Dark Season

by Joanna Lowell

  “What?” He was looking at her strangely.

  The man I love.

  She buried her face in her hands. He sat up and gathered her against his chest.

  “Shhhh.” His lips brushed her temple, nipped the rim of her ear, and pressed there, seeping warmth.

  “You help me believe it,” he said. The strength of his embrace made her bones creak, and then she melted into it.

  “Come,” he said at last, roughly, kissing the top of her head. “That’s enough talk before breakfast. You must be hungry. How do you feel about ham?”

  • • •

  Isidore fetched the breakfast tray himself. He wanted to protect Ella from the stares of the footman. It meant that he exposed himself to the stares of Mrs. Potts. The good woman passed him in the hall outside the kitchen with an odd, abrupt signal, as though warding off evil. He nodded cautiously, and she spun on her heel.

  “You’ll do right, my lord, I’m sure,” she said. She wasn’t sure at all. Her chins were quivering.

  “Yes, Mrs. Potts,” he said, with a docility that surprised her.

  “Well.” She snapped her mouth shut and bustled off to strike fear in the dust. The rhythmic jingle of her keys underscored her words. Do right. Do right. Do right. He would do right, or die trying.

  When he reentered his bedchamber with the tray, Ella was sitting at the table with Xenophon open. She was wearing the robe he’d put out for her. It was very plain, gray wool; she’d tucked one side tightly behind the other and cinched it with the sash. A nun might have worn such a garb without complaint. Her hair was still loose, hanging down her back like a spill of light. She looked up and smiled. His pulse accelerated. What unexpected pleasure, this. To open the door to his chamber and see her, wrapped in his clothing, curled up with a book, waiting for him, looking at him as though she were happier now that he was there.

  He felt as though whatever rush of excited blood made his cock “stand,” as she put it, was now doing the same thing to his heart. Dear God, an erection of the heart. This was why he was not a poet. He grinned stupidly, and she didn’t seem to mind. Two thoughts came to him simultaneously.

  He could have this every day.

  He wanted this every day.

  Greed made him rush to her and set down the tray with an inexpert crash.

  “Eggs, toast, ham, coffee.” He arranged the plates and silver on the table. She pounced on the food, buttered a piece of toast avidly, and bit into it. The crunching that ensued was not delicate. She caught his eye and coughed, choking on crumbs. He handed her coffee and slapped her back while she wheezed, color rising in her cheeks. She took the coffee in both hands and swallowed. Her smile was sheepish.

  “I am hungry,” she said, and her blush deepened. She added more milk and sugar to her coffee, and he took note. Almost white and sweet as golden syrup. He didn’t approve, of course, but he’d remember. He’d prepare it for her just like that. Next time. Next time. Those words filled him with delight. She bit again into her toast with a loud crunch. He even liked the way she ate. Determined. She examined the toast as though looking for the best angle of attack.

  “You’re not?” she asked pointedly.

  “What?”

  “Hungry,” she said.

  “Oh.” He laughed. Christ Jesus, she’d made him forget the ham. He folded two slices on toast with an egg hard-boiled and dispatched it within the minute. They didn’t speak, concentrating on chewing, and the silence felt companionable. Yes, they could eat together, read together, sit together without conversation, their silence a knowing silence, a conspiracy of contentment … The coffee vitalized him and reinforced his sense of well-being. He’d shown her the dark corners of his consciousness, and she’d blown away the cobwebs. He glanced up and saw her watching him with those unfathomable, dark eyes.

  “You read Greek?” he asked, gesturing, and she looked down at the book, closed now on the edge of the table.

  “A little. I didn’t take to it. I preferred Latin.” She tipped her head, giving him an oblique look. “I never would have guessed you liked to read, let alone in Greek. When I first met you, that is.”

  “Why’s that?” he asked airily, as though he wasn’t hanging on her every word. He helped himself to more ham.

  “You’re too tall,” she said.

  “For books?” He put down his fork. She nodded gravely.

  “By four inches at least.” Her mouth quirked. She was teasing him. He wanted to leap out of his seat and whirl her straight back to bed.

