Ruler of the Night

by David Morrell

  “Stay away!” Harold ordered. “Go back to your rooms!”

  As I leaned over Lord Cavendale, I was reminded of Thursday night when I’d crouched to feel the wrist on Daniel Harcourt’s mangled body, trying to find a pulse. It had taken all of my resolve to do what Dr. Snow had trained me to do, and now, while I still needed to muster resolve, I did my duty with less hesitation, not simply because Lord Cavendale’s body was intact but because, heaven help me, I was becoming accustomed to feeling for a pulse.

  Lord Cavendale’s two months of being an invalid had taken their toll; his wrist was thin and frail.

  “Can you feel anything?” Stella asked desperately.

  In the stale air that had accumulated behind the bed’s curtains, I bent lower. About to put my ear to Lord Cavendale’s chest, I noticed something that made me stop.

  “Carolyn, the lamp—please move it higher.”

  The changed angle allowed me to see the blue blanket that covered Lord Cavendale’s chest. Brown specks of something attracted my attention.

  “Father,” I said.

  When he leaned close to me, I pointed at the brown specks. He picked up some of them and brushed them between a thumb and forefinger.

  “His heart. Can you hear it?” Stella pleaded behind me.

  I put an ear against the left side of Lord Cavendale’s chest, which neither rose nor fell. I couldn’t hear even the faintest murmur of his heart.

  “Is there a mirror on his dressing table?” I asked.

  Stella ran to get it.

  I placed it under Lord Cavendale’s nostrils. Not even the slightest vapor accumulated on it.

  Lord Cavendale’s eyes were open, focused on nothing. But they hadn’t been focused on anything when I’d first met him, so in itself that wasn’t significant. However, when I moved Carolyn’s arm, bringing the lamp close to his dull brown eyes, he didn’t blink, and his pupils didn’t react.

  I pulled up the blanket and touched his feet, noting a phenomenon that Dr. Snow had taught me to look for. “His feet are already cold. In fact, the cold has crept up past his ankles.” Nothing feels colder, I thought, but I managed not to say that. “Stella, I’m very sorry. Your husband is indeed dead.”

  She seemed paralyzed. Tears trickled down her pale cheeks. She stared through them toward the motionless form in the bed. She shuddered and turned toward Harold.

  “You did this,” she told him.

  “What?” Harold asked.

  “When you were here.”

  “You keep saying that. But I wasn’t here.”

  Stella turned to the bed and saw a pillow next to Lord Cavendale. She picked it up.

  “Did you smother him? That would have been the easiest way.”

  She studied the pillow and turned it, revealing an impression on its underside.

  “Is this how you did it, pressing the pillow over his face? Robert’s breathing was so shallow that it wouldn’t have required much effort.”

  “You’re delusional!” Harold said.

  “Emily, what did you and your father notice on Lord Cavendale’s blanket?” Carolyn asked.

  When neither of us answered, Carolyn leaned between the parted curtains and noticed the same brown specks that I had. She rubbed some of the specks together in her fingers, as Father had. She smelled them.

  “Snuff,” she murmured.

  “That’s impossible,” Harold said, reflexively raising his right hand toward his nostrils.

  “You said it would have been better for him if he’d died,” Stella told him.

  “It was a way of expressing sympathy about how woeful his life was.”

  “No, Harold. It sounded to me as if you truly wanted him dead,” Stella persisted.

  “Why would I have wanted my father to—” Abruptly, he seemed to understand. “You think I wanted him dead so I could inherit his estate?”

  “You certainly went out of your way to point out that I wasn’t really a part of the family and that the boy you dismissively called your half brother wasn’t either.”

  “I don’t need to listen to this.”

  Furious, Harold walked toward the open door but suddenly turned. In the lamplight, his face was twisted with rage.

  “As you insolently remind me, I now do indeed own the estate. I’m no longer Harold to you. I’m Lord Cavendale, and I want the lot of you out of this house.”

  “With delight; we’ll leave in the morning,” Carolyn said.

