At the bottom stood the single word Papa.
With heart palpitating, I read the note with a consuming hunger.
Dearest one,
It is now upon you to finish two stories—the fictional one and the real-life tale it mirrors. I trust you to resolve both stories in the style of your own dear personality. Sending your mother’s story out into the world was necessary, but it has sparked a number of events that were long in coming. I’ve received written threats against my life, and if you are reading this letter it means my pursuer has likely succeeded in killing me. I want you to know that if it is who I think, I deserve it. You will understand many things if you dive into the empty notebooks on the shelf and complete the story I have left to you as your legacy. There is more information in those books than one might expect. I cannot state plainly what I suspect, because it is so thoroughly entangled in the novel I mean for you to finish, so you must complete both to fully understand.
Of all the worldly wealth I’ve held, my hands were never richer than when they were filled with my infant daughter. You are the greatest blessing I never deserved.
My hands trembled until the paper fluttered to the floor. Tears gathered and fell. Those notes from Nathaniel Droll in the notebook were his. It was the same writing.
And the clues he’d left—they were not meant to point to Lady Jayne’s killer, but to his.
34
Quite often, villains of one story were heroes in another.
~Nathaniel Droll, Lady Jayne Disappears
We returned well after dark, and the lack of Silas Rotherham’s presence echoed about the empty halls of Lynhurst. Glenna greeted us at the door, frittering around her mother as if I had accosted the woman and dragged her to London. Kendrick observed from the shadows, keeping his distance, and the servants politely ignored me as they came and went. In a house full of strangers, I had not a single ally.
“Mr. Rotherham hasn’t returned, has he?” This I voiced toward Garamond, the only one to meet my gaze.
“No, Miss Harcourt. All his belongings left with him, and he seems to have departed for good this time.”
As the small crowd ebbed and flowed around Aunt Eudora, the woman visibly detached herself from her family, curling back into her bitter self. A look of stone solidified on her face. I now recognized great suffering behind those sharp eyes as I recalled the way she stated her brother’s hatred for her. Years and years of pain twisted her features.
But on the heels of our return, Glenna pushed herself between us, eyes snapping, and led her mother away as if I meant to harm her.
Just like my mother, I had become an outcast at Lynhurst Manor. As Glenna settled her mother into the wheeled chair and rolled her through the echoing hall, I took myself off to my bedchamber, wishing for a warm bath to soothe my nerves. Instead, I curled into the moon glow pouring through my window and looked at my father’s notes, one by one, with new eyes. To whom did they point?
I puzzled over them until I could see the words on the backs of my eyelids. Yet in the midst of everything, I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother. Sliding the torn-out pages back between the notebooks, I slipped out of the room and found my way toward the south tower by the blue light of the moon, which cast deep shadows across the floor.
As I entered her chamber, the pure femininity and beauty of the forgotten room wrapped itself around me again and pulled me in. In one giant release, I collapsed on the rosette-covered bedspread, a cloud of dust puffing up around me. I coughed as it settled, then breathed in the scent of the room. Of my mother, perhaps. A lilac aroma hid beneath the fine layer of filth.
God, I’ve no idea what to do now. How do I figure this out?
And then, as I sat up and my eyes roved over the room, I froze. There, tall and regal, with the curtains wrapping themselves around her slender frame in the breeze, stood my mother.
35
Lady Jayne revealed her secrets—not to become vulnerable, but to avoid it.
~Nathaniel Droll, Lady Jayne Disappears
Time paused as we stared at one another across the room that resonated with her presence. And as I studied her large, watchful eyes, only detachment and a hard seed of hostility nestled in my heart for this wretched woman. She stepped forward out of the window bay, moving in the shadows, and paused before the bed, reaching out to finger a strand of my loose hair. “You look so much like who I used to be.” Her quiet voice rolled out as smooth and pure as the beautiful gown draped over her frame. Waves of calm kept me still as my mother, the woman connected to me by heartstrings, caressed my hair, then my cheek. “What a wonder to have your own self mirrored in another person. I see a familiar fire in your eyes, behind a face that is mine. I rather hoped for your sake you wouldn’t inherit the fire.”
“All dangerous forces can be harnessed.”
She smiled. “And your father’s wit. You are a dazzling blend of two very unique souls.”
“You did love him, didn’t you?”
She dipped her head, the energy radiating from her downturned face speaking more eloquently than words. “He changed my life. No, he gave me life.”
I gulped. “And me? Did you love me?”
Her countenance softened as she lifted her eyes and traced a fingertip over the contours of my face. The glow of approval in her eyes reached inner parts of my heart never before used and ignited them. “You, my dear, are my most elaborate, flawless work of art. A stunning blend of colors from two paintbrushes meant to work in tandem.”
I released a breath, wondering at the gorgeous being before me. “Everything Papa said about you . . . it’s truer than I ever thought.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That you were a beautiful woman with an addiction to love. He said it was your curse, and at the time I thought it a lovely curse to have.”
