Maddening Minx

by Pearl Darling

  His mother narrowed her eyes. “Go on.”

  “Celine said the Pink Canary Club in London was empty at the moment,” he said in a rush. He could feel the blush starting at the back of his neck and creeping through his scalp.

  “Edward!”

  “It’s the last place Mr. Khaffar will look,” Edward pleaded. “He owns it you see.”

  “We’ll go there,” Franklin said quietly. “What about Lord Colthaven and Celine and the others?”

  “Take them with you. Let Lord Colthaven go if he wants to as soon as you are clear of the castle. Don’t tell him where you are staying though. I don’t want him to lead Mr. Khaffar to us should Mr. Khaffar catch up with him. In fact…tell him you are going to Rochester Mansions.” Edward felt in his pocket for his watch. Damn! He still hadn’t got it back.

  Dowager Lady Rochester nodded. “Good. The man gives me the jitters. A day spent in a close carriage with him would send me insane. It’s been bad enough having him in the castle.”

  “He is a prominent member of the ton.” Edward sighed. “We must do the best by him that we can. I don’t want to tarnish our name any further.”

  Dowager Lady Rochester looked at Edward strangely. “Could you just repeat what you said again please?”

  Edward frowned. “Which part?”

  “The part where you said ‘our name’.” She smiled broadly. “That’s the first time I’ve heard you take ownership of the Rochester name.”

  Edward licked his lips. “Someone recently told me I wasn’t a Rochester.”

  Dowager Lady Rochester nodded. “I am not a Rochester, I don’t even have a drop of the blood in my veins. But I bear the name, therefore I am a Rochester. You, Edward, you do have Rochester blood in your veins.” She paused. “But you have my blood too. And you were raised practically by Robert. You are a Rochester, my son, but you are also many other things. As are we all.”

  Edward nodded and opened the door. He bowed to Franklin, who shuffled his feet and then bowed back, a deep, courteous bow. “My lord,” he said quietly.

  “About that. We’ll sort that out when I come back,” Edward said.

  He closed the door with a quiet click. Treading softly along the hall he passed the guest rooms and paused. Should he reassure Lord Colthaven that he would be able to leave the castle on the morrow? No. It seemed that Lord Colthaven had reacted rather strongly to being imprisoned. The relief of being able to escape might cause his actions to become even more erratic. He continued down the hall, past his rooms where the glint of the fire was no longer visible below the door.

  Softly he trod up the stairs towards the attic. Someone had removed the cobwebs at last. Quietly he knocked on the door and without waiting for an answer let himself in.

  The woman sat in a chair by a high burning fire, her maid opposite her. Her body was curled in on itself. But she still noticed the door opening.

  “John!” she said exclaiming. “You’ve come to see me. You’ve left it till late again. Naughty boy.”

  Edward sighed and nodded to the maid, whose surprise only showed in her raised eyebrows. She got up from her chair and moved in to a connecting room. Edward sat down in the chair vacated by the maid and took the woman’s hand.

  “Grandmama, it’s me.” He looked into the lined face of his grandmother, Lady Kathryn, and sighed inwardly. Her eyes were still bright, her face as creased as parchment. She’d been an older mother when she’d had her son. And Edward’s father had been old as long as Edward could remember him.

  “Grandmama! Grandmama? Who are you calling Grandmama, John?” Lady Kathryn bent her head back and forwards like a blackbird. “Why I admit I was a bit older when I had our son, who let me tell you has been a very naughty boy. He hasn’t been home from carousing in London for an age! It’s all that girl Lydia’s fault I tell you.”

  Edward sucked in a breath and continued to stroke his grandmother’s hand.

  “I tell you who I have seen recently.” Lady Kathryn’s face suddenly stilled. “That old supposed friend of his. The one that got Lydia in the end. Can’t believe he’d show his face here. John and Anglethorpe were furious with what he did. She should have been with David Granwich. We all knew that.”

