Ms. Davenport's Christmas Read online

  The wind had swung round to the east again, said the chatty waiter, and the short thaw was gone. Did madam notice the icicles? No one could ever remember having seen such big ones.

  “We are not interested in your observations on the weather,” said Mrs. Davenport, and her voice was so dripping with chill that the waiter swore afterwards that it was as if it dripped icicles like the eaves of the inn.

  The silent breakfast over, they retired to their rooms to put on their outer garments. With one last brave show of defiance, Jilly and Mandy wore their altered gowns and the fur-lined pelisses. Jilly was wearing the pearl necklace, and Mandy, the coral one.

  They climbed into the carriage. Jilly, looking out of the window, was remembering the dance, trying to remember every bright moment. The grim days had started all over again and they were going home.

  The carriage jolted off, swung round at the front of the inn onto the Oxford road, and left Moreton-in-Marsh behind.

  They climbed up the steep hills towards Chipping Norton, Mrs. Davenport averting her eyes from all the candles in the windows and all the evergreens that decorated the fronts of the houses.

  Outside Chipping Norton they headed towards Banbury. The day was gray and quiet. They jolted along. The old rented carriage creaked like a square rigger in a chopping gale.

  Would nothing happen to save them? wondered Jilly. Could not this antique carriage break a pole, snap a trace? But on they went, the afternoon growing quickly dark, her parents’ faces opposite, two white blurs in the encroaching gloom.

  Jilly was growing increasingly uneasy about Mandy. Her sister was so white, she looked as if she might faint at any moment. She herself had a hard lump of grief in her throat. She tried so very hard to think of the splendid fun she had had to console her, but all she could think about was Lord Ranger and being held in his arms in the warm darkness of the drawing room while the guests played Snapdragon.

  But he had kissed her and said nothing of love and he had let her go without any show of sadness, without any protest.

  A strong voice shouting something penetrated her thoughts. The carriage lurched to a halt.

  The carriage door was wrenched open and a menacing masked figure holding a pistol ordered, “Out! All of you.”

  Abigail began to sob and scream. Jilly and Mandy climbed down and stood next to the coach, followed by their parents.

  “We have nothing of value,” said Mrs. Davenport.

  “But you have,” said the highwayman in a gruff, coarse voice. He pointed the pistol at Jilly and Mandy. “You two. Get in that carriage back there.”

  Jilly put her head back. “No, you will have to shoot us first.”

  “I won’t shoot you,” he sneered. “If you both don’t do as you are told, I’ll shoot your parents.”

  “Come, Mandy,” said Jilly. She did not know why she was not afraid, only fired with an odd sort of blind courage.

  “Forgive me,” shouted Mrs. Davenport. “Don’t go, my children. Take me instead. Oh, take me instead.”

  For a moment the tall highwayman seemed to be nonplussed, surprised. But he quickly rallied. “Who wants you?” he growled. “You two. Do as you are told.”

  Arms about each other’s waists, Jilly and Mandy walked to the large traveling carriage that had stopped behind their coach. A muffled figure was on the box.

  “And their baggage,” ordered the highwayman, waving his pistol at the terrified coachman, who, babbling that he was a married man with five children, scrambled to get the trunks out of the rumble.

  He was ordered to put them in the highwayman’s carriage.

  Jilly and Mandy opened the door of the other carriage and climbed inside. “We could open the far door,” whispered Mandy, “and escape across the fields.”

  Her sister shook her head. “They would shoot us down.”

  They had not closed the door of the coach, however, in the hope they might find some way to escape, but the tall highwayman jumped inside and tapped on the roof, and the coach bowled off.

  The highwayman removed his mask as the girls, huddled together, shrank back against the squabs.

  “It is I, Ranger,” he said.

  Jilly stared at him, wide-eyed. “What are you about, my lord?”

  “How could you terrify us like this?” cried Mandy.

  “You are being abducted, ladies.”

  “Where are you taking us? To Lady Harrington’s?”

