The only way to find out was to see for herself and after a moment she deliberately lowered the wick on her oil lamp and taking it in her hand, moved very softly to her door. She set the lamp down on the floor behind it and then very slowly, opened it.
Outside it was all very black, and she knew she would be unable to open the door fully and see out properly as long as there was any light at all from her own lamp, and so decided to extinguish it completely. Her eyes would soon accustom themselves to the darkness and if there was anything to see or hear she would know it. So she bent, blew down the lamp chimney, and the light vanished in a tendril of acrid oil-scented smoke, and blackness enclosed her like a blanket.
She stood upright again and listened. Still nothing, and now she slid out of her room. This time she did hear something; a faint hiss of breath and a soft burring that could have been speech, or even laughter. Whatever it was, she thought, with fear running icy fingers across her shoulders and filling her belly with even colder sensations, that was no timber contracting in the coolness of the night. That was people wandering about in her house. And it was now – it must be – close on half past two in the morning. A ridiculous hour for sensible, honest people to be about. And she buried her fear in a conscious wave of anger that anyone should dare to behave so under her roof, and moved along the hallway.
She followed all her senses. She could not only hear but feel there was someone near; there was added warmth in the air, and smell too, a rich scent which she knew but could not quite place. She actually pulled back her ears to make it possible to pick up every hint of sound, and stretched her eyelids and even her nostrils as she moved slowly and carefully towards what she believed to be the source of the sounds that had first attracted her attention.
It all happened very quickly. One moment there was just herself and her suspicions pushing her forwards across the dark hallway of her second floor and then there was hubbub. She found herself entwined with other bodies, arms and legs and yielding softness and hard muscle, and she yelped in surprise as someone pinched the soft flesh of her right upper arm shrewdly and a voice deep and half whispering said words she had never heard before but knew to be very powerful swearing indeed.
A match flared and then a candle wick kindled and she was standing blinking in the suddenness of the light, feeble thing though it was, staring at the source of the sounds that had brought her from her room. And as she looked, her still confused feelings about Jem’s news mixed with weariness and a sense of deflation and the fear that had come when she had first heard the sounds in the hall, became a shriek deep in her throat. She opened her mouth to let it out; but before it could, a hand came down over her shoulder from behind and clamped itself over her face.
Chapter Twenty-Five
SHE WAS TO try often, in the times that were to come, to remember all that happened then, but never could. There was so much confusion, so many mixed feelings inside her, of anger as well as fear, excitement as well as terror, that she was barely aware of what was going on outside herself. But she did at last recognize and understand the voice that was speaking so urgently into her ear and managed to nod her head in acquiescence.
‘Please, Tilly, there is no need to be so alarmed, please, do not make a great din – we don’t want the whole house woken, do we? Please, it’s just me – Silas, only me – and there is no harm done, after all. Please Tilly – be quiet so that I might let you go.’
Once she had managed to nod her agreement the hand was taken from her mouth and she lifted her own to rub tentatively at her lips, which felt numb, and he was at once all compunction.
‘Oh, I do so hope I did not hurt you, Tilly, but it was imperative, I thought, that I keep you quiet. I knew you would be mortified if you woke everyone and they all came out and saw – well, perhaps not saw, but understood –’
‘Understood what?’ she hissed, instinctively pitching her voice to the same level as his, for he was whispering. ‘What is going on here?’ And she turned her head and stared about her. The candle that had been lit was still burning, sitting in a small china candlestick on the floor, tilted a little drunkenly so that wax dripped on to the polished boards, and her housewifely eyes noted that and were angered; but there was little to see by the light of that single flame. The door before which she stood was firmly closed, and she peered, to each side and at once identified which door it was: Sophie’s; and she caught her breath and closed her eyes as she tried to remember what she had seen in that brief movement before that hand had come down over her face.
