Herald of Joy, page 47
part #2 of Wintercombe Series
Rachael stirred as her brother laid her down on the soft warmth of her bed. Her blue eyes opened, still horror-struck, and she stared up at him. ‘Nat — please — oh, please…’
Her voice was almost lost, reduced to a desperate hoarse whisper by her bruised throat. Nat lifted his stricken face to Silence, standing beside him. ‘That’s — that’s what she said before I lifted her down.’
Rachael twisted violently under his steady hands. ‘No — please — let me alone!’
‘Listen.’ Her brother leaned over her. ‘Listen to me, Rachael. Do you think that I would? Do you really think that I want you to die? That any of us do? It doesn’t matter what you’ve done — you’re alive, and that’s all that matters.’
‘No,’ Rachael gasped, tears of bitter anguish flooding her eyes. Silence said softly, ‘Oh, please listen — we love you, Rachael, we all do — and we only want to help, nothing is worth losing you like that, nothing!’
But Rachael, unable to force any more words past her swollen throat, had turned her head away, and closed her eyes.
‘I’ll give you something to make you sleep,’ Silence said, recognising defeat. Best, for the moment, to give that tortured spirit the oblivion she craved, even if only for a little while. She had taken her precious phial of laudanum, expensive and in very short supply, from the still-room while Nat carried Rachael upstairs. Only a few drops would be needed, mixed in a glass of honey and water. The potion was bitter, and she did not know if the girl would swallow it.
But all the resistance seemed suddenly to have drained out of Rachael. She allowed Nat to prop her upright, while Silence tilted the cup to her lips. The liquid drained down her throat, and she lay back on the pillows, pale and unmoving. Together, they watched as her breathing grew deeper and more even, though still with that rasping painful sound, until they were certain that she was asleep. Silence tucked the blankets around her, for there seemed no point in disturbing her rest by attempting to undress her. Tomorrow, perhaps, she would have recovered her wits a little, and they could begin to repair the damage. Until then, she could sleep in this fragile illusion of peace.
But, Silence remembered, as she closed the door softly upon her stepdaughter’s empty shell, there were other reckonings and dues to be paid, come tomorrow.
*
Rachael woke suddenly, with a sensation of acute physical discomfort. Her mouth was dry as dust, she had a raging thirst, her throat hurt, and her head ached. It felt, in fact, as if she had drunk too much on the previous night. She had never been in such a condition before, but knew, from the talk of other sufferers, what it must be like.
She was still wearing her clothes. Her bewilderment increased. She sat up abruptly and then, with a gasp of pain, cradled her head in her hands. It felt as if she had red-hot spears lancing through her temples. A voice, soft and concerned, said just by her, ‘Rachael — are you all right?’
Recollection, vivid, humiliating, appalling, flooded through her mind. Yesterday, she had tortured her little sister, and forced her to tell her secret, and then she had used her ill-gotten knowledge to betray her family to the soldiers. In doing so, she had caused a man’s death, and brought disgrace and ruin and grief upon her beloved brother, and her stepmother. Too late, she had repented. And, unable to face the consequences of her dreadful deed, she had compounded her wickedness by trying to hang herself.
She had even failed in that. She had tied the knot wrongly, the rope had stretched, and she had spent what seemed like hours, balanced on tip-toe, the rope cutting into her neck so that she could barely breathe, unable to free herself, unable to die. However much she had earlier craved death, she had never been so glad to see anyone, when Nat had walked into the summerhouse, the lantern held high in his hand. She must have fainted then, for the last thing she remembered, with the clarity of nightmare, was the look of utter horror growing on his face, as he realised what she had tried to do.
She had a vague recollection, later, of being put to bed, and the presence of Nat and her stepmother. They must have given her something to make her sleep, and it had certainly worked, although her dreams had been frighteningly vivid.
‘Rachael?’ said that soft, familiar voice again, through the blinding waves of pain inside her head. She opened her eyes unwillingly, blinking against the light.
It was Patience.
Unwisely, she flung herself back down on the bed. The agony inside her skull increased to almost unbearable levels. Whimpering, she pulled a pillow over her head, to shut out the light, and the presence of someone whom she had always regarded as her enemy.
