Cecilia Or Flight From A Shadow Read online

  CECILIA

  OR

  FLIGHT FROM A SHADOW

  by

  CATHERINE BOWNESS

  Copyright © 2019 Catherine Bowness

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 9781096864561

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With love and gratitude to:

  Sophy and Ben for invaluable technical and emotional support

  as always

  and to

  Janis and Lyn for their endless patience, helpful advice and continuing encouragement.

  Previous Books by Catherine Bowness

  The Lost Palace

  Christmas at Great Madden

  For Children

  The Adventure to the Lost Palace

  Regency

  Alethea or A Solemn Vow

  Cynthia or A Short Stretch of Road

  Euphemia or The Secret Widow

  Sylvia or the High Moral Ground

  Mary or The Perils of Imprudence

  Honoria or The Safety of the Frying Pan

  Agnes or The Art of Friendship

  Letitia or The Convalescent Heart

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 1

  They had been travelling for days in a ramshackle carriage with a leaking roof, cracked windows and more or less non-existent springs, but, despite these vexations, the most dispiriting aspect of the journey was the absence of hope with which they had embarked upon it.

  It was apparent that the road had at last begun to climb; the horses, never precisely lively, moved more ponderously, the air which came into the carriage – and there was a distressingly large quantity of it - grew thinner and colder and the land fell away on either side. It was a beautiful sight with the first snow of the year lightly coating the trees and lying in swathes across the valleys like icing on a cake.

  Perhaps, if the last ten years had not involved a great deal of travelling long distances in increasing discomfort, Cecilia might have been more positively affected by the beauty around her. As it was, she found herself afflicted by mixed emotions: there was the relief natural in a person who could finally begin to imagine the end of an excessively long journey mingled with a sense of dread which was also, in the circumstances, only too natural.

  Since the reverse of fortune which her father’s death ten years ago had triggered, she and her family had been, not to put too fine a point upon it, rootless. Unable to afford the rent on the house in Sussex in which they had lived until then, they had begun by travelling to different parts of England, followed in quick succession by visiting Scotland, Wales and Ireland. They had remained nowhere for long. Gossip followed them and money flowed from them unremittingly. Their attempts to settle became increasingly brief and the houses where they laid their heads grew smaller, damper and less commodious as the months – and years – passed.

  There were fewer of them now because one or two had broken away. Originally there had been seven: six children and Mama. Four remained: one had joined the navy, one had made his way into legal chambers in London – in a very junior capacity - and one had married.

  It was less cramped with only four and there were fewer mouths to feed, although the most voracious eater, Endymion, remained and was even now complaining that he was famished and would surely perish before long if they did not stop soon.

  “We will find an inn in the very next village, dearest boy; it cannot be much further.”

  His mother’s attempt to reassure him might have been appropriate if she had been trying to avert a scene with a four-year-old. Her son was three-and-twenty.

  “I am afraid that may be too late,” he said with a heavy sigh, leaning back awkwardly against the front partition, which was not provided with squabs, and stretching out his legs, an action which meant that his mother, opposite, had to tuck hers further out of reach.

  “Pray do not be absurd,” Cecilia, who was some four years his senior, admonished. “You ate an enormous nuncheon – ridiculously so since you have barely stirred since. You will be as fat as Prinny in no time if you go on that way.”

  It was her opinion that her brother, a spoiled boy who thought the world owed him every consideration on account of his really quite startling beauty, had become intolerable since Mr Keats had published a poem bearing his name.

  “Will we die of starvation?” their younger sister asked, frowning.

  “No, of course we will not. We are not yet that impoverished,” Mama snapped.

  “I’m afraid it may come to the point where someone will have to be sacrificed to save the rest of us though,” Endymion said, his turquoise gaze resting thoughtfully upon his mother, a large woman who seemed to be able to maintain a vast presence in spite of the restricted victuals on which she and her daughters were obliged to subsist.

  “Whom do you suggest?” Cecilia asked. She was accustomed to intervening in any conversation which threatened to become an argument by drawing the fire upon herself.

  “I can see why you might be worried, Cissy dear, because I think it may have to be you. You were enormously useful when we needed a governess and you’ve supported Mama with admirable patience in her many hours of need but now, well I think you’re past marriageable age and too old to become anyone’s bit of fluff. You’ll have to cede your place as bait to poor little Phyllis.”

  “I am not poor little Phyllis!” that maiden retorted, stirred to unusual passion by this description.

  “Oh, I think you probably are,” her brother countered. “You’re really Mother’s last hope, aren’t you?”

  “It is you who should be providing for us,” Cecilia said quickly, seeing Phyllis’s confusion and knowing only too well to what her brother alluded. “I can’t think why you’re not more ashamed of eating more than the rest of us put together at every single meal and contributing nothing except sarcastic observations.”

