Page 12 of The Marriage Debt
‘Good morning, Mr Rawlings. Good morning, John. Everything is packed, I will just put on my bonnet.’
Theo stayed still as a statue by the door as John helped her into her pelisse and picked up the bags. She stopped at his side as she tied her bonnet strings. There did not seem to be any words, so she reached up, touched his cheek and left.
John was a brooding presence at her side as they walked down the endless dark passages and out into the blessed sunlight and fresh air. He hailed a hackney carriage and bundled her inside before plumping down opposite her and demanding, with all the licence of an old family servant, ‘Are you all right, Miss Katherine?’
‘Mrs Lydgate,’ she said firmly. It was the first time she had said it and it sounded rather well. Her coachman regarded her with much the same air her father had adopted when she came up with some excuse to distract him from a misdemeanour.
‘John, Mr Lydgate behaved like a perfect gentleman and absolutely nothing happened. Now that is as much as I am prepared to say, so you can stop looking like a cross bulldog.’
‘Humph. If you say so Miss…Mrs Lydgate.’
‘I was teasing you, John, please call me Miss Katherine. Now, has Philip taken the carriage out?’
‘No.’ He was still regarding her suspiciously as if he expected her to burst into tears at any moment. This was obviously not the reaction he had been anticipating.
‘Good, because I need the horses putting to and for you to pack your bags. We are going into Hertfordshire today.’
Jenny was inclined to be tearful at her return and then as baffled as John by the order to leave London. ‘Pack, Miss Katherine? But for how many days?’
‘I am not sure. It can’t be more than three, I pray it will take no more. And, Jenny, you know that old hat box we put up in the attic?’
‘Yes, Miss Katherine.’
‘Fetch it down please.’
Jenny departed, shaking her head. Katherine ran downstairs and into Philip’s study. Now where was the atlas? Yes, here it was, a volume of road maps. She conned the one for the Aylesbury and Oxford road carefully as it unwound in a long ribbon over several pages. There was Hemel Hempstead and there was Box Moor. Now, where best to stay? Her heart told her the Lamb and Flag but her head counselled caution. Hemel Hempstead was large enough to hold several respectable inns and, more importantly, magistrates.
She lifted the volume and started to leave, then turned back. She had better write Philip a note to say they had gone away, although, as he was not even here to meet her on her return, she felt a chilly hardening of her heart towards him. She pulled a sheet of notepaper towards her, dislodging several bills as she did so.Oh, Philip. Is it possible to stop loving your own brother? How many blows to the heart does it take before that feeling dies?
Jenny was in the hall, portmanteaux and bandboxes at her feet and a battered hat box in her hands. ‘What do you want this dirty old thing for, Miss Katherine?’
‘I do not want it at all, I want what is in it.’ There was an ugly hat resting on a bed of crumpled tissue paper. Katherine tossed it aside and reached under the paper. Her fingers closed over something as fluid and sinuous as a snake and she drew it out.
‘Miss Katherine. Diamonds?’
It was a necklace, dull through neglect, but still sparking with the unmistakeable watery fire of the true gems. ‘This is my last thing of any real value and I have been saving it for a rainy day, Jenny.’ She sighed. ‘It belonged to my grandmother and it will have to be sold to be broken up, I’m afraid, the stone are an old fashioned cut and setting.’
‘But, Miss Katherine, if you had this…’
‘It is worth a few hundreds, not thousands. See, there are not many stones and they are quite small. But I need it now because this is not a rainy day, this is a hurricane.’
John was ready and they piled their baggage into the old coach. ‘Newman’s of Lombard Street please, John, and then the road to Aylesbury and Oxford.’
Mr Newman was courteous to Mrs Lydgate and she suspected that her accent and the confident air she assumed impressed him. He had clearly not expected to bargain.
‘One hundred? I am sorry, Mr Newman, I have obviously been wasting my time and yours. I will find another jewellers with an appreciation of fine stones.’ She let her eyes roam around the shop dismissively. ‘You were recommended by Lady, er, well, perhaps I should not mention names. She will be so disappointed to hear she was mistaken in her advice.’ Katherine rose and picked up the necklace, careful that the darn in her glove did not show.
Half an hour later she was hurrying out to the coach, her reticule bulging, a gleam in her eyes. ‘Three hundred, Jenny, just imagine. I would have been happy with two, but I sneered so much at his lovely shop he gave methree.’
Her triumph lasted all the way to Hemel Hempstead. With money in her pocket they could afford a change of horses and when they reached the town she indulged herself with two rooms in the Swan in the High Street. It was only as the three of them sat down to dinner in the private parlour that the fear began to creep back. By tomorrow, four days left. Only four days.
If she failed then Theo would hang. She would be there, although not where he could see her. He would hate that, his pride would revolt at the thought that she should see him choke and slowly strangle to death, kicking in front of a baying crowd. She had known him for only a few hours, but already she knew that his pride drove him, fed him with a kind of anger which had driven him into whatever life he had lived on the continent and now gave him the grace to look an unjust death in the eye with dignity.
‘Are you going to tell us what we are doing here, Miss Katherine?’ John demanded after the waiter had deposited a leg of mutton on the table and departed.
‘Yes. Will you carve that please, John? We are going to prove Mr Lydgate innocent and to do that we need to meet a highwayman called Black Jack Standon and a magistrate whose name I do not know but who probably has a new watch and a scar on his head.’
‘Heaven preserve us, Miss Katherine.’ Jenny reached for a glass of ale and gulped a mouthful. ‘We’ll be murdered in our beds.’
