Summerset Abbey

by Brown, T. J.

  Victoria thought hard. She remembered being at the National Gallery with Mary and then Mary had . . . memories came flooding back and Victoria groaned.

  “I see you’re remembering.”

  She struggled to sit again and then gave up, settling back against the mattress. The pillow under her neck scratched, and she prayed it was the cheap linen rather than bugs. “Prison is different than I thought it would be.”

  The woman snorted. “This isn’t prison, this is the clinic. You were almost dead when they brought you in. You have a breathing disorder?”

  Victoria nodded. “Yes, I’m . . .” Victoria choked a bit on the word but used it anyway. It’s what she was, no matter how much she denied it. “I’m an asthmatic.”

  The woman nodded and made a note on a chart. “That’s what the doctor thought. And don’t worry. You’ll be seeing the inside of a prison cell soon enough, though you suffragettes usually rate one to yourselves. Just don’t try to starve yourself. We will force-feed you, and it’s the most God-awful thing I’ve ever seen or done.” Her face wrinkled into a stern look as she took Victoria’s pulse.

  “Why wouldn’t I eat?” Victoria asked. She’d heard of suffragettes going on hunger strikes, but she thought trying to kill oneself was a poor way to give to the cause.

  “Why would any of them stop eating?” the nurse asked reasonably. “But I’m sure a young woman such as yourself, who has struggled for her very life’s breath, would look at death a great deal differently than most idealists. You’re very lucky to be alive, Miss. I thought you were a goner. You were as blue as my shirt. Now, do you need to use the privy?” Victoria nodded and the woman indicated a bucket in the corner.

  Victoria blanched.

  “I know it’s not fancy, but then, I suspect the wardens don’t feel the need to roll out the fancy for those that break the law. Now, if you promise not to throw another fit, I’ll let you loose long enough to do your business. Give me a single moment’s worry and I’ll call in Ed and you’ll have to do whatever you need to do in front of him.”

  Horrified, Victoria promised. After the nurse had gotten her back into the bed, she told Victoria to try to sleep. “I won’t cuff you, if you promise me no more trouble. If you do, it’s my arse on the line and I’ll have to truss you up like a Christmas goose.” The woman rattled the cuffs for emphasis.

  The blood drained out of Victoria’s face. “I promise,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

  The nurse got Victoria into bed and settled the covers over her. Victoria’s bones ached, and even the roughness of the gray woolen blankets and the hard mattress felt wonderful. When the woman moved to leave, Victoria caught her arm. “Wait,” she pleaded. It seemed as if this woman was the only person between Victoria and unknown terrors. “When will I see a judge? When can I see my family?”

  The woman shook her head and flicked a switch off. The only light now came from the open door, and long shadows spilled over Victoria’s bed “I don’t know. It’s hard to tell.”

  “What’s your name?” Victoria pleaded. Anything to keep the door from shutting.

  “Eleanor. I’ll check on you before my shift is up. Now try to get some sleep.”

  The light slivered and then was gone. The darkness, once the door had closed, was absolute, and Victoria trembled. She’d never liked being alone at night, and for years she had slept with Prudence to keep the nightmares away.

  There was no one to keep the nightmares away now. Of course, how could anything her mind conjured be worse than her current reality?

  Tears rose and fell down her cheeks in the darkness. How did she get here? Why, oh why, hadn’t she just ignored Mary’s note? The woman was mad, crazy. Victoria wondered where she was and then realized that Mary was no doubt locked in a cell in this very prison.

  She wiped the tears with her hands. Her uncle would get her out if he could. He was an important man and a rich one to boot. Surely he could do something.

  With a sinking heart, she remembered some of the newspaper articles she’d read over the preceding months. Public opinion might be mixed on the suffragettes, but the justice system was not. Most judges had no sympathy whatsoever, and they had been known to throw a suffragette in jail and toss the key at the same time. And if they really thought she had plotted to destroy the painting . . . Victoria shuddered.

