Sir Richard.
Cedric frowned at him. ‘More in this than meets the eye. Why, Ricky?’
‘To be plain with you, he had hit upon the notion of extorting money from me by threatening to make known the fact that my supposed cousin was a girl in disguise.’
‘Yes, that’s Bev all over,’ nodded Cedric, quite unsurprised. ‘Offered to pay his debts, didn’t you?’
‘Oh, I had offered that earlier in the day! Unfortunately Captain Trimble learned of my appointment with Beverley in the spinney, and went there before me. I fancy he had nothing more than robbery in mind. There was a witness to the meeting, who described how a quarrel sprang up, and how Trimble struck Beverley down, searched his pockets, and made off. Possibly he thought he had merely stunned him. When I found him his neck was broken.’
‘Jupiter!’ said Cedric, giving a whistle of consternation. ‘It’s worse than I thought, then! The devil! There will be no hushing this up. They don’t suspect you of having a hand in it, do they, Ricky?’
‘I am fast acquiring a most unsavoury reputation in this neighbourhood, but so far I have not been arrested for murder. What precise object had you in coming here?’
‘Why, to choke the truth out of Bev, of course! Couldn’t get it out of my head he was at the bottom of that robbery. He was badly dipped, y’know. M’father wants my bloodhound called off, too, but I’m damned if I can come up with any trace of him. If you met the fellow on the Bristol road, that would account for my missing him. I went to Bath. Last I heard of Bev was that he was there, with Freddie Fotheringham. Freddie told me Bev had gone off to stay with some people called Luttrell, living at a place near here. So I saw m’mother, got the full story of the robbery out of her, and came on here. Now what’s to do?’
‘You had better make the acquaintance of the local magistrate. A man who might well be Trimble was taken up in Bath to-day, but whether the necklace was on him I know not.’
‘Must lay my hands on that plaguey necklace!’ frowned Cedric. ‘Won’t do if the truth about that were to come out. But what are you going to do, Ricky? It seems to me you’re in the deuce of a coil too.’
‘I shall no doubt be able to answer that question when I have talked the matter over with Pen to-morrow,’ Sir Richard replied.
But Sir Richard was not destined to have the opportunity of talking over any matter with Miss Creed upon the morrow. Miss Creed, going dejectedly up to bed, sat for a long time at the open window of her room, and gazed blindly out upon the moonlit scene. She had spent, she decided, quite the most miserable day of her life, and the sudden incursion of Cedric Brandon had done nothing to alleviate her heaviness of heart. It was apparent that Cedric considered her adventure only one degree less fantastic than the notion that she was to marry Sir Richard. According to his own words, he had known Sir Richard from the cradle, so that it was fair to assume that he was very well acquainted with him. He gave it as his opinion that she must marry Sir Richard, which was tantamount to saying, she reflected, that she had put Sir Richard into the uncomfortable position of being obliged to offer for her. It was most unjust, Pen thought, for Sir Richard had not been sober when he had insisted on accompanying her into Somerset, and he had, moreover, done it out of sheer solicitude for her safety. It had not occurred to her that a gentleman so many years her senior could be supposed to compromise her, or to engage his own honour so disastrously. She had liked him from the moment of setting eyes on him; she had plunged into terms of intimacy with him in the shortest possible time; and had, indeed, felt as though she had known him all her life. She thought herself more stupid even than Lydia Daubenay not to have realized before ever they had reached Queen Charlton, that she had tumbled headlong in love with him. She had refused to look beyond her meeting with Piers, yet she could not but admit to herself now that she had been by no means anxious to summon Piers to her side when she had arrived at the George. By the time she did come face to face with him, he would have had to have been a paragon indeed to have won her from Sir Richard.
His conduct had been anything rather than that of a paragon. He had spoiled everything, Pen thought. He had accused her of impropriety, and had forced Sir Richard into making a declaration he had surely not wanted to make.
‘Because I don’t suppose he loves me at all,’ Pen argued to herself. ‘He never said so until Piers was so odious: in fact, he treated me just as if he really was a trustee, or an uncle, or somebody years and years older than I am, which I dare say was what made it all seem quite proper to me, and not in the least scanda
lous. Only then we fell into so many adventures, and he was obliged to fob off Aunt Almeria, and then the stammering-man guessed I was a girl, and Piers was disagreeable, and I got into a scrape through Lydia’s folly, and the Major came, and now this other Mr Brandon knows about me, and the end of it is I have placed poor Richard in the horridest situation imaginable! There is only one thing for it: I shall have to run away.’
