A Little Deception Read online

  ‘How can I when he’s made himself absent. Clearly, he intended me to receive this letter before he returned. He wants to speak to me as much as I want to speak to him.’

  Arabella gasped. ‘I don’t believe you!’

  ‘Oh, Bella, you’re such a romantic.’ Rose gave a short, pained laugh. ‘You didn’t really think this was a match made in heaven? That we both fell in love with one another, despite the inauspicious beginning?’

  ‘Then you don’t love him?’

  Trailing over to the window Rose stared miserably across the sweeping lawns. ‘Would it make you feel better if I said I didn’t?’ she asked. ‘He gave me a thousand pounds to go away. With a thousand pounds I can make huge improvements to the plantation … and to tell you the truth, there is no other place that I would rather be just now.’ Seeing that Beth was now securing her trunk she picked up her reticule and went to the doorway. ‘Send my regards to my mother-inlaw. You might remind Rampton that I was ever the obedient wife. Rawlings is waiting with the carriage. Rampton apparently ordered it so I’ll at least go in comfort.’

  Arabella tried to bar her way. ‘This is nonsense, Rose. I don’t believe it. You’re acting with too much haste. You must at least challenge Rampton.’

  Rose pushed past her. ‘If Helena has decided Rampton is the only man who can make her happy I don’t stand a chance.’

  ‘No, Rose-’

  ‘And if Rampton is so easily lured, then I don’t want him, anyway!’

  ***

  A deep scowl blackened Sir Hector’s already bronzed complexion, causing the captain of the Mariah to wonder whether his esteemed client considered he’d been cheated.

  ‘The goods arrived in prime condition, I assure you, Sir Hector—’

  ‘Excuse me!’ Elbowing his way out of the saloon of the Pelican with uncharacteristic lack of courtesy, Sir Hector bore his portly form down the front steps with the agility of a man half his age.

  ‘Miss Rose! I say!’

  Rose turned, quelling the urge to hurl herself into her old friend’s arms.

  Rising from his bow, Sir Hector cast a puzzled look at her trunk, which several porters had set down while they waited, then at the tall-masted ship towards which Rose was clearly headed.

  ‘I’m sailing on the Mariah,’ said Rose, swallowing past the lump in her throat.

  ‘Since it will be some hours before the tides favour her departure might I request the pleasure of your company, Miss Rose?’

  It was indeed a pleasure to enjoy the company of a man not disposed to judge her harshly. After a bottle of Madeira had washed down a hearty meal of jugged hare and pigeon pie Rose was ready to pour out her heart for a sympathetic hearing.

  Sir Hector, however, was more sceptical than sympathetic.

  ‘Dispatched you by letter?’ Lacing his hands over his stomach, he shook his head. ‘Sounds deuced queer, if you ask me. Not at all Lord Rampton’s usual modus operandi, surely?’

  Rose wiped her eyes as the servant cleared the table.

  ‘So you love this fellow you’ve led such a dance, eh?’

  ‘As I’ve never loved anyone,’ Rose replied with a sniff, before explaining the circumstances that had given rise to her scandalous behaviour, followed by her suspicions regarding Helena and Rampton.

  ‘I might have known Helena was behind the trouble,’ Sir Hector harrumphed. ‘Always eyeing out the advantage.’

  ‘And now she’s cast Rampton a lure he couldn’t resist and that’s why he’s sent me away.’

  She looked indignant as Sir Hector chortled at the apparent ludicrousness of her deepest fears. ‘Maybe she did, but it’s Mr Albright she’s carrying on with. I happened upon them by chance in the Serpentine Walk at Vauxhall Gardens on Thursday last and it would appear she’s as susceptible to his charms now as she was when he swept her off her feet six years ago.’

  Rose nearly fell out of her chair. ‘Helena and Geoffrey Albright!?’

  Nodding, Sir Hector rose. ‘I’d be investigating this letter a little more closely before I did anything hasty, Miss Rose. Now, my dear,’ he stooped to kiss her forehead, ‘there’s nothing more I’d love than to see you safely back to town but I have urgent business to attend to and you have your maid. Besides which, I’d hate to intrude on the fond reconciliation.’ With a heartening squeeze of her hand he sent her on her way, adding, ‘If I wasn’t so sure you’ll find nothing more than a simple misunderstanding and a vengeful sister-in-law behind your troubles I’d be first to step into the role of gallant hero. But Miss Rose, your gallant hero awaits. Go to him now and see what he thinks about what I’ve said.’

