A Lady Never Lies

by Juliana Gray

  “Penhallow,” Mr. Burke said, speaking apparently through his teeth, “I’m deeply sorry for your troubles, but you really must see me another time. The battery . . .”

  Alexandra’s throat gave way at last, with a muffled choking gasp of a cough.

  “What’s that?” asked Lord Roland, wheeling about.

  “Nothing. Hydraulics. As I was saying . . .”

  Alexandra managed to suppress the next cough, but the third caught her by surprise.

  “There it is again! What the devil sort of hydraulics have you got in there? It don’t sound at all healthy.”

  Mr. Burke cleared his throat. “A mere . . . simply to do with . . . the braking system. A new design I’m trying out. Quite trying, involving the most immense concentration, and rather dangerous at that. I shall really have to ask you to leave.” His footsteps moved toward the door.

  “But see here, Burke. That’s exactly what I came to speak with you about. I was thinking . . .” Lord Roland paused. “I was thinking that perhaps you might take me on as your assistant. To keep me busy, to keep me out of her way, you see. It’s the most honorable course.”

  “My assistant?”

  “Yes. Don’t you need another pair of hands to . . . well, to help sort out . . . all this . . . this whatnot you’ve got here?”

  Mr. Burke sighed, so loudly Alexandra could hear the rush of air. “Penhallow, old man. Do you have the slightest idea how an electric battery works?”

  “Well, no. That is, I have some notion that . . . the sparks rather . . . well . . . no. No, I haven’t,” Lord Roland said humbly.

  “Can you even distinguish one end of my motor-car from another?”

  Alexandra saw his lordship’s highly polished shoes turn in her direction. She shrank into the recesses of the chassis.

  “I daresay . . . one would think that . . . well, if I should hazard a guess . . .”

  “Precisely,” said Mr. Burke. “Now if you’ll be so good as to return to the library and resume your quest for knowledge. Perhaps compose a verse or two, cataloging the anguish of doomed love. And if the delights of that endeavor should pall, you might consult with Giacomo regarding the cheeses in the stables, as a more practical matter.”

  “The cheeses?”

  “He’ll tell you all about them. But for God’s sake, Penhallow, whatever you do, leave . . . me . . . alone!” The door opened with a forceful scraping of wood against doorjamb.

  “I say, Burke, that’s hardly sporting.”

  “Really? How ungentlemanly of me.”

  “In any case, old Giacomo sent me down here to begin with. Said you needed help. It’s what gave me the idea.”

  “Did he, the old bugger?” Mr. Burke sounded dark, almost menacing. “Now that’s hardly sporting.”

  “Very well. I take your point,” Lord Roland said. His feet marched toward the door and beyond Alexandra’s vision. “But just remember, Burke . . . Oh, hullo there, Wallingford! Out for a stroll?”

  No. Not Wallingford. No merciful God would allow it.

  Alexandra held back a groan and shifted her bones against the agonizing hardness of the floor. She couldn’t hear the duke’s reply; he was still on the other side of the door.

  “Well, that’s the devil of a coincidence!” Lord Roland said. “He told me the same thing, about Burke wanting help in his workshop, and I thought to myself, Penhallow, old man, that’s just the ticket . . .”

  “Giacomo was entirely mistaken,” Mr. Burke said, in hard tones. “I’m in no need of assistance. Quite the opposite.”

  “Yes, yes. You’ve made yourself quite clear on the subject. I’m taking myself off directly, and I’d advise my dear brother to do the same.” Lord Roland’s voice drifted away, out the door and into unintelligibility.

  “And you, Wallingford?” asked Mr. Burke. “Aren’t you taking Penhallow’s excellent advice?”

  “No,” said Wallingford, quite clearly.

  Alexandra, staring in despair at the dark metallic gleam of the axle before her nose, felt her heart sink into the floorboards.

  Wallingford’s booted footsteps rapped against the wood, rattling her head. “It occurred to me, in fact, that our friend Giacomo’s suggestion might just solve our problems at a single stroke.”

  “Which problems?” Mr. Burke sighed.

  “For one thing, the problem of keeping Lady Morley away from your vulnerable heart,” Wallingford said, “and for the other, the problem of avoiding that Harewood witch.”

