Chronicles of Love and Devotion: A Historical Regency Romance Collection

by Abigail Agar

  ‘It … it’s beautiful,’ she said. It really was. The velvet was a deep crimson red and so, so soft to the touch. The style was a little old-fashioned but would still pass for current in continental fashions where the English obsession with the natural form had not been taken up on grounds that it appeared dowdy and conservative.

  ‘I will be retiring to your library, my dearest Vera. The bath is hot, and you may change at your leisure. Dinner will be at seven, and we can court like a normal pair, with the disapproving spirit of Fidel Fielding present as chaperone to keep me from sullying your reputation with my rakish ways.’ He smiled his charming smile, bowed sharply, and exited the room, leaving her to her privacy and the chance for one night to be Vera again, completely Vera, a stranger in this house and hidden behind a normal mask instead of one constructed by the outright lies and subtle implications of ‘Fidel’.

  ***

  They ate in the ballroom. The small table that had been laid looked absurd in the vast empty tracts of the hall. Most of the cavernous room was in a twilight cast by the single fire which served as both heat and illumination for the meal. Around the table had been arranged many candelabras with fresh candles into which lavender water had been infused.

  Lord Stanley looked dashing, dressed in a black coat and white britches, his cravat elegant and tasteful. There was no sign of the absurd fashions he had favoured for the ball. Vera smiled beneath the mask she was wearing – he saw no more need for costume, for playing the rake, with her at least.

  He had stood up from the table when she entered, and the look on his face melted her heart. He looked awestruck.

  ‘You look like you’ve never seen a woman before,’ she teased.

  ‘No,’ he said, regaining his composure and replying teasingly, ‘just never seen a woman as beautiful as you, at least not dressed as one.’

  ‘Your charm won’t work on me, Your Lordship,’ she said, then mimicking the thick Polish accent of her grandmother: ‘English men speak well, but lack the vigour of the continental specimen.’

  ‘I will have to work that much harder to impress you with my etiolated English vigour.’

  He pulled her chair out for her, and she curtseyed before taking a seat. A man born to the manor – or the Manse to be more precise – waiting on me without knowing the first thing about my real birth.

  Helen arrived shortly after that with the meal: thick steaks of roast lamb’s shank and boiled potatoes. The gravy was creamy and rich and the carrots and green beans fresh picked from the garden.

  Lord Stanley dismissed Helen, and once she had left the room, he said:

  ‘You can take off the mask now. I’ve told them not to disturb us until I ring for the sweets.’

  With delicate hands, he raised a glass. ‘To wives and lovers,’ he said. ‘May they never meet.’

  Vera laughed and clinked his glass which she noticed contained water in place of the usual wine or brandy. Perhaps a leopard can change its spots, she thought. Even after all this time.

  They ate and drank long into the night, when Lord Stanley played the piano for Vera and she sang. They both laughed when she spoke to Helen – through the mask – in her grandmother’s accent, and they spoke of their pasts.

  Vera was careful in what she told him, alluding to no specifics that would identify her with the murdered Ladislaws, and he seemed unwilling to say much about the years since his father’s death.

  Still, she found out much about him when he was just Mr James Stanley and had not yet ascended to the Lordship and Avonside Manse. How he had learned to ride, raised his hunting dogs in the house until Caruthers had trodden in dog mess, slipped, and fallen down nearly a full flight of stairs.

  She heard of his many friends at the time, but when pressed on where they had gone and why he spent all his time in more disposable company now, he fell silent, or made a joke and moved the subject in other directions.

  It was a wonder to Vera how quickly he could move between joviality and openness and complete shutdown and back. It suggested practice.

  I wonder if even Caruthers knows why he is like this? she thought as he shifted seamlessly around her mention of the East Wing and into a story about his father’s first military campaign. The thought reminded her briefly of herself in cautious words to Caruthers.

  When Lord Stanley eventually kissed her goodnight, the sun was already rising.

  Chapter 14

  After getting almost no sleep the night before, Vera decided that the best way to wake herself up would be to go for a long and vigorous walk.

  She discharged her duties with less than her usual care and in half the usual time then headed out for the avenue of trees that made for a beautiful mile long walk along the eastern edge of the gardens.

  The summer had faded fast, and the hot and humid air that once greened the trees was now cooling, drying, and turning the forests and orchards of the Avonside estate to a bright and particoloured riot of reds, browns, and oranges.

  A chill wind was lifting those leaves that had fallen into drifts, sending the odd sere leaf scuttling around the path by Vera’s feet. Her cheeks felt bright and red, and her spirits were high.

