Behind the Mask

by Linda Winstead Jones

  Chuck was stronger than he looked. He carried Tessa’s trunk to the front porch and deposited it there, and then hurried back to fetch John’s smaller trunk.

  The newlyweds stood before the house and stared.

  Holland House had once been the finest mansion in this part of Alabama. Constructed of stone in the early 1820s, there was a touch of Georgian influence in the design of the massive two-story house. At one time it had been grand, but now the windows were dirty, and a few of the shutters hung loose. The paint on those shutters was weather-beaten, peeling and faded. There were hints that some of the wood on the front porch was rotten. The ivy and shrubs that grew around the porch and along all sides of the large house had not been tended in many years. And still, it was quietly magnificent, like an aging dowager who had seen better days but could still turn heads as she walked slowly by.

  John removed the key to the front door from his pocket and headed forward as Chuck placed the second trunk on the porch.

  “I would help you carry the baggage inside,” the driver said as he hurried back to the carriage, all but running past John and then Tessa. “But I promised the missus I’d be home before dark.” He vaulted into the seat of the carriage without waiting for a response and released the brake.

  “Your fee...” John began, turning to face the carriage.

  “I’ll send you a bill,” Chuck said with a wave of his hand as he set the horses into motion. He didn’t look back, not even when he yelled out, “Good luck!”

  John sighed and walked toward the front door, key in hand. “Apparently he believes that nonsense about the house being haunted.” He shook his head and muttered, “Ridiculous.”

  Tessa wasn’t so sure. She had heard many unusual stories about this house, most of them from her mother’s mother, Grandmother Kathleen. But Tessa’s mother had assured her that there was no ghost, and John apparently didn’t believe that the place might be haunted by disturbed spirits. The tales that surrounded Holland House were just stories that came naturally with a large house that had been abandoned for a long time. And besides, Grandmother Kathleen was inordinately superstitious.

  “Completely ridiculous,” Tessa said agreeably.

  Her husband studied the front porch, pushing the toe of his boot against a weak spot. As he pressed against the damaged wood and it splintered with a cracking sound, he frowned.

  “Mother hired a woman to clean the house,” Tessa said, trying to ease his obvious distress. “I’m sure it’s much better inside than out. And Mother said she had the pantry stocked. I’m sure everything will be fine.”

  Tessa swallowed hard. Fine. Just fine.

  John unlocked the front door and threw it open. Inside, all was dark. The sun hung low in the sky, and there wasn’t enough light to illuminate the entry hall well.

  Door open, sun setting, John turned to her. He paused there, at the threshold, and something she could not read flitted through his eyes. And then he sighed. “I suppose I should carry you in. Tradition and all.”

  Tessa straightened her spine. “If you think that’s best.”

  In two steps he reached her. Without any apparent effort or emotion, he swung her into his arms. In order to keep her balance, Tessa very carefully placed her arms around his neck.

  Her husband carried her across the threshold and into their new home. Inside, their eyes quickly adjusted to the low light. Tessa blinked. Then blinked again.

  “Good God,” John said, his voice low. He did not place Tessa on her feet, but continued to hold her in his steely hard arms.

  Huge, intricate cobwebs filled every corner, catching the last light of day. There was dirt on the floor, new dirt and old, and the single ornamental chair in the entryway lay on its side, one leg broken, the padded seat tattered. The portrait of a solemn-looking ancestor adorned the wall. It hung quite crookedly and was home for more cobwebs.

  “Perhaps the woman Mother hired didn’t have time to clean every room,” Tessa said optimistically. “I’m sure the rest of the house is much better than... than this.”

  Finally, John very cautiously placed her on her feet. If he had been unhappy before, he was now approaching livid. Not that he said or did anything to indicate displeasure, but she could see the disappointment and growing anger in his eyes.

  While he went back to the porch to collect their baggage, Tessa ran to the doorway to her left. It opened onto the main parlor. A quick glance assured her that the cleaning woman had not had time to attack this room, either.