  “No spectacles. No whiskers. No ink stains.” She shrugged. “You just don’t look the type.”

  “I’ve been told I’m more in the Byronic mold.” He glowered at her.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Very good,” she said. She sipped her coffee and added—dear God—yet another spoonful of sugar. “I suppose there are all sorts of literary men.”

  “But the spectacles, whiskers, and ink stains … ?”

  “My father.” She smiled. “He lived in his books.”

  “It was your father who taught you Greek and Latin?” He watched the slight change in her expression, a melancholy stealing across her features. She sucked in her cheeks. The action plumped her lower lip distractingly. Her gaze drifted up to a distant point.

  “He didn’t always have time for supper, but he had time for the classics.” She laughed, a low, throaty sound, reminding him that he hadn’t heard nearly enough of her laughter. She and her father had laughed together. He could see it in her eyes.

  “You enjoyed each other’s company,” he said. The smile still lingered on her mouth as she looked at him.

  “He was my best friend,” she said simply.

  “Ella.” He poured himself more coffee. He considered the steaming liquid then her. “Why did you leave Somerset?” She continued to butter her second piece of toast, which suddenly required all of her attention.

  “My cousin,” she said. “I told you.” Her cousin. The hunter. She’d worn this same look the last time she’d spoken of him. A hunted look. He supposed it was fitting. She sighed and laid the toast on her plate. “He never liked me. I didn’t think he would inherit. No one thought it. But my brother died, and then my cousin Charles, then Benedict. When my father died last year … well, the estate fell to him.”

  She was wellborn. No shock there. But … “The Reed estate?” He lifted his brows. Her toast had again become interesting. She broke it in half then broke the halves into quarters. He leaned back in his chair, tipping it back onto two legs. It was that or drum his fingers on the table.

  “Reed is not my name,” she said.

  “No?” Damn it all. He hadn’t meant to strike that tone of mock surprise. She bristled.

  “No,” she said slowly, warily. “I adopted it as a precaution. I don’t want my cousin to find me.”

  “He’s looking, then?”

  Her posture began to change: chin tucking in, shoulders drawing up to her ears. She was trying to disappear into herself.

  Confide in me. He pushed aside the plates and took her hands, holding them on the table, trying to press this message into her palms.

  “The valuables you had in your possession,” he began.

  “Were mine!” She was magnificent in her defiance, her back straightening and her eyes throwing sparks. He released his breath in a low whistle. She didn’t hear it, swept away by her sudden passion. “The law that declares it theft is unjust. He has no claim to them I recognize. They were gifts my father made to me. And to my mother.” She sagged in her chair. “I have so little of her,” she said. “But I didn’t take those things for sentimental reasons. I took them to sell.” Her voice turned almost cold. That restraint he had seen in her from the beginning was taking over. Even her hands felt cooler, stiffer, like claws. At any moment she would try to pull them away.

  “So your cousin pursues you for trinkets?” He watched her closely. He had gained, perhaps, a few more pieces of the puzzle, but he had come no closer to putt
ing them together. She withheld too much. “And you have no friends, no other relations, no one to turn to?”

  “That’s right,” she said icily. “So you see why it is important I find paid employment immediately.” She tugged her hands, and he tightened his grip. “I am quite alone in the world.”

  “You have me.” She went dead white when he said it. He wondered if his face too had drained of color. He’d surprised himself. But now he had to press forward. “Reed is not your name. You’re afraid to claim your real one.” He looked at her widened eyes, her parted lips, the pulse fluttering darkly in her neck. “Take mine.”

  Her pallor had a greenish cast. She looked positively sickened. He squelched his misgivings—She doesn’t want to hear this, not a word of it—and plowed on.

  “I know I’ve said nothing to recommend my name. I’ve considered it a curse more often than not. But perhaps, if you too were a Blackwood … ” Spit it out, man. “Perhaps if we shared the name … I wouldn’t find it so distasteful.”

  Even when she’d vomited river water she hadn’t seemed so overset. A clicking sound was coming from her throat.