  “Such a remark merely shows how little you understand,” he retorted, giving her the half-smile which made her long to hit him, “you see, without me, I hate to think where you’d be. I don’t have to do anything; I have only to be.”

  “Well, your ‘being’ as you put it hasn’t proved very effective. Why are we not more comfortable and why must we sit in this horrid, dilapidated old carriage with the wind whistling around us?”

  “No, it is true that I have not been as successful as I once hoped I would be in alleviating that sort of affliction – or not yet, in any event. What I meant was that, but for the protective presence of a man, you – you and Phyllis – would have been sold into slavery by this time, and somebody would surely have strangled Mama. I could not abandon you – no matter how tempted I am – because you would, for a start, have been charged twice as much for this boneshaker of a c
arriage, would very likely have been given an even more spavined set of horses at the last stage and would never have been permitted to lay your heads in the flea-ridden inn we favoured last night. Dear girl, I am essential to your comfort and have sacrificed myself to take care of you when I could have been sailing the high seas or spouting finely phrased perorations in the Inner Temple. You should be grateful to me.”

  Cecilia, who had at first listened with some irritation and no surprise – for she had heard it all before - to her brother’s defence of his position, ended by nodding humorously for, in truth, she could see that he had a point. It was grossly unfair but there it was: but for his presence, she and Phyllis would have been abducted long ago and their mother kicked into the gutter. Indeed, he did not have to do much, but it was he who ordered the rooms, the carriage and negotiated the terms for the horses, and it was he who fixed an icy glare upon the countenance of any man who dared to try to take advantage of either of his sisters.

  “I am; thank you, Dym,” she said.

  “It is occasionally almost a pleasure,” he acknowledged, grinning at her in an approving fashion. “You’re a right one, Cecilia, and deserve an amiable husband. Perhaps we can find an old one – a widower – who will need the sort of care a youngish woman can offer. It would be better than treading the boards or hanging about at street corners, would it not?”

  “Oh, I think treading the boards, as you put it, might be a good lark but I’m afraid I don’t have much talent for that sort of thing. I have such a distressing tendency to stick to the literal.”

  “The widower will no doubt appreciate that,” he said kindly. “We’ll keep an eye out for one. If you’re very lucky we may be able to find one almost at his last gasp amongst the mountains.”

  “Now that is an excellent notion,” Mrs Moss said. If she saw the humour in her son’s remark, she chose to ignore it.

  “Nearly missed a trick there, didn’t you, Mama? It would be just the thing for Cissy; she’s already accustomed to looking after other people. We’ll find her an agreeable old gentleman who won’t trouble her for long and who will have plenty to leave her – and the rest of her family. In fact, since he won’t be hanging around for long, I shouldn’t think agreeableness is particularly important. Any old gentleman – so long as he has plenty of the ready – will do. You know, I really think that’s a much better plan than trying to find someone to marry Phyllis.”

  “Will that be difficult?” the girl asked.

  “Well, I cannot conceive how it will be easy,” her brother informed her, adding on a different note when he saw her crestfallen face, “No, I didn’t mean that, as you very well know. I meant that young men – even middle-aged ones – usually have mothers and mothers make an inordinate fuss about all sorts of perceived faults, including family background, when their sons come home with a possible bride – and yours doesn’t stand up to the smallest degree of scrutiny. But old men, sick old men, they won’t be wanting to please anyone but themselves; a soft pair of hands and a gentle voice will mean much more to them than a respectable lineage.”

  “Don’t all men want a pretty wife?” Phyllis asked. She was confused by a great many things in the grown-up world but had somehow latched on to this particular as a constant, perhaps because her mother was constantly mentioning it.

  “He might think he does but, in the end, I should think he’d be more likely to settle for a kind one. In any event, Cecilia is pretty.”

  “Isn’t she a bit old now?” This was another refrain of their mother’s which Phyllis had appropriated.

  “Well, at least he’s unlikely to try to make me his mistress,” Cecilia snapped.

  Endymion looked backwards and forwards between his sisters before observing, provokingly, “Depends, I suppose, on how good his sight is.”

  Phyllis seemed happy with this conclusion, although it was doubtful she understood the allusion, and sat back contentedly in her corner. She was in fact very like her older sister in feature and colouring. She differed mainly in her grasp of reality, which was tenuous at best. It was this, together with the fact that she seemed not to have grown up intellectually quite as they had once hoped she might, which prompted her brother and sister to take such care of her. Their mother refused to acknowledge the girl’s faults and seemed determined to throw her in the way of any passing man who looked as though he might be in possession, not so much of a fortune, but of sufficient funds to provide for her, perhaps even purchase her.

