An Unwilling Earl

by Sharon Cullen

  She pressed her lips together.

  “You can’t suddenly be silent now.” He was seething, and he realized he hadn’t felt this high emotion for a long time, since the early days after his family’s death. It felt good. It made him feel alive.

  Damn it, he wanted to help her and he would. Whether she wanted it or not.

  “You can trust me,” he said softly.

  “I know that.”

  “Then why don’t you want to?”

  The minutes ticked by while she gathered the courage to tell him. Jacob grew lightheaded while waiting, then realized he was holding his breath in anticipation. What could have frightened her so much that it had chased her into the rookery for weeks?

  “I think I know who is killing those women.”

  She said it so softly that he didn’t catch the first part of it. The only thing he heard was “those women.”

  “What did you say?”

  She drew in a deep breath. “I think I know who is killing those women.”

  Everything came together with sickening clarity. She wasn’t running from her aunt. She was running from a killer. A person who had murdered multiple women.

  “I think it might be my cousin.”

  Jacob’s mind was running slow because it took him a moment to recall who her cousin was. At first he thought she meant Chadley, but that wasn’t right because he was her uncle.

  “Lord Morris?”

  She nodded. She was wringing her hands, and she looked distressed and frightened, and she kept glancing at the door as if she still wanted to run.

  “Why do you think it is him?”

  “Can we sit down?”

  “Why don’t we go upstairs to the study where it’s more comfortable.” He wanted to shake the answers out of her before she lost her nerve, but he also knew pushing her wouldn’t help the situation.

  He followed her up the steps and could see her hand shaking as she grasped the handrail. They settled onto the couch, and he poured them both a glass of brandy, thinking she needed the fortification as much as he did.

  She took the glass but held it between her hands, her knuckles white, her face even whiter.

  Jacob waited impatiently, trying not to show it.

  “He’s an odd person, Edmund. Mainly silent. When he does speak, my aunt chastises him. It doesn’t matter what he says, even if he agrees with her, she finds something wrong either with what he’s saying or the tone of his voice. In the beginning, I tried to be friends with him. I thought that if we were a solid front against my aunt it would help. But he shied away from any overtures of friendship.”

  “Considering his mother berated him so much, it’s not a wonder.”

  “I feel bad for him. How horrible does that sound? Five women dead, and I think he might have killed them, and I feel bad for him. It’s almost as if his mother made him into the monster he’s become. If it is him murdering those poor girls.”

  “There are many children mistreated by their parents, but they don’t grow up to kill.”

  She turned her glass around in her hands. “One day, not long after I had moved in, I found Edmund in my room. I had brought a doll with me that had been my mother’s. It was the only thing left of her that I owned. Everything else had been lost or taken by my aunt. But for some reason, she’d let me keep the doll. Edmund had just been yelled at by his mother. I can’t even remember what it was about. I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible during those moments for fear she would turn her wrath on me. I think I had gone into the garden. I could hear her yelling through the closed doors and windows. A little while later I snuck up to my room in the hopes of avoiding my aunt, and Edmund was there. He had these long…” She swallowed, and her fingers clutched the glass until her knuckles were white.

  “He was holding long scissors, and he was just standing in the middle of the room. I said his name, and he looked at me, but it was like he wasn’t seeing me. His eyes were blank. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  She paused to consider her thoughts or to gather more courage.

  “I looked down at the floor and there…th-there was my doll, my mother’s doll. Her head had been ripped off, and he’d taken the scissors and stabbed it over and over and over…” A tear dripped down her cheek, and Jacob pulled out his handkerchief and handed it to her.

  Inside he was cold. Stabbed it over and over and over. He recalled his conversation with Armbruster, who had said all of the victims by the river had been stabbed repeatedly.

  “I screamed,” she whispered. “I think more because I was so surprised. And…” She swallowed and closed her eyes, squeezing more tears out. His handkerchief was bunched in her hand, forgotten.

  “Those glass eyes… They were staring at me. Accusing me, like I had let this happen. I gathered her head and her b-body and my aunt came running in and she saw what had happened and I think it was the first and only time I’ve seen her speechless. She just stared down at me and my doll with her mouth open and then she looked at Edmund and I remember…I remember her saying softly, ‘What have you done?’”

  Jacob felt like he was sitting on the edge of his seat, waiting for the next act. She was pulling so many emotions from him—anger, fear, sadness.

  Stabbed. They had all been stabbed. The doll. The women.

  Good God. Is Edmund the killer?

  “And then what happened,” he finally asked.

  Charlotte stood and put her still-full glass down on a side table before moving about the room. She touched the petal of a flower in a vase but didn’t seem to see it.

  “Nothing.”

  Jacob paused. “Nothing? Nothing happened?”

  “Aunt Martha took the doll from me and led Edmund out of the room. It was like he was a wooden toy, in a trance. He went where she prodded him.”

  “And nothing was said about it after that?”

  “I was told to forget it ever happened. My aunt even offered to buy me a new doll, but I didn’t want a doll that she had bought me. I wanted my mother’s doll.”

