Sheri Cobb South (8 page)

It was not to be expected that any lively young lady would allow such a statement to go uncontested, and Amanda was more than equal to the challenge.

“I won’t believe it! Do let the gypsy tell your fortune next, Mr. Fanshawe, and prove my sister wrong,” she urged, tugging at his sleeve.

“Yes, do, Mr. Fanshawe,” agreed Margaret, tongue firmly in cheek. “By all means, let us see what delights await you.”

Philip was quick to add his entreaties to those of his sisters, and James, seeing all three Darrington siblings allied against him, submitted meekly to his fate. The seer stacked and reshuffled the cards, then dealt them out in the now-familiar pattern and turned them up one by one.

“Interesting,” she muttered aloud, after studying the cards in silence for a long moment. “Most interesting. Three of swords—you have suffered a broken heart, yes?”

She pointed to a card picturing a red heart pierced with three swords.

James shrugged, shifting his weight awkwardly from one foot to the other. “Yes, well, who among us has lived for twenty-seven years on this earth without being disappointed in love at some time or another?”

The old gypsy woman nodded. “True, very true. But the other cards say your luck will change. Soon, very soon, you have love—yes, true love and wealth beyond your wildest dreams.”

Margaret leaned closer to Amanda to whisper in her ear. “I told you so.”

“And now we shall see what lies in store for the other young lady, yes?”

Margaret, finding three pairs of eyes fixed expectantly upon her, lifted her chin. “Very well. What, pray, does my future hold? A handsome and wealthy husband, I daresay.”

But the cards beneath the gypsy woman’s hand revealed a series of increasingly grim-looking pictures: a man in medieval robes struggling to balance two large coins; a woman, similarly garbed, standing blindfolded and bound amidst eight upright swords; and, most ominous of all, a skeleton on horseback, wielding a scythe. The caption beneath identified this last as Death.

“By Jove!” exclaimed Philip with ghoulish zeal. “Are we going to be putting poor Meg to bed with a shovel?”

“No, no,” the old woman assured him. To Margaret, she added, “The card does not mean physical death, but change. You have a decision to make soon, one that will change your life.”

“For good or ill?” asked Margaret, drawn into this cryptic prophecy in spite of herself.

The gypsy shrugged, causing her tattered shawl to slip from one shoulder. “Who can say? All depends on you, on the choices you make.”

The two younger Darringtons bombarded her with questions, but the old woman would say no more, apart from vague admonitions to choose carefully. At last the Darrington party exchanged the dark closeness of the tent for the bright sunlight beyond its flap and trudged back up the path toward Darrington House. Amanda and Philip indulged in far-fetched speculations as to how and when their predictions would be fulfilled, but Margaret could not join in their merriment. So certain had she been that her own fortune would be no more than a variation on Amanda’s, the gypsy crone’s unexpected warning troubled her more than she cared to admit. What choice might she be called upon to make, and how might it change her life? The whole thing was absurd, really; she should put it out of her mind at once.

She was still attempting to put this simple plan into action when James fell back to match his steps with hers.

“You are being unusually quiet, Miss Darrington. I hope the gypsy fortuneteller has not upset you.”

Margaret responded a bit too brightly. “Of course not! Even if I were to believe in such things—which I most certainly do not!—I may be assured that my life is not in danger. ‘The card means change, not physical death,’ ” she added in a very fair imitation of the gypsy woman. “Hmm, a choice that will change my life. What might she have been thinking of, do you suppose?”

“Miss Amanda’s marriage to the duke would certainly change your life,” suggested James.

“Yes, but one would think such a change would hinge on Amanda’s choice, not mine.” She gave a short laugh as they reached the front stoop. “Listen to us, analyzing the old gypsy’s predictions as if they would actually come to pass. We might as well speculate as to the source of this fortune you are soon to possess—unless, of course, you are to be retained as tutor to all those children Amanda and the duke are to beget.”

James laughed off this suggestion, as was obviously expected of him, but his smile faded to a puzzled frown as he recalled that nowhere in the gypsy camp had he seen anyone bearing the slightest resemblance to the tonsured stranger in the priory ruins.

