by Laura London
I spent more time than was good for me worrying about Lord Brockhaven and his cousin, Vincent, about Isabella and Brockhaven, about Isabella and Vincent. My isolated childhood had given me few instances to observe the married state. Be my experience ever so limited, I was sure that the relationship shared by Vincent and Isabella was a trap and a heartache to both parties. Underneath her wheedling, her dramatics, and her artificiality, one could sense that Isabella was deeply in love with Lord Brockhaven. It might be a selfish love, and a possessive one, but it was nonetheless strong enough to have torn to tatters the fabric of her marriage. Though she had not been kind to me, I pitied her. Only misery could come of giving one’s love in keeping to Lord Brockhaven, for surely few men were more alienated from their own emotions. I knew what drew her to him, though, and held her with so tight a bond. Even if he were not stunningly attractive, even if he had only a tenth of his self-assurance, Brockhaven still would have been able to draw people to him with as little effort as a falcon gliding toward heaven on the wind. It was too fascinating, that hint of gentleness in him, long-drowned in the shadows of his life. Everyone around him wanted to touch it, I could see that. Everyone wanted to be the one to come close to that lost sweetness where none was allowed. Robert came the closest. They might never have said much to express the bond between them—certainly they never did so in public—but it was there, nonetheless.
Lord Brockhaven’s relationship with Lady Gwendolyn was simple, superficial, and direct, which seemed to suit both parties very well.
“What it really is,” Ellen explained to me one afternoon, “is a standoff.”
We had been sitting together in the stable, in the boxstall that Brockhaven’s groom had allocated to my stallion, Kory. It was a lovely place with shiny brass tackle and fresh paint and sunny windows. The stall itself could have housed, in comfort, an elephant and her young.
Kory was lying on a pile of clean, dry straw, with my head against his withers. Once in a while, he would take my forearm between his teeth with a great show of fire and nibble gently for a joke, and I would dig into the bag I had brought with me from the kitchen and pull out another carrot for the old moocher. At first, our antics terrified the grooms, but as I had been here more than a week now, and Kory hadn’t killed me yet, the grooms only shook their heads, grinned, and said that I had something on that stallion, all right.
Ellen was sitting on the blacksmith’s pull around and munching, with an endearing lack of elegance, on one of the raw carrots from Kory’s sack.
“The thing about Mama and Brockhaven,” she said, chatting energetically, “is that they’ve got nothing in common. Nothing! Politics: Mama’s as staunch as a sitting cat and Brockhaven’s a liberal. Society: Mama loves people and Brockhaven hates them. Economic development: She likes the way things used to be and Brockhaven’s a progressive. She’s a moralist and Brockhaven’s… well, the opposite. I’ll tell you, Liza, the secret to harmony between a lady like Mama and a rakehell like Brockhaven is for them both to shut their mouths around each other. ’Sides, if he wasn’t so austere, I suppose she’d try to coddle him. Can you imagine Brockhaven putting up with that? We’d both be out on our ear in the time it takes to say—Liza! Here comes Robert!”
I hadn’t been at Edgehill above three nights before I discovered that Ellen was more than fond of Robert, a fact known and treated with charming delicacy by everyone from the lowest to the most elevated of the domestic staff. It was quite a humble devotion. Ellen never did more than dream, in a remote way, that Robert would ever take any special notice of her. I think she admired him because he was the closest thing to a pirate that she had ever met.
For his part, Robert remained mercifully in ignorance of Ellen’s feelings, partly, I’m sure, because she was rather shy around him and Brockhaven. Ellen was in the unique position of being treated by them with some kindness, which Ellen said Robert did because she stuttered like a bullfrog around him and it touched him with a casual pity for such a majestic lack of self-confidence. She claimed Lord Brockhaven did so from a natural disinclination to expose such a poorly defended individual to his acerbic tongue.
Kory put back his ears as Robert came up the boxstall.
“By God,” said Robert, “your beast hates me.”