  “No, you don’t understand. I’m not talking about the morning. I want all of you to leave immediately.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Carolyn told him.

  “Go downstairs, put on your coats and hats, and get the devil out of my house!”

  From a room farther along the corridor, the baby wailed.

  “And take your brat with you!” Harold ordered. “Do you think I believe for a moment that he’s truly my father’s child?”

  “What a thing to say!” Stella exclaimed in shock.

  “My father wasn’t well even before his accident. My mother once hinted to me that there was a reason they produced only my brother and myself. I don’t believe that my father was capable of siring more children!”

  I’ve never felt so dismayed about being in the midst of a family argument. Father and I looked at each other, as astonished as if we were witnessing people physically attacking one another.

  From along the corridor, the baby kept crying.

  “Didn’t you hear me? Make your brat stop squalling!” Harold demanded. “I’m sick of hearing him night after night!” He swung toward Father and me. “Get your coats and hats and leave!” He stepped closer to Father. “Opium-Eater,” he said with contempt. “Your presence in my house is an insult!”

  The violence in Harold’s voice was so startling that I couldn’t move.

  “No?” the man asked, his eyes raging in the light from the lamp Carolyn held. “No one wants to listen to me? Well, by God, I’ll take care of that!”

  He stormed from the room, thrusting aside servants who, despite having been ordered to their rooms, had nonetheless lingered in the corridor.

  “Stella, I’m so terribly sorry,” I repeated.

  The rain kept striking the window, but its sound had changed, acquiring the force of hail.

  “I’d better put some proper clothes on,” Carolyn said, using her free hand to clutch her dressing gown.

  “The baby,” Stella murmured. She called to a servant at the door. “We need to take care of him.”

  “Surely Harold doesn’t truly intend to thrust us from the house in the middle of the night,” Father said. “In this storm.”

  Returning footsteps pounded along the corridor.

  “Out of my way!” Harold shouted to the servants.

  He charged into the room.

  “All of you are still here? No one listened to what I said? Well, maybe you’ll listen to this.”

  I gaped at the riding crop in his hand. He lashed it through the air. The short whip at its end made a sharp whistling sound.

  “Out!” he ordered. “Downstairs! Leave! You!” he yelled to Father, seeing him take a laudanum bottle from a coat pocket. “Your behavior disgusts me! Get out of my sight!”

  He whipped with the riding crop, struck the bottle, and knocked it out of Father’s grasp. The bottle fell to the floor, its ruby liquid spilling.

  “No!” Father exclaimed, dropping to his knees and grabbing the bottle.

  Harold struck the riding crop repeatedly across Father’s back. “Go! Go! Go!”

  I stepped forward to stop him from hitting Father, and the riding crop stung my intervening arm.

  “Out! Out!”

  He swung the short whip, and abruptly my cheek felt as if it were on fire. Startled, I jerked a hand to my face and gasped when I felt blood.

  “You cut me!” I said in disbelief.

  “Go! Go! Out! Out!”

  Now Harold lashed the whip against Carolyn’s shoulder. “Do you think I
don’t know your game? You try to assume the airs of the gentry, but you’re nothing more than a moneylender. To raise yourselves in the world, you and your daughter conspired to trick my father into marriage.”

  The blood continued to ooze down my stinging cheek. Already the area was swelling. None of us had the size to confront Harold physically. I feared that he’d soon injure one of us in a far more serious way.

  “Father, we need to leave.”

  “Yes! Finally, someone understands! Leave! All of you!” Harold struck Stella’s left arm with the riding crop. “Go! Don’t bother to pack your bags! Be thankful I’m letting you take hats and coats! Out! Out!”

  Stella raced past him. Along with a servant, she rushed in the direction of the baby’s wails.

  Father, Carolyn, and I edged past Harold’s fury. He crowded us, shaking his riding crop at us, urging us from the room.

  The light from the lamp that Carolyn held cast grotesque shadows in the corridor. Father and I walked toward the staircase, but when we reached it, Father didn’t descend. Instead he turned to go up, presumably to his room.

