Lady Catherine's Necklace (14 page)

‘I'll go and find it,' said Anne, ‘and bring it here.'

The two friends were planting out seedlings in a potting shed at the far end of the great walled vegetable garden.

‘Wait there, I shall not be many minutes,' said Anne. ‘What did the book look like?'

‘'Twas bound in red leather, Miss Anne. But very faded. And only a little book – no bigger than a half-brick.'

Anne nodded and ran off. But when she reached the library, she found there a scene of dismay and shock. Lord Luke was in the room, and Colonel FitzWilliam, Mrs Jenkinson, Frinton the butler, the Delavals and Lady Catherine's maid Pronkum, who was having a fit of hysterics, weeping and laughing and calling upon heaven to have mercy.

‘Oh, be quiet, woman, will you! Cease making that atrocious racket!' cried Lord Luke with furious impatience.

‘What in the world is the matter?' asked Anne, startled out of her usual reserve.

‘Matter? Butchery and bloodshed's the matter!' shrieked Pronkum. ‘And torture and dreadfulness and wicked shockingness!'

She beat her hands frantically on a bundle of documents that lay on the library table. Presumably they had come from the attics, for they emitted a cloud of dust.

Mrs Jenkinson and Miss Delaval attempted to hush Pronkum, while Anne asked again, ‘What is the matter?'

‘Your uncle has had a letter,' said Colonel FitzWilliam, who was looking very pale and grave.

‘A letter? From whom?'

‘Oh, my lady, my lady!' shrieked Pronkum.

Anne was bewildered.

‘Is the letter from my mother?'

‘Oh, dear Lord Luke!' cried Mrs Jenkinson anxiously. ‘Do you think it right that Miss Anne should know about this?'

‘She has reached the age of reason,' snapped Lord Luke. ‘She is eighteen, is she not?'

‘Is my mother dead?' inquired Anne.

‘No, no. At least, we hope not,' said Colonel FitzWilliam.

‘If she is not dead, what has happened?'

‘The letter is unsigned,' said Lord Luke. ‘It appears to come from Cornwall, or somewhere in the West Country. It demands money for the return of your mother, and makes alarming threats if the money is not paid.'

‘How much money? And what sort of threats?'

Lord Luke and FitzWilliam exchanged looks.

‘No precise sum is stated,' Lord Luke told Anne, his severe expression suggesting that he found her behaviour far too undaughterly, composed and matter-of-fact. ‘Nor are the threats in any way specific. They merely state that great harm and punishment will be inflicted upon my poor sister if the moneys are not paid over.'

‘But how can they be paid, if no particular sum is stated? Or place of payment?'

‘The letter intimates that another communication will follow later.'

‘I believe,' put in Mr Delaval, ‘that in such cases of kidnapping this is a customary procedure, so as to heighten alarm and despondence, you know, in the unfortunate relatives of the kidnapped person.'

Lord Luke and Colonel FitzWilliam glanced at him sharply, manifesting disapproval at his claiming such familiarity with the niceties of kidnapping procedure.

‘May I see the letter?' said Anne, stretching out her hand to Lord Luke, who held a grimy and much-folded piece of paper.

He appeared hesitant. ‘I am not sure if it will be proper – some of the expressions employed are very coarse.'

‘Oh, good gracious!' Anne said irritably. ‘She
is
my mother.'

But as Lord Luke, capitulating, was about to pass over the paper, Pronkum, with a loud scream, snatched it and flung it into the fire.

‘That is the only place for such a wicked message!' she cried, and, casting herself full-length on the floor, drummed with her feet and sobbed at the top of her voice.

‘Oh, fetch a couple of footmen, Frinton, and take her upstairs,' said Lord Luke in disgust. ‘Let us have a little peace around here.'

‘But what can be done about my mother?'

‘Why – nothing, now. Not,' said Lord Luke scrupulously, ‘that we could have taken any practical measures, even had we retained that paper.'

‘We could have shown it to the constables,' pointed out Colonel FitzWilliam.

Lord Luke's expression showed how little help he felt this measure would have provided. Mrs Jenkinson – since Anne declined any restoratives, smelling salts, or condolences – hastened away to help the housekeeper pacify Pronkum, whose shrieks could still be heard ringing through the house.

