Shadow Conspiracy

by Phyllis Irene

  —The Holy Bible, Corinthians 15:54

  It was all the fault of Miss Emma Rigby’s scientific mind.

  She had determined to discover what it was that caused a young man to forsake all good sense and pursue a silly idiot of a girl: the sillier and the more idiotic, the better. It was a frivolous experiment, but it passed the time—and who knew? It might lead to useful conclusions.

  Emma’s father had raised her in unorthodox and remarkably eclectic ways, first in Constantinople and thereafter in India and China where the manners and morals of England were as exotic as the far side of the moon. But he had died two years past, and his estate had vanished in a cloud of solicitors and creditors, leaving his daughter to make her way as she could. She had found a haven of sorts as a lady’s companion.

  Lady Windermere was wise, gentle, and generous. Emma knew she was fortunate. But her life had closed in upon her, and it was becoming progressively harder to breathe.

  When the gaggle of young people on Grand Tour arrived in the stupefyingly staid and peaceful Alpine town of Ste-Sieglinde, Emma found herself swept up in a flurry of activity. Lady Windermere encouraged it: “You are young, child; you should dance. Laugh, too, if you can. Take the air with these butterflies; let sunlight into your heart. You’ve mourned long enough.”

  It was excellent advice, though what it led to, neither Lady Windermere nor Emma herself might have foreseen.

  On that bright morning in May, the whole flock had taken it into their heads to walk up into the mountains above the town. The sky was serene but for a thin streamer of cloud above the highest peak. The path was wide and open and not excessively steep. Their guide was unexpectedly entertaining: a little bantam cock of a man with an extravagant triple loop of moustaches, who claimed to be a native, a very native, of these fair valleys. But Emma heard rather more in his accent of the back streets of Salzburg than the villages of Switzerland.

  Emma might have allowed him to distract her, but she had a hypothesis and she meant to test it. She had chosen a target, the lovely and impressionable Mr. Willoughby Mason. She had dressed to attract him in a confection of frills and bows and flounces that, Lady Windermere’s maid assured her, was the latest fashion in Paris—though once it was on, she had disposed of as many of the bows and frills as she reasonably could. She would, after all, have to walk in it.

  Still, it was an attractive shade of blue-violet that went admirably with her eyes, and the pert little hat that accompanied it was both frivolous and becoming. She had excellent hopes of achieving her target.

  Unfortunately Mr. Willoughby had his eye on a target of his own. He acknowledged Emma’s exceptionally fine looks on this fine morning, but even as he kissed her hand and spoke her praises, his eyes wandered off toward the lovely, impressionable, and perfectly empty-headed Miss Cavendish. Her frills and flounces far exceeded even those that Emma had disposed of, and her golden curls and her clear blue eyes were offset perfectly by the heavenly blue of her gown.

  She was a vision to enchant any fool of a man, and a fool Mr. Willoughby certainly was. Her tripping steps, her little shrieks at every turn of the path or shift of a shadow, and her occasional swoon as exertion, altitude, and excess of emotion overcame her, gave Emma much to study. Whether she could bring herself to emulate it was another matter altogether.

  Indeed, as the morning advanced, she began to wonder whether she should have begun the experiment at all. Her lure had been set to attract the harmless and brightly coloured damselfish. Instead it had drawn the hunting shark: a hanger-on and late addition to the party, Mr. George Fraser.

  Emma knew his kind too well. He was not too long in the beard quite yet for hunting young ladies, being somewhere upwards of thirty but shy of forty, and he had the kind of rakish good looks that had no doubt lured many an innocent to her doom. Even as Mr. Willoughby drifted away toward Miss Cavendish, Mr. Fraser slid in beside Emma, took her hand and said, “A puppy will run after another puppy. You, my dear, are far too glorious a creature for the likes of that.”

  Emma slid her hand smoothly out of his clasp and did her best to simper. “Why, sir,” she said, “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

  His lips curled upward under his elegant dark moustache; his clear blue eyes glinted. “Don’t you, then? Come, walk with me. It’s steep ahead, and I’m not certain our guide is as familiar with these tracks as he pretends.”

