An Unspeakable Anguish

by Baird Wells

  She examined him in detail, more than she’d risked at dinner with Simon watching. The novelty of James's face was a pleasure, bare, with well-made angles in an age of jowls and oiled mustaches. He was thinner than she remembered at Meadowcroft, still a masterwork, but peeling under the forces of sorrow and self-neglect. She hadn’t stayed his hand before only to watch him perish slowly now, and bristled at the idea.

  They hung there in silence until James cleared his throat and reanimated them. She poured and passed his cup, then poured her own, and they both moved like clockwork people. “How long have you been in London?” she asked when they were settled again.

  “A few months. Tate got married and I thought it was time I gave him his space.”

  She smirked, knowing the truth by his tone. “Turned you out, did he?”

  James laughed, a threadbare sound that gave her hope, and he set his empty cup on the table. “She did, yes.”

  “We can never mourn as much as we’d like. Life has no patience for our suffering, always pushing us ahead.”

  He was staring again, and she stared back, heart skipping at a glimmer of something deep in his gray eyes. “Why didn’t you admit to knowing me at dinner?” he demanded in a hush.

  “Acquaintance with me would do you no credit in that circle.” She didn’t elaborate, didn’t explain that any hint of knowing one another, wishing to know more of one another, guaranteed that Simon would keep them apart.

  “Not a circle where I’d seek it,” he said. “Except perhaps Tad Hamilton.”

  “He’s a good man.” She nodded and slid her cup beside his. “Another sad animal in Simon’s menagerie.”

  His brow furrowed. “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that once you are in Simon’s pocket, it’s a long climb out.” Endless, even.

  “Why do you tolerate him?”

  “Why do you tolerate me?” she dodged.

  “In our limited history, you’ve given me little choice.”

  She laughed against the moment, against her will. “It’s almost bad manners to point out that I found you at my gate.”

  “I’m thinking of seeing patients again,” he declared. His announcement was matter of fact, drawing her up in her seat.

  “Oh? You were very set against it, at dinner.”

  “I was. But I’ve given the matter serious thought since then. As you said, life pushes us forward.” He shrugged and slumped deeper. “Just one or two patients, to get my feet under me.”

  Hannah bit her tongue and resisted telling him that she could be one of those two. She had dismissed her own physician, Doctor Morrow, the week prior. He’d been the sixth incarnation since her headaches had begun a decade earlier. Now, Fate had opened a dangerous door for her fascination with James Grimshaw. “When you’re ready,” she agreed, and marveled at the evenness of her voice.

  “Mrs. Chalmers mentioned a need, but I’ve yet to find an available post,” he added.

  Lucifer himself was engineering their conversation, Hannah was certain. She tucked a hand beneath her skirt and gripped the cushion for artificial self-control. “If I hear of anything, I’ll let you know directly.”

  His smile was tenuous, a stranger to his lips, but genuine. “I would appreciate it. I’m afraid of losing my nerve if too much time passes.”

  Her thread of self-discipline snapped, and she unraveled. “Well, I am looking for a new physician. I believe the wages are decent, but the work is, perhaps, beneath you.”

  “You?” he asked, and sat up and looked her over. “What complaint?”

  Her fingertips moved to her temple in reflex. “Headaches. Crippling, on occasion, but mostly nagging.”

  Compassion softened his frown. “There is little which is beneath me. Never, when the ailment is genuine. I accept.”

  There was no time to recant or change her mind, but also none to feel regret. Hannah wondered if that would change in time.

  Margaret’s knock at the door said she would have plenty of space to think on the matter. She knew it was Margaret because James had been in the parlor with her for more than half an hour, and her warden could be counted on to keep them on the straight and narrow. She swallowed back the familiar taste of bitterness, stood, and ushered him to the door. She rested a hand on the knob a moment before unlocking it. “When will I see you?”

  James patted at his trousers, his breast pocket. “What is today?”

  She laughed. “Tuesday.”

  “Thursday afternoon? I can take a history, we can talk.”