  Emboldened by her resolve to confront Rampton directly, Rose, on Sir Hector’s arm, swept out of the inn and commanded that her trunk be retrieved and her passage cancelled. What had she been thinking? A week in the country with Rampton’s brooding, critical mother had sapped her of her normal fight. Without Rampton’s belief in her she’d found herself longing for the familiarity of her island home. But is that where she wanted to be?

  Sir Hector had quizzed her directly on the subject and it was only then that she’d realised with utter conviction that she wanted Rampton to love her and that it was up to her to get him back.

  ***

  Rampton poured himself another brandy and stared at his wife’s portrait. There was the hint of amusement in her eyes. Her mouth looked ready to break into a smile. As if she were secretly laughing at him behind the composed expression.

  Was that what she was doing now? Laughing at him as she sailed into the sunset with Geoffrey Albright? Crumpling the cold-hearted missive she’d sent him into a ball, he hurled it at the wall.

  ‘Rampton, I thought at least you’d be with your wife if you hadn’t the courtesy to dine with your mother.’ The dowager looked grim. ‘I dined alone since Arabella was indisposed, also.’

  Rampton, who had left for a dawn ride, had come back to find the house in an uproar. One of the servants was tending to Arabella who had fallen gravely ill shortly after the warm milk Beth had brought her in her bedchamber.

  Apparently she’d been distressed, though Rampton hadn’t enquired. To be told she was still pining for Yarrowby would have been too galling, not to mention uncomfortable.

  Rampton had immediately gone in search of Rose, only to be informed she was visiting a friend in the village. Fortunately Arabella’s condition had improved but it was just before dinner than he’d found Rose’s letter, tucked beneath the turn-down of his bed.

  ‘Rose is … resting. What can I do for you, Mother?’ His tone was as frosty as hers.

  ‘I’m looking for my emerald necklace. I lent it to Rose for Mr and Mrs Lake’s dinner last week.’

  ‘Have you asked her maid?’

  ‘No one seems to have seen her. And if Rose is as indisposed as she would have one believe I felt it discourteous to knock and disturb her.’

  ‘Well, I don’t have it, Mother,’ said Rampton, irritably while his thoughts revolved around Rose’s no-doubt dreadful legacy. As he watched his mother depart he felt dismay spurt its poison into the fibres of his being.

  Trying to compose an inventory of the family jewels, Rampton made his way to the dowager’s dressing-room and set upon the task of uncovering the full extent of his runaway wife’s misdemeanours.

  ***

  The closer to London Rose travelled, the brighter her spirits. By contrast Beth looked increasingly long-mouthed until Rose asked in exasperation, ‘Were you hoping to set sail with me to the West Indies, Beth, and never see your family again?’

  ‘It’s just I were to meet someone at the docks, m’lady and now I dunno how I’ll be paid.’

  Rose looked at her curiously. ‘You’ll be paid as you always are. By me, at the end of the month.’

  ‘You’re going back to London, m’lady?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Rose envisaged, with a surprising degree of relish, the confrontation that lay in store. ‘I’m very much looking forward to my chat
with Lady Chesterfield.’

  The way she said it appeared to frighten the girl. ‘You’re going to see Lady Chesterfield?’ Beth gasped. ‘Oh no, ma’am, you ain’t takin’ me with yer.’

  Rose stared at her maid. Beth’s normally dull brown eyes gleamed in her sallow face. Fear lent her bovine features rare animation. Like a mirage taking shape and substance, suddenly everything made sense.

  For a moment shock rendered her silent. Helena had recruited Beth to help blacken Rose’s reputation in her husband’s eyes. All the time Beth had pretended to serve her she had in fact been acting for Helena.

  Rose’s hands shook and she tried to school her features into impassive lines as she sought for a motive.

  Why?

  Another insidious thought intruded. She’d believed Rampton had sent her away so he could be with Helena. If she’d believed he was being untrue, what other lies must he have been fed to think the same of her?

  Oh, God, she thought, shivering with fear and dismay. The sooner she could be at her husband’s side the sooner they could sort out this tangled web of lies.

