She did not hit him. That was certainly to be the basis for her beatification someday, because anyone less than a saint would have done him terrible injury by this point.
She accompanied him to his door, going so far as to open it for him.
“‘Good night, good night, parting is such sweet sorrow.’” He bowed again and tipped sideways, banging into the doorjamb. “Who wrote that, do you remember?”
“Someone quite dead, sir.”
“I suspect you are right. Thank you, Miss Edgerton. You’ve made this an unforgettable night.”
She pushed him into the room and closed the door.
* * *
Aunt Rachel was asleep, of course—laudanum let her escape life. Sometimes—a great deal of times lately—Elissande was tempted herself. But she feared the grip of laudanum. Freedom was her only goal. It was no freedom to be wretchedly dependent on a tincture, even without her uncle about to withhold the bottle at his whim.
A night and a day remained to her. Her freedom was no closer now than it had been two days ago. In fact, it was infinitely farther away than it had been during those giddy hours when she’d seen Lord Vere but not yet heard him speak at length. And Lord Frederick, kind, good, amicable Lord Frederick, was in his own way as unobtainable as the moon.
Her risk-it-all gamble appeared doomed to failure. She simply did not know what to do anymore.
“Go,” Aunt Rachel suddenly whispered.
Elissande approached the bed. “Did you say something, ma’am?”
Aunt Rachel’s eyelids fluttered but did not open. She was mumbling in her sleep. “Go, Ellie. And do not come back!”
When she was fifteen, Elissande had left once. And those had been the precise words her aunt had whispered into her ear before she walked the five miles to Ellesmere. The branch line at Ellesmere took her to Whitchurch. The regional line at Whitchurch took her to Crewe. From Crewe, she had been only three hours from London.
At Crewe, however, she had broken down.
By the end of the day she had returned home, walking the same five miles to reach Highgate Court a half hour before her uncle came back. Aunt Rachel had said nothing. She’d only wept. They’d wept together.
“Go,” Aunt Rachel said again, more faintly this time.
Elissande pressed her hands into her face. She must think harder. She must not let a little obstacle such as her inability to attract a proposal stand in the way. Surely God had not let loose a plague of rats on Lady Kingsley for nothing.
Her head came up. What had Lady Avery said this evening? She had caught a man and a woman in a cupboard in a state of undress and they’d had to marry.
Lady Avery could catch Elissande and Lord Frederick together, in a state of undress. And then they would have to marry.
But how could she do this to Lord Frederick? How could she deliberately entrap him? Her uncle was the one with all the subtlety, all the cruelty, and all the manipulativeness. She never wanted to be like him.
“Ellie,” her aunt mumbled in her troubled sleep. “Ellie. Go. Do not come back.”
Elissande’s heart clenched. Apparently a lifetime spent under her uncle’s thumb had not left her untainted. Because she could. She could do this to Lord Frederick. She was capable of using him to save herself and Aunt Rachel.
And she would.
* * *
From his room Vere monitored Miss Edgerton’s return to hers. After the light under her door disappeared, he waited five minutes before venturing into the corridor, tapping once at Lady Kingsley’s door as he passed.
Mrs. Douglas slept. He unlatched the painting and swung it out of his way. Lady Kingsley arrived in time to hold the light for him while he re-picked the lock of the outer safe door—he’d instructed Nye to lock the safe before he left, or the painting wouldn’t latch properly.
This time, the lock took him only one minute to pick. Lady Kingsley, who’d stood guard for Nye while Vere kept Miss Edgerton away, had the numbers for the combination lock. She turned the dial and pulled open the inner door.
And it was well worth the effort.
The contents of the safe documented Edmund Douglas’s history of failure. The diamond mine was legitimate. But after his one remarkable find in South Africa, his subsequent business ventures—seeking to capitalize on his new fortune—had achieved nothing but massive losses.
“My goodness, he’s a glutton for punishment, isn’t he?” Lady Kingsley marveled.