  John deposited her trunk on a creaking floor that coughed up a considerable amount of dust. He returned to the porch for his own trunk, while Tessa ran across the entry hall to the other two doors, both standing open. The small room at the front of the house was a music room, judging by the broken pianoforte and the stringless violin. The other room was a smaller parlor, something more intimate than the main parlor. Tessa stepped into the room. Most of the furniture had been covered in white sheets, but a considerable amount of dust covered those sheets, and more cobwebs hung from the ceiling. She ran a finger across a dust-covered table, leaving a long, winding trail. No, the cleaning woman had not found her way to this small parlor, either.

  Tessa whisked back the sheet from one chair, checked it carefully, and sat. It seemed solid enough, and with a good cleaning the room would do. For now.

  John came to the doorway, stopped there, and leaned against the doorjamb.

  Tessa took a deep breath. It was just the two of them, for now. Next week his father would arrive with horses, equipment and furniture would be ordered, and servants and a foreman would be hired. But the families who had arranged this marriage had agreed; John and Tessa needed some time alone before they jumped into building an empire. They needed to get properly acquainted. They needed to... Oh, she knew quite well what they needed to do. Her mother had warned her about the less pleasant aspects of marriage.

  She just could not imagine...

  “Let’s check out the kitchen,” John said tiredly. “I’m starved.”

  John led the way through the stairway hall at the rear of the entry hall, through a long dining room, and finally into the kitchen. At least here there were signs that someone had attempted to clean.

  His bride didn’t make a sound as she followed him. Meek as a kitten, she stood by the stove. “This is a bit better,” she said in a small voice.

  If it wasn’t bad enough that his new home was falling apart and had been unkempt for fifteen years, his wife was obviously terrified of him. She didn’t smile. She didn’t laugh. She barely raised her voice above a whisper. And her eyes, a deep chocolate brown a man might willingly fall into, were always wide with fear.

  When he had consented to this marriage, he’d remembered Tessa Douglas as a vibrant, laughing, beautiful girl. Six years ago this past summer, his family had spent more than a month at the Douglas home. Of course, Tessa had been fifteen then, not yet a woman. He had been a restless twenty-three-year-old who had no time or patience for giggling girls, but he did remember her fondly.

  Tessa was still beautiful, with silky hair as dark as her eyes, skin so pale and flawless he ached to touch that flesh to see if it was as soft and wonderful as it looked, and a womanly figure perfect on her petite frame. Her white satin wedding dress had shown off that figure well, so well the sight of her walking down the aisle had affected him more than he’d expected it might Even the more conservative traveling outfit she wore now, a gray skirt and jacket that nipped her waist and hugged her curves, was more than becoming.

  But in the past six months she hadn’t laughed once, that he had seen, and the vibrance he had once admired in the girl was missing from this meek woman.

  His wife.

  There were candles on the table at the center of the large kitchen. He drew a tin of matches from the inside pocket of his wedding coat and lit one, then another. It would soon be dark.

  A wide-eyed Tessa turned and ran to the pantry. She threw open the door and then let out a sigh
of relief. “The pantry is full, as Mother said it would be.”

  John looked around the kitchen. It did look as though someone had begun to clean here, but whoever that person was had stopped well before the chore was completed.

  “Good,” he said. “At least we won’t starve.”

  Tessa spun around and clasped her hands before her. “Oh, if we needed to go to town, we could. It would be a long walk, but it’s not too terribly far. We won’t have to worry about starving.”

  John sat at the kitchen table with a sigh. “I was kidding, Tessa.” Good Lord, he had married a woman who had no sense of humor.