  “No!” Harold whacked the riding crop against the railing. “Go down to the entrance hall!”

  “But in my room…I have…”

  The way Father clutched the almost-empty laudanum bottle told me that he wanted to get a much-needed full bottle from his travel bag before he was thrust from the house.

  Harold struck his shoulder. “I know what you want up there! But I won’t let you have it! Get out of my house!”

  The flurry of blows that Harold delivered made Father stumble down the stairs.

  “Leave him alone!” I shouted at Harold, stepping in front of him.

  Harold pushed me. I fought for my balance, lost it, and reached for the staircase’s railing, but I couldn’t grab it in time, and I fell. With a groan, I landed on the stairs and rolled down, stopping only because my body veered to the side and collided with the stone supports of the railing.

  “Emily!”

  Father hurried to raise me to my feet. He noticed my cheek in the glow from the lamp. “You’re bleeding.”

  “Go!” Harold yelled. His fury was now directed toward Stella, who’d reached the top of the stairs and was cradling her infant son in her arms. He almost pushed her the way he’d done to me, but a shred of decency made him hesitate. Instead, he whacked the riding crop against the brass railing, herding all of us—Father, me, Carolyn, and Stella holding her baby—down to the dimly lit entrance hall.

  “You!” Harold ordered a servant. “Get their hats and coats! Pile them here!”

  Hail rattled against windows.

  “Stella and I are wearing only our dressing gowns and slippers!” Carolyn pleaded.

  “The clinic is barely a half a mile away. None of you will freeze to death!”

  “But the baby—”

  “To hell with the baby, and to hell with all of you. Thank God I’ll never have to set eyes on any of you again.”

  The servant dumped our hats and coats at our feet, giving us an apologetic look and shaking his head in sympathy when he saw the blood dripping from my face.

  Harold unlocked the front door and yanked it open. A cold wind assaulted us. Even with the darkness outside, it was obvious that hail slanted across the driveway. I couldn’t tell the difference between gravel and pellets of ice.

  “Harold,” Carolyn said.

  “Lord Cavendale to you!”

  “You’ll regret this,” Carolyn said, standing straighter. I was startled by how stark her face became; it was no longer beautiful but had contorted into a seething rage.

  “Regret it? To the contrary.” He came close to laughing.

  “Your gambling debts have almost bankrupted the estate. With contempt, you called me a moneylender, but your father was able to continue managing his estate only because I kept loaning him money. A great many loans. A great deal of money. The scheduled repayments were never made. Tomorrow, the moment I return to London, I intend to call in those loans. Your gambler friends will suddenly be your enemies. When they demand the money for your debts that until now I’ve been honoring, they’ll bring riding crops of their own and no doubt worse than that. Your tailor, your butcher, your wine merchant, everyone you depend on for your lazy, worthless life will demand payment for what you owe them. When you can’t pay your servants, they’ll desert you. You won’t even be able to afford oil for your lamps and coal for your fireplaces. You’ll sit here in rags, freezing and starving in darkness.”

  “That’s what you think. In a few months, I’ll have income from crops.”

  “Not if the crops can’t be harvested. The tools, the wagons, the animals, everything was pledged to me as collateral. Even your furniture was pledged as collateral. Tomorrow I’ll seize everything.”

  “I lied,” Harold said, his wrath increasing.

  “Lied? About what?”

  “I did know Daniel Harcourt. I hired him to investigate you and your shameless daughter.”

  “Don’t be absurd. Daniel and I were business associates.”

  “He hated you! He despised your common origins and the airs you put on. He was thrilled by the chance to expose you and your daughter and make everyone realize the charlatans that you are! He must have been rushing here on Thursday night to give me proof that your daughter’s snot-nosed bawling brat isn’t my father’s son. Not that it matters any longer. I’m Lord Cavendale now. Neither your daughter nor her bastard belongs here! Go! Out!”

  Slashing the air with his riding crop, he drove us through the front door and down the granite steps into the storm.

  Hail gusted at me from the right, striking my shoulder, pelting my hat, stinging my injured cheek. The baby kept wailing under Stella’s open coat.

