The Wolfe's Mate Part 7

'I trust that you have finished,' he said politely, 'since I came here to enjoy myself, not to listen to sermons from stupid old gentlemen. And as to business, I can understand your distaste for it, since you have been so unsuccessful in the practice of it. I bid you good evening, m'lord, in the hope that another day may find you in a better temper and your son likewise.'

He bowed and turned back to Madame and Susanna. Lord Babbacombe, now gobbling like a turkey, had no alternative but to accept the insults put upon him, or challenge Ben to a duel. As he had neither the mind nor the courage to do the latter he was left in a quandary.

What he would have liked to do was to order his footman to give Ben a beating, and throw him out of Exford House, but that being impossible, he turned on his heel and left, silently promising himself to take all the steps necessary to drive Ben Wolfe out of society.

Madame said gently, 'Was that wise Mr Wolfe? Lord Babbacombe is a power in London society.'

'So much the worse for London society, then,' returned Ben, his face implacable. 'My only regret is that you and Miss Beverly-to say nothing of several spectators-were compelled to listen to such an ill-tempered to-do. I hope, Miss Beverly, that my plain speaking will not result in you refusing to stand up with me in the next dance.'

'Oh, I am well acquainted with your plain speaking, Mr Wolfe, and I am in the best position to know that your remarks concerning Lord Darlington were no worse than he deserved.' She felt, rather than saw, that Madame was intrigued by her forthright defence of Ben, but had decided that, for once, she might indulge in a little plain speaking of her own.

'And I shall certainly agree to stand up with you in the next dance,' she added.

Susanna surprised even herself by her behaviour. On the face of it she should have been shocked but, after his failed kidnapping of her, the rest of Ben Wolfe's conduct seemed to her to be small beer at the very least.

Which was a piece of internal vulgarity she had better keep to herself!

'I wonder that you dare commit yourself to such a bad hat as I am, Miss Beverly,' said Ben with a wry smile, 'knowing, as you do, the very worst of what I am capable of performing. Who knows what might happen next?'

'Surely, sir, the evening can hold no more shocks for me, either verbal or otherwise,' she riposted.

But she was wrong. Ben had taken her hand and they stood side by side waiting for an opposite couple to appear so that the dance might begin. A tall gentleman with one of Lord Exford's sisters on his arm arrived to take his place. He was so busy talking to her that he did not turn to face Ben and Susanna until the very moment that the music began and it was too late for Susanna to react to his sudden appearance.

Ben Wolfe felt her tremble, but did not know that what had disturbed Susanna was the arrival of the latecomer.

He was Francis Sylvester, whom she had last seen the night before he had left her at the altar.

Chapter Seven.

'Susanna,' said Francis agitatedly as he pa.s.sed her in the dance, 'can it possibly be you?'

As he ought to have known she could not answer him immediately for the dance had rapidly returned her to Ben's side. Nor, when they were next face to face again, hands held high, did he allow her to speak, bursting out instead with, 'I had heard that you had left your parents' house and were no longer in society.'

She barely had time to retort, 'Then you were wrongly informed,' before she was back with Ben, who hissed at her, 'Who the devil is that fellow who is pestering you each time you pa.s.s him?'

Fortunately the dance took her away from him, too. And who gave him leave to question her so summarily? Or Francis, either, for that matter. Both men had glared at her as though she had offended them. She decided to speak to neither of them, treading through the patterns of the dance in silence.

So when Francis asked her as they crossed again, 'Whose party are you with, Susanna, to whom I may pay my respects when the dance is over?' she said nothing, turning her head away from him before rejoining Ben-who demanded of her exasperatedly, 'Is that fellow still troubling you?'

She didn't answer him either-which was all that they both deserved, seeing that Francis had jilted her, and Ben had kidnapped her, neither of which acts could possibly be described as gentlemanly. Her temper wasn't helped by her noticing that both men were now scowling blackly at one another whenever they crossed.

'What in the world are you doing with him?' Francis snorted at her. 'Don't you know how dubious his reputation is?'

Susanna could not prevent herself from riposting, 'No more than mine was and is, Francis, after you had finished with me.'

That should have finished him but, judging by his wounded expression, hadn't, for when he next twirled her around he came out with, 'I never intended that, you know.'

'Then what did you intend?' she shot back at him before moving on to Ben, who muttered at her, 'Is he still importuning you? Do you want me to deal with him also, when the dance is over?'

Susanna nearly came out with, 'Heaven forfend', murmuring instead, 'Best not, he's Lord Sylvester.'

This made matters worse, for Ben immediately hissed at her, 'The swine who jilted you, eh? I will deal with him as he deserves.'

