Mademoiselle At Arms - Elizabeth Bailey (best 7 inch ereader TXT) 📗
- Author: Elizabeth Bailey
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The fellow seized on this. ‘Then it is that you will have pity? Here we have come, we poor, for aid. Pardon! I wish to say, for your granddaughter, we seek succour.’
‘I dare say you do,’ said the general, grim satisfaction overtaking his anger as his prophesy proved accurate.
‘It is not for myself, you understand,’ pursued the man, in an unctuous tone that sickened the general, ‘but for this poor one. Lost from all protection, all her family dead—as are mine.’
Shock ripped through Charvill’s chest. ‘What, is Nicholas dead?’
He saw the two of them exchange glances and an instinct of danger rose up. What was the fellow about? Was he being imposed upon? He watched as the man Valade turned back, spreading his hands in the French way.
‘General, we do not know. The last that is known of Monsieur Charvill is when he departed the Valade estate.’
Departed? ‘Tchah! I suppose the vicomte threw him out?’
Watching the fellow’s face, Everett felt his suspicion growing. Was the man debating whether or no to tell the truth? A grimace played about Valade’s mouth and the general waited, maintaining his own rigid pose.
‘It is, you understand, that Monsieur Charvill did not—how do you say in English?—having an eye to an eye—’
‘Didn’t see eye to eye with the Vicomte Valade? That I can well believe.’
‘It was so,’ said Valade, becoming a trifle more fluent. ‘And that Suzanne, the sister of my cousin the vicomte, must choose between Monsieur Charvill and her brother. For a pity, she has chosen to remain, and it has been her death.’
‘Slaughtered with the rest, was she?’
Despite his hatred of the woman who had caused so much grief, the general found he could not rejoice as he wanted to. Brewis had told him the Valade family had been victim to wholesale murder, and a twinge of compassion had wrung even his deliberately hardened heart. Well, let him be honest. Had this not been the case, he must have refused even to see his Frenchified granddaughter.
‘Monsieur Charvill,’ pursued Valade, ‘has left the chateau, and since we have heard from him nothing at all, but for the letters to his daughter from Italy.’
‘But two letters,’ put in the woman. ‘And if he is dead I know not.’
A question leapt into Everett’s head and he recalled the letter to the Abbess. ‘Was this when Nicholas commended you to this Abbess?’
‘But, yes. Papa has sent me to be religieuse.’
Fury rippled again. ‘That rascally knave sent you to become a French nun?’
Looking positively terrified, the girl nodded dumbly.
‘Dolt! Muttonheaded oaf! Why the deuce couldn’t he have sent you home?’
Valade cut in at that. ‘Monsieur Charvill thought perhaps that his daughter would find not a welcome.’
‘Tchah! Better a doubtful welcome here than a confounded French convent. The fellow is little better than a lunatic. How the deuce did I ever manage to father such a brainless nincompoop? A nun, for God’s sake! A confounded Catholic nun. A granddaughter of mine!’
The idiocy of this notion stuck in his craw and he could think of nothing else for a moment.
‘Pardon, milor’,’ said Valade, ‘but Monsieur Charvill, he was not at fault. Not entirely.’
‘I find that difficult to believe,’ snapped the general, jerking to and fro as his agitation mounted.
‘As I have said, it was a quarrel between the vicomte and Monsieur Charvill. The vicomte has, he say, enough femmes in his hands. He will not provide for the daughter. He is the one who has said that she must go to the convent. Monsieur Charvill, he has not the means to choose different.’
‘Hadn’t the wit, you mean.’
‘Also madame his wife—’
Charvill’s gorge rose. He’d borne mention of the woman’s name. But that title he would not endure.
‘Don’t dare call her that to my face.’
Both Valade and the granddaughter gazed at him blankly. Then Valade—was the man as big a fool as Nicholas?—tried again.
‘Suzanne, if I may say, had also not the choice. One would say she could try to—to prevent that her daughter will go to the convent. But the vicomte has said that his sister may remain, but that the daughter must go. Even the love of a mother does not sway him.’
Abruptly, the niggling doubt that had been plaguing Lord Charvill came sweeping to the surface. Mother? Suzanne Valade, her mother?
With deliberation, he spoke. ‘Do you tell me that my disreputable son had the infernal insolence to pass you off as that whoring Frenchwoman’s daughter?’
His answer was in their faces. His anger gave way to grim humour and he thrust towards them, leaning heavily on his cane.
‘Typical. Hadn’t the stomach to admit the truth, had he? I’ll lay any money he labelled you with some foul French name as well. What was the name on those marriage lines you showed me?’
‘M—Melusine,’ stammered the woman, her countenance yet registering shock.
‘I knew it.’ The snaking suspicion rolled through his mind again. ‘And you come to me, thinking yourself half French, and expect me to take you in. What is it you’re after? Money, I suppose. Don’t you know I disinherited the rogue?’
‘This we knew, milor’,’ said Valade. ‘Also that it was that you did not wish the French connection.’
‘And your precious vicomte didn’t wish for the English one,’ said Charvill, acid in his voice. ‘They eloped. But he didn’t marry her. Not then. Too damned chickenhearted to confess to me he’d run off with the woman. If I’d known, there would have been a different story.’ Bitterness rose up as he looked at the female. ‘And you, my girl, if you’d been born at all, would have been just what you think you are. Half French.’
The woman shrugged helpless shoulders, looking to her husband. ‘André? Que dit-il?’
