A Beastly Kind of Earl

by Mia Vincy

  “I wanted her to receive the best care.”

  “Do you remember, I volunteered to come with you? But you said there was no need to drag me away from my home, you’d hire someone else. I would have gone to the ends of the earth if it meant being with Katharine.”

  Helplessly, Rafe’s eyes sought Thea. Their gazes wove together, and it was all he could do not to cross the room and lay his head in her lap. But when she half rose, as if to come to him, as if he were calling to her, he swung away to face the window. He watched her reflection, the shadowy movement as she resumed her seat.

  “I’m sorry. I had no idea. If I’d known how you felt,” he said to the window, to his ghostly reflection, to the lawn and lake beyond.

  “Yes, if you’d known.” Bitterness soured Sally’s tone. “For all I knew, you would have dismissed me, had you known. My father would have put me in an asylum, had he known. And if you’d known what Ventnor was attempting, you would definitely have taken Katharine away. It was selfish of me, but I was so sure I could protect her.”

  “You did save her,” came Thea’s voice.

  “But the shock, the fright, what it did to her mind…”

  On the lawn, a large black bird landed and fluttered its glossy wings. A second bird joined it.

  “The crows,” Rafe said.

  “The crows,” Sally confirmed. “The day after the kidnapping attempt, Katharine saw them: a dozen crows, gathering in the tree outside her window.”

  Rafe pressed his fingers to the glass, hardly seeing the sunny scene through the memory of the storm clouds rumbling over Katharine’s head that long-past afternoon. You are as dark and silent as the crow, and with just as evil intent.

  Sally’s words washed over him. “She became convinced the crows were coming for her, to do her harm. Her conviction grew, and sentences in that Gothic novel confirmed it, and she came to believe the kidnappers were from you. I hid the book, but she found it. I put laudanum in her drink, but she must have tricked me and not taken it.”

  “Then she saw a crow kill a sparrow,” Rafe finished, “and the coming of the storm.”

  He turned back around. With great effort, as though her eyeballs weighed a ton, Sally looked at him. “My error in judgment will haunt me forever. I loved her, and I killed her. If I had told you, if I had not been so selfish…”

  If, if, if, if, if.

  “The kidnapping attempt,” Rafe said. “She must have been terrified.”

  Sally smiled wanly. “You would have been proud of her, the way she fought. One of those men wears my bullet hole, but the other will carry Katharine’s tooth marks till the end of his days.”

  The image of Katharine fighting off one of Ventnor’s ruffians swelled in Rafe’s mind. He thumped the window frame, the sting in his knuckles driving the picture away.

  “We tried so bloody hard to keep her calm,” he said. “That’s what they recommend. Calm. Routine. Sympathy. Sunlight. And she went months without an episode, living a normal life. Then blasted Ventnor sends his blasted ruffians…”

  “It was all Ventnor’s doing, then,” Thea broke in. “Neither of you is responsible for her death. Ventnor’s actions led to his daughter’s death, and he probably doesn’t even care.”

  “He doesn’t,” Sally spat with loathing. “He even said her death solved his problem.” With another deep breath, she stood. “Master Rafe—I mean, my lord. I have so many regrets. I have tried to do right by you, since you came back. I have kept this house in readiness for the day you brought home another bride, to house a new, happy family. But perhaps my reasons for that were selfish too: Because if you could free yourself of the past, maybe I could too. I shall leave, now.”

  Rafe shook his head. Free himself of the past? He had lost himself in the selva for that, yet still the past pursued him. Once again, his gaze strayed back toward Thea, but this time, he could not bear looking at her. This time, the walls began to close in, air became short, his legs grew heavy. Nicholas was rising to his feet, Martha was frowning at him, Thea was saying his name in an echo that shuddered through his suddenly empty skull.

  “I need to think,” he managed to say, eyes on the door, forcing his legs to carry him away. Something in Sally’s face stopped him as he reached her side. He put a hand on her shoulder. “You loved her. I am glad of it. She deserved to be loved.”

