by Michelle Cox
Without thinking, she raised her finger and put it gently against Gunther’s lips. Softly he kissed it, and a resultant electric current immediately coursed through her. He reached up, then, and wrapped her tiny hand in his calloused one and turned it slowly, so that he could brush her palm with his lips.
There was more tenderness, more intimacy, in that small gesture than any she had ever known with the likes of Harrison, and she knew she was becoming untethered, skating farther out to where the ice was very thin. Her heart was pounding in her chest, and she felt as though nothing had ever existed before this moment. He was leaning so very close to her, his lips inches from hers, and she could sense him trembling too. But before she gave in completely, a warning bell went off somewhere in the far corners of her mind, forged perhaps from her many hours of tears over Harrison—and of Stanley, truth be told—and the current spell was sadly broken. Slowly she pulled her hand from his.
“Who is Anna?” she whispered, searching his eyes with her own.
“Anna?” he asked, confused.
“I . . . I read your notebook,” she said, though her tongue felt thick in her mouth as she said it. “The night at the hospital. I . . . I thought you knew . . .”
“No, I did not know this,” he said, puzzled.
“You called out for her in your sleep.” Elsie watched as his face contorted. “Who is she?”
“Ach! Elsie,” he groaned. “I meant to tell you. I have wanted to tell you for so long. It is partly what I came here now to tell you. She . . . she’s someone I am helping. It is a very long story.”
“She lives with you, doesn’t she?” Elsie guessed.
Gunther nodded slowly, his eyes closing. “Sometimes,” he sighed.
“With . . . with your mother, right?” Elsie asked, the hope in her heart that there was at least the semblance of a chaperone present causing her chest to burn.
“My mother is dead,” he said quietly. “She died on the way over.”
Elsie felt all the breath go out of her, not realizing she had been holding it in. Dead? she said to herself, trying to take it all in. “You lied?”
“I didn’t mean to, it’s just that—”
“So it’s just the two of you?”
“Yes, but it is not what you are thinking, Elsie,” Gunther said the urgency in his voice increasing.
Elsie stood up and thought she might be sick. Not again. “Please . . .” she murmured.
“Let me explain,” Gunther begged, standing up now, too.
“No!” Elsie almost shouted. “No, I don’t want to hear it. Any of it. I can figure it out for myself,” she said, backing away from him. “How dare you come to me like this and say these . . . these things when you aren’t free? I thought you were different!” she cried, breaking down into sobs.
“Elsie, please,” he said, tears in his own eyes now, as he tried to grasp her arms. “You do not understand. Anna is—”
“How dare you,” she interrupted, roughly pulling away from him. “How dare you tell me what I am doing is wrong and to try to turn me from it! To what end?
“I am not trying to tell you what you are doing is wrong!”
“Yes, you are! You say that I’m confused and somehow don’t know my own mind. That I’m running from one cage to the next, as you put it. And you tell me this—why? So that I will fly into yours? Yours, which is just as tarnished as all the others, it would seem.”
“Elsie, you must let me explain—”
“Do you love her? No! Don’t answer that,” she said before he could answer. “I don’t want to know.”
She began to cry again, and she was overwhelmed with a desperate desire to flee. To be anywhere but here. Suddenly the tropical air felt overwhelming and thick, noxious even. She ran toward the door.
“Elsie, please . . .” Gunther called out.
But Elsie did not stop to listen, and instead hurried through the doors and down the circular staircase to the gleaming floor below. She ran across the hall to the main staircase, gasping for breath as she clasped the chrome railing and feeling utterly sick to her stomach. How had she fallen prey to yet another brute? she wondered, as she ran across the circular drive to escape into her room.
Chapter 23
“Another?” Clive asked Bennett, holding up the decanter of cognac. Bennett gave a tight nod from where he sat in the leather armchair in the study at Highbury, a fire crackling in the large stone fireplace. As Clive poured, he was uncomfortably aware of how reminiscent it was of all the evenings he had spent in here with his father. Outside it was snowing again, coming down heavily.
