Dark Season

by Joanna Lowell

  He loved to make violins, loved every aspect of the process: plotting the curves on paper, selecting the wood, planning the top and bottom plates, cutting and bending the ribs, shaping the neck. He sometimes fancied he could hear the particular sound the violin would make even before it was completely assembled. Rocco, the violinmaker he lived with in Agerola, shared that fancy. One day, while they sat together varnishing instruments so they shone a rich red-brown, Rocco described harvesting the wood.

  He wandered the Alps, he said, pressing his ear to the spruces in search of the perfect tone; only when he heard that tone singing out through the bark would he chop down the tree. Rocco was a dark, short, bandy-legged man with a crooked spine and bright blue eyes—Norman eyes—strange to see in that most Neapolitan of faces. He always had a tale on his lips. He said he never lied, which was true, if you accepted, as he did, that reality was something you could invent. His optimism was staggering.

  “The first fifty years of my life,” he told Isidore, “I carried spruce trees down the mountain on my right shoulder. You see how my back is bent to the right. The next fifty years of my life I will carry spruce trees down the mountain on my left shoulder. That will straighten me out again.”

  Isidore had looked at Rocco’s twisted shoulders, then at his battered hands, fingernails cracked, skin stained with varnish. Rocco’s hands were so different from his father’s, so different from the hands of any man he’d ever known.

  “I understand.” Isidore had met Rocco’s twinkling eyes. Sometimes the Italian offered wisdom in parables. “It’s not too late to change the direction I’m heading.” He shook his head. “But I need to have patience. It will take a hundred years for me to find the right path.”

  “I don’t know,” Rocco had replied. “I was talking about me. You, it might take two hundred years.”

  And he had laughed so hard he fell off his bench.

  If Giuseppe Pietro Rocco, cobbler, vintner, violinmaker, had been his father instead of Gore Morbury Blackwood, tenth Viscount Blackwood, maybe he wouldn’t need centuries to find his way. Everything would be different. Simpler. More wholesome. He often thought that those months he spent with Rocco and his family had given him the strength to stay alive.

  The donkey he’d carved was in the likeness of Rocco’s donkey, Geppetto. Quite possibly the loudest donkey that ever lived. His alternately deep and squeaky brays carried for miles. Rocco seemed proud of this when he wasn’t threatening to walk behind him with a stick and beat him until he jumped into the volcano.

  Isidore had taken a liberty with the story he’d told to Clement. Rocco only slept in the same room as Geppetto when his wife got angry and sent him to the barn.

  He would keep the donkey carving. Miss Reed, though, might appreciate the deer. He could give it to her when her month with Mrs. Trombly was over. To make whatever tiny garret she occupied as a governess seem more like the wilds of West Somerset.

  Well. He was certainly making progress. Discharging his lordly duties. He dug his ledger out from beneath a stack of folded letters and glared at the numbers.

  His neck felt stiff. He had to look up, tilt his head from side to side. His neck cracked as he pressed his chin to his chest. Getting old. Amusing thought for a man not yet thirty. He was in the prime of life. At this point, the ton diagnosed his bachelorhood as a persistent but not yet incurable condition. Clement was his age and remained one of society’s most enticing prospects. But Clement was unmarried because he was still looking for the right woman. Whereas he was unmarried because … well, the Blackwoods had destroyed enough. He would not pick a bride and watch while proximity to his blighted heart withered her hopes and ate away at her dreams of happiness. Blight her he surely would. He could not take a young woman into the dark circle of his confidence. Intimacy with him could bring only misery.

  Come with me; the marriage bed is in the ossuary. You don’t mind, my love, that we sleep with skeletons between us?

  Miss Reed had looked at him with eyes like black wells, wells so deep no ray of the sun could ever reach the bottom. They were eyes that reflected the night sky, even at noon. They stripped the sky of its mask of blue and showed eternity: endless black spangled by stars.

  She had looked at him as though she too carried a great burden. She did not bow beneath the weight, even though it made itself known in every step she took. He could almost imagine that together they could bear both their burdens more easily.

