Cecilia Or Flight From A Shadow Read online

  “Indeed; I cannot tell you how relieved I am to see those lights. Do you suppose they’ll open up and let us in? And is there no ostler to take these poor nags in?”

  “I will see if I can find someone,” Mario offered, setting off towards the back of the building.

  Endymion returned to the carriage, leaning in to inform the three women that he was going to see if he could command some rooms for the night.

  “Shall I come with you?” Cecilia asked, preparing to jump down to join him.

  “I suppose you can if you like,” he conceded, unfolding the steps and holding out his hand.

  Together they trod across the frozen snow to the door and beat a loud tattoo upon it.

  It did not seem that the landlord was eager to welcome new customers. Apart from the lamplight in the windows, it looked as though the place was deserted.

  Endymion banged upon the door several times before, stepping back the better to pitch his voice upwards, resorting to shouting.

  Cecilia, meanwhile, knocked upon the nearest window which, after a brief pause, was unlatched and thrown open. A moment later a face was thrust out.

  Chapter 2

  The three persons clustered around the fire had been engaged in a somewhat stilted conversation and might have been relieved by the diversion. The fact that they were not – or did not appear to be – probably owed a good deal to their differing attitudes.

  The Earl of Waldron, who had heard the knocking on the door but had assumed that it would be answered by one of the servants, frowned and rose.

  “You are surely not going to open the window,” the older lady said as he approached it.

  “I cannot leave some poor soul outside on such a cold night,” he returned.

  “It is not your business to be opening the door and letting all sorts of rogues and murderers in,” Miss Godmanton, for such was the name of the speaker, continued.

  “I was not – at least at present – intending to open the door,” his lordship argued, “merely the window.”

  “One thing will lead to another,” Miss Godmanton predicted – with some accuracy.

  “Not opening it might lead to someone’s death,” his lordship said and, without more ado, pulled the curtain aside, unlocked the window and threw it open.

  The person outside was revealed as a startlingly pretty young woman with dark hair escaping from the confines of a shabby bonnet. Her face was pale and her nose red but, in spite of these unattractive signs of extreme cold, there was no denying that she was excessively pretty. It was this pulchritude which made the two females roasting themselves beside a roaring fire shudder with dislike the minute they saw her. Pretty women had been the cause of most of the irritation and disappointment they had suffered all their lives and they were firmly of the opinion that the fewer they encountered the better.

  The Earl inclined rather to the opposite view. Affected immediately by the enchantment of the face, framed by the window and set against a dark sky lightened only by the sleet which had begun to fall behind her, he did not hesitate to offer to open the door so that she could come inside.

  “Oh, pray do not let her in,” Miss Godmanton besought. “She is probably a decoy – there will be a whole gang of ruffians behind her.”

  “In that case it is surely imperative that she should be offered asylum without delay,” he pointed out, wilfully misunderstanding and leaving the room without pausing to shut the window, so that his companions began to shiver as well as purse their lips.

  “She will cause trouble, you mark my words,” Miss Godmanton warned, but the Earl had already gone, leaving the door open so that a draught rushed in from that direction as well. “We were just getting comfortable too,” she continued inaccurately.

  In point of fact she and the younger female had been engaged in crossing verbal swords and had been feeling anything but cordial when the banging began.

  She had been exhorting the younger to mend her manners and strive to put a pleasant expression upon her face. She did not say, because he was in the room, but the purpose of these adjustments to Miss Lenham’s demeanour was to beguile their male companion. The young woman had taken exception to the correction, although she was perfectly aware that her manner was inclined to be disagreeable.

  During her childhood Helen Lenham had been thrown in the way of her cousin Waldron until, at the age of one and twenty, he had taken refuge in Europe, a move which had failed to extinguish her mother’s dearest wish that the two should wed.

  Having failed to convince her parent of the likelihood that the Earl remained abroad in order to avoid the demands of his family, she had been despatched in search of him, ostensibly on a foreign tour to help her recover from a bout of illness. She was chaperoned by Miss Godmanton, who, although disapproving of a parent who sent a young girl on such a quest, had jumped at the chance to accompany her and, believing it to be her duty, did her utmost to bring Lady Charles’s ambition to fruition.

  Miss Godmanton inclined to the view that men were a sub-species of human best avoided. Fortunately for her, most members of that sex felt similarly towards her and did their best to keep their distance so that she had never been obliged to defend her honour or reject an eager suitor. The two women had arrived in France some six months earlier, when the weather had been balmy. They had travelled desultorily down through France, stopping at those sites of interest which had not been flattened during the recent Napoleonic Wars, traversed the Kingdom of Sardinia and continued down through the Grand Duchy of Tuscany until they reached the Papal States.

  Rome proved to be the southernmost point of their trip and the point at which Miss Godmanton dug in her heels and refused to proceed further. She was of the opinion that the inhabitants, particularly the male ones with their black hair and flashing eyes, were positively ferocious. She no longer felt able to control the conduct of her charge who, as her strength returned, had become not only argumentative but a great deal too ‘coming’ with the wild men.