  She could not read his expression in the gloom, did not know that he was suddenly embarrassed. Usually very much in charge of every situation, Lord Ranger felt at a loss. What if he told them they were being taken to Gretna and they said they did not want to be married?

  “Lord Paul is driving,” he said instead. “We are taking you to a friend’s outside Banbury. He is a friend from army days, Harry Simpson. We will explain all when we get there.”

  “But our parents, for all their faults, will be beside themselves with worry!” exclaimed Jilly.

  “They will find a letter waiting for them at the posting house in Banbury,” said Lord Ranger soothingly. “Lord Paul is keeping up a breakneck pace. We will soon be at the Simpsons’. Are you not happy to be rescued?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Jilly. But she took her sister’s hand. She was very worried, her feelings in a turmoil. She had barely recovered from the fright of believing that Lord Ranger was a real highwayman. Now a new fear was taking hold of her mind. She had let him kiss her and caress her. He might have abducted her to make her his mistress!

  She and Mandy sat in worried silence. Lord Ranger could not bring himself to say anything about marriage, still worried that until they recovered from the shock of thinking they were being abducted by highwaymen, they would not be prepared to listen.

  He looked out of the window and realized with relief that they were bowling up a long drive. It was a good thing that Harry Simpson was such an easygoing rattle, for they had not warned him of their impending arrival or that they were bringing two future brides with them.

  Harry Simpson, an amiable man with a large nose and large feet, received Lord Paul and Lord Ranger in the hall with many cries of pleasure and welcome. Yes, he would be delighted to put them and their ladies up. Respectable ladies? Had to consider the wife’s sensibilities.

  Deadly respectable, said Lord Paul. Everything would be explained later. If they could just get the ladies indoors?

  Mrs. Amy Simpson tripped down the staircase at that moment and hurled herself into Lord Ranger’s arms. She was a dainty little blonde with a roguish eye, and Lord Ranger was suddenly reminded of the fact that Amy used to flirt with him and hoped she would not do so in front of Jilly.

  Amy’s blue eyes hardened a fraction when she was told about the waiting ladies, but she was intensely curious to find out what Lord Ranger was up to and so she said they must be brought in to the drawing room fire immediately.

  She was relieved when Jilly and Mandy were led in by Lord Ranger. No one looking at such shivering waifs could ever imagine them to be other than respectable. For one awful moment Amy had feared that the two lords had brought their Cyprians.

  “And where are you all going?” asked Amy brightly. “I see the ladies do not have a maid.”

  “Not now,” said Lord Ranger. “We will explain later. Perhaps if the ladies could be shown to their rooms…?”

  “Of course,” said Amy. “Our guests left last night and all the rooms have been cleaned and aired. Come with me.”

  She showed Jilly and Mandy upstairs and into adjoining bedchambers. “I will send my maid to help you change,” said Amy. “Dinner is in an hour. We do not keep very fashionable hours in the country. Have you known Lord Ranger and Lord Paul long?”

  “A few weeks,” said Jilly nervously.

  “Such a pair of rakes,” said Amy lightly. “I always used to say to Ranger, ‘No lady is safe with you.’ That pair specialize in breaking hearts, I can assure you. But I gather I must not ask questions until this odd… er… affair
is explained. Ring the bell if you require anything. Here are the maids to unpack your things.”

  The girls could not find an opportunity to talk about their fears because of the presence of the bustling servants. And no sooner had they left than a French lady’s maid arrived to help them into their dinner gowns and to arrange their hair. She was a very sophisticated French lady’s maid of a breed neither Jilly nor Mandy had met before, and she subtly made it obvious that she knew by looking at their dinner gowns that they had been made over, and by a provincial hand, too.

  Then there was a footman in livery to lead them downstairs to the drawing room, where they sat politely and listened as Harry rattled on about army days, and then in to dinner, where neither Jilly nor Mandy felt like eating much.

  They answered questions about their Christmas with the Harringtons and then Amy rose as a sign that they were to follow her back to the drawing room and leave the gentlemen to their wine.

