by Abigail Agar
Penelope’s mother drew in a breath and said, “Yes, I was fine. I got jostled, but Mother held me safely. She hurt her ankle climbing out of the carriage. It never was quite the same after that. She always had a slight limp that grew worse when the air was cold and the ground warm. She said it was there to remind her to be more careful of travelling when the wee ones were out at play.”
“I can see why you would be uneasy travelling when it is foggy,” Penelope said. She had not guessed that her mother’s anxiety rose from any place of reason. So often her mother had seemed to cower before shadows that only she could see, but now Penelope could see them too. She could see them and understand them.
They grew silent as they both watched the fog outside their windows. The wee ones were frolicking tonight, Penelope mused to herself silently. How they must be playing with the fog dancing so alongside the carriage. They must be dancing and twirling and racing to keep up even with the slow pace of the carriage.
The Duke’s mouth moved as if he spoke words that only his dreams could hear. Penelope wondered if he heard their words and now wee ones danced in his dreams. What dreams did one have when one brushed along the curtain of death? Penelope did not know. She had never walked that path or seen those sights.
Do not wander too far, Penelope pleaded silently to the man.
***
Getting the Duke settled into one of the upstairs rooms was the easy part, then came time to get him looked after, and Penelope was practically shoved out of the room. The servants insisted that she leave, as did her mother. Penelope was led away by her mother as three male servants undressed and cleaned the man’s wounds.
“I could help,” Penelope said in frustration. “What good is learning of science and healing if I am not allowed to practice any of it?”
Lady Winchester led her daughter into the sitting room and poured some tea from the teapot that was awaiting them on a silver tray. “Sit down and rest yourself. The doctor will be here soon. We have but to wait.”
Penelope sighed. “Waiting is not helpful.”
“You might as well get used to waiting now,” Lady Winchester assured her daughter. “Women have to be patient creatures, Penelope. It is our lot in life, but it is also our advantage. Men are rash things that rush about without the gentle steering of women in the right direction.”
Penelope frowned. She pondered her mother for a moment. “Why learn all of the sciences and such, though? I shall never be allowed to do any of that.”
“Some say it is a disservice to fill young ladies’ heads with such things,” Lady Winchester noted as she stirred some sugar into her tea. “I think that it is the least I can do for you. You should have your own mind.”
Penelope picked up the tea that her mother had poured her and sipped it. “Perhaps it is a disservice, and it gives us all sorts of ideas. For instance, it might give me the idea that I do not need a man.”
Lady Winchester laughed and sighed. “Unfortunately, men are a necessary thing, my daughter. Women can do so little in this world without the aid of a man, but men need women too.”
“You would not think it the way men treat women,” Penelope said with a frown.
Lady Winchester nodded her head slowly. She took a small sip of her tea before she looked at Penelope. “Not all men are like that, Penelope. Surely, you do not truly believe that?”
Penelope shook her head, but deep in her heart, she held onto the fact that she did believe all men were like that. Her father was like that and her grandfather before him. If not all men were like that, then surely the women in her family were cursed to be yoked with overbearing men. No, Penelope would not suffer the fate of her mother and her grandmother.
“I am feeling very tired,” Penelope said as she set her teacup down. “Oh,” she said in a mournful voice. “My poor dress.”
Both Penelope and Lady Winchester looked at the front of Penelope’s dress and the red stain that was darkening on the silken fabric. Lady Winchester said, “It will need to be done away with, I am afraid.”
“I should change,” Penelope said as she stood up.
Lady Winchester set down her tea. “Do remember to go to your room and stay away from our guest’s room.”
“Of course, Mother,” Penelope said as she fought the urge to roll her eyes. “Good night, Mother.”
Lady Winchester nodded and returned the sentiment as Penelope slipped out the door to the sitting room. Penelope looked around the hallway and found it empty. Some of the staff must be awake, but Penelope heard nothing apart from an owl somewhere outside.
She made her way towards the front hall and the stairs that led up to the bedrooms. She preferred their country home, but Penelope had fond memories of her governess telling her stories while her mother and father attended parties on the ground floor of the home. Penelope had been blissfully unaware of what Seasons and balls were for back then.
To young Penelope, the beautiful dresses and lovely music had been something out of her fairy tales. She had even longed to be allowed to attend the wonderful parties. Oh, how Penelope had begged her governess into letting her take a peek.
If only she had known then what she knew now. Penelope shook her head at the dancing couples on the wall covering that her mother had chosen. The couples twirled among the lanterns on the print. Penelope could almost imagine the music that would be drifting around the dancers.