  “I’ve despoiled you of your virginity,” he said. God, it was clunky. “I want to make right by you.” He wouldn’t thank Mrs. Potts for this phrasing when he saw her next. Ella’s nostrils pinched.

  “You do me great honor,” she intoned. It was the very voice of death. “I regret I cannot accept your offer … ” She stopped, rigid, even her vocal cords paralyzed. He pushed back his chair and circled the table, falling to his knees at her side. He wanted to shake her until she woke up, until he saw her again peering through the dark glass of those distant eyes. But he jerked her chair around and laid his arms on her knees, gripping her legs, staring up at her fiercely.

  “I don’t care what you did,” he said. “Whatever it is, you can trust me with it, now, later, never. I won’t let your cousin hurt you. I can protect you with my name. With my life.”

  This, at least, cracked her iron control. Her breath whooshed out. Hectic spots of color bloomed across her cheekbones. “You would do this twice.” She shook her head frantically. “You would make this sacrifice twice, binding yourself to a woman to save her.” She looked at him with something kindling in her face. He couldn’t interpret her expression. Desire was there. Tenderness, gratitude too, and regret. Then her face hardened into a mask. “I cannot be saved.”

  “Ella.” He’d bungled the proposal with his chivalric cowardice, his talk of his name and her virginity and making right. He didn’t give a goddamn if marrying her made anything right. It could send them straight to hell, and he’d want it anyway. He wanted her, wanted to stare into her odd, angular face and discern her moods and spout fooleries until she laughed and made some unexpected sally of her own. He wanted to make her sigh as he tasted her everywhere, learned every crease and hollow of her body. He wanted to listen to her muse about her favorite books. He wanted to play music with her in Castle Blackwood with all the windows open until the ghosts flew with the notes out into the high blue sky. As a thousand sentiments warred for precedence and tied his tongue in knots, she spoke again.

  “It’s nothing I did,” she said, her chest rising and falling rapidly. “It’s who I am.”

  He reached up and gripped her by the nape, her hair flowing cool as starlight over his wrists.

  “You can decide,” he said, echoing her own words. “You can decide what that means.”

  “I have.” She exhaled. “My answer is no. What happened between us … it can’t happen again.”

  He sat back on his heels. He realized—and the realization did nothing to flatter his ego—that he must look stunned. He stood.

  “You accept my answer,” she said uncertainly.

  “Of course not.” He forced a grin, and when he saw the fear and confusion dawning in her face he almost pitied her. “But we can agree to disagree. The fun will be in trying to convince each other.”

  “Fun.” She said it with disbelief.

  “Mmm,” he murmured. “Fun.” He put his hand on the back of her chair, leaning over her. “Marry me, Ella.”

  “No.” Her eyes were enormous.

  “Tell me no again,” he whispered, leaning closer. “Like you mean it.”

  “No.” The word barely crossed her lips so he met it there with his own. The kiss was soft and sweet and fleeting. She turned her head away.

  “No,” she said again, not looking at him. He pulled away and crossed back to his chair. His coffee was tepid, but he made himself drink it anyway. Her head was still turned. Her hair had fallen forward and partially veiled her face. He could see only the tip of her nose, the curve of her lips, and the trembling point of her chin. He steeled himself to stay in his seat. He wouldn’t push her harder. Not yet. He would change her mind in time.

  What if there wasn’t time? What if her mind could not be changed?