Sophie, indeed, and in the darkness inside her eyelids Tilly could see the fine cambric nightgown she had worn, one shoulder slipped halfway down her arm in a fashion that showed far more of her breast than it covered, her hair in a luxuriant tumble about her neck and her arms up and –
Tilly’s eyes snapped open and she stared at the door in front of her. Duff. He had been there too, with Sophie’s arms about his neck and his head turned towards Tilly, his mouth half open with shock. And – she swallowed as she remembered – he had been wearing nothing at all as far as she could see in her memory. Certainly his chest had been bare, as Sophie’s creamy round arms set against Duff’s darker skin made very clear.
‘I don’t –’ she began but Silas set two fingers to her lips and jerked his head to move her away.
‘Please, not here,’ he breathed, and in one swift movement took her by the elbow while bending to pick up the candle in its stick, and started to lead her towards the top of the stairs which led down to the drawing room.
But before they could reach the stair head, there was a click as somewhere along the hallway a door began to open and in a trice he had blown out the candle and had pulled her sideways to stand close to the wall. In the heavy blackness Tilly held her breath as she heard Miss Knapp’s voice, thin and reedy with uncertainty – a rare sound indeed from that usually formidable lady – calling out, ‘Is anyone there?’
Behind her, Silas too was holding his breath, and for some reason she took her lead from him. There was no reason why she should not have called out that it was she, Tilly, who was wandering about her house in the middle of the night, which no doubt Miss Knapp would have accepted without question, for who had a better right to wander about than the owner of the house? But by the time Tilly had thought that through it was too late to answer, for Miss K was still standing suspiciously at her door. It was almost possible to see her as a thicker blackness against the pervading darkness of the hallway. If Tilly had spoken now it would have seemed exceedingly odd, she decided. So she still held her breath; and just when she was certain she could do so no longer, but would have to gasp for air in a most audible manner. Miss K at last took a deep breath of her own, and went back into her room and clicked the door shut behind her.
They stood still for a second longer, and then Silas tugged on her elbow and before she realized what he was doing had pulled her into her own room and closed the door silently behind him without so much as a snicker of sound from the lock. And as she stood there in amazement, he moved further into the room with the sureness of a cat which could see in the dark and again lit the candle he was still holding. He must have had a match in his pocket, she thought absurdly, blinking a little as the candle flame lifted and dipped wildly, sending shadows leaping alarmingly over the ceiling, and then the light became richer and stronger and steadied as he found her oil lamp, still sitting on the floor behind her bedroom door, and bent and picked it up and lit it, without, to her chagrin, any difficulty whatsoever.
He stood there holding her lamp high and staring down at her and she took a deep and shaky breath and said, still speaking quietly, but with definite anger in her voice, ‘You have no right to be in this room, sir! Please to leave at once!’
‘Oh, Tilly,’ he said and smiled, a rather bleak smile but one with genuine amusement in it for all that. ‘Please, don’t be so absurd! Can you not imagine how Miss Knapp is now? She will have woken Miss Fleetwood and they will both be ly
ing there listening with their ears out on stalks. If I leave now they will certainly hear me and they will be out of their room like jack-in-the-boxes and staring about them. Do you wish them to see me emerge from your door? We had to come in here – but now we are here it will be best if we stay for a while until those two old besoms fall asleep again.’
She glared at him, non-plussed. He was, of course, right. Both the Misses K and F were inordinately curious. There could be no doubt they would be peering about for some time, and the thought of what their reactions might be if they should suspect that she and Silas – her heart quailed and with it her legs seemed suddenly to become jellies and she almost tumbled across the room to land on her chaise longue in a little huddle.
At once he set down the lamp on the small table that stood at the foot of the chaise longue and was on his knees beside it. ‘Oh, my dear, are you overcome? You are fully entitled to be, for this has been a dreadful ten minutes for you.’
‘Ten minutes?’ she said and glanced up at the clock. It was indeed just a quarter to three and she took a deep breath and shook her head. ‘Only ten minutes.’
