“Well, ye can’t deny it explains a great deal,” said Aldous Congleton.
“That’s right.” Cyril Bedale was moved to unravel his hands from his stomach and lean across to pat his friend’s arm. “No need to be ashamed of it, old fellow. Bound to happen sooner or later.”
“Yes, but it has not happened,” said Denzell in a harassed sort of way. “Merely because my sister chooses to take some romantical notion into her head —”
“Then how do ye explain your conduct these many weeks?” demanded Congleton. “Ye’ve not set up a single flirt since the season began.”
“I’m trying to avoid the matchmakers. With the new crop of debutantes just out, every bachelor who wants to remain so has to be careful. Besides, it isn’t true. I’ve been courting several chits.”
“Ah, but with what sort of enthusiasm, old fellow?” put in Cyril. “Abstracted, that’s what you’ve been. All noticed it. Haven’t we?”
Congleton nodded. “Noticed it from the first. Except Freddy, but he never notices anything.”
Desperation lent Denzell wit. Here was an opening. Let him, for pity’s sake, deflect attention from this appalling nonsense. At the same time, he decided, he would have a little of revenge on Freddy for putting the cat among the pigeons in that boneheaded fashion.
“You’re in the right of it there, Cong,” he agreed. “Freddy hasn’t even noticed that he’s about to enter parson’s mousetrap himself.”
“Eh?” said Lord Rowner, startled.
“Well, you are going to marry Teresa, aren’t you?”
The other two gentlemen roared with laughter at Freddy’s astounded face. He blushed, blurting out, “How the deuce did you know that I am going to marry your sister?”
“Come, come, dear boy,” Denzell said. “This is Teresa we are talking about. If you must have it in words of one syllable, it is my sister who says you are going to marry my sister.”
“But, dash it, I haven’t even popped the question!”
“What has that to say to anything? If you don’t get a move on, I have every expectation that Teresa will pop it to you.”
This remark not unnaturally provoked a deal of hilarity in their colleagues, further embarrassing the unfortunate Lord Rowner, who would now be obliged to endure much chaffing.
“If I were you, dear boy,” Denzell advised him in a voice of mock kindness, “I should run away as fast as you can. I have never met a stronger-minded woman than my own sister.”
Except, he found himself reflecting privately as his friends turned their teasing attentions upon poor Lord Rowner, for Miss Verena Chaceley. Did it not take a strong character to maintain that iron self-control?
A fleeting idea crossed his mind that it was this strength that had made him depart in such haste — running away, as he had advised Freddy to do. Only what had he to fear? Verena did not even like him, let alone wish to catch him in matrimony. Her iron will could give him no qualms.
But she was not iron beneath, came the unbidden protest from somewhere deep within him. Oh, she was not. He would swear to that. She was as soft as the snowflakes she had caught at that day to build the children’s snowman.
Verena awoke to the sound of violent knocking. Starting up in bed, she sat a moment, blinking in the dark, the shock reverberating in her head as the relentless rat-tat continued.
Abruptly the significance struck her. Nathaniel! Who else would come battering on the door in the middle of the night? He had come at last, just as she had known he must.
Even as the thought was forming in her mind, she had thrown off the covers. Sweeping aside the curtains, she flung out of bed, snatching up her flannel dressing-robe from the chair nearby with shaking fingers. There was a candle on the bedside table, together with a flint to light it, but she had no time to fiddle with that now. Mama must be stopped from going down.
Groping her way to the door, she dragged it open and became aware of voices in the hall below. Mrs Quirk had already opened the front door.
Verena flew for the staircase to the upper floor, almost bumping into Betsey’s bulk as the maid arrived at an uneven stumble at the bottom of the flight, armed with the oil lamp that always remained burning low against Mrs Peverill’s difficult nights. Verena saw her own confused anxiety matched in the maid’s illuminated features.
“It must be him,” Verena uttered in a harsh whisper, grasping at the woman’s arm. “Go down, Betsey. At all costs, you must prevent him from coming up.”
“Who, Miss Verena?” The maid’s tone was a trifle bleary still with sleep, but matching her urgency. “Who is it?”
“Who? Who but Nathaniel!”
Betsey’s large hands gripped the oil lamp tighter. “Not the master!”
“It must be. Go down, Betsey, for the love of heaven!”
