She wished suddenly that she had allowed Captain Harris to write his letter and had awaited a reply. What she had done instead no longer seemed a wise course at all.
Several liveried, white-wigged servants stood about on duty. One of them was hurrying toward her, she saw in some relief. She had been feeling invisible and conspicuous all at the same time.
“Out of here immediately!” he commanded, keeping his voice low, attempting to move her back toward the doors without actually pushing her. He was clearly trying not to draw attention to himself or to her. “If you have business here, I will direct you to the servants’ entrance. But I doubt you do, especially at this time of night.”
“I wish to speak with the Earl of Kilbourne,” Lily said. She never thought of him by that name. She felt as if she were asking for a stranger.
“Oh, do you now?” The servant looked at her with withering scorn. “If you have come here to beg, be off with you before I summon a constable.”
“I wish to speak with the Earl of Kilbourne,” she said again, standing her ground.
The servant set his white-gloved hands on her shoulders, obviously intending to move her backward by force after all. But another man had glided into place beside him, a man dressed all in black and white, though he did not have the same sort of splendor as other gentlemen who were in the hall and on the stairs. He must be a servant too, Lily guessed, though superior to the first one.
“What is it, Jones?” he asked coldly. “Is she refusing to leave quietly?”
“I wish to speak to the Earl of Kilbourne,” Lily told him.
“You may leave of your own volitionnow,” the man in black told her with quiet emphasis, “or be taken up for vagrancy five minutes from now and thrown in jail. The choice is yours, woman. It makes no difference to me. Which is it to be?”
Lily opened her mouth again and drew breath. She had come at the wrong time, of course. Some grand sort of entertainment was in progress. He would not thank her for appearing now. Indeed, he might not thank her for coming at all. Now that she had seen all this, she began to understand the impossibility of it all. But what else could she do? Where else could she go? She closed her mouth.
“Well?” the superior servant asked.
“Trouble, Forbes?” another, far more cultured voice asked, and Lily turned her head to see an older gentleman with silver hair and a lady in purple satin with matching plumed turban on his arm. The lady had a ring on each finger, worn over her glove.
“Not at all, your grace,” the servant called Forbes answered with a deferential bow. “She is just a beggar woman who has had the impudence to wander in here. She will be gone in a moment.”
“Well, give her sixpence,” the gentleman said, looking with a measure of kindness at Lily. “You will be able to buy bread for a couple of days with it, girl.”
With a sinking heart Lily decided it was the wrong moment in which to stand her ground. She was so close to the end of her journey and yet seemingly as far away as ever. The servant in black was fishing in a pocket, probably for a sixpenny piece.
“Thank you,” she said with quiet dignity, “but I did not come here for charity.”
She turned even as the superior servant and the gentleman with the cultured voice spoke simultaneously and hurried from the hall, down the steps, along the terrace, and across a downward sloping lawn. She could not face that dark driveway again.
The light of the moon led her onward to a narrow path that sloped downward at a sharper angle through more trees though these did not completely hide the light. She would go down far enough, Lily decided, that she was out of sight of the house.
The path steepened still more and the trees thinned out until the pathway was flanked only by the dense and luxuriant growth of ferns. She could hear water now—the faint elemental surging of the sea and the rush of running water closer at hand. It was a waterfall, she guessed, and then she could see it gleaming in the moonlight away to her right—a steep ribbon of water falling almost sheer down a cliff face to the valley below and the stream that flowed toward the sea. And at the foot of the waterfall, what appeared to be a small cottage.
Lily did not turn up the valley toward it. There was no light inside and she would not have approached it even if there had been. To her left she could see a wide, sandy beach and the moonlight in a sparkling band across the sea.
She would spend the night just above the beach, she decided. And tomorrow she would return to Newbury Abbey.
When Lily awoke early the following morning, she washed her face and hands in the cold water of the stream and tidied herself as best she could before climbing the path back up over the fern-draped slope and through the trees to the bottom of the cultivated lawn.
She stood looking up at what appeared to be stables with the house beyond. Both looked even more massive and forbidding in the morning light than they had appeared last night. And there was a great deal of activity going on. There were numerous carriages on the driveway close to the stables, and grooms and coachmen bustled about everywhere. Last night’s party guests must have stayed overnight and were preparing to leave, Lily guessed. It was clearly still not the right time to make her call. She must wait until later.
She was hungry, she discovered after she had returned to the beach, and decided to fill in some time by walking into the village, where perhaps she could buy a small loaf of bread. But when she arrived there, she found that it was by no means the quiet, deserted place it had been the evening before. The square was almost surrounded by grand carriages—perhaps some of the very ones she had seen earlier by the stables of the abbey. The green itself was crowded with people. The doors of the inn were wide open, and a great bustling in and out discouraged Lily from approaching. She could see that the gateway to the church was tightly packed with an even denser throng than the green held.
“What is happening?” she asked a couple of women who stood on the edge of the green close to the inn, both staring in the direction of the church, one of them on tiptoe.
They turned their heads to stare at her. One looked her up and down, recognized her as a stranger, and frowned. The other was more friendly.
“A wedding,” she said. “Half the quality of England is here for the wedding of Miss Edgeworth to the Earl of Kilbourne. I don’t know how they squeezed them all inside the church.”
The Earl of Kilbourne! Again the name sounded like that of a stranger. But he wasnota stranger. And the meaning of what the; woman had just said struck home. He was getting married? Now? Inside that church? The Earl of Kilbourne wasgetting married?
“The bride just arrived,” the second woman added, having thawed to the idea of having a stranger for an audience. “You missed her, more’s the pity. All in white satin, she is, with a scalloped train and a bonnet and netting that covers her face. But if you stand here a spell, you will see them coming out as soon as the church bells start to ring. The carriage will come around this way before going back around and through the gates, I daresay, so that we can all wave and get a good look at them. Leastways that is what Mr. Wesley says—the innkeeper, you know.”