  Emma had reached that conclusion soon after they left the hotel. She had to acknowledge Mr. Fraser’s charm, and he had read her rather too well. Even as he spoke, he had closed the distance between them again, standing just a little too near and looming just a little too large.

  This was by no means the light and harmless game that she had set out to play. She was not frightened; she had met his kind before and dealt with it as it deserved. Indeed, if she could deceive this practised deceiver, it would truly and clearly demonstrate her hypothesis.

  She lowered her eyes and averted her gaze and slid, as if shyly, away—but not so far as to escape him altogether. As he pursued, one of the less foolish young women happened to enquire, “Is that a storm gathering up on the mountain?”

  “Oh, no,” their guide declared with one of his grand flourishes, bowing and scraping and wielding his distinctly questionable command of the Swiss accent. “It is simply the most delicate veil of modest cloud across the face of the beautiful lady of the peaks. She is jealous, no doubt, before such mortal beauty as stands before her.”

  “Stuff and nonsense,” Emma said to herself. She was new to these mountains, having only arrived in Switzerland the week before, but she did recognise a storm cloud when she saw one. Whether it would come down to this altitude was the question. Of all the people in the party, she was forced to conclude that the clearly widely travelled Mr. Fraser was more likely to have an answer than their nominal and ostensible guide.

  She sighed extravagantly and tuned her voice to a breathy register an octave higher than its native tones. “Oh, dear Mr. Fraser, is it so? Is it truly but a mist along the summits? Because indeed, Mr. Fraser, in our dear beloved England, among the Lakes to which my precious, sainted mama of late memory”—and here she dabbed at her eyes with a bit of otherwise useless lace handkerchief—“was wont to bring me to visit my dear, dear namesake, Aunt Emma—Lady Ambersleigh, of course, such a dear lady, so kind—such a cloud promises the most inclement of weather.”

  She had perhaps gone too far with the flutter and the babble, but it seemed that Mr. Fraser was disinclined to be a critic. He smiled at her, showing just a hint of the shark in the gleam of a canine, and said in a tone of the smoothest reassurance, “Oh yes, my dear, it is a storm, and there’s a fair burden of snow in it, too, from the look of it. But in this season it’s unlikely to come so low. At worst it will pass over us with a mist of rain and, one may hope, the glory of a rainbow.”

  “Oh!” squeaked Miss Morton, who happened to be within earshot. “Rain? Oh, dear!” Her hands fluttered over her crown of artful golden curls. “Oh! What shall I do? All I have to shield me is this silly frippery of a thing.”

  “There, there,” her escort said soothingly, wielding that self-same frippery, a much be-laced and be-ribboned parasol, to shield her from the sun. “It won’t rain. Mr. Fraser is a fine man for a jest, eh, George? Getting the ladies all aflutter, when there’s no reason for concern.”

  Mr. Fraser shrugged and smiled. Mr. George Fraser, Emma reflected, knew very well the uses of a smile. “You’re right, I’m sure, John. It’s been a year or two since I climbed these mountains. The nature of the weather might have changed.”

  Irony might be beyond either of the young lovers at whom it was directed, but Emma recognised it with perfect ease. She had a parasol that, though pretty, had both the breadth and the substance to cope with a bit of rain, and despite its excessively fashionable cut and ornamentation, her walking costume was made for the hills and the storms of Mother England.

  The question remained as to whether
she would allow Mr. Fraser to achieve a portion of his goal, and let him steer her away from the beaten path. If she did so near enough to the meadow to which their extravagantly moustachioed guide professed to be leading them all, and made certain to keep track of the landmarks as she went, she calculated that she could complete her experiment without damage to her person or her reputation, and return unscathed to the rest of the party.

  She harboured no illusions as to the difficulty of the challenge. Mr. Fraser was a predator: cold-hearted, ice-blooded, and altogether untroubled by any moral scruple.

  He was also, and this drew her interest beyond the scope of her experiment, pursuing a separate purpose. She had had the first inkling of it shortly after he attached himself to her, when the party dallied beside a brook to drink, lave faces heated by exertion, and allow the ladies to practise their arts upon the gentlemen. In the midst of playing the attentive swain, he paused to slip somewhat from the pocket of his greatcoat and glance quickly at it before it vanished away again.