* * * *

To Peregrine Palmer, sitting up in bed and reluctantly accepting a cup of herbal tea from his aunt’s solicitous hands, the world was a capricious and unjust place. He, at least, felt very hardly used by it, for he had not effected an introduction to Miss Amanda Darrington that Sunday past; in fact, he had not left his bed at all. His unseasonable dunking had metamorphosed into a bout of chills and fever from which he was only now, some ten days later, beginning to recover.

“Your uncle bade me give you this,” said Lady Palmer, presenting him with the newspaper she had tucked under her arm. “It is several days old, but perhaps it will help to alleviate your boredom.”

“Thank you, Aunt,” replied Peregrine, idly turning over the pages of the outdated copy of the
Times,
“and please tell my uncle that I hope to give myself the pleasure of partaking of a glass or two of port with him tonight.”

“I cannot think it wise of you to indulge too freely in alcoholic beverages,” fretted her ladyship. “A cup of broth, perhaps, or some thin gruel—”

“Good God!” exclaimed Peregrine, bolting upright with such force that herbal tea spilled onto the sheets.

“Very well, we shall dispense with the gruel, but I assure you, Cook’s broth is quite tasty—”

“Yes, yes,” muttered Peregrine, intent upon the newspaper. “That is, no, do not bring me anyone’s broth, for I feel sure I should hate it. But this article on page three—has my uncle seen it?”

“I don’t know. I daresay he might not, for the account of the Corn Law debates in Parliament put him so much out of temper that he cast the rest of it aside unread, and said I might give it to you.” Her eyes narrowed in sudden suspicion. “You are not going to rant at me about the Corn Laws, are you?”

“No, of course not. But this missing duke of yours—I know him, Aunt!”

“What?” Gruel, broth, and the Corn Laws all forgotten, Lady Palmer leaned forward to read the newspaper over his shoulder. “You know where he is?”

“No, how should I? But I know
who
he is. We were at school together. His name is—was—James Weatherly. We all called him Weathervane, on account of his nose being rather long.”

“Then the more fools you,” retorted his aunt. “Surely you must know by now that a large nose in a common man may make him an object of ridicule, but in the heir to a dukedom it must be considered a mark of distinction.”

“Amongst schoolboys, Aunt, I assure you it would have made no difference. His being the heir to a dukedom, I mean. Not that we knew he was any such thing, for we didn’t. What’s more, I’ll wager
he
didn’t know it, either. The best of good fellows, but shabby-genteel, and quite resigned to the necessity of earning his own bread.” He returned to the study of his newspaper. “And it appears he was doing exactly that. Before he succeeded to the title, he was curate of Fairford parish. According to the
Times,
he departed Fairford a se’ennight past, and was believed to be settled in Montford, until his solicitor called upon him there and found that no one had seen hide nor hair of him.”

Lady Palmer found this revelation far less intriguing than did her nephew. “Depend upon it, he is in some tavern, squandering his inheritance on wine, women, and song. You rackety young men are all alike!”

“You are fair and far off there, Aunt,” protested Peregrine. “I shan’t deny having been rackety enough in my own misspent youth, but I cannot allow you to malign James Weatherly in such a manner, for a steadier fellow I never saw. In fact, it was usually he who rescued the rest of us from the consequences of our excesses.”

He frowned down at the newspaper on his lap, but Lady Palmer had the impression that it was not the printed page that he saw in his mind’s eye.

“What, then, do you suppose has happened to him?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but I refuse to believe he’s merrily gone a-wenching while half the world wonders where he is.” He set the cup down with a decisive clink, swept the newspaper from the counterpane, and threw back the bedclothes.

“Peregrine, what are you doing?” cried his aunt, aghast. “The doctor says—”

“The doctor be hanged! I should have been on my feet three days ago. If some injury has befallen him while I’ve been lolling in bed sipping broth—good God, it doesn’t bear thinking of!”

Heedless of his aunt’s protests, he steered her from the room, firmly shutting the door on her objections. Within five minutes, he was dressed, albeit without his usual elegance, in the buckskins and top boots of the country gentleman. After successfully escaping from the house without encountering his aunt, he went ‘round to the stables, ordered his horse saddled, and soon set out in the direction of the Pig and Whistle.

