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“No, no,” said Mr Hartwell, turning briefly in their direction. “On second thoughts, it may be as well for her friends to be at hand in such a situation as this.”
Annabel was silent, unable to think beyond the impending horror of what she was going to be told. The vicar’s eyes came back to hers, and then passed on to Janet.
“Ah. Perhaps it would be sensible for your maid to remove the infant? Your attention, my dear, cannot be upon her well-being in this extremity.”
“Extremity?” It was both sharp and low.
Mr Hartwell smiled his reassurance. “There is no cause for alarm, Mrs Lett. I am the bearer of tidings more shocking than distressing.”
These words did nothing to allay Annabel’s fears. She turned with that automatic action which drives one through emergencies.
“Janet, take Becky into the house.”
She watched her maid walk across the grass and scoop up her daughter. Rebecca protested, and a slight delay was occasioned by her insistence on Janet’s gathering up the carefully selected store of pebbles from the bench. When the maid had slipped them into the pocket of her apron, there was yet recalcitrance. But Janet murmured soothingly—of cake, Annabel suspected—at which her daughter’s protests ceased abruptly and she allowed herself to be borne away.
“Sit down, Mrs Lett.”
Annabel sat down, vaguely aware that her two friends did likewise. She stared up into the vicar’s face, noting that his air of solemnity had been replaced with an edge of excitement.
“Pray tell me quickly,” she uttered rapidly. “This suspense is more than I can endure.”
He dropped back a pace, letting go her hands. “Mrs Lett, I have been requested to break to you a piece of news which may, in its production of joy, prove overwhelming.”
Benumbed, Annabel repeated it. “Joy?”
“Dear me, this is harder than I thought for,” said the reverend gentleman, his portentous air deserting him. “Nothing in my experience has prepared me for such a situation as this. I hope I may be forgiven if I mangle the task. Mrs Lett, my news is nothing short of miraculous. Your husband is alive.”
Annabel hardly heard the murmured expressions of astonishment. Her voice was faint.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your husband, Mrs Lett!”
Annabel stared at him, blank with incomprehension. What husband? She had never been married, for she was a fallen woman. Rebecca was the nameless product of an act of lunatic passion. What in the world could the man be talking of?
He seemed to read her thought. “I am speaking of Captain Lett.”
“Captain Lett?” repeated Annabel stupidly. But there was no Captain Lett!
“You believed him dead,” went on Mr Hartwell earnestly, and with growing eagerness. “But it appears that the report was false. He had been severely wounded, and taken prisoner. He was able to get a message to his regiment, and negotiations were begun which ultimately ended with his release.”
“Oh, Annabel, how fortunate!” came from Charlotte. “I am so happy for you.”
Annabel’s eyes turned towards her. Had she gone mad? Of all people in this village, Charlotte surely knew that she was not who she said she was. They had never overtly spoken of it, but hints enough had been passed for Annabel to know that Mrs Filmer had guessed the true situation, which had made it abundantly clear that her own was just the same.
“It is indeed miraculous!” said Jane Emerson warmly, and Annabel saw that her soft brown eyes were misted.
Annabel’s gaze returned to the parson’s face. “I don’t understand.”
“No wonder!”
“It is as he feared,” agreed Mr Hartwell worriedly. “It is just why the Captain requested my intervention. I wonder if perhaps I should—”
He had taken a few paces towards the corner of the cottage as he spoke, but he broke off. With a wide gesture indicating the way he had first come, he turned back to Annabel.
“But here he is—in person. Now perhaps you will believe what I am saying, Mrs Lett.”
A gentleman came into sight. A tall, broad-shouldered gentleman, clad not in scarlet regimentals, as might have been expected, but in frock-coat and breeches. He carried his hat in his hand, and the sun fell upon his head of bright red-gold hair, which was matched by a clipped moustache.
Annabel sat rooted to the spot. She heard nothing of what was said around her, for shock deprived her of everything but recognition of the stark, bare fact.
This was no husband—and no Captain Lett. It was Captain Henry Colton, the father of her illegitimate child.
Chapter Two
For a few breathless moments, Hal’s poise near deserted him. He had made a dreadful mistake! Was this whey-faced creature—this demure little matron, becapped and respectable—was this his fiery Annabel? She had never been a beauty, but she’d been spirited. She’d had a special magnetism that had haunted his dreams, along with those flashing green eyes.
Then he realised that they were staring at him in both shock and bewilderment. That there was a gauntness in her cheeks where there had once been bloom. But recognition surfaced just the same. This was Annabel.
