Lovely Lying Lips Read online

  Above the excited twitter that greeted this revelation, her brilliant crystal blue eyes met the narrow green gaze of the condemned man—met and locked.

  From the scaffold the man about to be hanged concealed his astonishment with difficulty.

  For the lovely challenging face he gazed upon was one he had never seen before. This lady, just now occupied with saving his life, was a complete stranger.

  He wondered, even through the shock wave of relief that went through him, whatever had induced this lustrous wench to lie for him.

  And how she came to do it makes a tale worth the telling.

  PART ONE

  The Daffodil and the Iris

  Other loves may hold her, other arms entwine

  But they will be no bolder than the arms she left behind,

  Other men may stir her, other vows endure

  But she will not forget him—that at least is sure!

  The Valley of the Axe,

  Somerset, England,

  December 1684

  CHAPTER 1

  A cold wind was sweeping down from the Mendip Hills. It brought with it the promise of snow and a white Christmas at Axeleigh Hall, and the two young ladies in their fashionable velvet riding habits clutched their plumed hats lest they be swept from their heads and sent skittering across the meadow or perhaps lodged in the winter-bare upper branches of a nearby wych elm that soared a hundred feet and more above them.

  They made a remarkable pair: dainty Pamela, in her slate blue velvet habit with her wealth of golden hair and blue and white plumes, sitting proud and erect in the saddle and controlling with practiced ease her white Arabian mare who wanted to dance sideways down the road. And her father’s ward, Constance, tall and reed slender in her violet velvets, swaying with unconscious elegance and with a cloud of midnight dark hair beneath her wide-brimmed violet-plumed hat.

  The two girls could not have been more different in appearance but they shared two traits in common—impetuousness and reckless hearts. And both would lead them into trouble.

  Pamela Archer, who talked a great deal, was speaking now.

  “I don’t care how wealthy Melissa Hawley’s father is!” she told Constance energetically, and her strikingly beautiful blue eyes, so light in color that they were near to crystal, sparkled with annoyance. “She isn’t good enough for Tom. He needs—”

  “Someone like you?” hazarded Constance, her lovely but slightly jaded face turned toward sixteen-year-old Pamela.

  “No, I mean she’s out to get him any way she can!” sputtered Pamela, giving the older girl an angry look. “When I spied them last night at the ball at Hawley Grange, they were clutched tight together there in the dark buttery. Melissa’s bodice was clear down off one shoulder and Tom was untying the riband that held her chemise. I could actually see his hands on it—fumbling!”

  The ghost of a smile hovered at the corners of Constance’s pretty mouth. “You could see all that in the dark?”

  “I had brought a candle,” said Pamela stiffly.

  “Naturally.”

  Carried away by her subject, Pamela missed the irony of that comment. “Indeed had I not chanced upon them, a moment more and he’d no doubt have borne Melissa to the floor and her father would have insisted the fool marry her!” She sounded indignant.

  Constance’s calm gaze was fixed on a distant line of willows that, she knew, hid from view the silvery ribbon of the River Axe as it wound through this lovely valley. “And what,” she wondered, “were you doing in the buttery at that hour? Surely the ball was not taking place there!” She swung her amused gaze around to the younger girl.

  Pamela gave her an injured look. “Of course the ball wasn’t taking place there, Constance! Don’t be dense! Melissa’s mother had organized a game of hide-and-seek for the young people while the musicians rested and had some ale,” she explained huffily. “As you might very well have guessed.”

  “As I might indeed have guessed,” agreed Constance lightly. She was thinking of that huge barnlike house at Hawley Grange—indeed it had been a medieval tithe barn and had fallen into disrepair before wool-rich Nathaniel Hawley had decided to remodel the old stone structure to house his growing family. That he had done so neither tastefully nor well in no way diminished the value of the 125-foot-long building with its 40-foot gabled ends and its rabbit warren of rooms, for playing hide-and-seek. “And while the rest of them were hiding, you were seeking Tom, I take it?” she could not resist adding.

