Place of Confinement by Anna Dean Page A

Kent.’
    ‘I beg your pardon.’
    ‘I only mean to say,’ he continued, watching her closely, ‘that in promoting my marriage, you would be furthering the cause of your own.’
    Heat flooded Dido’s cheeks. She could neither speak, nor look at him; she turned her eyes away to watch a herring gull gliding up the breeze above the stark ribs of a new roof.
    ‘It will not do to be so very disapproving,’ he laughed. ‘For you and I both know that it is my little difficulties with my creditors which keep my father from marrying again. He thinks himself too poor to take a wife. But let me get an heiress to settle my debts and you could be a married woman by Michaelmas!’
    ‘I do not understand your meaning, sir,’ she said, exerting herself to speak calmly.
    He only laughed.
    Shocked and shaking, she could trust herself to remain no longer. She turned and began to make her way blindly along the mall. But he raised his cane, pointed it at her retreating back and called, ‘You understand me, Miss Kent. And you know that you and I are natural confederates in this business.’
    She fled against the salt breeze, her hands shaking as she clutched her pelisse about her. She wanted only to escape, to get beyond the cruel gaze of his eyes.
    All at once the open mall which had, minutes ago, seemed all cheerfulness and refreshment was become a place of torture. It was too straight, too wide. There was no avoiding that terrible stare; she seemed to feel it as an ache upon the back of her head.
    She was now passing the broad steps which fronted the town’s newly built public rooms, and she saw that a large wagon was drawn up on the road. Like a hunted fox seeking cover, she hurried forward and escaped to stand on the steps, where the sides of the wagon hid her from Tom’s view.
    She stood quite still in the deep shade, trembling with relief as the pain upon her neck eased. She pressed a gloved hand to her mouth.
    What did he know – what did he suspect – of how matters stood between her and his father?
    She could not bear that he should know – and laugh. The vulgar sneer seemed to pollute what was most dear to her. But was she also doubting herself? Did some part of her pain spring from the suspicion that he had guessed aright?
    Dido stood for several fugitive minutes in the shadow of the wagon – whose gaily painted sides declared it to belong to the travelling theatre company of one Mr Isaac Mountjoy. And, in the shelter Mr Mountjoy provided, she forced herself to face her own schemes – to name them to herself. What was it, exactly, that she had planned as she sat beside her aunt’s bed?
    To find Miss Verney, and so get herself to Belsfield. And once there she hoped to … reach an understanding with Mr Lomax? To achieve an engagement public enough to relieve her of Doctor Prowdlee’s attentions?
    Yes, she confessed it to herself, that was her plan.
    But there was no denying that it would be a long engagement. No marriage could take place until the debts which Mr Lomax had assumed for his son’s sake were all paid. Two or three wretched, interminable years must be waited through. Two or three years spent as a ‘visitor’ in Margaret’s house, becoming every day more contemptible in the eyes of the world.
    Tom’s marriage to a wealthy woman would certainly be to her advantage. But she was not quite so unprincipled as to sacrifice another woman’s happiness in the cause of her own.
    At least, she hoped that she was not. And, after all, she told herself, once she was returned to her family, it would be for Miss Letitia herself to decide whom she married, would it not? In searching for Miss Verney, Dido was by no means directly promoting her marriage to Tom.

Chapter Eleven
    ‘Ah! Fair damsel, what is it that troubles you?’
    Dido looked up in alarm as the voice boomed over her head, and saw a man as large as his voice hurrying down the steps from the colonnaded front of the rooms. He was wearing a canary-yellow