The House at Bell Orchard Page 2

  The brothers exchanged a puzzled glance; Miles said slowly: “May I inquire, sir, how you propose to do that?”

  “Very simply. Dunton is known to the Government as an active supporter of the Stuarts, and therefore can make no accusation against us in person, but I am sure he will realize, as I have done, that there is one person who would have both the means and the will to destroy us, if she were put in possession of all the facts. I refer, of course, to Miss Tarrant.”

  Understanding dawned upon the young men. Harry gave a satisfied chuckle, and Miles said thoughtfully: “You propose, then, to use Miss Tarrant as the bait in a trap?”

  The Colonel nodded. “That is exactly what I intend. Your stepmother and I will leave for Richmond as soon as the last of our guests have departed, and you may be sure that we shall not permit Miss Tarrant to be parted from us again. It will seem natural for us to offer her guidance and protection at such a time. As soon as the funeral is over we will take her to Bell Orchard, for I believe that Sussex will be more convenient to our purpose than London. That, too, will occasion no surprise. Her father’s suicide is bound to give rise to a deal of nasty talk, from which it will be our natural desire to shield her.”

  Harry was frowning again, and as soon as his father paused he said uneasily: “Bell Orchard? Is that entirely wise, sir?”

  Miles laughed unpleasantly, but though the Colonel glanced sharply at him, he did not inquire the cause of his amusement. Instead he said:

  “Are you thinking of Piers Wychwood’s troublesome activities? We must be careful not to arouse his suspicions, of course, but otherwise I do not think we need trouble ourselves unduly. His efforts have met with singularly little success so far.”

  “What is this?” Miles asked curiously. “How does Wychwood enter into the affair?”

  His father told him, briefly repeating what he had already said to Harry. Miles listened with a faint, mocking smile, and at the end said contemptuously:

  “Our dear friend Piers! So earnest, so righteous—and so deplorably dull! I marvel that he could bring himself to leave his bucolic pursuits even to answer what he imagines to be the call of duty.”

  “Piers is no fool!” Harry said curtly. “What is more, I have never known him to abandon any project, once he has set his mind to it.”

  “I am inclined to agree with you in that,” his father remarked reflectively, “but in this instance I feel that the advantages of carrying out our plans at Bell Orchard outweigh the risks. Wychwood is not likely to make Miss Tarrant’s acquaintance, since her mourning will prevent her from taking any part in social activities.”

  “Oh, there are no sociable exchanges now between us and the Wychwoods,” Miles put in maliciously. “Harry has seen to that.”

  “Indeed?” The Colonel’s shrewd glance turned towards his elder son. “How is that?”

  Harry shrugged, casting a furious glance at his brother.

  “Merely a deal of fuss about nothing, sir. Piers saw fit to disapprove of what he chose to call my pursuit of his sister. Simply because I took the child riding without an attendant.”

  “The child, as you call her, is turned seventeen and remarkably pretty,” Miles said softly. “Nor, as I heard it, were you engaged in riding when Piers discovered you.”

  “Piers is as eager to think the worst as you are to make mischief!” Harry retorted violently. “Damn it all, I did no more than kiss the girl!”

  “It is fortunate that you did not,” his father said cuttingly, “for I can think of nothing more likely to ruin us than to be forced into an unwanted alliance with the Wychwood family. So that was the tale you imagined that Piers had brought me!”

  Miles laughed. “How foolish of you, dear brother!” he remarked. “I find Piers Wychwood insufferable, but even I know that he would not come whining to our father of such a matter. That is not at all his way.”

  “It most certainly is not,” Fenshawe agreed scornfully. “Now understand me, Harry, for I shall not warn you of this again. I will overlook your indiscretions only as long as they involve women of a certain class. I will not permit you to trifle with innocent girls of good family such as Dorothy Wychwood. Nor am I prepared to wait indefinitely for you to show a proper obedience to my wishes. Miss Tarrant is approaching the day when she will become sole mistress of her fortune, and I do not intend to let such a prize slip through my fingers. While she is in mourning for her father there can of course be no formal betrothal, but before she leaves Bell Orchard, you will oblige me by reaching an understanding with her, not only to secure her money, but also to ensure that no word of our dealings with her father ever leaks out.” He set down his glass and rose to his feet. “Now I must return to my guests. Remember what I have said.”