As Penelope stepped onto the landing at the top of the stairs, she heard a moan and bit her lip. She fought the urge to go towards the door that sealed off the room where the Duke was being cleaned up. Penelope forced herself to walk on by.
Her own room was further down the hallway, and Penelope swiftly slipped through the door to her room when she reached it. Once inside her room, Penelope tried her best to put the other thoughts out of her head.
“Miss,” Gina, Penelope’s chambermaid and lady’s maid, called softly.
Penelope looked towards the door that joined to the next room. “Would you give me a hand, please?” Penelope asked as she motioned to her dress.
“Bless me, what on Earth happened to your dress, Miss?” Gina said as she came into the room and shut the door behind her. She was quickly over and helping unbutton Penelope’s dress down the back.
Penelope sighed. “I had someone fall on me,” she said.
“Oh? Is it that gentleman they have cloistered away in the first bedroom?” Gina asked, her voice full of conspiracy and curiosity.
Penelope nodded and said, “Yes. I do hope the doctor is able to help him. I had not realised until now how much blood he had lost.”
“By the looks of your dress, I’d be surprised if he had any left in him,” Gina said with a shake of her head and a cluck of her tongue.
Before long, between the two of them, they had Penelope’s ruined dress off, and Gina rushed to find a replacement. “Do you want your sleeping gown, Miss?”
“Yes,” Penelope said. “It is not likely I shall be entertaining our guest tonight, after all. Mother will not stand for me being in the doctor’s way, so I shall just have to content myself with what I can hear from the adjoining room if anything.”
Gina frowned. “Your mother does not like it when you eavesdrop, Miss,” Gina reminded Penelope gently.
Penelope should have scolded the girl for her impudence, but Gina had been Penelope’s chambermaid for the last couple of years, and the girl was only a year older than Penelope herself. Yet, how different Gina’s life was to Penelope’s own. Gina was widowed and had two children already. Penelope, by comparison, was a mere slip of a girl, still innocent in the ways of the world at times.
“Then I shall just have to make sure that I do not get caught,” Penelope said with a smile to her friend.
Gina shook her head and said, “As you say, Miss.”
As soon as Penelope was in her nightgown, Gina took her leave to go to her own room. Penelope often asked after the woman’s children, who stayed with Gina’s mother while she worked. Th
e father of Gina’s children had died shortly after the twins had been born, but Gina’s father and mother had been generous enough to let her stay on with them. In return, Gina helped bring money into the household.
Penelope frowned at her own reflection after Gina had left. The Duke had called her an angel. Penelope eyed her face. Her cheeks were a bit too rounded, and her eyes a bit too wide. Penelope saw nothing in her face that resembled a heavenly host, but then the man’s vision had been a bit clouded by the loss of blood.
Her mother had said that the man was a killer. Penelope amended that to be an alleged killer. She had heard the rumours before from her mother’s lips but had simply dismissed them. Having seen this killer for herself, Penelope pondered what a killer should look like. Penelope had always imagined the sneer and sharpness of a murderer’s face would give them away.
There was no harshness in the face of the Duke of Richmond. Penelope remembered the lines of the man’s face as he lay unaware in the carriage. He had a kind face. How could someone with such a beautiful face be a monster?
Penelope blushed at her own thoughts. She glanced up at her reflection and saw the tell-tale pink rising to her cheeks. A sound made Penelope jump, and she realised all at once that it was someone banging on the front door.
The sound echoed up from the ground floor and ricocheted up the hallway. There were footsteps that pistoned up the stairs, their noise deafening in the stillness of the house. The banging of their rhythm like the horrible machines that ran in the factories, the steady thuds rang closer as Penelope rose to her feet.
Pulling her dressing gown on over her night clothes, Penelope eased her bedroom door open. She saw a couple of men she did not recognise and Reginald. The men were swiftly into the bedroom that contained the Duke. Penelope eased her door shut and slipped into the adjoining room which was a bit closer to where the Duke lay.
With her ear pressed against the wall, Penelope listened as the doctor talked to his fellow men about the man’s injuries. The men were silent for long minutes while they worked, and each time they fell silent, Penelope’s breath would catch in her throat. With each word they uttered, Penelope remembered to breathe, and she gasped in the air as if surfacing from underwater.
After what felt like hours, the men congratulated themselves on having completed their task. Penelope waited until they were gone before she ventured out into the hallway. Lord and Lady Winchester were standing in the hallway, Penelope realised too late. Her parents turned to look at her as Penelope grimaced.