  She found that keeping up with Lord Stanley in his many outdoor and occasionally indoor pursuits had given her physical strength that she had ever been forced to discover in herself in her life on the family estate.

  These brisk walks, considered rather outré for a lady in society, were marvellous fun when done as Fidel. And they gave her the joy of being alone, not having to worry about the facade, or about switching from Fidel to Vera and back. She could be simply whatever she was at that moment as she let her mind wander over her many, many troubles and her many, many joys.

  There was a break in the trees of which she was especially fond, one of the avenue’s oaks torn down by a storm opening up to reveal a beautiful view of the vast and maze-like flower beds, over the water features, to the neo-Gothic exterior of the East Wing. When she reached it, she turned and took in the view, enjoying the contrast between the cold of the air and the warmth of the sun.

  She stepped out of the shade of the trees and looked out where the orange of the leaves and the pink of the setting sun were all reflected in the glinting windows of the Manse.

  She froze, and a thrill ran down her spine like she had seen a ghost. She couldn’t quite work out what it was that she had spotted, but something in her mind saw something that thrilled or frightened her.

  She looked closer studying the view. Nothing moved in the gardens, the wind at her back barely making a whisper in the leaves. The house too seemed serene.

  Peering in, she could just about make out the draped curtains that covered all the windows in the East Wing. Or … she focused her eyes on one section of the house. There was something different there.

  There it was! One of the windows was only half covered by its curtains, the broken pattern of the windows had only registered in her subconscious at first, but it was enough.

  Then she realised why that small irregularity had thrilled her so: something moved.

  It was just a small movement, a mere shadow on a shadow, but there was no mistaking it. There was definitely a figure moving around in one of the rooms, the same room she had spotted all those months ago; the window was in shadow, no reflected light to confuse her or make claims of optical illusions.

  There was no mistaking it this time – someone was in that room, a silhouette she couldn’t recognise at this distance, but it must be someone from the household staff.

  Unless … she remembered all those Gothic stories of ghosts and prisoners, of secret infiltrations and of murderous sprites. She didn’t dwell for long, ending her walk then and there, breaking into a run towards the house. As she pelted along feeling the rough thump of the grass and soil against her feet, she counted the windows from the main house to the uncovered window.

  The third floor, eight or nine rows of windows in from the eastern-most end of the house. No nine. The t
hird floor, nine rows from the eastern-most end. The third floor… she repeated the coordinates over and over to herself.

  I mustn’t get this wrong.

  She stopped briefly in her quarters to extract the stolen key to the East Wing from beneath her trunk and then pelted up to the corridor full of suits of armour on which the door matching the key could be found.

  ***

  When the door gave way to her push, Vera was surprised by what she found. The mystery of what was behind the door had dogged her for so long she hadn’t realised that she had been picturing bare granite walls and winding staircases, something medieval and more fitting of the Gothic mystery that hung over the wing in her imagination and that of the local community.

  Instead, what she found was another corridor much the same as the one she just left, only sans suits of armour, and with the addition of a quite remarkable quantity of dust.

  There were also no carpet runners softening the sound of her footfalls, and when she looked down at the gloomy floor, she could see the dust was so thick that her shoes were leaving clear, shiny prints in it.

  At least I know no one has come this way in a while.

  She set off down the corridor, which was largely lit by the thin lines of light which escaped from beneath the doors on the right-hand side. So that must be the Northern line of rooms.

  The room she needed was two floors above her; she would need to find a flight of stairs first of all. She found them at the end of the corridor. With no external windows, despite the bright sun outside, the stairs seemed to vanish into darkness, slowly emerging then fading again behind her into the gloom.

  On the third floor she began checking behind doors, trying to orientate herself. The first appeared to be a bedroom, the four-poster at its centre covered by a tarpaulin. The next room was completely bare and the third appeared to be an old nursery which had been left almost exactly as it must have been when it had been Lord Stanley’s place of rest as a child.

  Vera stood a while in the room. Rummaging about and running her hands over the toys that he must have loved and played with in his youth. Most of them were still in near perfect condition apart from the dust that covered everything.

  There were lead soldiers and a cloth lion with one ear chewed to a matted paste. Vera pulled aside the cloth on the crib and looked at children’s bedding arranged as it must have been the very day he was moved to a more grown up room.