‘Poor Miss Anne!' said Priscilla Delaval. ‘This must come as a severe shock to you.'

‘Well,' Anne said dispassionately, ‘it is not often that one receives such a piece of news, I suppose.'

She glanced into a box of faded, dusty books that stood on a side-table, and, selecting the one she was seeking, took it out and left the room.

But when she returned to the potting shed, Joss was no longer there.

Smirke was there instead, busy stirring an evil-smelling mixture of rainwater and hop manure.

‘I was obliged to send the lad off to Marsden for a cartload of potash, Miss Anne,' he said smoothly. ‘Young Joss can't always be at your beck and call, you know. Or I should be obliged to tell his lordship how much time you spend with him.'

‘I doubt if his lordship would care,' Anne said coldly. But she gave Smirke a guinea and carried the book,
Talking About Trees,
back to her own bedroom.

Inside the cover was an inscription in faded brown ink:

A Mon Chéri

from

His Fair Star

and under the inscription were four lines of verse in the same hand:

O eat your cherries, Mary

    O eat your cherries now

O eat your cherries, Mary

    That grow upon the bough.

Lady Catherine was relieved to find what she took to be a tinderbox in a small canvas bag on the shelf with the tallow candles. It was a kind of pistol mechanism in which, by turning a wheel, a flint was made to strike a steel plate. Unfortunately it took her a great many efforts before she managed to make it strike a spark, and then her lack of dexterity was a shocking hindrance, for even when she achieved a spark, she could by no means persuade it to ignite the strips of charred linen and rope ends dipped in pitch, which were presumably intended to be used as kindling material. She tried and tried, and could have wept with frustration, remembering the high-piled fires and the closed Rumbury stoves which burned day and night at Rosings. Did the kitchen fire ever go out? If it did, Lady Catherine knew nothing of the process by which some kitchenmaid or scullion persuaded it to blaze up again.

At last, more by luck than skill, she did succeed in producing a tiny, flickering flame. No paper was to be seen, but she remembered that in her muff she had retained a scrap left over from the letter home she had despatched from the inn at Truro. Delving into the pocket of the muff, she was relieved to find that it was tolerably dry inside, and that the paper was still there and still combustible.

With trembling hands she enclosed the little flame in a framework of twigs and shavings scraped from among the logs, and felt a surpassing sense of triumph when she succeeded in creating a small but healthy blaze, which she carefully augmented with all the driest bits of wood that she could find in the heap. The warmth was most gratifying, and so was the light.

Lady Catherine had no idea what time of day it was, for she wore no watch, and the travel clock had been left behind in the carriage.

So far, so good. The fire was a comfort, but she was, by this time, so hungry that she felt weak and sick. She ate an apple. It was sour, but quenched her thirst and helped allay the worst pangs of hunger. She eyed the flitch of bacon – but it was out of her reach. There was a three-legged stool, but Lady Catherine was not going to venture herself standing on
that.
She still suffered from intermittent spells of dizziness. If only the wretched man would wake up!

‘Sir! Sir! You!' she addressed him urgently. ‘Rouse yourself!'

But he snored on, and she was bound to admit to herself that his forehead and cheeks looked flushed and hot; his sleep was not natural slumber, but that of fever.

And all that the miserable cabin contained was apples and an inaccessible side of bacon!

There was, however, a cooking-pot, and there was a knife. And there was water. Grimly, Lady Catherine set to work, clumsily chopped up half a dozen apples, using the stool as a chopping-board, and set them to boil in the pot with some water. She hoped by this process to make a kind of apple porridge.

The process took much longer than she had expected. She burned herself several times until she discovered how to wrap her hand in a layer of petticoat before touching the handle of the pot. Her petticoats, of which she had put on numerous layers for the journey, were otherwise a decidedly bulky inconvenience, since all her tasks had to be performed at ground level.

When the apple sludge was prepared, she set the pot on the earth floor to cool and levered herself into the hammock again, for all these efforts had exhausted her. The fire would burn for an hour or two yet: she had built it up with several substantial logs. Perhaps some deliverer would presently arrive…

She slept.