  Alexandra’s mouth tightened indignantly.

  “Those are your problems, Wallingford, not mine,” Mr. Burke said.

  Alexandra turned her head to watch their feet and saw that Mr. Burke had resumed his pose against the worktable, leaning against it with insouciant ease.

  Wallingford turned to face him. “The problem of Lady Morley is entirely yours.”

  “No, Wallingford. The problem of Lady Morley is entirely in your imagination,” replied Mr. Burke, not moving an inch. “A scientist of no particular charm, an untitled Irish bastard of no social standing. I daresay the impeccable Lady Morley would sooner cut off her right arm than share my bed.”

  He spoke with firm assurance, with deliberation, each word cutting through the air between them to pierce her exact center. Social standing. The impeccable Lady Morley. Share my bed.

  Bastard. She hadn’t known that.

  “You sell yourself far too short, old man,” Wallingford said quietly, and then, with greater strength, “You’re a bastard of high breeding indeed, after all. And in any case, the inducement is high. She’d give anything to have us out of the castle.”

  Mr. Burke uncrossed his long legs and straightened, making some motion with his arm that Alexandra couldn’t see. “For God’s sake, man. Do you see her here?”

  “I’ve no doubt she’s assembling her plan of attack this very instant. Which is why I’ve come to help. No, don’t thank me.” Wallingford squared his booted feet on the floor, five unbearably short feet from Alexandra’s nose. “It’s my duty, you see, to protect you from designing females. You haven’t any idea what they’re capable of. Lady Morley would make mincemeat of you.”

  “I daresay,” drawled Mr. Burke, “but at the moment I’m entirely absorbed in the improvement to my battery. I shouldn’t notice if Lady Morley herself were right here, holding the wires for me.”

  “Holding wires?”

  “For hours on end, I’m afraid. Very tiring work. I’d be so terribly grateful if you’d take it on. I believe I’ve got an extra smock somewhere, though it’s perhaps a bit oily. And then there’s the acid . . .”

  Wallingford took a step backward. “Acid?”

  “Yes, of course. How do you think a battery produces its charge? Sulfuric acid, non-dilute. Strong stuff, of course. Liable to blind you if you’re not careful. I’ve got patent protective goggles, myself.” Mr. Burke’s legs moved briskly over to the table against the wall, where he’d made the tea. “Look, here’s the stuff. Take a look?”

  Wallingford took another hasty step backward, bumping into the automobile. It shifted slightly, with a faint groan of protest, the axle just grazing the tip of Alexandra’s nose.

  Mr. Burke’s feet dashed to the machine. His voice exploded in the air. “Good God! Careful, man! Step away from that!”

  Alexandra’s breath froze in her throat. She squeezed her eyes shut and crossed her arms above her face, because by God she’d be damned if her corpse weren’t viewable, like poor Lady Banbury who fell through the skylight last June, during an ill-advised equestrian-themed bacchanal on her lover’s rooftop.

  But the machine held. She cracked her eyes open and fastened them on the curving metal, the individual bolts and fastenings, confirming their immobility. Somewhere through the machinery, she sensed Mr. Burke’s strong, capable hands steadying the shifting mass, returning it to equilibrium.

  “Well, then! What a lucky thing you weren’t underneath just now. Assisting me, that is,” Mr. Burke sa
id, between hard breaths of air.

  “Look,” Wallingford said, “perhaps I could come back another time. When you’re working on . . . the steering mechanism. Or the wheels.”

  “Don’t you think, Wallingford, you’ve done quite enough already?”

  “Christ, man. It’s for your own good.”

  “Why,” Mr. Burke said, sounding cross, “does everybody think me incapable of self-restraint, despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary?”

  Wallingford laughed, in his short, bitter way. “Good God, old fellow. Haven’t you seen the look on your face when she’s about?”

  “As I am not, in fact, equipped with a mirror, I should expect not. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve had enough assistance from the Penhallow family this morning to set me back a week or more.”

  Share my bed.

  The words echoed back unexpectedly in Alexandra’s brain.

