Chapter 9
ZACHARIAS MANAGED TO prevail upon Miss Gentleman to return to the school the next morning: whatever had passed between them, she still owed Mrs. Daubeney a farewell, and if she returned, no one need know she had passed the night at the inn.
He had been thinking of his own reputation as well as Miss Gentleman’s.
He had no wish for it to be bruited abroad that the Sorcerer Royal was in the habit of abstracting maidens from girls’ schools and entertaining them in his rooms. “It is quite enough for them to call me a murderer and an ingrate, without adding the ravishing of innocents to my trespasses!”
But Zacharias was tempted to regret his discretion when he was shown into Mrs. Daubeney’s drawing room in the morning.
The lady herself was cast down upon an ottoman, weeping stormily into a handkerchief.
Prunella hovered nearby with a bottle of smelling salts.
She had the air of one to whom such displays were commonplace, but the apprehension in her eyes belied her appearance of composure.
“I am sorry to intrude,” said Zacharias. “Shall I return at a more opportune time?”
Mrs. Daubeney dabbed at her eyes and sat up. “What time can be opportune now that my poor Prunella is ruined?”
“I met Mrs. Daubeney as I was returning to my room,” explained Prunella.
Mrs. Daubeney had had every intention of snubbing Mr. Wythe when she saw him again.
She considered he had behaved very shabbily in failing to be impressed by the Seven Shackles, which she regarded as a prime feather in her cap.
And he had been a shocking dinner companion, speaking once in ten minutes if he spoke at all.
No, the Sorcerer Royal was quite exploded in Mrs. Daubeney’s eyes.
She would not be surprised if he had murdered poor dear Sir Stephen after all, and that faithful old dragon of his!
Her plan to treat him with silent dignity was forgotten in her distress over Prunella, however.
Mrs. Daubeney’s affection might fail so far as to lead her to demote Prunella at her convenience, but Prunella’s disgrace was a catastrophe she had neither conceived nor desired, and she was all the more dismayed for that she felt she was in part to blame.
Prunella would never have been so reckless if she had not been distressed by the little scolding Mrs. Daubeney had given her.
Clearly she had run away in a fit of temper, and thereby come to her downfall.
But Mr. Wythe’s was the guilt, and he need not think he would escape it. Any notion of silent dignity was cast aside, and Mrs. Daubeney harangued Zacharias quite as though he were an old acquaintance.
“If you had a heart, you might imagine my feelings when I saw Prunella’s bed unslept in!
” she said. “My own child, whom I raised ever since her poor father walked into the river! I do not claim my care was a substitute for the affection of her parents. I daresay it was not, but I challenge you to name anyone who would have shown a penniless female such devotion as I gave!”
“You have been very good, Mrs. Daubeney,” said Prunella. “To a mere penniless female!”
There was an undertone in her voice that made Zacharias glance warily at her, but Prunella knew her audience. Mrs. Daubeney was too wound up to take any notice of her interjections.
“And then to learn she had fled my roof for yours!” lamented Mrs. Daubeney. “The world may call you a great man, Mr. Wythe, but I say you are the veriest blackguard for preying upon a young female, reared in retirement, and innocent of the ways of the world!”
“Pray do not distress yourself, Mrs. Daubeney,” said Prunella. “Even if anything untoward had happened—and Mr. Wythe will vouch that it did not—I haven’t got any reputation worth speaking of, you know.” Her eyes glittered. “After all, it is not as though I were one of the young ladies.”
Mrs. Daubeney drew herself to her full height, the picture of affronted hauteur.
“Prunella, you forget yourself,” she said. “Remember your father was a gentleman!”
“But if he drowned himself and left his infant daughter with the landlady, he cannot have been very respectable,” argued Prunella.
“Ah! Poor Gentleman,” said Mrs. Daubeney, shading her eyes as though she were looking down sunlit avenues into the depths of her past. “He had had a hard time of it, indeed.”
Zacharias saw his chance.
“I gather Mr. Gentleman contrived at his own demise?” he said.
“He left a note,” said Mrs. Daubeney. “Otherwise I could never have believed it of him. Such a prettily written note! ‘Miranda’—we were such friends, we never stood on ceremony with each other—‘Miranda, I know your generosity will forgive this final trespass, despite the trouble I have caused you.’ Even then, in his anguish of mind, so considerate!”
