Page 97 of Impetuous

“No!” Sarah grew even more agitated. “No! We can’t go back. It’s too late!”

Suddenly everything fell into place in Cassandra’s mind. “Sweet Lord in Heaven!” Cassandra breathed. “It was you, wasn’t it? You were the one who locked me in the windmill!”

“Yes! Yes!” Sarah hissed, and, taking Cassandra completely by surprise, she stuck her hand into her reticule and pulled out a pistol. She pointed it straight at Cassandra.

It occurred to Cassandra that she was growing quite tired of having guns pointed at her. “Miss Yorke, please, why don’t you put that thing away, and we can talk? There is no need to tell everyone that you were responsible for the windmill incident. I am sure you regret it.”

“I didn’t want to hurt you,” Sarah agreed earnestly. “I liked you. I truly did.” She waved the pistol at Cassandra, motioning her forward. “But we have to walk. You have to walk.”

The pistol in Sarah’s shaking fingers made Cassandra exceedingly nervous, so she did as the woman asked, starting once more down the path.

“You have to turn down there and go out to the trees,” Sarah instructed, once again motioning with the firearm.

“Of course, if that is what you want.” Cassandra strolled along as slowly and as calmly as she could. The last thing she wanted to do was to set Sarah off. She needed time to try to figure out how she was going to get out of this nightmare. “But, you know, it really would be more comfortable to talk in the house. We could have a cool drink. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

“Don’t condescend to me,” Miss Yorke snapped.

“No, I would never…”

“Yes, you would, you all would—although you seemed better than the others. Like that cousin of yours, Miss Moulton.” She made a noise of disgust. “I thought it was she whom he liked when you first arrived here. She was so pretty, and she hung on his arm, as if he were her property.” Jealousy dripped from every word. “She looked at me as if I were nothing, a worm, not even worthy of her notice. I knew she would take him away from me.”

“Joanna is like that,” Cassandra admitted. “However, she is like that to everyone. She thinks herself so beautiful that everyone else should fall down in admiration.”

Sarah let out a small, twisted smile. “She fell all right. I thought if I pushed her in, she would get scared. That she would go back where she came from. It didn’t hurt her. She wouldn’t even have gotten so wet if she hadn’t floundered about. But then she just got him to carry her out of the water, and she leaned against him so brazenly and flaunted her body in those wet clothes, and I thought that I had just made it worse.”

She paused as they reached a path leading away from the garden and into the more untamed reaches of the estate. Cassandra was reluctant to go, but Sarah motioned impatiently with the gun, and Cassandra started along the path.

“Then I saw that I had been all wrong. It was stupid of me, really. I should have know that Philip could not be interested in a vain, feather-headed chit like that. Whenever I was there, I could see that he avoided her. But he was spending all his time with you!” She glared over at Cassandra.

“We were working on something together,” Cassandra tried to explain. “It wasn’t preference for my company, it was just the project. We were trying to find the Spanish Dowry, you see.”

“Stop it! Just stop it! Do you think I’m feebleminded? Of course, it was a preference for you. He is marrying you!”

Cassandra realized that Miss Yorke had a point. There was little possibility of convincing this jealous woman that Philip did not care for her when he had proposed marriage to her. She decided to keep her mouth shut on the subject and hope that Sarah would move on to something else more easily dealt with.

“I didn’t want to hurt you,” Sarah rambled on. “I liked you. You seemed much nicer and more intelligent than other young ladies of quality. You took an interest in Silverwood, too. The boys liked you.”

“Thank you. I like them, as well. And I like you, Sarah. Don’t you think that we could be friends?”

“Friends! How can we be friends? You have everything I want. I can’t stand by and watch you marry him!” They walked a little farther, and Sarah said again, “I didn’t want to hurt you. I didn’t mean to. I knew that they would find you at the windmill in a little while. If they hadn’t, I would have come and let you out. I just wanted you to get scared, to decide to leave Haverly House. Why couldn’t you simply have left? Then we would never have had to come to this point.”

“We still don’t have to come to it,” Cassandra soothed.

“Yes! Yes! You wouldn’t leave. You wouldn’t leave, and now the only thing to do is to stop you from marrying him.”

Cassandra didn’t want to ask how Miss Yorke planned to stop her. “You know, Miss Yorke, just because you get rid of me, it doesn’t mean that you will have Philip to yourself.”

“But I would! He would have turned to me sooner or later, I know he would. He would have come to see that I loved him more than anyone else possibly could. He was so good to me, so kind to give me the position at Silverwood. I know it must have indicated some degree of affection on his part. Don’t you see?”

“Yes. I am sure that Sir Philip is very fond of you. But he won’t be if you—if you—” She balked at the words.

“He won’t know!” Sarah crowed. “That is the beauty of it. It will look like an accident. No one will ever know.”

“Of course they will. Someone is bound to have seen us from a window of the house. They will know that we left together, that you were the last person to see me.”

“Shut up! Shut up!” Sarah shrieked, and Cassandra wisely did not say anything. It was obvious that the woman’s control was hanging by a thread.

They continued walking, but they did not say much now. Cassandra hoped that someone had indeed seen them from the window, but it would be sheer happenstance. She could not count on it. And even if someone had seen them, they would think nothing of it, just that the two of them were going for a walk.