“It depends on if you are giving or receiving it. Loving someone makes you their slave. But being loved makes you the master.” Her gaze intensified. “And after a childhood like mine, I wanted nothing more than to be master.”
I swallowed the angry words fighting for control over me. “And did you succeed?”
Those luminescent eyes flickered intensely as they held my gaze. “He didn’t tell you of my childhood, did he? If he had, you’d know the answer simply by looking at me.”
She sank down beside me on the edge of the bed that used to be hers, and she began. “In my youth, life had beaten down my father and his pride, so he beat us down. Six women in his household, and none of us stood up to him. But soon I discovered the power of my beauty in the world outside my house, and I collected affection as some girls accumulate buttons or oranges.” She gazed past me. “Even into adulthood and marriage I used the power of seduction, of withheld gratification, to survive. Until I met your father.” Tears glistened and one cut a path through her powder mask. “I couldn’t help loving him, no matter what I tried. Just by sheer force of who he was, he lured it out of me in a way too powerful to stop.”
“But you were married to someone else.”
She dropped her gaze. “I married a man rich with connections, with grand hopes he’d rise to the top, and I with him. He was well-dressed, with a gentleman’s position, and I’d been born into a mill family living in a coarse, dirt-floor hovel in the country. This man provided a way out of poverty. I married and had a child with him, but after the birth, I became less and less of myself, until I was merely a body doing what it ought while my soul pined away in a separate corner. A person is never meant to survive such a separation, and it was killing me.
“And then . . . ,” her eyes slid closed, “then came your father. Woolf Harcourt, that radiant prism of light and vitality. The nearer I was to his presence, the more he infused his life into me, and I constantly went back for more, never satisfied.”
“How did you meet him?”
“My husband worked for his family. They were close, and saw much of each other.” She gave a soft laugh. “You have no idea what it
did to my heart to see them side by side every day, the flapping simpleton and the dashing, brilliant man who turned my life upside down with a simple wink. At first, it was only walks in the sunshine between Woolf and me. Soon that wasn’t enough, and I needed more and more of him to feel alive.
“Your father managed to have my husband sent abroad for six months in service to his family, and our love flamed like nothing I’d ever experienced before.” Her lips trembled. “But then I learned you were coming. I wrote to my husband to confess and begged him to return so that we may pass you off as his. He refused, so Woolf whisked me off to Lynhurst so I could carry and birth our baby away from the public eye.”
“So that summer you spent here as Lady Jayne . . .”
“Yes, I was hiding you. I assumed the identity of ‘Lady Jayne,’ tight-laced my corset until it nearly suffocated me, and danced into the night as often as I could, grasping at the sunset of my freedom. When I could no longer hide my secret, I kept myself in this very room, awaiting what was to come.”
“And after I was born?” I nearly whispered the next words.
Her face hardened, a cord tightening along her throat. She gulped.
When tears welled in her big, beautiful eyes and poured over her lashes, I steeled myself against the outpouring of her sorrow. “I suppose you wish me to forgive you now.”
She leaned back with a soft laugh, face moist. “And what do you imagine must be forgiven? Every person has the right to freedom, to live the life implanted in the core of her being. No, child. I’m not sorry.” Her eyes searched mine and the tears renewed themselves. “They’d have persecuted me if I’d returned with a baby that could not be my husband’s. I couldn’t have borne it. And then he’d have come home and puttered about with his sad, mournful eyes. Every time he’d have glanced at this child, it would remind him of the love his wife shared with another man.” Tears spilled down and dripped off her chin. “For a woman accustomed only to adoration, I could not bear the thought of being scorned.”
My hands trembled in my lap. Pain rippled over me in terrible waves as I stared at this woman who had given birth to me yet was not even a shadow of a mother. I could not cry over her, for I felt as though she were merely the one informing me that my mother had never existed. “So you chose to leave me.” My cold voice offered these words as a statement for her to verify or deny.
“If fate handed me a second life, I would do the same again. Hate me if you must.”
Chill permeated my being. “Then why did you come here now? Why contact Aunt Eudora?”
Slowly she lifted a green-bound installment of Lady Jayne Disappears in her lace-gloved hand. “This.” The pages had been well-worn by eager thumbs. “I know so well that beautiful writing, as well as the woman painted by the words. They are more familiar to me than my own home. When I read this, I knew I had to face him again.”
“So it was Papa you sought?” Rejection pooled in my heart, drowning it.
“After you were born, I ran. I never intended to leave him, only the tangled mess in which I found myself.”
Which was me.
“After things settled I sought him out, but your father had disappeared. Vanished from the earth, leaving only a letter breaking off our love. His rejection shredded me from the inside out until I hardly knew who I was anymore. For many years, I thought I’d forgotten him. But when I read this, and saw the love that glowed from every page, I knew his letter had been a lie.” More tears trailed down her cheek. “So I wrote to his sister, Lady Pochard. I wanted to see Woolf again, to hear from his own lips that he does not love me, because I couldn’t believe it. Not after what he wrote.”
