The Elsingham Portrait - By Elizabeth Chater Page 0,30
don’t be childish! Do you really think his lordship would be deceived for one minute if I said you’d gone off to Ireland without a penny in your pocket? Be sensible, Miss Kathryn, do!”
Kathryn smiled reluctantly. “Yes, Bennet,” she said.
“Good! Now I’ll help you dress, and then I’ll write the letter to Richard, and then we’ll smuggle you out of the house.” She was bustling about as she talked, but she managed a surreptitious glance or two at the pale beautiful woman whose lovely face was drawn with pain and exhaustion. “I’ll just pack a wee bag for you, Miss Kathryn: some underthings, a comb and brush, soap, and the laudanum Dr. Anders sent over to dull the pain and help you sleep.”
Kathryn, dressed in what she suspected was Bennet’s best dress and cape, found them a very snug fit. A bonnet and heavy veil were carefully fitted over the glorious hair.
“I could be Jack the Ripper and no one would know it, with this disguise,” whispered Kathryn. She was feeling lightheaded with pain and nervous tension. Bennet forced her to sit down while the letter to Richard was being written. Then, with Bennet in the lead carrying the neat satchel of clothing, the two women crept down the great stairway in the dark. Kathryn was almost glad she couldn’t see the elegance and beauty of the mansion she was leaving so stealthily. She had never really belonged here—even Nadine had been an interloper—and a fool, Kathryn thought, angrily. To have all this—and throw it away! Into her mind, unbidden, unwelcome, flashed a picture of a tall, golden-haired man, asleep somewhere in a magnificent bed, the master of this house. Perhaps in sleep the angry, contemptuous frown would be smoothed away, and his face would be relaxed and kind . . . Bennet opened the ponderous front door cautiously. The foggy chill of predawn struck into the warm, scented hall. Shivering, Kathryn followed the older woman out, waited while she closed the door, and then hurried after her down the street.
Nine
Kathryn was never able to recall that journey away from London without mixed feelings. She told herself, as the coach clattered and swayed over the cobbles of the London streets in the dawn, that she should be watching and listening and storing up impressions. What other librarian in the history of the science had had a chance actually to live in the country and time of her favorite authors?
As the coach lumbered out into the country, Kathryn had decided that England seemed much smaller than she had pictured it. And greener. The country air smelled so fresh that she almost forgot the dull aching of her arm in the incredible sweetness of it. As a matter of fact, however, the one, overriding, inescapable sensation she remembered was pain: physical pain from her arm, held in a sling and bound close to her body, and nagging unhappiness from her ambivalent feelings toward John Elsingham.
She hated him for his arrogance, for his stubborn refusal to consider her problem without prejudice. Yet she could not forget his gentleness with her, and the disturbing sweetness of his smile. What a fool Nadine had been, to throw away the passion and devotion of such a man! What could it have been that had seemed more enticing to her than an adoring husband, an honored name, a fortune? Locked into the boredom and misery of the long jolting ride, Kathryn considered for the first time what she had learned about Nadine.
A young Irish girl of good but impoverished family, raised with casual indifference by a sport-mad widower father and a scheming nurse. It was little wonder that so young a girl, so raised, would not have been prepared to deal with the challenges and pitfalls of an ultra-sophisticated society. And as the possessor of unusual beauty, she would have been the immediate target of every unprincipled gentleman in Polite Society. Kathryn remembering what she had read about the haut ton of eighteenth century London, concluded cynically that even some of the “principled” gentlemen would have found Lady Nadine Elsingham fair game. And her seduction a hilarious joke on Lord John.
And there was Donner. Always Donner, lurking in the background, doing whatever damnable thing she did with her drugs and her wheedling and her hypnotic flat black stare. Small wonder that a willful, ignorant girl, manipulated from infancy by God knew what techniques for what unholy purposes—small wonder, indeed, that she had become the reckless wanton of