Mask of Duplicity (The Jacobite Chronicles Book 1) (33 page)

“If it’s Sir Anthony, Sarah, tell him to go away,” she said, examining the dark shadows under her eyes with a grimace.

“No, it’s Lord Daniel,” Sarah said, coming up behind Beth. “A little rice powder will hide those,” she said practically.

Beth started up in joy, almost dropping the hand mirror.

“Tell him I’ll see him in ten minutes and...what’s wrong?” Sarah wore a worried expression.

“It’s nothing, really. Only he seems very...distracted, somehow. Not himself at all,” she said.

Beth didn’t care how he seemed. He was here. He would be able to give the lie to Sir Anthony’s tale.

“He must have had a reply from his father. Show him into the parlour, Sarah. I’ll be down directly.”

“Do you think he’s going to propose to you? He seems very nervous.”

“No. We’ve already decided to take things slowly, I told you that. It’s very important that he gain the approval of his father. He won’t do that if he proposes formally to me before his parents have even seen me. No, it must be something else.” A cold finger of doubt touched her heart, but she dismissed it. His father must have made a negative reply. It was not insurmountable. She had not seen Daniel since Sir Anthony had invited her to meet the king, but she would tell him today. That would be sure to impress the earl.

When she opened the door he was pacing up and down the parlour like a caged lion, but stopped as she entered the room. She looked at him, surprised, understanding now why Sarah had been worried. His clothes looked crumpled, as though he had slept in them, and his forehead was creased in a frown. He moved forward to greet her and she smelt the unmistakable odour of stale tobacco. Daniel did not smoke, but he had obviously spent some considerable time in the last hours in the company of men who did. She suffered him to kiss her, although his breath smelt sour. It was so unlike him to be anything less than immaculate that she knew something was seriously wrong, and when he moved away from her, Beth’s face wore a frown to match his.

“What is wrong?” she asked. “Have you received an unfavourable reply from your father?”

“What?” he asked distractedly, as if he had no idea to what she was referring. “Oh, oh, yes. No, he has not yet replied. No, I have come to ask you...” he faltered, “something else.”

Now she was seriously alarmed.

“Now you are frightening me, Daniel,” she said. “What has happened?”

“Nothing!” he exclaimed with exaggerated brightness. “Only...I did not sleep well last night, and I am a little tired. Er...do you think we might have some tea?”

She called for tea, and by the time it was served Lord Daniel had regained a façade of composure, at least, while Beth was becoming more unsettled by the minute. She waited impatiently while he drank one cup of tea, but when he reached again for the teapot she could stand it no longer.

“For God’s sake, Daniel, what have you come to tell me?” she cried.

He put down his cup and stood up, moving across to take her hands in his.

“Forgive me, Beth,” he said, attempting to smile reassuringly. “I am very nervous. I have come to ask you if you will do me the honour of marrying me.”

He was so certain she would say yes that her reaction took him by surprise. She pulled her hands from his grasp and her face drained of all colour.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know I should make a speech, go down on my knees. But you know I love you, and I am so nervous, that if I kneel I don’t think I’ll be able to get up again!” he smiled at her, and she looked away, swallowing hard.

“I thought you wanted to take things slowly, Daniel,” she said emotionlessly. “What has changed?” She looked at him, praying that he would give a good reason, a plausible explanation for his sudden proposal.

“Nothing!” he exclaimed again. “Only I have not seen you for three days, and they have been excruciating. I realised then that I couldn’t live without you and decided I must marry you now, before someone else tries to take you from me.”

She closed her eyes, trying to tell herself she was imagining the insincerity of his tone. A lump came to her throat and she swallowed again.

“Where
have
you been for the last three days, Daniel? Why didn’t you call on me if you missed me so? I have been here, waiting for you.”

It was his last chance, although he did not know it. If he had told her the truth then, she would have forgiven him, would have married him against all common sense, so much did she believe herself in love with him.

“I have been busy getting my affairs in order, to be sure that I could afford to make my proposal to you. And I wanted to see how long I could endure not seeing you.” She willed him to look her in the eye, but his gaze slid past her, fixing on an object somewhere over her left shoulder.

