The Secret of Pembrooke Park(72)

His eyes glinted knowingly. He must have seen her less-than-deft attempt at concealment.

“A letter?” he asked. “From whom, pray tell?”

“I . . .” Abigail hesitated. She believed the letter writer was Miles’s own sister. Likely he could look at the writing and confirm whether that was true, and the mystery would be solved. Why then did her spirit catch at the thought of showing it to him?

Abigail lifted her chin. “Forgive me, Mr. Pembrooke. But I hardly think it your concern.”

“Ah! A love letter, is it? I am all devastation.”

“No, it is not a love letter.”

“Then what has you looking so flushed and secretive?”

“Your persistence, sir!” she protested.

“From Mr. Scott, perhaps? Or the good parson?”

“Neither. And that is my last word on the subject. However, if you’d like the new Quarterly Review, I am sure my father would not mind your reading that to your heart’s content.”

He reached out and stroked a thumb across her chin, smiling indulgently. “You are charming when you’re vexed, Miss Foster. Has anyone ever told you that?”

“No.”

“Ah. That honor is mine at least. If not first in your esteem, at least I am first in something.”

Deciding to forgo her walk, Abigail excused herself, took the letter upstairs, and carefully latched the door of her bedchamber before opening it.

The letter began with two lines in bold print:

I hear you have a houseguest by the name of Pembrooke. Why did you not heed my warning?

This was followed by a long letter written in that familiar script. It was not a page from a young girl’s journal, as most of the others had been, but instead appeared to have been written recently.

We had been living in Pembrooke Park for more than a year when I first saw her. She stood in the rose garden, staring up at the house with haunted eyes. I stood at my bedchamber window, contemplating the grey sky, wondering whether or not to bother going out for a ride or if I would end up soaked. Riding was the only diversion I enjoyed, beyond reading novels. I had no friends. Not one. We had not been in Easton long before I realized our neighbors despised us. It was almost as if they feared us. Why, I wondered, when they don’t even know us? It seemed devilish unfair to me.

No one allowed their daughters to accept my invitations. Nor their sons to spend time with my brothers. The boys at least had each other. But I had no one. Maybe that is why I noticed her. A girl, perhaps a few years younger than myself, standing close to the house and partially hidden behind the rose arbor. I wondered if she was bent on mischief or simply afraid to be seen. Did she think we would run her off, not realizing I, at least, would welcome her warmly, so rare was a visitor to Pembrooke Park?

I thought I had seen most of the village girls at least from a distance, at church or on market days. But I had not seen her before. She had golden hair peeking out from her bonnet and wore a stylish spencer over her frock. She didn’t look poor, but neither was she a girl “equal to my station,” as mother referred to it. That was how she tried to console me—telling me it was just as well no girls my age called, for she wouldn’t want me to spend too much time in the company of uneducated rustics, not when I was well on my way to becoming an accomplished young lady. I confess I snorted a bit at that. A year earlier, we’d been living in a pair of shabby rooms in Portsmouth and wearing castoff clothing. Of course that was before Father had received his prize money and helped himself to the contents of his brother’s safe.

The first time I saw the girl with haunted eyes, I did nothing. When I noticed her a few days later, I raised my hand, hoping she would see me. But she didn’t. So I opened the window, thinking I would call out a greeting, but the sound of the latch startled her, and she bolted like a wild hare fleeing a fox.

When the girl didn’t return for several days, I went in search of her. Eventually I found her in a hideaway she had made between the potting shed and walled garden, quite out of view of the house. To a casual observer—or a boy—the arrangement of planks, bricks, colorful glass jars, and a pallet covered with a castoff petticoat might look like an odd collection of rubbish. But I saw it for what it was. A playhouse.

Not wanting her to flee again, I decided not to risk a direct approach. Instead I returned later in the evening to leave flowers in one of those glass jars along with a note assuring her I meant no harm and asking if I might play with her the next day. I signed it, Your Secret Friend.

I was afraid she would leave as soon as she discovered the note and knew someone had been in her hiding place. Instead, when I walked over the next afternoon, she stood there and watched me approach, looking solemn and older than her years.

“Why do you want to play with me?” she asked.

I decided to be honest with her. “Because no one else will.”

“And will you promise not to tell anyone?”

I nodded. “I promise. It shall be our secret.”

“Very well.” She tilted her head in thought. “You may call me Lizzie,” she said. “And I shall call you . . . ?”

“Jane,” I supplied, giving her my middle name. Afraid she would refuse to associate with me if she knew who I really was.

And that was the beginning of our secret, mismatched friendship. We met nearly every afternoon when the weather was fine, for most of that summer. We performed the little plays I had written, and played house, creating families and situations and lives more appealing or interesting than my own—likely than her own as well.