  He went out of the room, leaving Harry standing there with a dark flush in his cheeks and smouldering resentment in his eyes, resentment which flared into blazing anger as Miles said jeeringly:

  “I have not heard him take that tone with you these ten years past! Thanks be to Heaven I am not the elder son.”

  In two swift strides Harry was beside him, towering over him, his face dark with fury.

  “Liar!” he said between his teeth. “Where Charmian Tarrant is concerned you would give all you possess to stand in my place! Well, I am willing to step aside, but what would that avail you? You have been courting her for two years, and still she is scarcely aware of your existence.”

  Miles did not reply at once. He brushed past his brother and went to pour more brandy into his glass, standing by the table with his back to Harry.

  “We all have our crosses to bear, dear brother,” he drawled at length. “You are in danger of being bullied into matrimony by our confoundedly autocratic father. Our stepmother is to be exiled to Bell Orchard to comfort the bereaved heiress—poor Lavinia, how she will hate it! And I? As you say, Miss Tarrant is scarcely aware of my existence.” He sipped reflectively at the brandy for a moment, and then turned with lazy grace, the voluminous cloak swirling about him. He was smiling. “But she will be made aware of it one day, my dear Harry,” he said softly. “Death itself is not more certain than that.”

  2

  A Time for Tears

  In the coach making its hasty way along the road to Richmond, Charmian Tarrant sat silent and unheeding, oblivious alike of the discomfort of that hurried journey and of the old gentleman beside her. She was frozen into a state of numb incredulity, her shocked mind refusing to accept the truth of the news which Mr. Brownhill, her father’s nearest neighbour, had so reluctantly brought

  Her thoughts went back to the events preceding this urgent journey, and the scenes unfolded in her memory with a clarity which as yet brought no pain, for they seemed to concern some person other than herself. She recalled the ballroom with its flowers and glittering chandeliers, and the shifting pattern of colour as the gaily-clad guests threaded the intricate movements of the dance. She had turned, laughing, to find Lavinia Fenshawe at her side, white with shock beneath the rouge, and had been led by her away from the music and the mirth to a quiet room where the Colonel and Mr. Brownhill were waiting.

  As gently as they could, they had broken the news that her father lay dead by his own hand, but Charmian had been unable to believe it. With mute disbelief she had allowed them to make what arrangements they chose, only rousing when she found herself in Mr. Brownhill’s coach and on the point of departure. Then, giving way for a moment to panic, she had frantically sought Colonel Fenshawe’s guidance, and been reassured by the promise that he and his wife would join her as soon as they could. It was perhaps strange that she should turn for comfort to this man who had been her father’s intimate for only two years, instead of to Mr. Brownhill whom she had known all her life, but the Colonel was a man of strong character and commanding personality, beside whom the kindly, well-meaning old magistrate faded into insignificance.

  Charmian Tarrant was an only child and an heiress; she was also a very lonely young woman. Her mother had died s
uddenly and tragically, in an accident nine years before, and her father, who had married late in life a lady many years his junior, had from that day withdrawn into an impenetrable aloofness. Always reserved and studious, with a deep interest in the past, he now immersed himself in his historical studies, and sought, by so doing, to ease the sting of his present sorrow.

  Throughout Charmian’s girlhood he had remained a kindly but remote figure, and only her deep affection for him had prevented her from revealing the resentment she often felt at their restricted way of life. She was a gentle and sweet-natured girl, but with spirit enough to rebel against the unexciting rhythm of her days. All their acquaintances were of her father’s generation, and on the rare occasions when Charmian did attend some private party or local assembly, she did so in the care of Mrs. Brownhill. This good lady was so conscious of the responsibility of chaperoning an heiress, and so terrified that her charge might fall into the clutches of some fortune-hunter, that she would scarcely permit the girl to leave her side.