  Twice more he had done so, and she had, through swaying and swooning and at one juncture melting against him on a steep and stony portion of the track, determined that he had a packet of papers in that pocket, one at least of them was a map, and he consulted that map whenever the path took a turn.

  They had nearly come to the meadow, the guide assured them; it was only another little way, not so steep, no, nor so difficult that the ladies would in any way be discommoded. Emma was ready for Mr. Fraser’s next ploy: the clever resort to steering her to the side where the path widened, a pause to investigate yet another stream, and a dulcet suggestion that perhaps she might wish to look upon the illustrious Edelweiss, that most delicate of Alpine flowers.

  Emma refrained from observing that not only was it too early in the year for the Edelweiss, it was too low on the mountainside. A young lady of breeding should never contain such botanical minutiae in her pretty head. She simpered at him, and would have blushed if she had ever mastered the art, but the flush of exertion no doubt would make up for the lack.

  Mr. Fraser assisted her along the smaller track that followed the stream. He was guiding her upstream, she noted, and somewhat away from the path to the meadow, but she had marked a distinctive spur of rock and the particular angle of the mountain’s slope, and would remember it as they navigated away from it.

  The stream was swift and surprisingly deep. Its bubbling quickly overcame any sounds from the rest of the party; all too soon, there was nothing to be heard but the rushing of water and the rattle of stones underfoot, and the occasional trill of a bird.

  The sky was no longer so clear a blue. Streamers of cloud had begun to stretch across it, unfurling above the peaks. The sun’s heat was somewhat mitigated; a breeze sprang up, light at first, then growing brisk.

  Emma’s apprehension in that moment was all for the weather. When Mr. Fraser turned abruptly and seized her, she stared at him as if he were a stranger.

  In a manner of speaking he was. The easy smile was gone. The clear blue eyes had gone pale and hard. They reminded her of the alteration in the sky.

  A woman is always aware of a man’s strength, and yet for all her foresight, Emma had underestimated his. The body beneath the gentleman’s clothing was hard and honed; he was fast on his feet, faster than she had anticipated. In the blur of an instant she found herself cast down on the mossy bank, with his weight crushing the breath from her and his knee thrusting up in a direction in which he was in no way welcome.

  Her parasol’s sharpened tip was of no avail when the implement itself had flown free of her hand. She had nothing of use in her reticule but a small sewing kit, and that was trapped beneath her. All she had to oppose him was her own strength, which though a fraction of his, was still more than most young ladies could lay claim to, and a certain repertoire of skills which he would not be expecting.

  For the moment, a very simple one of the latter might suffice. She went limp as if in a dead faint. He laughed in her ear, short and sharp, and tugged at her skirts.

  As she had hoped, he shifted his position preparatory to an act of which she knew more than he might imagine, having observed it in stable or scullery often enough. He had his own clothing to contend with as well as hers, and she was, as he thought, completely at his mercy. There was no one within sight or earshot to protect her, and no father or brother to defend her honour should she accuse him thereafter, even if she could so far overcome her shock and shame as to confess what had been done to her. She was as safe a quarry as an adventurer might hope for.

  She kept her wits about her, mastered her breathing, and waited. The wind was cold on her bared limbs. He completed his arrangements and poised above her, pausing for an instant to savour his conquest.

  Her knee snapped up. The air rushed out of him. He gagged and dropped.

  She gathered, rolled, and sprang to her feet. He lay drawn into a knot, wheezing, clutching the outraged portion of his anatomy. Emma considered applying the tip of her parasol to it, but some imp of either wickedness or prudence urged her to continue the experiment. She swayed, hand to brow. “Oh! Mr. Fraser. I had the most terrible dream. Were there brigands truly? Are you wounded? Did you save my life?”

  The eye that rolled at her was sour with loathing, until he remembered his own game. He rose with difficulty, thanking his stars no doubt that the greatcoat concealed the extent of his dishabille. “Your life is safe, my dear,” he said, “but it seems I misjudged the temper of heaven.”

