The Moonless Night, page 14
“I suppose you hope it will,” she ventured.
“Certainly I do,” he said, then smiled, looking much younger. “No, I don’t, though. It would be fun to go after him, wouldn’t it?”
She was happy to see he was not only a clever agent, but also a human being, with sentiments similar to her own secret ones. “I expect you have had many exciting adventures in your work.” David had given tantalizing hints of exotic scrapes in Europe, but she had heard nothing firsthand.
“I have been involved in a few escapades,” he admitted modestly. “There were some intrigues at the Congress of Vienna, as you may imagine. That old devil Metternich gave us a rough time.”
“How interesting.”
“Still it has caused me some personal hardships. My being caught up in this work leaves me little time to manage my own affairs at home. The fact is, Miss Boltwood, that while I was in Vienna, my man of business was so foolish as to set an enormous mortgage on Oakhurst, my place in Devon, where I am a neighbor of Lord Sanford. My man did it to pay some outstanding debts. I had given him my power of attorney as I was not able to keep in close touch with him. By the time I got back, the affair had gone too far for me to do a thing about it. The mortagee had foreclosed, taken over my place, that had been in the family for three hundred years. It was an infamous thing, but my own fault entirely. I could easily have raised a loan, for I am not quite without prospects and friends, but on the day the mortgage was due, Lord S—the mortgagee—foreclosed on me, without giving me a chance to make other arrangements.”
“Could you not buy it back?”
“No, he would not sell, or not at a reasonable price in any case. So I have lost my home, and…” He came to a stop, while she listened eagerly, her heart going out to him.
“Well, in that circumstance, you know, I cannot say to you what I should like to say. Oh, not that I am completely in the basket—far from it. Considerable cash came to me after the sale, after the mortgage was paid off, and I stand to inherit something from relatives, but a man without a home to take a bride to has no business taking a wife.”
Her heart was hammering. It had bothered her, that one fact of his having lost his home, and not told them, but now he had done it, and the facts were not so desperate as she had feared. He had something—one could always buy another home. “That would make little difference to some ladies,” she told him, hoping her tone let him know she was amongst those uncaring of a roof over her head.
“It would always make a difference to me,” he said, looking away across the rolling lawns, while he heaved a deep sigh.
“The case is not desperate. If you married a lady who had some money-in her own right...”
“Never! I don’t wish to stand accused of fortune-hunting, have no desire to live off my wife. Till I bring myself around, I have no right to be courting anyone. Indeed, I have no right to be here at all,” he said.
That he was here despite not having any right occurred to her, of course, but she had the answer to that. He had come as a spy, and ended up a reluctant lover. She wanted to assure him she understood, appreciated his scruples in telling her how he stood, and proceeded to do so.
“I can’t think how anyone would be so low as to take advantage of your absence to cheat you out of Oakhurst,” she finished up. “Who was the man? What was his name?”
“The name is no matter. He was a neighbor who coveted my place. A noble gentleman, one even with whom I am well acquainted. It was all legal, however, and I cannot blame him for snapping up Oakhurst, despite his having twenty-five thousand acres of his own, and that is only at Pais—only one of his estates. He has others.”
The whole dreadful truth slowly descended on Miss Boltwood. The unsaid name, Lord S, the unnamed property, Pais—Sanford being a noble neighbor, in possession of other estates. “Well I think that very underhanded of Lord Sanford!” she exclaimed, her nostrils flaring with anger.
“I didn’t say Lord Sanford! Where did you get the idea it was he?” Benson asked in open chagrin.
“You were too much the gentleman to say it, but I see it all now. No wonder he was so intimately acquainted with your position. He put you in it himself, then went prating to me of poor management on your part!”
“Did he say so?” Benson asked, offended. “Now that is doing it a bit brown, when he had a pretty good idea why I was at Vienna. But pray, say nothing to him. He is your father’s guest, and I wouldn’t have any unpleasantness under your roof for the world. I have pretended not to understand his little slurs.”
“I shall certainly tell him what I think of him. Not that he doesn’t know!”
