65 A Heart Is Stolen Page 10

  As the door closed behind him, Ivana turned to face the Marquis standing in front of his desk as Mr. Markham had done.

  “You seem to have taken charge of my servants,” the Marquis said in an icy voice, “but I am prepared, Mrs. Wadebridge, to listen to your explanation of what has been occurring here at Heathcliffe.”

  He looked down at the ledger as he spoke and then, as he was aware that Ivana was feeling for words, he asked sharply,

  “Why are you here in the first place? And why have you entered the house in such a strange manner?”

  “I came to see Travers,” she answered. “And I was told that you had taken the ledger from the estate office into the library.”

  “You were – told?” the Marquis queried. “Does everything that happens here reach your ears?”

  “A great deal of it.”

  The Marquis made an exasperated sound and sat back in his chair.

  “I am listening,” he said, “and, as I have already said to Markham, I want the truth.”

  Ivana gave a little sigh.

  “I realised as soon as you arrived so unexpectedly that we could not go on as we were.”

  “It was obviously unfortunate that I decided to visit my own house,” the Marquis murmured sarcastically.

  “It was, as far as we were concerned.”

  “Who is ‘we’?”

  “Nanny, Marky, Travers and, of course, the men we have been helping.”

  The Marquis’s lips tightened and then he said,

  “I am waiting to hear about these men. I imagine they are sailors.”

  “Of course.”

  “Suppose you start at the beginning.”

  Then, as if even in his anger, he was aware he should be showing good manners, he said somewhat grudgingly,

  “Do you wish to sit down?”

  “No, thank you,” Ivana replied. “I would rather stand. I am well aware, my Lord, that you are sitting in judgement upon me.”

  The Marquis did not reply.

  His eyes were hard and he was thinking that, although he was curious to know how he had been tricked and made to look a fool of by his servants, it was something he disliked intensely and to the offenders he intended to show no mercy.

  As if she knew what he was thinking, Ivana said after a moment,

  “I think perhaps as you said, I had best start at the beginning.”

  “I should have thought that was obvious,” the Marquis said coldly.

  “It all began three years ago when my brother Charles came back to England with his ship after the Battle of the Nile.”

  “In which your father was killed.”

  “Yes. Charles was a Midshipman and he survived.”

  Ivana paused and the Marquis thought that there was a suspicion of tears in her eyes and there was certainly a throb in her voice as she went on,

  “Charles told me how bravely Papa had died and he also brought home with him a sailor who, he said, had saved his life, but who had afterwards been badly wounded.”

  Ivana paused a moment before she said,

  “As I am sure your Lordship is aware, nothing is done by a disgracefully ungrateful country for those who have been injured at sea. They are just dismissed and cast off as paupers to live on what they can beg or – steal.”

  “I am aware of that,” the Marquis replied, “and I consider it a scandal, but there is nothing I can do about it.”

  “I thought that would be your attitude,” Ivana said scornfully, “and that was why I felt justified – ”

  She stopped and said,

  “I had better continue with my story.”

  “That is certainly advisable,” the Marquis said, “rather than become side-tracked into recriminations which will get us nowhere.”

  He saw the flash of anger in Ivana’s blue eyes before she went on,

  “Nanny and I nursed George back to life, although he will always be a hopeless cripple.”

  “I suppose that is the man with the wooden leg?”

  “So you did notice it!”

  “I notice most things,” he declared dryly.

  “I was afraid you might be curious about it.”

  “Only because you lied to me and said that you and your nurse were alone in the house, although I suppose actually the man sleeps in the barn.”

  “Why should you think that?”

  “Because I saw a light in the window after Sir Anthony and I had driven you home.”

  “That was careless,” Ivana said, “but I could not have anticipated that you would accompany me.”

  “Of course not, but, when one is telling lies, one has to take every precaution against being found out.”

  The Marquis spoke scathingly, but Ivana went on,

  “When George was a little better and Nanny and I were very proud of what we had been able to do for him, we went shopping in Brighton one day. I saw two other sailors there begging in the streets from the fashionable ladies and gentlemen parading themselves in their jewels along the Steine.”

  There was a contemptuous note in her voice as she carried on,

  “They were almost skin and bone and anyone who was not blind could see that they were half-starved. But nobody stopped to help them, no one would give them a fourpenny piece out of the hundreds of pounds which we are told are gambled away every night in the Royal Pavilion!”

  “So you brought them back to Flagstaff Manor with you,” the Marquis remarked.

  “Of course I did! How could the people of this country leave men, who have nearly died to keep us free from Bonaparte, in such a condition?”

  As she spoke, Ivana was almost spitting the words at him, but he said in a deliberately calm and indifferent voice,

  “Continue with your story.”

  “I suppose the word got around of what had happened. Anyway, more men came to ask our help and I could not – turn them – away.”

  She looked at the Marquis as if she appealed to him to understand, but he said after a moment,

  “Then I imagine you ran out of money?”

