Chronicles of Love and Devotion: A Historical Regency Romance Collection

by Abigail Agar

  The effect was as if she were dogged by invisible hunters treading the exact same corridors as her and always just a little way behind. Ghostly shadows alighting in her footsteps and watching her from empty eye sockets.

  With the curtains drawn and the moon almost new, the rooms were dark and cavernous. Her candle seemed to cast a sphere of light around her that seemed incapable of penetrating the dark beyond its borders, as if the dark were a substance, her candle inflating a little bubble in a deep well of ink.

  Perfect place for a ghost, Vera thought. A ghost like me.

  But she pushed the thought away; that seemed too much like self-pity. She owed too much pity for those she had hurt, who she was about to hurt with this betrayal.

  I hope I can make it up to you one day, my love.

  One more crime, this one real, and really truly hers to suffer for. One more, and she would be free of this place. Her obligations to the Manse.

  She couldn’t quite explain why it was that she could no longer take the money from Lord Stanley. He had never rescinded the offer. But somehow she knew that if she were to disappear from his world and return as Vera, she would have to do so without begging her way.

  Begging is better than theft, said the voice in her head.

  ‘I won’t be bought and paid for,’ she replied out loud.

  The narrow corridor opened suddenly into a cavernous hall. The hulking shape of a chandelier, draped with a dust cloth hung overhead like a monster of the deep swimming in the thick liquid black. The beams of the candle reached out into the dark, and the creature above seemed to reach back with its own presence, a weight as heavy and as insubstantial as the one on Vera’s heart.

  A bird, nesting in among the dust sheet blasted out of the pile like a ball from a cannon. She ducked, and in the flickering light and fluttering wings, the bird took on a monstrous form. Like the spirit of the Albatross from Coleridge’s poem.

  To calm herself she repeated the lines of the poem aloud, hearing them echoing back in her whispers from the roof and the strange angles of the room:

  ‘The very deep did rot: O Christ! That ever this should be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs, Upon the slimy sea.’

  Perhaps this is not so comforting a poem, she reflected. Settling instead on Blake’s Tyger, Tyger.

  One more passageway, and she was there, the eastern-most room of the house – an old drawing room with huge stained glass windows taken from a medieval Norman church that was dug up in the grounds. At the far side of the room came the odd red glint of glass throwing back the candle’s gleam from the panes set in the East Entrance.

  The second of the stolen keys scraped in the external lock, and the handle resisted her turning it only for a moment. Then she heard the mechanism click. She slid open the two bolts that held the doors to the floor and lifted the bar that held them together.

  The house was unchanged from the outside, but it was now open and waiting for Fielding and his crew to enter her and gut her.

  Vera’s debt was paid. She felt strangely serene. She had left Vera’s grief behind when she had become Fidel, and now as she transitioned to something new, she felt as if she were leaving the responsibilities and feelings she had as Fidel behind.

  She would join Fielding on the road, find the killer, and when her life was claimed back, maybe then she could return to Avonside not as Fidel, perhaps not even as Vera. She still hoped that when all this had passed, she could find a way to reconcile it all with Lord Stanley and finally be free to take the name he’d offered her.

  Lady Stanley, she thought. It is a pretty dream.

  ***

  The constables arrived in the morning. Vera expected them to be called, but not so soon. The robbery could only have been carried out last night, and Bathcombe was half a day’s ride away.

  Nonetheless, Vera woke to the sound of carriages pulling up outside the Manse and hammering on the servants’ entrance.

  Confusion followed. Vera could hear it building through the house in the drumming of feet. The quick patter of Helen’s shoes, the slow careful tread of Eli, cook’s rambunctious skittering.

  That was quick, she thought, wondering if she had overslept. The theft could hardly have been discovered so soon or the constables whipped up from Bathcombe on such sudden notice. Perhaps it was a smaller delegation from Myton Brookleigh.

  She lay in the warmth of her bed, feeling the cold air of the room breezing on her exposed arms. A month ago this would have been a moment of panic, of fear of being caught without her disguise.

  Now, she wore the Fidel skin so well that she could rise quickly, bind down her breasts, shrug herself into a shirt, lace up her britches and be ready to face the law in the guise of a man in no time. She would have to stand by her victims in solidarity, support Lord Stanley without giving away her involvement.

  She threw off her covers, listening to the raised voices of cook and Helen trying to get some sort of response from the men as to why they were here.

  We were robbed, Vera answered Helen quietly as she dressed. Or perhaps to handle the matter of the duel. With some consternation, she wondered if the sick lieutenant might have passed in the night. That would explain how the constables had got here at daybreak.