  “Now,” said Harry, “what’s this all about? Not like you to cavort around the countryside with a couple of scared virgins, hey?”‘

  “We abducted them,” said Lord Ranger, “on the Banbury road. We snatched them from their parents.”

  Harry dropped his wineglass and it shattered on the table.

  “You what? Look, I want no part in this.”

  “You do not understand,” Lord Ranger said, and patiently began to tell Harry the whole story and about the planned flight to Gretna.

  Harry stared at them in amazement. “That puts a different light on the matter now that I know your intentions are at least honorable. But there are two very scared ladies there. Are you sure they want to marry you?”

  “We haven’t asked them yet,” said Lord Paul.

  “Here’s a coil. Mayhap they think you have taken them away for other purposes.”

  “How could they think that?”

  “Because,” said Harry patiently, “at no point in your story did I hear anything about declarations of undying love. You’d best get through to the drawing room and get to it or you’ll have that pair running off into the night, thinking they are saving themselves from a fate worse than death.”

  Amy was telling the girls another story about the exploits of Lord Paul and Lord Ranger. “There were these two Spanish señoritas in Madrid,” she was saying, “who were enamored of that pair, and their parents called on our lords and threatened to shoot them if they did not back off. What heartbreakers.” Amy twisted a golden curl in her fingers and looked slyly at Jilly. “That terrible rogue, Ranger, set out to break my heart as well. And me, a married woman!” She looked up as the door opened and the men walked in.

  “Come along, my dear,” said her husband. “They need to talk. Paul, you can take Miss Mandy to the Green Saloon, and we will leave Ranger here with Miss Jilly.”

  Jilly reached out to stop her sister leaving, but Mandy was looking up into Lord Paul’s eyes as he led her out and seemed suddenly oblivious to everything else.

  When they were both left alone, Lord Ranger held out his hand. “Come here to me, Jilly.”

  She backed away and said in a trembling voice, “There are no parents here, my lord, nor Lady Harrington either. I must ask you your intentions.”

  He crossed the room to where she stood in front of the fireplace and went down on one knee in front of her.

  “Miss Davenport,” he said solemnly, “will you marry me?”

  “Why?” asked Jilly.

  He stood up and drew her into his arms. “Because I love you with all my heart. We are going to be married at Gretna, and then if your parents ever forgive us, we will be properly married in church on our return from the North. Kiss me, Jilly, for heaven’s sake, girl, and tell me I have not made the most disastrous mistake.”

  Her eyes were suddenly full of tenderness and laughter. “I love you with all my heart, and yes, I will marry you. I cannot believe the nightmare is over.”

  He kissed the tip of her nose, then her cheeks and then her mouth, and he was kissing her with increasing intensity when the door opened and Mandy and Lord Paul walked in hand in hand to join them.

  Mr. and Mrs. Davenport were sitting in their private parlor in the Spread Eagle at Banbury, waiting for the arrival of the magistrate and the head of the local militia.

  “It is a judgment on us,” said Mrs. Davenport tearfully. “My precious girls. My babies. We were too harsh on them. It’s all your fault, Abigail. You enjoyed tormenting them.”

  There was a scratching at the door, which then opened to reveal Peter, the footman, from Colonel Tenby’s. He bowed low and held out a letter. “Mr. and Mrs. Davenport, this is for you.”

  Mrs. Davenport took the letter and broke open the seal. It was a long letter from Lord Ranger, and she read it several times as if unable to believe her eyes. In it he said that he and Lord Paul had pretended to be highwaymen. They were taking Jilly and Mandy to Gretna to marry them over the anvil at the blacksmith’s. If the Davenports hounded them or tried to bring them back, then both he and Lord Paul would be happy to expose in court all the misery that the Davenports had inflicted on their daughters. On the other hand, they could accept the marriage with good grace and so avoid scandal.

  He apologized for all the distress he had caused them but assured them he was convinced that it was nothing compared to the distress such unnatural parents had caused their own children. He begged to remind the Davenports that he and Lord Paul were the sons of dukes and not without power.

  At last she looked up, her eyes blank with shock, and said to the waiting Peter, “You may go. There is no reply.” Then she handed the letter to her husband.