  His heart, which had felt engorged, shriveled. She didn’t want him. He’d been drunk on the fiery liquor of her kisses, on the promise of more nights like the one they’d shared. Now his head ached. His eyeballs felt dry and tacky. Revenge would be bitter if he lost her. The peace he gained would afford him the opportunity to contemplate this new emptiness. If he listened, he’d hear that shrunken muscle in his chest knocking with every beat.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Blackwood Mansion was a severe, three-story building with a broad exterior staircase leading into a chilly entrance hall. Ella kept out of the way of the servants who trooped back and forth, conveying chairs, candelabra, and rolled rugs into the dining room. She felt awkward standing useless in plain view, ignored by Isidore and subjected to unabashedly curious stares by everyone else, and drifted at last into the massive library. She sat in a cold leather chair. She thought she’d read, but she ended up sitting stock-still, hands in her lap, staring vacantly. The ponderous atmosphere depressed her. A library should be intimate, cluttered, even shabby, because it was used. The books thumbed through and returned to the shelves willy-nilly, pushed in at different depths so the spines made a scalloped pattern that beckoned to browsing hands. Everything about this library was forbidding. She couldn’t imagine extracting a volume from the ordered ranks that lined the walls. If she selected the wrong one, a trapdoor might open, and she’d fall into a dungeon, or the wall would groan around a secret pivot and disclose a torture chamber. Fantastical thoughts, she knew, but enough to send her jumping to her feet, hurrying on through the suites of rooms. In the ballroom, she stood and gazed at the enormous plaster decoration above the fireplace: the Blackwood arms, a blood-red chevron between three wolf heads guardant. No wonder Isidore kept this house closed.

  Her skin prickled. She turned, and there he was, coming toward her with that fluid, graceful tread. He made no attempt to soften his face with a smile. Hair fell across his brow, and her fingers twitched with the desire to brush it back. She wadded her black skirts in her hands. She had no right to touch him. Never again. She had said no, three times no, and he had not renewed his offer. During their subsequent interactions, he’d been aloof, not cold precisely, but distracted. The fun, perhaps, of convincing her to become his bride had spent itself in that first attempt. He had made a noble gesture that she had nobly refused. That was the end of it. He was relieved, most likely. She should be relieved too.

  She wasn’t. She felt like the ruin of a ruin. Like the ruin of a ruin’s shadow.

  She tried to smile as he approached, as she had tried to smile last night at supper before retiring to the guest chamber. As she had tried to smile this morning when they breakfasted together, not in his bedchamber but downstairs in the drab but cozy breakfast room. As she had tried to smile this afternoon when they sat side by side in the coach, both erect, silent, their shoulders swaying slightly with every bump but never enough to brush together. As she had tried to smile when he led her into the dining room at Blackwood Mansion and swore over the rugs—Don’t just hang them. It’s a séance, not a bazaar. Tie an
other rope. Make a kind of tent. Christ, give that to me—striding away from her with a “Make yourself comfortable” tossed over his shoulder.

  It wasn’t getting any easier. But she couldn’t fade away now. He still needed her. She could see the strain in his posture. Tension corded his neck. Of course he was tense. Tonight he hoped to catch a killer. She was afraid his plan wouldn’t work, and she was afraid that it would. What would he do when the man revealed himself? Attack him in front of a hundred witnesses? She hadn’t asked. She wondered if he’d thought that far himself. A vision of the future flashed before her, both of them in cells, her in the asylum, him in the prison. Suddenly she wished she had a gun. If she had a gun, she could shoot the murderer herself, shoot him as Isidore leapt forward. She would become the deranged murderess, the violent lunatic of Mr. Norton’s predictions. It would be the sanest thing she had ever done. With one bullet, Isidore would be freed. Released from his revenge and its consequences. Her incarceration would be brief. She put her hand to her throat. What would she say on the gallows?

  Love cured me of my life. I’m not sorry.

  But she had no gun.

  He stopped before her, and she caught her breath, lowered her hand. The smile wobbled into place.

  “You should go upstairs,” he said brusquely. “It won’t be long now before people begin to arrive.” She thought she saw him wince, regretting the peremptory address, and the next moment he was leaning forward confidentially, adopting a waggish air.

  “That is … the Wheatcrofts have the irritating habit of showing up to things on time.” His lips quirked. Sardonic Isidore Blackwood, lord of the manor. But he couldn’t quite carry it off. His voice sounded strangely hollow. He was pale beneath his tan. Sweat glimmered on the skin above his lip. He did not look well. She knew he would not appreciate a show of concern. She tried to match his careless tone.

  “Perhaps you should come upstairs too,” she said. “And sit for a bit.”