  How odd that this miserly, stingy woman would offer to purchase Charlotte a new doll. Jacob highly doubted the woman felt badly for what her son had done. Or, had she thought it a bribe to keep Charlotte quiet?

  “And so you went about your daily life even though Edmund had decapitated and stabbed your doll?” Just like those five women were decapitated and stabbed.

  “Yes and no. Things returned to their type of normal. But the doll was only the first incident.”

  She’d moved from the flowers to the window where she touched the curtain that was closed against the chilly, rainy night and let her fingers drift through the tassel on the tieback.

  “It wasn’t until a few years later that I realized he’d moved on from inanimate objects.”

  The brandy he had drunk boiled and roiled in his stomach, and he had to swallow a few times to keep it down. He really didn’t want to hear more, but he wanted to help Charlotte, and the only way to do that was to listen to her story and help her decide what they should do.

  “You mean he moved on to animate objects? Living objects?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Cats,” Charlotte said.

  “Charlotte…” He reached for her, but she shied away.

  “I stumbled upon it by accident. I went to the cellar on an errand for the cook. She liked me. I think she felt sorry for me, and when I appeared in her kitchen, which was frequently, she found things for me to do. That day it was to fetch a jar of preserves for our afternoon tea. She told me I could pick the flavor. I was thinking strawberry because that was my favorite. I was looking forward to her warm scones with strawberry preserves. She would always let me have one or two before she served them in the sitting room.” She paused, lost in her memories.

  “So you went to the cellar,” he prompted.

  “There was a small part of the cellar where extra furniture was stored. I never went over that way, but that day I heard a noise, like a cry, so I went
to investigate.” She moved from the window to a side table against the wall where a silly figurine that Cora had purchased sat. A spur-of-the-moment purchase, but it was something she had cherished, and Jacob hadn’t been able to deny her such an extravagance even though they’d not had much money at the time.

  As if she knew how precious the figurine was, Charlotte touched it only with the tip of her index finger before pulling away and wandering back to the couch where she sat on the edge, her knees and ankles pressed together, hands folded in her lap.

  “Edmund was standing in front of a table. It was dusty, the table. It’d probably been there a long time. And on it. Sitting on the table. Lying there. Was a…” She licked her lips, and a shudder went through her body.

  “Later I found out it was a cat, but at the time I hadn’t known what it was. Edmund had a knife in his hand. A long knife. And it was covered in blood. And there was a mass…a bloody mass of something on the table. I just stood there. I didn’t know what to do. It was like my feet wouldn’t work. He looked like he had the day he’d destroyed my doll. Like there was nothing behind his eyes. Like maybe the devil had taken over him. Finally my feet became unstuck and I ran. I ran upstairs and when cook asked me about the preserves I told her I couldn’t find the strawberry and I ran up to my room and didn’t leave all that day.”

  It seemed that destroying dolls was not enough for Edmund, and he’d had to move on to animals. And was the next step humans? It seemed like a natural, albeit horrific, progression.

  “He came to my room that night,” she whispered. “And he told me that if I told anyone, especially his mother, that I would be the next dead thing on that table.”

  “Oh, Charlotte.” He put his hand on her rigid arm. Small tremors went through her.

  “So I didn’t. Tell anyone. Except for you. I’ve now told you.” She drew in a shuddering breath. “After that, I started noticing disturbed dirt in our back garden. Aunt Martha hired a gardener but only to clip the bushes back and keep the grass from growing too thick. It was a rather plain garden. But I noticed these mounds of dirt, and one Sunday I told Aunt Martha that I had a headache and couldn’t possibly go to church. She wasn’t happy, but when I clutched my stomach and started gagging, she told me to stay at home and kneel by my bed and pray for the sickness to pass. Instead of praying I grabbed the gardener’s shovel and started digging up those mounds.”

  He was beginning to wonder if America was far enough for her to escape. Monsters, she had said, lived in all of us. But Edmund was far worse than any monster Jacob had encountered.

  “More cats?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Some graves had more than one, sometimes three. Like he’d killed three cats in one day. Like one wasn’t enough anymore.”

  Just like dolls hadn’t been enough anymore.

  “There were dozens,” she whispered.

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  “Nothing. I covered them back up with the dirt and I said a prayer for each one and I never mentioned it to anyone.”

  She closed her eyes, and a tear escaped from beneath her lid.

  “Is that when you left?” he asked.

  She shook her head, dislodging more tears. “I should have then,” she whispered. “And I don’t know why I didn’t. I should have warned…” She drew in a shaky breath. “I left right after Penny disappeared. Maybe a month later, I’m not sure.”

  “Penny?”

  “The maid.”

  “Did he…?” He couldn’t quite make himself say it.

  “I don’t know. I hope not. But something told me to get out of there, and so I did. I took the candlesticks and I snuck out in the night.”

  She started crying in earnest, and Jacob drew her to him, pressing her head against his shoulder, and he let her cry, suspecting that this was the first time she had allowed herself to finally let the emotions out. Her sobs came from deep within, and he absorbed them, took them as his own and felt each ragged breath she took. He promised himself that he would protect her with everything he had. He was an earl now, surely that meant something. Surely that leant her some extra protection.