  Then his legs propelled him forward again, to make his escape.

  In the oppressive foyer, Rafe headed numbly for the front door, but Thea’s voice, calling his name, coiled around him like a rope. If only the whole blasted world would disappear, leaving nothing but him and Thea. She would chase away his shadows, and he would chase away hers.

  As he pivoted back, she skipped through the doorway toward him, easily, assuredly, their quarrels forgotten. She pressed a hand to his chest, and it felt the most natural thing in the world to trail his knuckles down her cheek.

  “It wasn’t you,” Thea whispered, her eyes searching his.

  Then Nicholas joined them, and they lowered their hands in a futile charade of propriety.

  “Forgive me,” Rafe said. “I need some time alone. I need to think.”

  Nicholas laid a hand on his sleeve. “Then take time to think. And think of how it truly was not your fault Katharine died. Not yours, nor Sally’s. You have believed the wrong story all these years. This is what I tried to tell you.”

  A disbelieving laugh curled out of Rafe’s throat. “Oh no, old man, do not pretend you ever imagined this.”

  “Not this exactly.” Nicholas tilted his head to consider. “Fair enough. Not this at all. But I never doubted you did everything you could for Katharine.”

  “Yet it wasn’t enough.”

  Nicholas and Thea exchanged a look, and Rafe’s feet shuffled on the checkered floor. His four limbs fought to take him in different directions: to run to London and tear off Ventnor’s head; to pull Thea into his arms and lose himself in her; to dive into the lake and swim to exhaustion; to fall to his knees and weep.

  “Miss Knight, if you might give us a moment?” Nicholas said.

  “Very well.”

  Rafe kept his eyes on Thea as she returned to the drawing room, watching until the hem of her dress disappeared.

  Nicholas pulled the door shut behind her and grinned. “She’s truly enchanting, isn’t she, our Miss Knight?”

  “Now? You want to do your matchmaking now?” The man was impossible. “Yes, she is enchanting, but recall she is here only so I could secure the funds to finance the medicine business. If you want happy marriages and rooms full of babies, go bother Christopher and leave me alone. I’m the man who could not protect his first wife from her own father.”

  He turned to leave but Nicholas caught his arm in a surprisingly firm grip. “You know, my boy, I have always wondered about this plan of yours to make medicines. I wondered how much you wish to save others because you still long to save Katharine. For years, you had to watch someone you love suffer, while you stood helplessly by. I know something of how that feels. But know that Katharine died despite your love, not because of it.”

  Air was growing short again, and Rafe glanced longingly at the front door. “Does this sermon have a point?”

  Nicholas smiled. “Now you are in love again, and you are afraid.”

  “I am not.”

  But he was something. Something that did feel a little like fear. He was accustomed to fear as a jolting thing, direct and acute, with teeth and claws or guns and knives. This was a different kind of fear. The kind of fear that used to grip him when he witnessed Katharine’s torments, when he lay awake in the dark worrying what to do. This kind of fear turned him to stone, from his shoulders to his feet, and it was difficult to breathe, with stone lungs.

  “Forgive me,” he said again. “I need some time alone.”

  Nicholas nodded and stepped away, and Rafe escaped into the air.

  Craning her neck at a window in the drawing room, Thea watched Rafe stride across th
e lawn toward the woods, toward his greenhouse and his plants. Only when he was gone from view did she turn back to where Sally and Martha sat silently side by side.

  “This is why you feared I would dismiss you,” Thea said to Sally. “The secrets you kept.”

  “I cannot live here,” Sally said. “Not after what I have done.”

  “No,” Thea protested. “It was not your love that killed her, but Ventnor’s fear. No one blames you.”

  “I blame me.”

  Martha laid her hand over Sally’s. “You loved her.”

  Sally smiled. “I used to tell Katharine that her illness was due to her having so much spirit, her human mind could not contain it.”

  “And when she died, you had to grieve alone,” Martha said.