  Both daughters had their mother’s raven black hair and large eyes, although they were not the same colour; Phyllis’s were, like their mother’s, a brown so dark as to be almost black and, when she stared, unblinking, at her interlocutor, impossible to read. She looked – and was - an innocent in every way. Cecilia’s eyes were a remarkable turquoise, likened by one Italian admirer to the colour of the Adriatic.

  The party was on its way to Switzerland, going up through the Alps from their most recent domicile in Turin, where one of the three sisters had married – not well, but adequately. In the circumstances, becoming the wife of a prosperous farmer was more than anyone had expected. Such a future looked increasingly unlikely for Cecilia, who was now seven and twenty, as well as for poor little Phyllis, who seemed destined for a less proper career.

  There had already been one or two gentlemen who had taken an interest in the girl, but, as their intentions did not include marriage, Cecilia had seen them off - with Endymion’s help. She had to acknowledge that, although he did not earn any money and was inclined to waste anything he won at the gaming tables by losing it again immediately, he did serve a purpose in this way. He was young, tall and muscular so that his presence held a certain menace for lustful gentlemen, most of whom had squandered their own strength in a variety of idle pursuits over a considerable number of years. Phyllis was a charming little thing but there were plenty of others of a similar type who did not have a glowering elder brother to protect them.

  Whether he would have bestirred himself to keep an eye on his little sister without the prompting of his big one, is debatable but Cecilia, by dint of keeping a close watch on both her sister and her mother – who, she knew, had every intention of selling her youngest child to the highest bidder – had so far managed to circumvent the machinations of a number of loose screws.

  They had left Turin when one of these admirers had hinted that he might have to reveal the scandal from which they had been fleeing for the past ten years if he could not have Phyllis for his latest plaything. Mrs Moss, fearful lest the farmer should take fright and abandon Charlotte, did not take much persuading to pack their dwindling possessions into their trunks, hire as cheap a carriage as could be found, together with a driver, and set off on their travels again.

  Following Endymion’s suggestion for Cecilia’s future, the party lapsed into silence, punctuated only by the sound of the horses’ hooves, the moaning of the wind outside and the irritating flapping of one imperfectly secured window. They did not stop until darkness had fallen because, unfamiliar with the route and desirous of covering as many miles as possible before halting for the night, they found themselves on what appeared to be an endless road through increasingly mountainous scenery where there was not an inn to be found.

  “Do you think we will ever be able to stop?” Phyllis asked as they plodded uphill.

  “Do not give way to despair, dear child; I am persuaded we will find somewhere soon,” Mrs Moss said in the reassuring tone which they had all heard far too frequently and had little reason to trust. She was, Cecilia believed, simply trying to do what she believed was the mother’s part: soothe her children by making empty promises which, when they had been younger, had perhaps answered; they no longer did, although, touchingly, her offspring still sought solace from her from time to time.

  “I should think it most likely we’ll grind to a halt soon, inn or not,” Endymion said impatiently. “How do you suppose Mama will know whether there is an inn to be found this side of the Alps
?”

  “Have you not been this way before, Mama?” Phyllis asked. She was of the belief that her mother knew the answer to everything and had been everywhere in the world.

  “I cannot say that I have – not this precise way in any event,” Mrs Moss admitted. “But I assume the coachman knows what he is doing.”

  “I would not altogether rely upon that,” Endymion said. “He did not strike me as a man gifted with more than the minimum in the way of a brain. To do him justice, I don’t suppose even he could have known how exceedingly slow these nags would be. I am afraid they will die in harness any minute now and we will be forced to sit here all night and hope that someone passing will take pity on us.”

  The horses did not expire that night – or not before they had pulled the carriage into the forecourt of an inn seemingly perched on the very edge of a precipice. Fortunately, the Mosses did not know their exact location until the next morning because it was an exceedingly dark night with no glimmer of a moon or stars.

  They knew they had arrived somewhere because the glow of lamps from the building penetrated the dense blanket of cloud which had descended to enclose them. Indeed, even Endymion expressed admiration for the coachman having safely guided them into the forecourt of an inn when it was hard to see the fingers of one’s own hand.

  Perceiving that they had stopped and cheered by the faint light, he opened the door, without waiting for the coachman, and jumped down on to ground that was slippery with a layer of ice laid invisibly over a thin carpet of snow.

  “Mario!” he called, going to the horses’ heads. “Are you still alive or frozen to your seat?” He spoke in Italian, a language he had imperfectly mastered during the six months they had been in Turin, but of which he had sufficient knowledge to put simple questions to servants.

  “Si, Signore,” Mario replied, jumping down in his turn. There did not seem to be any need to tether the horses as they looked entirely spent and appeared to remain on their feet only because of their harness. “I have brought you safely to the door of an inn,” he went on, showing the sort of pride in his achievement that Endymion had learned usually meant he expected a few extra scudos for his trouble.