  After he read it, he said wrathfully, “Will that magistrate never arrive? I will have them hunted down and those girls dragged back. I will—”

  “No!” said Mrs. Davenport in a trembling voice. “Do you not see how it will make us look? We will be in the newspapers. We will be vilified. We should never have left Yorkshire.”

  “But they are our daughters,” cried Mr. Davenport. “We cannot let this happen.”

  “It has happened,” said his wife. She straightened her gown and stiffened her spine. “The devil has entered the souls of our girls. It is not our fault. Nothing we have done has caused this.”

  And so they consoled each other until the magistrate arrived to hear with surprise that Mrs. Davenport had had a “queer” turn and had imagined everything.

  Chapter Nine

  Lady Harrington was glad the long winter and chilly spring had ended at last, bringing blue skies back to the Cotswolds. The hedgerows were heavy with Queen Anne’s lace and hawthorn blossom and the delicate fresh green of young leaves that had not yet acquired the dull green of midsummer.

  She often thought of Jilly and Mandy. She had lost two baby daughters in a smallpox epidemic many years ago, and the Davenport girls were what she had dreamed her own girls would grow up to be. She imagined Jilly and Mandy being crushed and berated and beaten until there was nothing left of their happiness and warmth and affection.

  Many times Sir John had had to stop her from setting out to the North. There was nothing they could do, he kept saying. The Davenport girls had left their mark on the village. The vicar, the schoolmaster, and the curate constantly called to ask if there was any news. Margaret Andrews had written from London with the glad news that she was engaged to be married to Mr. Travers and that Belinda Charteris was engaged to Mr. Jensen and had also asked if anything had been heard.

  Even Colonel Tenby had called on a brief leave, saying that the visit of the Davenport girls had changed his life, for his wife was now more pleasant in every way and had even confessed to bribing Mr. Nash and had got his precious plate back.

  Lady Harrington, in an effort to try to find out if Lord Ranger or Lord Paul had shown any remorse at having let the girls go so easily, had written to friends in London asking about their whereabouts, but no one had seen them. The Season had started, Lucinda and Lady Harriet were to be seen everywhere, bu
t there was no sign of either lord.

  She often went for a walk by the pond, looking out at the sunny waters, imagining it covered once more with ice, seeing Jilly and Mandy spinning about on their skates, laughing and carefree.

  She was standing one day as usual by the pond. A lilac tree sent purple blossoms onto the surface of the water, blown by a light warm wind. As usual, she was thinking of Jilly and Mandy, hoping they were well, trying to banish black images of them being forced to marry unsuitable men. She hoped that Sir John had been right, and that the bright memories they had given them might help them to be brave.

  And then she heard the sound of a carriage out on the road and looked towards the open gates at the end of the short drive, wondering if the squire had come to call.

  A very grand coach indeed turned in at the gates, driven by a splendid coachman in a white wig seated on a gold hammercloth-covered box.

  She turned and hurried up to the house to greet these unexpected visitors.

  Two ladies and two gentlemen were alighting. She stopped still and then held her arms wide. Jilly and Mandy, dressed in the very height of fashion, threw themselves into her arms, laughing and crying as Sir John came out to see what was causing all the noise.

  At last Lady Harrington drew back and looked at their rich clothes and then towards where Lord Ranger and Lord Paul were standing, and her face hardened.

  “What has happened here?” she demanded. “I read of no wedding announcements.”

  “We are married,” said Jilly. “We will tell you all about it.”

  “Married!” Now Lady Harrington began to cry in earnest, saying between sobs that she had been so worried about them, had imagined them being starved and beaten and locked in dark cupboards, until Sir John said cheerfully that they would all be more comfortable indoors.

  Jilly looked about the drawing room that she had once thought never to see again. There were bowls of flowers all about the room and a lazy little fire smoked in the hearth, nothing like the gigantic bonfire caused by that Christmas Yule log.

  Lord Ranger settled down beside her on the sofa and took her hand, staring for a moment at his wife in delight as if not yet quite used to the fact she was really his.