  Edward shook his head. She was getting worse. It had started five years before, little things like forgetting that she’d told him a piece of gossip. Telling him the same piece of gossip again and again five times in the space of two hours. And then she had started to forget what time of day it was, demanding breakfast in the middle of the night. Forgetting people’s names. Forgetting who they were, unless they lived fifty years before.

  And now seemingly she had forgotten who he was, and now thought that he was her husband. Not only that, she was seeing things. But again, not surprising if she thought he was her husband. It was a madness. Just like his father had been mad. Just as Edward would be mad. Was perhaps already mad.

  He shook his head. It was that word that he kept coming back to. Lydia.

  Lydia Randall, Lady Lydia Randall and Granwich’s lost love.

  Edward drew in a breath and gripped his grandmother’s hand tightly. “Where did you see the man that got Lydia, Grandmama? Where was he? What was his name?”

  “I can’t remember his name. His title was something pretentious to do with horses. Marecove? No that’s not it.” She put her hand on her chair and shakily pushed herself up, gripping onto Edward’s hand with a tight grasp. Edward rose with her and she shuffled across to a high window and tapped on the dark pane. “I saw him down there. Down where I saw you ride away last time. You didn’t wave me goodbye and blow me a kiss as normal.”

  Edward tried to change subjects quickly in his head. He had seen her at the window when he had left from the castle courtyard, the month before. The cart had been outside. That meant that whoever his grandmother had seen had been just outside the castle, where the soldiers were. Someone that wasn’t from India, but from England itself.

  Was there a man hidden among the soldiers that knew something about the castle? About why Edward and Celine seemed to be caught up in an ever decreasing spiral with regards to Lydia Randall and Lord David Granwich?

  The thing is, all spirals come to an end somewhere.

  CHAPTER 31

  Celine left the warmth of the bedroom and stepped out into the hall after Edward. She was just quick enough to see him enter another doorway further down the dark passage. But she wasn’t the only one.

  She stepped back into her room as the door next to hers opened. Lord Colthaven, the man that had fallen into a dead faint at her feet, crept out and went straight into the room opposite, without looking left or right.

  Celine closed the door and waited for the fire to die, intently focused on any sounds outside the door. Half an hour passed, until she heard the unmistakable sounds of the door next door click shut again. Ten minutes later, soft footsteps clicked across the wooden floors outside. Waiting for a minute, Celine slowly opened her door, stepped out into the hallway and closed her own door again holding on to the handle to prevent the customary click.

  A light showed briefly down an upward staircase she hadn’t noticed before. Moving stealthily she crept up the stairs. A door stood partly open at the top, the flickering flames of a fire indicating that at least one person was in the room.

  Without waiting permission to enter she opened the door.

  Edward stood in the middle of the room, a hand on a girl’s shoulder whose back was to her. As she watched he pulled her into his strong embrace.

  Mad. Edward’s obsession with madness. Edward’s need for a courtesan, not a real woman companion. His lack of intimacy. His frustration and passion.

  He had a wife already. ‘It’s all about mad wives in the attic now’, Agatha had said. Celine gasped. Should she run?

  Or should she face the truth as she had never done before?

  Edward turned. “Celine.” He kept a rigid arm on the girl’s shoulder. “
I didn’t want you to come up here.”

  “I’m not leaving until you tell me what you are doing!” This was facing the truth?

  The girl turned towards her. Celine started forward. It wasn’t trickery with makeup. The girl’s face was lined, an old woman. “Lydia?” the woman said disbelievingly. “What are you doing here?” She started forward. “What have you done to your face?”

  Celine put a hand to her face. She had no makeup on—she had rubbed it all off before Edward had swung through the window. “I—nothing.”

  “John? Why is Lydia here if that man is here? We told her not to come here again after the trouble it caused last time. We can’t hide her again.”

  Lydia. Celine watched as Edward crouched down to the woman’s face. “Grandmama, I’m Edward, not John.”

  “Don’t be silly, John. We’ve been through this before.”

