His At Night

by Sherry Thomas

  He stroked her hair, the warmth of his touch as lovely as that of a cashmere scarf. But his words made no sense—she needed air.

  “Inhale slowly, and not too deep. Same when you exhale.” His hand was now on her back, a subtle pressure that calmed her.

  She did as he asked. Soon it became apparent that he was right. Controlling her intake of air, a course of action that ran entirely counter to her intuition, soothed her nerves. The numbness and tingling went away; the tightness in her chest dissipated, as did the wobbliness in her head.

  He helped her sit straight. Her eyes still hurt slightly at the corners, but she no longer saw dancing spots—only him. He looked worn, his expression a slight frown, but his gaze was steady and kind.

  “Better?” he asked.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  His fingers barely touching her, he turned her face to inspect it. “The bruises will be ugly. You should be in bed—it’s been a very long day.”

  Was it only this morning she’d awakened full of boundless optimism for the future, certain that every piece of her life had at last fallen into place? How could so much be destroyed in so little time?

  “I’m all right,” she muttered mechanically.

  “Are you?”

  She could not hold his gaze. Her eyes dropped to her own hands. “Is he back in custody?”

  “He was.”

  Her chin jerked up. “Was?”

  He hesitated.

  Her hand gripped the scroll arm of the chaise longue. “Has he escaped again? Please tell me he has not escaped again!”

  Her husband glanced away briefly. When he looked back at her, there was a certain emptiness to his eyes. “He is dead, Elissande. He committed suicide at the police station. Some sort of poison pills—cyanide, most likely. We’ll have to wait for the coroner’s report to know exactly what he died of.”

  Her jaw dropped. Her breaths once more turned wild and uneven.

  “Slowly,” he had to tell her, his hand on her arm. “Or you might get dizzy again.”

  She counted as she breathed. She could force her diaphragm to obey, but inside her rib cage, her heart pounded away in shock.

  “You are—you are sure it was not a ruse?”

  “I was there in person. He is as dead as any of his murder victims.”

  She rose; she could no longer remain seated. “So he couldn’t bear to face the consequences of his own actions,” she said, her voice sounding infinitely bitter in her own ears.

  “No, he couldn’t. He was a coward in every way.”

  She pressed two fingers to the place between her brows—hard. It hurt. But nothing hurt as much as the truth. “And he was my father.”

  Everything she believed of herself had been turned on its head.

  Something was pressed into her hands—a generously filled glass of whiskey. She wanted to laugh: Had Vere forgotten her limited capacity for liquor? Instead she had to bite her lip to force back tears.

  “He abused Andrew and Charlotte Edgerton to me every chance he had. I understood that even were the two judged kindly, most people would still see Charlotte Edgerton as loose and her husband foolish. Yet—”

  She blinked hard. “Yet I loved them—I believed them dashing and larger-than-life. I imagined that as they drew their last breaths, their greatest regret was that they could not watch me grow into womanhood.”

  Instead, when her father drew his last breath, his greatest regret must have been that he could no longer torment Elissande and her mother to his heart’s content.

  The thought seared her. Instead of generous, affectionate, if overly impulsive Andrew Edgerton, her father was a man who laughed gleefully at the possibility of her having to raise a passel of moronic children.

  She saw her reflection in the mirror on the wall. Her husband was wrong. It was not that her bruises were going to be ugly, they already were: red welts turning purple, a cut across her lips, one of her eyes swollen nearly shut.

  Her own father had done this to her, with distinct pleasure at her pain and injury.

  She had believed freedom was as easy as physically escaping Highgate Court. But how did she escape this? For as long as she lived, Edmund Douglas’s blood would pulse in her, a daily reminder of the unbreakable ties of kinship that now forever bound her to him.

  She turned away from the mirror, pushed the glass of whiskey back into her husband’s hand, and made for the door. Up the stairs, down the corridor, into her room. She opened the treasure chest and took out all the mementos she had so cherished over the years.

  “Elissande, don’t do anything rash,” said Vere.

  She had not even heard him, but he was in her room with her.

  “I’m not going to damage them.” Even if the mementos no longer held the same meaning for her—it was a knife in the heart to look upon them and remember the life she believed she could have had if only Andrew and Charlotte Edgerton had lived—her mother would still wish to have a few keepsakes by which to remember her sister. “I only want to burn this chest.”

  “Why?”