This decision, however, made her feel so melancholy that several large tears brimmed over her eyelids and rolled down her cheeks. She wiped them away, telling herself it was stupid to cry. ‘Because if he doesn’t want to marry me, I don’t want to marry him – much; and if he does, I dare say he will come to visit me atAunt’s house. No, he won’t. He’ll forget all about me, or verylikely be glad that he is rid of a badly behaved, tiresome ch-charge! Oh dear!’
So sunk in these dismal reflections did she become that it was a long time before she could rouse herself sufficiently to prepare for bed. She even forgot the elopement she had helped to arrange, and heard the church-clock strike midnight without so much as recalling that Lydia should now be stepping up into the hired post-chaise, with or without a cage of love-birds.
She spent a miserable night, disturbed by unquiet dreams, and tossing from side to side in a way that soon untucked all the sheets and blankets, and made the bed so uncomfortable that by six in the morning, when she finally awoke to find the room full of sunlight, she was very glad to leave it.
A considerable portion of her waking hours had been spent in considering how she could run away without Sir Richard’s knowing anything about it. A carrier was used to go into Bristol on certain days, she remembered, and she made up her mind either to buy a seat on his wagon, or, if it was not one of his days, to walk to Bristol, and there book a seat on the London stagecoach. Bristol was not more than six or seven miles distant from Queen Charlton, and there was, moreover, a reasonable hope of being offered a lift in some conveyance bound for the town.
She dressed herself, and very nearly started to cry again when she struggled with the folds of the starched muslin cravat, because it was one of Sir Richard’s. Once dressed, she packed her few belongings in the cloak-bag he had lent her, and tiptoed downstairs to the parlour.
The servants, though she could hear them moving about in the coffee-room, and the kitchen, had not yet come into the parlour to draw back the blinds, and to set the room to rights. In its untidy, overnight state it looked dispiriting. Pen pulled the blinds apart, and sat down at the writing-table to compose a letter of farewell to Sir Richard.
It was a very difficult letter to write, and seemed to entail much nose-blowing, and many watery sniffs. When she had at last finished it, Pen read it through rather dubiously, and tried to erase a blot. It was not a satisfactory letter, but there was no time to write another, so she folded, and sealed it, wrote Sir Richard’s name on it and propped it up on the mantelpiece.
In the entrance-parlour she encountered the pessimistic waiter who had served them on the previous evening. His eyes seemed even duller than usual, and beyond staring in a ruminative fashion at her cloak-bag, he evinced no interest in Pen’s early rising.
She explained to him glibly that she was obliged to go into Bristol, and asked if the carrier would be passing the George. The waiter said that he would not be passing, because Friday was not his day. ‘If you had wanted him yesterday, it would have been different,’ he added reproachfully.
She sighed. ‘Then I shall be obliged to walk.’
The waiter accepted this without interest, but just as she reached the door he bethought him of something, and said in a voice of unabated gloom: ‘The missus is going to Bristol in the trap.’
‘Do you think she would take me with her?’
The waiter declined to offer an opinion, but he volunteered to go and ask the missus. However, Pen decided to go herself, and, penetrating to the yard at the back of the inn, found the landlord’s wife packing a basket into the trap, and preparing to mount into it herself.
She was surprised at Pen’s request, and eyed the cloak-bag with suspicion, but she was a stout, good-natured woman, and upon Pen’s assuring her mendaciously that Sir Richard was well-aware of her projected expedition, she allowed her to get into the trap, and to stow the cloak-bag under the seat. Her son, a phlegmatic young man, who chewed a straw throughout the journey, took the reins, and in a few minutes the whole party was proceeding up the village street at a sober but steady pace.
‘Well, I only hopes, sir, as I’m not doing wrong,’ said Mrs Hopkins, as soon as she had recovered from the exertion of hoisting her bulk into the trap. ‘I’m sure I was never one to pry into other folks’ business, but if you was running away from the gentleman which has you in charge, I should get into trouble, that’s what.’
‘Oh no, indeed you won’t!’ Pen assured her. ‘You see, we have not our own carriage with us, or – or I should not have been obliged to trouble you in this way.’
