Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
Inez was exhausted already.
The journey to Plymouth had taken all day, with stops in St. Mellion and Saltash to rest Arthur and herself.
Jock seemed tireless, endlessly alert as he drove the trap along the increasingly well-traveled roads.
She hadn’t been able to eat a thing at the coaching inns.
The bun from that morning was a hard rock in her belly that rolled back and forth with her worries.
Priscilla would greet her with a welcoming smile and forgive her everything.
Priscilla would turn her straight over to constable.
Inez would be tried in the Plymouth assizes and tumbled directly into prison without ever seeing the light of day, or Joseph, ever again.
He wouldn’t know what had happened to her.
She would die an old woman without her teeth, friendless and despairing and alone.
No, she recalled as she clutched the stocking bag in her lap, she’d stolen from a lord.
She wouldn’t be sent to prison. By the Bloody Code, she’d be executed, probably hanged, and who knew what they did to the bodies of felons here.
It wouldn’t matter to the judge that she had stolen at the behest of the lord’s daughter.
Inez’s hands had gathered up the jewels, and her hands had kept them all this time. She was riding to a sentence of doom.
They ferried the trap and horse across the River Tamar from Saltash, and Inez knew the sea was approaching by the way the land turned marshy and the air grew heavy with the smell of wet earth and salt.
To think this same sea lapped her old home in Portugal, and yet the land was so different.
The square tower of an enormous medieval church hulked in the distance for a long time, a beckoning finger, and then all of a sudden the town sprang up about it like nestlings seeking protection.
“That’s the minster of St. Andrews,” Jock told her as they joined the traffic wheeling into town.
“They say Katherine of Aragon touched down in Plymouth when she came to marry the Prince as was Arthur. Said a prayer for safe travels at the church, though it didn’t do ’er nor ’er ’usband a scratch of good.
That’s yer namesake, ye great plodder,” Jock said to the horse, who flicked his ears at his name.
“Sir Francis Drake, the great admiral and favorite of Queen Elizabeth, he lighted ’ere after his voyage ’round the world,” Jock went on. “The priest is holding a service, and all sudden his church empties and his flock’s pourin’ down to the quay to hail the returning hero.”
“Carrying wealth he looted from the Spanish.” Inez pressed a hand to her belly as if she could keep the stone there from rolling about. “Your English buccaneers were not heroic to those whose ships they plundered.”
Jock shrugged. “Drake died of fever abroad, didnee, and Queen Katherine died of a cracked heart when her King Henry cast her aside. So have a care what prayers you say in St. Andrews, that’s the lesson I’d be taking.”
He pointed. “That other, Charles Church, that’s un the citizens built to appease Charles II after they gave ’im back his crown. And that,” he said, pointing toward the tall spires that thronged like the arrowed tips of great barren trees, “be the quay, and the ships from all lands a’ coming.”
“Some Portuguese vessels, I don’t doubt,” Inez murmured. She sent up a quick, silent prayer that her father was safe. And that he hadn’t stayed in England to see what she had made of herself: a thief, and a kept woman.
Jock drove them past the church and the guild hall onto a broad street that led straight down to the quay and the inlet they called Sutton Pool.
He slowed before a stretch of modern houses, only a few decades old, their stucco fronts and Palladian proportions a polished contrast to the rubble and plaster of the earlier merchant’s houses and stores.
Jock stopped before a timbered door, slightly recessed, with a modest fan light above.
The house boasted two more stories of tall windows, none boarded up to avoid taxing, and a delicately painted string course in contrast to the deep brown of the window casings and a thick cornice above.
The house spoke of comfortable wealth, and in Inez’s experience, those made comfortable by their wealth usually declined to share it.
Her nerves assailed her. She couldn’t knock at the front door, not as the lady’s former servant. She was about to tell Jock to pull around to the back when the door opened and Priscilla herself appeared on the threshold.
Priscilla had always dressed in the height of fashion, and Inez held no doubt that her entire ensemble had come straight from the latest plates she found in whatever French mantua-maker had the honor to dress her.
A robe à l’anglaise of blue silk trimmed with yards of blonde lace belled over her beribboned petticoats, and a straw hat bearing enormous puffs of silk and feathers tipped forward at a jaunty angle.