  It was a strange glimpse back through time. She tried to imagine the hopes and fears of Lord Stanley’s parents as they raised him. Did they fear the French revolution crossing the channel? Did they fear that the child in the crib might grow up in a more equal world, his vast wealth stripped away from him?

  She left the room, pleased to see that the clean floor meant there was no sign of her invasion of a room that was clearly visited from time to time by whoever stalked these corridors – a sentimental Caruthers? An inquisitive Helen? Lord Stanley himself, nostalgic for his youth?

  As she left the room, she caught sight of what she needed. The light from the window was thrown into the corridor and by that light she could make out footprints in the dust which led into a room a few doors down from the nursery.

  Sure enough when she checked the room in question, she found one of the curtains flung open to illuminate the room in which an oil lamp sat unlit but emanating heat and a smell of soot that indicated it had only recently been snuffed out.

  This is it, thought Vera. The shadow in the window was at this window.

  The room was a large dressing room off of what appeared to have once been the master bedroom of the whole house. A huge four-poster bed, almost twice the size of the one in the previous bedroom she had examined, showed its shape through a whiter set of dust sheets in the main room. Special care seemed to have been taken with the preservation of this room, much the same way it had with the nursery.

  The dressing room, however, where the curtains were thrown back, was rather less well kept. The large free standing tub had become home to a family of mice and a truly magnificent cobweb occupied most of the wall opposite the windows. From the dusty web, hundreds of black little eyes sat at the centre of the looping patterns of overlapping webs.

  The thick dust on the floor was patterned with footsteps of varying ages. Some showed as faint shapes of dust on dust while others were fresh patches of shiny clean floorboard.

  These footsteps congregated around a large cuboid roughly shoulder height to Vera and covered by the curtain that should have hung over the window. It was covered more hurriedly and more crudely than most of the furniture in the wing.

  Vera fitted her feet into the newest and shiniest of the footsteps, trying to leave as little sign of her violation of the room. She walked towards it, carefully placing her feet only on the freshest of the footprints in the dust.

  The voice in her head reminded her repeatedly that these were the footsteps of a member of the household, probably Caruthers. Not a ghost, as her instincts kept crying out to her.

  Don’t be superstitious, she reminded herself, even as a shiver ran up her spine at the prospect of so carefully treading the way of a member of the undead.

  With great trepidation, she lifted the corner of the curtain and peered at the box beneath – it was a simple cabinet of pitch black ebony carved with just a simple raised border around the door and a plain black knob. It looked more like a strongbox than a bathroom cabinet. There was no lock, and the door swung open easily when she tugged on it.

  The smell that spilled out hit Vera’s nose like a tidal wave. It was a pungent smell carried on the biting stench of solvents; beneath it was a sickly sweet smell, like frangipane flowers or – Opium, Laudanum, Tincture of Arsenic, she read off the labels of the bottles.

  One large specimen jar like those on the shelves of her father’s office contained three bunches of hemlock, one in flower, one gone to seed, one made up of early shoots.

  Several dried valerian root were hung from a hook set in the side of the cabinet along with a number of other medicinal herbs in varying states of desiccation. Two small unlabelled vials were filled with the pollen of some plant, and another contained a dozen bees in vinegar.

  Beside such woodland remedies were bottles of tonic pills, castor oil, Indian brandy, ergot of rye, Epsom salts.

  Most of the medicines drawn from an apothecary appeared old, the bottles’ labels browned, while some of the folk remedies and herbal infusions looked more recent.

  Why is this cabinet kept here? Why so well maintained? She couldn’t help thinking of the witches and wizards who still practiced odd arts for the rural workers. The charlatan who would take a loved one’s ills and cast it into a toad, or would sell you a curse for a shilling and skip town before the misfortune failed to fall.

  The hemlock in particular seemed fearful; it was a large jar for something that must be administered so carefully. She couldn’t imagine anyone but a bumpkin’s midwife suggesting such a dangerous cure at all.

  The mice scurried in the bathtub, and Vera couldn’t help thinking of Socrates bathing himself before his execution by hemlock to save the women of Athens from having to clean his corpse.

  Perhaps this was an old medical chest left behind when the wing was locked up. Certainly, the oldest bottles looked like they might have been used in the years before the old Lord Stanley passed. But that didn’t explain the freshly cut hedge-cures.

  Vera looked closer hoping for some sort of clue to the mystery.

  On the top shelf of the cabinet a row of small stoppered empty bottles sat, and at the end of the row was a perfectly round print in the dust where one had been removed, perhaps having been filled with a cure, perhaps with something more sinister.