Disappointment thrust at Hal, driving down the guilt, and he was conscious of a craven wish that he had not come. But his scheme—designed to thwart the inevitable defiance of the remembered Annabel—was fairly embarked, and he was as well trapped himself as he had thought to trap his quarry.
He became aware of the cleric at his elbow, the innocent Mr Hartwell, whom he had suborned into establishing his claim in a bid to make it impossible for Annabel to repudiate him.
“Mrs Lett is a good deal overcome, sir.”
An understatement. She was clearly near swooning with shock. There were two females fussing to either side of her, the younger of whom was despatched by the other to fetch a glass of water. He had not intended Hartwell to make so public an exhibition of the affair.
“I feared that it would prove overwhelming,” he responded, and noted with dismay that Annabel’s silent figure flinched at the sound of his voice. She evidently knew him.
The vicar’s expression was expectant. It flashed through Hal’s mind that his assumed role demanded more of him. He hesitated. Should he go to her? Would a true husband at this juncture seize her in his arms? He could not bring himself to do it! Not to the female staring at him in so bemused a fashion. He did not even know what to say to her.
In truth he had not planned beyond the softened presentation by a local man of the cloth. But then it had not occurred to him that he would find so altered a creature in the woman he had loved and wronged. Nor that he would meet with anything other than a rebuff. Hence Mr Hartwell.
“If Jane will only hurry with that water,” came worriedly from the older female, who was chafing one of Annabel’s hands. “I fear she may faint away, Mr Hartwell!”
“I never faint.”
Hal felt his guts go solid. Annabel’s voice was a thread, but he would have known it anywhere. Its clear tone was in his head in too many recollected utterances to be mistaken. Deep inside the stranger he was confronting lurked the woman he had known.
He knew that it behoved him to consolidate the position he had adopted, but some quality in Annabel’s dull green gaze—it had used to be anything but lacklustre!—made him pause.
His soldiering instincts came to his rescue. When baulked by the enemy, retreat and regroup. He set his shoulders and summoned a hearty air.
“Perfectly true. To my knowledge, she never has fainted.” He turned to the vicar. “All the same, I believe it will be best if we withdraw for a space, my dear sir, and allow my wife a little time to recover.”
Annabel stared after his retreating back. Wife? His wife? She became aware of coolness against her lips.
“Drink, Annabel.”
She did so, bringing up a wavering hand to clasp the cool glass. There her fingers encountered Jane’s, bringing her a little more alert.
“I think I can manage.”
“Very well, but I will remain close by.”
The glass came into her full possession and Annabel drank deeply. Her head began to clear. But an odd sensation, as if she were living in a dream, possessed her.
If she was not asleep, then Hal was here! Hal, whom she had last seen on that fatal night which had shattered her then known life, casting her adrift in this alien sea. Forced to hide her identity under a living lie, that a false cloak of respectability might be cast over the shadowed little creature that was her innocent daughter.
Hal, whom she had been unable to forget—unable to forgive!—reminded daily by the growing likeness in Rebecca’s face and hair. How had he traced her here? Why had he done so? Foolish question! The answer was in Mr Hartwell’s announcement.
Murmurs above her head reached vaguely through the cloudy thoughts that roamed her mind.
“He is so extremely handsome, don’t you think?”
He had ever been so, and he had changed little—if she had been in any condition to judge. A dashing red-coat, who had returned her deep regard—inexplicably! Many had been her rivals, and no one had been more surprised than Annabel when he had sought her out.
“And so like Rebecca. There can be no doubt of his being her father.”
No doubt at all. And so everyone must suppose who saw him. Oh, she was undone indeed!
A faint protesting sound escaped her, and the two ladies immediately bent towards her.
“Poor Annabel, are you a little recovered?”
She turned her eyes on Charlotte Filmer’s anxious features. “I think I shall never recover.”
“Oh, don’t say so!” exclaimed Jane Emerson. “You are shocked, of course, and have not yet had time to realise—”
She was cut off with unusual curtness by the gentle Mrs Filmer. “Hush, Miss Emerson! She has time enough for realisation. Dear Annabel, take one little step at a time, I urge you. To be so suddenly re-united with your husband must be a severe disorientation.”
“Oh, yes, and he clearly saw it,” agreed Jane eagerly. “It shows such delicacy of feeling in Captain Lett to have brought Mr Hartwell to pave the way.”