‘Well, not much more,’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’
‘A little bewildered, perhaps,’ she managed. ‘That is all.’ And she put her hands up to her head to smooth her hair, suddenly very aware of the fact that she was wearing just a nightgown and a thin silk wrap and that her hair was tumbled about her shoulders. ‘I am not sure what is happening here.’
He smiled again but more warmly this time. Because he was still kneeling beside the chaise longue, his face was on a level with hers and also very close and she could see clearly that there was a small quirk in the corner of his mouth and found herself thinking, he must have been dimpled when he was a child. A ridiculous thought to have in such circumstances and her awareness of that made her sharp. She drew back from him against the corner of the chaise longue and said. ‘So, what were you doing wandering about the house at such an hour?’
‘The same as you were, I suspect,’ he said and seemed to take the message from her, for he sat back on his heels, leaving more space between them. ‘I heard sounds and was alarmed. I do not believe that every night we are surrounded by would-be robbers, yet one hears so many tales of barefaced burglary that – well –’ He shrugged. ‘I felt some concern.’
It made sense, she thought, looking at him. There had indeed been recent tales of local houses being broken into by robbers in the boldest manner possible; had she not herself thought that she was being robbed, though perhaps by an insider rather than an outsider?
‘But why creep about so, like a robber yourself?’ she snapped. Her strength and self-control were returning to her now. ‘If you thought there was trouble abroad, why not come out with a light and call out as any sensible person would?’
‘You did not,’ he pointed out with sweet reasonableness, still smiling. ‘As I recall, you too were creeping along the hallway in the dark trying not to be heard.’
She flushed. ‘I was not sure – it might have been – I did not know –’ she began and he lifted his brows and nodded.
‘Precisely. I felt the same way. It might be a robber bent on stealing – or it might have been some persons showing a greater interest in each other’s company than – well, we have an interesting household here, after all.’ He quirked an eyebrow at her. ‘Have we not? Mr Cumming and Mr Hancock and Mademoiselle Salinas – after all, people are but human –’
‘Not in my house!’ Tilly said with a snap in her voice. ‘I would not permit – I mean – this is a respectable lodging. I would not have among my guests such as would misbehave in such a way that –’ Her voice faltered and she looked down at her hands, which were twisting and untwisting in her lap.
‘Yes,’ he said after a moment, his voice grave, and he got to his feet and sat down on the end of the chaise longue, not too close to her but near enough for her to be very aware of him and feel the heat of his body. He was wearing a thick silk dressing-gown and beneath it she could not help but see his bare ankles and feet in leather slippers. Clearly he too was in his nightshirt beneath the gown, and no more, and there was something so intimate in that thought that she found herself getting flustered again.
‘I hope – ‘ he began and then stopped and thought for a while before trying again. ‘I hope you will not be too perturbed by tonight’s events,’ he said at last.
‘Perturbed?’ She too was thinking, remembering the way those two faces had looked in the gleam of the single candle in the split second in which she had seen them, before Silas had put his hand over her mouth and she had closed her eyes automatically as she struggled to escape his grip. Duff, looking rather foolish if the truth were to be told, with his mouth half open and his eyes set so wide with shock that she could see a line of white above the pupils, and Sophie’s own face, for she had stood there with her cheek pressed to his and also staring at Tilly. But she hadn’t looked foolish in the least. The expression on her face had been a complicated one, a half smile curling the lips, the eyes seeming modestly shaded by the lids but gleaming in a way that showed they missed nothing – she had looked more like a satisfied cat, Tilly thought suddenly. A cat with cream on its whiskers.
‘I’m not sure what you mean by perturbed,’ she managed to say and put her hands up to her face again. Her eyes were feeling hot and sandy and her lips were tight and dry. She licked them in an effort to be more comfortable but that seemed to make the dryness worse.
