Podmore,’ he said as though that explained it.
‘Oh, dear lord,’ she groaned, laying her forehead against the window.
‘Shall I tell her you are too tired to receive anyone just yet,’ ventured Adams, ‘having so recently returned from such a long journey?’
‘It is tempting, but, no.’ She sighed. ‘The wretched woman will only call back, again and again, until she’s said whatever it is she wants to say. Or ambush me in the high street, or on the way back from church. So I may as well get it over with by taking the tea you were going to bring me, with her.’
If Adams was surprised to be on the receiving end of such a frank speech, he betrayed no sign of it. Merely nodded his head and offered to take the tray she’d been awaiting into the front parlour.
Into which she had not wanted to go, not just yet.
Two birds with one stone, Amethyst muttered to herself as she opened the door to the formal gloom of the parlour and walked in.
‘My dear, is it true?’
Trust Mrs Podmore to ignore the convention of commencing a visit with polite enquiries after her health, and so on, and launch straight into the matter that really interested her.
‘I heard that dreadful Mountsorrel woman has run off and left you. After all you have done for her. The ingrate!’
‘How on earth has such a rumour managed to reach your ears?’ Amethyst went to the chair opposite Mrs Podmore and reached for the teapot. ‘I have only been back five minutes!’
‘But she hasn’t come back with you, has she? I had it from...the most impeccable source that it was quite another person who alighted from the carriage with you outside your doorstep earlier. A quite inferior-looking person—yes, thank you, I will have one of these cherry slices—who promptly got on the very next stage back to London. You simply must have your cook give me the receipt for my cook. Not that she will make them half so moist, I dare swear. She will leave everything baking until it’s done to a crisp. But is it true?’
Though Amethyst was sorely tempted to say she could not possibly know if it was true that her cook burned everything to a crisp, she refrained. She knew exactly what Mrs Podmore wanted to find out.
Which was what had happened to Fenella.
‘The rumour that Mrs Mountsorrel has run off? Absolutely not.’
‘But she is not here, is she?’ Mrs Podmore looked round the room as though she might spy Fenella lurking in some shadowy corner, the way she’d always done when one of the doyennes of Stanton Basset had come calling.
‘Indeed not,’ replied Amethyst calmly, adding a dash of milk to both their cups.
‘Well, where is she, then? Not—’ Mrs Podmore sat forward, her eyes brightening ‘—not suffered some terrible accident, I hope?’
‘Oh, no,’ replied Amethyst, dashing Mrs Podmore’s hopes. ‘In fact, quite the reverse.’
‘The reverse?’
Amethyst took a sip of tea, deliberately leaving her visitor trying to work out what could be the reverse of a terrible accident. Only when Mrs Podmore’s face betrayed a state of complete bewilderment did she relent.
‘She has remarried.’
‘No!’
‘Yes. The Comte de Quatre Terres de...’ She wrinkled her brow in concentration. How irritating. The one time his titles might have come in useful, she could only recall a small part of one of them. ‘Well, I forget quite where. A French count, anyway.’
‘Well, I never.’ Mrs Podmore set her cup down in its saucer with a snap. ‘However did a person like her come to rub shoulders with a French count?’
‘Oh, didn’t you know?’ She widened her eyes in mock surprise. ‘Fenella is very well born.’ Though she hadn’t welcomed Mrs Podmore’s visit, now the wretched woman was here, she might as well put her to good use. To set the record straight.
‘She made a poor choice of husband the first time round, it is true. A man who left her destitute and estranged from her family. But she is exactly the kind of person who should be rubbing shoulders with a French count. Not that we knew he was anything of the sort when we met him. I...’
She’d been about to say she’d hired Monsieur Le Brun as their courier. But once Mrs Podmore knew of it, it would be all over Stanton Basset, and from there the county, and who knew where else, within days. And he hadn’t wanted anyone to know about his mission. He’d taken her into his confidence. And she didn’t, she realised, want to break faith with him. It would be...well, a perfectly horrid thing to do. He’d probably exaggerated the danger he might be in, should anyone know who he really was, but she couldn’t contemplate exposing him to even the possibility of coming to harm. And it wasn’t just because she couldn’t bear to think of Fenella being widowed a second time. Especially not through something she’d said, or done.
It was for his own sake.
Good heavens. To cover her consternation at discovering she’d somehow started to care about offending a man she’d thought of for weeks as Monsieur le Prune, she took a defensively ladylike sip of tea.
‘Well, it makes no difference,’ said Mrs Podmore, bristling with annoyance. ‘Even if she was high born, it wasn’t her place to go taking up with some Frenchman while she was supposed to be working for you. Putting herself forwards, no doubt, with those airs and graces she had.’
Amethyst thanked providence that Mrs Podmore had lost interest in probing any further into the identity of the French count Fenella’d had the temerity to marry. And was revealing, at long last, just what had been at the root of the townswomen’s malice. It sounded as though they’d resented her for behaving like the lady she truly was. Assumed she’d thought herself too good for the likes of them and decided to take her down a peg or two.
‘I have never observed Mrs Mountsorrel put herself forwards,’ she said icily. ‘In fact, I think it was her very reticence that brought out all the protective instincts in...her new husband. And I am pleased for her. She deserves some happiness, don’t you think, after all she has been through?’
Mrs Podmore pursed her lips and shifted in her chair. ‘What I think,’ she said, setting her teacup down with a snap, ‘is that you are too liable to get the wool pulled over your eyes by people who are out to take advantage of you, that’s what I think. I can’t say I’m sorry she’s gone. But what I am sorry for is what people will say about you now. Why, you had to come back here all on your own. Which is not the thing, you know, not the thing at all.’
‘I hired a person from an agency in London for the journey home—’
‘Well, we all know how unsatisfactory she must have been, or you wouldn’t have sent her packing the moment you got here.’
‘No, that wasn’t why—’
‘A woman in your position must have a decent female companion, as I am sure I have told you before.’
‘Yes, you have,’ admitted Amethyst drily. ‘Many times.’
