Mischances #3
Margaret’s pulse nearly stopped. “For…wh-whom?”
“Has he broken your heart, Miss Hale? ‘Fred,’ was that his name? Oh! I care not if you are pining after another man, so long as you have no real expectations of him. The heart forgets in time.”
“I do not know what you are speaking of!”
“Come now, at least two or three others saw you with him, and they all heard your name. You cannot escape it now, Miss Hale. That, coupled with the attack I witnessed, will be sure to cause you some difficulties. Have no fear, I do not doubt your virtue and would be quite willing to overlook a trace of gossip. You are a clever girl, from what I hear. A bit too outspoken, but at least you are not ignorant. A parson’s daughter, is that not right?
You must be proper and chaste, so that is something.
And a handsome woman you are, as well! You would make a fine mistress for my home. ”
The blood from Margaret’s head was pooling somewhere around her middle. “Mr Hamper, I must protest! I scarcely know you, and I have done nothing improper!”
He raised a brow. “And who was the gentleman you were walking out with after dark? Not your father—I saw him clearly enough to know that.”
Her throat closed; a great darkness fell over her eyes.
It was like that hideous day at Marlborough Mills when blackness had claimed her and she had fought to see, to move, but found herself helpless.
Except this time, it was not Mr Thornton who bent over her with gentle words, who carried her to safety.
It was Mr Hamper claiming her arm and directing her steps.
She could speak nothing; she knew nothing more until her own door loomed and Dixon’s figure appeared.
“I will escort your father to the funeral,” she heard, but only vaguely. “Until then, Miss Hale.”
She managed to turn, to watch him away, but the next moment she was stumbling into Dixon’s motherly embrace. “There, there, Miss,” clucked the old serving woman. “I told you it was too late for a lady to go out. Is Frederick safely away?”
“Y-yes.” Margaret felt her way to a chair, her eyes still glazed and nearly sightless. “Frederick is safe.” But I—oh! What have I done?
Mrs Hale’s funeral passed with little notice or grief by most, but not for John Thornton.
The dead woman’s husband had come meekly to pay his respects, but with him also had come his daughter.
The circumstance was unusual but not unexpected.
In fact, John had offered the use of his carriage for the family to protect Miss Hale from prying eyes, but the offer had been politely declined.
The reason, as he discovered later, was that Hamper had arrived to escort them first. He puzzled long and fretfully over this and could not recall any particular friendship between Mr Hale and Hamper.
Still, he was silently grateful to his colleague for showing kindness to a family sorely in need of it.
Hamper had nodded his greeting and taken a pew beside John, and no words passed between them.
John scarcely saw Margaret’s face, draped in her black veil as she was.
Once she accidentally caught his eye as she was turning to comfort her father, then she quickly looked away.
He regarded her closely, wondering if shame had clouded those living eyes, but he could not see them.
What the devil could have made her walk out with a stranger, and in the dead of night?
He would not have his answer this day. Hamper had closed in on them, stepping neatly behind Margaret’s black figure as the small assembly filed out of the church.
There was some pause as the grieving family stopped at the door to solemnly acknowledge the fellow mourners.
Margaret gave her hand to the parson and to a neighbour or two, but him she allowed to pass with a mere dip of her shrouded head and a whispered recital of his name.
Then she coaxed her bereaved father into Hamper’s carriage, and he saw her no more.
At least not her person. Her image he could not erase from his mind. That shameless public embrace, that handsome youth who clung to her! Was he a cousin, a friend…a lover? The thought made his stomach roil.
John’s head was hanging and his steps frenetic as he marched to his door.
He intended only to dress for work again and return to the mill, but a curious tittering noise from the drawing room raised his notice.
He glanced as he walked by and found Fanny cloistered with three other young ladies—each sillier than the last, if memory served.
Odd giggles, flushed cheeks and fluttering fans were sufficient to inform him that their conversation was not one to interest him and he meant to pass on.
“Oh, there you are, John,” Fanny called from the room. Her voice carried an amused lilt that he recognised as her particular way when she thought to make a spectacle of him before her friends. He sighed and stopped.