  The further south they had penetrated the more Miss Lenham had been taken with the scenery, the art and most particularly the men. Her ill-temper had so diminished that from time to time she presented as almost winsome; certainly, the local men seemed delighted with her, her unusual looks striking them as indicative of her having been sent from Fairyland to amuse them.

  Women in the southern half of Europe rarely possessed skin so thin that it appeared translucent or so pale that the faintest touch made it redden. Helen’s hair was the colour – and almost the consistency – of moonbeams, being so fine that cobwebs appeared more substantial. And then there were her eyes, which were such a glacial blue that they too had hardly any colour at all. It was as though one were glimpsing the Arctic sea through a layer of ice.

  The Roman men seemed to have difficulty believing she was real, although Miss Godmanton could not help noticing that their open-mouthed admiration and flowery compliments did not prevent them from attempting to kiss and caress her in a manner which the chaperone found positively repugnant. Indeed, she was convinced that she would have an apoplexy if she were to be forced to guard the girl from such outlandish persons much longer.

  Consequently, having trailed round the famous sights of Rome, she insisted on their making an about-turn and setting their direction towards the north again. It had been arranged before they left England that they would meet Lord Waldron, who was Helen’s cousin, in Venice, where he had an elderly relative on his mother’s side whom he liked to visit from time to time. From thence he would escort them to his own residence near Geneva, where he was attached to the British Embassy. How long they would remain there had not been fixed. Lady Charles Lenham, Helen’s mother, hoped that they would not stir until Helen had become Lady Waldron when, she fondly imagined, they would all return to England – although she would not object if they left Miss Godmanton in Geneva.

  Helen said nothing. She was heartily sick of Miss Godmanton, who had been governess to the children of one of Lady Charles
’s neighbours and had, since retirement, been living on her own in a drab little room in someone else’s house in a dreary part of London. She had not been Helen’s governess – that duty had gone to a succession of other impoverished females, all of whom had now left.

  Miss Godmanton was, unusually for a governess, fairly well-informed on the sort of subjects which everyone believed would be invaluable on such a trip: history, art, music, and so on. It was a pity that so much education had not improved the openness of her mind or the optimism of her nature.

  She was no more attached to her charge than Helen was to her, and, never having had anything about her person or countenance which might have prompted any degree of admiration from the opposite sex, had developed an extreme dislike of all pretty women from an early age.

  Helen also disliked pretty women; the orphaned heiress, who had been brought up with her, was exceedingly pretty and had always seemed to her to be more favoured by her parents than Helen herself. She harboured, therefore, a deep resentment towards the pulchritudinous. She was by no means in love with Lord Waldron and he had never shown the least interest in her except as a little cousin to whom he was but loosely attached. On the other hand, no one, least of all Helen, had been able to come up with an alternative bridegroom.

  She rose when her cousin left the room, attempted to shut the window, failed, sighed heavily and shut the door instead.

  “You’d better throw another log on the fire,” Miss Godmanton said.

  Helen did so and, eschewing her seat by the fire, went to gaze out of the open window. The pretty face had gone but the sleet continued unabated. Peering further out, she could see that a travelling chaise was drawn up outside the front door. It did not look to be in much better condition than the young lady’s bonnet, from which she deduced that the travellers were not well-off.

  After a few moments she saw a young man stride back towards the chaise, open the door, let down the steps and with a cheerful invitation to the passengers inside, hold out his hand.

  The first person to emerge was a matron of generous proportions who asked in carrying tones, “Have you booked us some rooms?”

  “Not yet; there doesn’t appear to be anyone in charge, but a fellow guest has opened the door and assured me that there is plenty of room, no one else at present being in residence apart from himself, his cousin and her chaperone. So, come along, Mama.”

  “It looks rather ramshackle,” the lady muttered, a remark which struck the listener as abominably arrogant in view of her own shabby appearance as well as that of their vehicle.

  “Indeed; I see that as an advantage,” the young man said brightly. “It should mean it’s fairly cheap. Indeed, I’m hoping that the absence of staff may mean we won’t have to pay at all.”

  “Hmn.” The female turned towards someone else still in the vehicle and exhorted her to hurry up and get out.

  A moment later an exceedingly young woman emerged, setting her dainty feet carefully upon the icy surface of the courtyard, and followed her parent and the young man – presumably her brother – into the shelter of the inn.

  As he walked up to the door, Helen was able to see, in the beam of light issuing from the hall, that he was strikingly handsome. Apart from the mother, who had perhaps once possessed a number of fairly obvious charms now largely obliterated by the expansion of her figure, it seemed that the family was not only good-looking but also poor. She was afraid that her cousin, who had a ridiculously kind heart and was no more immune to feminine beauty than any other man, would be bound to want to offer succour to two such unfortunate females.

  “Have you been able to see the ruffians?” Miss Godmanton asked as her charge, unable to shut the window, drew the heavy curtain across the gap and returned to her seat.

  “They are not ruffians.”

  “I cannot conceive how you can be sure of that.”