‘It is not easy when a mother – when young men grow up,’ Silas was saying carefully. Too carefully, she thought; he sounds like an adult talking to a child and I am not a child. ‘So he and the delectable Sophie are enjoying a little amatory adventure? You should be happy for him that he has so much pleasure in his life rather than –’
‘You do not need to lecture me, Mr Geddes,’ she said icily. ‘I am well aware of the responsibilities and problems of a mother of a young son. I have after all, been such a mother for some years. You have not.’
He looked taken aback. ‘Well, no, I have not. But –’ He seemed to gather his composure, ‘But I have been a young man like Duff, and I can only commend his good taste and applaud his good fortune in finding a young lady so willing to dally with him.’
‘In the middle of the night? In a hole in the corner fashion? Dressed like a – like a –’ She could not say the word that had come into her mind and she suddenly remembered those words she had heard out there in the dark hallway; words she knew were curses, even though she was not certain of their meaning. Now she thought of it, they had been said not by Silas or Duff as she had supposed, but by Sophie. ‘I have been wickedly misled,’ she said with sudden passion. ‘I believed Sophie to be what she seemed, a respectable, well-behaved young lady. I set aside my doubts about her living alone at her age, even set aside my concern when she admitted to being a dancer on the stage, but I should not have done so. I should have sent her away immediately and never have let her anywhere near Duff.’
She felt sobs choking her throat and could not stop her eyes filling with tears. ‘It was all my fault. If I had not been so anxious – if only I had – oh, I am wretched! Quite wretched.’ And the tears overflowed and began to run like a tap. So did her nose. She was sobbing bitterly and her face was wet and she had no protection for it but her own two hands.
He moved closer and set one arm about her heaving shoulders and with his other hand set a large handkerchief to her face. She seized it gratefully, and mopped her cheeks and blew her nose and tried very hard to stop the tears, but it seemed beyond her powers to do so. The weeping went on and on, her shoulders enveloped by his warm grasp and her nose filling yet again. She seemed to consist entirely of head; there was no sense of any other part of her body. There were just her eyes and nose and ears and face, all melting away into thick, scalding, horrible tears.
But slowly the storm subsided until she found herself clutching the sodden rag that was Silas’s handkerchief in one w
et hand and lying with her head resting on his shoulder. He was rocking her gently and crooning into her ear and it was agreeable in the extreme. She sat there staring sightlessly ahead of her and making no effort to move at all.
How long she might have gone on so, she could not know. She was, in fact, becoming sleepy. The excitement and the great rush of emotion added to her existing fatigue had almost overwhelmed her. She should, she knew in a vague sort of way, be concerned with the fact that she had surprised her innocent young son almost in flagrante delicto with a girl who was, she was now certain, no better than a slut at heart, but somehow there was no emotion left in her. It had happened and that was that, and she felt her eyes slowly closing.
Silas moved beside her, putting his head forwards so that he could look down into her face and without thinking she lifted her chin and looked up at him, her eyelids heavy and blinking. She wanted to say something; that she was appreciative of his care; that she was sorry to have made such a cake of herself; that it was time for him to go, please, and thank you for your interest and just leave me be so that I can go to sleep – I am aching to sleep –
But he seemed to see something else in her face for suddenly he bent his head and put his mouth on hers and her eyelids, hitherto seeming totally out of her control, flew open in amazement and then, as he became more urgent, pushing her lips apart with his tongue, closed again and now she had no control over them whatsoever.
Or indeed over anything else, it seemed. It had been many years since she had been this close to a man. In the days when her first husband, Francis, had been alive, his attentions had been more frightening than enjoyable, more painful than pleasurable, but this was different. Sensations were moving through her body that amazed her. It was as though there was sitting beside her and watching her with a sardonic eye another Tilly who was observing and recording all that happened and saying in an amused sort of voice, ‘Well, well! Dear me! Imagine you, Tilly Quentin, behaving in such a manner! And enjoying doing so, what’s more. And there were you criticizing your son, or rather Sophie – well, well, dear me.’
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