  “I cared for nothing anymore.” Sally stared down at their joined hands. “I could not bear to stay here, so I went to London. I knew I could not harm Ventnor so I used him instead. When he offered his patronage—the whole notion thrilled him, I think—I decided to live as I pleased. After all, keeping secrets had led only to heartache. But in the end, I was sent running again.”

  Thea growled. “Yet another reason to loathe Ventnor, for chasing you away.”

  Sally suddenly grinned. “The man who threatened to cut me was the same man I had shot. He told me his shoulder ached in the cold; I told him I was sorry for it, and regretted not shooting him in the heart.” Her mirth faded as she shook her head. “Listen to me, talking as if I were brave, when I could not even denounce Ventnor to the world. All I can do is look after those in my care, and I never let anyone be harmed on my watch.”

  “You never let yourself love again either,” Martha said softly. “Time has passed. You have grieved. The past cannot hold you forever.”

  A look fluttered between Sally and Martha, a deeply intimate exchange that made Thea hastily pivot away. She stared out the window, where Rafe had gone. How foolish of her, to have quarreled with him, to have wasted so much time.

  “If only we could show the world what Ventnor truly is, if the world could stop admiring itself long enough to listen.” Thea turned back to the others. “It’s not right, that everyone believes lies about you, so you were forced to skulk away like a villain.”

  Sally snorted. “They believe the lies because they fear me, though I would do them no harm.”

  “They should fear you.” Thea laughed at Sally’s outraged expression. “After all, you are rather fearsome.”

  A heartbeat later, Sally laughed too. “I am rather, aren’t I?”

  Thea paced away from the window, powered by her growing fury. “You were threatened, and Katharine was killed, and Rafe is slandered, and I was cast out. Ventnor and Percy and their ilk merrily go about their lives, while the rest of us live like exiles because of them.”

  “Who are we to take on a powerful viscount?” Sally gestured at the three of them. “A Sapphic actress, a foreigner, and a scandalous outcast.”

  A scandalous outcast with a fortune, Thea silently amended. She had not let herself think about the money Rafe had secured for her; Pa would be displeased if she took her dowry while remaining unmarried. But fifteen thousand pounds… Oh, the mischief that could buy! Her pamphlet would be the first step. Then she’d find a way to ruin Lord Ventnor’s life. And then… Well, the world offered no shortage of villains for her to bring down.

  And maybe, one day, news of her activities would reach Somersetshire and Rafe would—

  No. She must not start painting futures where there were none. Optimism was one thing. Delusion was another. Rafe did not want to be in the world. The world was poorer without him in it, but that was his choice. She would concentrate her effort on the things she could do, and keep such magical notions for the outlandish stories that flowed from her pen.

  With as much consciousness as an automaton, Rafe marched in the direction of his greenhouse, but in the woods, he impulsively veered off along another path, ending up in the small clearing, standing by Katharine’s grave.

  Dropping into a crouch, he ran his fingers through the glossy leaves of the morning glory vine and parted them to reread the words he had ordered carved on her headstone: Come unto Me and I will give you rest. Perhaps he had chosen those words for himself rather than for her; in the grip of his grief and guilt, he had found some solace in the thought that finally, Katharine could know peace.

  So many years had passed, taking his grief with them. He had shed it during his travels, dropping bits behind him as he roamed. Such was the nature of grief; grief for his wife, for his father, for his brother. But guilt, ah, guilt never faded. Guilt lurked always, taunting him with the intolerable injustice that he remained, when all the rest were gone.

  He let the vines drop over the stone and stepped back. He had planted this morning glory the day he left England, and never tended it since. It had flourished over the years. And, he realized, it was trained to grow over the grave. He took another few steps back. The grass was trimmed. The granite headstone was clean. Someone was tending this grave carefully, and that someone was not him.

  Sally.

  He had never guessed her feelings; he had been insensitive and she had hid them too well. He dug into his memory, turning up images like fresh earth. Katharine teaching Sally to play cricket on the lawn. The two of them at the pianoforte at night, singing in harmony, while he and John chatted idly over their port. Their heads bent together as they read or sewed.

