“I will not have a husband that must be bought and paid for. Better to be alone than married for what Ambrose would bestow on me,” Hyacinth said. “If I ever marry, it will only be for love. And I think the chances of that fade more with each passing day.”
“You think that now… but one day, my dear, you will be so lonely that the reason for marriage will not matter. Only the lack of it,” Lady Arabella pointed out, her lower lip trembling with the warning.
Hyacinth clasped her hands together in front of her. “It would matter to me, Lady Arabella. It matters very much to me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll walk in the gardens. It’s chilly, but I daresay I should take advantage of the sun while I have it. Good morning.”
Ian had broken his fast early as was his custom and had retreated to his library. The truth was he rarely slept more than a few hours at a time. If his own nightmares didn’t wake him, then some strange noise or phantom vision would. Still, being up early had its advantages. Mrs. Lee rarely came down before ten in the morning. If he ate an hour before that and closeted himself in his study, he could avoid her and her toady of a son at least until the dinner hour. And he did have a great deal of work to do, but his mind was on none of it. He was once more staring out the window at the gardens beyond and wondering what it was that he’d truly seen the night before.
From his peripheral vision, he saw the fluttering of a gown and turned, his heart in his throat. But it wasn’t an apparition he saw. It was something infinitely worse. Miss Collier walked alone in the garden, her head cast down as if the weight of the world was draped across her shoulders along with the paisley shawl she’d donned for warmth.
He didn’t consider his actions. If he had, he’d probably have remained inside. Instead, he found himself stepping through the door onto the terrace and then down the steps toward the garden bench she approached. “Good morning, Miss Collier,” he called out.
She looked up, startled. Her wide violet eyes were like amethysts in the morning light. “Lord Dumbarton, I’m sorry. I must have been woolgathering.”
“I’ve never known wool to be so troublesome, Miss Collier. You look rather pensive this morning,” he observed. “Do you mind if I join you?”
“If I’m pensive, surely I would not be good company,” she replied.
“Nonsense,” he said. “We will simply be pensive together.”
His teasing coaxed a smile from her and he was grateful for it.
“Thank you, my lord, for your hospitality. But I think I owe you an apology… especially as I know one will not be forthcoming from Lady Arabella. I did not know what scheme she and your mother had concocted. I’m not a woman looking to be matched so I cannot imagine what made her envision herself a matchmaker.”
Ian considered his answer for a moment. “You have nothing to apologize for. And if my mother’s schemes have made you uncomfortable here, then I will issue an apology on her behalf. They are meddlesome but well meaning.”
“Indeed,” Miss Collier agreed.
Ian watched her for a moment, the graceful way she moved, the delicate curve of her neck and subtle beauty of her pale features. She was lovely. Far lovelier than she realized, he thought. Perhaps it was that the notion that she needed to be made aware of her many charms that prompted him to speak boldly. “And I will admit something to you, Miss Collier, ill-advised though it may be. If my situation were different, and the prospect of freedom not so very far from me, I might have had a very different response to their interference.”
She stopped walking then, her feet shuffling to a halt. Then she turned and glanced back at him. “That is very kind of you to say, my lord, but such flattery is unnecessary. I know my place in the scheme of things. I’m not an heiress, nor a great beauty, and my only lofty connections are tenuous ones through my sister’s marriage. I’m hardly what one would consider a catch.”
Ian wondered if perhaps she was fishing for compliments. As soon as the thought entered his mind, he dismissed it. It was not her way. So he said, “It is a pity, Miss Collier, that you see yourself through such a skewed lens. You are a beautiful woman. Much more so than you know… I think because you’ve spent your life in your sister’s shadow.”
Her eyebrows shot upward. “How do you know that?”
Ian smiled, but it was a rather grim expression as he remembered the way Annabel had ranted and raved over the new Lady Ambrose. “My wife was a great beauty… she lacked fortune and family connections, as well. But she did have friends who brought her into society. She was the belle of every ball until your sister came to town. Even married and obviously in love with her husband, nearly every man who encountered your sister and even a few who did not, wrote odes to her beauty. Annabel, for perhaps the first time in her life, was outshone and she despised your sister for it.”
Miss Collier shook her head sadly. “Until Lord Ambrose entered our lives, my sister’s beauty was nothing but a burden to her. As young women alone, the best we can hope for is to go unnoticed. And poor Primrose never did.”
Ian frowned at her choice of words and an ugly suspicion entered his mind. “And did you go unnoticed, Miss Collier?”
“Most of the time.”
“But not all of the time.”
“No, Lord Dumbarton. Not all of the time,” she replied and began walking again.
He waited a heartbeat only and then once more fell in step beside her. She might have a past, but so did he and he would not judge her as harshly as the world judged him.
Chapter Seven
It had been three days since she’d arrived at Dubhmara in such a state of disarray and chaos. Her bruises from her injuries were fading and she had developed a routine of sorts with Ian Blake, Lord Dumbarton. They would walk in the mornings and they would talk, but not of anything significant. Instead, he’d tell her of the estate and its history, most of which he’d only learned himself recently. She would tell him of their fun family times in the small cottage she’d shared with her siblings, leaving out the ugly truth of their intense poverty. But he knew. She could see it in his all too knowing gaze. But he wasn’t the only one with powers of keen observation.