“So he’s dead, then?” Bennett asked, swirling the amber liquid that Clive had just poured into his glass.
“Yes, the bastard’s finally dead. I can finally stop looking over my shoulder, or Henrietta’s shoulder, I should say,” Clive responded, bracing one outstretched arm against the mantle as he gazed at the fire. “Thank God.”
He was elated that Neptune, and both of his right-hand men had been shot and killed that night, and he couldn’t stop replaying it in his mind, over and over. Watching Neptune fall after he had pumped three shots into him and seeing the look of shock and pain on the bastard’s face as he went down slaked a fury inside him that he hadn’t fully realized was there.
“Davis going to make it?” Bennett asked, peering up at him.
Clive let out a deep sigh. “Yes, I’m pretty sure. The doctors think he’ll be in for a few more weeks, but they’re hoping for a full recovery.”
—
Davis had indeed survived the shot to his abdomen, the bullet somehow miraculously missing all of his vital organs. Clive and Henrietta had been to see him every day since that fateful night, especially as no family members had so far come forward to visit. The chief had come at least once, blustering his way into Davis’s room, and Clive and Henrietta had run into a few other men visiting from the station, but mostly, they observed, he was alone. So far, he had been unconscious each time they visited, but just yesterday, he was awake when they came in.
Henrietta rushed to his side, setting down the flowers she had brought from the florist in town, exclaiming as she did, “Oh, Sergeant Davis, you’re finally awake!”
“Don’t you think you’d better call me Frank?” he asked with a voice thick and gravelly from underuse. “Considering.”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right,” Henrietta said, her eyes crinkling into a smile as she patted his hand. She looked up at Clive as she did so, who merely arched his eyebrow in response.
“How are you?” Clive asked, clearing his throat, as he stepped closer to the bed.
“Been better,” Davis managed.
“I owe you one,” Clive said.
“I’d say so.”
“You’re very lucky, Sergeant Davis,” Henrietta said.
“Frank.”
“I mean, Frank,” she corrected herself. “The doctors can’t believe it wasn’t a fatal shot.”
“Luck of the Irish, I guess,” he said with another grin. “On my mother’s side.”
He closed his eyes, as if even that little bit of conversation had exhausted him. Henrietta looked at Clive and then back at Davis. His eyes fluttered open again after a few moments.
“Sorry,” he croaked.
“Don’t apologize!” Henrietta said. “You’re obviously very weak still. We’ll go and let you rest now. Can we bring you anything?”
“Nah,” he said, closing his eyes again briefly.
“You’re sure?” Henrietta persisted.
“How about a Scotch?” he said, opening his eyes to peer at Clive.
“When you get out,” Clive responded. Davis gave a barely perceptible nod and closed his eyes again.
A nurse bustled in, carrying a clipboard braced against her massive chest. “Visiting hours are over, I’m afraid,” she said crisply. “Sergeant Davis needs his rest.”
“Of course,” Henrietta said, giving Davis’s hand a squeeze, which caused him to open
his eyes again and look at her. “We’ll be back tomorrow,” she said to him with a smile and made her way quietly out.
“Good-bye, then, old man. Chin up, as they say,” Clive said, holding his hat in his hands.
Davis looked to where Clive was standing. “You’re lucky you have her,” he said, his voice thick.
“Yes, I know,” Clive said and ducked out of the room.
“He’ll be back at work soon enough, I should imagine,” Clive said now to Bennett, shrugging his bad shoulder as he slumped down into the armchair opposite.
“You wish you could join him, don’t you?” Bennett asked, observing Clive. “Go back to detective work.”
Clive let out a deep sigh. “Is it that obvious?”
Bennett unexpectedly laughed. “It’s been obvious since the minute Alcott died, my boy.”
At the older man’s utterance of “my boy” as he sat in his father’s chair, Clive’s breath momentarily caught in his throat. He tried to ignore the surreal similarity before him and concentrate on Bennett’s words instead. Painfully, Clive tried to consider how much of him grieved his actual father and how much of his grief was for the life he had hoped to take up here with Henrietta—the detective work, the shoring up of Highbury, making a clean slate of things, modernizing. It hadn’t fully occurred to him until just this moment, and he didn’t know what to say. Part of him was ashamed by this line of thought’s very existence.