  Something dropped outside the door and she stilled. She could hear muffled voices for a bit as the nurses and orderlies worked their way from room to room, checking on patients, and she listened intently. At least she knew there were people out there and she wasn’t all alone. But the noises grew fainter and fainter and soon there was only the sound of her own ragged breathing. Then a soft moaning began and her heart leapt jaggedly in her chest. She screwed her eyes up tight against the darkness and began to recite:

  ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

  All mimsy were the borogoves,

  And the mome raths outgrabe. . . .

  “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

  The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

  Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

  The frumious Bandersnatch!”

  Victoria paused with a shudder. No. Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” was much too frightening for this situation. Her father used to run his fingers through his hair and recite it while making the most horrible faces. Father! She swallowed and began again. This time choosing Rudyard Kipling’s, “The Bee Boy’s Song.”

  BEES! BEES! Hark to your bees!

  “Hide from your neigbours as much as you please,

  But all that has happened, to us you must tell,

  Or else we will give you no honey to sell!”

  She started softly and then got louder and louder as the words chased the last of the shadows from her mind.

  A maiden in her glory,

  Upon her wedding-day,

  Must tell her Bees the story,

  Or else they’ll fly away.

  Fly away—die away—

  Dwindle down and leave you

  But if you don’t deceive your Bees,

  Your Bees will not deceive you.

  Her heart beat and her breathing had both returned to normal, and she settled further down under the blankets, racking her brains for the vast reserves of Kipling poetry she had stored there. She wouldn’t think about being alone in a dark place. Alone in a notorious prison where they sent murderers and robbers. Where women lived out their entire lives, forgotten by the world. Victoria whimpered and sank down further under the blankets.

  Desperately she moved from poetry to stories: “This is the story of the great war that Rikki-tikki-tavi fought single-handed, through the bath-rooms of the big bungalow in Segowlee cantonment . . .”

  Continue reading for an exclusive excerpt from New York Times bestseller Jane Feather’s charming Edwardian novella

  AN ENGAGEMENT AT BEAUFORT HALL

  When Imogen Carstairs discovers that her fiancé Charles Riverdale has been carrying on an affair with another woman throughout their betrothal, she immediately calls off the engagement, just three days before the wedding. In the wake of social scandal and a broken heart, Gen retreats to her family’s sprawling country estate with her sister, Esther. But Beaufort Hall proves not as distant an escape as she’d hoped when she discovers that Charles has purchased the neighboring estate . . . and received permission to hunt on her land. With Charles so close by, passions quickly reignite, and Gen is left reeling. Can she let herself trust this man again after such a betrayal? Should she follow her head . . . or her heart?

  Chapter 1

  LONDON, NOVEMBER 1899

  “What the devil are you saying, Imogen?” The Honorable Charles Riverdale stared at his fiancée across the cozy salon, his eyes darkening with anger and confusion. Rain drummed against the long windows that opened onto a small walled garden in this quiet London street of tall, terraced houses, and the gas lamps in the room were a
lready lit to combat the afternoon gloom, a coal fire burning brightly in the grate. As brightly as the anger in his betrothed’s clear gray eyes.

  Imogen Carstairs held his stare, resolution now superseding the anger in her gaze. “It’s a simple enough question, Charles. Is it true that Mrs. Symonds has been your mistress for the last two years, throughout our betrothal? And do you have a one-year-old child by her?”

  “And just where did you hear this?” Charles regarded her closely, no longer confused.

  “I’m not on the witness stand, Charles,” Imogen snapped, “so don’t try your barrister tricks on me. I asked you a question and I’d like an answer.”

  They were like two angry bears facing each other over a newly killed carcass, Esther Carstairs thought from her position hidden behind the concealed door that led from the small salon at the back of the Carstairs’ mansion in Stanhope Terrace into a private cabinet that their father had used as his study. She had gone in to fetch some visiting cards from the secretaire and suddenly found herself on the outskirts of what sounded like a major row between the betrothed pair.