  Ivana nodded.

  “I sold all the jewellery Mama had left me and spent every penny of the small allowance I receive from Charles. I could not sell the furniture because that belongs to him.”

  “So instead you appealed to Markham to help you.”

  “He had always been a tremendous admirer of my father’s and, when Papa was killed, he was almost as upset as I was. He knew I felt that in helping these sailors I was doing something of which Papa would have approved.”

  “So he began to ‘cook the books’?” the Marquis said harshly.

  “It was not exactly like that. As the footmen left one by one, he did not replace them. He handed over to me the money he received from you for their wages.”

  “And that was not enough?”

  “We managed,” Ivana replied, “until about a year ago. Then more and more men begged our help and, although I tried to be firm and send them away, I could not bear their helplessness, the manner in which they did not plead with me – but merely said, ‘I understand, ma’am, I’ll manage somehow’.”

  Her voice broke and she added,

  “I knew they could not manage – not with their wounds turning gangrenous. Some of them had lost an arm or a leg, some could not even think properly and were – half-dazed from the – horrors they had been – through.”

  “So what did you do?” the Marquis asked, but he thought before Ivana replied that he knew the answer.

  “I sold a snuffbox.”

  There was silence while the Marquis stared at Ivana and she seemed incapable of continuing her story.

  Then with an effort she said,

  “It was not one of the best ones, in fact I thought it rather ugly. But the dealer who had bought my mother’s jewellery gave me a surprisingly large sum for it.”

  The Marquis remembered the box he had been shown by Peregrine Percival.

  “But one was not enough. So you went on stealing.”


  “Y-yes,” Ivana stammered. “Having taken one and Marky had no idea I had done so – I took another – then another.”

  She made a helpless little gesture with her hands.

  “They were not the best, they were the ones I thought, if you learnt about it, which seemed very unlikely as you never came to Heathcliffe, you would miss the least.”

  “So you actually did consider me in this extraordinarily reprehensible behaviour!” the Marquis said cynically.

  “I knew how much they had meant to your father, because Marky told me. But as you had so many other interests over and above Heathcliffe, I did not think you would miss what you obviously did not value personally.”

  “That was a quite unwarranted presumption,” the Marquis snapped.

  “I realise that now, since you have been here and seem so interested in the pictures. But at the time I thought an absentee owner was less important than a war and the men who were fighting in it.”

  Ivana said this defiantly and, as her eyes met the Marquis’s, it was as if she battled with him.

  “Go on,” the Marquis ordered. “I am wondering where Bateman comes into all this.”

  “Bateman resented being without footmen,” Ivana replied, “and actually he was incapable of doing anything because, having the keys to the cellar, he just drank and drank until half the time he was in such a drunken stupor that he could not even move.”

  “Markham should have reported it to me,” the Marquis said angrily.

  “He wanted to, but I persuaded him not to,” Ivana answered, “because we needed the money. Then I sent Travers here regularly to keep the place clean and tidy.”

  “Travers was with you?” the Marquis asked.

  “Yes, he came to me from Charles. He was only slightly wounded, but it meant that he could not go back to his ship for six months and before he was well enough to do so the peace came. Then I needed him desperately.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, as you know, sailors were made redundant in their hundreds. I think it was worse on other parts of the coast, but there were too many here for me to cope with.”

  “What do you mean by that?” the Marquis asked.

  “Most of the men had homes to go to or at least could return to their own towns where there was a chance of local assistance. But the trouble was, they had no money to get there.”

  “Are you telling me you supplied them with money for that purpose?”

  “You can imagine what happened when they first came ashore,” Ivana said. “There were harpies, crooks and pickpockets all waiting to take from them any wages they might have saved. After two nights on land, most of them were completely penniless.”

  “Surely that was their own fault?” the Marquis suggested.

  Ivana just looked at him and he had a sudden vision of Lady Rose’s face when he awoke after having too much to drink and found her beside him.

  “Continue with what you were telling me,” he said sharply.

  “Travers sorted out for me the men who were really worth helping,” Ivana said, “and we gave them enough money to go home and to buy food on the way. The ones that were scroungers he turned away, which I should never have been able to do on my own.”

  “So Travers was really your servant.”

  “Yes,” Ivana admitted, “but, when we heard that you were returning, I sent him quickly to Heathcliffe, taking with him as footmen the four most able men we could find at a moment’s notice.”

  The Marquis thought of the four clumsy lackeys in the ill-fitting livery and how Travers had seemed to do all the serving.

  “I presume Travers was on your brother’s ship,” he said after a moment.

  “He was the Admiral’s personal servant.”

  ‘I might have guessed it!’ the Marquis thought.

  Aloud he said,

  “Actually I was suspicious, even before I arrived, that something was happening here. One of my guests at Veryan had a snuffbox that I was quite certain had been in my father’s collection. It depicted a battleship on an emerald sea.”

  “I was afraid you might mind losing that when I sold it.”