  With her body safely covered, she completed her toilette a little more lazily, pulling on her stockings, shoes, and liveried coat, combing her hair and stepping out into the corridor feeling ready to raise hell about this intrusion into his Lordship’s household.

  She met the constables, driving Helen before them, as they were heading, not towards the scene of the theft in the East Wing, but coming down towards the corridor she had just left where Vera’s room and Caruthers’ sickbed were housed.

  As was fitting for the robbery of so great a house as the Avonside Manse, leading the way was William Fitzwilliam himself. His eyes seemed to light up when they found his erstwhile duelling partner under his sights.

  ‘What is all this about, Fitzwilliam,’ Vera snapped.

  ‘Sir, to you, you little oik,’ Fitzwilliam snarled back.

  ‘Your family don’t take much mind of you, so I don’t take much mind of your family, Fitzwilliam. I will fetch His Lordship for you but expect no other courtesy from me.’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere, wench.’

  Vera froze, half turned around in the corridor.

  They’re not here for the theft.

  She turned back, looked at Fitzwilliam, and read the triumph in his face.

  They’re not here on behalf of the lieutenant, for the duel, for Lord Stanley.

  She blinked slowly.

  Of course. The doctor had said that the lieutenant had been speaking of murder. The doctor didn’t mention whose murder was meant. The lieutenant didn’t mean the duel with Stanley was attempted murder. He had recognised her on the field. Evidently, his wounds had healed enough for his mind to turn back to avenging himself on her.

  They had found her: Vera Ladislaw, murderess.

  When she swore, it was out loud, and foul enough to make the constables blush.

  ***

  Vera very much wished she had accepted her arrest with dignity a few moments later when, as she pelted down the corridor at full speed, she was caught by Fitzwilliam himself and laid low with an agonising blow of his cane to her legs.

  In an instant she found herself lifted clear of the ground by a constable on each arm.

  ‘Get her out of those ridiculous garments,’ snarled Fitzwilliam, throwing a coarse grey woollen dress at Helen.

  ‘Guard the doors,’ he barked at the taller constable who seized her arm, grunted at Helen to lead on and dragged her back up the corridor she had just run down to her quarters.

  Vera hung limp from her captor’s grip; she felt faint. It had been so close – a few more days and she would have been on the move, ahead of the law, and on the trail of the men who had done all this to her.

  He threw her onto the bed, and she struck her head against the wall. Then he s
lammed the door shut leaving Helen and Vera standing in the cool dark of the room. Helen stepped forward and put one hand to Vera’s face.

  ‘Is it true? You’re a lass?’ her voice was flat, unsure of what emotion it should feel. Vera could see the struggle to understand waging in Helen’s eyes.

  Helen took her hand away, a smudge of blood on her finger from where Vera’s scalp was now matting her hair with a sticky trickle of blood.

  Somehow it reminded her of how she had nursed Lord Stanley, the same tenderness and care, the same slow discovery that one of them was not at all what they had seemed. Only this time she was at the disadvantage, penned in, and disgraced.

  ‘Aye, Helen. My name is Vera Ladislaw. I’m a gentleman’s daughter, and I am wanted for the death of that gentleman, his servant, and his wife, my mother. But Helen, I did not kill them.’

  ‘That’s between you, God, and the King’s Justice, Miss,’ said Helen formally. ‘We’d best get you dressed more suitably.’

  So Helen helped Vera change from Fidel Fielding, manservant, into the wanted criminal Vera Ladislaw. When Vera lifted her shirt, Helen smiled a little. ‘I dreamed so many times of doing just this for you – to you when you were Fidel, Miss Vera.’

  She laughed a little when Vera’s trousers came off. ‘Why, Miss Ladislaw, I don’t know what I’d have done if it had come to this, and I’d found you lacking in that way.’

  When the full transformation was complete, she said, ‘I wonder that I ever loved you so, Miss Vera. You a beautiful woman and all. I should have been jealous, not lustful of you.’ There was a kindness in her voice, her confusion and disappointment dissipated.

  This all passed for Vera as if in a dream; the effort of being Fidel had fallen away, the fear of being caught had been dispersed by the decisive event of capture. Vera was serene; she hadn’t known with what fear she had been living these past months, so heavily masked was it all by the false face of Fidel.

  Now she was Vera again, and because she was no longer sure what that meant, there was no pressure to act in a certain way or be a certain person. In the grey uniform of the gaoler’s gown she could subside into a kind of thoughtless anonymity.

  She could let go of it all because it was all over. For her at least.