  Indeed, thought Emma, he had. The storm was coming. The mountains were veiled in heavy swathes of cloud.

  Emma turned to retreat the way she had come. She recalled a place farther down, where an outcropping offered a modicum of shelter. It would not protect them from wind-borne rain, but it would keep the worst of the rain from their heads, and shield them from hail.

  But Fraser—no honorific for him now, not in Emma’s mind, nor hereafter—seized her wrist in a rough grip and dragged her upward. She struggled; she stabbed with her parasol. She struck home: he grunted, cursed, wrenched the parasol from her hand and flung it across the stream. “Enough of that!” he barked at her. “There’s shelter up ahead, you silly nit, and I’m getting us to it as fast as may be. Now will you stop that and let us get on with it?”

  That cooled Emma’s head admirably, and sharpened her wits as well. Her sobbing was feigned but her acquiescence was not. Whether she would be safe when she reached such shelter as Fraser might aim for, she had no way of knowing. But she was most certainly not safe on a mountainside in such a storm as was rolling down upon them.

  It smote like the wrath of the Almighty. Within moments Emma was drenched through every layer of her considerable and sturdy clothing. Fraser made no offer of his greatcoat. He seemed to have forgotten what he dragged behind him, clambering up an ever steeper slope through the sluice of rain.

  She concentrated her energies on keeping her footing and on simply breathing. He had not abandoned her; therefore he needed her. While she performed her experiment, it seemed, he had been performing one of his own: though what purpose she might serve, or what use he intended to make of her, she lacked the data to determine. She could only go on, and trust to such skills as she had, and hope to win whatever battles lay before her.

  She lost her bonnet over the edge of a precipice, plucked ribbons and all from her head by a swirling gust of wind. Her hair, never the most biddable aspect of her person, shed its pins and tumbled down her back, save for one dark lock that whipped her face. She scraped it away, nearly oversetting them both on the narrow path.

  He hurled her against the cliffside with force enough to drive the breath out of her lungs, bent and spat words in her ear. “One more such antic and I drop you off the cliff. Do you understand me?”

  She nodded, mute. She hardly needed her acting skills to make her eyes huge or her face stiff with cold and shock.

  His lips ground on hers. There was nothing tender in that kiss. It was pure possession
. He owned her. She was as much his creature as any automaton, bound and enslaved to his will.

  So he might be pleased to imagine. She let the rain scour the taste of him from her mouth. In her heart she swore a vow. “This you will pay for, George Fraser. Pay long, and pay high.”

  Sister Annunciata was almost ready. The fire of the body had sunk low. The soul was nearly fledged, stretching its wings like a bird of flame.

  Mother Agatha set down the opticon. As always, the light of the mundane world seemed grey and cold in comparison. In the plain whitewashed cell, Sister lay barely breathing. The skin clung tight to the bones of her face; the hands folded on her breast were skeletal.

  “Tonight,” Mother Agatha said to the younger nun who knelt beside the narrow cot. “See that the vessel is prepared.”

  Sister Magdalen bowed her head, crossed herself and rose. In the silence that followed her departure, Mother Agatha heard the chanting that resounded perpetually in the chapel, sweet and high and far like the voices of angels.

  Mother Agatha bent over Sister Annunciata’s body. Breath barely stirred it. Her consciousness had gone some time since. Only the life itself was left, and the soul awaiting its translation.

  The abbess laid her hand on the cool, still forehead. “Soon, Sister,” she said. “By God’s will.”

  The light was fading. The storm, by the will of the mountain’s gods, was not. Rain had turned to sleet. If they ascended much higher, they would meet the snow.

  Emma was cold to the bone. Only determination warmed her, and her well-nurtured hatred of George Fraser. He had stopped for nothing in longer than she was able to calculate, even to peer at his map.

  For some time he had forced her to take the lead. He was using her as a windbreak. There was no pretence now of anything but mastery.

  Let him believe he had mastered her spirit as he had, for this little while, her body. Her spine was steel and her heart was stone. She climbed in the deepening twilight, numbed with cold and blinded by the sleet, until she found herself face to face with a massive and iron-bound door.