“Must we?” The coroner remained standing in front of his chair enthralled with Lord Ravencross’s astonishing performance and my bewilderment. “Finally getting interesting.”
“Aye. We must!” The justice of the peace gave Mr. Griswold a pointed frown with his great bushy eyebrows. “Past time. Come along, then.” The coroner reluctantly accepted his hat from Greaves, and my three inquisitors left the room escorted by Miss Stranje. Sera slipped out behind them.
“Betrothed?” I whirled on Gabriel. “What possessed you to say such a thing?”
“I was explaining to our magistrate that you would be leaving Stranje House to become my wife. I see nothing extraordinary in that.”
“Extraordinary? It is a complete and utter lie. The laudanum must be playing tricks on you, my lord, or else pain has twisted your reasoning, for I agreed to no such thing. In fact, I clearly told you the very opposite. That we have no future—”
“Ahem.” Miss Stranje had returned and stood in the doorway.
Gabriel turned very stiff and formal. “You must be overtired, my dear. I distinctly heard you consent to become my wife. Surely you remember telling me that you did not find my scars at all repugnant. In fact, I can recall your exact words. You said—”
“Aaargh!” I roared, to stop him from talking and flung myself in the chair. “He’s gone completely mad.”
“What is all this, then?” Miss Stranje did not sound angry, but she did not sound pleased either. “Lord Ravencross, did you propose to Miss Aubreyson or not?”
“He did not.” I smacked my hand down on the arm of the chair and whipped my attention back and forth between the two of them. “You didn’t! And even if he had, which you most certainly did not do, there are at least a dozen reasons why I could not accept.”
“Only a dozen?” Gabriel made a pretense of incredulity. “So few. I had thought you would say a hundred or a thousand.” He turned gravely serious. “You wish to stay at Stranje House, do you not? I have just delivered the means by which you may do so.” He turned to my headmistress. “Miss Stranje, as her fiancé, I will gladly pay whatever outstanding tuition she might owe. And when the next bill comes due, you may send it directly to me.”
For the second time in the last three minutes, my mouth dropped open. Then it closed because I thought I finally glimpsed an explanation for this absurd charade. “That’s why you said—”
“Not entirely,” he snapped. “But it’ll have to do, until you come to your senses.”
Miss Stranje intervened. “That will not be necessary, my lord. If Miss Aubreyson wishes to stay, I will find the means to keep her here.”
Again, I gaped, but this time at Miss Stranje. She would?
“Excellent.” He winced and opened the flap of his coat to check his wound. “Nevertheless, my offer stands. Do whatever you must to keep her here. And now, if you will excuse me? I believe my bandage is beginning to leak.”
There was, indeed, a scarlet bloom spreading on his shirt.
“You’ve overexerted yourself, my lord. Pray, sit down. I’ll send for my kit and change that dressing.” Miss Stranje hurried to the wall and yanked on the bellpull. “Philip!”
But Lord Ravencross did not sit. He yanked a handkerchief out of his pocket and stuffed it between his shirt and his coat. “Nonsense. You needn’t fuss. The sawbones is waiting at my house. He can attend to it. I’m paying him well enough to do so.” He was almost out of the room when Philip rushed in.
Miss Stranje issued orders to her footman with the steely authority of a field marshal. “You will accompany Lord Ravencross home. All the way home, mind you, and make certain he is in the hands of his physician before you return.”
Philip pulled on his forelock, signaling obedience, and dashed after Lord Ravencross, who was already striding down the hall.
I stood. My instinct was to run after them, to make certain Gabriel made it home to the doctor, but for the first time in my life I found my legs would not move. I was frozen in place, still stunned by what he’d said. It occurred to me I might be in the midst of another dream. I stood, blinking.
“Sit down, Tess.” Miss Stranje’s sharp command brought me back to reality with a thud.
She pulled a chair next to mine and sank into it, hands folded calmly in her lap. “Now then, what is all this business about marriage?”
