Mrs. Budley Falls from Grace Read online

They were to travel in a hired carriage but without any servants. The hotel was so busy that Betty and John, who usually had the luxury of only waiting on the poor relations, had been drafted in to help with the general work.

  Lady Fortescue and Colonel Sandhurst came out onto the pavement to wave goodbye to Sir Philip and Miss Tonks. Sir Philip kissed Lady Fortescue’s hand and then tried to kiss her cheek, but she was taller than he and by drawing back a step she left him straining a kiss up into the empty air. Sir Philip climbed into the carriage, the door held open by a beaming Jack in splendid new hotel livery, and sat down beside Miss Tonks in as grim a fit of the sulks as he had ever been in. To add to his miseries, he loathed the country and all in it, from cows to dung heaps to yokels, and he began to say so at length, a long litany of complaints, until Miss Tonks remarked acidly it was amazing how people like Sir Philip turned self-pity in their minds into justified indignation, and that he was a pain and a bore. He said, not for the first time, that she was an acidulous dried-up old spinster, and no wonder no man had ever wanted her, and so they both fell into a bitter silence. The first day, they ate their meals in silence, and in the evening, at the inn at which they stopped for the night, went to their respective rooms without exchanging a word.

  Sir Philip had drunk too much the night before and slept until noon, much to Miss Tonks’s fury, for it meant they were forced to make a late start and not arrive at the castle until sometime close to midnight. She broke her silence to berate Sir Philip, but her fury only put Sir Philip into something approaching a good mood. The day was fine and sunny and Miss Tonks forced herself to forget the obnoxious Sir Philip and admire the countryside, sleepy under a lazy sun.

  Neither of them had thought of highwaymen or footpads, for such creatures surely belonged to the dark, to the wild heaths, certainly not among this well-tailored landscape of neat fields, stone walls, and cropped hedges.

  They stopped for a country dinner at four in the afternoon, and then later at nine at another inn for supper. They were rolling comfortably towards their destination in the fading light along the Fosse, that straight Roman road which runs from Gloucestershire to Warwickshire, and were climbing slowly up one of that road’s many steep hills when suddenly the coach stopped and a voice cried, “Hold hard or I’ll blow your brains out.”

  “Highwaymen, damn them,” muttered Sir Philip. “Let them take what they want, Miss Tonks. Better to stay alive than try to be brave.”

  “But we have the wedding presents for dear Eliza,” protested Miss Tonks.

  “She’ll be happy to have us in one piece and without the presents,” grumbled Sir Philip. “Curse that coachman and guard. Can’t they fire a shot?”

  The carriage door was wrenched open and a burly figure stood there. “Out!” he ordered.

  Sir Philip climbed down and helped Miss Tonks to alight.

  “Throw your jewellery on the ground,” ordered the highwayman.

  “Haven’t got any on,” said Sir Philip, who had packed his one precious stick-pin along with his watch.

  In the lights of the carriage lamps, their assailant was revealed as one ill-favoured man on foot. The fact that he had not even bothered to conceal his unlovely features filled Sir Philip with alarm. The highwayman probably meant to leave no witnesses behind.

  “Get the trunks unstrapped, old man,” said the highwayman, levelling his pistol at Sir Philip.

  “Do it yourself,” said Sir Philip. “You’re going to kill us anyway.”

  Miss Tonks felt she was standing in some dream.

  “Stop,” she heard herself say calmly. “I have gold in my reticule. I will give it to you.”

  She felt inside her reticule and her fingers closed round the small pistol Lady Fortescue had given her. “Ladies should always be armed,” she remembered Lady Fortescue say, “this little toy is quite effective.” And her own protest of, “I don’t know how to fire a gun.” And Lady Fortescue laughing and saying, “It’s primed and ready. You simply point and pull the trigger.”

  “Are you going to kill us?” she asked, her own voice seeming to come from far away.

  “O’ course he is,” said Sir Philip. “He hasn’t even bothered to cover his face.”

  “Give it to me,” shouted the highwayman.

  And so Miss Tonks did. She raised her reticule and pressed the trigger. The report seemed quite deafening. The highwayman stared in surprise and then dropped to the ground, his own gun spinning uselessly away.