“No, please, you must not. I wouldn’t have it happen for any consideration. The matter was legal, there was no wrongdoing in his foreclosing the mortgage. He was well within his rights. I wouldn’t satisfy him to think I held a grudge. You must promise me you will say nothing. Please, Marie,” he asked, grabbing her hands. “Do it for me.”
How could she resist such an appeal, with her given name used in his emotional state? How could she resist such a gentleman, who forbore telling her he loved her because Sanford had stolen his property, who forbore even being nasty to his victimizer, or allowing her to be? Such magnanimity went beyond anything she had ever encountered or even imagined. Somehow while she looked at him, with her two hands held firmly in his, they moved a step closer. They were in the privacy of a bower, with no chance of being discovered unless someone should enter the library at the unlikely moment of ten minutes before dinner. Their eyes were locked, Marie’s heart beating wildly against her rib cage. Soon their lips were approaching the touching point. She closed her eyes, anticipating the inevitable embrace, when suddenly she felt Mr. Benson stiffen and drop her hands. She opened her eyes in surprise to see Lord Sanford smiling at her mockingly from the edge of the bower. How had he got there without being heard? He had sneaked up on them silently as a cat.
He continued looking at them both a moment, then glanced up to the sky. “Looks as if we might get rain,” he said, and walking forward, he sat on a hard wooden bench, threw one leg over the other and leaned his arms along the back of the seat as though to say, I mean to stay. “Or perhaps you two weren’t noticing the sky? Love, they would have us believe, is blind.”
Marie could contain her temper no longer. She had promised Everett she would say nothing about Sanford’s stealing Oakhurst, but she had scores of her own to settle with him. “It must be, if you can think Madame Monet is pretty!” she flashed out.
“That is a blindness I share with the rest of the gents hereabouts. She is much admired.”
“She is not admired by any gentleman of any taste or discernment or common decency!” she shot back.
“Common decency?” he asked, raising his brows. “How did that moral judgment get into a discussion of beauty? Bad taste, which is to say a taste at variance with your own, may be termed ill-advised, but surely not a challenge to common decency. Chacun à son gout. I find her utterly charming.”
“You would!” Marie said in a scathing way. She turned immediately to leave, then turned back and took Mr. Benson’s hand. “You will not want to be alone with your ex-neighbor, Mr. Benson. Come with me. I want to speak to Father.”
“I wouldn’t want to pester Sir Henry with this business,” Everett told her as they hastened away.
“I don’t intend to. I only wanted to get away from that horrid Lord Sanford.”
She glared at him over dinner with all the venom a pretty, young face with long-fringed eyes could produce. She failed to hear his request for ham, or any other remark he directed to her, but was solicitous to hear Benson’s slightest whisper, and to see he was never without a full plate. Biddy took her to task for it when they retired to the saloon, raising again the point of Benson’s poor judgment in staying on. How she longed to tell her the whole! That Benson was here on delicate official business, that he was without an estate only because Lord Sanford had stolen it, but she was reduced again by her promise to venting her wrath on Madame Monet.
“I wish you will stop harping on that point, Marie. Naturally you are jealous, but...”
“Jealous! Jealous of that fat Frenchie! I don’t care a hoot if he marries her. They’re a good pair.”
“You should care if you hadn’t more hair than wit. Such an eligible parti, Lord Sanford. I wonder how his pancreas goes on. I’ll relieve it again before he goes to bed this night. I’ll show you later how it is done, in case he requires the treatment when I am not there to perform it.”
Marie turned aside in vexation, only to see Lord Sanford entering the saloon in advance of the others, limping directly towards herself. She hopped up and went to the magazine table, in hopes that he would sit with Biddy and discuss his pancreas, but he stood waiting to see where she would sit, and as soon as she took a sofa by the grate, he came forward and sat beside her, ruining any chance for a cose with Mr. Benson.
“I have spoken to Biddy about you two coming to me for a visit. Has she said anything to you?” he asked.