‘My wife does not understand,’ said the fellow, frowning deeply.
‘Of course she don’t understand,’ snapped Charvill irascibly. ‘Been led up the garden path by that confounded rapscallion. Your mother, for what it’s worth to you—for there’s nothing for you here, by God!—was the woman I chose for Nicholas. An Englishwoman. Good-looking girl.’ He looked the girl up and down. ‘You don’t favour her, bar the black hair. Don’t favour your father much, either, if it comes to that.’
It had not before occurred to him, but this realisation fuelled the general’s growing conviction that he was being imposed upon in some way. How would it serve Nicholas to keep the truth from his daughter? A tiny thread of disquiet troubled him.
‘But this Englishwoman,’ asked the man Valade, his puzzlement plain to see, ‘who was she?’
The question irritated Charvill. ‘What are you, a nincompoop? She was Nicholas’s wife, of course. His first wife. Married the other and ran off after Mary died.’ His eyes found the girl again, and he added rancorously, ‘Giving birth to you. Couldn’t face me with what he’d done, the miserable blackguard.’
The crack in the iron front widened a little, and the general was obliged to clamp his jaws tight against the rise of a pain too well remembered.
‘Might have forgiven him,’ he muttered under his breath, ‘if he hadn’t taken the babe.’
At this, the fellow Valade burst into unwise speech.
‘Sapristi. Then Melusine is in truth your granddaughter. Yes, yes, you do not like the French, and so this English lady here, she is altogether your flesh. It is that you cannot refuse her sanctuary.’
The girl held out her hands. ‘Ah, grandpére.’
Fire enveloped Charvill’s mind and he brought up his cane, pointed like a musket. ‘Keep your distance! You dare to tell me I cannot refuse?’ He glared at the girl. ‘Do you think I could endure to hear you prattling your abominable French in my ear day by day? Enough to drive me straight into my grave. I’ll give you grandpére!’
‘But milor’—’
‘Pardon!’
No longer master of his actions, the general lurched forward, waving his cane. ‘Get out! Out, I say! Think I want another miserable cowardly good-for-nothing wastrel on my hands? Begone! Out of my house!’
He drove them to the door, grimly satisfied when the girl’s nerve broke.
‘Ah, bah, it is enough,’ she cried, and turning, ran out of the room.
Valade stood his ground, holding the doorjamb, and facing up to the general. Charvill’s fury was burning out. He stopped, panting hard, slamming his cane to the floor to make use of its much-needed support.
‘Well?’ he uttered between heavy breaths. ‘Still—here? Wasting your—time. Get nothing out of me. Try your luck with Jarvis Remenham—if you will.’
A sudden frown sprang to the fellow’s face. ‘You said—who?’
‘Remenham. Maternal relations. Kentish family. Find them at Remenham House—if you can.’ A gleam of rare humour slid into Charvill’s chest. ‘For my money, you’ll not get much out of old Jarvis either. He’s dead.’
Creeping along the dark narrow passage, with lantern held well ahead to keep her step steady on the uneven stones—and to warn her of the advent of rats—Melusine kept her long petticoats fastidiously clear of the dirt with an efficient hand, a habit she had learned in the convent.
‘Parbleu, I hope that I do not have many more times to come in this way to the house,’ she muttered fretfully.
‘What, miss?’ asked Jack Kimble from behind her.
‘This journey I do not like,’ she said more loudly. ‘And if it was not for that imbecile of a Gérard, who has put his soldiers to watch for me, it would not need that I make it.’
‘Even if they militiamen weren’t there, miss,’ cautioned her cavalier, ‘you couldn’t go marching into the house open like. That there gatekeeper would’ve called them out again.’
‘Ah yes. He will be sorry when he knows who I am,’ decided Melusine with satisfaction.
There was some justification for her annoyance, for negotiation of the secret passage demanded either a stout heart, or a desperate one. The original passage, Martha had told her, had led only from an upstairs room to one downstairs. But the Remenhams in the days of Charles the First, with the need for an escape route from Cromwell’s increasingly victorious forces, had cut a trapdoor through its floor into the cellars below, and thence hewn the long rough passageway that led underground right outside the boundary of the estate. The entrance was concealed between two huge boulders within a clump of trees, and was now so overgrown that no one who did not know of its existence could ever hope to find it.
Even Melusine, armed with special knowledge, and the enthusiastic assistance of Jack Kimble’s strong arm, had taken almost half a day to locate the place. She had known that Remenham House would be deserted, for Martha—released, as she had carefully explained to her charge, by her vows to God from servitude and obedience to Nicholas Charvill, a mere mortal—had begun a correspondence with a friend of her youth, Mrs Joan Ibstock, née Pottiswick. That good woman, although astonished to hear of Martha’s conversion to Catholicism and embracing of a religious sisterhood, responded with the news of Jarvis Remenham’s death.
Martha had been careful to make no mention of Melusine, and did not reply to Mrs Ibstock’s enquiry about the fate of the little babe. When she confessed all this to her charge, telling the now grown up babe that there was no hope in the world of establishing any claim, she very soon discovered her mistake. Rebellious and resentful, Melusine decided there and then that she would do exactly that, come what may. Once in England, she made all haste to visit Remenham House.
On that first occasion, the delay in locating the entrance to the secret passage meant that she had to wait until morning to make her search. She had been obliged to spend the night in that fateful bedchamber, the faithful Kimble—who had foraged at a nearby inn, bringing back a large pie and a jug of porter
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