  But first she must find Helena.

  The carriage bumped uncomfortably over the rutted roads. London would soon be reached. So, too, she desperately hoped, would a reconciliation between her and her husband, once Helena’s part in the conspiracy to part Rose from Rampton had been explained. In the meantime she needed to find out from Beth as much as she could. She took a deep breath and strove for icy calm. ‘So Lady Chesterfield paid you to place the letter on my dressing-table yesterday morning?’

  Beth looked mutinous. ‘I ain’t saying nuffink.’

  ‘And Lady Chesterfield intends running away with that ne’er do well, Mr Albright?’

  ‘Dunno, ma’am, only I don’t want to never see Lady Chesterfield again if she knows that you knows everyfink, now. Please,’ begged the girl, ‘if you’re not going on that boat just take me back to Lord Rampton’s ’ouse so I can get me fings and do a runner.’

  Rose pounced. ‘Lady Chesterfield is not at Bruton Street? Has she gone already?’ Fear that Helena might have neatly slipped away without being called to account for the damage she had caused Rose made her grip Beth’s arms and shake her. ‘Where is Lady Chesterfield going? What do you know of her plans?’

  ‘I dunno, m’lady.’ Beth looked close to tears. ‘Only that she’s bin visiting Mr Albright at a ’ouse in Marylebone. Aitken Street – number nine, I reckon - so you go and sort it out wiv ’er but leave me out of it for I don’t know nuffink!’

  Before Rose could stop her Beth had thrust open the carriage door and thrown herself on to the road. They were not travelling fast and as Rose pulled back the curtain she saw that the girl had regained her footing without apparent injury and was covering the adjacent cornfield with surprising speed.

  Chapter Twenty

  RAMPTON CONTEMPLATED THE unsavoury truth. Rose had known what she was about. Just like the necklace she’d pawned, the family heirlooms were valuable stones in unremarkable settings. Having dismissed Fanshawe, Rampton was dressed only in his silk banyan when Arabella and Felix burst in upon the briefest of knocks.

  ‘Most men find more honourable methods of disposing of their wives when they tire of them!’

  The angry blaze in his brother’s eye was so at odds with his normally placid demeanour that Rampton was momentarily speechless. Felix advanced a few steps and, to Rampton’s incredulity, put up his fists, saying, ‘If you weren’t my brother I’d have no compunction in dropping you this instant!’

  ‘Welcome home, Felix. I’m glad that brotherly love prevails.’ To his further surprise, Arabella, who looked pale and wan, appeared fully to endorse Felix’s threat of violence. ‘Would you mind,’ he asked, ‘explaining to me the reason for this uncharacteristic, and certainly unwarranted, attack?’

  ‘Unwarranted?’ Felix made a noise of disgust. ‘Unwarranted? Because my sympathies lie with my sister-in-law rather than my brother?’

  Rampton blinked. ‘I’d have thought I was particularly deserving of your sympathies at this moment. You are, I assume, aware that my wife has left me?’

  It was the first time he had said the words. How remote from reality they sounded.

  ‘Left you! Why, you sent her away with as much compunction as you would discard an old coat that no longer pleased you. Like so many of your mistresses.’

  ‘I would like you to find one of my former mistresses who considers herself discarded in such an uncaring fashion,’ Rampton was stung into defending himself. ‘But I find the charge as regards my wife a bit rich since she has just run off with Albright … taking, I might add, a king’s ransom’s worth of our mother’s jewellery.’

  He felt only transitory satisfaction at the shocked dismay and confusion that replaced their anger.

  ‘It can’t be true!’ Arabella was the first to break the silence. ‘She has left Larchwood yes, but only because you sent her away. Back to the West Indies!’

  ‘I did no such thing!’ Rampton glared at Arabella. ‘What else did Rose tell you? That I am an unfeeling, nay, violent husband? That she can no longer tolerate my mistresses? That I have refused her every comfort? Failed to indulge her at every turn?’ With superhuman effort he reined in his temper. ‘I have not so much as looked at another woman since I married your sister!’

  He looked witheringly at each distraught face. ‘I wrote a letter sending her away? Show me! She went of her own volition … to be with her lover. Here is the letter she wrote to me!’ He thrust the crumpled piece of parchment covered in Rose’s handwriting at Felix.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Felix said, putting a comforting arm around the now weeping Arabella. ‘Albright? They hardly know one another.’