“Oh, no,” I said quickly. Kory had so frightened the stable boys on his first days there that Brockhaven had warned me that he’d get rid of that “wild nag” if he didn’t calm down, and I still hadn’t recovered from my fear that Brockhaven would make good his threat. “Kory’s only making a warning. He’d never attack anyone unless I told him to. My grandmother trained him that way, because she worried that someone might try to molest me.”
“Then I’ll remember to molest you in places far removed from the stables.” He gave me a wink. “Stand up. Lord, this is the first time I’ve seen you in… what’s that word you have for us?”
“G-gorgio,” Ellen supplied.
“In the guttural, yet, Ellie. Soon we’ll have you hopping around with a hoop in your ear.” He grinned. “Gorgio. This is the first time I’ve seen Liza dressed like one of us decadent gorgios. Where’d you get the toggery? I thought Lady G. said that your dressmaker outfits wouldn’t be done until Thursday.”
“They won’t be,” I said. “Isabella sent this riding habit for me with a note that said she thought I might like to ride.”
His grin broadened. “And break your neck, with her compliments. Stand up.”
With Robert, that’s that. I was supposed to jump to my feet and stand heedless as a marble statue as he examined me at his leisure, unknowing or uncaring about the mortification it caused me. I’d learned by now that it was less than useless to say no to Robert. There’s no man better at getting his way. If there was nothing else that I blessed Lord Brockhaven for, I blessed him for interrupting Robert and me that first day in the library, because the better I knew Robert, the more sure I was that he would have had what he wanted of me, by fair means or foul. That had been before he learned that I was a “lady,” and now he would no more ravish me than his own sister, so he had told me, to my embarrassment. The gorgios have a very bewildering code of honor.
At any rate, I stood up, and Ellen knelt beside me to brush the straw off my skirt, saying, “It is pretty, d-don’t you think? R-red velvet! Mama felt it was a touch risqué for Liza, but the c-color is so b-becoming, is it not?”
“Very becoming,” Robert agreed, his gaze sparing no part of me, until I thought to distract him.
“Would you like to see the bonnet?” I asked, grabbing up the matching hat and squashing it down on my head with the scarlet and black feathers every which way, to make Ellen laugh. I think she looks very pretty when she laughs. You couldn’t tell if Robert thought so because he was laughing about the hat, too, and it’s hard to tell what people are thinking of when they laugh.
“Marvelous. The Unattainable in Red, they’ll call you,” he said.
“Will they? Who are they?”
“Oh, the hoi polloi who hang around the Park in London to watch the gentry on their afternoon trot. I don’t doubt the crowds will double to see the gypsy heiress on her half-tamed stallion,” Robert said. “I suppose Vincent put Bella up to sending you the dress, as usual, sparing no pains…”
As lightly as I could, I said, “You don’t like him, do you?”
“Vincent?” He put his hand through his dark hair, shrugging his shoulders in a loose, nervous motion as though my question were a cage that might trap him. “Old wounds, Liza. Bad associations. Alex and I lived with Vincent’s family after my parents died, did Gwen tell you? An uplifting story! My mother was shot by one of her lovers in a jealous fit and… what’s the matter, Ellie?”
“It’s only th-that my mother said sh-she had died of influenza.”
Robert’s grin differed little from a grimace. “Wishful thinking on the part of the relatives who felt disgraced. My father was dead before the year was out, another admirable mortality. That story even E
llen has heard.”
“Yes. H-he had drunk to excess in a g-gin shop, in d-despair over the death of your mother…”
“In anger that her parents had stuck him with her funeral bill,” corrected Robert, leaning forward with his elbows resting on the stall door. “On the walk home, he espied an elderly watchman and decided it might afford him a moment or two of amusement if he beat the old fellow to death with his cane. All was going just as dear Papa had planned when a good Samaritan passing by thought to object. My father was so enraged at the Samaritan’s ungentlemanly attempt to interfere with his pleasure that my father challenged the man to a duel. Right won the day, as they say, and my father died with a bullet in his heart.”
