Page 6 of A Gentleman’s Offer
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Dominic was forced to conclude that his companion had a point. ‘I can spend time in their company,’ she went on reasonably, ‘and try to see if they are behaving oddly, though it’ll be difficult to tell for certain as I don’t know them at all, apart from what she’s told me in her letters. I have asked my aunt to give me details of anyone Maria is particularly close to, and she has done so, but she’s so very distressed over what’s happened that she can’t be much help beyond that. She’s taken to her bed with a spasm today, Hannah tells me. Or several spasms. And palpitations, whatever they are.’
‘My mother suffers from them too. I’ve always supposed them to be imaginary, but perhaps I’m being unfair. They do sound most disagreeable. But let us not be distracted by such incidental matters. It is plain that you must continue in your deception. Very well. And the servants who have changed their situations? It sounds as though that aspect of the problem might be easier to deal with. If any of them are living and working in London, or near London, I assume their fellow servants will know, and perhaps they’ll even have their directions?’ She nodded. ‘Well then, my valet or my groom, both of whom are utterly trustworthy, I promise, can be admitted into the secret so that they can help us interview them in a discreet manner. Does all this sound like a plan?’
Miss Nightingale had seemed more cheerful for the last few moments – clearly the idea of positive action appealed to her lively nature – but now she said doubtfully, ‘We can do all these things, and we must.’ Dominic could not help but notice that his companion was very keen to involve him much more deeply in the matter than he had so far promised to go, with her clever use of the innocuous little word ‘we’. ‘Don’t think I’m not grateful for your help, sir, because I am, but I’m very conscious that the clock is ticking all the while. When is your wedding to be? I collect it is quite soon, but Maria didn’t say.’
‘Can you wonder she didn’t, since she apparently had no intention of actually participating? In three weeks’ time,’ he responded rather hollowly. ‘At St George’s, Hanover Square. As one might expect.’
‘And what happens if we can’t find her before then, sir?’
‘The wedding will have to be called off,’ he said resolutely, frowning down at her. ‘Really, it must be. There’s no other option. If I were more sensible, I’d put an end to this farce directly myself rather than tacitly support you in it. It’s quite plain your sister doesn’t want anything to do with me, and really, you know, I’m an easy-going sort of a man as a general rule, but I don’t experience a great desire to spend the rest of my life with a woman who’d rather run away from her home and family in the middle of the night than become my bride. I hope I’m not excessively conceited, but you can’t expect me to like it nonetheless. I should speak to your father without delay.’
‘I quite understand your feelings, but you must see that you can’t do that,’ she said persuasively, her large blue eyes liquid and earnest. ‘For heaven’s sake, Sir Dominic, your engagement party was just last night! There’d be a fearful scandal, and your reputation, and your family’s, would suffer for it, as well as Maria’s. You can’t call an end to the engagement – men can’t, can they? – so if you intend to put it about that my sister has cried off, you’d have to tell my father the whole truth to make him cooperate with the lie. And that would be most unkind to my poor aunt, and to Maria herself, if she means in fact to come back, which for all we know she might. You can surely imagine how Lord Nightingale would react to such a blow to his conceit. He’d cast her off in the most dramatic of fashions, making a huge public fuss like a great spoiled baby and doing everything he possibly could to be excessively disagreeable. I assure you from my own knowledge, he can be most unpleasant when he is thwarted. It’s only fair that we at least try to find out where Maria is and why she left. We mustn’t despair yet.’
That ‘we’ again. Such a small word, and so dangerous. He felt himself weakening in the face of her determination, and looked down at her with a lurking smile in his grey eyes. ‘You are a young lady of great energy and resolution,’ he said. ‘To set off in such haste, too, to come to the aid of a sister and an aunt you haven’t seen for years – your loyalty is admirable.’
‘Nonsense,’ she said, flushing a little. ‘They needed my help. They still do. And Mama would have come too, though obviously she could not be expected to stay under my father’s roof, which would be extremely awkward, only she is very exercised with finishing her latest novel, which does not progress as it should and is due to be delivered to her publisher next month.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I see.’