I groaned. “Then he really did say all those things? I’d thought I must be daydreaming. The betrothal?”
“Most assuredly. And he did so quite publicly.”
“Oh, dear.”
“I take it you are not pleased,” she said flatly.
Pleased?
Was I?
Suddenly, I grinned. Not only that, I could not keep from grinning. I tried to stop, because I never grin. I don’t. I really, truly don’t.
I put a hand over my mouth and tried to wipe the silly thing off my face, but it simply wouldn’t budge. I felt wickedly and enthusiastically happy. Truth be told, despite it being dreadfully wrong of me, I was pleased.
Excessively pleased.
“Hmm.” She crossed her arms and contemplated me. “I see.”
“No. No, you don’t.” I shook my head, ignoring the discomfort this brought because of the bump, which was now truly beginning to throb. “I’m not pleased. Not really. Oh, I suppose some stupid part of me feels absurdly happy that he would do such a kind thing for me, but—”
“I sincerely doubt kindness had much to do with it.”
My foolish grin vanished and I sat back. “Then why?”
“You know why.”
The lightness of being I’d felt a moment ago disappeared entirely. In its place a millstone thudded down atop my chest. “No,” I gasped. “He can’t be. He mustn’t be. Surely, he isn’t in love with me? There’s no future in it.”
She didn’t argue with me. No, Miss Stranje is far too clever for that. She never argues a thing directly. She always goes around the corner from an obstacle and attacks it from the side.
“If you say so,” she said with a dismissive flick of her eyelashes, as if it were something as unimportant as the weather we’d been discussing. “Let us turn to the matter of your aunt. If you wish to stay at Stranje House, and I gather now that you would prefer to stay here rather than going back to Tidenham. Although for what reason, I’m not certain…”
She waited, letting her half-spoken question hang in the air, and I sank deeper into the chair without answering.
“We can always find a position for you here. I’m certain your assistance with diplomatic matters will, of course, prove extremely valuable to your country in the coming years.”
She meant spying. Even in private she rarely used that term.
“If, on the other hand, for various reasons you would prefer to stay nearby—” Miss Stranje paused again, but being met with only silence from me, she pressed on. “Madame Cho believes your fighting skills are excellent enough that you might help instruct the other girls.”
I took a deep breath and let it out. “Thank you. I cannot tell you what a relief that is. I did not think my aunt was actually looking forward to my return.”
“Agreed. I sensed reluctance in her letter as well. Although I’m certain she desires your company, I believe her reticence has more to do with that cryptic promise she made your mother. The promise that she would watch over you until—”
“The end,” I murmured.
Miss Stranje probed artfully. “Yes. What a very odd thing for her to say.”
Not really.
“Tess, you’ve been here for how long?” She was coming at me sideways again. Emma Stranje is not the prying sort, she respects secrets more than most, but when she decides to find out something she goes at it like the hawk that she is. She circles her prey until the exact right time to dive down for the kill.
So I hesitantly answered her question, wary of where it would lead. “In October I will have been here four years.”
“Four years. Hmm. And in all t
hat time with me, you’ve never once spoken about what happened to your mother.”
For good reason.
I try every day not to remember.
“No, I haven’t.” It came out soft as a whisper.
“I believe it’s time you told me.” She didn’t say it as if I were a field mouse caught in her claws. There was softness, and a directness, that spoke only of concern. When I searched her eyes, I nearly cried at what I saw there. I thought only mothers looked at their children that way. I bowed my head.
It was time.
“For generations in my family, the oldest daughter has been afflicted with the dreams. The dreams took my grandmother early. They tormented my mother so badly that she stopped sleeping. Fear of the dreams kept her awake. Days she would go without eating or resting, wide-eyed, talking incessantly. Then the visions started coming even when she was awake. With each passing day, they got worse. Until one afternoon, moaning and crying, she bolted from the house and ran barefoot into the woods. We thought she’d come back. She always came back.