“L-like your mother!” said Ellen softly, struck by the irony of it.
Robert smiled, not pleasantly. “Not quite. My mother died with a bullet in the head. Alex told me. He ought to know. He saw it.”
“Oh, no,” Ellen cried.
I felt her arm come around my waist.
“Poor, poor little boy,” I whispered.
Robert made a restless movement with his hand. I could tell that this was a memory on which his mind never lingered. He said, “It was a scandal, and a slur on the family, and a black mark on the honor of the name. So Alex and I heard for years from Vincent’s mother.”
“But surely,” I said earnestly, “you couldn’t be blamed for the things that your parents did!”
“But then you didn’t know Vincent’s father, the Right Honorable William T. Randolph,” said Robert curtly. “On the day we arrived to live at his home, and every Sunday thereafter he took us to the big, dark vault of his family chapel and made us kneel on the flagstone floor from dusk until midnight. I was four then, just turned four. I remember how tall Randolph looked to me, blond with that exquisite, controlled face, the replica of Vincent. Like some wrathful archangel, telling us to pray that our souls wouldn’t decay, as our parents’ had done. Then he’d lock us in and it would be quiet, and black, and cold. Alex wrapped his jacket around me and set me on the pew. For hours, he’d tell jokes and stories, to keep me from being afraid…
“And Sunday chapel was only the beginning. I was spared the worst of it. Alex saw to that, though it made things harder for himself.” He made an impatient gesture. “Why am I telling you little monkeys all this? Oh, yes. Vincent. Why don’t I like Vincent? That’s a hard question, isn’t it? He’s such an exemplary fellow, pious, devout, mannerly. All my youth, his parents held him up as the model after whom I should mold myself. It’s a miracle, isn’t it, that I don’t like him?”
Chapter Five
I was not supposed to ride that afternoon, for underneath the heavy full skirts of the riding dress were the same bare feet I’d worn since my birthday. There had been no time for the shoemaker to finish the half boots Lady Gwen had ordered for my use. Inside I was glad of it, because the binding pressure of a shoe is intolerable to one who has known the freedom of unclad feet. No use to tell this to Lady Gwen. It would only grieve her terribly to think that I was uncomfortable. I had suggested—casually—that it wouldn’t really be so bad, would it, if I didn’t wear shoes. Lady Gwen had made a face that I’m ashamed to say reminded me of a thorned sheep and said that you might as well show a man your bosom as your naked feet.
The second reason I was not supposed to ride was that Lady Gwendolyn was afraid I might meet somebody, and it would make no good impression if I was jouncing around on the saddle like a hoyden on my first acquaintance with anyone of note. She would arrange a more dignified entrance into society for me.
This was why Ellen and I waited until Lady Gwen left to pay an afternoon visit to the parson’s wife before we rode out and why we took only the loneliest backroads. Ellen has this funny way of grinning and saying, “We won’t want to upset my mother,” which means the same thing as, “Let’s go, she’ll never find out about it.”
Ellen’s mind was so lively that she managed to inject the trappings of an adventure to any outing, and today was no exception. I discovered that it was thought befitting to the station of a young lady that she should ride accompanied at the very least by a trusted family retainer. To me it sounded like the height of splendor to be accompanied by a fatherly groom in dashing livery, but to Ellen it was dull, safe, and confining. She got rid of the well-meaning accompaniment by repeated assurances that we would go no farther than the lime avenue that bordered the south lawn. You might have guessed, though, that when we reached the last of the limes, she turned her mare to the east, smiled at me, and laughed, calling over her back, “This way, Liza. We’re off to hunt for missing treasure.”
Off we set; our only claim to chaperonage was Caesar, Lord Brockhaven’s lion-sized mastiff. Lord Brockhaven had left home early that day, much to the dog’s disgust, so he had been happy to attach himself to us as a diversion from moping around the stables waiting for his beloved master’s return. Caesar was the most intelligent dog of any species I’d ever met, and the most well-trained. Immediately, Brockhaven made it clear to Caesar that I was a friend and since that moment, Caesar had treated me with a dogged devotion. It was Ellen’s opinion that since mastiffs were among the first dogs, probably Caesar’s ancestors had been the prized hunting dogs of Assyrian emperors. Brockhaven only laughed and said that more likely Caesar came from the line of mongrels that hung around the streets of ancient Jerusalem, eating carrion and spreading rabies.