  Edward turned to Celine. “Please wait for me?” His expression became anguished. “I must explain.”

  Celine nodded. Edward put his arm back around his grandmother’s shoulders and guided her away into the next room. She followed them to the interconnecting door, pulling away as she saw Edward settle the older woman with a young maid, dropping a tender but sad kiss on her lined brow.

  The expression as he turned was heart wrenching, a mixture of grief and pain. As he caught her glance he straightened and walked to the door, the emotions wiped clean from his face.

  “She called me Lydia.” Celine turned back into the room.

  “She called me John.” Edward collapsed heavily into the chair by the fire. “She doesn’t know who anyone is anymore.”

  “And you think that she is—”

  “Mad?”

  Celine shook her head. “No. I didn’t mean to say that.” She lifted her chin up. “I thought you had someone else when I walked through the door to the attic.”

  “Someone else?”

  “A wife. A woman that you had to keep hidden because they were mad.”

  “Why on earth would you think that?”

  “Because you kept talking about being mad. Because you were in the attic.” Because you never used to touch me, and now you do so here, as if a man possessed.

  Edward shook his head. “Sit. Please?” He took in a deep breath as Celine sank into the chair opposite him. “Five years ago Grandmamma started to forget things. A name, a place. She would start to take walks by herself outside, but never remember where she was going. We lost her for two days once.”

  “Hence why you keep her inside.”

  Edward nodded. “It was her choice to come up to the attic. It is where the nursery was. It is when, not where, she sometimes thinks she is now.” He looked down at the floor. “Cressida, the maid, says she thinks we ought to give her a doll. That it might comfort her.”

  “She called me Lydia.”

  “I’ve already told you she doesn’t know when she is sometimes.” Edward’s voice dropped lower. “I’m just waiting for her to forget who she is.”

  “That man, Lord Colthaven, called me Lydia. He said he watched me die.”

  Edward was silent for a while before starting to speak again. “Grandmama mentioned that she had seen a man at the gates earlier, that the man had been the one to win Lydia in the end over Granwich and my father.”

  “Over your father?”

  Edward nodded.

  “Do you know any more about it?”

  He shook his head. “My father—” he paused and coughed. “My father lost his marbles when I was ten.” He glared at Celine and remained silent.

  “Lost his marbles? You mean as in—”

  “As in, lost the plot, married the goose, paid his entry to the lunatic asylum.” Edward turned his face away from her and stared into the fire. “And everyone laughed.”

  “In what way did he become mad?”

  “He thought he was a young man again. He kept bringing women home and flaunting them in front of my mother, even though he was sixty years old. Sometimes he didn’t even recognize my mother existed.”

  “Like your grandmother.”

  “Just like Grandmama,” he said quietly. Suddenly he sat forward. “And then he thought he was a dog and ran to the stables just as Alasdair told Pablo Moreno.”

  Celine sat still as Edward bowed his head. “We were the laughing stock of the county.”

  “How did he die?”

  “The doctor said that one day he forgot to breathe.”

  “And has the doctor seen your grandmother too?”

  “No. I won’t allow him to.”

  “Have you even seen the doctor again? Asked him what the diagnosis was?”

  Edward stared at her. “Of course not. It was evident in the shouts of the crowds as father was carried out in his coffin. ‘Long live Lord Lunatic’, ‘Hooray for Happy Harry’, ‘Long Reign to the Raving Rochesters’.”

  “And then your grandmother became—ill,” Celine paused as realization dawned. “And you—you became Mr. Fiske.”

  Edward nodded. Suddenly he touched her on the arm. “Quiet. I can hear someone.”

  Celine shivered and tensed as he took her hand.

  The door to the attic opened slowly. Alasdair appeared silently through the door. “My lord, I thought I might find you up here.”

  “What is it, Alasdair?” Edward’s thumb traced a circle in Celine’s palm. She glanced at him, but he stared away from her at Alasdair.