  Share my bed. His bed, Mr. Burke’s bed, Phineas Burke’s bed, warmed by his body, smelling beautifully of oil and leather and male skin; full of his sturdy limbs, his red gold hair, his lawn green eyes, his rare, luminous smile. She closed her eyes. Lying there, with perhaps half a ton of poorly supported automobile hovering above her, she felt an ache in her chest build and grow. Felt herself revel in the unfamiliar burn of want.

  “. . . for your good intentions,” he was saying. “You’d be useless as my assistant, as you very well know.”

  Wallingford grunted. “Very well, then. I’ll leave. But do be on your guard, old man. She may have a viper’s tongue, but by God she can kiss like a Parisian opera dancer.”

  A tiny pause. “I shall take that under consideration, thank you.”

  The duke’s booted feet began moving, at last, to the door, creaking the floorboards in the most beautiful music Alexandra had ever heard. “Right-ho, then. I’m off,” he said. “Shall I see you at . . .”

  Wallingford’s sentence arrested in midair, dangling there in the preternatural stillness like a boom about to fall.

  “What’s that?” Mr. Burke said.

  The duke spoke with dangerous calm.

  “Tell me, Burke. Why, exactly, are there two teacups on the table behind you?”

  TEN

  Phineas Burke had first learned the value of composure in crisis at the tender age of six, when he’d released a jar of toads down the hallway of his godfather’s London mansion just as several white-bearded Cabinet ministers were emerging from a meeting in the study. Instead of breaking down under interrogation, he’d explained the situation in rational terms: “Your Grace, in order to properly determine the relative speed of the toads”—Finn was that sort of nauseatingly precocious youngster who hadn’t said a word until shortly after his fourth birthday, at which time he’d opened his mouth and begun speaking in complete and grammatically correct sentences—“I required a long stretch of uninterrupted territory, and the sudden entrance of your friends into the racecourse was a variable that I could not reasonably be expected to predict.” By the end of this speech, his godfather was working too hard to suppress his laughter to inflict any sort of meaningful corporal punishment on him.

  But faced with the thundering accusation in the voice of the Duke of Wallingford, Finn’s ordinarily nimble mind stumbled and fell. “Two teacups? How extraordinary. I suppose . . . well, I wanted another cup.”

  Wallingford inspected the cups. “Half-full, both of them.” He turned back to Finn, eyes glittering. “You didn’t think simply to refill the first?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, old chap. You’re like a detective from one of those dashed sensational novels.” Finn drew breath, folded his arms against his chest, and stood firm. “I suppose I forgot about the first cup. One tends to get a bit distracted, fiddling with machines all morning.”

  Wallingford began walking to the cabinet.

  “Look here!” Finn exclaimed, but Wallingford had already thrown open the door with an enthusiastic Aha!

  “You see?” Finn said triumphantly. “Nothing there.”

  “Oh, she’s here, all right. I know it. I can feel her, sneering at us.” Wallingford stalked about the room, peering behind the piles of chests, the spare parts, the stack of new state-of-the-art pneumatic tires. He looked up into the rafters, as if expecting to see her ladyship swinging by her marsupial tail.

  “Wallingford,” Finn said, as dryly as he could manage, “you’re boring me. Can you not learn to control this . . . this clinical paranoia of yours? Find some other baseless obsession. Resume your goose feather flirtation with young what’s-her-name. Oh, really. I assure you, she’s not in the damned sink!”

  Wallingford spun about, nostrils flaring. His gaze fell upon the automobile on its blocks. “Yes,” he whispered. “Of course.”

  “You’re mad.”

  Wallingford didn’t reply. In two long strides he swallowed the distance to the automobile. She sat there innocently in the center of the room, wheels removed, seats unbolted, a bare hollow shell of molded metal. Finn had had her made to his own design a few months ago, had shipped her with almost maternal care on her own special railway car, across the Belgian plains and Swiss mountain passes, covered with flannel-lined tarpaulins against the cold and the damp. Even now, raw and unfinished, her beauty still took his breath away, long and lean and unlike anything else yet designed. Finn could almost see the air slipping along her top and sides, could almost hear the rush of speed against his ears. Breathtaking speed, unheard-of speed.

  He adored her.