  Miss Tonks carried her reticule close to the carriage lamp. “There’s a hole burned in it,” she said in a thin voice.

  Sir Philip crouched over the highwayman. “Straight through the heart,” he marvelled. “Now where’s that coachman and guard?”

  He searched round the carriage and then along the road, but it was obvious that the coachman and guard had run off, leaving them to their fate.

  “Englishmen are grown soft,” he grumbled to Miss Tonks, who was still peering at the damage to her reticule. “I’ll drive. You’d better climb up on the box with me, Miss Tonks. You ain’t going to faint? I’ll hand it to you. I’ve never seen such courage in a female, never.”

  “I am not going to faint,” she said in a calm clear voice.

  She climbed up onto the box. Sir Philip took a pile of carriage rugs out of the coach and threw them up to her. Then he slammed the carriage door and, made energetic by shock, managed to get himself up onto the box and picked up the reins.

  He urged the horses forward up the steep hill. At the top they came out of the black shadow of tall hedges. A full moon shone down, silvering the countryside. He reined in the horses and turned to his companion. “Hey,” he said softly, “we’re alive!” He began to laugh, throwing an arm around Miss Tonks’s thin shoulders, and he laughed until he cried.

  “Pray drive on, sir,” said Miss Tonks coldly. “This is no time for mirth.”

  He wiped his eyes and eyed her narrowly and then gave her a sharp slap across the face.

  “Oh,” she said, and then, “Oh! Oh! Oh!” And then she began to shake and scream.

  “Get it out now,” said Sir Philip, gathering her close. “There now. My brave Letitia. Philip’s here. Faith, I am proud of you.” And he held her tightly, occasionally giving her an impatient shake until her hysterics calmed down to quiet sobbing.

  At last she said, “We left the body on the road.”

  “So we did,” said Sir Philip, picking up the reins. “Best place for it. Otherwise we’d waste hours of time with the authorities. You saved him a nasty death on some gibbet, Miss Tonks, if your Christian soul is worrying you.”

  “But what if he didn’t mean to kill us?”

  “He did.”

  “I could have wounded him.”

  “And give him a chance to loose his gun on us? I owe you my life, Miss Tonks.”

  They drove on down the steep hill, Sir Philip occasionally casting anxious little glances at his companion. He would have liked to put a comforting arm around her shoulders, but driving a four-in-hand was taking all his strength and concentration.

  Miss Tonks hugged the rugs about her, trying to control bouts of shaking.

  At last the castle swam up before them like something out of a medieval romance. Under the portcullises they rolled, over the drawbridge, the way that Mrs. Budley had come when she had been sent to rob the marquess.

  Sir Philip tried to climb down from the box but fell the last two feet and lay helpless on the ground. Miss Tonks climbed down and stood looking at him. She bent down to try to help him up, but her legs suddenly gave way and she fell on top of him.

  The castle door swung open and the marquess strode out, followed by his servants.

  “Drunk,” he said, looking down at the couple on the ground. He turned to his servants. “Carry them in.”

  Mrs. Budley was roused from a deep sleep with the news that Miss Tonks and Sir Philip had arrived. She dressed hurriedly and ran lightly down the stairs to the great hall.

 
“My dearest.” The marquess went to her. “Your friends have had a hair-raising adventure. They were held up by a highwayman, their coachman and guard ran away, and Miss Tonks here shot the highwayman!”

  “Letitia!” Mrs. Budley went and stood before Miss Tonks’s chair in front of the huge fireplace. “How very brave. But I must get you to bed. How did you come to have a gun? How did you manage to fire it?”

  “Lady Fortescue gave it to me just before we left. I don’t know how I managed to kill that man. I cannot remember now what I thought, or if I thought at all. I am so glad to be safe,” said Miss Tonks, allowing herself to be helped up. “I can’t quite believe it happened.”

  “Owe her my life,” said Sir Philip. “Who would have thought it! Miss Tonks!” He kissed her on the cheek and gave her a quick hug.