But at least he had gotten revenge on his father’s killers, he repeated to himself yet again. Well, three of them, anyway, he conceded and wondered where the rest of Neptune’s gang had scattered to, especially Vic. He was tempted to telephone his former chief in the city, who naturally had ties to the underworld, informants who would know who was afoot and who had jumped town to lay low for a while. But what did it matter? It wasn’t his job anymore. It was time once and for all to put that behind him, he told himself. His future sat in front of him in the form of Sidney Bennett. Now that he could truly lay his father to rest, he knew he needed to pour all of his energy into running the firm. It was time.
“So why don’t you?” Bennett asked him as he took a drink of Scotch.
“Why don’t I what?” Clive asked, perplexed.
“Go back to detective work.”
Clive let out a snort and took a drink of his cognac—a big one.
“I’m perfectly serious, Clive,” Bennett said, casually crossing his legs. “I’ve been thinking about it since . . . since Alcott’s unfortunate demise. It’s obvious you’re not suited to running the firm.”
“Thanks very much.”
“I don’t mean you’re not competent. Not at all. You are certainly capable of running Linley Standard. But your heart isn’t in it, is it? I tried to tell this to Alcott, but he wouldn’t listen.”
Suddenly his father’s parting words in the letter in the cottage came back to him, his instruction to listen to and trust Bennett. He mulled over the words once again. We have grown up together, in a way, and he saved me once when I was about to make a very grave, very foolish mistake. Make a friend of him, Clive.
“What exactly did you save my father from?” Clive asked abruptly.
Bennett’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“Just that in my father’s last letter, the one I found in the cottage, he says that you saved him from making a very grave mistake. What was it?”
“Ah.” Bennett said, not looking at him and instead averting his eyes to the fire. After a few moments, he looked back at Clive. “I suppose it doesn’t matter now if I tell you.”
Clive waited expectantly.
“It was just that your father nearly had an affair,” he said quietly.
“Jesus Christ.” Clive had had a niggling feeling ever since he had read the letter, but he had hoped it was something else. Like a bad investment perhaps. He gave Bennett a sideways glance. “Who with?”
Bennett sighed. “Does it really matter?”
Clive contemplated this. “How long ago?” he asked instead.
“Years and years ago. Not long after I met him, really. I was surprised at the time that he listened to me, to be frank. He confided in me one night. We had both been drinking. Said he was tempted, that he was thinking of taking it further, that it was common between servants and masters in England.”
“Servants?” Clive coughed, his cognac going down the wrong way. “It was a servant?” he asked, quickly running through them in his mind. Who had been with them that long?
“Not . . . not Mary, was it?” Clive asked, thinking that chronologically it had to be either the cook or Mrs. Caldwell, but both prospects seemed ludicrous in the extreme . . .
“It was Helen,” Bennett said softly.
“Helen? Helen Schuler?” he scoffed, holding onto a tiny shred of hope that perhaps it was some other Helen, now long since gone.
“Yes, Helen Schuler.”
“But that’s impossible. She was . . . she was insane!” Clive insisted.
“She wasn’t once,” Bennett said. “She was gorgeous. No other way to put it. Golden hair, curves, the accent. I would have been tempted too, I’ll admit it. I felt sorry for Alcott in a way. It was torture for him for a while, knowing she was just below, in the kitchens, working away. It would have been so easy . . .”
“But wasn’t she married? To one of the gardeners or something like that?”
“Yes, Neils was his name.
“Did she . . . did she return his affections . . . my father’s, I mean?” Clive asked hesitantly.
“I don’t think so. From what I understand, she was devoted to Neils. But at the time, she was sleeping upstairs in the maids’ quarters, and Neils was out above the stables with the other gardeners. There were no accommodations for married servants. Alcott could have easily gone up and had his way with her. She was terribly young; wouldn’t have put up too much of a fight—not that he was that sort,” Bennett said when he saw Clive wince. “Quite the opposite, actually.”