“Inez!” she cried, her tone all delight.
“You are an apparition I have longed to see! I vow, I thought that groom had a cunning look in his eye when I spoke of you to him.” She wiggled her fingers at Jock in an airy gesture, a blend of invitation and reproach.
“But how did he produce you so quickly? He could never have gone all the way to London and back, unless some magical portal has opened in England while we were away.”
Inez found herself borne inside on the strength of Priscilla’s warm enthusiasm, propelled through a pleasant hall and up an expensively carved wooden staircase, and delivered into a tall-ceilinged parlor of gracious proportions.
She was bestowed upon an upholstered chair where Priscilla declared, “There, I can see you in this ghastly gloomy English light, but it won’t harm that beautiful complexion. ”
Inez was briefly touched that the young woman would guard Inez’s skin as jealously as she guarded her own skin, white as bone china.
Priscilla deposited herself on a striped silk-upholstered settee in a well-practiced move that appeared artless but which Inez knew took some doing given the hoops required to give her bottom that shape.
She proceeded to unpin her hat, leaving the lace indoor cap beneath, and spoke the serving girl who poked her head around the door.
“I won’t be going out after all, Sally, for I shall be entertaining my very good friend. Please send in tea and those delightful little cakes that Cook makes. Oh, and do tell my beloved Monsieur Dervieux that his presence is required immediately in the petite salon.”
Sally nodded but gave Inez a narrow-eyed stare, as if she had assessed at a glance that her lady’s visitor had no higher status than the maid herself.
Inez nearly rose from her seat, recalled to the impropriety of sitting in the company of her former employer, of behaving as if she were calling on a woman she had formerly served.
Her rump had scarcely cleared the lovely butter-yellow damask of the cushion when a thought struck, as if a bell had rung in her head: If she were wed to Joseph, a baronet’s lady, she could sit in all company save that of the Queen.
Slowly, Inez lowered herself to her chair.
She wanted to marry Joseph.
The remark he’d made so casually had stuck in her head like seed that planted itself with tiny spikes, and here was the blooming of it.
She wanted to marry Joseph Illingworth. She would in a moment, were she so allowed.
She would never be allowed.
“You’ve come over with a strange look all of a sudden, my dear Inez,” Priscilla said with a laugh. “I suppose you are surprised to see me in England again, and happily married, too.”
Inez recalled herself to the task at hand. She was weighted to this chair now like iron filings to a magnet.
“That you were happily married, I never doubted,” she said politely. “But to see you in England, I could only hope.”
The other woman regarded her with a considering look, and Inez recalled a suspicion she’d had before of Wigsby’s daughter: she played at the light-headed coquette, but she was really quite shrewd at the core.
“I hear my father has been giving you a devil of a time about the…er, aid you gave me in getting free of him,” Priscilla said. “I do hope he hasn’t been too much of a bother.”
Inez swallowed an agonized laugh. Not too much of a bother.
When for the past two years, she had looked about her each time she set foot on the street in London, knowing if he’d found her so easily the first time, he could again.
Without a character reference she could only get the lowest of stations, laundry maid, cook maid, scullery, when she had been lady’s maid to this elegant creature.
And in the laundry and the kitchen and the scullery there were footmen with roaming hands and butlers who thought the maids were perquisites of their employment, or men of the house who thought that because they paid a meager salary, the women in their employ should attend to all manner of their needs.
She’d been chased from house to house as if pursued by the hounds of hell, and the only safe place she’d found to land was the household of Amaranthe Illingworth.
Where, instead of having to fight the attentions of Joseph Illingworth, she had found a greater threat to her happiness: she’d fallen in love with the great sodden oaf, and now that she knew the happiness of being in his arms, she never wanted to be anywhere else.
Inez swallowed another lie—they seemed to rise so naturally—and instead said, “I understand why your father would be anxious to locate me.” She reached for her bag, wondering if now was the appropriate moment.
“That is very good to hear, because— Oh, my love. How wonderful that you could join us.” Priscilla held out her hand with a smile that transformed her face from merely pretty to truly beautiful.