The finest man of anyone’s acquaintance, he thought with absurd pride.
Two weeks in the country had reddened Freddie’s fair complexion and bleached his sandy curls several shades lighter. He picked up the walking stick Vere had dropped and unobtrusively straightened Vere’s necktie, otherwise always set thirty degrees askew.
“Kingsley asked me if I wanted to come visit his aunt. I said yes, once he told me you’d been invited too.”
“I didn’t know the Wrenworths had Kingsley to their place.”
“Well, I wasn’t at the Wrenworths’. I left their place last Thursday and went to the Beauchamps’.”
And there he should have stayed. The substantial lack of bodily harm in his line of work notwithstanding, Vere would have been better pleased had Freddie not come.
“Thought you always liked it at the Wrenworths’. Why’d you leave so soon this time?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Freddie unrolled Vere’s sleeves, which Vere not infrequently kept rolled at uneven lengths. “I was in the mood for a different place.”
This gave Vere pause. Restlessness was not a trait he usually associated with Freddie—unless Freddie was unsettled about something.
A virgin-meeting-dragon’s-teeth scream shattered the bucolic quiet.
“Good gracious, what was that?” Vere exclaimed with very believable surprise in his voice.
The question was answered by more screams. Miss Kingsley, Lady Kingsley’s niece, rushed out of the house shrieking at the top of her lungs. And barreled directly into Vere—he had a terrific talent for stepping into people’s way.
He caught her. “What’s the matter, Miss Kingsley?”
Miss Kingsley struggled in his grip. She stopped screaming momentarily, but it was only to gather another lungful of air. And then she opened her mouth wide and emitted the most demonic screech Vere had ever heard.
“Slap her,” he begged Freddie.
Freddie was aghast. “I can’t slap a woman!”
So Vere did. Miss Kingsley ceased her shrieking and went limp. Gasping and blinking, she stared at Vere with unfocused eyes.
“Miss Kingsley, are you all right?” Freddie asked.
“I’m—I’m—Dear God, the rats, the rats…”
She began to sob.
“Hold her.” Vere thrust her into Freddie’s kinder, more compassionate arms.
He ran into the house and came to a dead halt in the middle of the entry hall. A dozen or two rats, he’d said to Holbrook. But there were hundreds of them, flowing like streams along walls and corridors, sprinting up banisters and down curtains, knocking over a porcelain vase with a loud crack even as Vere stood stock-still, at once revolted and mesmerized by the sight.
“Out of my way!”
Kingsley, Lady Kingsley’s nephew, came running, a rifle in hand. At the precise moment he crossed the center of the hall, a small rat jumped down from the chandelier.
“Kingsley, above you!” Vere cried.
Too late. The rat landed on Kingsley’s head. Kingsley screamed. Vere flung himself to the floor as Kingsley’s rifle went off.
Kingsley screamed again. “Bloody hell, it’s inside my coat!”
“I’m not coming anywhere near you if you don’t put down your rifle first! And don’t throw it, it could go off again.”
“Ahhh!” Kingsley’s rifle fell with a heavy thud. “Help me!”
He jerked wildly, a madman’s marionette. Vere dashed to his side and yanked off Kingsley’s day coat.
“I think it’s inside my waistcoat. God almighty, don’t let it get inside my trousers.”
Vere ripped apart Kingsley’s waistcoat. And there the little vermin was, stuck under Kingsley’s brace. Vere grabbed it by the tail and tossed it aside before it could twist around and bite him.
Kingsley sprinted out of the front door in his shirtsleeves. Vere shook his head. More screams came from a room to his left. He hurried toward it and opened the door—and had to immediately grab on to the top of the door and get his feet off the floor as a torrent of rats rushed out.
Lady Kingsley, three young ladies, two gentlemen, plus one footman stood on the furniture above a sea of rats, two out of the three young ladies screaming away, Mr. Conrad joining them with equal gusto and volume. Lady Kingsley, atop the piano, used the music stand to grimly whack away at any rats that dared to climb up to her island of safety. The footman, a poker in his hand, defended the young ladies.