  “You were loved,” he whispered to the grave. “You were loved.”

  Rafe left Katharine’s grave and walked. He walked and walked and walked, until the light began to fade and he returned to the house. Inside, sounds came from the dining room: Thea and Nicholas, Sally and Martha; he lingered in a hallway, listening to their muffled merriment, then he continued his walk upstairs. A tray of food had been left in his room; numbly, he ate, exhausted from turning his life over. He had been so sure he could not change the past, but later, as he slid into sleep, his past broke around him, and rebuilt itself as something new.

  When Rafe awoke, the sunlight was already a golden glow slicing through the edges of the curtains. He washed and pulled on his trousers, stockings, and shirt, wondering at the quiet, belatedly realizing it was Sunday. Only a skeleton staff worked on Sunday, and Nicholas would have gone to church. Martha traveled further, to a Catholic Mass, and Sally had taken to accompanying her. Thea would likely have joined one of the parties. Or perhaps she had left for good.

  Taking a neatly pressed neckcloth from the drawer full of neatly pressed neckcloths, Rafe paused and looked around his clean room. He stepped into the silent corridor, the wooden floorboards cool through his stockings, and studied the row of windows overlooking the courtyard garden. There were too many windows—an extravagance on his father’s part, given the taxes on windows and glass—but they were all spotless. The candle sconces along the wall gleamed. The door frames were polished.

  He opened the next door down; this room too was fresh and tidy, albeit with signs of Nicholas’s occupation. Rafe shut the door and kept walking, opening each empty room in turn. In each room, he found the same thing: The curtains were closed against the sun, but nothing was under dust covers. Everything was clean and fresh. One might think the house was fully occupied, and that the entire family and their friends would soon come crowding back. Every day, while Rafe went about his life, scores of invisible hands were keeping this house ready to welcome its inhabitants home.

  I have kept this house in readiness for the day you brought home another bride, to house a new, happy family, Sally had said. Because if you could free yourself of the past, maybe I could too.

  Then Thea had arrived.

  How right she had looked in the library, in the drawing room. How easily she had slid into place, as if she was the one the house had been waiting for. Thea, an outcast wearing her sister’s clothes, the merchant’s daughter who had learned to walk and talk like a lady, the optimistic survivor who had a plan for fixing her life th
at did not include Rafe.

  Rafe walked on, faster now, until he reached her rooms. He knocked. No reply. His heart thudded a violent protest. Surely she would not leave without first saying goodbye?

  His chest tight, Rafe shoved open her sitting room door; her belongings were still there. He crossed to the window and looked out, over the gardens, and beyond, the woodlands and fields. And below him, a flash of yellow.

  A chestnut-haired woman in a butter-yellow gown was traipsing through the flowerbeds.

  Rafe pressed a palm to the glass.

  If he were a different man, he would walk with her in the sunlight.

  And then he remembered that everything had changed, and if everything had changed, then he could change too. If he chose.

  He could choose to keep living in fear of watching someone he loved suffer. Or he could choose to be that different man.

  He wheeled away from the window and ran.

  Chapter 21

  First, Rafe found a straw bonnet and a yellow shawl, flung across a wooden bench. He set his neckcloth down beside them and walked on.

  Next, he found a pair of women’s shoes and stockings. Rafe peeled off his damp stockings and laid them down. Barefoot, he walked on.

  Then, he found Thea.

  She was drifting through the gardens, singing to herself, fingers brushing over the flowers and leaves. Her hair was pinned up but for a few tendrils and one persistently errant lock, and her feet were white against the green grass, beneath her yellow hem. It felt like a lifetime since he had touched her; it was a wonder he had stayed away.

  She spared no thoughts for him, he supposed, lost as she was in the simple pleasure of watching butterflies in a flower garden on a warm summer’s day. This was her strength. It was not the kind of strength the world valued, but its power stole his breath. This was what made her a survivor: her gift for transforming the ordinary world into a wondrous, captivating place. Despite everything, no one had taken that from her. If Rafe had his way, no one ever would.