  Mrs. Budley led her friend out and upstairs to one of the guest bedchambers. Two maids followed. One unpacked Miss Tonks’s trunk while the other helped Mrs. Budley undress Miss Tonks and get her into bed.

  “Would you like me to stay with you, Letitia?” asked Mrs. Budley.

  “No, Eliza. I think perhaps I shall go to sleep right away. I am so very tired. Sir Philip was amazing kind. Odd, is it not? When one is twenty, one dreams of dashing and handsome young lovers; then, when one is thirty, one dreams of quiet vicars or widowers; and now”—her voice broke on a sob—“when one is over forty, any man will do.”

  “And what do you think that meant?” Mrs. Budley asked the marquess over the breakfast table the next morning. “She cannot possibly be beginning to think of Sir Philip in a romantic light. He is over seventy.”

  “I would not pay any attention to anything she said, my love. She was babbling with shock.”

  But in the week before the wedding, it became noticeable that Miss Tonks and Sir Philip spent a great deal of time together. They went for drives, they went for walks, they played backgammon and Pope Joan. Miss Tonks gained a vague sort of prettiness, not so much in appearance but in a sort of happy ambience.

  The castle was gradually filling up with the marquess’s relatives, including Mr. George Pym, who appeared to have accepted the forthcoming marriage with bad grace.

  It was a fine day for the wedding. White was for virgins, and so Mrs. Budley was married in cream satin, and Miss Tonks, resplendent in pink taffeta, with the tip of her long nose pink with excitement to match, declared there had never been a more beautiful bride.

  But when the wedding service began, Miss Tonks cried. The marquess was so commanding, so handsome with his dark, brooding good looks, so much the man of her lost dreams, that she could not help feeling very sad that she would never find herself in such a blissful situation.

  She recovered at the wedding breakfast. Sir Philip made a speech quite awful in its quota of double entendres and salaciousness, but he had been so kind and friendly to her during the visit that even that did not put her out of charity with him.

  The marquess and his new marchioness were rarely to be seen on the following days, and when they were they looked exhausted and happy and stared into each other’s eyes, picked at their food, looked into each other’s eyes again and, as if at some exchanged telepathic signal, took themselves off to their bedchamber again.

  “Should have bought them a new bed as a present,” said Sir Philip. “They must have worn that one out.”

  “I thought Eliza would have been better company,” complained Miss Tonks. “What can they find to do up there all day long?” She blushed. “I mean, there are limits.”

  “And I think we’ve reached the limit of our stay,” said Sir Philip. “Let’s go home and see the others.”

  They had an amicable journey back in one of the marquess’s travelling carriages. Neither seemed to want to rush home and they spent a whole day at a pleasant inn at Chipping Norton, just under thirty miles from the castle.

  Miss Tonks began to see a future stretching out before her. It wasn’t the one of her dreams, but it included, of all people, Sir Philip Sommerville. They would live somewhere far from London, perhaps Chipping Norton, and she would have companion hip and that blessed title of “Mrs.” in front of her name at last.

  She no longer had to fear the Runners. The hotel was doing well. Surely Lady Fortescue could be persuaded to sell.

  And unaware that she was shortly to look back on those days in Sir Philip’s company with sentimental longing, Miss Tonks smiled and chatted and furnished the house of her dreams in her head right down to the colours of curtains and carpets.

  Colonel Sandhurst had decided to use the absence of his rival and Miss Tonks to press his suit with Lady Fortescue. But somehow, fate seemed to be against him. All sorts of minor disasters occurred, from querulous and difficult guests to a genuine kitchen fire. Lady Fortescue leaned more and more on her cane, surprised at how much she missed Miss Tonks and how efficient at hotel organization that spinster had become.

  But one blessed evening, when their aristocratic guests were all, down to the last one, out for the evening, the colonel suggested a walk in Hyde Park, where they had first met.

  He hired an open carriage to take them there, for the evening was fine. He felt as proud as any young buck as he drove smartly down Bond Street with his hat tilted and his whip held at just the correct angle. In just such a way, he thought, he would drive Lady Fortescue home through the country lanes after they were married, back to that trim manor-house of his dreams where there would be no Sir Philip waiting for them.