He was and it did not make any sense to Vere. Why did Douglas persist in these investments? Ought not a man learn after five or seven times that he had been simply a lucky bastard where the diamond mine was concerned and stop trying to recapture the lightning?
“If you tally everything together, he might be in debt,” Lady Kingsley whispered excitedly. “See, he does need money. There’s our motive.”
What excited Lady Kingsley even more was a dossier written in code, a far more complicated code than the mere shifting around of letters.
If one assumed that Edmund Douglas himself had committed his secrets in code, then he possessed a very fine penmanship indeed. The more Vere learned of Douglas, the more unlikely the man became. Understated home, refined appearance, elegant handwriting, not to mention educated speech—his niece’s speech contained nothing of the Liverpool docks. Could a fortune in South Africa truly alter a man so much?
“A hundred quid says all the evidence we need is in here,” said Lady Kingsley.
Vere nodded. He felt around in the interior of the safe. Ah, they had not exhausted its secrets yet. There was a false bottom.
The compartment beneath the false bottom contained only a drawstring pouch. Vere expected to find it full of diamonds; instead he found finished jewels.
“Rather ordinary, aren’t they?” said Lady Kingsley, fingering a ruby necklace. “I would say a thousand pounds for everything inside, at most.”
An image of Miss Edgerton suddenly came to him, Miss Edgerton with her bare throat, bare wrists, bare fingers. He’d never realized it before, but she wore not a single piece of jewelry, not even a cameo brooch. A singularly odd thing for the niece of a man who mined diamonds.
As he returned the pouch to the safe, however, he noted that he was mistaken. There was something else in the hidden compartment, a tiny key, less than an inch in length, with a great many notches along a spine as slender as a toothpick.
Lady Kingsley held the key up to the light. “If this is meant for a lock, then it’s a lock I can snap in two with my bare hands.”
They replaced everything except the coded dossier, which Lady Kingsley wanted to keep.
“Are you taking it to London in the morning?” Vere whispered, bypassing his exhausted vocal cords.
“I can’t leave all my guests and go away for eight hours. And you’d best not either. Or Douglas’s suspicion will fall squarely on you should he find it missing before we can get it back to the safe.”
She left first with the dossier. Vere closed and locked the safe. When he’d pushed the painting back into place and latched it, he turned around—and froze.
Miss Edgerton, when she’d come to check on her aunt, must have added coal to the grate. In the firelight, Mrs. Douglas lay with her eyes wide open, staring at him.
Any other woman would have screamed. But she remained eerily quiet, even as her eyes bulged with terror.
Vere moved carefully, inch by inch toward the door. She closed her eyes, her whole person shaking.
He took a deep breath, slipped out the door, and listened. If Mrs. Douglas was going to recover her voice and scream, she would do so now. The service stairs were near, he’d escape that way to avoid the guests her bloodcurdling shrieks were sure to bring.
But no sounds came from Mrs. Douglas, not a gasp, not a wheeze, not even a whimper.
He walked back to his room, completely unsettled.
* * *
The longcase clock gonged the hour, three brassy chimes that quavered in the dark, still air.
It was always three o’clock.
The ormolu banister was cold. The tall palm trees that his father was so proud of were now ghosts with long, swaying arms. One frond scratched against the back of his hand. He shook with fright.
Still, he kept descending, feeling his way down one step at a time. There was a faint light at the foot of the stairs. He was drawn to it, like a toddler to a deep well.
He saw her feet first, delicate feet in blue dancing slippers. Her gown shimmered, faintly iridescent in the light that came from nowhere. An arm, with its long white glove that reached past her elbow, lay across her torso.
Her white shawl curled slack about her shoulders. Her coiffure was ruined, feathers and combs embedded pell-mell in a tangle of dark knots. Her much-envied five-strand sapphire necklace had flipped itself and now draped her mouth and chin—a bejeweled muzzle.
Then, and only then, did he notice the impossible angle of her neck.