  “Again I suppose I should be grateful that you even thought of me,” the Marquis remarked, “and let me add that when I arrived and saw that the cabinet was nearly empty, I was aware that a number of snuffboxes were missing.”

  “I was hoping you would not notice that until after I had robbed you!”

  The Marquis looked at her in astonishment.

  “Good God!” he exclaimed. “So you were the highwayman!”

  Ivana nodded.

  “It was the only way I thought I could prevent you from realising that the snuffboxes were not there.”

  “Then they were all that are left?” the Marquis enquired. “I thought perhaps some of them might have been put in the safe.”

  “I anticipated you might think that too,” Ivana replied. “That is why I made one of the men come through the pantry door.”

  “You certainly seem to think of everything. I could hardly believe that you could play the part of a man so well, although I did half suspect it after I heard you say you were a mimic.”

  “That was another mistake to call the parakeets,” Ivana said with a sigh, “but you kept asking about the barn and I was so afraid that you might insist on looking inside.”

  “What would I have seen?” the Marquis asked.

  “There are only five wounded men left,” Ivana replied, “but that night there were ten others staying whom we were sending home to different parts of England the next day.”

  “You are certainly organising things on a grand scale with my money,” the Marquis remarked.

  “I am – sorry, but I can give you back the snuffboxes that are left and, of course, your watch and the gold ship.”

  “Why, as a matter of interest, did you take that?”

  “Because I thought you would think it strange if a highwayman left anything so valuable behind on the table. But I promise you I would never have sold it. It belongs particularly to Heathcliffe as perhaps nothing else does.”

  “That sounds very convincing, Mrs. Wadebridge,” the Marquis said sneeringly. “I am just wondering whether, if I had not returned now, there would soon have been any of my possessions left. What about the pictures and the furniture?”

  “It’s no use my trying to excuse myself,” Ivana answered. “I am aware how angry this must make you, but I felt what I was doing was right and just.”

  “Just – for who?”

  “For England!”

  “I think your notions of justice are somewhat muddled, I might even say twisted,” the Marquis said. “Or do you fancy yourself as a latter-day Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the poor?”

  He spoke so contemptuously that Ivana felt her anger rising.

  “Perhaps it is a good comparison, my Lord,” she replied, “but to be truthful, it was stealing from the very very rich for the men who were prepared to die so that his possessions should not be taken from him by the French.”

  The Marquis thought that she had scored a point, but he countered,

  “You can hardly expect me to approve of your methods however well you doll them up with pretty words.”

  “I have no wish to do that,” Ivana said. “All I want is that you should understand that everything that has happened here was my fault and my fault entirely.”

  “Markham is my agent and as such his loyalty should have been to me as his employer.”

  “Is that all that matters to you?” Ivana asked. “He had a deep affection for my father and, although he connived at giving the sailors the money, you were paying for servants who were doing nothing, he did not know for a long time that I was stealing from you.”

  “And when he did?” the Marquis enquired.

  “He was shocked – very shocked, but when he saw the suffering of the men I was trying to help, he knew that without extra money for medicines and the food they required they
would soon join those we – had buried in the – churchyard.”

  There was a quiver in Ivana’s voice as she added,

  “Four died last year and three the year before. Nanny and I did everything we could, but it was hopeless – they were – all so – badly hurt.”

  The Marquis looked down at the ledger.

  “You have made out a good case for yourself, Mrs. Wadebridge,” he said, “but I am certainly not happy about the way Markham has behaved in this whole matter.”

  “I have explained to you – ”

  “I know,” the Marquis interrupted, “but, as I have said, Markham is my agent. I trusted him and he has abused that trust, which is something I will not tolerate.”

  Ivana gave a little cry and moved nearer the desk.

  “You cannot mean – ?” she said. “You cannot – intend to – dismiss him?”

  “I see no other course of action.”

  “But you must not do that! He has been here all these years. It is his life. He loves Heathcliffe. He would die for – the house and – your family.”

  “All I ask is that he should live honestly while he is working for me.”

  “You cannot be so – cruel – so hard,” Ivana said. “It would – kill him to go – away. Besides – where would he go? He has no – money saved.”

  “I suppose you spent that too.”

  “I tried to prevent him from being so generous, but he insisted and would often give the men – something behind my – back.”

  “That was his decision,” the Marquis asserted.

  Ivana looked at him and thought that his expression was merciless.

  “How can I plead with you?” she asked. “What can I say to make you – understand that Marky must not – suffer for this?”

  Her hands were on the desk now as she said,

  “Listen to me – my Lord. Please – listen.”

  The Marquis’s eyes were on her face as she went on,

  “I will do – anything you tell me to do. You can – punish me in any – way you wish – even send me to prison – and I will not – complain. But don’t make Marky – suffer for – my sins.”

  “Your sins are a very different matter, Mrs. Wadebridge,” the Marquis said, “and, as you have said yourself, the punishment for your crime is very obvious.”