  Mr. Tarrant was a wealthy man, and Charmian had inherited also a large fortune from a maternal uncle, and these facts, combined with a considerable degree of good looks, should have made it easy for her father to arrange for her an excellent marriage. He had made no attempt to do so, and as Charmian approached her late teens, the omission began to cause her a good deal of secret disquiet.

  Matters might have continued thus indefinitely had not Mr. Tarrant, on one of his occasional visits to London—excursions upon which it never occurred to him to take his daughter—made the acquaintance of Colonel Fenshawe. How and where they met Charmian did not know, nor what business they discussed at such length behind the closed door of her father’s study whenever Fenshawe visited the house at Richmond, but she perceived at once that the Colonel was vastly different from the majority of her father’s friends. He was first and foremost a man of fashion, in whose presence, in spite of his unfailing courtesy, Charmian felt acutely conscious of her lack of social experience, and her countrified dress manner. Through him she caught her first glimpse of a wider and more exciting world, and when, on his third visit, he brought with him his young, handsome wife, exquisitely dressed and overwhelmingly friendly, she responded to every overture with guileless eagerness.

  Lavinia Fenshawe, it seemed, had resolved to take Miss Tarrant under her wing, and for the next few weeks Charmian lived in a whirl of excitement which culminated in her first visit to London. Her father, pleased to see her so happy, made no objection either to the visit or to the new and expensive wardrobe it required, and it occurred neither to him nor to his daughter that Mrs. Fenshawe’s kindness might be prompted by the fact that the Colonel had two unmarried sons of a former marriage, extravagant young men for either of whom the hand of an heiress would be a notable prize.

  Charmian made the acquaintance of the younger of these two brothers as soon as she arrived in London, and Miles, enchanted by her soft brown eyes and shy, sweet smile, and equally enchanted by the size of her fortune, lost no time in stealing a march on his brother and paying court to her in the most lavish style. But though Charmian found his admiration gratifying at first, and was grateful for his escort to balls and parties, it soon began to pall. She disliked his many affectations, his intense preoccupation with dress and all that was fashionable, and found it impossible to take him seriously.

  When Harry Fenshawe put in an appearance, however, her reaction was very different, for he seemed the embodiment of every romantic dream she had ever cherished. His dark good looks, the suggestion of dare-devilry that clung about him, contrasting so strongly with his brother’s studied languor, even the fiery temper of which she caught occasional glimpses, fascinated and excited her, and when Mrs. Fenshawe hinted delicately at the possibility of a marriage to strengthen the bond of friendship between their families, Charmian felt that her cup of happiness was full.

  Two years had passed since then, she was still waiting for Harry to propose, and lately had begun to doubt whether he ever would. It seemed that he was deliberately avoiding her. He had always spent a good deal of time at his father’s estate in Sussex, but now, it seemed, he lived there permanently, or else arranged his visits to the London house so that they did not coincide with hers. With her twenty-first birthday in sight—an almost unheard-of age for a girl in her circumstances to reach not merely unmarried but unbetrothed—Charmian was beginning to feel desperate.

  But now these doubts and fears were forgotten, driven from her mind by the appalling news of her father’s death. There seemed to be neither sense nor reason in such a tragedy. Suicide was the last, hopeless resort of those driven to desperation by a crushing weight of ill-for—tune, or by some intolerable grief, but her father was neither of these, and it seemed incredible that he should have ended his life by violence, self-inflicted. Why had he done it? Why?

  The question throbbed tormentingly in her mind, deepening the sense of unreality, of the utter impossibility of such a disaster. The journey seemed interminable, and it was with a sense of profound relief that she realized the coach was jolting at last through the familiar gateway of her home. Now this nightmare would be dispelled, and sanity return to the world.

  Mr. Brownhill descended stiffly from the coach and turned to help Charmian to alight. A pale dawn was breaking behind the trees at the edge of the garden, and below the sloping lawns the river was veiled in mist, but lights were burning in the lower windows of the house. The door was opened for them by a servant whose normally impassive face bore the marks of shock and grief, and as Charmian stepped into the hall, another door opened and Mrs. Brownhill, plump and motherly, came out to meet her. She looked pale and tired, and her eyes were reddened with weeping, but she came forward with outstretched arms to take the girl’s cold hands in her own.