  He checked his watch. Eleven a.m. He went to check the clock in the hall. Eleven a.m. Had all the timepieces broken? He breathed easier once he was in the hall. So much easier that he continued on down the stairs. A short walk would do him good. He donned his overcoat and waved off Brinkley as the man tried to present him with a heavy, old-fashioned top hat of felted beaver fur. The other option was a hat of silk plush with a towering crown and a broad, swooping brim that tilted up at a dramatic angle. He tried it on gingerly.

  “You could empty an entire water glass into this brim,” he said, running his fingers down the brim’s steep slope. “Was it made to hold liquid?”

  “I doubt expressly for the purpose, my lord.” Brinkley too was eying the hat critically. “But the shape does put one in mind of a rain gutter.”

  That settled it. He snatched the hat off his head.

  “Thank you, Brinkley. I’ll go without.”

  The day wasn’t dreadful. He turned his collar up against the damp as he walked through a pocket of brown fog. Not absolutely dreadful, no. The sun was struggling to burn through the mist, and it wasn’t out and out raining. A few suspended water droplets never hurt anyone. After the confinement of his study, he felt downright giddy with the circulating air. Perhaps, though, a hat was in order. Something similar to the hat he’d lost, nothing made of pelt or with a brim like a trough. With that mission in mind, he decided that his short walk in Pimlico would have to become a cab ride to Mayfair followed by a stroll along Bond Street.

  Once he had purchased a hat at a gentleman’s shop—tasteful, black silk, the crown high but not vying with the chimneys, the brim nearly straight—he found himself too close to Mount Street not to drop in on Louisa and show her his acquisition.

  As he waited for Rutherford to open the door, he imagined tipping his hat to Louisa.

  “I tried to purchase a turban,” he’d tell her. “But they’d sold out, so a topper it was.”

  He would ask after Miss Reed, but he wouldn’t ask to see her. Of course, if she happened to be in the sitting room …

  Rutherford opened the door.

  “Good afternoon, my lord,” he said, and Isidore grinned at him.

  “It is afternoon, isn’t it?” He stepped into the hallway, handing Rutherford his hat. “Not eleven?”

  “No, my lord.” Rutherford regarded him evenly. “It is not eleven.”

  “Heaven be praised. I could have sworn the day got stuck somewhere in the forenoon.” He nodded at the hat. “Do you approve?”

  Rutherford did not so much as glance at it. “A great gain for civilization, my lord.” The deep creases alongside his mouth deepened as though a smile were being sternly suppressed. Isidore listened for the sound of feminine voices: Louisa’s high and thin, Miss Reed’s low and breathy … the kind of voice a man wanted to hear close to his ear. Her little moans had sounded such sweet, low notes.

  He grimaced. “Is Mrs. Trombly at home?”

  “No, my lord. She should return shortly.”

  “Ah.” He flicked his cuffs. Really, he was a master of nonchalance. He ran a hand through his hair. “Well then,” he said. “Is Miss Reed at home?”

  “No, my lord.” If Rutherford had divined the question before it was asked, he tactfully gave no sign. “She accompanied Mrs. Trombly.”

  “Well,” said Isidore again. “I suppose I’ll wait.”

  “Yes, my lord,” said Rutherford.

  “I’d leave my card, but I seem to have forgotten them.” Isidore smiled weakly. “I’ll wait for just a
few minutes. They’ll return shortly, you said?”

  And before he knew it, he was in the sitting room again. He hadn’t expected to find himself back in that room until late April. May, even. His will was not made of iron. Aspic, perhaps. He rubbed at an ache above his left eyebrow. Well done.

  There were fresh roses in the vase on the table. The room smelled of roses and of powdered sugar. He couldn’t sit but roamed about. One of the watercolors framed on the wall was Clement’s. Blue borage flowers, petals arrayed like stars. The others—all of birds—were his. The flaws screamed at him.