When enough rats had stormed out of the drawing room, Vere helped Lady Kingsley’s besieged guests down from their high places. Miss Beauchamp trembled so much that he had to carry her outside.
He found Lady Kingsley standing with one hand against a wall, her other hand on her abdomen, her jaw clenched tight.
“Are you all right, ma’am?”
“I don’t think I will need to try very hard to look stricken when I call upon Miss Edgerton,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “And Holbrook is a dead man.”
* * *
“‘On the highest point of the plateau is the small chapel of Santa Maria del Soccorso, where a so-called hermit keeps a visitor’s book, and sells wine. The view from this headland is singularly attractive and imposing, the precipice being absolutely vertical, and the coastline in every direction full of beauty…’”
Elissande saw it clearly: the Isle of Capri, rising sirenlike from the Mediterranean. Herself, walking along its abrupt cliffs, her hair flying in the breeze, a bouquet of wild carnations in her hand. No sound but the sea and the seagulls, no one but the fishermen repairing their nets far below, and no sensation but the clarity and serenity of utter, absolute freedom.
She barely caught her aunt as the latter toppled from her seat in the water closet.
It had been more than forty-eight hours since Aunt Rachel last eliminated—the effect of an invalid existence. Elissande had wheedled Aunt Rachel to sit for a quarter hour after lunch, with herself reading aloud from a travel guide to Southern Italy to help pass the time. But thanks either to her less than stimulating reading, or the laudanum from which she could not wean her aunt, Aunt Rachel had fallen asleep instead—with the receptacle beneath her still worryingly empty.
She half pulled, half carried Aunt Rachel out of the water closet. In her arms the older woman weighed little more than a bundle of sticks—with about as much mobility and coordination. It was her uncle’s specialty to discover what displeased his dependents and to inflict it upon them. For that reason Aunt Rachel’s nightdress smelled strongly of cloves, which she disliked.
Which she had disliked. For years now, Aunt Rachel had been in a near-perpetual laudanum haze and noticed little else, as long as she had her next dose of the tincture on time. But Elissande still cared—she’d brought an unscented nightdress from her own room.
She gently deposited her drowsy aunt on her bed, washed her own hands, then changed her aunt’s nightdress, and made sure Aunt Rachel slept on her right side. She kept careful record of the hours Aunt Rachel lay on each of her sides: Bedsores came easily to someone who spent the overwhelming majority of her time in bed.
She tucked the coverlet about the older woman’s shoulders and retrieved the guidebook that had fallen on the floor in her haste to catch Aunt Rachel. She’d lost her place in the book. But that wasn’t important. She was just as happy to read about lovely Manfredonia on the Adriatic coast, founded by a hero of the Trojan War.
The book flew out of her hand, crashed against the painting that hung on the wall opposite her aunt’s bed—the painting Elissande did her best never to look at—and plunged to the floor with a resounding thud. Her hand went to her mouth. Her head swiveled toward Aunt Rachel. But Aunt Rachel barely twitched.
Elissande quickly picked up the book again and checked it for damage. Of course there was damage: The endsheet had torn from the back cover.
She closed the book and clutched it hard. Three days ago she had taken her hairbrush and smashed her hand mirror. Two weeks before that she�
��d stared a long time at a box of white arsenic—rat poison—that she’d found in a broom closet.
She feared she was slowly losing her sanity.
She had not wanted to become her aunt’s nursemaid. She’d meant to leave as soon as she was old enough to find a post somewhere, anywhere.
But her uncle had known it. He had brought in the nurses, so that she’d see Aunt Rachel cower and cry from their maniacal “medical” treatments, so that she’d be forced to step in, so that loyalty and gratitude, otherwise lovely things, turned into ugly, rattling chains that bound her to this house, to this existence under his thumb.
Until all she had for escape were a few books. Until her days revolved around her aunt’s regularity or lack thereof. Until she threw her precious guide to Southern Italy against a wall, because her control over herself, the one thing she’d been able to count on, was eroding under the weight of her imprisonment.