  She wished he had said ‘tomorrow’, and nodded, unlocking the door.

  “I would come tomorrow,” he offered as though he’d heard her thoughts, “but I’ve been invited to a ball at the Findlay’s.”

  Hand on the knob, she paused. “What a strange coincidence. I will be there also.”

  “Very strange,” he agreed. “I was invited only yesterday, and nearly declined.”

  She wondered how James Grimshaw had come to the notice of a prominent family such as the Findlays, and suspected Simon’s hand in events. James was a gentleman, of course, being a doctor, but that didn’t mean anyone who mattered had heard of him. “You did my brother-in-law the favor, not vice versa,” she whispered, cracking the door and relieved to find the hallway empty. “Remember that you may tell him ‘no’ to anything he asks of you.” She wished the same were true for her.

  “I am practiced at saying no, Lady Hannah.” His gray eyes fixed her. “But I’ve also found an unexpected pleasure, on occasion, in saying ‘yes’.”

  She held her breath, silent while his frankness threatened to unravel her. She willed her heart to keep a safe pace, willed her lips not to damn her. Whatever he did to unbalance her, Hannah didn’t trust herself in its aftermath.

  He slipped through the door, closed it without a sound, and left her alone in the parlor. She waited until she heard the front door open and shut and a carriage rattle past over the cobblestones out front before she dared into the hall and upstairs to her room, locking the door behind her. Claiming a pen knife from a shelf in her wardrobe, she seated its dull blade into a notch of one of the boards at the bottom. She pried until she could just get her fingernails around its end, and then her fingers. Setting the narrow plank behind her gowns and petticoats at the back, she reached into the wardrobe’s false bottom and fished out James's letters to Emily. She cradled them, turned them over in her hands and then slipped the bundle back inside, too ashamed to do more than glimpse them.

  * * *

  Exhausted by all his contortions and lying, James went straight from Hannah’s mansion to a small street on the outskirts of Mayfair to settle his new lodgings there.

  On the ride over, and as one hundred of Simon’s five-hundred pounds retainer was handed off to the broker, he chewed on Hannah’s warning about being in Simon’s pocket. He appreciated being very much in it, had fallen straight to the bottom, and at the moment had no hope of finding his way back out. He’d made a devil’s deal to spy on Hannah, even though he had agreed to do no more than see her and discover what he could. In true devil’s-deal fashion, though, in a three-day span he was moving into a new house, shortening his hours at Lofton & Dooney, and attending a party which seemed a preview of the hell for which he was someday bound. In short order, Simon had one string of James's existence looped on all ten of his meddling fingers.

  He would pay the price willingly. Hannah, like an illness he struggled to diagnose, was a puzzle. Soft and then sharp, witty between frozen silence, she was made of contradictions. He’d be consumed until he figured her out.

  There were so many modifications to their arrangement, and James recognized that Simon was only getting started. There was a fever in his eyes, to his words, when he spoke of Hannah that had warned how far the man would push boundaries. James wondered if that was the same reason he had finally agreed to Simon’s terms, would agree to more of them. Hannah was the only person who ignited something like feelings inside of him. Stilted
and obsessive feelings, but he was a thirsty man in a desert, and James admitted he’d drink the water even if it were tainted.

  When papers were signed and the broker had gone, he took the opportunity to explore his lodgings while the housekeeper was out. Twice he’d been close to saying that he didn’t need help and had almost asked the broker to dismiss her. Then, he’d considered the pleasure of eating something besides gristly sausage and that having her send out the wash for nine pence or his boots for three was a small price to pay to live like a sane person, even if it was a façade. Behind that stood guilt, a lingering feeling that he didn’t deserve happiness, even a minor sort.

  He’d worried over missing the coziness of his one room Whitechapel hovel until he was away from it. The new house in Brook’s Mews was small, a modest three stories, but cavernous by comparison, with a study and a parlor that was its own room and not the unused half of a dining room.