With a soft rustle of her gown, she turned to me and clasped my stiff hands. “And now you shall be the instrument that brings us together, after you once tore us apart. How fitting it should be so. Please, won’t you tell me where he is?”
Steeling myself against her warm hands, I met her gaze. “He is dead.”
The flat words melted her refined features and she dropped her head, shoulders shaking. “No.”
“He died in debtor’s prison.”
She shook, slender arms vibrating with emotion. After several moments, she drew her mournful eyes up to meet mine, studying them. The silk of her caress on my arm softened my bitterness. “If you are the sort of girl I believe you to be, his death has left you utterly empty too, hasn’t it? For you know as well as I that there is no one like that man. No one who understands you or loves you quite as well.”
I turned my face away to hide the well of tears. Her sudden warmth collided with an overwhelming desire for Papa, and for everything familiar.
“I’m so sorry. For both of us.” She breathed in the quiet space that followed for several seconds. “What happened?”
“He was murdered. I’ve no idea who is responsible.”
“Murdered! How terrible. Surely you must have some notion of who could have done such a thing.”
“He never said a word before it happened. All he left me was riddles and clues.”
“Daughter, show them to me.” She gripped my arms eagerly, forcing me to turn toward her. “I know Woolf inside and out. Any puzzle he has created, I can unravel for you.”
I stiffened, a refusal on my lips, but her gentle touch cut it off. Her hand rubbed small circles on my upper arm, loosening my bitterness with each arc.
“Please. Allow me to do this one thing for you. My freedom has cost you much. I may be selfish, but I am not unaware.”
My heart hurt with a physical ache. It could not keep up with the emotional twists and loops. With an exhale that loosened the resentment hardening me, I stood and nodded. “The notes are in Papa’s room, where I’m staying. We’ll need to sneak through the great hall.”
Her eyes sparkled. “We absolutely will not.” Rising and guiding me by the hand, she took me to a little closet just outside the south tower and forced open the too-tight door. A narrow staircase climbed straight up. “After you.”
I should not have been surprised that those steps reached another door right outside Papa’s old bedchamber. After a breathless climb up stairs nearly too steep to scale, we tiptoed into my room and over to the desk. Slipping the notes out from between the notebooks, I laid them all out flat on the desk, arranging them into the order in which I’d received them. Her fingertip glossed over his handwriting, emotion fanning out over her face, as if she caressed the hand that wrote these words.
“He’d been receiving threatening notes before it happened, from what I have learned. Although he never saw fit to tell me any of it while he lived.”
“Knowing your father, he had some foolish notion of protecting you.”
I leaned over the pages alongside her. “What do these mean? What is he saying?”
She skimmed them, passing over each torn-out page carefully. “It’s in these last emphasized sentences of each note—that is what he’s trying to tell you.”
“They don’t make sense.”
“Because they’re coded.” Her brow furrowed. “I know, because he used to write me these terrible sonnets where the first or last letter of each—” Her voice hitched as she studied the note before her.
“What? Who is it?”
Urgency sparked through her fingers as she flipped through the notes again and then dropped them. “It’s my husband.”
“Lord Chetworth? But he seemed so—”
A knock on my door cut off my thought.
“No, not him. My first husband.” With a panicked glance toward the door, she flung herself toward the heavy drapes beside my window, disappearing into their voluminous mass.
My eye flicked over those sentences, picking out the first letters of each word, and the last letters of the third.
Go and run away—make off now, dear.
Ghosts are real, and may one never die.
Darling Aura, fair Aura, I’m too soon dead.
G-A-R-A-M—
The door flung open and I turned, sho
ving the papers under a notebook.
“Garamond. Lord Gaffney. What are you doing here?”
36
Hothouse flowers and hothouse women should always be left where they are. For you can never re-create or maintain the flawless environment to which they’ve become accustomed.
~Nathaniel Droll, Lady Jayne Disappears
I strode hastily toward the interloper to keep him from coming near the window. His narrow face had taken on a green cast, his eyes wide and panicked as his gaze locked on me.
“What’s happened? What isn’t she telling me?” Garamond’s pasty face appeared even more pale as he closed the gap between us in two steps, gripping my arms. “Tell me.”
“Who?” I stiffened in his grip.
“Lady Pochard said you’d been to see Jayne, as if you’d found her alive.” Sweat gathered at his receding hairline and dripped down his sideburns. “Where is she? Where is my wife?” He shoved back suddenly and lurched forward, grabbing his knees as rasping breaths shook him.
My mother. He was referring to my mother.
Arm around his back, I moved quickly into helper mode, guiding him to the chair near the door and easing him into it as he convulsed. Whipping a towel off the stand, I dipped it in the washbasin and returned to smear the cool water across his head. “Shhh. Easy, easy.”
His breathing slowed and the trembling of his shoulders lessened. When his neck had regained a slightly rosy hue, he drew his head up and sat back against the chair to look at me. “I’m sorry. So sorry.” His haggard, fleshy face seemed aged. “You must think me mad. Please, we mustn’t tell Glenna anything. She’s such a delicate flower, I’m afraid it would break her.”
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