Chapter 11 #2
Peaches wanted to look around the corner and tell Irene that she didn’t have to worry about anyone of an American persuasion wanting anything to do with the future Earl of Artane, but she didn’t have the chance because Irene launched into a scathing attack on gold diggers in general and her in particular.
“But I think David likes her very much—”
Irene’s laugh was like knives cutting through the air. “Don’t be ridiculous, Andrea. He’s toying with her.”
“He arranged this house party for her,” Andrea said firmly. “He told me so himself.”
“Yes, darling, for a particular reason.”
Andrea was silent for a moment or two. “I don’t think I understand.”
“Please, Andrea, don’t be an idiot. He wanted an excuse to play cards with his friends and have his own private entertainment after that. She is here for the second reason alone.”
“But David isn’t like that—”
Irene laughed again, and it wasn’t a pleasant laugh. “You don’t know my brother. He’s practically engaged, or didn’t you know? To Phyllis Milbourne.”
“Really? But she hasn’t any title.”
“But she does have what he wants, which is the ability to look the other way whilst he beds all the pretty girls in the northern hemisphere, and buckets of money.”
“But Peaches—”
“Organizes socks,” Irene said crisply, “has no money, and a face that will captivate him for all of forty-eight hours. You see, that’s why he needs to marry a rich wife. Someone has to pay for his elaborate preparations to get women into his—”
“Shhhh!”
Peaches supposed Andrea might have said that because she had dropped her purse into the sink.
“There’s someone else in here.”
“I wonder who?” Irene said, sounding not in the least bit interested. “Let’s see, shall we?”
Peaches wasn’t sure if she were more humiliated that she’d had to listen to a private communication or that she’d had to listen to a private communication that involved details about her and her would-be boyfriend.
Details she just couldn’t believe. David had been very kind to her, very attentive and generous. After all, he’d bought her what amounted to an entirely new wardrobe, hadn’t he?
But to think that the only reason he had done so was so he could take advantage of her …
She eyed the only exit, which now lay beyond two exquisitely garbed, noble-by-birth women. Andrea was looking at her with miserable pity. Irene only looked at her coolly, as if she had actually enjoyed the pain she’d inflicted.
Peaches pushed past them, between them, without comment. Irene’s laughter followed her from the bathroom and hung in the air until the closing of the door cut the thread.
She saw David standing at the end of the hallway and turned without thinking and walked the other way. Before she realized it, she was running, not walking. She had no idea where she was going, but away was good enough for the moment.
The only thing that struck her as odd as she fled out the door and down steps into the dark was how damned comfortable the shoes were she was wearing. Whatever else could be said about David Preston, it had to be said that the man knew how to pick out a pair of pumps.
Then again, perhaps he had done that sort of thing more than once.
She realized she had walked out onto the far end of the same porch she had been standing on earlier with David.
She wasn’t sure if she were more embarrassed that she’d been taken for a ride by David Preston or that she’d been seen making a fool out of herself by Stephen de Piaget.
She who never cared what people thought of her, who had spent the past five years of her life telling people not to take themselves too seriously and get their lives in order and center themselves so the storms that would inevitably blow around them wouldn’t touch them.
She started to cry, which was truly the final straw to an evening that had turned out to be less a fairy tale than a nightmare.
Damn it, she was going to ruin her makeup.
She heard a door open and saw more light spill out onto the porch, which propelled her forward.
The clock began to strike midnight.
She ran down the steps, grateful some enterprising soul had sanded them, and out into the garden that was remarkably free of snow and slush.
She ran into what she quickly realized was a hedge maze.
It wasn’t particularly pleasant, actually, because the shadows that the hedges made peeking in and out of the fog that seemed to have suddenly sprung up were very unsettling.
And it had gone from being very cold to bone-chillingly bitter.
She wasn’t sure when that had happened. Probably sometime about the same point where her desire to run away from everything that humiliated her had ebbed.
She came to a skidding halt, not for any more pressing reason than she had lost her shoe. She paused, then frowned. She hadn’t been counting, of course, but it was odd how quickly that clock had gone through its twelve strokes.
Wasn’t it?
And then Peaches realized something. She realized that particular something because she had a finely attuned woo-woo meter and the needle wasn’t pegged, it had spun so hard into the red that it had left the meter entirely.
She would have bent to look for it—figuratively of course—but she didn’t dare.
Because she was standing on a time gate.
There was no point in examining why she knew that; she just did.
It was rather surprising, however, to find such a thing loitering in the middle of David Preston’s hedgerow maze.
She wondered if he lost many visitors to it, or if most people just walked right over it without noticing it.
Maybe it only opened its wretched portals to those who knew what to look for.
Maybe she was losing it and needed a brisk slap.
Well, she would deliver that to herself just as soon as she saw to business first, which was to hop off that particular spot of ground without delay.
Unfortunately, she had the distinct feeling her hopping had gone awry.
“Oooh, ’tis a faery!”
“Nay, a witch!”
“The queen o’ the damned—”
Peaches turned around with a witty retort on her lips.
After all, there was no sense in letting Kenneworth House’s servants think they could get mouthy with one of the guests.
She was just sure Irene wouldn’t approve, and then the trio of servants who had commented on her sorry self would find themselves out …
of … jobs … She looked up, then felt her mouth fall open.
The house was gone. All right, she would call it what it was.
The bloody palace was gone. In its place was a hut.
Well, it wasn’t exactly a hut. If she’d been out in the Middle Ages looking for a quaint little place to crash in for the night, she would have found it perfectly acceptable.
But when compared to the splendor that had been Kenneworth House, this was something else entirely.
It was a hovel.
And the unkempt, barely intelligible men standing in a little semicircle facing her were not wearing the standard uniform of David’s footmen.
She made a very quick list of her options. She could scream, which was tempting; she could faint, which was even more tempting; or she could run. She considered the last, only she wasn’t quite sure where she would run to. She backed up onto the gate and hopped up and down a time or two.
Nothing.
She swore, because it seemed like the right thing to do.
She was left with her third resort, which was to run.
Surely she would find another gate somewhere in the area.
After all, England and Scotland were hotbeds of paranormal activity, especially of the specterish kind.
And who could blame a shade? The climate was unreasonably lovely, what with all that rain and cloudiness and lovely winds caressing the trees.
Or perhaps they stayed for the history. There were castle stairs to come thumping down, old enemies to continue to vanquish, king and country to defend—as well as any number of lesser territories and families to uphold the honor of.
Then again, it might have been, she had to concede, continued irritation about the food. She was all for a lovely bed-and-breakfast or well-appointed hotel, but she had had the worst meals of her life in London.
She realized that the moon, which she hadn’t noticed before, had come out in time to reveal her companions carrying a pointy thing each.
She revisited the idea of running, but she only had one shoe left.
Maybe the gate had rested long enough and would now carry her back to where she was supposed to be.
She put aside her antipathy for everyone and everything at the future Kenneworth House and jumped forward onto the time gate.
She looked up, but no joy.
She decided that perhaps she just hadn’t been firm enough, so she jumped a few more times.
Her trio of companions seemed to find the sight rather alarming because they backed away, crossing themselves, spitting over their shoulders, and making all kinds of other hand motions she didn’t recognize but imagined she wouldn’t care to know the meaning of.
It took a while, but she eventually got tired of jumping. It wasn’t that she wasn’t in decent shape, it was just that she was in one high heel and a fancy ball gown, and she was slightly stressed.
She finally stopped and leaned over with her hands on her knees to try to catch her breath.
And that was the last thing she knew before blackness descended.