  Its interior was composed of clean white bead-board and high windows at the back that faced a small garden. None of the furniture was lavish, but it was newer. No stuffing pouring like guts from ruptured cushions, no dark rings of stains on the mattress to make him shudder. He clenched his jaw. Wasn’t that what he deserved? Did he have the right to be comfortable?

  It was a trade, he reminded himself. He could keep the house in Meadowcroft, at least a while longer. And he could unravel Hannah. That should help pass most of his hateful waking hours.

  When he’d acquainted himself with how full the house was, and how barren his wardrobe, he went out to Oakes to see what could be done about clothes. It was strange not to stand and wait and then come back later when everything had been sewn up. In Meadowcroft, everything was made by the tailor who promised a perfect fit, but Emily had always had to hem and tuck when his suits finally arrived home. Oakes on Bond Street had everything prepared in drawers and cases: cuffs and collars, socks and vests by the armload in all sizes, all of it to be had by just a few quick measurements. Handing off an almost painless twelve pounds for his necessities and a good evening suit, James decided all of London life was transactions. Houses, clothes, marriages; money and goods and people exchanged in turn. More tired, more weary than he’d felt in weeks, he scrawled his new address on a delivery slip and started home.

  He hadn’t questioned Simon Webster’s accusations against Hannah, not after the dinner. All he’d heard was an excuse for being around her and that had been enough. Now, skirting Grosvenor Park between an afternoon sway of fashionable couples strolling against a crisp autumn breeze, James turned the matter over in his mind.

  Had it shocked him to hear her called a murderer? Nothing shook him anymore; a combination of not caring and no longer being surprised by anything had washed away his curiosity long ago. In Meadowcroft and in other places, he had seen, as a doctor, what people were capable of doing to one another. Violence and cruelty or plain apathy had been as common among his patients as wounds and infections. But when he considered Hannah’s coming to him, seeing to his welfare, it was difficult to take Simon’s words at face value. Then again, kindness to one soul didn’t exclude offense against another.

  He massaged a throbbing temple and reasoned that he should put it all from his mind, though he couldn’t. All of medicine was a puzzle, small ones and large ones and each as pleasing to solve as to have solved. He wasn’t patient when it came to fitting them together; Emily had chided him for it countless times with coffee and a frown, in the wee hours of the morning, he sitting at his desk and she having passed the night in bed alone. Now, there was Hannah to stew over, and no one to shoo him on when his obsessing grew too long.

  He paused at Davies Street and squinted against warm light filtering through ash trees, now transformed from green to golden, and waited for a cart hauling a piano, its horses dashing faster than was good for its cargo or passersby.

  He would have answers, a few at time. Tomorrow night at the ball, on his appointments for treating Hannah, James would get answers for Simon, but first he vowed to get his own.

  .

  CHAPTER SIX

  Hannah invaded the foyer, under stares that burned equal to the heat of the candelabras around her. She belonged, but the Findlay’s guests all wished she didn’t and were ravenous for any opportunity to cut, to shun. They were clearing their throats now – she smiled – but they were all about to choke. She slipped from her finely made black coat, plush velvet and silk, that she’d worn countless times to dinner or the opera. None of the guest could have prepared themselves for the social transgression concealed beneath. She handed off the garment to a hovering valet, inhaled, and braced for their shock.

  She could have kept things simple with a high collar, no trim, and sleeves to please a nun. That would have found equal but different scorn, and in the end, she’d decided to simply please herself. A war was made up of small rebellions.

  Lavender was appropriate. No one could argue with the color for half-mourning, but there was a shocking luster to her choice of silk faille. Her bustle and overskirt pushed the bounds of propriety, and even she had to admit they were a shade too close to periwinkle and almost cheerful against white pleats and tassels.

  Gold bracelets? Unthinkable.

  Amethysts? Horrid.

  A neckline that could be measured from shoulder to shoulder? Hannah bit down a smile. That detail might have been for sport. She was a murderess, after all, a merry widow. Why not dress the part? She snapped open her fan, strangling its ivory spokes, and fanned in an obscene wave.

  So began her gallows procession through the Findlay mansion.

