Free The Devil on Horseback by Victoria Holt

good deal of Derringham blood hereabouts … though called by other names. There was one of the Wedder girls who had two bastards by him, so the story goes, and that where James comes in. Always gave himself airs, did James. And now to run off like that.”
    They can’t have got far,” I said.
    “They’ve got a start you know. They’ll bring them back mayhap … and what then?” She looked at me intently.
    “They say it was to have been a match between her and Mr. Joel. That was why she was brought over here … least, that’s what I heard. What’ll happen now … who can say?”
    “She is very young,” I said.
    “I know her well … through school. I think she would be inclined to act recklessly and regret afterwards. I do hope Sir John is in time.”
    “They say Mr. Joel is determined to stop the marriage. He’s gone off with his father. The pair of them will put an end to this, you can be sure. But what a scandal for the Manor.”
    Anxious as I was to glean all the information I could, I was glad when Mrs. Manser left. I think she was trying to offer me some oblique warning, for it had been noticed that I sometimes rode out with Joel Derringham. Although there was not such a wide gulf between us as there was between Margot and her groom, still the gulf was there.
    Mrs. Manser thought I should be wise to” encourage the courtship of her son Jim and learn to become a farmer’s j wife. ^
    A whole day and night passed in anxious speculation and’;
    then Sir John and Joel returned bringing Margot with them. I| did not see her. She was exhausted and distraught and put;
    straight to bed. No one called from the Manor to give me| the news, and once again it was from Mrs. Manser that I| gleaned information. ‘ “They found them in time. Traced them, they did. They’d covered more than seventy miles. J heard it from Tom1 Harris, the groom that went with Sir John. He likes a jug of our home-brew taken in the parlour.
    He says they were both scared out of their wits and Master James wasn’t so bold when he was faced with Sir John. He’s been sent off on the spot.
    That’s the last we’ll hear of James Wedder, I shouldn’t wonder. Not like Sir John to send a man off when he’s got nowhere to go to, but this was different, I reckon. This ‘un teach him a lesson. “
    “Did you hear about Mademoiselle?”
    Tom Harris said she was crying as though her heart was broken, but they brought her back . and that’s the end of James Wedder for her. “
    “How could she have been so foolish!” I cried.
    “She might have known.”
    “Oh, he’s a dashing young fellow and young girls when they fancy themselves in love don’t always give much thought to what’s coming of it.”
    Again I felt she was warning me.
    Life was changing rapidly my mother gone forever and new responsibilities crowding in on me. The school was not the same; it had lost the dignity my mother had given it. I was well educated and could teach, but I seemed so young and I knew there was not the confidence in me which my mother had inspired. I was only nineteen years old. People remembered this. I found taking class more difficult than it had been;
    there was a certain amount of insubordination. Margot had not come back to school although Maria and Sybil had. Maria told me that at the beginning of the summer she and her sister were going to a finishing school in Switzerland.
    My heart sank. Without the Derringham girls, the school would lose the pupils who came from the Manor the preserve on our bread, as my mother had called them. But it was not so much the preserve I had to worry about as the bread itself.
    “There is talk of our brother’s going on the Grand Tour,” Maria told me maliciously.
    “Papa thinks it will be a good education for him and all young men of his station do it. He will be going soon.”
    It was as though Margot’s adventure with the groom had set something in motion, the subject of which was to change everything.
    I