He was determined to keep his inevitable reflections to himself, but Miss Margaret appeared to have divined them by some mysterious means, for she said, ‘I don’t suppose you do, you know. I can see you think that she is being selfish, not coming to help, but you’re wrong. We have not very much money, and for the most part Mama is obliged to support us with her writing. I have been able to make almost no contribution as yet, though of course I hope I shall in time. This means she has commitments she must fulfil. A legal contract! I expect you think that successful writers like my mother earn a great deal of money for their labour, and live in great luxury on it, but I must tell you that it is not so.’
‘I’d never considered the matter particularly before,’ he replied, ‘not being of a literary turn myself, but I might have imagined that your father supported you both, or at least supported you, as you are his acknowledged child and his responsibility, at least till you are of age.’
‘He is supposed to, but he does so very grudgingly, and the payments are always late, or mysteriously go astray, and certainly are not to be depended on always to keep a roof above our heads, the servants’ wages paid and food on the table. Paper, too, is quite shockingly expensive, you know, and postage, and books, which are a necessity for existence, naturally.’
‘Naturally they are. The more I hear about your father,’ Dominic said rather grimly, ‘the more I am inclined to dislike him enormously, and, for that matter, the more I wonder that my father should have entered into any sort of agreement with him, least of all one of such an important nature. My own father was quite another type of man, I assure you. But friendship – especially if it is of many years’ duration – is a mysterious thing, I suppose.
‘We may be refining too much upon the matter, of course. I will never know my father’s motives now, though my mother’s seem clear enough. One is, after all, obliged in the end to marry someone in particular. And your sister is highly eligible by anyone’s standards. But we are wandering from the point. Will you draw up a list of former servants and their directions, so that you can share it with me? I assume you are to attend Princess Esterhazy’s ball tonight?’
‘I am – Maria is – although I am by no means sure that my aunt will be well enough to accompany me. She is still quite overset. Would your mother consent to act as my chaperon, do you suppose?’
‘Need you ask? Nothing could delight her more,’ he said drily. ‘And she’ll be a most inattentive duenna, I promise you. I dare say we could disappear together for hours and she would turn a resolutely blind eye to it. She will be in alt when I tell her that I have seen you already today and you have requested that we collect you this evening.’
Miss Nightingale grimaced, wrinkling up her freckled nose in a manner that made her look quite astonishingly unlike her sister. ‘Oh dear, I expect she will be. She will be devastated if you are obliged to tell her that the match must be called off, will she not, when she has done so much to promote it, whatever her reasons?’
‘She will, and I suppose I must be sorry for it. But I challenge you to present me with an alternative. Can you, in all seriousness, envisage any possible combination of circumstances that leads to your sister walking up the aisle and joining me, of her own free will, in three weeks’ time? Because I must be honest and say that at this moment I cannot. And I warn you that I will not accept an unwilling bride. I may be expensive, elderly, and altogether quite a frippery fellow, in your eyes, but I am not a complete fool.’
‘I never said you were… some of those things,’ she responded with dignity. ‘You can’t imagine, now that I know what has happened – because my aunt’s letter was extremely incoherent, so that I had no real idea what I might find when I got to London – that I mean to try to force Maria to marry you? I would not do such a thing even if it lay within my power. It does seem quite clear that she doesn’t want you, which is her right, and I must respect that, even if I fear my father won’t. My first concern is to see her safe. That’s all I care about, really. If she doesn’t want to come home for some other reason, and I would be the last person to blame her for it, we can deal with that together. If I end up having to reveal to my father that she’s gone and I took her place, and that she has no intention of returning, I will do that for her. I’m not scared of him. She’s the one who’s been forced to live with him these past five years, after all, while I was much happier with Mama even if we do lack for money. I’m sure no number of pianoforte lessons and silk dresses could make up for that.’
‘You must be right. I’m sure you would tell me that you often are,’ he said, smiling. ‘But you told me you came up to Town by stage?’ What entertaining, unexpected company she was – he had not the least idea what she was going to say next, and he was conscious of an unaccountable desire to prolong the interview beyond its natural duration. Dammit, he knew he was going to help her. Of course he was. ‘Without even a maid to accompany you?’
