‘What… Where are they going, Miss Lawrence?’
‘Away, because I need to talk with you, Henrietta. Very seriously.’ I sat on the bench, pulling her down so she had no option but to land with a bump beside me. ‘About Arabella Trenton.’
‘No! I cannot… I mean, I have no idea…’
‘You have no idea how much trouble you will be in if you do not tell me,’ I promised her. ‘She may well be in danger – don’t you care?’
‘I… yes, of course I care, but she made me promise. And anyway, I cannot tell anyone without explaining about the masquerade and Papa will kill me.’ The big brown eyes filled with tears and she scrabbled one-handed in her reticule for her handkerchief.
‘You know perfectly well he will not, whereas someone might kill Arabella, if they haven’t already.’
She gave a small scream and stared at me.
‘Or rape her, or both.’ That did it. She burst into tears, more out of shock at my explicitness than anything, I suspected. ‘Now, tell me and I will do my best to keep you out of it. But if you don’t tell me everything, then I will take you back home and speak to your parents myself.’
It took another five minutes before the weeping and wailing subsided enough for her to make sense. Two weeks before she and Arabella had crept out to a masquerade ball, masked and wearing dominos. ‘Lucy Fanshawe told us about it, and she could take us up in her carriage because her cousin Harry escorted her. It was a great lark, and really so fortunate that he could come with us. He had been sent down from Oxford that week, you see. He is so handsome and such good fun.’
I could just picture Cousin Harry. ‘I presume that you are not supposed to attend masquerade balls?’
‘Oh, no and I can quite understand why,’ she confided, wide-eyed. ‘It was a sad romp and there are all kinds of people one d
oes not normally meet. I mean, cits and tradespeople and women of ill-repute, I dare say. But we were masked, so it was quite safe, you see.’
I imagined that pretty face and nubile figure thinly disguised by a mask and domino and wondered how she had managed to get home in one piece.
‘But it did become rather… wild as the evening went on, but it was all right because just when two dreadful bucks started ogling us and tried to get into our box, Lord Welney appeared and rescued us. He was masked, but he is so good looking that we knew him at once. And he is very tall and dresses so well and he has wonderful shoulders…’
‘Henrietta! Pull yourself together. What did Lord Welney do? Hit them?’
‘Oh no. He just looked at those awful men through his quizzing glass and they went,’ she said simply.
‘I see. Looked at them through his glass, you say? Terrifying for them.’
‘It was. I would have been in an absolute quake.’ Obviously sarcasm made no impression on her. ‘And, of course, we invited him into our box to thank him and he ordered champagne. It felt so grown up, because Mama does not allow me to drink wine in company, only a small glass when we dine en famille.
‘And then?’ There had to be a then.
‘He invited us to a reception at his house. He said it would be quite informal, with some dancing and cards – just a romp, really.’
I bet, I thought grimly. ‘Did you go?’
She bit her lip and blushed. ‘No, I could not because Mama caught me kissing Frederick Gorridge behind the potted palms at Lady Hestercote’s ball the next night and now she will not let me go to any evening entertainments for a whole month and she makes Potter – that is her maid – sleep in my room every night. So I could not go.’
‘Did Arabella go? When was it?’
‘It was the night she disappeared,’ Henrietta confessed with a gulp.
Chapter Eleven
I released Henrietta’s arm, stood up and walked away from her because I was within an inch of boxing the little idiot’s ears. ‘And it did not occur to you that something happened to her at this reception?’ I said when I had calmed down enough to turn back. ‘That you should tell someone where she might have gone?’
‘But then I would have had to say how I knew.’
‘And you are so disloyal to your friend that you would put getting into trouble with your parents over her safety?’
‘But she would not be unsafe, not with Lord Welney. He wants to marry her, I think. He is courting her.’
I sat down and contemplated tearing off my bonnet and stamping on it. I couldn’t blame the girl, she had been brought up to be an ignorant innocent and she probably had not the slightest idea how dangerous a man like Welney might be. ‘How do you know he is courting her?’ I managed when I had got my impulse to explode into basic Anglo-Saxon under control.