  Milky globes of the gas lamps overhead cast a flush from the crimson wallpaper, painting added indignation to faces as she passed. “Really!” they gasped, lips to ears, smiling with their mouths and poking her with their eyes, heads canted away.

  It had been no different when she and Gregory were first married. In those days, she had been called grasping and avaricious, married to a man twenty-two years her senior and with a fortune and better title. The only difference had been that she was twenty and in love and had let their accusations wound her. Now, they rolled off skin toughened by years of the frigid in-between. Tad was correct: she did wear a scarlet letter, but it had changed shape over a decade. She smirked at Lady Alice’s sniff and feigned a yawn. London had spent all their worst barbs when she was young and delicate. She wanted to applaud society’s longevity in continuing to hurl them, but was too bored by their repetitive malice.

  Within the cage of the mansion’s mahogany staircase, she encountered Lady Sarah Granville coming down. Lady Sarah stopped and half turned, pressing her daughter Lizzie behind her as though the girl was something she’d stolen from the pantry.

  “Lady Hannah,” Sarah murmured, eyes trained on the treads and up on tiptoes to spare poor Lizzie from such a sight. It wouldn’t do, young ladies questioning the rules and getting a lot of ideas in their heads. That could lead to riding astride and reading French literature and wondering at the purpose of standing passive like a statue for half the day.

  Hannah craned her neck left and then right, feigning ignorance. “Who is that back there? Who’ve you got?”

  Sarah smoothed the blonde peak of her bouffant curls and worried a spill of ivory lace at her bosom. “I was taking Lizzie down for some air. She has felt out of sorts this evening.”

  “Hm.” Hannah curtsied and smiled. “Then perhaps you should not have pressed her into coming. Sick girls catch poor husbands.” She lifted her skirts and went up, carried along by Sarah’s huff. Poor Lizzie, a commodity of virginity and good breeding. Who cared how she felt about her place in matters? Lady Sarah did the thinking; Lizzie did as she was told.

  Hannah shook her head, for her younger self as much as for Lizzie, and claimed the first-floor landing.

  The ballroom’s gray and white palette was cool in opposition to stifling heat from a hundred bodies pressed together. High windows stood open, their efforts futile against fires which had been lit, sh
e presumed, because fires must be lit on November evenings.

  There were plenty of other people making spectacles of themselves, enough with more recent offenses than hers, that she finally enjoyed a reprieve from the stares. She slipped along the ballroom’s edge to a shadow between two columns, unfettered by social scorn.

  Sir Jeremiah Findlay appeared at her side on cue, his long silver mustache turned down like a sad frown at having to engage her.

  “Lady Hannah,” he sighed, as though admitting something shameful.

  “Sir Jeremiah,” she answered, but kept her gaze fixed on the dancers.

  “May I get you a partner?” he offered in quaver.

  She had already violated an eleventh and twelfth commandment, arriving unescorted, and then crossing the ballroom alone. If only women like her would attend the rules, and spare some poor goodwife from having to produce a new etiquette bible every year. “A partner?” She mmd. “Yes, thank you.” She pressed a hand to her chest and batted her lashes. “And I shall stand right here, obediently, just so, until you return.”

  Jeremiah’s long arms went slack as he exhaled and bowed, or rather, sagged.

  Hannah clucked her tongue to no one. Didn’t he grasp the futility of his errand by now? Not a man in the ballroom would agree to follow him back. But they would still have to look at her, tip her a nod, and fill her glass at the punch bowl, and that was punishment enough.

  * * *

  James was still handing off his hat and watching the butler scrawl his name on a marker card, tugging up stiff white cotton gloves which made his fingers itch, when his host appeared trembling and out of breath.

  Sir Jeremiah Findlay was older and not remarkable in any way, except that he was long all over, a replica society gentleman stretched into near gangly proportions. James quickly ran through the list of activities for the well-to-do; he worried for Jeremiah sailing on a windy day, and wondered at the man’s safety on horseback. A rifle, with its kick and recoil, must be out of the question.