And as they walked that morning, Hyacinth noted the way his dark eyes scanned the tree line and delved into ever shadowy recess they passed in the garden. He was like a man hunted. A man frightened.
“What is it that you think to find behind those shrubs, my lord?”
He turned to her then, his brows rising in surprise. Then he shook his head. “If I tell you that, Miss Collier, you will surely think me mad… and a murderer.”
She didn’t hesitate. Instead, she simply asked as bluntly as a person could, “And are you?”
“Which?” he fired back.
“Either.”
He smiled but there was nothing amused about it. It hinted at hidden pain. “A murderer? No, Miss Collier. Contrary to what some might say, I did not cause my wife’s death. If I am guilty of anything, it is that I failed to see the signs and protect her from her own impetuous nature.”
“I see,” she said. And she believed him. Perhaps it was her growing tendre for him that prompted her faith, but she couldn’t help that. “Mad, then?”
His smile faded entirely then. “Perhaps. I see things and hear things, Miss Collier. They are worse at night. They always come at night… I am mad or I am haunted. But neither is an acceptable way to live. Neither of them is something I should drag you into. If I were a better man, Miss Collier, I would put you and Lady Arabella in a carriage and send you on your way.”
She laughed. “You may send me away, but Lady Arabella will only go of her own choosing. Anything else would result in substantial bloodletting.”
His smile returned then, fleeting. It flashed across his too-handsome face for just a moment and then faded. He moved several steps away from her, off the path, and toward a large tree. Tangled in the branches, there was a dark blue ribbon. He pulled it free, letting the silk slide between his fingers. The expres
sion on his face was one of horror.
“What things do you see and hear in the night, Lord Dumbarton?”
“I would not burden you with it,” he said.
“I am offering to share your burden, my lord,” Hyacinth said.
“Have you ever seen a ghost, Miss Collier?”
Hyacinth recalled the woman she’d seen that first day, standing at the end of the corridor. There had been something frightening about that encounter, something that had, at the time, at least, seemed otherworldly. But she was not a woman given to flights of fancy. Her life had often depended on her ability to be very much grounded in the here and now. “I’ve seen things that frightened me, things that, at first glance, appeared to be something they were not. But taking a deeper look often reveals that what we perceive as magic—or phantoms—is naught but smoke and mirrors.”
“And if one lacks the courage to look deeper?” he queried.
“Then one should ask for help,” she replied. “I would help you. You have only to tell me what it is that you require.” Hyacinth realized that her offer extended far beyond simply identifying what sort of games were being played with him in regards to the fate of his presumably late wife. She was tempted by him in ways that she had never before experienced. Virginal, yes, but not some innocent and sheltered miss, she knew precisely what it entailed to be intimate with a man. She recalled the sights and sounds of the quick and hurried couplings that had occurred in their small room in the Devil’s Acre, just as she recalled the lewd winks of the men who’d paid her mother for that privilege. Surely with a man such as Ian Blake, it would be something different from that. Finer and more significant, she would hope.
His silence stretched on and his gaze shifted over her. He’d caught the double entendre that she had certainly meant with all her heart but not intended to utter. That silence spoke volumes.
Embarrassment flooded her. “I should go back inside. No doubt Lady Arabella will be looking for me. We are to picnic at the cliffs this afternoon,” she said and turned to walk away.
He couldn’t let her leave him. The idea of being alone with his own thoughts, with the hallucinations, if that is what they were, left him weak. And also, he simply needed her. There was a peace to be found in her presence, not because she kept the apparitions at bay, but because she was simply Hyacinth Collier. And he desired her far more than he should.
“Don’t go. Stay with me. Please,” he said.
“It isn’t wise,” she replied. “You understand that, don’t you?”
“I think my wife’s spirit is haunting Dubhmara,” he blurted out suddenly. She had called his bluff, it seemed, even when he hadn’t known he was bluffing.
She paused immediately in her hasty retreat, her steps halting long before she reached the path that would lead back to the house. A deep and heavy sigh escaped her. Then she turned to face him. “Why do you think such a thing, Lord Dumbarton?”
“I’ve seen her. I’ve heard her. She calls to me in the darkness. I am haunted, Miss Collier, or I am mad. And I cannot say which fate is preferable,” he admitted. He waited for it then, for her to laugh and point, to stare at him with pity, to call him a madman and run screaming from his presence.
“What does she look like? Your late wife?”
“Come with me, Miss Collier, and I will show you.”
Ian didn’t hesitate then, but stepped forward and took her hand, leading them both back to the house. Through the library doors and up the stairs, they climbed without a word passing between them.
When they reached the second floor, he turned them toward the family wing and the portrait gallery that flanked it. At the end of the long corridor, near the window, hung the portrait of her that had been painted just after they’d come to Dubhmara, when there had still been some hope of happiness for them.
“That is Annabel, Miss Collier. That is my late wife.” He gestured to the portrait. It showed her beauty, but the artist had failed to capture the darker part of her. Annabel had possessed the ability to be cruel like no one else he had ever known. She would use words to cut a person to the quick and smile while she did so.