  ‘They never met in the West Indies?’ Rampton barked the question at Arabella.

  Arabella looked downcast. ‘But it was Helena, not Rose, who caught Geoffrey’s fancy.’

  ‘How would you know? You were only a child, still in the schoolroom?’

  ‘I know my sister!’ Arabella cried. ‘She’s incapable of such deception.’

  ‘She deceived me into making her my wife.’

  They jumped as the clock in the landing chimed the hour. Rampton went on, ‘Are you now going to tell me she has never been seen in Geoffrey Albright’s company during the past few weeks? Pray, cast your mind back to Lady Barbery’s ball. And Lady Chawdrey’s. A little too much champagne punch and she was throwing herself into his arms. If you don’t believe me, then read it!’

  Felix held the letter to the light and murmured Rose’s words of shame and regret at her decision to elope with Geoffrey, adding that she was taking nothing from Rampton that was not due to her.

  ‘Nothing, except the family jewels,’ muttered Rampton.

  Soberly, Felix handed his brother back the letter. ‘It doesn’t make sense. To everyone else you appeared the love match of the season.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense, because why would Rose tell me she loved her husband, despite the fact he was sending her away?’ asked Arabella, fiercely. ‘I saw the letter you wrote her.’

  ‘The letter I wrote her?’ Rampton harrumphed. ‘Did you read it?’

  Arabella bit her lip as she shook her head. ‘Why would Rose lie about that? And I refuse to believe she wrote that letter to you.’

  ‘Well, my dear,’ countered Rampton, ‘what do you propose? That I saddle Chestnut and ride post haste to the docks to fetch my runaway wife - who has probably already departed - and prove this is all a lie, and that she is somehow the wronged party?’

  ‘Yes!’ came the unanimous rejoinder.

  ‘And I shall follow in the carriage!’ declared Arabella.

  ‘Before Mother discovers her jewels have gone,’ suggested Felix.

  ***

  A relentless drizzle made the roads slippery but they pressed on. Not to the docks but to London following information that a carriage bearing the Rampton family arms had been sighted on the London road.r />
  It was not until they reached the first post house, where they procured fresh horses and stopped for a hurried breakfast, that Rampton and Felix were able to exchange a few words.

  ‘That little maid of hers went with her. I’ll wager anything it’s she who’s taken Mother’s jewellery,’ Felix asserted as the publican’s daughter removed the lid from a platter of calf’s liver and bacon. ‘Probably wrote the letter, too, to hide her part in it. Which she has conveniently taken with her.’

  Rampton raised his head from his pot of ale and levelled a long, hard look at his brother. ‘You’re really championing that sister-in-law of yours, aren’t you?’

  Felix met his stare, confidently. ‘You don’t have much faith in your wife, do you? Or her sister, since you don’t give much credence to what Arabella says about the state Rose was in when Rose left.’ He shrugged and added between mouthfuls, ‘Why, she’s mad for you!’

  ‘Then why has she left?’

  Felix shrugged. ‘A woman used to taking charge of her own life might consider disgrace and ignominy a fair price for her freedom if the alternative were a loveless marriage.’

  The knuckles which held Rampton’s mug handle turned white. ‘A loveless marriage,’ he repeated in a whisper and Felix said hurriedly, ‘I’m not pretending I know anything about your marriage but—’

  ‘You obviously know nothing about it, otherwise you would sympathize with the number of times I’ve been deceived.’ Waving away the hovering publican’s daughter who had made to remove several finished dishes he went on, ‘I’m not talking about the kind of love that every greenhorn experiences half a dozen times in his life; I mean the anguish of loving one woman, one’s wife … despite everything.’

  ***

  ‘What do you mean, she was sighted on the London Road?’

  Helena swung round, her skirts frothing at her ankles, her high heeled shoes clicking across the floorboards of the shabbily furnished little room as she advanced towards the fireplace. Her voice shook.

  Geoffrey snorted. ‘I thought it a ridiculous plan in the first place and we couldn’t trust that little maid of hers to carry it out properly.’ His voice sounded bored, disembodied in the gloom of the wing chair in which he was ensconced. He didn’t even look up from the book he was reading; merely puffed on his cigarillo with irritating indifference.