  ‘Perhaps not so jealous after all, Helen. They will hang me for what they accuse me of,’ said Vera, eventually.

  ‘His Lordship won’t allow that,’ said Helen kindly. Though she did not say it nearly as kindly as she would have to Fidel, thought Vera.

  Then it hit her.

  My trials are not done. I cannot calmly accept my fate.

  With a sense of harried exhaustion, she realised she had to try and find a way to stay with Lord Stanley. To accept execution might be the easiest task for her – the pale grey face of Caruthers, lips daubed with a crust of white saliva seemed to hang in the air above her bed as Helen tied the last laces on the back of the plain grey prison-gown.

  ‘Oh, kind, kind Helen,’ Vera said. ‘Please do one thing for me. Ask Lord Stanley to believe nothing until he has spoken to me. Believe nothing but this: that I love him with all my heart. Tell him only to believe in me as I will always believe in the good in him.’

  His wife hadn’t been able to hold on; Vera could not abandon him like that again by going to the gallows uncontested.

  ‘Let’s go, Helen. No point in delaying. But you must promise me to tell him.’

  ‘I will,’ Helen said, then she turned to knock on the door to let the constable know that the women were ready. While Helen’s back was turned, quick as a flash, Vera slipped her hand into the pocket of her coat which was laid out on the bed and with finger and thumb lifted the little bottle of laudanum that lay there. She slipped the vial into the bosom of her dress and smoothed it out before Helen turned back and the guards came in to take her away.

  If it comes to the worst, she thought. I will have a way out that is not the gallows on my own terms, like Caruthers and Lady Stanley.

  The guard took her out the back, through the kitchen, and bundled her into the waiting coach.

  William Fitzwilliam was sat within, waiting for her, a cruel smile on his lips.

  Vera smiled back as politely as she could.

  She saw that he was sat with his cane held cautiously as if he were afraid of her lunging at him. But she remained unshackled.

  Doesn’t want to appear afraid of a woman, she thought with contempt rising in her gorge. But he is.

  ‘Tell me, Fitzwilliam.’ His eyes flashed with irritation. ‘I don’t suppose you bothered looking much further than the testimony of the gentleman with the white side-whiskers and the criminal associates?’

  ‘I can’t believe I took you for a man,’ he replied ignoring her question. ‘Did Lord Stanley know?’

  ‘I don’t suppose you took the man’s address either?’

  ‘I did, in point of fact, Miss Ladislaw. But if you think that everyone who’s used the Bathcombe knocking shops is a murderer then you’d be locking up much of the gentry – including my esteemed brother. I don’t doubt even your dad, old Ladislaw Esquire had his fair share of marital assistance from the ladies of pleasure.’

  Vera broadened her own smile, ignoring the barbed comment. Before she had been a man herself, someone like Fitzwilliam would have quelled her spirit with his air of authority. Now she understood how hollow the structure was that gave him his power as a man and a gentleman at that.

  Now it would take more than condescension to send her into quiet acquiescence.

  What she was aware of was her own equality of mind, superiority in this case, for he was a constable chasing the wrong criminal, and she was far closer to finding his prey than he was.

  The lines of Mary Wollstonecraft seemed to carry more weight than ever. They seemed to ring in her ears: How can the object of both sexes should be the same, when the mind formed by its pursuits, is expanded by great views swallowing up little ones? Men have superior strength of body; but if women acquire sufficient to enable them to earn their own subsistence they too can bear those bodily inconveniences and exertions that are requisite to strengthen the mind.

  That strength of body was all that kept her here, and even then William Fitzwilliam couldn’t trust it more than the length of his cane.

  She’d certainly seen more than enough of bodily inconveniences and exertions since her life had burned up in a puff of powder smoke.

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘My nephew recognised you at the duel. He wasn’t sure about it at first, then he was shot, but lying in bed for months on end seemed to clarify his mind on the matter. He told his father, but for some reason, Lord Fitzwilliam didn’t see fit to let me know.’ He said the word Lord with utter contempt that curled his lip and made his whole body shudder. ‘You have some powerful protectors. But they are not above the law. And in this county. I. Am. The. Law.’

  She squared her shoulders to look Fitzwilliam straight on eye to eye, and she smiled her sweetest most deprecating smile before, in her best drawing room tones saying:

  ‘You. Are. A. Wretched. Incompetent.’ She paused to let that sink in. He had clearly never been spoken to like that by a woman. ‘So easily fooled by the murderer into hunting down the last of his victims and sending her to the gallows in his place. The man walked in, confessed his crime to you, held out his hands for the shackles, and you were too dunderheaded to place them on him–’