‘Rachael, I have something for you to take — Silence said you would wake with a headache.’ For the first time, a note of uncertainty, even pleading, entered the older girl’s quiet voice. ‘Please take it, Rachael — you’ll feel so much better.’
Anything would be preferable to this numbing, shrieking pain. Much more cautious this time, Rachael drew the pillow back from her head, and sat up with considerable care.
Patience was perched on the edge of the bed. For once, she was wearing one of her older garments, a plain but becoming blue, unenhanced by her usual frills and furbelows and lace. Her pretty face was devoid of cosmetics, and pale and taut with strain and anxiety. ‘It’s feverfew water,’ she said, taking a pewter cup from the table beside her. ‘Silence says it’s an excellent remedy for the megrims, and you’ll feel better within the hour. And there’s honey for your throat, and plenty of water, too — she said you’d feel thirsty.’
Without speaking, Rachael took the cup. She loathed the bitter aromatic taste of feverfew, but knew that it worked. She swallowed it in one gulp, despite the raw pain in her throat, and tried not to shudder. Then she handed the cup back to Patience, who put it down on the table, and picked up one of the ubiquitous little brown-glazed earthenware storage pots. ‘Honey?’
Rachael nodded, and Patience passed her the pot and a spoon. The cool thick sweetness was wonderfully soothing. She swallowed mouthful after mouthful, washing it down at the end with several tankards of cool, refreshing water from the well in the kitchen garden. Already, the brutal agony in her head was beginning to recede, and she was able to think about something other than her own physical needs.
She looked at Patience, sitting there so calmly, with not a trace of the pert lively manner that had once annoyed her so much. She dreaded to see sympathy or curiosity in the large brown eyes, but there was nothing discernible, save an air of practical serenity that greatly resembled her sister’s. Suddenly, Rachael realised that she must speak to her stepmother — whether to apologise, explain, or to try to make amends, she did not exactly know, but she could hardly confide in Patience. She tried to speak, but it came out as a half-strangled croak. Impatiently, she tried again. ‘See — Silence.’
Patience understood. ‘I’ll fetch her. She’s sitting with Captain Hellier at the moment, but she asked me to tell her as soon as you woke.’
Rachael stared at her in disbelief. Words and questions suddenly jostled in her mind, but could not fight their way past the painful blockage in her throat. She put all her fierce will into the most economical sentence she could manage, and still make sense. ‘He — he isn’t dead?’
‘Of course he isn’t,’ said Patience, with brisk cheerfulness. ‘Oh, I’d forgotten, you couldn’t have known — he lost quite a lot of blood, but Silence thinks that he will recover. I hope she’s right,’ she added, thinking of her sister’s face, for once unguarded, as she had looked down at the man lying in Nat’s bed. It had come as a startling revelation to Patience, and explained a great deal: Tabby’s partisan friendship, his return to Wintercombe, and Silence’s obvious distress when he was hurt. She knew that she was not imagining it, for she had spent too many years analysing her own affairs of the heart, and those of other people, to mistake it. Her sister, her calm, serious, responsible sister, thirty-five years old, a widow and a mother of four children, was in love with this reckless and disreputable Cavalier. And the liaison could only have begun six years ago, when he had been commander of the garrison here, and thus nominally her enemy.
So George was cuckolded, Patience had thought, with satisfaction. Good. I’ve never met anyone who deserved it better. And now, she is at last free to marry Nick Hellier — but he is not.
She had devoted her mind, since, to plotting ways of setting him at liberty. All her ideas, of which there had been several, had foundered on the undeniable fact that he was hurt, and weak, and in no condition to flee anywhere, unless he risked his life. She had almost been glad to sit with Rachael, all night, for Silence had felt that her stepdaughter should not be left alone.
Patience had learned with appalled bewilderment, and a certain small thread of contempt, of Rachael’s attempt at self-murder. She herself loved life, had always wrung from it whatever it had to offer, and could not imagine any circumstance in which she would wish to put a premature end to it. But that dreadful mark under the other girl’s jaw, her evident desperation, had aroused Patience’s reluctant pity. At least, Rachael had felt some remorse for her dreadful deeds.