“I thought you were asleep,” Lady Winchester said with obvious disapproval.
Lord Winchester grumbled, “Clearly, our daughter was too concerned for our guest’s well-being to go to bed.”
“Is it not right that I should be concerned?” Penelope asked even as her mother bowed her head ever so slightly at the tone of Lord Winchester’s voice.
Lord Winchester was a towering man, and Penelope had thought him brave and true for most of her life. However, it had taken her finding her mother’s diary for Penelope to see the man for all that he was. Lord Winchester, much like Penelope’s grandfather, was a tyrant who had her mother cowed into submission.
Lord Winchester frowned. “I suppose it would not do for this to leave you unaffected. However, I cannot see any good reason why my home was deemed worthy for the Duke of Richmond’s recovery. Could you not have taken the man elsewhere?”
“But Father, did Mother not tell you?” Penelope asked as she glanced over at her mother.
Lord Winchester asked warily, “Tell me what?”
Penelope wrapped her arms around herself. “He saved me from a roguish man who would have harmed me. Mother and I were simply standing on the sidewalk when the man launched himself at us. If not for the Duke, then we could have been killed.”
Lady Winchester stared at Penelope blankly. Lord Winchester seemed to be thinking before he said, “In that case, I cannot begrudge a Duke a place to rest. I shall speak with him tomorrow, however, and we can see what we might be able to manage from this situation.”
“The man is desperately ill,” Lady Winchester said in a scandalised voice to her husband.
Lord Winchester said, “The doctor said he should recover. Our noble deed should win us something, should it not?”
“Kindness is a reward unto itself, Father. Do you not listen to the sermons we attend?” Penelope saw the pink on her father’s nose and knew the man’s temper was about him, but she did not back down. Penelope straightened herself. She might not be as tall as her elegant mother, but Penelope would not bow to anyone, especially not her father.
Lord Winchester frowned at his daughter. “It is that headstrong notion of yours that will keep you from marrying,” Lord Winchester reminded his daughter. “Men like softness in women. You are like an old gnarled oak that refuses to bend except the way it wants to.”
“I beg to differ,” Penelope said. “Oaks can break; I will not.”
***
Penelope wanted to sleep, but sleep would not come. The house was silent, and everyone else, she assumed, had succumbed to their exhaustion. She rolled over and pulled the covers up around her neck. There was a chill in the room, but not enough of one to light a fire for.
She fell slowly into her dreams. She fell so slowly that she did not even know she was asleep at first. Penelope danced in the ballroom at the Earl of Havenshire’s home.
She caught sight of the blue tailcoat, the one she had seen when she and her mother had been arguing. She saw it, but more important, Penelope saw him. The breath left her for a moment as he held out his hand to her, and Penelope took his hand as if it were a leap of faith.
Where the man led, she would follow, and that was all she knew. Penelope wondered at the strangeness of it, of herself. She had never wanted such things, yet here she was practically swooning at the feeling of his hand lightly against the small of her back.
There were scandalous whispers, and Penelope did not care if the whole world saw them. She did not mind at all if they whispered their rumours because all it meant in the scheme of things was that Penelope was whole and safe. She was loved.
Gasping, Penelope sat up in bed. She glanced around herself. “Oh Lord,” Penelope whispered. “What folly has this thing called a heart brought upon me? I do not seek marriage or love. Love is not true.” Duty to the family was the truth, and that was her reality.
She chided herself for acting like some silly little girl. It was normal she supposed for her to experience such things, but it made it no easier to deal with. Penelope fell back against the bed and shook her head at herself.
It could have been worse. Penelope had heard of young women wasting away and pining for dream lovers. The idea was absurd, of course, and the writings of poets and authors of dashing young men were what her father hated the most. It was one of the things that her governess and her father had always butted heads about.
It was one of the few things that her father and mother seemed to agree on. Penelope frowned and thought about that. Her father and mother did not seem to have that bad a marriage, yet Penelope knew that what most people saw of her parents was not true.
She had found her mother’s diary, and she had read enough of it that she knew that there was nothing good or lovely about marriage. There was nothing to be gained there and everything to lose. Penelope sighed up at the ceiling unsure of what she should think. There was no one there to tell her what the right thing to do or say was. What way would lead to happiness and in what direction lay sorrow?
Penelope got up, pulled on her dressing gown, and gently opened her bedroom door. There was only silence. Penelope crept out her door and pulled it to quietly behind her. The moonlight slanted in the windows that lined the hallways on the East. Penelope had always thought the manor house laid out in an odd way.