'Oh, not that,' she said. 'What little good reputation we still possess would be quite destroyed, and having escaped hanging for George, you would swing for Francis instead. Neither of them are worth it and I should have to retire to a nunnery to escape public obloquy.'

Fortunately Ben's sense of humour revived itself when he saw that she was smiling as she spoke. 'True,' he said, his lips twitching again and his harsh face lightening a little. 'I admit that I am being somewhat extreme, but he's exactly the kind of soft fool I most dislike.'

Susanna refrained from pointing out to him that most of the men in the room were soft fools if you compared them with Mr Ben Wolfe, but that didn't justify him threatening them all with violent death as a consequence. She also reflected that, until she had met him, her life had been conducted after a fashion which could only be described as dull and boring, whereas now even attending a ball at Exford House had become almost dangerously exciting!

There was no time for further talk with him, or with Francis either, who next had the impudence to ask, 'Are you married, Susanna? I trust that that great oaf, Ben Wolfe, is not your husband if you are.'

'No business of yours if he is,' she told him briskly, over her shoulder, as she left him for the last time.

The dance over, Ben seized her arm proprietorially and virtually dragged her over to where Madame was sitting, but he didn't succeed in throwing Francis off the scent. He doggedly followed them, bowing to Madame and ostentatiously avoiding any eye contact with Ben who had been compelled to release Susanna once she was under Madame's wing again.

Francis bowed to them all. He was, Susanna noticed, as superbly turned out as he had been when he had been her supposedly faithful suitor. Yet Ben was right: his face was soft, something which she had not noticed when she had been a green girl. His public manners, however, were still superb.

'We met in Paris, I believe, Madame la Comtesse,' he said, 'at a reception given by M. de Talleyrand. I am happy to renew your acquaintance, and would wish to renew that of Miss Beverly-if she is still Miss Beverly, that is.'

Madame's manners were, as always, impeccable. 'Lord Sylvester,' she acknowledged. 'Yes, I remember the occasion. And Miss Beverly is not married, but I am not sure whether she will wish to renew her acquaintance with you. She must speak for herself.'

'Then I must beg of her that she will allow me to speak privately to her-for a few moments only,' he said hastily, 'for I have to inform her of something meant for her ears alone.'

Susanna looked away from him. 'This comes a trifle late, m'lord, if it is an explanation of your behaviour of four years ago.' Or an apology, she was going to add, but he did not allow her to finish, saying, 'I know that I did you a great wrong, but I wish to remedy that. I ask you to allow me to speak to you in memory of what we once were to one another.'

She could almost feel Ben Wolfe's hard eyes on her, willing her to refuse him, but that very fact compelled her to accede to Francis Sylvester's wishes. To neither of them would she give the right to determine her conduct. She would speak to Francis of her free will, and that same free will would determine the nature of her reply to him. Her decisions would be her own.

'Very well, Lord Sylvester,' she said, rising. 'I will allow you to address me privately, but for a few moments only, and on the understanding that you will make no attempt to detain, or control me, physically.'

'He'd better not,' growled Ben under his breath, earning himself a sharp tap of her fan from Madame who was watching with interest the play of emotion on his usually impa.s.sive face.

Lord Sylvester held out his hand. Susanna shook her head as she joined him, and, not touching, they walked out of the Grand Salon and into the self-same anteroom into which George had earlier dragged her.

He turned to face her, indicating that he wished her to sit while he spoke to her. Susanna shook her head again. 'I would prefer to remain standing,' she said, as coolly as she could.

Francis inclined his handsome blond head. His looks were the exact opposite of those of Ben Wolfe-but they had lost the power to attract Susanna.

'Very well,' he said, his voice melancholy. 'I wish to tell you how sorry I am that I behaved to you as I did four years ago. But I had no alternative. I was heavily in debt, but the moneylenders, knowing of our marriage, were holding off. And then, two days before the wedding your guardian, Mr Samuel Mitch.e.l.l, came to me and told me that, contrary to public belief, you were not an heiress. That he had discovered that your father had left you nothing, and that consequently I was right up the River Tick again. That the moneylenders had word of this and there was a writ out against me, consigning me to the Marshalsea since I would now be unable to pay my debts.

'Consequently, to escape imprisonment I would have to fly the country at once. He said that he would help me on condition that I said nothing of this, for he would put matters right with you and ensure that you did not suffer as a consequence of your marriage failing. He told me what to say in my letter to you, and I set sail for the Continent on the following day. You may judge of my surprise when I heard not long ago that you had left your home soon after we should have married.'