“You have just come from Mrs Hale’s funeral, have you not?” she asked.
“I did not know you took an interest in Mrs Hale,” was his deadpan retort.
Fanny cast a significant look at each of her friends. “And I heard that Miss Hale meant to attend? Did she really do so?”
“With no other family to comfort Mr Hale, I expect she did not wish for her father to attend alone.”
“Oh, to be sure, Miss Hale never shrinks from venturing forth. I never saw anyone who did not fear courting scandal, but our dear Miss Hale seems not at all troubled by such a worry.”
John narrowed his eyes at his sister. One of the other young ladies lost her composure and was obliged to conceal her mouth behind her handkerchief. He glanced curiously at each of them, then brushed it off as spiteful frivolity—a thing he was not unaccustomed to from Fanny or her friends.
An hour later, he was back in his office after making his rounds at the mill.
He had scarcely taken his seat when a knock sounded on the door, and Hamper walked in.
John braced himself for another argument about that blasted Regimental contract.
However, behind Hamper came Mason, a young police inspector with whom John had worked before.
Perhaps it was to be a new subject today.
“Thornton,” Hamper began without preamble, “we’ve a delicate situation, and you are just the magistrate for the job.”
John pushed aside his ledger and drew out a blank sheet of paper to take notes. “What is it, Mason?”
The inspector flipped open his hand book and began to read off the details. “Sir, this morning a body was brought in and identified as a Mr Leonards—a former baggage handler at Outwood train station.”
John’s cheek flinched as he wrote. Outwood… “Yes? Go on.”
“We have multiple witnesses who testify that last evening, they saw Mr Leonards struggling on the platform with an unknown man. Leonards fell, and the other man boarded the London train. Leonards was seen later to stumble away and was found dead at five-thirty this morning by the tracks.”
“You believe this other man delivered a mortal blow?”
“The coroner is still examining the body, sir. I can tell you more when he is finished.”
“Leonards was a diseased drunkard, and everyone at the rail station will tell you so,” Hamper interrupted.
“What we need help with, Thornton, is that a lady’s reputation has become entangled with this.
I was a witness to most of the events—well, not the scuffle that Mason here told you of, but much of the rest—and I am here to see that her name is not harmed further. ”
John blinked; his hand frozen on the page. “A lady? At Outwood station in the middle of the night?”
“Now, we did not say it was the middle of the night,” Hamper pointed out. “But you have the right of it, for it was the eleven o’clock train that the gentleman boarded.”
The pen was somehow locked in his knotted fingers, and he could not release it. “The name of the lady?”
“Why, you saw her only this morning—you were at the funeral. Margaret Hale. I thought, since you are a friend of Mr Hale, you would be just the chap to help us.”
“Miss Hale?” he breathed.
“Yes, well, she had her reasons for being out. I assure you, Thornton, the lady did no harm, and I will personally vouch for her.”
John tilted his head up to peer through haze-covered eyes at his old business rival. “Personally vouch for her? How do you intend to do that?”
“Well! I saw her home and out of—may I say—a dreadfully compromising position. I shall refrain from telling more of the circumstance in which I found her, but I have just come from speaking with Mr Hale. She is to be my wife.”
Mason was speaking again and Hamper still trying to talk over him, but John’s ears were drumming with another kind of torment. Margaret! Married to Hamper! It must be a falsehood; he must have misunderstood!
“You needn’t trouble yourself interviewing Miss Hale,” Hamper was announcing. “I will ask again the name of the fellow she was with and then inform Mason here, but truly, Thornton, I am sure the man did nothing but perhaps hasten Leonards’ death. The bounder was sick before he attacked Miss Hale.”
“Attacked Miss Hale!” John staggered to his feet, his figure heaving.
Hamper changed hues. “Not Miss Hale, I meant ‘before he attacked the other fellow.’ Look here, Thornton, I’ve no idea who the other was, but it is best for us all if little inquiry is made over the affair.
I am sure it was only a matter of insult and youthful brashness—you know how young men can be.
Miss Hale does not regret him, I am sure of it, and I would have this scandal swept aside as much as possible before our wedding. ”
“Wedding!”