“What happened?”
“Apparently, he found her alone one night when he stumbled downstairs after some dinner party. This is what he told me, anyway. Said he tried to kiss her, but she turned her head away. Said it was the ‘please’ that got him.”
“‘The please’?”
“She whispered ‘please’ to him, as in ‘please don’t’, and it utterly unmanned him. Couldn’t go through with it. Didn’t even touch her. But it didn’t stop him obsessing, though.”
Clive remained silent, trying to take all of this in. “So where do you come into this?”
“I told you. He confided it all to me in a misguided, drunken state. I tried to talk sense to him. I liked Alcott very much. Loved him, actually, in the end. He was a great man. I . . . managed to persuade him to let her be. It was my idea to have the cottage built, and he agreed to it. He put out a grand announcement, saying that married servants should have their own accommodation, that it was the only decent thing to do, all that sort of thing, but it was really just a way to get her out of the house, out of the line of temptation.”
Clive mused this over. “But why? Why would you care if he had an affair? I’m sure half the men you’ve dealt with over the years have done so.”
Bennett shifted uncomfortably. “I was worried it might be bad for business. Especially if Hewitt got a whiff of it. He was fiercely protective of Antonia.”
Clive gave him a skeptical look.
“All right,” Bennett sighed. “It was for Antonia too. I cared for her. I didn’t want to see her hurt. I knew her in New York, you see,” he added, not meeting Clive’s eye.
Clive wasn’t sure how much more he wanted to know. “So that was all there was to it? Nothing really happened?”
“No, nothing happened. I told him to turn to Antonia. Get to know her better. I think, in truth, he was a little afraid of her in the beginning.”
Clive smiled. “Everyone’s a little afraid of her.”
“Seems he did, though, and she w
as soon pregnant with Julia. Helen got pregnant right around the same time, so that clinched it.
Clive looked up with an arched eyebrow.
“No, you don’t have a long-dead half-sister. It was Neils’s. That was obvious. Alcott never spoke about it again to me, so I don’t know if it was hard to get over Helen or not. He seemed devoted to Antonia after that, however. He did love her, if that’s any consolation,” Bennett said, looking at him steadily.
“Yes, he said so in the letter. And I do believe he did.” He paused, thinking. “Do you think she knows—Mother, I mean—about his . . . his feelings, let’s say, for Helen?”
“Why else would she have thought to look for the money in the cottage?” he said, taking a drink of his cognac. “Of course she must have known.”
Clive let out a deep breath. It all made sense. It was as though a veil had been removed to illustrate a part of his father’s life he hadn’t known existed, hadn’t even suspected. Slowly he traced the etchings in the crystal glass he held. Something else was bothering him, though. Something else that was in the letter. Tell her I never stopped loving her despite her— Despite her what? Clive wondered.
He looked up at Bennett, who was staring into the fire. He supposed Bennett knew what this referred to, but Clive wasn’t sure he had the heart right now to hear anything more, especially of a disparaging nature against his mother. He couldn’t bear to think of her having an affair. He let it sit for a few moments, trying to drag his mind back to his father or Helen or Neptune or anything, really, rather than the possibility that his mother may have once strayed, or nearly so. It was one thing for his father to be tempted, but not his mother. Unfortunately, despite his effort to the contrary, he began to wonder, almost against his will, who might have caught her eye, and his mind went almost immediately to Carter, the speed with which it did so its own source of irritation. Could it have been Carter, though? he wondered. Always sneaking around the upstairs wings, particularly near his mother’s rooms? And why else was she so protective of him? He would never have thought it was possible, but perhaps if she had indeed known of Alcott’s predilection for . . . for Helen (God, he could barely think it), she might have thought that what was good for the goose was good for the gander? No! Impossible. If something had . . . happened, he preferred to imagine it was someone from their set, someone rich and powerful. Somehow that would make it more palatable than if it had been the old dog, Carter.