Lady in Rags

Chapter Thirty-Four: Bone, and Tendon, and Skin

They waited in the arbour for over an hour while Verity recovered her strength. It had been harder for her to hear the news that he was alive than it had been to hear that he was dead. Perhaps it was the baby kicking in her belly that made the difference. She could not stop thinking that Neil would never hold his own child. And the baby kept kicking, as though calling out for him.

Finally she stood, and took a deep breath. "I'm ready, Lord Landon. Let's go."

Mrs Roper stood as well, but Verity motioned her back down. "I know you must also wish to see Neil, and I am being very selfish in asking, but will you return to the inn?"

Mrs Roper shot a wary glance at Richard. "If something goes wrong, I should like to protect you, my dear."

"If Armiger betrays me, or if Lord Albroke sees me, there shall be nothing you can do. However, if he is to be trusted, then it should be easier to bring me alone into the house. Some of the servants may still know you from when you worked here, and even those that don't would not wish to question what the master of their house was doing alone with a young woman." Verity felt her cheeks burn at the deception, and added, more truthfully, "You have been so kind to me, and helped me in all things, but this is one moment in which I strongly desire to have no audience, no advisor, and no helpmate."

A spasm of emotion crossed Mrs Roper's face, before she captured it between pressed lips, and swallowed it.

"Aye. I'll give you that then. I'll wait for you at the inn." She jerked her head at Richard. "If she's not back by dinner, I'll be breaking the knocker of your grand front door."

They parted ways. Verity followed Richard to the end of the tunnel of leaves, and out onto a path twisting through rhododendron bushes. They approached the grey manor in a circuitous route, along the most bushy and overgrown areas of the garden. Despite her nerves, Verity noted with scorn that the house was so grand it had statues on the roof. To a girl who had grown up in poverty, statues on the roof were the height of senseless extravagance. What use were statues way up where nobody could see them?

"My father is in his office at the front of the house," Richard explained, as they walked under the shelter of a hedge towards a raised terrace leading into the house. "He will not see us if we approach this way. But the servants, too, we should avoid."

At the bottom of the steps leading up to the terrace, he paused.

"Wait here. I shall go first, in case there is anybody about."

When he had limped to the top of the stairs, he disappeared a moment from her line of sight beyond the balustrade. She waited uneasily, a strange premonition of doom upon her, yet after only a moment, he was back, and beckoning to her. She climbed the stairs, and they darted across the terrace, and through a half-open French window.

They stepped onto a floor of polished parquetry. Verity winced to see the mud she was leaving on it. The gallery stretched most of the length of the centre wing of the house, and its walls were cluttered with paintings. At regular intervals, hovering above identical Louis XIV yellow-silk settees, were life size portraits of the ancestral Armigers. There were two jaundiced Sir Thomas Lawrence portraits of Neil and Richard; a Batoni of Lord Albroke in his younger days; and even a very severe gentleman who could plausibly have claimed to be of Holbein's hand, but was probably not. Richard did not spare a glance at them as he led her swiftly through the gallery and into a vast drawing room, with a very sparse amount of uncomfortable looking arm chairs in symmetrical pairs, and some strange lumpy objects under dark linen covers that were probably musical instruments.

It was carpeted in here, and their footsteps were deadened. Richard took the moment to say, in a low voice, "We should be safe now. But do not talk."