As we hitched past an old slate barn, Ellen pulled her mare into a trot beside Kory.
“We’re off on a mission of mercy,” she said.
“I’m all for mercy! What’s toward, O Noble Companion?”
“You recall, don’t you, about the littlest Perscough boys?”
“Measles,” I said.
“Yes, indeed. The day before they were stricken they were playing pirates, and guess what was the booty? An old Chinese lacquer box of their mother’s that had been a birthday present from one of her cousins, and that she had always declared she detested. Well, as it happened, the boys forgot it in the woods. It was a couple of weeks before Mrs. Perscough discovered it missing and, instead of being indifferent to its loss, as the boys thought she would be, with typical motherly perversity she had the house turned topsy-tipsy to look for it and went on and on about how it was a gift from her dearest cousin and how valuable it was and so on. You can see that it’s imperative that the box be found, returned to the house, and planted ingeniously under a tumbled cushion in an antechamber before it’s been discovered that the boys ever had it out of the house! Since they’re not well enough yet to travel out of doors, I’m to find the box. They’ve even provided us with a treasure map.”
The lane had narrowed to a wide, uneven cowtrack, bordered on two sides by a deep, quiet woods. Honeysuckle flowed across the track like tendrils of fog and wood pigeons cooed among the branches. We slowed to a walk and studied the crumpled scrap that Ellen had drawn from her reticule.
The map was a funny little diagram, with many scratchy lines and Xs and box-shaped buildings with chimneys giving forth a screw of smoke. Edgehill faces to the east, but the map had marked it facing west and there was an ink blot and lopsided star below that located the lacquer box by an area titled “Palace of the Dead Arches (ruin).”
Ellen chuckled at my expression. “Never fear, I know the place well. It’s an old Roman villa on the hill crest. It was burned down more than a thousand years ago by the Saxons, or the Jutes, or whoever. All that’s left is rubble, but you can see one of the mosaic floors and the line of a wall. People used to go up there for picnics. That’s all stopped now, though, since Isabella’s older brother died there. Come to think of it, he would be your cousin!”
“How did he die?”
“In a word—he was eaten.”
“That was three words,” I pointed out in an unsteady voice. We passed Caesar, digging in a foxhole beside the track. “What ate him?”
“A large—thing. They never found out for sure and as I understan
d it, th-the er—body was so mangled that they wouldn’t have known it was Frederick except that there were the remains of the red coat he was last seen wearing.”
The air changed as we entered the deep woods, the fresh smell of spring giving way to the dank, fertile odor of the deep forest.
“We’re going right to the spot, are we?” I made my voice tremble as if in terror and was rewarded with a laugh.
“Oh, Liza, you’re a p-peach. Whatever did I do before you came to Edgehill? Have no fear. The creature hasn’t been heard from since, aside from a few farmers saying they’ve heard howls late at night. You know how country people are!”
We rode without talking. The spongy forest floor cushioned the hoofbeats of our horses and above us came the eerie whistle of the breeze and creak of sawing branches. Many trees were still bare of new yearly growth, and the limbs speared the sky above the path at sharp, jutting angles.
Ellen’s face was deadly serious when she spoke again. “To be perfectly honest—no, I shouldn’t tell you this, probably. I don’t know. But then you might hear it from someone else sometime and… the truth is, Liza, there was a rumor at the time that Frederick’s murder was done by Lord Brockhaven.”
My hands clamped on the reins so forcefully that Kory jumped and lifted his forelegs from the ground in protest. When he had grown calm, I said, “That doesn’t surprise me a bit. I’ve always suspected that Brockhaven could eat someone alive.”