  Neither of them knew she was there and, indeed, she had not intended to eavesdrop. She should have crept away and ordinarily would have done, but this conversation was too startling, too dramatic to ignore. Her sister had never mentioned the possibility that Charles had a mistress, so how on earth had it blown up just three days before the wedding was due to take place? Gen was as hotheaded as her fiancé, and they were often at loggerheads, usually about politics, but this subject was something of another order altogether, one that didn’t sound as if it could be solved by their usual route to reconciliation or compromise.

  “I would still like to know where you heard this.” His tone was clipped.

  He was playing the barrister, using his courtroom voice and demeanor to intimidate her as Imogen had seen him do so often in court. “Damn it, Charles, don’t use that voice with me.” She stamped her kid-booted foot on the gleaming copper fender as she stood sideways to the blazing fire. Her hand, resting on the carved mantel, curled into an unconscious fist around the base of a silver candlestick. “Are you asking where I heard a tissue of lies, a piece of malicious gossip, or the truth?”

  Charles considered his options, watching her fisted hand warily. He knew his betrothed too well to hope that she might be deflected from a train of thought once embarked upon, and while a sin of omission could be brushed aside, a sin of commission certainly could not. He opted for a reasonable approach, saying mildly, “I’ve been friends with Mrs. Symonds for a long time, Gen, it’s no secret.”

  “That was not my question, as you damned well know,” she stated. “Is this woman your mistress?”

  “Yes,” he admitted. “But it’s not unheard of for a man to have a mistress, Gen.” It was a mistake, he realized, the minute the words were out of his mouth.

  “What’s that got to do with anything? I’m talking about us.” Imogen felt her temper slipping its reins, although she had sworn to herself that she would keep her emotions in check, stick to the facts, ask the questions in a straightforward manner. But Charles’s specious responses seemed to make light of a situation that was unendurable. “You kept a mistress throughout our betrothal. Isn’t that true?”

  “Even if it is, it’s not unheard of either,” he returned, his own anger building anew. He was more used to interrogating than being interrogated, and he didn’t care for the role switch in the least.

  “And as of this day, Mrs. Symonds remains your mistress?” She spoke very slowly now, separated the words as if to be certain he understood the question. All the while her gray eyes, now the color of arctic ice, were fixed upon his countenance with a closeness that unnerved him, made him conscious of every twitch of a cheek muscle, flicker of an eyelid.

  “We are both agreed that our liaison must come to an end on my marriage,” Charles responded crisply, trying once more to take charge of the discussion. “There’s no need for you to become prudish about this, Imogen. It’s a perfectly common fact of life—”

  “Prudish, you dare to call me prudish?” Imogen’s complexion paled as it always did under extreme emotion. “We have been lovers for the last year, and you’re admitting that throughout that time you kept Mrs. Symonds as your mistress?”

  “My dear girl—”

  “I am not your dear girl,” Imogen declared, her voice full of scorn. “And believe me, Charles, I never will be again. You are a liar, a deceiver, a betrayer of every honest principle, and a hypocrite of the first water.” Her voice shook with outrage as she added the coup de grace, unconsciously lifting the silver candlestick from the mantel.

  “A hypocrite? How so?” His voice was now low and there was a dangerous gleam in his dark brown eyes, fixed upon the upraised candlestick.

  Imogen ignored the danger signals. “You practice in the divorce courts, you prate about making the laws of marriage fairer to women, and yet you always side with the husband, and that’s what you’re telling me now. That for a man to commit adultery is a mere peccadillo, an established fact of society, but for a woman it remains criminal and immoral.”

  “For a start, we are not talking about adultery here,” he pointed out sharply. “We are not yet married, my dear. The fact that you and I have anticipated marriage has nothing to do with the fact. I will pledge my fidelity to you at the altar and swear to you I will keep that pledge.” He took two rapid steps toward her and grasped her wrist, twisting the candlestick from her grasp and setting it back on the far end of the mantel. “I don’t like threats, as you should know by now.”

