I waited until the footsteps should have passed, and then threw back my bedclothes and moved as soundlessly as possible to the chair by my door. I put on my dressing-gown and reached for the knob. Another instant, and the doorway yawned wide — I peered out, scarcely breathing, and surveyed the gallery. It was empty of life. Whoever had passed must be presently upon the stairs.
One foot forward, and then another; and at length I had achieved the end of the hall. I must be admitted as possessing an advantage, in having traversed it a thousand times before. Not for me the trespass on a weak board, that should alert my quarry to pursuit. I peered down into the sweeping dimness of the stfirs, and glimpsed a single figure bobbing hesitantly before me in the dark — a woman, fully dressed and bonneted, and carrying a satchel. It must be, it could not be other than, Anne Sharpe.
I abandoned caution, and hastened down the stairs in her wake. She turned, and uttered a little cry that was as swiftly stifled by a hand to her mouth. Then she sped rapidly down the remaining stairs.
“Miss Sharpe!” I trained my voice to a whisper, but the words issued forth with all the violence of a shot in the echoing expanse of the marble-floored front hall. She was but a few feet away from me now, and intent upon the front door. As she struggled with the bolts, glancing half-fearfully over her shoulder, I reached her side.
“Whatever can you be thinking of, my dear? To walk abroad in the dead of night, without a single friend to bear you company? You are certainly in the grip of a fit,” I told her firmly, and closed my hand over her own. “Come sit down upon this bench, and tell me what you are about.”
“Why, for the love of God, can not you leave me alone?” she cried. “But for you, I should have been comfortably away! Away — from all that is painful, from—”
“Julian Sothey?”
“Mr. Sothey is nothing to me, Miss Austen. You quite mistake the matter, I assure you.”
“Nothing to you now, perhaps. But I think there was a time when he was very dear, indeed.”
She went limp, and allowed me to lead her towards one of the little damask benches that lined the entry hall. There she sat down and threw her head in her hands.
“You met at Weymouth and I suppose you fell in love with him there. Did you know that he was in Kent when you accepted the position at Godmersham?”
She nodded helplessly. “We had agreed to a secret engagement, and corresponded faithfully. I used to walk out on the morning a letter was expected, and intercept it in the post. I did not think that Mrs. Austen would look kindly on such a predisposition.”
“It bore too much of an affinity for intrigue — yes, I see how it was. And I suppose you met with Mr. Sothey, in the stableyard at The Larches, when Mrs. Grey was abroad?”
Her head came up at that, and a band of moonlight cut across her face. I read the look of shock in her countenance. “I, meet Julian in the stables at The Larches? However can you have devised such a notion, Miss Austen?”
“You did not sometimes visit him there?”
“How should I, who have no mount at my disposal, and am not a great walker, have travelled all that distance? It is above six miles! Impossible! I have never been nearer to The Larches than the Canterbury race grounds; indeed, I never had occasion to observe Mrs. Grey herself, until—” She faltered.
“Until the lady brought her whip down upon the neck of your betrothed,” I concluded grimly, “and you knew in an instant that the greatest intimacy must subsist between them. Or feared as much.”
“Feared — knew — I cannot tell you which,” she replied wretchedly. “I may only say that the most powerful conviction of betrayal then overcame me — and with it, a dreadful sense of shame. I had been treated lightly by a man I thought worthy of my love, and knew myself for a fool.”
“Mr. Sothey saw you on that morning, I collect?”
“Our eyes met across the race grounds. You must recall that he was positioned in such a manner that his figure must be visible to our party; seated in the Austen barouche, I was similarly exposed to his sight. We had not met in over a year, Miss Austen; and at my first glimpse of him, what joy! — to be overcome, so suddenly, by a passion akin almost to hatred.”
“He did not attempt to converse with you.”
“No,” she agreed, “and that alone convinced me of his guilt. Julian is many things, Miss Austen, but he is not a man who may lie in his looks. I knew that he was afraid to meet me, knowing what I had witnessed; and in this I comprehended the whole of the story.”
“Perhaps he read only indignation in your countenance, and thought to appease you later, when the first anger should have passed. Did he attempt to write a letter?” I enquired ingenuously.
“He may have attempted much,” Miss Sharpe replied, “but any letters I subsequently received, I burned without reading. Perhaps I should have returned them; but I had heard he was gone from The Larches, and did not know the direction at Eastwell. To have enquired it of Mrs. Austen would have appeared too strange.”
“I see.” Much of my supposition regarding the governess was proved correct — all but Mr. Brett's tale of a dark-haired woman departing on horseback from The Larches' stableyard. Could Mr. Brett be believed? Or was the story the merest fabrication? “Were you surprised, Miss Sharpe, to learn that Mr. Sothey was gone to Eastwell?”
“Utterly surprised,” she said in a low voice. “Julian had made no mention of such a removal to me, in his earlier letters — had offered nothing of a new direction, where my correspondence might be sent. In such neglect, Miss Austen, I read a further disregard. It was plain that Julian had tired of me, and wished to be free of all obligation.”
“Never say so, my dearest!”
The words burst forth in a cry of anguish, and in an instant, Julian Sothey was upon us. From whence he had come, drawn by the little scene, I could not at first imagine; but he was dressed as fully as Anne Sharpe, as tho' he, too, had intended a midnight flight. He threw himself upon his knees before the governess and seized her hands.
“You see before you, Anne, a heart now more your own than when you nearly broke it a few days ago! Have you any notion of the agony you have caused — the sleepless nights, the endless calculation, the desperate attempts at communication? All for the merest trifle — a misapprehension — the bitter result of a petulant woman's fury! Can you possibly have believed that I should abandon you, my Anne, for the fiend that was Mrs. Grey?”
Anne Sharpe still sat rigidly upon the bench, as tho' turned to stone by Mr. Sothey's appearance; his words had washed over her as ineffectually as a summer storm. “Please, Julian, I beg of you. Do not make me look a fool. Mrs. Grey should never have presumed to strike you, did she not believe you to be well within her power.”
“Within her power, perhaps,” he replied, “but never what you believe me to have been. Come to your senses, Anne! Is it conceivable I could be other than your own?”
She did not reply, but struggled to free her hands from his; and at that moment, a second voice at our backs alerted all our senses.
“Julian, Julian — must you bring the entire house around our ears?”