Captain Lett! She had forgotten. Hal had come here posing as her husband, revoking her pretended widowhood. She was not ruined, but rather vindicated—but by a further lie. And one which gave him rights he did not have!
Abruptly, the implications of his action leaped into her mind. A surge of warmth overtook her as a memory—long thrust away as too painful to be contemplated—burst into life.
That little summerhouse! She had gone there, dragged by his impatient hand, only to indulge in a quarrel so empassioned that the deep-seated emotions that had bound them together had flamed, disastrously consuming them both.
Annabel had not blamed him for it, though he had bitterly condemned himself. She had been as much at fault, had owned as much to Papa. Only—
Her chest locked as the long-buried hurt rushed up to taunt her. Only Captain Henry Colton, in whom she had believed so implicitly, had failed her. And now—more than three years too late!—he dared to return in a mockery of that role he should rightly have assumed at the outset, as her husband.
Wrath burned as she recognised how he had trapped her. Before three witnesses, no less. It would be all over the area before the cat could lick her ear! Useless to beg her friends to keep silent. They would, if she required it, she knew. But to what avail?
Mrs Amelia Hartwell was probably already in possession of the news. From the vicar’s wife to the world was but a short step. And what hope had she of hiding anything when Aggie Binns was living not one hundred yards from her own door?
All vestige of that earlier shock had left her, replaced by fury such as Annabel had not felt in years. At his arrogance. At his sheer audacity!
Gripped by impatience, she rose abruptly. “I must thank you both for your kindness. Will you think me rude if I ask you to leave me now?”
Her voice was shaking, and Jane instantly picked up on it.
“My dear Annabel, you are in no condition to be left alone!”
“Indeed, my dear, I am persuaded you ought to lie down upon your bed for a little,” added the anxious Charlotte.
It was only by a supreme effort of will that Annabel prevented herself from shouting at them to go. But the habit of these last years reasserted itself. She was used now to suppressing the volcano of her feelings! She managed to summon a smile.
“Truly, I am over the shock now. But you will understand that the situation demands a degree of privacy.” Her tone became vibrant, despite that tight control. “I must speak with Hal alone!”
“Hal? How charmingly that suits him!” exclaimed Jane Emerson.
Annabel could have screamed. It was plain that her friend had been carried away by the romance of it all. Well, if she was determined to approve the bogus Captain Lett, let her do so. She might sing another tune if she knew the truth!
To Annabel’s relief, Charlotte Filmer intervened. “Come, Miss Emerson, we must take our leave. There must be so much to be said, and we are abominably de trop.’
Even as she spoke, the two gentlemen were seen to be returning around the corner of the house. The sight of Hal in person threw Annabel back into a degree of disorder, so that she scarcely took in the varied remarks of the well-wishers through the leave-taking. Yet in no time at all the murmur of voices died away, and she was left standing under the overhang of the chestnut tree, confronting a ghost from the past.
The silence lengthened. Hal knew not what to say. Almost he wished he had taken the sage warnings of his brother to heart. His determination, in the face of the apparent stranger that Annabel Howes had become, seemed to him now the product of that reckless temperament Ned had so often deprecated.
Regret his hastiness he might, but having taken this fatal step, he would stand buff. Only how to open communications with the creature he now faced utterly defeated him.
He drew a breath. “I have taken you by surprise.”
An abrupt spurt of mirthless laughter escaped Annabel’s lips. “To say the least.”
Hal stiffened. “It was meant for the best.”
Sudden fire from the green eyes took him aback. Annabel—much more the Annabel he remembered!—threw back her head, thrusting a defiant chin into the air.
“It was meant, Captain Colton, to ensure my acquiescence. It has not been so long that I am unable to recall your skill with tactics.”
Hal let out a reluctant laugh. “The devil! And I thought you’d changed beyond recognition.”
Annabel’s fire died, and she tried to recover her rapidly slipping control. It was like a nightmare. Standing here in his presence, hearing his voice, a prey to every outraged feeling he had ever made her feel, so that she knew not what to feel or think. She barely knew that she answered him.
“I have changed, yes. Circumstance has a way of making one do so.”
“So I see.”
He received a bleak look that struck him between the ribs. Her voice had taken on coldness. She blamed him for the change! Why would she not? Guilt rose up. He took a pace towards her.
Annabel drew back. “Keep your distance! You need not imagine that your usurped identity gives you any rights concerning me.”
Despite himself, Hal felt his temper rising. “What do you take me for? I have no intention of—”
“I am glad you chose to bring up the subject of your intentions, sir, because I am excessively interested to know what they might be.”