  “There is a secret compartment in the lid. When I was a little girl he showed me the key slots and told me that one day I would find the keys. I know now what’s in it.” She had to clench her teeth against an upsurge of disgust; she felt entirely unclean. “It must be his diary.”

  And the painting that had hung in her room at Highgate Court, with the thorny red rose arising from a pool of his blood, that had been his hint to her all along, hadn’t it?

  “This chest would produce a great deal of fume in the grate,” said her husband. “I have the keys for the compartment. Why don’t I open it instead?”

  She stared at him; she’d forgotten his field of expertise. “When and where did you find the keys?”

  “One in the safe at Highgate Court, when we visited after our wedding, the second tonight on Douglas’s person.”

  He left briefly to retrieve the other key from his room. She set the chest on top of her dresser. He fitted in the keys and turned both at the same time. The bottom of the lid sprang open half an inch or so. He carefully pulled it down until a small, cloth-wrapped package slid into his palm.

  Opening the square of blue broadcloth revealed a leather-bound volume, with the initials G. F. C. embossed in a corner.

  “There is a note here for you.”

  “What does it say?” She did not want to touch anything that had been in Douglas’s hands.

  “‘My Dear Elissande, Christabel Douglas never died. Ask Mrs. Douglas what happened to her. And—’” Her husband stopped and glanced at her. “‘And may I live forever in your memory. Your father, George Fairborn Carruthers.’”

  It was as if Douglas had punched her again. At least he need no longer regret not silencing him sooner with the chloroform. He always meant to have the last laugh from beyond the grave.

  She grabbed the diary from Vere’s hands and threw it across the room. “God damn him!”

  The tears that she’d tried to keep back streamed down her face. They burned where Douglas had hit her.

  “Elissande—”

  “That’s not even my name.”

  She’d always loved her name, which combined Eleanor and Cassandra, the names of Charlotte and Andrew Edgerton’s mothers. She’d relished the care and thought that had gone into its creation, the exotic, musical syllables, the aspirations that Charlotte and Andrew Edgerton must have had for their daughter to bestow such a grand name on her, one not every girl could carry off.

  Much of her life she had seethed in powerlessness. But never had she felt as powerless as she did this moment—stripped of everything that had ever mattered to her.

  Behind her, her husband placed his hands on her arms. Then, very gently, he wrapped his arms about her middle and held her against him.

  And she wept for all her broken dreams.

  * * *

  When she had no more tears, he disrobed her and changed her into her nightdress. Then he lifted her, ca
rried her to her bed, and tucked her in.

  He extinguished the light and left her room. She lay with her eyes open, staring into the shadows, wishing she hadn’t been too proud to ask him to remain with her for a little longer. But to her relief—and a bittersweet moment of happiness—he came back in the next minute.

  “Are you thirsty?” he asked.

  She was. He pressed a glass of water into her hand—that must have been what he’d left to get. She drank almost the entire glass and thanked him. He pulled a chair next to her bed and sat.

  Perhaps he was right. Perhaps she was grateful for every little kindness shown her. But this was no little kindness on his part, to stay with her on the darkest night of her life.

  He took her hand in his. “Elissande.”

  She was too worn-out to remind him that Elissande was not her name.

  As if he’d heard her, he said, “It’s beautiful, this name with which your mother rechristened you.”

  Her heart skidded. She had not thought of it that way.

  “It’s beautiful for all the hope with which she endowed it, the bravest moment in an otherwise timid life. That she dared to hide her daughter in plain sight is testament of her love for you.”

  She’d believed that she had no more tears. Yet her eyes prickled hotly again as she remembered her mother’s desperate valor.

  “Do not forget it, Elissande.”

  Tears spilled from the corners of her eyes, past her temples, into her hair. “I won’t,” she murmured.

  He gave her a handkerchief. She held on tight to it—and with her other hand she held on tight to him.

  He skimmed the back of her hand with his thumb. “When I did my reading on the artificial synthesis of diamonds, every article I came across mentioned the fact that a diamond consists solely of carbon, which makes it kin to both blacklead and coal. Douglas is your father—I don’t dispute that. But whereas he is nothing but a lump of coal, you are a diamond of the first water.”

  She was hardly that. She was a liar and a manipulator.

  “Your mother would not have lived to this day were it not for you—of that I have no doubt. When she was defenseless, you defended her.”