She rose to her feet, smiling down at Rachael’s chalk-white face. ‘I’ll get her. I won’t be long.’ Somehow, it did not seem as if self-murder would be attempted again, as soon as she turned her back.
Silence was sitting in a remarkably similar position by Nick’s bed, sewing. Captain Hellier appeared to be asleep, but his eyes opened as Patience entered the room, and he gave her a faint, friendly smile. She said quietly to her sister, ‘Rachael is awake, and wants to see you.’
‘Does she? I’ll come at once.’ Silence put down her sewing, a cushion cover which she was embroidering in stumpwork, and rose to her feet. She said to Nick, ‘Do you mind if Patience watches over you for a space? She’ll get you anything you need.’
‘I doubt it,’ said Nick. His voice was faint, but held a note of laughter that was as obvious as a caress. Patience, her mind once more busy with escape plans, took her sister’s place at the bedside, and Silence went to see Rachael.
She had said nothing yet to Nick, concerning her stepdaughter’s attempted suicide. Sooner or later, she might judge it right to tell him, if Rachael herself agreed to it, but for the moment, she, Nat, Patience, and Jude Hinton, were the only ones who knew how closely real tragedy had come to them last night.
Patience had left Rachael for only a moment or so, but Silence was still a little apprehensive as she knocked on the door. Her imagination, always inconveniently vivid, showed her a flashing succession of horrific pictures: slashed wrists, severed throats, nooses…
There was a rasping sound on the other side of the door. She opened it, and went in.
Rachael was sitting up in bed. She was dreadfully pale, and the evil mark below her jaw stood out as vividly as a scarlet collar. She gave her stepmother a twisted travesty of a smile, and whispered something that might have been, ‘Sorry.’
Silence thought that the word was, at the least, just a little inadequate in recompense for what she had done. Yet somehow, her attempt to hang herself, so obviously genuine and desperately desired, had cauterised much of the bitterness and resentment that her stepmother might have felt. They would all suffer because of her betrayal, but none more so than Rachael herself.
At least, however, Nick was not dead; Touchet had escaped, though how long such an arrogant idiot, with his inconvenient resemblance to Royalty, would manage to stay at liberty, remained to be seen; and perhaps Tabby would succeed in deflecting the blame, and the punishment, from Nat and from Wintercombe.
This time tomorrow, they would know their fate. It all depended on Colonel Pyne, and what Silence had heard of him was not precisely reassuring.
But, she reminded herself sternly, nothing, and no one, can ever again terrify me as Ridgeley did. He held all our lives in the grip of his hand, and he valued us as little as he might an annoying insect. That man was truly evil. Pyne is a self-important lawyer who has come to power by relentless scheming, and by packing the Committee and the Militia Commissioners with his cronies. He is a little man, a big pike in a small pond, and in no way is he comparable with Ridgeley.
However, her thoughts would not help her, when the time came to face him.
She smiled at Rachael, and sat down on the chair next to the bed. She said, ‘You shouldn’t try to talk too much. It will probably take several days for your voice to return to normal. Meanwhile, you can stay in this chamber, until there’s no sign left of what…of what you tried to do. If, of course, that is what you wish.’
Rachael nodded fervently. She swallowed several times, obviously in sonic pain, and then whispered, ‘Nick — all right?’
‘He will be, if we are granted time, and no corruption enters the wound.’ Silence said. She uttered a brief wordless prayer, for if that wicked, deep, almost fatal hole in his shoulder should become infected, he would undoubtedly die. At least she had taken great care to ensure that it was clean. In wounds, as in her dairy, great ills could prosper in dirt.
An expression of huge relief passed over Rachael’s face. She closed her eyes, and tears slid from under the blue, exhausted lids. Her lips shaped the words, ‘Thank God.’
‘Did you think he was dead?’ Silence put out a hand to touch the girl’s arm. That explains it, she thought. That explains why she was so distracted as to attempt to take her own life, for she knows how much I love Nick. Controlling her voice, she added softly, ‘I did too, for a while — I did not think we could save him, he’d lost a lot of blood. He should never have tried to fight against such odds.’