  Lady Fortescue, her back as stiff and straight as it had been when she was a young girl, glanced out at the passing crowd from under the brim of her bonnet, occasionally nodding to some acquaintance—for trade or no trade, no one dared to cut Lady Fortescue.

  The colonel drove into the Park and called his team to a halt by the very bench where he had first met Lady Fortescue. He jumped down and tethered the horses and then helped Lady Fortescue down and led her to the bench and sat beside her.

  “Here we are again,” he said. “Just where I met you.”

  Lady Fortescue smiled at him. “A momentous day. We never thought we would be owners of the hotel, did we? Ah, but that was Sir Philip who bullied us into it.”

  The colonel scowled. He wanted to forget the very existence of Sir Philip.

  With great daring, he took her gloved hand in one of his and, emboldened by the fact she did not withdraw it, said, “Amelia, we are both very tired and I think the time has come to discuss our future. You know, you must know, that I would consider myself honoured above all men if you would become my wife.”

  She threw him a roguish look, conjuring up, for one fleeting moment, the ghost of the pretty girl she had once been. But she said seriously, “I had not considered us quitting the hotel so soon. I must confess the last week has been a taxing one. Paradoxically, the more famous we become, the more autocratic and demanding our guests. It would, I admit, be wonderful to wake up one morning and realize all one needs to do is to turn over and go back to sleep.”

  “So what is your answer, my heart?”

  “Very nearly yes. But give me one more day to think about it.”

  He looked about the Park in a sort of dazed happiness. The new green leaves of the trees were luminous in the setting sun. Only one more day to wait!

  He woke the following day with a feeling of excited anticipation that he remembered having when he knew his schooldays were over, that it was his sixteenth birthday, and that he was a man at last.

  He dressed with extreme care, almost as if preparing for his wedding. His childlike blue eyes sparkled and he applied his silver-backed brushes to his snowy hair until it shone.

  He sensed a new excitement in the hotel as he made his way next door. But he quickly decided that the excitement was not in the hotel but in his heart.

  “Lady Fortescue?” he asked Jack. He could not approve of this footman, having come to the conclusion that any young man who could so readily carry out one of Lady Stanton’s nastier schemes was not to be trusted a
t any time in the future.

  “Her ladyship is in the office.”

  The colonel swept off his hat and pushed open the door of the office.

  Lady Fortescue rose to meet him, her eyes glowing with such a light that his heart turned over.

  “Oh, my dear,” she cried. “Such news.”

  He smiled at her tenderly. “I take it the answer is yes.”

  She looked at him in a puzzled way and then her face cleared. “Oh, that. No, no. Such news. The Prince Regent is to dine here tonight! The pinnacle of our achievement. If only Sir Philip and Miss Tonks could be here to share our success.”

  The colonel sat down suddenly, feeling very old and tired.

  But game to the last, he said, “Do you remember what we discussed yesterday in the Park?”

  “Ah, yes, but we were overset with fatigue and plagued with complaining guests. Do you not know what this means? We can raise our prices. After tonight’s visit, we shall be so fashionable that we can pick and choose our guests. So much to do! New covers for the dining-room and those new French table napkins. Do go down and check the wine, for no one has such a good palate as you. So much to see to. This is the happiest day of my life!”

  She bustled off, her ebony cane left forgotten by the desk.

  The colonel put his head in his hands. “Damn this hotel,” he said aloud. “Damn it to hell!”

  For Lady Fortescue, it was indeed an evening to remember. His Highness declared himself pleased with his dinner, pronouncing it “the best in London,” and only the colonel reflected sourly that it would be a miracle indeed if the bill were paid.

  The Prince stayed five hours, and when he and his friends finally left, the colonel was exhausted and decided he could not enjoy any “post-mortem” with his beloved and took himself off to his bed.

  Lady Fortescue knew why he was sad and tired, but any guilt she felt over that was outweighed with the glory of the success for the hotel.

  Sir Philip and Miss Tonks read about it in the newspapers on the last morning of their journey and all the easygoing friendliness disappeared from Sir Philip as he stared at the reports in mounting fury.