“Three days we hunted for her. All of us searched, Lydia, Uncle Martin, my grandfather, our servants, even me.”
Especially me.
“I was nine at the time, but I knew my mother’s forest haunts better than anyone else. My grandfather tried using the hounds to track her, but they lost the scent. We combed the nearby woods. Hunted through the forests. Scoured the riverbanks. All of us did.”
Especially me.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell Miss Stranje how panicked I’d been. How I’d searched with the frantic desperation only a child knows. Grief from my father’s death two years earlier had still pressed heavily on me. I couldn’t bear to lose my mother, too. I needed her. I had to find her.
“On the third night after she went missing, I had my first dream. I saw her death.”
“No.” Miss Stranje pressed her lips tight and covered her mouth with her hand. The lone sound had come out of her mouth like a breath, a feary wisp of anguish for the girl I’d once been.
I swallowed hard and tried to tell her the rest as best I could. She might as well hear it all.
“I’d hoped that dream was a simple nightmare. Except it wasn’t. I’d seen flashes of the place. My mother falling. Just glimpses. But it was enough. I’d recognized that ravine and led my grandfather and uncle there. We saw her lying at the bottom. My grandfather shouted at me to stop, to not go down. ‘Come away, child!’ he’d shouted.”
“But you went down, didn’t you.”
I nodded. “I had to. I scrambled down the steep incline and crumpled to my knees beside her. I think I knew she was dead. But my foolish child’s mind thought surely she would awaken to her daughter’s plea. I begged her to wake up.”
Miss Stranje murmured, “Oh Tess, I’m so sorry.”
I shook away her pity and took a deep, shuddering breath. I stared at my hand gripping the arm of the chair and remembered how my fingers had trembled that day when I’d reached out to brush decaying leaves from my mother’s hair and cheek. I’d touched her pale brow, it had been smooth as ice. I remembered noticing that her fearful creases were gone. A rare softness curved her lips. That’s when I knew she’d truly left me. Her eyes were finally closed.
Asleep.
“She finally found peace,” I said a bit too loudly and looked squarely at Miss Stranje, as if it wasn’t ripping me up inside to remember all this. “And she left me to deal with her nightmares.”
Alone.
Miss Stranje probably wondered why I was able to tell her this story without crying. Perhaps I should’ve explained to her that I never cry. My last tears fell beside my mother’s body, lost forever among the withered leaves in that ravine.
I have not cried since.
Not until today.
Except that didn’t really count as crying.
She rubbed her chin, studying me. “That’s why you told Lord Ravencross no, isn’t it? You believe you will suffer the same fate as your mother. And clearly, so does your aunt.”
“Yes. I mean, no. That is to say, Lord Ravencross didn’t actually ask me to marry him. Not really. But yes, my aunt and I have discussed this at length. We both want the dreams to end with me. The idea of my marrying anyone is out of the question.”
“I see.” But her face remained pinched up as if she was still scrutinizing the matter.
“What’s more important, I am committed to the work we do here. It gives what’s left of my life purpose. Besides, what sort of wife would I make, scaling walls and throwing knives?”
The small lines beside her eyes crinkled up. “A very dangerous sort, I should think.”
Sixteen
DANGEROUS
A very dangerous sort.
“Precisely,” I said.
“Very well. Since you would rather stay here—”
“I would. Except what will you do with me when the dreams get bad and turn my mind?”
“That is still a very long way off. Let us tackle that problem closer to the time, shall we? At present, we must deal with your aunt. I shall write to her and explain that her very generous father-in-law covered your tuition for another year and a half—”
“He did?”
“Oh, my dear, I always overcharge abominably.”
“Of course, you do. Because our families are willing to pay an exorbitant fee for you to take us off their hands.”