  Her flat palm cracked across his cheek. “And you should know by now that I don’t make idle threats.”

  Charles reeled backward a step, his hand lifted to the scarlet mark of her hand. He took a deep, steadying breath and Imogen closed her eyes for a moment, cursing her lack of control. Without that control, against Charles she became a spearless, shieldless gladiator confronting one of Nero’s well-armed favorites in the arena.

  “Don’t ever do that again,” he said softly.

  “Chance would be a fine thing,” Imogen retorted. “I don’t ever want to be in the same room with you again. You’ve lived a lie with me for the last two years. I have never been less than open with you.” She stepped away from the fireplace, turning her back on him. “I cannot marry a deceitful philanderer . . . and I certainly couldn’t marry such a hypocrite.”

  “Don’t walk away from me.” He took a step after her. “We are to be married in three days, Imogen. Three hundred people in St. George’s, Hanover Square.”

  “Then I am afraid they will be disappointed. Would you send a notice to the Times, please, Charles?” Imogen walked from the room, her long stride unfaltering, her shoulders ramrod straight, and as soon as she reached the hall, she gathered her skirts and raced up the stairs to the seclusion of her bedroom, fighting back the tears. Anger at Charles’s appalling betrayal had buoyed her so far, but now, in the aftermath of that climactic scene, she felt drained of all emotional strength. The previous day, before she had learned the truth, seemed to exist in a different life, one where there was a future full of love and excitement, and now there was only the ugliness of deceit, of broken promises, of the feeling that she had been a pathetic naïf not to have seen what kind of man he was, the man she thought she loved so deeply.

  Charles Riverdale stood stock-still for a few minutes in the small salon, staring sightlessly around the room. It was a particularly attractive room, he had always thought, furnished by the late Lady Carstairs as her own private salon. An easel with one of the lady’s own paintings, a delicate still life of the garden in spring, stood in front of the windows onto the now winter-bare garden. The chaise and chairs were as delicate and gilded as the lady herself had been, at least physically. Lady Carstairs, who had suffered from a weak heart all her life, had died three years earlier, but her frailty and diminutive stature had belied a formidable intellect, a determination and a powerful sen
se of what was wrong with the social world, qualities, if they could be called such, inherited by both Imogen and Esther. Although Esther was rather quieter in her passions than her sister. A great deal more restful. But then when had he relished restfulness? Charles reflected grimly.

  How stupid he had been to imagine that Imogen wouldn’t have found out about Dorothea eventually. It had been on the tip of his tongue to tell her so many times, and yet every time he’d shrunk from the prospect of her reaction. Imogen was no prude, and he’d been a fool to accuse of her such, but she had a very powerful moral compass. She was a passionate champion of the issue of women’s unequal treatment under the law, and while he had taken her position seriously, and had been more than happy to debate it with her, it had never occurred to him that her attitude would drive her to such extreme action. It wasn’t possible that she was prepared to call off their marriage three days before they were to stand at the altar in front of three hundred guests—surely it had just been a threat born of hurt pride?

  He went to the door, hesitating with his hand on the latch, wondering if there was any point going in search of her and starting again. But maybe it would be wise not to stir the waters any further. He would return this evening. He picked up his hat and went into the marble-floored hall.

  Sharpton, the butler, was overseeing a parlormaid as she trimmed the sconced gas lamps above the front door. He turned as soon as Charles stepped into the hall, and while his expression was one of smiling impassivity, Charles thought he could detect a watchful, knowing air about the man. He wondered how much the butler had heard of the scene in the salon, and guessed that he had heard most if not all of it. It was always impossible to keep a family’s secrets from its household.

  “Your hat, Mr. Riverdale.” Sharpton solemnly passed Charles his hat. “Your umbrella, sir. Should I send a lad to fetch a hackney for you?”

  Charles shook his head. “No, thank you, Sharpton. A little rain never hurt anyone.” He nodded a brisk farewell as he stepped out through the front door into the wet and gloomy afternoon.