The stage from Littledean had just arrived, so he was obliged to wait while the proprietor tended to the needs of the new arrivals. These, it seemed, were many and varied. Peregrine, who could afford the luxury of traveling by private coach, was unfamiliar with the niceties of stagecoach travel, and watched with detached curiosity as passengers were bundled off and on again with scarcely time to answer Nature’s call before the coach set out for its next destination. Of those who disembarked at Montford, some demanded to be fed, while others requested a room where they might stay the night, and still others inquired as to directions or local transportation to their final destinations.

The crowd having at last thinned, Peregrine approached the proprietor, a portly fellow engaged in refreshing himself after his labors with a tankard of ale and a pipe from which he puffed rings of blue smoke.

“Tell me,” Peregrine addressed this worthy, “do you recall having seen a tall, fair-haired gentleman of about twenty-seven stop here about a se’ennight past?”

The proprietor sucked on the stem of his pipe. “No, can’t say as I do,” he pronounced at last. “This here’s a busy place. Surely ye can’t expect a fellow to remember every stranger passing through.”

“Oh, but he didn’t pass through. He disembarked here.” Clearly, some further description was called for, but as Peregrine had not seen his schoolmate in more than five years, he was not certain to what extent, if any, that young man’s appearance might have altered. He decided to concentrate on those aspects most likely to remain. “Surely you must have remarked him: gangly, shabbily dressed, perhaps wearing spectacles—oh, and he had a rather pronounced proboscis.”

“Eh?”

“A long nose,” explained Peregrine.

The proprietor chuckled, setting his large belly bouncing. “You’ll find no shortage of long noses in these parts, thanks to their Graces, the dukes of Montford.
Noblesse oblige,
you know.”

Peregrine rather thought
droit du seigneur
was the correct term, but as he had not come to debate the intricacies of the French tongue, he allowed the error to pass. “But you do not recall seeing such a man?”

“Oh, I may have done,” admitted mine host. “But I can tell you this much: he never stayed the night under my roof, nor took his mutton here neither, and that’s God’s own truth, for I never forgot a shilling nor the man what gave it to me.”

With this Peregrine had to be content. He thanked the proprietor for his help, such as it was, and gave him a coin for his pains, thereby earning, it must be assumed, a permanent place in that man’s memory. Strolling back into the yard, he called for his horse. But even as he placed his foot in the stirrup, he recalled having passed Montford Priory. As he recalled, the distance was not great. Was it possible that James, who’d never had tuppence to rub together, had eschewed more expensive transport and set out on foot? Despite his fears, Peregrine had to smile at the idea of the duke of Montford trudging up to his own door like the lowliest vagabond.

Kicking his foot free of the stirrup, he looped the reins about his wrist and set off down the road, leading the horse alongside him. His mount, unaccustomed to this arrangement, whinnied and nudged Peregrine’s arm with his muzzle.

“Yes, I may be three kinds of fool,” Peregrine informed the animal, “but something is very rotten in the state of Denmark, and I’ve a mind to find out what.”

Unfortunately, he had no very clear idea of how to go about pursuing this worthy goal. Even his present course of retracing his friend’s supposed last steps was no more than a vague impulse, as he had not the faintest idea of what he was looking for or what, if anything, he might expect to find.

Still, any activity was better than none, so he led his horse in the direction of Montford Park. Once outside the village, he provided himself with a walking stick in the form of a stout branch, and with this he periodically explored the vegetation lining both sides of the road. If he had feared to find his erstwhile schoolmate’s bloody corpse decaying beneath a hedge, he need not have worried. There were no bodies beneath the hedges; in fact, his random pokes with the stick revealed nothing at all for the first half-mile. Then, thrusting the branch yet again into a promising patch of flora, he caught a glimpse of something white peeking between the green leaves. Hope flared in his bosom that here at last was some proof that James Weatherly had indeed passed this way. A monogrammed handkerchief, or some such personal item, would suit his purposes admirably, as it would provide positive identification. He wondered fleetingly if a curate’s income would run to monogramming, and dismissed the likelihood with some regret.

At any rate, the state of James’s linens proved to be a moot point, as the white object was not a handkerchief at all, but merely a paper—a discarded letter, in all probability, judging from the wax seal, now broken, overlapping one edge. Dismissing it as of no importance, Peregrine removed his stick, allowing the thick vegetation to fall back into place. He had already stepped away from the hedge when some impulse made him turn back and retrieve the abandoned letter from its hiding place.