“Biddy?” she asked with a proud stare. “Miss Boltwood has said nothing to me.” Her ears were ringing with the constant plans in this regard, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing what an uproar the invitation had caused.
“I have achieved a first-name basis with Biddy—like Monique, you know. She has professed a strong interest in seeing Wight, and thought you would enjoy it, too.”
“Our tastes are quite different. I dislike all islands very much.”
“What a pity you were born and reared on one.”
“England is different—a whole country.”
“How about coming to Paisley then? Right in the heart of the island, with thirty thousand acres.”
“I have heard twenty-five thousand, but then you have added some acres recently, have you not?”
“A few, not quite five thousand, however. How did you hear that?”
“There isn’t much I don’t hear,” she replied, stiff as a ramrod.
“Funny you didn’t hear Biddy mention my invitation.”
“I suppose Madame Monet will be there?”
“No, she is desolate to have to refuse me, and so am I desolate.”
“Well, I must refuse you as well,” she said, and flung open a magazine.
Benson and David went to a farther corner and were soon deep into talk. Sir Henry, with no petition and no parish business to busy him, suggested a hand of cards. Biddy and the boys were lured into it with him. Miss Boltwood, finding herself alone with Sanford on the sofa, set aside her magazine for a hard-covered book three inches thick. She opened it at the first page, hoping her companion would take the hint she did not wish to talk.
“Plan on some heavy reading, do you?” he asked.
“Yes, I enjoy to read.”
“I'm impressed to see how quickly you’ve picked up Latin,” he said after a moment. As her angry eyes focused on the letters, she saw them to be composed of a multitude of words ending in ‘ibus.’ At a loss for any explanation in her defense, she turned to attack instead. “What keeps you from Madame Monet tonight?”
“My pancreas. And the weather, of course. You were too well occupied with Benson before dinner to notice the dark clouds forming up. His conversation must be extremely diverting.”
“It is,” she answered with a smug smile.
“How very strange, and the rest of the world finds him a dead bore.”
“Is that why you were so eager to be rid of him as a neighbor?”
“No, that isn’t why. It is not necessary to be bosom bows with one’s neighbors. It was his being an absentee landlord allowing his estate to become badly run down that occasioned the general rejoicing when he left. A falling-apart old rabbit warren of a place detracts from the whole neighborhood. The people who bought it have fixed it up very nicely. Cut down the pasture in the front lawn, replaced the windows, and are speaking of putting in floors and ceilings.”
“The person who bought it can well afford to, I expect.”
“They seem to be well to grass.”
“I expect the walls, if they bother to install any, will be decorated with bogus Rembrandts.”
“You think I mean to palm off my forged Caravaggio on them, I expect. No, I don’t go out of my way to make enemies. In a few cases, however, it seems to happen in spite of my best efforts.”
“I wonder why that would be.”
“That matter of taste we were discussing before dinner, in the garden, must account for it.”
He tried a few times to rally her into conversing but failed, and before long he went to say good night to everyone. Biddy mentioned repeating the vacuum treatment, but he pronounced her too good a physician to require a second treatment. The card game did not last long. A neighbor from the parish board came to talk to Sir Henry about a possible addition to “the situation,” which required the privacy of the beloved office to keep it from Marie’s ears. She’d have to wait and hear from Biddy who the girl was.
Marie offered to take his place at the card table, but looks were being exchanged between David and Benson. It soon came out that Mr. Benson had to go out somewhere. The night was wretched, with rain threatening at any moment, and to stop Biddy’s protests, Benson let on he was only going down to the winch room for another look at it, but his cohorts knew it was more important business taking him into a howling storm.
Before long, Marie discovered the exact nature of his business. “He has a line on the money,” David said. “Thinks he might know who has it, and where it is hidden. I offered to go with him but he says it is too dangerous for us both to risk it. If anything happens to him this night, all this affair will rest with me. One of us must survive to carry on,” he said gravely, unconsciously straightening his shoulders and lifting his chin to meet the challenge.