Susanna, shocked by this surprising news, stared blankly at him. Could Francis possibly be speaking the truth? Had her stepfather been playing a double game with her? And if so, why? She remembered that, immediately after Francis Sylvester's rejection of her Samuel Mitch.e.l.l had informed her that he had known since her father's death that he had died penniless and had deliberately kept the truth from her until Francis's dereliction had made that impossible.

Could she trust no one? Was everyone lying to her? Samuel Mitch.e.l.l, Ben Wolfe and now Francis Sylvester. The room swung about her. She put out a hand to grasp the back of an armchair in order to steady herself.

'Am I to believe a word that you are saying?' was all she could manage.

Francis, shocked by her pallor, said, 'I swear to you, by all I hold holy, that I am telling you the truth. I loved you then, and I love you now. I fled because I could not condemn you to a marriage with a man who would shortly enter a debtors' prison, or to a narrow life in Calais never to revisit your home again. Forgive me for deceiving you so vilely four years ago, but, seeing how much I loved you, I thought that it was for the best.'

He might, perhaps, be telling her the truth, but Susanna dared not trust him. Her common sense, which rarely deserted her, had her asking him, 'If that is so, why are you able to return now?'

'Because an old aunt, whom I scarcely knew, died, leaving everything to me. Enough to pay my debts and enable me to live a decent life again in England. I have forsworn gambling and the wild life which went with it. I am a reformed character, and I wish to make a new start-with you, if you will accept me.'

He made a move to take her hand, but she pushed him away. She could not bear to be touched by him.

'Accept you!' she exclaimed bitterly. 'You do not know what you are asking, nor what my life has been since you left me at the altar. As for forgiveness, you may have that, but only because I must not forget the Christian faith by which I live and which bids us to forgive sinners. But marry you! Never, not if you were the last man in the world.'

To her horror, for horror it was, he went down on his knees before her, half-moaning, 'You cannot mean that.' This time he clutched at her hands and would not let them go. Susanna sought to release herself, but he was obdurate. He was not yet trying to force her as George had done, but she feared that he might.

'Listen to me-' he began.

Attempting to pull away, she exclaimed, 'No, I will not...'

At which point the door opened and it was Ben Wolfe again who strode in saying, 'For a short talk, you said, and you promised not to detain her, but, damme, I find you at it after all.'

His expression was so ugly that Susanna, freeing herself from a startled Francis Sylvester, caught him by the arm, exclaiming, 'No, Mr Wolfe, do not attack him, I was only trying to prevent him from proposing to me and from holding my hand while he was about it.'

'What! And give himself the pleasure of jilting you twice, I suppose,' was all the answer she got, but he made no further attempt to a.s.sault Francis, simply adding, 'If you dislike his advances, then I offer you my arm to escort you out of his unwanted presence.'

Francis, his face white now, said angrily, 'I was merely trying to make Miss Beverly an honourable proposal. Can you claim to wish to do as much?'

'Certainly,' almost shouted Ben, coming out with something which he had never thought to hear himself say. 'Miss Beverly, if you will only consent to marry me, I shall apply for a special licence tomorrow.'

The look which he threw Francis was a triumphant one.

But he did not triumph with Susanna.

She jumped back from the pair of them, exclaiming, 'Oh, you are impossible, both of you-and for quite different reasons. You are only alike in wishing to make my life miserable, and I certainly don't want to marry either of you.'

Which, she later dismally acknowledged, was not a true statement at all so far as one of them was concerned, but she wasn't going to allow anyone-even someone she was beginning to love-to bully her into doing anything.

And as the two men turned to her, both speaking at once, she said as coldly as she could, 'As you claim to be gentlemen, pray allow me to depart without troubling me further.'

Her head high, she walked past them to the door, pacing slowly along the corridor, delaying her return to the Grand Salon, for after what she had just pa.s.sed through she did not know whether to laugh or to cry.

After that, the evening resumed the normal course of such evenings. Francis Sylvester disappeared, not to reappear again. Susanna could only imagine what Ben had said to him before he returned to talk to her and Madame as though nothing untoward had occurred. She could not help wondering of what he was thinking-and all the time she spoke and laughed and danced without an apparent care in the world, although not again with Ben, who stood silent behind Madame's chair.

Was he regretting his rash proposal-or her rejection of it? At the end of the evening when Madame rose to take her leave, Ben bent over Susanna's hand in farewell, murmuring in a voice doubtless meant to be rea.s.suring, 'I do not think that that fellow will trouble you again, Miss Beverly. If he does, pray inform me immediately.'

Miss Beverly! So they had returned to their previous relationship with one another as though his proposal of marriage had never been made. In theory, this should have pleased Susanna but, in practice, made her feel cold and desolate.

He had only proposed to her in order to annoy Francis and to put him off-and he had succeeded. It was simply one more of Mr Wolfe's many deceits performed to allow him to remain in control of his life-and the lives of others.

