Impetuous

Both Joanna and Aunt Ardis turned toward him, promptly forgetting all about their inelegant relative. Aunt Ardis’s face underwent a miraculous change, becoming suddenly gracious and welcoming. Beside her, Joanna dimpled and smiled and began to fan herself coyly.

“Why, Sir Philip!” Aunt Ardis exclaimed warmly. “What a pleasant surprise to come upon you.”

“Hardly an unlikely event,” Sir Philip replied drily, “since we are both staying here.”

Joanna tittered as if he had said something unbearably amusing. Sir Philip turned toward her. “Miss Moulton.” He gave her a sardonic look and continued, “I trust that you are feeling better this morning after your nightmare last night.”

Joanna’s mouth dropped open, and she glanced from him to her mother and back. Aunt Ardis was of no help, appearing equally astounded. Sir Philip looked toward Cassandra. She met his eyes with a stony gaze, folding her arms across her chest. Sir Philip started to speak, then stopped. He nodded toward them in a general way.

“Good day, ladies.” He turned and walked briskly away from them.

For a long moment Joanna and Aunt Ardis stared at his retreating form in stupefaction. Finally Joanna exclaimed, “He knew! Mama, he knew!”

“Nonsense. Just hush.” Her mother frowned at Joanna and cast a significant glance toward Cassandra.

“Oh.”

“Please, don’t bother trying to hide anything on my account,” Cassandra told them. “I am quite aware of your scheme to entrap Sir Philip.” She paused and added pointedly, “Obviously he is, too.”

“You told him!” Joanna cried indignantly.

“Joanna!” Aunt Ardis interrupted sharply.

“Well, she knows anyway.” Joanna pouted. “She’s probably been sneaking about listening at keyholes.”

“It is hardly necessary,” Cassandra replied coolly. “Anyone who heard your mother banging on your door and shrieking last night would have had a fair idea what you two were up to. And given the way you were throwing yourself at Sir Philip yesterday afternoon, it was not hard to guess who you were trying to entrap.”

Mrs. Moulton let out a moan of mortification, but Joanna started toward her cousin furiously, shrieking, “Why, you jealous cat!”

Aunt Ardis had the sense to grab Joanna’s wrist and hold her back. “Joanna! Stop it! Right now. I will not have you creating a scene at Lady Arrabeck’s house party. Things are bad enough already.” She glanced around the lawn anxiously, as if she expected the other houseguests to be gathering around and whispering about her. “Do you really think they all believe that we—that Joanna—”

Seeing her aunt’s look of humiliation, Cassandra almost took pity on her. However, she was in no mood to linger here, and she knew that if Aunt Ardis didn’t fear the scorn of the other guests, she would remain at the country estate as long as she could, searching for another prey for her daughter or perhaps even convincing herself that Sir Philip was still interested in Joanna himself. Joanna was, as even Cassandra was forced to admit, an exceptionally handsome woman, and Aunt Ardis was of the opinion that every man swooned before Joanna’s beauty. She never considered that anyone might be repelled by Joanna’s shallow, selfish nature or her silly conversation. It would not take Aunt Ardis long before she began to tell herself that if only Sir Philip continued to see Joanna, he would fall in love with her despite the trick Joanna had tried to play on him.

So Cassandra said flatly, “I am sure that they found it quite as peculiar as I that you were shouting outside Joanna’s room last night. It didn’t help that Joanna opened the door and told you that ‘he’ was not there.”

“You see?” Aunt Ardis exclaimed, rounding on her daughter. “I told you that you should not have said that. Anyone could have heard you. Why didn’t you think?”

“I suspect that Sir Philip must have heard her, too,” Cassandra added, hardening her heart to her aunt’s piteous look. “He was probably coming down the hall when you enacted your tragedy in Joanna’s doorway. No doubt he heard it all, and since he alone would have known for certain that it was he whom Joanna had invited to her room, he would have realized instantly what was going on.”

“I didn’t invite him,” Joanna protested, not very convincingly.

Cassandra did not reply. She merely cast her a look of patent disbelief that made Joanna screw up her face unattractively.

“Well, you needn’t think he is interested in you,” she huffed at Cassandra, “just because you managed to get him to walk with you in the maze. He would never have any interest in such a bookworm.”