‘Are you shocked, sir?’ she replied tranquilly. ‘I suppose it is highly irregular. But my mama has brought me up not to regard social conventions overmuch, and the last thing I needed was to bring someone with me who might go chattering indiscreetly about my sister’s disappearance while there might still be a chance of keeping it secret. It was a great adventure, I assure you, and most interesting to have the opportunity to talk to people I did not know, though it was not, of course, terribly comfortable, and very slow. We don’t keep a carriage, and I couldn’t possibly have afforded to travel post, in any case. It didn’t occur to my aunt to send me any money for the journey, and no wonder, so distressed as she is, poor thing.’
‘I am sure the journey offered you many opportunities of observation that you will quickly turn to good use as a writer. But I haven’t thought to ask you if Mrs Greystone knows anything that might point to your sister’s whereabouts. I assume she does not?’
‘Not the least thing in the world, I assure you. She is my father’s sister, you know, and quite in awe of him; Maria would never confide in her, for fear she’d fall into a fit of the vapours and tell him everything.’
‘Perhaps tonight we may discover if any of your sister’s friends are in her confidence, instead?’ He couldn’t help realising that he was saying ‘we’ now too; it must be infectious.
‘I hope so,’ she said doubtfully. ‘We can only hope that none of them realises I’m not her – but then, why should they, since I have never appeared in society and don’t live in London, and they probably barely know I exist? I have a list of them already, though there’s no point sharing it with you – it’s not as though you, of all people, can go round interrogating debutantes, or even talking to any one of them on your own for very long; everyone would think you’d run mad, especially now you are betrothed. But I’ll make up another list, of servants who have left, which is a very good notion of yours and where you can perhaps be useful.’
He bowed. ‘Thank you; to be of use to you is my sole aim in life, naturally, ma’am.’ He hoped it wasn’t true even as he said it, but feared it might swiftly become so. ‘If you can contrive to have it sent over to my house quite soon, I can make a start on it. Otherwise the afternoon will be quite wasted in my usual idle and inconsequential pursuits. Perhaps you can send your sister’s maid, Hannah? I’d like to talk to her, in any case.’
If she was aware he was teasing her, she showed no sign of it. ‘I don’t think she knows anything, or she’d have told me, but of course I will, if you wish it.’
They parted cordially, Dominic throwing Miss Nightingale up easily into the saddle and watching her trot sedately away with Robert a discreet length or so behind her. Her back was very straight and her seat excellent; she made a brave figure in her bright blue habit, and despite his earlier lively amusement he was frowning as his eyes tracked her out of the gates and into the busy street.
He was aware of a strong and growing sense of foreboding, though he hoped he had revealed nothing of his fears to his companion. He greatly admired her fierce determination to help her sister, and he supposed it might be possible that one of Maria Nightingale’s bosom bows might be keeping secrets for her, or that she’d taken shelter with a trusted servant who’d known her since childhood. But if neither of these avenues of investigation led anywhere, they would swiftly find themselves at point non plus. They’d have to tell Lord Nightingale and insist that he call out the Runners, hoping desperately that they had resources denied to private persons, and be damned to all hope of concealment. There would be a dreadful scandal – but that was the least of his worries.
It seemed certain that Miss Nightingale had fled of her own free will, but that was not to say that she was safe now. She could have found herself in all manner of peril a few minutes after she’d left her father’s house. She could be held against her will in some house of ill repute; she could be injured, or dead. She could, in fact, be floating in the river at this minute, a lifeless, nameless corpse, just one among many. London was a dangerous city, full of hazards for a young woman on her own, and it was all too possible for a vulnerable and friendless girl to fall prey to one of them and disappear forever without leaving any trace. What then? All Meg’s high courage and desire to be active would help her little if the days passed, and then the weeks and months, with no news. Her father’s anger and the scandal of a broken engagement could soon be as nothing to what she might have to endure in dread and constant anxiety. And her life, it seemed to him, had been hard enough already, though she made light of it. It struck him as cursedly unfair.