  “Let me help,” I told her, grabbing her arm as her slippers slid on the ice pellets she walked upon.

  “No, I’ll do it,” Carolyn said, urgently putting an arm around Stella. “Take care of Thomas.”

  Holding Father, I looked back at the house and the open door where Harold stared savagely at us. Abruptly, the lamplight vanished when he stepped inside and slammed the door, the noise as disturbing as a gunshot.

  The hail pushed at us. The baby’s cries intensified, prompting Stella to say, “Hush, Jeremy, we’re going to be all right. Don’t fear. You’ll soon be where it’s warm.”

  That couldn’t happen soon enough. As the hail stung me, I felt its cold rising through the soles of my boots, and I couldn’t imagine how the ice pellets must feel under the slippers that Stella and Carolyn wore.

  “Harold hates me so much that he hired someone to investigate me?” Stella asked in outrage. “He doesn’t believe Jeremy is his father’s child?” Her voice broke. “Does he also not believe that sweet little Jennifer wasn’t his father’s child?”

  “Hate him in return, Stella,” Carolyn urged. “I promise we’ll punish him. Don’t think about anything else. Make your need for revenge warm your body.”

  We struggled along the gravel driveway and turned right into the hard-to-see road that led to the clinic. The hail had gusted at us from the right, but now our change of direction resulted in the hail driving straight toward us. I lowered my head. Ice pellets struck the exposed back of my neck. I couldn’t stop shivering as the hail melted, trickling beneath my coat and down my spine.

  “Harold will wish that he’d died instead of his older brother,” Carolyn vowed. “God in heaven, how I’ll make him pay. Keeping thinking that, Stella. We’ll make him suffer. When we finish with him, he’ll be crawling in the gutter. Keep fueling your rage. The heat of your hate will warm your body. It’ll keep the baby warm.”

  Father slipped on the ice pellets that covered the road. In the dark, I managed to grab him before he fell. Abruptly, the road seemed to tilt, and I realized that with the hail covering the gravel, we couldn’t know which way the road went. Disoriented, we were veering off it.

  “We’re going into the ditch!” I warned, gra
bbing Stella and Carolyn before they would have fallen with the baby. “Move to the left! I’ll stay on this side and try to judge where the ditch is.”

  They had to walk slower while I constantly tested with my right foot, feeling where the slope began. The hail felt like stones that street urchins hurled at me.

  Father lost his balance again, and this time, he fell. Groaning, he managed to stand. “I’m not hurt. Keep going. Ahead. On the left. I think I see something. Or maybe it’s only—”

  “No, Father, it isn’t opium. That’s the silhouette of the hill.”

  “The clinic is at its base,” Stella said, her voice trembling. She told the baby beneath her coat, “Jeremy, we’re almost there. You’ll soon be warm.”

  Wet and shivering, I walked as fast as I dared while using my right boot to continue testing where the ditch started. The hill became darker and taller. I began to see the outline of three large buildings at the bottom of the hill, all of them without illumination at this late hour.

  “I see the lane!” Carolyn said.

  As we turned to the left, hurrying, I noticed something farther along the road from which we’d veered. I couldn’t be certain in the dark with the hail blurring my vision, but the object seemed to be a canvas-covered wagon that wasn’t moving. I wondered what it was doing there.

  Someone pounded at the front door.

  “Help! Help!” a woman shouted.

  Ryan slowly lifted his head from a sofa in Dr. Wainwright’s office. After he and Becker had interviewed as many of the clinic’s clients as possible before they retired to their rooms for the night, he’d gone back to the doctor’s office to study the list of guests and the details about them. While some had come from London (or claimed that they had), many had arrived from as far away as Scotland and Ireland. He couldn’t decide how many of them were truly sick and how many had come to the clinic because it was a socially expected thing for the wealthy to do. So far, neither he nor Becker had sensed that any of them were lying when they said that they’d never heard of Daniel Harcourt or that they were familiar with the name but had never had any business with him. He felt a growing sensation that he and Becker were wasting their time.