She took this sad and lonely thought to bed with her.

As for Ben Wolfe, his night was spent in wondering at himself. In the name of all that was holy, how had he come to propose marriage to Miss Susanna Beverly when he had always told himself that-other than for revenge on the Babbacombe-he would never marry? In retrospect, his rashness appalled him. She might have accepted him on the spot, then where would he have been?

Properly caught-but she had not accepted him. Instead of being pleased, he was feeling glum-which was ridiculous, for he had had no real desire to marry her, had he? He had merely been putting down that a.s.s Francis Sylvester, hadn't he?

So why was it that he couldn't sleep, and was behaving like a moonstruck boy whose love had turned him down flat? Yes, he must be moonstruck, fit for Bedlam: hard Ben Wolfe, who was slowly being overcome by a pair of fine eyes and a brave spirit such as he had never met in a woman before.

And, when sleep came at last, his dreams were filled with visions of Susanna.

'A letter for you, my dear,' said Madame, pa.s.sing it across the breakfast table to her several days later when the Exfords' ball and its many incidents was becoming a memory.

'For me?' Susanna looked up in surprise. She could not remember when she had last received a letter. The invitations to the many social events which she was attending were made to Madame: and she had lost all her friends from her old life after Francis had jilted her.

The letter looked official. It was addressed to her in a clerk's copperplate script and it invited her to attend the offices of Messrs Herriott and Bracewell as soon as possible, where she might learn something to her advantage. She pa.s.sed it over to Madame, saying, 'Whatever can it mean? Do you know anything of this?'

Madame shook her head. 'No, my dear. I am as surprised as you are. Do you know of the firm?'

'Only that it was Papa's. I never had dealings with them after he died. Everything was done by Mr Mitch.e.l.l even before he married Mama.'

'Indeed,' remarked Madame drily, thinking of a conversation which she had had with Ben Wolfe. 'I think that you ought to visit them as soon as possible. You may take the carriage this afternoon.'

'But you were going to the Park...'

'Oh, that can wait,' said Madame airily. 'This is more important.'

It was a somewhat puzzled Susanna who was shown into Mr Herriott's office later that day. He rose to meet her, offering her a chair and a gla.s.s of Madeira in that order.

'Thank you, no,' she said to the Madeira. She saw that Mr Herriott had another portly middle-aged gentleman with him and a.s.sumed that it was his partner, Mr Bracewell. Stranger and stranger, she thought, surely my business cannot be so important that it needs the two senior partners to conduct it.

'First of all,' began Mr Herriott, whose face looked as though he had drunk more than his share of Madeira in his time, 'we are here to offer you an apology for what is a dereliction of duty on our part. It has recently come to our notice that you have been under the misapprehension that your father left you a pauper. That the money set out in his will was non-existent and had been lost by him before he died.

'Regrettably we were unaware of this but, once it was brought to our notice that your stepfather, Mr Samuel Mitch.e.l.l, had misappropriated a sum upwards of one hundred thousand pounds, it was our duty to remedy the matter, in so far as we could.'

Susanna was not so innocent that she did not grasp that Mr Herriott was using grand language to obscure his own share of guilt in the matter. It had been his duty to protect her interests-something which he had singularly failed to do.

'Immediately we became aware of the true situation, we set matters in train. Mr Mitch.e.l.l has been compelled to make over to you the balance of your fortune left after his depredations had reduced it. You will immediately receive the sum of some sixty thousand pounds-or, rather, the yearly interest of that sum. As for Mr Mitch.e.l.l, he will escape conviction and transportation only because he has cooperated with us in restoring your fortune to you, and because we believe that you would not wish your mother and your half-sisters to be left in penury and without a husband and a father. He has sufficient capital left to enable them to live in modest comfort.

'If, of course, you felt that this punishment was not enough, then we would inform the proper authorities, but we believed that you would not wish your mother to be punished as well.'

Susanna hardly knew what to say. Mr Herriott rose and poured her a gla.s.s of water. 'Drink this, Miss Beverly, I am sure that this news has come as a great shock to you.'

She drank the water greedily down before saying, 'So, when my stepfather virtually turned me out of the house in order to earn my own living, he was actually using my money to improve his own circ.u.mstances?'

'Yes. It appeared that, shortly before he married your mother, he had lost a great deal of money in speculation and he used part of your inheritance to overcome that. Later, after your marriage with Lord Sylvester was arranged, he had another run of bad luck, he said, and embezzled most of the rest of it to make up his losses.'

Susanna thought of what Francis had told her at the Exfords' ball-and knew that he had been speaking the truth.