“I see,” she replied. She desperately wanted to believe him, but his dishevelment coupled with his extreme nervousness and his inability to look her in the eye, told her he was lying. Sir Anthony’s poisonous words of the previous day echoed in her head; “If the boy is to obtain the money to discharge his debts, he will have to seek elsewhere than his family for it.” She felt sick and numb, but with a monumental effort composed her face into a mask of politeness.

“And have you succeeded in setting your affairs in order?” He opened his mouth to answer, but she hurried on before he could lie to her again. “Four thousand pounds is a great deal of money to find, when your father is unwilling to give it to you. How did you obtain it?” Her voice was cool, matter-of-fact, although the hot blood surged through her veins. She wanted to fly at him, tear him limb from limb, hurt him as he was unknowingly hurting her now.

At last he looked directly at her, his mouth falling open with shock.

“How did you find out?” he asked automatically before flushing, obviously regretting the words as they left his mouth.

“Sir Anthony told me,” she said, half hoping that Daniel would later call him out and kill him. “But it’s common knowledge by now. As is the fact that you did not go to Italy earlier this year, but were banished to the country by your father in an attempt to break you of your mania for gambling.”

He sank down into a chair, his blush vanished, his face now as pale as Beth’s. Then he looked up at her, clearly trying to find a plausible explanation.

“I would suggest that instead of trying to invent another story, you tell me the truth,” she warned him, her voice still emotionless. Her heart thumped leadenly in her chest.

“I love you, Beth, that is the truth, and I do want to marry you, I swear it!” he declaimed passionately. “I am sorry. I didn’t want to lie to you, but I thought you would despise me if you knew I gambled. I have mended my ways now, though. I will never go near a card table again, I assure you.”

He sounded genuine. But then he had sounded genuine when he had told her of the beauties of Florence and Venice, beauties that he had not seen, of the interesting people he had never met last summer, of the glorious warm weather he had not enjoyed.

“I am not asking you to marry me for your dowry. I love you, surely you know that?”

“I’m very happy to hear that, Daniel,” she said. “In that case, I think we would do better to stick to your original plan, and wait until your family have met me. I am in no danger of falling in love with anyone else, I promise you.” At this moment she thought she would never love anyone, or trust anyone, ever again in her life. But if he passed this final test, accepted her suggestion, she could at least walk away from this meeting with some vestige of belief that his declaration of love had not been a total lie.

“But you must marry me!” he cried, panicked. “There is no other solution!” He sprang to his feet and would have embraced her, but she backed away so hurriedly that she collided with a small table, knocking a vase of flowers on to the floor. The delicate glass shattered, and water splashed up her skirts unheeded. She was certain now. He wanted her for her dowry. Whether he loved her or not was immaterial; she no longer believed he did. Her fragile control threatened to fragment as the pain welled up in her heart. “I cannot live without you!” he added passionately.

“I am afraid you will have to. The answer is no, Daniel. I will not marry you. Not now, not ever. I am sorry.” She turned away blindly, desperate to be away from him, to be alone, where she could break down, scream, wail, tear her hair out. Her satin-shod feet crunched unheeding through the broken glass as she dashed for the door.

He ran in front of her, blocking her exit.

“You cannot do this to me, Beth. I thought you loved me!” he pleaded.

“Yes,” she said, her voice trembling. “I thought so too. But I was wrong. You have betrayed my trust, Daniel, and you have lied to me for no good reason. I do not love you any more, and that is all there is to it.” She swept past him and left the room, walking straight-backed up the stairs without looking back, leaving a trail of bloody footprints and a distraught Lord Daniel behind her.

By the time she got to her room she no longer wanted to weep and wail. She felt drained, and sank down on the bed, willing herself to sleep, seeking escape from the heartbreak that she knew would overwhelm her if she let it. Sarah, alerted by the blood, appeared a few minutes later and to Beth’s intense relief did not express any curiosity as to what had transpired in the parlour. She merely examined Beth’s feet and left the room silently, returning after a short time with a bowl of hot water, some tweezers and strips of clean linen. She extracted the splinters of glass, washed and bound her mistress’s feet and then picked up the bowl of bloody water and ruined shoes.