  “Nothing of the kind! I was searching about for a clever place to hide, and it occurred to me that the dark buttery—”

  “Was exactly the place where Tom might be hiding with Melissa?” suggested Constance with gentle irony.

  A high color rose in Mistress Pamela’s cheeks and she reined in her white Arabian mare so sharply that Angel reared up indignantly on her hind feet. Constance, not the superb rider that Pamela was by half, managed to bring her gray to a restless halt.

  “Oh, you can’t think I’m after Tom Thornton!” cried Pamela passionately.

  Constance wondered suddenly if golden-haired Pamela was the only person in the county not to know it. Had she really managed to deceive herself into thinking she was not in love with Tom? At the sight of Pamela’s flushed indignant face and snapping crystal blue eyes, she concealed a smile with difficulty. “Oh, I wasn’t saying that,” she managed vaguely.

  “I should hope not!” cried Pamela with so much energy that Constance fought back an almost uncontrollable desire to laugh. “ ’Tis just that I’ve grown up with Tom, being neighbors,” she added in a prim voice.

  And you’re mad in love with him, and he still sees you as the tomboy you were, the rampant little girl he took fences with as a boy, and climbed trees with—and not as the beauty you’ve become! thought Constance wryly.

  “Well, Tom Thornton’s a fickle fellow, not bent on marriage,” she told Pamela with a shrug. “You know that very well, yet every time he takes off after a new girl, you near burst your bodice with worry. I’m not implying that you need stays,” she added hastily to mute the black look Pamela gave her. “Not with a waist like yours that’s near to nothing!” For dainty Pamela’s waist was indeed as slim as her own.

  The compliment breezed right past Pamela, who had but one thing on her mind. “Tom’s like a brother to me,” she insisted with a righteous air. “And I can’t bear to see him make a mistake and ruin his life.”

  “Some would say ’twas no mistake,” countered Constance, “to court the daughter of a man as rich as Nathaniel Hawley!”

  “Oh, that’s ridiculous,” sniffed Pamela. “Melissa’s father is wealthy enough with all those sheep grazing, ’tis true. But there are lots of girls could bring him more!”

  Yourself, for instance, mused Constance. You, the heiress to Axeleigh Hall, could bring him manors and farms, and the dairies and cheeses of Cheddar, which your father owns as well, to add to Tom’s home estate of Huntlands.... Aloud she said, “Weren’t they surprised to see you, dashing in on them like that? I mean, I suppose they felt safe from prying eyes in the buttery. What did they say?”

  “Tom turned and glared at me,” admitted Pamela, aggrieved. “Melissa just stood there giggling away, and when I told them everybody was wondering where they were and her mother would no doubt be searching the house for them, Melissa pulled away from Tom, making sure that I could see the state her bodice was in, and she sort of swaggered toward me, just flaunting her bare skin at me as if to say ‘Can’t you see he’s mine if I want him?’ ”

  “Did she say that?”

  “No, she said”—Pamela gritted her white teeth—“she said, in a sort of plaintive wail, ‘She’s found us again, Tom!’ As if I was searching the house looking for them!”

  Constance, from her slightly taller height, gave the younger Pamela a commiserating look. “That must have been irritating for you,” she agreed.

  “Irritating? I was about to box Melissa’s ears for her when Tom stepped betwee
n us and said in a truly icy voice, ‘I hope if I should chance to run into you again this evening, Pam, that you will be in better humor.’ And dragged Melissa away with him! I followed along after because I realized of course by then that the game of hide-and-seek must be long over.”

  Of course, since you’d no doubt spent quite a while searching the house for Tom and his newest light of love, thought Constance, amused. “So what happened then?” she asked.

  “Oh, the dancing had begun again and before Tom could get Melissa on the dance floor, that gawky Landwell fellow claimed her and swung her out on the floor.”

  “And did Tom ask you to dance?”

  “No, he spun on his heel away from me and asked somebody else—Lydia Wilston, I think.” How galling that had been showed plainly in Pamela’s voice.

  Lydia Wilston, undoubtedly, thought Constance with a wry look at Pamela. You probably could catalog with complete accuracy every partner Tom Thornton had in the dancing and where he was at any particular time during the evening. Pam was nothing if not thorough in these matters. She sighed.