He was sick to his stomach. But she was his mother. He reached out to touch her. Her eyes suddenly opened, eyes empty yet petrified with fear. He reared back, his heel caught against the first rise of the staircase, and down he went.
Down, down, down—
Vere bolted upright in his bed, gasping. The dream recurred periodically, but never quite like this. He had somehow juxtaposed Mrs. Douglas’s terrified eyes onto his old nightmare.
His door opened. “Are you all right, Lord Vere? I heard noises.”
Miss Edgerton, a shadowed silhouette on the threshold.
For a moment he was seized with the mad desire to have her next to him, her hand caressing his cheek, telling him that it was only a dream. She would coax him to lie down, tuck him in, and smile—
“Oh, no, gosh, no, I’m not all right!” he said forcefully. “How I hate that dream. You know the one, where you are searching for a water closet high and low and there isn’t one anywhere in the house—and no chamber pots and not even a proper bucket. And there are crowds in every room, and out in the gardens, on the lawn, and—Oh, good gracious, I hope I haven’t—”
She made a choked sound.
“Oh, thank God,” he continued. “Your beddings are safe. But if you will excuse me, I must—”
The door closed decisively.
* * *
In the morning everyone drove over to Woodley Manor for a look at the disgusting mountain of dead rats. The rat catcher, with his exhausted rat dogs, a triumphant ferret, and an incomprehensible accent, proudly twirled his dark, luxuriant mustache as he posed for Lord Frederick’s camera, commemorating the occasion.
“My staff is already hard at work,” said Lady Kingsley to Elissande. “There is much to do, but they assure me the house will be fit for habitation by tomorrow. I promise you we shall remove ourselves the moment it is the case.”
Elissande saw the handwriting on the wall. There was no more time left. Something must happen.
She must make something happen.
God helped those who helped themselves.
Chapter Seven
Elissande had inherited a few things from her parents: a set of her mother’s silver combs, a bottle of perfume blended especially for Charlotte Edgerton by Parfumerie Guerlain, her father’s shaving brush, a bundle of letters tied in lilac ribbon, and a small oil painting of a female nude.
She was sure Lord Frederick would appreciate seeing the painting. She hadn’t shown it to him for one very significant reason: She was afraid that the subject might be her mother, and one simply did not go around letting gentlemen look at one’s mother in such a state of exposure.
But now she was throwing all scruples to the wind.
“My goodness, but it’s a Delacroix!” exclaimed Lord Frederick.
She was unfamiliar with the name; the books on art that the library had once housed had concentrated on the art of classical antiquity and that of the Renaissance. But judging by Lord Frederick’s expression of delight and reverence, a Delacroix was nothing to sneer at.
“Do you really think so, Lord Frederick, that it is a Delacroix?”
“I am almost one hundred percent sure.” He brought the small painting even closer to his eyes. “The signature, the style, the use of color—I would be shocked if it weren’t a Delacroix.”
His enthusiasm quite infected her. It must be a sign from above. How else could her treasure chest, which contained nothing of value—except the sentimental kind—prove so startlingly helpful on this very day?
“It is exquisite,” Lord Frederick murmured, enraptured.
She stared at him, similarly enraptured by her sudden stroke of good fortune.
“How did you come to have a Delacroix?” Lord Frederick asked.
“I haven’t the remotest idea. I suppose my father must have purchased it. He lived in Paris during the early seventies.”
“I don’t think so,” scoffed Lord Vere.
Lady Kingsley had letters to write. Lady Avery and the young ladies had gone to Ellesmere. Most of the gentlemen had departed to shoot what grouse there was to be had at Woodley Manor. Lord Frederick had declined, citing a lack of interest in badgering the poor birds. Lord Vere, who had originally declared his intention to go, had, to Elissande’s simmering exasperation, subsequently changed his mind to keep his brother company.
As a result, he sat at the other end of the morning parlor, playing solitaire. Elissande had done her best to ignore his presence, but now she had no choice but to turn her head his way. He did not look up from the cards he’d laid out—and they were not for a game of solitaire, but simply one long line from which he was now turning random cards faceup.