Mrs Hopkins said that she was not one to grudge trouble, and added that she was glad of company. When she discovered Pen had had no breakfast, she was very much shocked, and after much tugging and wheezing, pulled out the basket from under the seat, and produced out of it a large packet of sandwiches, a pie wrapped in a napkin, and a bottle of cold tea. Pen accepted a sandwich, but refused the pie, a circumstance which made Mrs Hopkins say that although the young gentleman would have been welcome to it, it was, in point of fact, a gift for her aunt, who lived in Bristol. She further disclosed that she was bound for the town to meet her sister’s second girl, who was coming down on the London stage to work as a chambermaid at the George. The ball of conversation having been set rolling in this easy fashion, the journey passed pleasantly enough, Mrs Hopkins furnishing Pen with so exhaustive an account of the various trials and vicissitudes which had befallen every member of her family, that by the time the trap drew up at an inn in the centre of Bristol, Pen felt that there could be little she did not know about the good lady’s relatives.
The stage was not due to arrive in Bristol until nine o’clock, at which hour the coach setting out for London would leave the inn. Mrs Hopkins set off to visit her aunt, and Pen, having booked a seat on the stage, and deposited the cloak-bag at the inn, sallied forth to lay out her last remaining coins on provisions to sustain her during the journey.
The streets were rather empty at such an early hour, and some of the shops had not yet taken down their shutters, but after walking for a few minutes and observing with interest the changes which, in five years, had taken place in the town, Pen found a cook-shop that was open. The smell of freshly baked pies made her feel hungry, and she went into the shop, and made a careful selection of the viands offered for sale.
When she came out of the shop, there was still half-an-hour to while away before the coach was due to start, and she wandered into the market-place. Here there were quite a number of people already busy about the day’s business. Pen caught sight of Mrs Hopkins bargaining with a salesman over the price of a length of calico, but since she did not feel that she wanted to learn any more details about the Hopkins family, she avoided her, and pretended to be interested in a clockmaker’s shop. So intent was she on avoiding Mrs Hopkins’s motherly eye, that she was blissfully unaware that she herself was being closely scrutinized by a thickset man in a duffle coat, and a wide-brimmed hat, who, after gazing fixedly at her for some moments, stepped up to her, and, laying a heavy hand on her shoulder, said deeply: ‘Got you!’
Pen jumped guiltily, and looked round in sudden alarm. The voice sounded familiar; to her dismay she found herself staring up into the face of the Bow Street Runner who had overtaken Jimmy Yarde at the inn near Wroxham.
‘Oh!’ she said faintly. ‘Oh! Are you not the – the man I met – the other day? Good – good-morning! A fine day, isn’t – isn’t it?’
‘That’s so, young sir,’ said the Runner, in a grim to
ne. ‘And a werry complete hand you be, and no mistake! I’ve been wanting another touch at you. Ah, and when Nat Gudgeon wants a touch at a cove, he gets it, and no mistake about that neither! You come along with me!’
‘But I haven’t done anything wrong! Indeed I haven’t!’ said Pen.
‘If you haven’t, then there’s no call for you to be scared of me,’ said Mr Gudgeon, with what seemed to her a fiendish leer. ‘But what I been thinking, young sir, is, that you and that fine gentleman what was with you loped off mighty quick from that there inn. Why, anyone might have thought, so they might, as how you had took an unaccountable dislike to me!’
‘No, no, we didn’t! But there was nothing to stay for, and we were already much delayed.’
‘Well,’ said Mr Gudgeon, shifting his grip to her arm, and grasping this firmly above the elbow, ‘I’ve got a fancy to question you more particular, young sir. Now, don’t you make the werry great mistake of trying to struggle with me, because it won’t do you no good. Maybe you ain’t never heard tell on a cove by the name o’ Yarde: likewise you wouldn’t reckernize a set o’ sparklers if you was to see one. Lor’! if I had a brace of meggs for every green-looking young chub like you which I’ve took up – ah, and shut up in the Whit just as snug as you please – I’d be a werry rich man, so I would. You come along of me, and stop trying to gammon me, because I’ve got a werry strong notion you know a deal more about a certain set o’ sparklers nor what you’re wishful I should get wind of.’
By this time, the attention of several persons had been attracted, and a small crowd was beginning to gather. Pen cast a hunted look around. She saw the aghast face of Mrs Hopkins, but no means of escape, and gave herself up for lost. Mr Gudgeon evidently meant to march her off to the gaol, or at any rate to some place of safe-keeping, where her sex, she suspected, would soon be discovered. Meanwhile, the crowd was swelling, several members of it loudly demanding to know what the young gentleman had done, and one knowledgeable individual explaining to his neighbours that that was one of they Bow Street Runners from London, that was. Nothing would serve her, Pen decided, but a certain measure of frankness. Accordingly, she made no attempt to break away from the Runner’s hold, but said in as calm a tone as she was able to assume: ‘Indeed, I do not mind going with you at all. In fact, I know just what you want, and I dare say I can furnish you with some very valuable information.’