“Do you want me to stay or would you rather be alone for a while?” she asked softly.

Beth looked at the maid for the first time. Sarah’s face was a mask of concern.

“I would like to be alone for a time, Sarah. I won’t do anything foolish, but I need to be on my own just now.” Her voice broke, and she turned her face into the pillow. She heard the door close quietly a moment later, and then she could hold the pain of betrayal and loss back no longer. She curled up on the bed and let the hurt, the misery and finally the tears come, huge racking sobs that tore through her body until she thought she would die. She had not felt so bereft since her father died, and vowed in that moment that she would never again let anyone get close enough to hurt her like this.

Chapter Twelve

Beth stayed in her room for two days, giving her inability to walk due to lacerated feet as an excuse for not going down to face the barrage of questions from her family that she dreaded. In fact, although her feet did indeed hurt when she put weight on them, in the past she had shrugged off minor injuries, any discomfort subdued by her zest for life.

Now, however, she possessed no zest for life to act as a painkiller, and moped around her room, eating sparingly and drinking rather more wine than was wise. Sarah attended her, at first sympathetically and then increasingly disapprovingly as she started to suspect, quite rightly, that her mistress was now unhealthily and uncharacteristically wallowing in self-pity.

Isabella visited her once, and Beth explained that Daniel had proposed marriage to her and gave the reasons why she had refused him in an unemotional voice, after which she had lapsed into a moody silence, unbroken until Isabella took the hint and left.

“It won’t do, you know,” Sarah said suddenly on the evening of the second day, after she had made up the fire, lit candles and closed the curtains, while Beth sat on a chair chewing her fingernails and staring into space. Beth looked up.

“What won’t do?” she said.

“This,” Sarah said flatly. “Locking yourself away from the world. The longer you stay here, the harder it’ll be to go out and face the world again.”

“I’m not ready yet. Give me another day or two and I’ll see how I feel,” Beth replied listlessly.

Sarah snorted through her nose.

“In a day or two you’ll feel worse. I know how you feel, Beth, but...”

“Do you?” Beth said, suddenly animated. “Do you really? Have you ever been in love, trusted someone absolutely and been utterly betrayed?”

“Of course I have!” Sarah exploded. “Why do you think I ended up on the streets before Richard found me? Because I fell in love with a man who promised me everything and then as soon as I was pregnant disappeared, that’s why! I found out later that he was already married with three children. So yes, I do know how it feels!”

Beth looked at Sarah in astonishment.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

“No, well, you never asked, did you?” Sarah said, in a softer voice.

“What happened to the child?” Beth asked. She was ashamed of herself. Sarah had been with her for months now. They had become good friends. But she had never talked about her past, and Beth had never thought to ask her.

“She died,” Sarah said, in a tone which stated clearly that she didn’t want to talk about it. “If you sit around here moping, you’ll never get better. I know you don’t want to go down and face the gossip, but it’ll be going on anyway whether you’re there or not. You might as well get your version in.”

“Is there a lot of gossip?” Beth asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve not been out of the house for two days. The only thing I do know is that Lord Daniel has left London, so you don’t need to worry about meeting him.”

“You’re right,” Beth said. “I have been feeling sorry for myself. I’m pathetic. I’ll get up tomorrow.” She looked at Sarah’s sceptical face. “I promise.”

In the morning she felt far from ready to get up, but she had promised Sarah, and besides, she
was
being pathetic. She had always prided herself on being a fighter, and in many ways she was. But this was the first time she had trusted and loved someone and been betrayed by them. Richard’s treatment of her had frightened and enraged her, but she had never loved or trusted him.

She got up and washed herself with a cloth and water from the bowl on the dressing table. She dressed informally; she would spend today quietly in the house with her cousins, and then tomorrow would throw herself back into the social whirl.