*   *   *

Mr Stillbrass, Lady Catherine's attorney, was summoned from Tunbridge Wells and came in haste.

When told that the ransom note had been burned, he looked exceedingly grave.

‘That was a most injudicious thing to do!'

‘It was an accident. Lady Catherine's maid was distraught. But in any case, there was no signature, no means of identifying the writer.'

‘You did not recognize the handwriting?'

‘The note was printed – very clumsily printed,' FitzWilliam recalled. ‘It seemed like the scrawl of a low-class, illiterate person.'

‘Oh, my poor dear sister!' lamented Lord Luke. ‘I hope she is not fallen into the hands of some blackguards or ruffians who will villainously mistreat her!'

Anne reflected that these were the kindest sentiments she had heard her uncle express towards her mother for some considerable time.

‘And you have not, since that one, received another note?'

‘No, we have not.'

Lord Luke seemed rather puzzled and surprised at this. But he added, ‘Doubtless the villains wish, by prolonging and heightening our anxiety, to render us more amenable to some outrageous ransom demand. What kind of sum, Mr Stillbrass, do you think may be required of us?'

‘I suppose that must depend on the class of persons who have committed this felony. If they are, as you say, low-class ruffians, their demands may not be so very exorbitant. A sum such as five hundred pounds may be the summit of their expectations.'

‘If they are better educated, you think they may expect more?' FitzWilliam said ironically. ‘What can we afford to defray, out of my aunt's estate? Yes, cousin Anne, you may well look grave – whatever the sum may be, it must all come out of your dowry!'

‘I assure you, cousin,' Anne told him coldly. ‘that my thoughts ran in quite another direction.'

She said to Mr Stillbrass, ‘Sir, since you are here, I think it must be proper to hand over to you this copy of my father's will, which J— which was discovered up in the attics among some other papers of my father's, during my Uncle Luke's researches up there.'

Mr Stillbrass was electrified.

‘A will? Another will of your father's? God bless my soul! What next? What is its date? I must pursue it most carefully. If it should post-date the one that has been implemented – good heavens, good heavens!'

She handed him the document, which, like all the papers, deeds and records fetched down from the attics, was in poor condition – yellowed, crumbling and dusty. Mr Stillbrass's expression, when he studied it, was one of relief.

‘No, this is the same testament, of the same date, that I have in my office. The date, the bequests, are the same. Thank heaven!' He turned the pages. ‘No, here is a codicil – this I do not have. It is handwritten in your father's hand, unwitnessed, though, therefore invalid.'

‘What are its provisions?' Colonel FitzWilliam asked with interest.

‘There is only one. “My cottage in Wales – Uthan, at Moel-y-Fiediog, to my eldest child.” Well, that is you, Miss Anne. You were Sir Lewis's only child, therefore his eldest. You would have inherited the cottage, on your majority, without his troubling to add the codicil.'

‘I never knew that my father owned a cottage in Wales.' Anne was quite startled. ‘I did not know that he had even been to Wales. My mother has never mentioned such a property.'

‘It was a whim – he purchased it quite late in his life. I do not believe that he visited it above two or three times. A smallholder's dwelling, you know, with two or three acres of grazing, no more. I hardly think it would suit your tastes, Miss Anne!'

‘Who is in it now?'

‘Nobody. It was let to an old shepherd but he, I think, died some years ago. Nobody else has come forward as a prospective tenant. It stands too remote.'

‘When we are married,' FitzWilliam said in a kindly tone to Anne, ‘we will make a journey into Wales to look at the property, and decide what is to be done with it.'

Anne gave him a cold glance.

‘I am obliged to you, cousin. But meanwhile, what is to be done about my mother? Could we not advertise in the press?'

Mr Stillbrass looked at her with surprise and some respect.

‘You have a head on your shoulders, Miss Anne! But do we really wish her predicament to be made public?'

Lord Luke and Colonel FitzWilliam were both firmly against this suggestion.

Lord Luke said: ‘No, no, that would be to bring down a dozen impostors and charlatans on our heads, all threatening – or promising – to produce her in return for outrageous sums of ransom. No, our only recourse is to keep silent, let no one know that there is anything amiss and wait until we receive a second message.'