  “Charmian!” she exclaimed brokenly. “Oh my poor, dear child, what can I say? This dreadful tragedy—” her tears overflowed again, so that she was unable to continue, and could only press Charmian’s fingers tightly in token of sympathy.

  Charmian looked at her, and then at the sad-faced servant and at Mr. Brownhill, tired and kindly and concerned, and slowly the awful reality began to force itself upon her. In horrified denial of it, still trying to thrust it away and wake from the nightmare, she said sharply, her voice high and strained in the silence:

  “My father! Where is he? I want to see him!”

  Mr. Brownhill laid a hand on her shoulder. His face was twisted with grief and pity.

  “My dear child,” he said unsteadily, “do not insist upon that. The nature of his injury—you would find it too harrowing.”

  Reality could be held at bay no longer. It pressed upon her from every side, in the unnatural silence of the house, in the pale, sorrowful faces of her companions, most of all in the pitying words which sketched a picture from which her imagination recoiled in horror. For a moment or two she continued to stare at the old man, and then with a broken cry buried her face in her hands. There was to be no awakening, and home was not the sanctuary she had expected, but the source from which the nightmare sprang.

  Of what followed she afterwards retained no clear recollection. Mrs. Brownhill presently got her to bed, and sat with her in her darkened room while the summer dawn gave place to a day whose bright beauty mocked at sorrow and bereavement. The old lady was bewildered and a little frightened. Charmian did not weep; after that one broken, protesting cry she scarcely uttered a sound, but lay staring before her with wide, blank eyes until she fell at last into an exhausted sleep. Mrs. Brownhill slept, too, dozing uncomfortably in her chair, until roused by the sound of the door being softly opened. An elegantly dressed young woman looked into the room, cast a swift glance towards the bed, and then laid a finger to her lips.

  Mrs. Brownhill, still dazed with sleep and weariness, obeyed an imperiously beckoning hand and followed the newcomer out into the corridor. The lady drew the door of the bedchamber shut again and said in a low voice:

  “I am Lavinia Fens
hawe, ma’am. How fares my poor Charmian?”

  “She is sleeping now,” Mrs. Brownhill replied in the same tone, “but she has been so quiet, so calm! It does not seem natural.”

  Lavinia nodded. “So it was when she left London, but the breaking-point will come soon, no doubt. Let her sleep while she may.” She paused, studying the elder woman’s tired face, and then added smoothly: “You, too, are in need of rest, Mrs. Brownhill. I will take your place with Charmian now.”

  The old lady hesitated, for though she was almost lightheaded with fatigue, she felt oddly reluctant to hand over her charge to this stranger. Mrs. Fenshawe was very handsome, but her pale, blonde colouring and light-blue eyes gave an impression of coldness, and there was a certain hard selfishness about her mouth. No fault, however, could be found with her manner, and Mrs. Brownhill decided that the doubts she felt were merely the result of weariness and the shocking events of the previous night. She gave a murmur of assent, and went slowly downstairs to join her husband.

  It was an hour or so later that Charmian awoke. For a few bewildered moments she lay still, conscious only of a heavy weight of foreboding, a sense of disaster which her familiar surroundings seemed to belie. Then, as recollection forced itself into her mind, she gave a stifled cry and sat upright. At once the bed-curtain was drawn aside and Lavinia stood looking down at her. Charmian stared back, seeing in her presence there confirmation of all the terrible memories and fears which were confusing her mind. “Lavinia!” she whispered. “Is it true? My father—”

  “Yes, it is true!” With a swift, graceful movement Mrs. Fenshawe seated herself on the bed and took Charmian into her arms, “My poor child, would to Heaven it were not! There, my dear, weep if you will. It is a time for tears.”

  A sob had broken from Charmian’s lips at Lavinia’s first words, and the tears which had seemed frozen within her flowed at last. She wept for a long time, to the point of utter exhaustion, and all the while Lavinia Fenshawe remained at her side, stroking her hair and murmuring words of comfort, while elsewhere in the house her husband set himself to discover the exact circumstances of Mr. Tarrant’s death.