Miss Collier stepped closer to the painting, staring up at it with an expression that was entirely inscrutable to him. After a moment, she stepped back turned to face him. “And she’s haunting you,” she said, echoing his earlier statement.
Bitterness welled inside him. He wanted to rip down the blasted portrait and toss it out the nearest window. Dead or alive, all his misery could be traced to the woman in that painting. “I know I sound mad. It seems impossible. In truth, in the bright light of day, I question it myself. But in the darkness, it’s far more difficult to convince myself that it’s only my mind playing tricks on me.”
She reached out, her hand covering his which still gripped her much smaller one. That touch, her bare skin sliding over his own, was like a lifeline. It pulled him back from the edge of fury, from the edge of madness. “Oh, no, Lord Dumbarton. I didn’t mean to imply that I lacked faith in your assessment. She is haunting you… and I know that for a fact, because I’ve seen her, too. On the very first day I arrived at Dubhmara.”
His blood went cold. “You saw her?”
Miss Collier nodded and offered him a reassuring smile. “I didn’t know it was her. I was coming downstairs just before tea, and I felt… as if I were being watched I suppose. I turned to look behind me and a woman stood at the end of the corridor in a white, flowing gown. But I didn’t have my spectacles and I couldn’t make out her face, really. Just the color and the shape. I saw long auburn hair and a white gown.”
He sighed in relief. “Then I’m not mad. There is no living person in this house who fits that description.”
“That we know of,” she stated emphatically. “I do not believe the dead are walking amongst us… but I do believe that someone very much wants you to believe that. The question is why?”
He shook his head. “I’ve considered every possibility and I can find no reasonable explanation. You said you wished to help me, Miss Collier. Will you help me with this?”
“I will,” she replied. “I would see you relieved of this heavy burden you bear. I would see you peaceful and contented if I could.”
They were no longer speaking of just the situation pertaining to the possible haunting. It had shifted and morphed into something else altogether, just as it had in the garden moments earlier. Three days in her presence had reduced him to a mooning, calf-eyed fool. Without conscious thought, he closed the distance between them, coming to stand close enough to her that he could see each freckle on her nose distinctly, that he could smell the soft scent she wore. He could also see the way her pupils darkened and her breath caught as she looked up at him.
“I was furious at my mother’s meddling and at Cousin Arabella for being part of her schemes,” he admitted ruefully.
“I was not exactly pleased with them,” she admitted and there was a breathless note to her voice that hinted at anticipation.
He wanted to kiss her. He wanted it like he wanted his next breath. Her face tipped upward toward his in invitation and he leaned in, slowly drawing closer to the sweet temptation of her soft lips. Before he reached them, a door slammed in the corridor and they both jumped. They broke apart like guilty children, but he held on to her hand, unwilling to let go of all contact with her.
She shook her head as if to clear it. “I must go. Arabella will be very cross if I am late… but you should join us this afternoon. Your mother will be there and, frankly, you being in this house with only the servants and your mother-in-law—it cannot be good for you,” she said, a shudder wracking her at the thought.
Ian smiled in spite of himself. “She is a bit of a termagant. I will join your party for the picnic.” He looked down at their hands, hers still enclosed in his and appearing all the more delicate for it. It was an impulsive gesture to lift her hand to his lips, to kiss the delicate skin just above her knuckles.
“You shouldn�
�t,” she whispered.
Ian looked up then, meeting her wide, violet gaze and noting the blush that stained her cheeks. He wanted to see that lovely flush for a very different reason. Being near her was dangerous for them both. It made him want things he could not have, but he was helpless to resist. For the first time since Annabel’s disappearance, he felt things other than gut-clenching guilt, shame, fear. Hyacinth Collier made him feel alive. She made him remember the man he’d once been, and the man, God willing, that he would be again.
“I should not,” he agreed. “But I have. And I mean to do so again… next time, Hyacinth, it will not be your hand I kiss.”
Her jaw dropped and her lips parted on a surprised gasp. She was temptation personified in that moment. But the sound of voices from the corridor, specifically that of Vera Lee, was enough to dull the edge of it.
“I will see you this afternoon,” he said, stepping back reluctantly and releasing her hand.
Rather than risk discovery together and face the disapproval of a woman who thrived on the misery of others, Ian left the gallery to face her alone in the corridor and steer her away from Hyacinth. It was the least he could do.
Chapter Eight
Hyacinth stifled an exasperated sigh as she trudged along behind the sedan chair Lady Arabella had insisted upon for their outing. The dowager Lady Dumbarton was far ahead of them in a sedan chair of her own that was apparently manned by far more capable porters, but it was still slow going. She was impatient to reach their destination. They were going to the cliffs that looked out over the sea, and out over the stretch of beach where she’d been told the missing Lady Dumbarton had vanished from. If there was one thing Hyacinth was certain of, the woman she’d seen in the corridor had been flesh and blood. How would she have created a vision of Annabel that matched her so closely having never seen her otherwise?
The Midnight Hour: All-Hallows’ Brides Page 49