Zacharias nodded sagely. “It sounds like him.”
Mrs. Daubeney’s eyes widened. “Did you know him?”
“I owe you my apologies, ma’am. I ought to have told you yesterday, but I did not wish to speak until I had confirmed Miss Gentleman was the object of my search,” said Zacharias.
He sat down across from Mrs. Daubeney, though she had not invited him to take a chair.
He must conduct himself with the utmost confidence, or the game was up.
“Mr. Gentleman was a particular friend of my guardian, Sir Stephen Wythe. I saw him often.”
“Why, you cannot have been very old then,” said Mrs. Daubeney. “Gentleman came here the instant he returned from India. He told me he had no relations and no friends he cared to see in England. If you knew Mr. Gentleman before he left for India, you cannot have been very old.”
“Certainly I was not very old, but Sir Stephen told me so much about him, that I feel as though I knew him myself,” said Zacharias, inventing wildly. “He—he was not such a man as one easily forgets!”
In Mr. Gentleman Zacharias had hit upon the one subject in respect of which Mrs. Daubeney would swallow nearly anything. Her eyes dimmed. “Yes. You knew him, I can see!”
“Unfortunately Sir Stephen did not hear from him for many years after they parted,” said Zacharias, suppressing a pang of guilt.
“He then discovered that Mr. Gentleman’s fortunes had taken an adverse turn; that he had passed on, and left a daughter in straitened circumstances.
My guardian had only sufficient time to discover so much before his own death, and he was not able to help his friend’s daughter as he desired.
It was his wish that I should locate her, and offer her what assistance I could.
It was in accordance with that wish that I came to your school. ”
“That explains why Georgiana’s nephew did not come!” cried Mrs. Daubeney.
Zacharias paused to cast a glowering thought in the general direction of Rollo Threlfall, who was doubtless strolling along Bond Street at that very moment, blissfully unaware of the predicament in which he had landed his friend.
“Yes, I proposed that I should take Mr. Threlfall’s place,” said Zacharias. “I had heard a rumour that Mr. Gentleman had passed his last days in these parts, and I wondered whether his daughter might not be among the gentlewitches at your school.”
“I had wondered! The Sorcerer Royal was never concerned with the education of gentlewitches before,” said Mrs. Daubeney.
She was enchanted by this vision of her beloved Gentleman as an intimate of the Sorcerer Royal, fondly remembered even upon Sir Stephen’s deathbed, and herself the friend who in her nobility of character had preserved his daughter from the workhouse. “But this accounts for all!”
Zacharias nodded, though he felt wretchedly uncomfortable. Having set his hand to the plough, however, he could hardly turn back.
“I was soon certain that Miss Gentleman was the young lady I sought, but I had only time to inform her of the bare fact of my guardian’s connection with her father,” he said.
“Anxious to learn more, she came to the inn yesterday to speak with me. She ought to have consulted you, ma’am, before undertaking such a visit alone, but we will forgive Miss Gentleman her eagerness to understand more of her origins. ”
“That was very impulsive of you, Prunella,” said Mrs. Daubeney chidingly. “But I suppose it was understandable. Goodness knows I have longed to know more of Gentleman’s history! He never gave me a hint of what he had endured. He was not a man to complain.”
“By the time I had answered Miss Gentleman’s questions, it was so late I was reluctant to turn the coachman out of bed to return her to you,” said Zacharias. “Fortunately Mrs. Headey was able to make up a bed for her at the inn.”
“Well, Mrs. Headey is a mother, and ought to know what she is about,” said Mrs. Daubeney.
“But it looked very bad—you cannot deny it looked very bad, Mr. Wythe. A man of the world will understand these things. I beg you will recollect that Prunella has not a soul in the world to depend upon, except for me!”
Her eyes welled up with tears. Zacharias looked at Prunella in desperation, but this display of sentiment did not seem to affect her one whit.
“You forget, ma’am, that I have myself,” she said. “Should you like the smelling salts?”
“I assure you I am as anxious as anyone could be that Miss Gentleman should come to no harm,” said Zacharias.
“I wish only to assist her, and would like to accompany her to town, if you will permit it. Lady Wythe will be pleased to receive her there, and we can make such arrangements as Sir Stephen would have wished.”