  Wallingford’s large hands gripped the edge of the doorframe, exactly where Lady Morley had run her fingers not twenty-four hours before, and peered inside. The tips of his shoes protruded slightly under the chassis, no more than a foot away, Finn judged, from her ladyship’s elegant ear. Outside the open doorway, the squirrels were chattering again, oblivious to the knife-edge silence within the cottage.

  Wallingford made a growling sound from the bottom of his throat. “Empty.” He turned around to face Finn. His eyes had narrowed into slits. “Where is she, then?”

  Finn spread his hands before him, trying desperately not to smile. “Haven’t the slightest. Back in the castle, perhaps?”

  The duke’s eyes slid to the old carriage doors at the back, closed and innocuous. “She slipped out, didn’t she? When Penhallow arrived.” He stomped toward the portal and flung it open on one side, allowing a bright beam of noontime sunshine to burst into the room, illuminating the high shine of the automobile’s metal frame. “The question is,” he continued, turning his head one way and then the other, “whether she’s gone back to the castle or lingered about, waiting for us to leave.”

  Finn shrugged. “Search away.”

  “My guess is that she’s still about. She’s a persistent woman, after all. Tenacious.” He glanced back at Finn. “Come along. I’d like to keep an eye on you.”

  Finn sighed. “You bloody dukes. You don’t understand the first thing about actual work. How, for example, it requires hours of uninterrupted concentration . . .”

  “Humor me.”

  Finn threw his hands in the air. “Bloody hell, Wallingford.” He stomped after the duke into the warm spring air, mild and silken against his cheek, laden with the rich scent of apple blossoms from the orchard above. Next to the olive tree he stopped and crossed his arms. “I’ll wait here,” he said.

  The duke walked the perimeter with excruciating care, as if he were stalking a particularly canny stag through the autumnal mists of his Scottish estate. At each tree, he looked up and searched the branches, rotating his head this way and that, all but sniffing the air.

  No, check that, Finn observed in amazement: He was sniffing the air, damn him. Trying to detect that telltale hint of lilies, perhaps? Finn’s fists curled into balls against his ribs. It offended him, somehow, that Wallingford knew her scent.

  “There, you see?” he called across the grass. “She’s not here. Now would you mind taking yourself off?”

  The duke kept walking, unti
l he’d arrived back at the door. He swiveled his head in Finn’s direction. “Well done, Burke. Admirably played. But next time, I assure you, I’ll be ready.”

  “Whose blasted side are you on?”

  “Yours, though you may not believe it.” He put his hand on the latch.

  Horror flooded through Finn’s veins. What if she’d thought the alarm was over and broken cover? “Look here, man. You’ve already searched the damned cottage!”

  “Only retrieving my hat, for God’s sake,” Wallingford said, disappearing into the doorway.

  Finn ran up behind him. “I’ll retrieve your hat!”

  But it was too late; they were already inside. Finn glanced around the room and closed the door discreetly behind him. No sign of her, thank God. She’d kept her composure, remained in hiding until he came back to sound the all clear.

  “For God’s sake,” Wallingford began impatiently, and then he turned around and took in Finn’s expression.

  “Aha,” he said, quite soft. “She’s still here, isn’t she?”

  “She was never here. You and your damned imagination.”

  Wallingford ignored him. He rotated slowly about, eyes sliding along the rough stone walls. “Now,” he said conversationally, “if I were a lady, caught in flagrante . . .”

  “In flagrante, my arse.”

  “. . . where would I scurry to hide my shame? A slender lady, mind you. And one with plenty of nerve. None of your missish airs about Lady Morley, I’ll say that.”

  His gaze landed once more on the automobile, and then slid to the ground. “By God,” he said. “You damned clever thing.”

  “Wallingford, you’re mad.”

  “Do you know, Burke,” said the duke, walking with slow deliberation to the automobile, as if savoring the moment, “I almost admire this Lady Morley of yours. It takes a certain amount of fortitude, not to say cheek, to lie beneath an automobile for such a considerable period of time. I do wonder whether she’s sincerely in love with you after all.” He stopped a few feet away and spoke in a soft voice. “Are you, Lady Morley? Are you in love with my friend Burke?”