“You should have insisted on going with him!” Marie adjured at once, but already Benson was off on his dangerous mission. All they could do was sit and wait, and pray for his safe return, preferably with the money.
He hadn’t been gone ten minutes till Biddy picked up her needlework and retired to her room. Before much longer, Sanford sauntered down the stairs looking for her. He had changed from his black jacket, was wearing a sort of lounging coat, a new fashion that David had not come across before. It was longish, made up in maroon velvet, very elegant. When Sanford saw the Boltwoods sitting alone, he asked, “Where’s Benson?” in a sharp voice.
“Out,” David answered. “He didn’t say where.”
“It must be an important matter to take him out on such a night as this. Didn’t he say where he was going?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“We do not feel it our right to question our guests,” Marie added.
He turned without another word and went to his room.
“That fellow gets under my skin,” David remarked idly.
This opened the doors to the whole of his heinous conduct. She didn’t feel Benson would object to David’s knowing it. Upon hearing how he had diddled Ev out of Oakhurst, David’s ire knew no bounds. His quoting Cicero, his insistence on cutting the chain and all his other misdeeds were recalled and discussed, with the fairly recent crimes of planning to take Seadog to Sinclair’s dock thrown in. Suddenly he jumped to his feet with a totally new and extremely damning piece of evidence. “Did you notice that jacket he wore?”
“Yes, I thought it looked very strange. Too long for a jacket and too short for a dressing gown. What was it?”
“I didn’t mean the cut! I meant the buttons.”
“I didn’t notice the buttons.”
“How could you miss them? They were brass.”
David was partial to a brass button himself, the bigger the better, so she wondered why this fact had him excited. He continued, “Don’t you remember—the night I heard the two spies talking I thought one of ‘em was a military man—he had brass buttons. It wasn’t an officer at all. It was Sanford, wearing that jacket. It had two little rows of smallish brass buttons, just like an officer’s jacket. A bit of a military cut to it, too. Of course it was him! What would an officer be doing here at two o’clock in the morning? He had just arrived—you mind Papa told us the next morning he got here very late. The first move he made when he got here was to keep a rendezvous with his partner, whoever he is. I’ve got to tell Ev this.”
“You can’t tell him till he gets back. We don’t know where he's gone.”
“We know now where he’s gone, right enough.”
“Where?” Marie asked in puzzlement.
“To Madame Monet’s. I’ve had a pretty good notion all along she’s in on it, and this pretty well proves it. If Sanford is Cicero, and hiring her a private house and all, you know what it’s for. It’s the headquarters where all the arrangements are being made to rescue Boney, and it’s where the gold is hidden.”
“It’s not right on our doorstep.”
“He hadn’t taken it there yet when I heard him say that. Use your head, woman. Can’t you figure out anything? Ev’s tumbled to it and gone there to get the gold. I’ll have to nip along and warn him Sanford knows he’s gone. No saying he won’t follow him, for you saw how excited he was when he noticed Ev was gone. Made quite a point of trying to find out where he was.”
“Benson should have asked you to keep an eye on Sanford.”
“He’d gone to bed, letting on his liver was cutting up. All a hum so Ev would think he had clear sailing. I’ve got to go at once.”
“Why don’t you check and see if Sanford is going out first?”
“Can’t wait. Ev warned me you have to be ready to move on a moment’s notice. I’ve got to get there before Sanford and warn Ev. You keep your eyes open here at home and see if anything new turns up. Now that we know Sanford is Cicero, you may notice something. Now that we know where to look for trouble, I mean.”
David was gone, and Marie sat on mulling over their talk. She couldn’t think of a single new vista of investigation opened up to her as a result of Sanford’s established guilt. Even, she wondered, if a set of brass buttons were not flimsy evidence on which to accuse him so positively. But of course the brass buttons were only one link in a long chain. His every move since coming to them was suspect. Even his being here was suspect. Why was he? Not a connection nor a suitor, only a meddler who happened to have a title and the gall to push himself in where he was clearly not wanted. Not even the decency to behave with propriety towards his hosts. That “odd notion of my preference in females” rankled still.