  He checked his watch. It was getting on toward two o’clock. Time had sped up and escaped from him. He needed to get back to Pimlico soon to meet Mr. Chadwick.

  He couldn’t tell if he was relieved or disappointed. When he saw the maid at the door, he shook his head.

  “No tea, thank you. I’m just leaving.” Then he noticed she held no tea tray. Her hands were working at her sides, and she cast a quick glance around her before she gave a queer little hop that launched her into the room.

  “Your lordship.” She curtsied, a dip down that jettisoned her up again. She was a bouncy creature. Round faced, young, and not unattractive. He recognized her, vaguely, from prior visits.

  “Miss … ” He nodded at her, bemused.

  “Lizzie,” she said. “Lizzie Bradshaw.” Again she shot a look around her. It was almost comical—even her desire for circumspection was brash. She approached another pace.

  His eyebrows shot up. He wondered suddenly if she meant to make some kind of advance. She was chewing on her lower lip and blinking at him with a most determined expression.

  He did not tryst with servants. Ever. It was a rule with him. Too unfair to the woman and too messy. Lizzie came yet nearer with a twitch of her skirts. He cleared his throat. But at that moment Lizzie burst into speech, and his warning “ahem” was drowned out in the rush of her words.

  “I need to talk to you,” she said. “Mrs. Hexam’d have my head if she knew, but she didn’t see what I saw, and she’s like Mrs. Trombly, thinking Miss Reed is pure as a dewdrop because she’s pretty and talks in a pretty way and pretends she can hear the spirits, but she can’t. She’s clever with her pretending, but she’s a liar and a thief too. I saw the proof of it, and you being so closely connected to the family, and what with the master away, I had to say it to you when I saw you’d come back. I wanted to say it to you when you came before, but I never had the chance.” She paused after this remarkable outburst, sucking in a breath like a hiccup. “Miss Reed,” she added, “is a nasty baggage.”

  Isidore gaped. Then he almost laughed at his own shock. He really had been expecting a stream of seduction to issue forth from the maid’s lips. Daphne’s flattery must have swollen his head. Thank God he hadn’t given any sign of his gross misperception.

  “You think it’s funny, my lord? That Mrs. Trombly is nursing an ass to her bosom?” Lizzie Bradshaw’s face was screwed up into an expression of intense dislike.

  Ass to her bosom? What the devil … He comprehended her mistake and exploded into a coughing fit, hitting his own chest with his fist until his eyes watered.

  “You’re laughing.” Her voice was filled with wondering disgust. “I tell you that night she was carried in and put in bedclothes I took her dress to the laundry room and found a pouch filled with all kinds of valuables sewn inside, and you’re laughing at me.”

  He sobered instantly. “What are you talking about? What pouch?”

  “A pouch of valuables,” she said. “Jewels and the kind of spoon you’d give a little lord.”

  “They might belong to her,” he said, even as his heart sunk.

  “Oh, aye,” said Lizzie. “Maybe she talked to Prince Albert’s ghost and he got Queen Victoria to make her a gift of sapphires and pearls. I don’t think so, my lord.”

  He didn’t think so either. “Why don’t you tell Mrs. Trombly?”

  “I told you.” Lizzie thinned her lips until they went white. “She makes such a fuss over Miss Reed, it’d be like telling her that biscuits ain’t made of flour or that butter ain’t made of milk. She wouldn’t believe me, and I have no proof.”

  “You left the pouch in Miss Reed’s dress, then?” The ache above his left eyebrow was starting to stab into his brain.

  “Course I did.” She drew herself up so rapidly she had to hop backwards to keep her footing. “I am an honest woman. Just because I see something’s been stolen, it doesn’t give me the right to steal it meself, now does it? It’d tell pretty black against me if I stole what her stealing tells black against her. If you understand my meaning, your lordship.” She was affronted, but he couldn’t muster an apology. He thumbed his eyebrow, mussing and smoothing the hairs.