  Celine watched as Alasdair shifted his gaze to Edward’s hands and then back to Edward before giving her a flickering glance.

  “It’s Lord Colthaven, sir. Robert says that he just left the castle by the kitchen door.”

  “Good god.” Edward stood, still holding on to Celine’s hand. “He’ll be taken by the guards!”

  “He didn’t seem too bothered about subterfuge. He stepped out with a lantern and a large bag under his arm.”

  “By all accounts the man’s behavior has been so erratic that it’s something that he could do.”

  Celine shook her head. “Edward.”

  Edward turned his handsome face towards her. She stared at him for an instant. It was as if she didn’t recognize him. All the Fiskeness had disappeared, and in its place—she wasn’t sure what was left in its place.

  “Edward, Lord Colthaven said he saw me, Lydia, die.”

  Edward’s hand grasped hers more tightly. “Yes?”

  “Your grandmother said she saw someone at the gates that had won Lydia years ago from Granwich and your father.” She took a breath. “Wouldn’t it be possible that if a man won a woman and watched her die, it would be likely that he had been married her?”

  “You are saying that Lord Colthaven was Lydia Randall’s husband?”

  Celine nodded. “Major Coxon-Williams’ father.” She frowned. “Granwich never said who the Major’s supposed father was.”

  Edward shook his head. “No, he didn’t. But my grandmother also said something else.”

  Celine waited as Edward drew his hand away from hers.

  “She said that she and her husband helped hide Lydia from that man.”

  “You think they helped to hide Lydia from Lord Colthaven?” Celine frowned. “This is all very well, but it doesn’t tell us any more about why Mr. Khaffar wanted the information about Major Coxon-Williams.” She shivered. “It is a little like delving into another person’s sordid history.”

  “There could be a perfectly reasonable explanation for Lady Randall to have run away from her husband,” Alasdair said quietly, directing a meaningful look at Edward.

  Edward nodded. “There are many reasons why people run away when they are married.”

  “Pardon?” Celine was confused.

  “My mother ran away from my father many times. At first because she didn’t want to be married to him. It was an arranged marriage. He was old, and she was young. And then later on when he became less…predictable she would take shelter elsewhere.”
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  “What about you? Where did you go?”

  “Robert took me in. And Franklin and Alasdair.” Edward stood. “We must rescue Lord Colthaven from the soldiers outside before they get him. If Mr. Khaffar wants more information about the note that he has already then Lord Colthaven will be an ideal prisoner for him.”

  “What about us, what about breaking free from the castle?”

  Edward shook his head. “If Mr. Khaffar has Lord Colthaven in his clutches, it might be we are no longer needed. Those men out there have no mercy, I’ve met them before. They’ll kill us before we can leave.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Edward let go of Celine’s hand with reluctance. He wanted to stay longer and stare at her. Just marvel at the way she had quickly put all the pieces together. Not just about Lydia Randall, but about him. And that was when you became Mr. Fiske. She hadn’t drawn away from him, she hadn’t run screaming from the room that he was as mad as his family forebears.

  But perhaps then she hadn’t made the connection that Edward had made?

  That the chance that not one but two direct family members would fall ill to the same disease was infinitesimally low? That a father would die before his mother? That both would turn mad in the same way?

  It all pointed in one direction. Edward’s future was not his own.

  He paused on the stairs, there was no need for subterfuge any more since Lord Colthaven had left, and Celine was with him. “Alasdair, has Mama got a new maid recently?”

  “No, why?”

  “The cobwebs have gone from the stairwell.”

  “I don’t understand that. I know you gave an order that no one new was meant to come up this way so that your grandmother could have continuity. The maid who normally does this area is getting a little older if you know what I mean, so I’m surprised the cobwebs have gone.”

  “They haven’t gone,” Celine said quietly behind him. She touched his back, and pointed over his shoulder, her breath warm on his cheek. “The webs have been broken, back to the casement, as if someone has been searching along the wall.”