She didn’t answer that, there was no need. We all knew it was true, even if it did still sting. She chirped on about what she would put in the letter to my aunt. “And then so that she won’t worry, I’ll tell her that you are quite happy here. You might want to write and tell her the same.”
“No, you can’t say that.” I sat up and shook my head. “It would be doing it up too brown. She’ll never believe I’m happy. I’m not the happy sort.”
“I see.” She seemed to take me seriously, but I couldn’t tell for certain. There was a little twist to her mouth that made me wonder. “Quite right.”
She tapped the arm of the chair thoughtfully. “Then I shall tell her this: that your embroidery and sewing skills are wretched and still require considerable work, your watercolors are deplorable, and your French lessons are coming along rather slowly. But to encourage her, I will add that your nightmares appear to be less severe than they once were. I wonder if I ought to speculate that perhaps the farther you reside from Tidenham, the less the dreams seem to intrude upon your peace.”
“Oh, yes, brilliant! That would do it.” I stared at my teacher, amazed. Almost every word she planned to say was true, almost, except the part about the dreams, and yet it had nothing to do with the important facts of the matter.
“That settles that, then.” She stood and shook out her stiff black skirts. “Come. I need to make haste and compose a message to Captain Grey. We’ll stop by my study to write it, and then you can accompany me to the dovecote. The pigeons always behave better when you are there.”
“Because I feed them.”
“Hmm.”
Georgie’s favorite room in the house, apart from her laboratory, is Miss Stranje’s study. It is my least favorite. I feel trapped here. The bookshelves tower to the ceiling and every inch is filled. Even though she has shelves lining all three walls, books are still stacked on the floor. Miss Stranje claims there is an order we cannot see to her office, and I believe her. Ask her for a book, and she knows exactly where it can be found.
Her papers, however, are a different matter. They are arranged meticulously in slots along the wall behind her and in three bins atop her desk. A cunning woman, Miss Emma Stranje, to have laid a trap so subtle that something as insignificant as a cut pen nib falling out of place would tell her that we had riffled through her papers.
She indicated a chair for me and proceeded to sit at the desk and cut a long thin strip of vellum. She possessed two inkwells, the regular variety of India ink and the invisible ink Georgiana had created. First she would compose a message in India
ink and then, when that dried, she would follow with more sensitive information written in the disappearing ink.
While she worked, I fidgeted with the fringe on my chair and then started perusing the books on the shelf nearest to me. One in particular caught my attention, a collection of geographical information and maps of China, and next to it stood a book with Chinese characters etched on the spine.
Curiosity overtook me, and I interrupted her writing. “How long have you known Madame Cho?”
She didn’t look up from blotting the vellum. “A great many years,” she said. “She came to live with us when I was seven.” She glanced up and smiled. “Cho was not much older than you are.”
“How?” I blurted. “How did she come all the way from China to here?”
Miss Stranje snapped out of her reverie and frowned. “What has she told you?”
“Only that her father taught her the fighting skills she teaches us. And that she lived in a village where two rivers meet.”
“Ah, yes, the Xi and the Tan.” She bent again over the slender strip of paper and concentrated on making very small, careful strokes.
I scooted my chair closer and folded my arms on the edge of her wooden desk, watching her work. “Why did she come to live with you?”
“My father adopted her. We were raised as sisters.”
“If she was my age, she was rather old to be adopted. How did he come by her? Did he steal her away from her home in China?”
“Good heavens, no!” She glanced up at me, astonished by my question. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
I smoothed my fingers over the soft quail feather on one of her extra quills. “It’s just that Madame Cho looked excessively sad when she spoke of the place where two rivers meet. Which made me wonder why she would have left her family and a place she loved to come to England.”
“What a horrid hypothesis, to think my father would do something so reprehensible. Nothing could be farther from the truth. My father was an honorable, caring man.” Miss Stranje bristled at me and waved the small scrap of paper to make the ink dry faster. “You will have to ask Madame Cho. It is not my story to tell.”
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