  Miss Reed … a common criminal. She wasn’t a puzzle that he could linger over. She was a problem that he needed to eliminate. At once. She would have to leave Trombly Place. He could not tolerate a thief. Why did he feel this creeping sensation of disappointment? The thought of driving her out of the house made him sick. She would return to her madam, her pimp, return to whatever den she’d crawled from. What could that mean to him?

  Sad story there. Yes, she must have some sad story. Genteel poverty produced its criminals as surely as squalor. But she couldn’t be allowed to fleece the family who had all but raised him while he pondered what sad circumstances could possibly have led her to this pass.

  And so Miss Reed, the truce is over. Nullified as if it never were. He would show her no mercy, and he would show himself no mercy. No game of cat and mouse. No deluded dalliance. Severance. Swift and final.

  “I’ve looked for it since,” said Lizzie when it became apparent he was not going to speak. “In her room, but she’s hidden it good. She’s probably adding to it, too. Building up her little hoard. Not that I’ve noticed anything missing; I keep a look out, your lordship. But you can’t be too careful with a woman like that.”

  “No.” He checked his watch. Another few minutes of this, and he’d end up late to his appointment.

  “I did right to tell you?” Lizzie was wheedling now. There was a protocol for this kind of exchange. In his ill-humored distraction he’d almost forgotten. He produced a guinea and handed it to her.

  “Thank you, Lizzie,” he said through clenched teeth. “It was most proper of you.”

  Lizzie smiled, plummeted into a curtsy, and popped up again. The guinea had disappeared like a magic trick.

  “You’re going to talk to Mrs. Trombly, then?” Emboldened by the tip, she inched toward him. “And when might that be? You won’t say my name? Not at first? Not until she believes you? Not until she knows how black it all tells against Miss Reed without hearing it’s from me?” She was agitated, eager. He could smell her nervous energy, sour and metallic.

  His headache made it difficult to think. He nodded curtly at her as he headed for the door.

  “I’ll come back this evening to speak with Mrs. Trombly. Your … ” He searched for the phrase. Vindictive meddling? “Keen perception will be appreciated, I’m sure.”

  “Tonight’s the Tenbys’ dinner party!”

  Her shrill reminder made him wince. He muttered something indistinct as he continued down the hall. Back on the street, he hailed a hack. He climbed inside and shut his eyes, rubbing small circles on his throbbing temples. Christ. He’d already sent Tenby his polite excuse. Should he send a polite excuse for failing to keep his polite excuse?

  He would be dining out after all. He would corner Miss Reed at the party and hear what she had to say before he went to Louisa. He would give her that much of a chance to explain herself. But he had a feeling Miss Reed would offer him nothing satisfactory. She would offer him her back, most likely, as she turned and fled back into the shadows from whence she came.

  Chapter Eleven

  It was between the fish course and the entre that Ella took her first easy breath. The party was not an unmitigated disaster. No one was interviewing her about her rel
ationships with the dead. No one was paying the slightest bit of attention to her. Even her dinner partner, Mr. Huntington, had abandoned her. They had suffered through two false starts—he asked what events she was planning on attending this season and who her connections might be in London—before settling on a sufficiently general subject—the weather.

  Throughout their painful dialogue, Mr. Huntington had kept his ear pricked to the low tones of a far more interesting tête-à-tête taking place across the table. Ella had just made the observation that the fog and the smoke in London shared several qualities and was beginning, after his prolonged silence, to enumerate those qualities, when he jerked his head around and cried, “Why Cliveden never said any such thing! What rubbish. I was there. Out with your sources.”

  The orbit of the very entertaining conversation about what Cliveden did or did not say, and to whom exactly, widened to include Mr. Huntington. And only Mr. Huntington.

  Cliveden could have nothing to do with her.

  Seated at the long, candlelit table, wine flowing and conversation sparkling all around her, she might as well have been alone. If she were attending the party not as Miss Reed but as Miss Arlington—a different Miss Arlington, healthy and whole, with a brain bright and spotless as new bunting—the situation would have been cause for tears rather than quiet celebration. Slighted by a dinner partner! Ignored by everyone of consequence! The horror.