The sound of a carriage coming up the drive had her gathering her skirts and rushing out of Aunt Rachel’s room. Her uncle enjoyed giving her false dates for his returns: Returning early cut short the reprieve of his absence; arriving late dashed her hope that he’d perhaps met with a most deserving end while away. And he had done this before: making up a trip only to take a drive in the country and come home in a mere few hours, claiming that he’d changed his mind because he missed his family too much.
In her own room, she hurriedly shoved the travel guide in the drawer that held her undergarments. Three years ago her uncle had purged his house of all books written in the English language, except the Bible and a dozen tomes of fiercely fire-and-brimstone sermons. She’d since found a few books that had accidentally escaped the eradication and guarded them with the fearful care of a mother bird who had built her nest in a menagerie of cats.
The book secured, she went to the nearest window overlooking the driveway. Oddly enough, parked before the house was not her uncle’s brougham, but an open victoria with seats upholstered in jewel blue.
A gentle knock came at the door. She turned around. Mrs. Ramsay, Highgate Court’s housekeeper, stood in the open doorway. “Miss, there is a Lady Kingsley calling for you.”
Squires and local clergy occasionally called on her uncle. But Highgate Court almost never had women callers, as her aunt was well-known in the surrounding area for her exceptionally delicate health and Elissande’s was equally well-known—thanks to her uncle’s strategic public comments—as unspareable from the former’s sickbed.
“Who is Lady Kingsley?”
“She has taken Woodley Manor, miss.”
Elissande vaguely recalled that Woodley Manor, two miles northwest of Highgate Court, had been let some time ago. So Lady Kingsley was their new neighbor. But ought not a new neighbor leave a card first, before calling in person?
“She says there is an emergency at Woodley Manor and begs that you will receive her,” said Mrs. Ramsay.
Lady Kingsley had come to precisely the wrong person then. If Elissande could do anything for anyone, she’d have absconded with her aunt years ago. Besides, her uncle would not appreciate her receiving guests without his permission.
“Tell her that I’m busy caring for my aunt.”
“But, miss, she is distraught, Lady Kingsley.”
Mrs. Ramsay was a decent woman who, in her entire fifteen years at Highgate Court, had yet to notice that both of the ladies of the house were quite distraught too—her uncle had a knack for hiring servants who were loyally unobservant. Instead of holding her head high and conducting herself with a modicum of dignity, perhaps Elissande too should have succumbed to vapors once in a while.
She took a deep breath. “In that case, you may show her into the drawing room.”
It was not her habit to run from distraught women.
* * *
Lady Kingsley was almost beside herself as she recounted her faintly biblical tale of a plague of rats. After her recital, she needed an entire cup of hot, black tea before the greenish pallor faded from her cheeks.
“I am very sorry to hear of your trial,” said Elissande.
“I don’t think you’ve heard quite the worst part of it yet,” answered Lady Kingsley. “My niece and nephew have come to visit and brought seven of their friends. Now none of us have a place to stay. Squire Lewis has twenty-five of his own guests. And the inn in the village is full—apparently, there is to be a wedding in two days.”
In other words, she wanted Elissande to take in nine—no, ten strangers. Elissande tamped down a burble of hysterical laughter. It was a great deal to ask of any neighbor of minimal acquaintance. And Lady Kingsley didn’t know the first thing of how much she was asking from this particular neighbor.
“How long will your house remain unusable, Lady Kingsley?” It seemed only polite to inquire.
“I hope to make it suitable for human habitation again in three days.”
Her uncle was supposed to be gone for three days.
“I would not even think of putting forward such a request to you, Miss Edgerton, except we are in a bind,” said Lady Kingsley, with great sincerity. “I have heard much of your admirable devotion to Mrs. Douglas. But surely it must be lonely at times, without the companionship of people of your own age—and I’ve on hand four amicable young ladies and five handsome young gentlemen.”
Elissande did not need playmates; she needed funds. By herself she had a variety of paths open to her—she could become a governess, a typist, a shop woman. But with an invalid to feed, house, and care for, she needed ready money for any chance at a successful escape. Would that Lady Kingsley offered her a hundred pounds instead!