  He would use whatever was at his disposal for her and then some.

  …

  Lady Morris was the last to leave, and the church doors shut with a solid thunk behind her as she made her way down the steps, her Bible clutched to her chest like a knight with a shield. It was funny, the way some people could take religion and twist it until it was more evil than good.

  Jacob approached as she descended the last step, and she drew back with a look of distaste.

  “Lady Morris,” he said, touching the brim of his hat.

  It took her a moment to recognize him. “Mr. Baker.” Her nostrils pinched, and he got the impression that she would give a mongrel dog the same look.

  “Actually, it’s Lord Ashland,” he said with a small smile.

  “Lord?”

  “Earl of Ashland.”

  She sniffed as if not impressed, but he had a feeling she knew she’d been put in her place. The tables had turned, and he was no longer beneath her, a servant she could give orders to, whom she could pay to do her bidding.

  “I’ve come to talk about your niece, Miss Charlotte Morris.”

  “I know her name,” she snapped.

  “Of course.” Be nice. You’ll get nowhere with her if you snip back. “I wondered if you had found her yet.”

  She looked him up and down, her pointed nose lifting just a fraction, her lips pursed, as if she found it repugnant to speak to him. “You made it perfectly clear that you had no interest in locating her.”

  “I admit at the time that I had no interest in the case, or the fact that you wanted the investigation done in your own way. But I’m intrigued.”

  “A lord like you would take on work for pay?”

  “I’m a solicitor. That was why you contacted me in the first place.”

  She looked around as if she could find help, or an escape. But everyone had drifted off, and they were alone in front of the church.

  “Have you found her?” he asked. It was a calculated risk because if she knew that Charlotte was staying with him, then she would know he was far deeper into this than she wanted him to be.

  “No.”

  “Were you able to hire someone to find her?” Was someone out there looking for Charlotte right now? Would this person visit Sarah and discover Charlotte was with him?

  “No.”

  “I see.” He looked around as if searching for someone. “Where is your son? I thought he would be at church with you.”

  Was it his imagination, or did she pale a bit?

  “He wasn’t feeling well, so he stayed at home. Are you still interested in finding my Charlotte?”

  My Charlotte. Interesting wording considering the woman had treated Charlotte so horribly.

  “She’s a woman of twenty years. If she wants to forge a life of her own, then I don’t see how we can interfere in that.”

  Her eyes darted about until she leaned ever so slightly toward him. “She may be twenty years in age, but mentally she is far younger than that.”

  Well, then. This was an interesting turn of events. Lady Morris was going to claim that Charlotte was not of sound mind. Very interesting, and also very dangerous for Charlotte if the authorities chose to believe her aunt.

  He raised a brow when what he really wanted to do was take a step back and breathe fresh air. Lady Morris smelled stale. “Is she unstable?”

  She hesitated, her gaze flickering around. “She cannot be on her own. She is not capable.”

  “I see why you are so keen on finding her then.”

  “I’m worried about her. She cannot take care of herself.”

  “Then finding her is imperative. I was not aware when you first came to me.”

  She straightened and squared her shoulders. “I did not want to start any rumors. It’s a terrible thing to have a ward who does not possess her full faculties. It’
s wearing on the family. Poor Edmund had to play second fiddle while I cared for Charlotte.”

  For someone who lived and breathed the Bible she could certainly twist her beliefs to fit her narrative.

  “I’m sure it was a burden.”

  She sniffed. “We all have burdens we must bear, Mr. Baker—my lord.”

  “Certainly, but yours seems more burdensome than most. Charlotte is not even your own daughter.”

  “She is still family, and therefore I must care for her.”

  “Of course. Very noble of you.”

  “As you can imagine, caring for a child who is not mine and whom I had not anticipated having guardianship of takes a toll on certain finances. I wouldn’t be able to pay you much to find her.”

  Ah, the frugal witch.

  “Don’t worry about that. Everyone should take on charity work once in a while.” As he had anticipated, she did not like being referred to as charity. Her eyes flashed and her nostrils pinched, and he swore he heard her gnashing her teeth. “Have you gone to the police to report her disappearance?”

  “This is a private matter, Lord Ashland, and I prefer to handle it as such.”

  Because if you went to the police they would discover that your son is a killer?

  “They have resources that I do not have.”

  “She cannot have gone far. She has no money, nor does she have the wits to survive on her own.”

  Ah, but that was where she was wrong, and Jacob felt that the woman knew this.

  “Lady Morris, might I ask you something?”

  She hesitated, but he had her in his clutches. She was desperate to get Charlotte back, afraid of what her niece knew about her monster of a son. She would tolerate Jacob for as long as he was useful to her. “Yes?”

  “Aren’t you worried that something awful has happened to Charlotte, what with all of the women they are finding in the river?”

  “Charlotte is much better than those women, and she does not venture to the parts of the city in which a man like that, a man who kills those kinds of women, would be. I’m sure she is safe. Probably hiding.”