“No doubt you are right,” Cassandra replied calmly. “As it happens, we met by accident in the maze. He seemed unable to find his way out, and I had to tell him.”

Joanna sent her a smug gaze. “You know nothing about men, Cassandra. No man likes to be told what to do.”

“How unfortunate, since so many of them seem in dire need of it.”

“Girls, please!” Aunt Ardis snapped, drawing attention back to the truly important issue—her own discomfiture. “This is not helping at all. We need to think what to do. I cannot bear to remain here with everyone staring at us and thinking that we—that you—”

“Engineered an incriminating rendezvous with Sir Philip Neville?” Cassandra suggested crisply.

“Really, Cassandra, you have a most unlady-like bluntness. It is very unappealing.”

“I’m sorry, Aunt Ardis,” Cassandra said with a noticeable lack of regret. “I am sure it must be a very trying situation for you. Perhaps we should leave.”

Aunt Ardis looked a little surprised, but a moment’s consideration had her nodding. “Yes, that’s the thing. We shall go back to Dunsleigh, and soon everyone will have forgotten this.” She frowned. “But what shall I say to Lady Arrabeck? I must not offend her.”

“Blame it on me,” Cassandra said cheerfully, knowing that was the plan most likely to please her aunt. “Say that I have been taken ill. I will go straight back to my room now, saying I feel poorly. This afternoon you can tell Lady Arrabeck how wretched I am and that I insist on returning home. Tell her you worry about me. Tell her I’m frail or something.”

“You are as healthy as a horse,” Joanna objected contemptuously.

“Lady Arrabeck doesn’t know that.”

“You don’t look sick. You look positively robust.”

“I shall do my best to look wan. Unless, of course, you would rather act the invalid.”

Joanna considered the matter, thinking of the appealing picture she would make, pale and fragile, leaning on her cousin for support as she made her weak way out to the carriage. Or she might even have to be carried out by one of the footmen—that handsome one she had seen in the hall yesterday, perhaps. Her lips curved up in a smile. “Yes, I think that would be best. It would be much more natural for Mama to be concerned about her daughter, anyway. Here, Cassandra, give me your arm.”

She put her hand through Cassandra’s arm and drooped against her. Cassandra stifled a sigh of irritation at her cousin’s dramatics, reminding herself that she would do almost anything to get out of this place and away from the odious Neville. She started slowly back toward the house with Joanna. She refused to think about the way that Sir Philip had ruined all her plans. All was not lost. She would go home and continue her search for those letters, and then...and then somehow she would figure out a way to find the Spanish dowry on her own.

Chapter Four

JOANNA ENTERED INTO her deception with such enthusiasm, applying white powder to her face for an interesting wanness and lying in her darkened room emitting effective groans and sighs, that it was all Cassandra could do not to slap her. Naturally, with Joanna “weak” in her bed, it fell to Cassandra to pack for both of them. She wondered darkly if her lazy cousin had taken that fact into consideration before she offered to play sick. It was the middle of the afternoon before Cassandra managed to get everything together and stowed away in their carriage, interrupted as she was by her aunt’s often contradictory orders.

However, finally Joanna, wrapped in a blanket, was carried down the stairs and out to the carriage by a burly, graying footman and carefully bestowed within, and Cassandra and her aunt climbed in after her. Lady Arrabeck’s daughter came out to graciously bid them farewell, and a few moments later they were wheeling at a smart pace down the drive and through the open iron gates of the estate.

“Whew!” Joanna pushed the carriage rug from her lap. “Get this thing off me. I’m sweating like a pig.”

Cassandra noted that perspiration was, indeed, making little rivulets through her cousin’s white powder. However, she said pacifically, “You put on a wonderful performance, Cousin.”

Joanna scowled. “Why did that awful old footman have to carry me down?” She was thoroughly disenchanted with the whole charade. “And no one was there to see us leave.”

“Lady Patricia,” her mother reminded her. “It was a very nice gesture, I thought.”

Joanna snorted. “She’s only the spinster daughter.”

“And so will you turn out to be, if you make many more mistakes like yesterday’s!” Aunt Ardis snapped.

“I! I made the mistake?” Joanna turned on her mother wrathfully. “It was you who came pounding on my door too early! You couldn’t wait, and it chased him away!”

“I came when we had agreed I would! He didn’t arrive on time, that’s what happened.”

“And that is my fault?”