  “You would agree if you had seen them. Three of them are women, two daughters and a mother, I should say, and the other is a young man – and, if you are minded to think he is a ruffian, I can only say that you are letting your imagination run away with you. What ruffian would go out on a cold, dark night to do anything nefarious accompanied by three females?”

  “Do you mean to say there are two more women in addition to the one we have already seen at the window? Why, I wonder, is the world so full of females?” What Miss Godmanton meant, but was reluctant to state, was that there were too many pretty ones.

  “Very likely because the whole of Europe has been at war for as long as I can remember and most of the men are dead,” Helen retorted. She had already discovered that there was a severe shortage of young men.

  “Well, it may be disappointing for you that there is not a string of gentlemen outside,” Miss Godmanton said, remembering her visceral dislike of men, which was perhaps even stronger than her objection to beauteous females. “But at least we should be able to rest easily in our beds if there is only one man in the party; he will no doubt have his hands too full dealing with his own womenfolk to bother about us.”

  Chapter 3

  The face which appeared in response to Cecilia’s knocking on the window was masculine.

  “Good evening,” its owner said agreeably. “Can I be of assistance?”

  “We were wondering if there were any rooms to be had,” Endymion explained, taking his sister’s place.

  “I should think so; it’s not a large place but the only guests, so far as I am aware, are members of my own party – and there are but three of us. Would you like me to let you in?”

  “We would, rather,” Cecilia said. “It’s excessively cold out here.”

  “Indeed. Bear with me and I will unfasten the door directly.”

  “Perhaps they looked out of the window and decided they would rather not receive any more guests at this time of night,” she murmured, covering her despondency with a thin layer of humour.

  “I’m sure that’s not because they took against you; I don’t see how they could have done. They do not appear to be precisely over-burdened with staff at the moment so I daresay they don’t know you’ve arrived. I expect – indeed I rather hope – they’re cooking my dinner and that that’s what’s been occupying them. Hold on – I’ll see if I can open the door.”

  He moved away from the window but did not close it, perhaps thinking that shutting it in someone’s face might cause offence, particularly when it was so very dark.

  Without him in the way, they could see into the room where a log fire was blazing directly opposite. It looked extraordinarily welcoming, as indeed had the gentleman, who was well-spoken and handsome.

  Cecilia found it difficult to tear herself away from what she could see of the hearth, which, as well as the flickering flames, was bathed in lamplight, until she perceived the two women who were sitting one on either side of the fire; neither looked particularly amiable: one was young, not much older than Phyllis, but wore a disgruntled expression, and the other was a person of more advanced years, rather thin and bony with a sour face.

  A moment later she heard the door being unlocked and Endymion exchanging greetings with someone.

  “You’d better come in,” the gentleman said, standing aside to allow her brother to enter. “Where is your companion?”

  “Still staring longingly in at the window; come along, Cissy, the door’s open. Do you go in and I will fetch Mama and Phyllis.”

  The well-spoken gentleman held out his hand, saying, “Waldron at your service.”

  She smiled and gave him hers. “Cecilia Moss.”

  “I am delighted to make your acquaintance, Miss Moss. Do I understand the young gentleman is your brother?”

  “Yes – there are four of us, plus of course the coachman. I hope someone will let him in for he has been sitting on the box in the cold all this time. He went round the back.”

  “I will ring the bell inside. I daresay someone will come in answer. If not, I can always let him in this way as well.”

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nbsp; “Yes. It seems deserted but for you, sir; is there an ostler to take charge of the horses, do you think? They must be on their very last legs. They were not precisely lively when we set off and have been toiling up this mountain with admirable persistence. I would not like to think of them freezing in harness.”

  “No, indeed. If you like to go into the parlour – down there to the left - you can ring the bell yourself while I wait here to greet the rest of your party as I seem to be standing in for the landlady.”

  Cecilia did as she was bid.

  Entering the saloon, she found that the two women she had seen from the window were both standing. The older one was trying to shut the window but, although she was pulling at it ferociously, was not having a great deal of success. Her face was screwed up even more tightly than before and her bony frame was straining with the effort.

  “Let me,” Cecilia said, leaning forward to see if she could do any better.

  “It was unwise of him to open it,” the woman said. “I don’t suppose it’s been opened for years, if ever. Now it will never shut and we will no doubt be frozen to the spot in a matter of minutes.”

  “Oh, I am sure it can be shut,” Cecilia said pleasantly. “I am sorry to have caused so much trouble. Why do you not go back to the fire and let me see what I can do?”

  With a disapproving harrumph - which might have been a comment on the degree of trouble which people arriving outside in the dark were bound to cause those sitting comfortably inside or, alternatively, an aspersion cast upon Cecilia’s strength - she ceded her place to the newcomer. Either way, Cecilia could not help feeling that the woman was justified in her annoyance for she could no more shut the window than her predecessor.

  A servant appeared in the open doorway asking what he could do for the Signora. Cecilia, who had not been certain whether they had yet crossed the border into Switzerland, drew the conclusion that they had not.