“Five handsome, unmarried young men.”
The desire to laugh hysterically returned. A husband. Lady Kingsley thought Elissande wanted a husband, when marriage had been Aunt Rachel’s curse in life.
There was never a man present in all her dreams of freedom; there had always been only her, in glorious, splendid solitude, replete in and of herself.
“And have I mentioned yet,” continued Lady Kingsley, “that one of the young men staying with me—in fact, the handsomest one of them all—also happens to be a marquess?”
Elissande’s heart thudded abruptly. She did not care about handsome—her uncle was a very handsome man. But a marquess was an important man, with power and connections. A marquess could protect her—and her aunt—from her uncle.
Provided that he married Elissande within three days—or however short a period of time before her uncle returned.
Very likely, wasn’t it? And when she’d hosted ten guests her uncle had not invited—a blatant gesture of rebellion such as she’d never dared—and fallen short of her goal, what then?
Six months ago, on the anniversary of Christabel’s death, he had taken away Aunt Rachel’s laudanum. For three days Aunt Rachel had suffered like a woman forced to endure an amputation without chloroform. Elissande, forbidden to go to Aunt Rachel, had pummeled the pillows on her bed until she could no longer lift her arms, her lips bloody from the bite of her own teeth.
Then, of course, he’d given up on his attempt to detach Aunt Rachel from her laudanum, an evil to which he had introduced her. I simply can’t bear to have her suffer anymore, he’d said, in the presence of Mrs. Ramsay and a maid. And they had believed him, no questions asked, never mind that it was not the first, the second, or even the fifth time this had happened.
At dinner that evening, he had murmured, At least she is not addicted to cocaine. And Elissande, who hadn’t even known what cocaine was, had been so chilled that she’d spent the rest of the night huddled before the fire in her room.
The chance of success: infinitesimal. The cost of failure: unthinkable.
She rose from her seat. The windows of the drawing room gave a clear view of the gates of the estate. It had been years since she last ventured past those gates. It had been at least twice as long since her aunt last left the manor itself.
Her lungs labored against the suddenly thin air.
Her stomach wanted very much to eject her lunch. She gripped the edge of the window frame, dizzy and ill, while behind her Lady Kingsley went on and on about her guests’ civility and amiability, about the wonderful time to be had by all. Why, Elissande didn’t even need to worry about securing provisions for them. The kitchen at Woodley Manor, well removed from the house, had been spared from the rats.
Slowly Elissande turned around. And then she smiled, the kind of smile she gave her uncle when he announced that, no, he wouldn’t go to South Africa after all, when she’d finally come to believe that he truly would, following months of preparations she’d witnessed with her own eyes.
Lady Kingsley fell quiet before this smile.
“We shall be only too glad to help,” said Elissande.
Chapter Three
Aunt Rachel showed no reaction at the news: She dozed on.
Elissande smoothed limp strands of graying hair behind the older woman’s fragile ears. “It will be all right, I promise.”
She laid an extra blanket of soft wool over Aunt Rachel—Aunt Rachel, thin as poorhouse porridge, was always chilled. “We need to do this. It is an opportunity that will not come again.”
Even as she spoke she marveled at the remarkable timing of Lady Kingsley’s plague of rats, almost as if the rats had known the hour of her uncle’s departure.
“And I’m not afraid of him.”
The truth didn’t matter one way or the other. What mattered was that she should believe in her own valor.
She knelt down by the bed and took Aunt Rachel’s small, fine-boned face into her hands. “I will get you out of here, my love. I will get us both out of here.”
The chance of success was infinitesimal, but it wasn’t nil. For now, that would have to do.
She pressed a kiss to Aunt Rachel’s sunken cheek. “Congratulate me. I am to be married.”
* * *
“We need to get married,” said Vere to his brother.
Lady Kingsley had two carriages but only one team of horses. So the ladies had gone off first to Highgate Court, leaving the gentlemen behind to wait for their transport.
His At Night Page 2