  “I wish you had attended the ball, Constance,” said Pamela plaintively. “I don’t know why you pleaded you were sick and stayed at home. You weren’t sick, you couldn’t have been or you wouldn’t be so fit today!”

  “I—do feel somewhat better today,” admitted Constance. Her dark winglike brows drew together in a frown that shadowed the deep purple of her eyes. It was not illness that had kept her from last night’s ball at Hawley Grange, but Ned Warburton. Ned was pressing his suit with too much heat and she was growing uneasy lest the Squire, her guardian, point out to her bluntly that she had already turned down half the young bucks in the county and bid her to choose one of them forthwith—perhaps even Ned. Indeed it was to elude Ned who, she sensed, might dash over today from Warwood on his big gelding to inquire about her health, that she had ridden out with Pamela. For Constance was not, like the Squire’s daughter, born to the saddle. She detested riding and she was rather afraid of horses. Indeed she was having trouble handling the spirited mount she was presently aboard.

  “Ned was there,” Pamela volunteered with a slanted look.

  “Was he indeed?” said Constance grimly.

  “Yes, he asked about you and when I told him you weren’t well he seemed very concerned and we had a long talk in the dining room.”

  “Really? What about?”

  “About Tom and his unconscionable behavior!”

  “And did Ned agree with you?”

  “He said I’d bring him to heel! Can you imagine?” Constance very well could but she forebore to say so.

  “I am furious with Tom,” announced Pamela hotly. “In fact, if he shows no better judgment than to pursue lightskirts like Melissa Hawley, then I may decide to wash my hands of him!”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t call her a lightskirt,” demurred Constance. “A little foolish, perhaps. And if you’re washing your hands of Tom Thornton, may I ask why you’ve headed your horse so determinedly toward Huntlands?”

  Pamela caught her breath. “Why, I wasn’t aware which way we were going,” she said with an airy toss of her golden curls. “I suppose we are headed toward Huntlands but that certainly doesn’t mean—”

  Constance caught that argumentative note. She didn’t want to quarrel with Pam, for whom she held a warm affection. She managed to veer the conversation into a discussion of marriage, and whether they should fly into it on their own or wait to be pushed and cajoled into it by well-meaning family members—meaning the Squire.

  It was a subject Pamela enjoyed discussing.

  “My old governess wrote me last week from Bath, where she’s teaching a whole brood of youngsters,” she told Constance. “It was a very gloomy letter. I had told her you were here with us now and she urged us both to marry!” Pamela’s laughter pealed; her laugh had an infectious ring that made all the world seem better.

  “And why, pray, should she urge that?” wondered Constance, looking blank.

  “She says that at seventeen you are already past your first bloom and can hope for little enough,” Pamela told her on another ripple of laughter. “And that I am still in my prime—but just barely—and I should take the first man who offers!”

  Constance looked amazed. “If those are her opinions. I’m surprised your father had her in the house!”

  “Oh, she was very mousy when she was here and never expressed any opinions. I take it she’s rather come out in Bath. What was your school like, Constance? I mean—Mistress Waldegrave’s, was it? Did they strap you to a backboard to make you straighter and pile books on your head to make you hold your head just so? My old governess was always threatening to do things like that but she never did.”

  “Oh—no, they didn’t,” said Constance vaguely and Pamela shot a sudden look at her. There was something rather mysterious about Constance, she thought. Daughter of an old friend of her father’s of whom Pamela had never heard until the day last summer that Constance arrived in their midst, Constance seemed to have a reluctance to discuss the past. Not that she didn’t answer with apparent openness anything you asked her, but she never volunteered anything. And she must have had a bad time, all those years in that school for girls, for her violet eyes were often so sad. You’d think she’d want to tell someone about it, but she never did. She’d just fall into those long silences and stare pensively out the window and when you spoke to her she would give a sudden start as if she’d been miles away.