But if he had not, she reminded herself, he would not be Nick, and she would not love him so much, for that reckless defiance in the face of such great danger.
‘My fault,’ said Rachael, with difficulty, the tears still flowing. ‘How can you forgive me? My fault.’
Silence stared at her for a long moment, that heart-felt, whispered plea echoing in her mind. At last, she said reassuringly, ‘Things might not turn out to be so bad as we think.’
Rachael made a strangled gesture of disgust, and banged the bed with her fist. ‘I — I betrayed you!’ she gasped. ‘Doesn’t matter what happens!’ She doubled over, coughing. Silence poured water and handed her a cup, and her stepdaughter gulped it down, scarletfaced, her eyes streaming.
‘Yes,’ Silence said, when at last she was calm. ‘Yes, you betrayed us. Was it because of Jack?’
Rachael looked at her, evidently astonished by her perspicacity. She nodded, and then shook her head, and her soundless mouth shaped the words. ‘Don’t want to marry him now.’
‘I think it quite possible that he won’t want to marry you,’ Silence said, with some asperity. Rachael’s attempt to kill herself had forced her to realise the depths of the remorse which her stepdaughter must feel, but it still did not, as the girl herself had pointed out, erase the enormity of what she had done. She knew that Patience pitied her, in a rather condescending way, for her sister had the strong animal’s unthinking superiority over the weak. Yet pity and sympathy would not help Rachael come to terms with her treachery, and nor would sweeping it under the mat. She had probably already confronted it, in those lonely hours in the summerhouse, and decided that she could not live with what she had done. But Silence, looking carefully at her stepdaughter, thought that she would not try to kill herself again. There was a subtle, bleak strength in the set of Rachael’s mouth, which indicated that she had decided to accept life after all, and whatever of good and bad it had to offer her.
‘Don’t want to see Jack,’ said Rachael, in that almost voiceless whisper, and shook her head violently. ‘No — never again.’
Some impulse, some instinct that this was the right time, prompted Silence to say, ‘In that case, I think that there is something you should know about the betrothal.’
The girl looked up at her, surprise on her face. She went on, knowing that it was too late now to turn back. ‘Nat told you, of course, that your father had left you a dower of a thousand pounds, under the terms of his will. But did he tell you about the condition attached?’
‘Condition?’ Rachael’s voice was quite strong on the first syllable, but died away into a whisper and another fit of harsh, painful coughing. She gulped some more water, and then stared at her stepmother. ‘What condition?’
‘Your father ordered that the dowry was only to be paid if you married Jack. If you rejected him, if you wanted to marry someone else, you would be dowerless.’
In a way, it was cruelty to shatter the girl’s illusions thus, but Rachael had been in thrall to her false memories of her father, for too long, and too miserably. With compassion, Silence watched the dawning realisation in her stepdaughter’s face, the understanding of what her words implied. She said at last, hoarsely, ‘You mean…you mean, he wanted to force me?’
‘He knew that without a dowry, you would be unlikely to marry anyone else. He wanted you to marry Jack, and I don’t think… I don’t think that your wishes meant very much to him. Even after his death.’
Rachael buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders heaved, and great tearing sobs shook her thin body. Silence put her arms around her, feeling again the savage loathing which her husband had once inspired in her. None of this was really Rachael’s fault: all this confusion, this terrible mess of love and hate and betrayal, had sprung from a daughter’s desperate desire to be loved, and a father’s need to have his wishes at last obeyed. And she did not think that she herself was entirely guiltless.
There was a sudden thunderous knocking on the door, and it was flung open before Silence had time to draw breath. Jude Hinton stood there, her normally placid, good-natured face pale with alarm and fear. ‘Oh, m’lady, m’lady, Eliza told me to tell ee — Colonel Pyne be here!’
Rachael, lost in her own grief for what had never been, did not seem to notice. Silence sat still, lending her strength to the sobbing girl, gathering her forces for the confrontation to come. She gave the maid a brief, reassuring smile. ‘I shall be down presently, Jude. As you can see, Mistress Rachael has more need of me, at present. Meanwhile, I am sure that Sir Nathaniel is more than adequate to deal with the occasion.’
