Chapter One #2
“Tell him nothing!” thundered Mrs. Dere. “Foul interloper! Wicked seducer!”
“I—must object. I’m nothing of the kind, madam.”
“Er—Mrs. Dere, I don’t think I’ve been seduced,” ventured Maria.
She might be wholly inexperienced with men, but honestly!
One could not grow up surrounded by chickens and sheep and such, without garnering notions of the general procedure, and surely she was not that sound a sleeper—!
“In fact, I would vouch I haven’t. Perhaps it would be better if we were all to go about our business now, and forget all this… ?”
“Silence, child. This person invaded your private room, climbed into your bed, and passed the night with you. What is this, if not seduction? If not debauchery?”
“It’s scandal and shame, is what that is,” put in the innkeeper from the doorway. “It’s tarring a respectable establishment with the brush of indecency. This is no house of ill repute, young miss, whatever your ideas, and I’ll thank you all—the lot of you—to be on the first coach out.”
But Maria’s family turned their back on the man, forming a literal wall between him and the purported debauchees. Even Mrs. Dere looked daggers at him, she feeling to her very core that such judgments on family matters lay in her hands alone.
“Let the young man explain himself, Alice,” the baron bid her. “It is the quickest way to the truth.”
At the word “truth” Mrs. Dere’s eyebrows flew up her forehead in whatever emotion lay beyond skepticism, but she recognized when her uncle would have his way, and she did not like to undermine his authority before strangers (more than she already had and constantly did).
Therefore she gave a reluctant nod of permission, and the circle of onlookers unconsciously crowded closer around the bed.
“I am Benjamin Ellsworth,” he began, his voice low and heavy with effort. “And, if this is not my room, there has been some terrible mistake.”
“We know no Ellsworth family,” Mrs. Dere returned, as if that were another injury for which he must answer.
“Even if you had heard of them, the Ellsworths of Winchester, I am only a poor cousin of that wealthier branch.” He dragged a hand through his disordered hair.
“Not that they would decline to own me, my cousins. We are all close. But I have lived in Oxford since attending New College, where I am now a fellow.”
Muffled gasps of “Oxford!” greeted this, and the young man frowned, his gaze slowly sweeping the chamber. “I am not there now, am I?”
“You are in London at the Bolt in Tun coaching inn,” replied Lord Dere. “If we were surprised, it was because we too are from Oxford—or thereabouts. Iffley, to be precise.”
“You see?” said Maria. “Oxford. I told you! I knew I had seen him before.” But her mother hushed her.
Mr. Ellsworth turned to regard her, his dark eyes still weary and bemused and too shiny. The baron was right: he was not altogether well.
“It’s you,” said the young man. “The girl who saw me after the plaster. You see? It is a dream.”
Maria’s lips parted to speak again, but her sister-in-law Sarah interposed herself, holding up a scratchy wool counterpane and enfolding Maria in it.
“I’m afraid this is no dream,” the baron told him with a sigh.
“But it must be,” Mr. Ellsworth persisted, “for there is the girl I saw who accompanied the little boys. How they stared because of the bits of plaster still clinging to me!” To their amazement, he chuckled, his eyelids drooping again drowsily.
“Does he mean court plaster?” wondered Gordon.
“Or mustard plaster,” proposed Peter, who had squeezed past the innkeeper into the room again. “They can be messy things.”
Maria shook her head. “No, it was plaster plaster he was dribbling. Plaster of Paris.”
Snapping her fingers, Mrs. Dere abbreviated this discussion and picked up the thread again.
“Did you follow her to London, young man?” she demanded, giving the bed a shake to rouse him again.
“To steal into her room and ruin her?” Much as everyone felt the urgency of this question, it must be confessed several of them were equally curious about the plaster.
His eyes blinked open again. “Ruin her? No, no. Charming young lady, though I do not know how she came to be in my room. Or any of you, come to think of it. You say I am in London?”
“Yes, London,” Maria assured him, ignoring the others’ frowns when she piped up, “but this isn’t your room. It’s my room. As my mother pointed out—there’s my portmanteau. See?”
“This room is reserved for ‘Party of Dere,’” was the unexpected contribution of the chambermaid, forcing her way back in with the Bolt in Tun’s ledger in her arms. The innkeeper snatched it from her, gave a nod, and thrust it under Mr. Ellsworth’s nose.
“All right, then. We know whose room it was, but if the young lady wasn’t a willing party, she should have raised the inn when she found herself intruded on—”
“But I didn’t know I was intruded on,” Maria objected, “because I was asleep! I don’t see how one can be blamed for what happens when one is asleep.” This (in her opinion) perfectly rational defense won her nothing more than a sigh and pat of the hand from her mother, however.
“Are you going to leave that chit there to do all the talking?” the innkeeper reproved Mr. Ellsworth. “Better sit up and explain yourself, young sir, if ‘sir’ you be, because the ledger has ‘Mr. B. Ellsworth’ in the neighboring chamber.”
“That bed hasn’t been slept in, Mr. Costard,” reported the officious maid.
“Nor nothing touched since I cleaned it yestermorning, and when I come into the young lady’s room just now, there the pair of them are, all wound about each other like eels, intimate as you please.
I screamed because I know there’s only supposed to be the young lady in here, and I know how you feel, Mr. Costard, about unmarried types using our inn to contort with each other. ”
“Consort, Molly,” said the innkeeper, but he lifted his round chin in righteous defiance of the Party of Dere and their airs, or at least the airs of that gold-haired one.
“Twined just like eels in a barrel,” resumed the maid, “and his hand was on her ba—”
“Thank you, Molly,” interrupted the baron. “We quite understand.”
By this point Mr. Benjamin Ellsworth had succeeded in sitting up and must also have been shaking off his lethargy, for his vague expression was gradually yielding to horror.
“Are you saying I entered the wrong room last night?” he faltered. “I—I was unwell, but I thought my illness, my weakness from fever, was the reason the door was so hard to open. I had to force it.”
“You remember doing so?” Lord Dere prompted. “Forcing the door? Is it coming back to you now, where you are and your reasons for it?”
“Yes, yes! I know now,” he panted, apparently taking no comfort in the dawning clarity. “I am in town. In London. I came up to meet with the printer in Whitehall and to visit Gray’s in Sackville Street…”
“The jeweler?” asked Mrs. Dere sharply.