  It had been worse lately. Tabby, her maid, muttered sometimes that the Squire’s new ward was “given to the sulks,” but somehow Pamela thought that wasn’t true. Something had happened in Constance’s past, something that didn’t bear speaking of. Something that had Marked Her Childhood! But she would find it out! Her crystal blue eyes sparkled.

  “Perhaps my old governess will find a match for each of us in Bath,” she chuckled. “And send them riding posthaste here to Axeleigh!”

  “I doubt that!” Constance was adjusting the plum velvet skirts of her narrow-waisted riding habit as she spoke and wondering if the sudden wind that had come up and was whipping across the brown-and-straw-colored meadow grass would tear loose the long hatpin that held her hat. Even as she reached for it, on a sudden wild gust the hat tore loose and went skittering into the meadow, its violet plumes ruffling as it sped along, as if it were alive. “Oh, no!” she wailed in dismay.

  Pamela, superb rider that she was, immediately touched Angel with her knee and launched herself into the meadow. Hanging onto the horn of her sidesaddle and putting her weight precariously on one stirrup, she swung down and swept up the quivering hat with one gauntlet-gloved hand. Laughing, she rode back to Constance, who had reined in her horse and shuddered as she watched the performance.

  “I couldn’t have done that,” sighed Constance. “I’d have catapulted headfirst into the meadow and garnered a headful of burrs!”

  “So nearly did I,” laughed Pamela. She had a sweet clear voice with a ring to it, like the clear chiming of church bells in the distance—none of the lazy languor of Constance’s dulcet tones. “But ’tis not so hard to catch the knack of. Here, shall I toss it back and you try it?”

  Constance gave her such an affronted look that she laughed.

  “You were born on a horse—I was not!” Hastily retrieving her hat from Pamela, Constance tried vainly to pin it more securely to her thick dark hair. “I was a city child and there were always plenty of sedan chairs or hackney coaches about!”

  Pamela nodded contentedly. She was glad she hadn’t been brought up in the city, viewing life from the stuffy confines of chairs and coaches. She loved to feel the wind in her hair and her skirts blowing as she cleared a stone fence. And she wanted a man like that, someone to ride beside, laughing and carefree.

  She shot a sudden look at Constance. “What kind of man would you choose for yourself?” she challenged.

  Around Constance the world seemed to still suddenly. She had chosen a man for h
erself, although curious Pamela was not to know that. Before her, from the slight rise of ground over which they now rode, stretched the broad Valley of the Axe, with the river flowing silvery and sparkling down through meadowland and woodlands, shadowed on the north by the blue beauty of the Mendip Hills—but she was not seeing any of that. She was seeing instead the beech and birch trees of the glorious Essex countryside, and the leaden skies of winter that rode the Axe River valley had changed for her to the blue and white rhapsody of summer. The months had magically melted away and she was floating as a bride on a sea of joy. Her light feet hardly felt the cobbles, warm underfoot from the brilliant sunlight. So dazzled were her eyes on that, her wedding day, that she had seen no pitfalls—none at all.

  “You have that same faraway look again,” complained Pamela as Constance gave up on her hat and clasped it under her arm as she urged her horse forward in an effort to keep up with Pamela’s dancing mare. “As if you’ve gone some place I can’t follow. I always feel you’re seeing demons, that there’s something lurking, waiting to jump out at you!”

  Constance shot her a sudden look. Frank young Pamela was more perceptive than she had thought.

  “You’ve never really told us about your past, you know.”

  “What do you want to know?” asked Constance warily.

  “What was it like, living in London?”

  “In summer, when the weather was fine my father would hire a carriage and we would all ride out into the country and stay at some inn. In winter there were frost fairs.” No need to tell Pamela that the frost fairs and the country inns were all part of the early life that had degenerated as the pittance of money which Anne Cheltenham had brought to her marriage gradually dwindled out. No need to tell her about the lean years when they lived—no, existed was a better word—from month to month, managing to get by mostly on the grudging generosity of a distant cousin in Norfolk who sent a trifling sum and a scolding letter on the first of every month. Anne always cried when she received the letters and Hammond Dacey would go striding out and come home drunk. Running from his problems—he had always done that.