“I beg your pardon, sir? You don’t think my father lived in Paris?”
“Oh, I’m sure he did, but I’m not so sure he came by his Delacroix honestly,” said Lord Vere nonchalantly. “Lady Avery was chewing on my ears at dinner last night. She told me that your grandfather was a great lover of art and that your father stole some pieces from him before he ran away with your mother.”
Elissande was overcome for a moment. Her uncle had said plenty of unpleasant things about her parents, but at least he had never accused her father of thievery.
“Please do not speak ill of the dead, my lord,” she said, her voice tight with fury.
“Telling what happened in truth isn’t speaking ill of someone. Besides, it’s a fascinating story, what with your mother having been a kept woman and all. Did you know she was your great-uncle’s mistress before she married your father?”
Of course she knew that. Her uncle had made sure she understood well the ignominy of her parentage. But it was the worst breach of manners for Lord Vere to speak of it publicly, with such carelessness for the ramifications.
For the very first time Lord Frederick, red at the ears, spoke in censure of his brother. “Penny, that’s enough.”
Lord Vere shrugged and gathered his cards to reshuffle them.
There was a long, awkward silence. Lord Frederick broke it—lovely, lovely Lord Frederick. “I do apologize,” he said softly. “Sometimes my brother gets his stories confused. I’m sure he’s quite mistaken about your family.”
“Thank you,” she murmured gratefully.
“No, it is I who should thank you, for the chance to admire a Delacroix when I least expected it.” He handed the painting back to her. “What joy such beauty brings.”
“I found this among my father’s things last night. We have trunks and trunks of my father’s possessions. Perhaps I can unearth some more.”
“I would dearly love to see what else you can find, Miss Edgerton.”
“She’s not wearing anything,” said Lord Vere, suddenly next to her. She had not heard him get up from his chair at all.
“It’s a nude, Penny,” Lord Frederick explained.
“Well, yes, I can see that: She’s not wearing anything.” Lord Vere leaned in farther. “Except a pair of white stockings, that is.”
His arm practically brushed her hair. She would have expected
his clothes to reek of tomato sauce—he’d had quite an incident with the sweetbread at luncheon. But he only smelled brisk and clean.
“It’s a study of the female form. It’s not prurient,” said Lord Frederick. “It’s not supposed to be prurient.”
Oddly enough, Lord Frederick flushed. But he quickly gathered himself. “And thank you again, Miss Edgerton, for the privilege. I hope you find more hidden treasures. I cannot wait to see them.”
“I will be sure to show you anything I find that very instant,” she said, smiling and rising. There was still much, much to do.
Lord Vere called after her, “I’d like to see them too if they look like this, wearing only stockings!”
She did not throw a vase at his head. Her canonization was now assured.
* * *
Miss Edgerton’s movements and gestures intrigued Vere. The way she sometimes played with the ruches on her sleeves. The way she touched her hair, as if deliberately drawing attention to the soft, shining mass of it. The way she listened to Freddie, with one index finger along her jaw, her torso slanted at a slight angle, so that it gave a clear but still discreet impression that she wished to be closer.
But nothing incited Vere—and repelled him—quite as much as her smiles. When she smiled, despite everything, his heart skittered.
There was a science and an art to manufactured smiles. He, too, was fairly accomplished at smiling, no matter what he truly felt. But she…she was the ceiling at the Sistine Chapel, the glorious, eternal, unsurpassable standard.
Where had she come by the ingénue charm and the virtuoso radiance? How did she manage to retain the honest naïveté in her eyes and the relaxed set to her jaw? Her smiles dazzled so much that sometimes he could not remember what she looked like otherwise.
But she had not smiled when she’d discovered that she’d sat on his lap. She had not smiled at any point during the ninety minutes his drunken antics had kept her away from her aunt’s room. She had not smiled at him just now, as he reveled in her less-than-desirable parentage. And for her, not smiling was akin to another woman leaving the house without her petticoats.
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