  This marriage had seemed like a good enough idea when his father had presented it to him in the spring. Steel and coal had made the Travis family rich, but they would never be anything more than carpetbaggers if they didn’t marry well. John’s older brother, Graham, had refused such an arrangement. He had insisted on marrying for love, instantly and insanely falling for a pretty girl whose family had neither money nor good name, and marrying her without the blessing of his family. That had been ten years ago. Graham and Doreen were still married, and they were both miserable. There were three children, and Graham was almost certain that one of them was actually his. The other two he knew without question were not. So much for love.

  John didn’t believe in love, so he wasn’t in any danger of following in his brother’s foolish footsteps.

  But he did wish his wife would look at him without terror in her pretty eyes.

  “I’ll fix us some supper...” Tessa began.

  She was interrupted by a crashing noise from upstairs. John glanced up. So did Tessa.

  “No one else is supposed to be here,” she whispered.

  “Perhaps the cleaning woman is trying to make amends,” John suggested. “She might have gotten a late start and decided to take care of the kitchen and maybe one of the, uh, bedrooms today.”

  Tessa blushed. John suspected he did, too.

  “It came from directly above us,” Tessa said, continuing to whisper.

  “Yes, it did.”

  “If I remember correctly, that’s not a, uh, bedroom. It’s the ballroom. All the other upstairs rooms are located at the front of the house.”

  “I see. Well, whatever we heard, I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation. Rats, perhaps, or...”

  Tessa went pale at the mention of rats.

  “Perhaps a squirrel.”

  “Perhaps.”

  Since a trace of color came back to her cheeks, it was clear Tessa found squirrels less daunting than rats, though to John’s way of thinking, there was little difference. One had a furry tail; the other did not. They were both rodents. He decided not to present that argument to his bride.

  Above stairs, the sound muffled by distance and yet still quite clear, a door slammed shut. And then another. And then another.

  Tessa’s dark eyes were impossibly wide. “I don’t think that was a squirrel.”

  2

  He would prove to Tessa that there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for the noises from above stairs. Squirrels. Rats. The wind. She followed him obediently back through the dining room and into the stairwell hall, but at the foot of the spiraling staircase she hesitated.

  “I really should see to supper before it gets too dark.”

  “We have plenty of candles.” To prove his point, he held the one he carried high.

  When Tessa showed no sign of following him onto the stairs, he grabbed her wrist and insisted. She followed with no protest other than a seemingly involuntary soft squeal.

  The winding stairway was in no better shape than the rest of the house. Cobwebs stretched along the banister; the stairs creaked a loud warning with each step. His father thought it would be a wonderful idea to expand the family business by making his middle son, John, a gentleman farmer, as well as a continuing partner in the steel business. When the old plantation house was restored, they would have soirees, weekend parties with the Southern aristocracy. Ha! It would take him fifty years to make this place fit to live in.

  Although the upstairs hallway was definitely in disrepair, it showed no sign of rodent invasion. There were four doors off the wide hallway, all closed.

  “Where is the entrance to the ballroom?” he asked, his grip on Tessa’s delicate wrist never loosening.

  “You can’t get to the ballroom from here,” she said as she studied the four closed doors. “It’s a separate wing. The only entrance is through the stairs at the back of the house.”

  John went to the nearest door, dragging Tessa with him, and opened it without hesitation. If one discounted the fact that the bare-mattress bed was canted, thanks to one broken leg, and the dresser was missing a drawer, the room was not too bad. He had already begun to overlook the cobwebs and dirt that were everywhere.

  “See?” he said, stepping inside and raising the candle high. “No rats, no squirrels, and no ghosts.”

  “But we heard—”

  “The wind,” he said quickly.

  “I haven’t seen any open windows.”

  With the hand that carried the candle, he waved off her concern. The flame flickered, dancing wickedly. “It’s a drafty old house, Tessa. The wind might have come through a chimney. And we haven’t yet inspected all the rooms. There might be broken windows, here and there.”

  “If you insist,” she said meekly.

  This bedroom definitely would not do for their first night together as man and wife. Surely one of the others would be more suitable.

  He dragged his wife back into the hallway to choose yet another closed door for exploration. And found them all standing wide open.

  “Weren’t these doors... closed?” Tessa asked, her voice a whisper. “They were. I remember.”

  “Obviously, they weren’t closed well,” he reasoned. “I’ll have to take a look at the latches on these doors. They must be defective. Another draft blew them open.”

  “I didn’t hear a draft,” Tessa insisted.

  Neither did I. “Our, minds were elsewhere.” His had been, briefly, on the wedding night to come. He had no idea where Tessa’s mind might have gone.

  He really should drop her hand. She wouldn’t flee now. And if she did, one word from him and she would be back. She was quite obedient, his Tessa.

  But he didn’t so much as ease his grip. He held her wrist in one hand and the candle in the other as he continued his investigation.

  The room across the hall was in better shape than the first one they had inspected, and perhaps a little bit larger. The dresser was intact, and there was even a mirror over that dresser. It was cracked and dirty, but still, it was a mirror. No bed, though. Only an empty space where a bed had once been.

  The next room was also in decent shape and actually had an unmade bed that sat up on all four legs. John’s hopes began to rise. A broom, a bucket of water, and a few rags, and this might make an acceptable bedroom.

  The fourth and final bedroom was by far the best. It was even a bit larger than the other three. The four-poster bed was wide and sturdy, and this room sported not only a dresser, but an armoire, a standing cheval mirror, and a washbasin.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “Either of the rooms with a bed that’s standing on all four legs is fine with me,” Tessa said, waving her hand between the two least horrid of the chambers. “They’re both about the same. You choose first. I’ll take the one you don’t want.”

  John turned and looked down at his wife. God, those eyes again. “Separate rooms?”

  He could see her swallow. “It doesn’t matter to me,” she said quickly. “I just thought you might sleep better in your own room. I might... snore or something, and I have been told that I thrash about something awful at night. I would hate to disturb your much needed sleep.”

  The corners of his mouth twitched. He couldn’t help it.

  Something unexpected lurched inside his chest. “You’re afraid you might disturb me with your sno
ring?”

  “Possibly,” she whispered.

  He tugged on her hand and pulled her an inch or so closer. The awkwardness of the day aside, Tessa was a lovely, tempting creature. He rocked one finger against her wrist. “I don’t think newlyweds are supposed to have separate rooms,” he said in a low voice.

  Even in candlelight, he could see her cheeks go pale. Oh, he was an idiot. This was why she was afraid. This was why her eyes had been so wide all day. He should have realized earlier, but he’d never bedded a virgin before. He didn’t know how to tell his wife that she had nothing to be afraid of.

  “I will try not to hurt you, you know,” he said, attempting to reassure Tessa without lying to her.

  It didn’t work. If anything, she looked more frightened than before.

  “I’ll make supper,” she said quickly. “I think I saw linens in the pantry, on one of the top shelves. You can bring in the trunks and put them wherever you want.”

  He peeled his fingers from her wrist “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  His second attempt to reassure her was no more effective than the first. She sighed as she turned her back on him and made her way to the stairs.

  Tessa paced the candlelit bedroom, her gaze occasionally falling to the two trunks which sat side by side on the floor beside the armoire. There were two perfectly serviceable empty bedrooms on this floor, and two others that could be quickly made into useable rooms, if it became necessary. Why did her husband insist that they share this one? The bed would be crowded, and if she didn’t snore he surely would.

  She stopped before the mirror and pulled the already high collar of her nightgown even higher, so that it touched her chin. Dinner had gone well, she thought as she played absently with a length of her loosened hair. She might not be a wonderful cook, but she could manage to keep herself and her husband fed until they hired a housekeeper. There was ham and bacon in the smokehouse, and plenty of canned goods in the pantry, along with potatoes, onions, apples, and dried beans. They could make it through the coming winter with what they had on hand, if they had to.