  “How could I not? She needed me.”

  “Not everyone watches out for the powerless. You would have profited far more by flattering Douglas—or you could have left by yourself. It takes moral fiber to do the right thing.”

  She bit the inside of her lip. “Keep talking and soon I will believe myself a paragon of virtues.”

  He chortled. “That you are not, and probably never will be. But you have both strength and compassion, neither of which Douglas understood or possessed in the least.”

  He smoothed away the wetness at her temple, his touch as light and careful as a miniature painter’s brushstrokes.

  “I have watched you these past days. A life under Douglas could easily have made you brittle, anxious, and resentful. But you have been incandescent. Don’t let him take it away from you. Laugh at him instead. Have friends, have books, have a ball with your mother. Let him see your days suffused with pleasure. Let him see that even though he devoted his life to it, he’d failed to ruin yours.”

  More tears tumbled into her hair. Mrs. Douglas was right: Elissande was a fortunate woman. The man she’d wronged the most had turned out to be a true friend.

  She thought of her mother, safe and sound in her room, never to be mistreated again. She thought of herself: still her own mistress—that would not change. She thought of the coming morning—even the darkest night did not last forever—and surprised herself with a desire to see the sunrise.

  “You are right,” she said. “I will not let him diminish me from beyond the grave, just as I never allowed him to take a piece of my soul while he yet lived.”

  * * *

  When Vere was sixteen, he and Freddie were summoned from Eton to attend their father on the latter’s deathbed.

  Being a dying man had not rendered the marquess any less vitriolic than usual. With Freddie in the room, he had instructed Vere to marry soon and reproduce fast, so that there would be no chance for the title and the estate to pass on to Freddie.

  Vere had held his tongue because of the presence of a physician and a nurse. But he’d grown angrier and angrier as the evening progressed. Finally, deep in the night, he could stand it no more. His father might be at Death’s door but he needed to be told that he was a despicable man and a wretched excuse for a father.

  He made for the marquess’s bedchamber. The nurse had nodded off in the next room but the door to the marquess’s bedchamber was ajar, leaking both light and voices into the passage. He peeked in and recognized the rector by the man’s vestment.

  “But—but—but, my lord, that was murder,” stammered the rector.

  “I knew bloody well it was murder when I pushed her down the staircase,” said the marquess. “Had it been an accident, I wouldn’t need you here.”

  Vere saw black. He gripped a wall sconce for support. Eight years before, his mother had died of what everyone believed to be an unfortunate fall from the grand staircase of the marquess’s London town house. She’d stayed out too late, had a little too much to drink, the heels of her dancing slippers had caught, and down she had gone.

  Her death had devastated Vere and Freddie.

  Her blood had had nothing of the Norman purity her husband so prized in himself; her father, despite his superlative wealth, had ranked in the marquess’s eyes as little more than a peddler. But she had been no wilting flower. The only child of an extraordinarily wealthy man, she’d known very well that her dowry paid the marquess’s debts and kept the estate afloat. And she’d protected her children, especially Freddie, from the marquess’s unpredictable and often virulent temper.

  The marquess and the marchioness’s mutual loathing had been common knowledge. The spendthrift marquess had already depleted the considerable dowry his wife had brought into the marriage and was in debt again. Vere’s maternal grandfather, Mr. Woodbridge, no fool, provided for his daughter’s needs directly: her gowns, her jewels, her trips abroad so she and her children could get away from her husband.

  Yet despite all the domestic tension, no one had ever suspected foul play in her death. Or at least, no one had ever dared to accuse the marquess himself of it. Six months later the marquess married again, a lesser heiress this time, but one who had already come into her inheritance—no pesky father-in-law this time.

  While the record was firmly set that the first marchioness’s death had been an accident, pure and simple.

  And so Vere had believed, until that heinous moment. He wanted to hide. He wanted to run. He wanted to kick open the door and stop the proceedings. But he was frozen in place, unable to move a single muscle.

  “I assume you have repented, my lord?” asked the rector, his voice squeaking.

  “No, I would do it again if I had to—I couldn’t stand her another minute,” said the marquess. He laughed, a wheezing, horrible laugh. “But I suppose we must go through the formalities, mustn’t we? I tell you that I’m sorry and you tell me all is well on God’s green earth.”

  “I can’t!” the rector cried. “I cannot condone either your action or your unrepentant ways.”

  “You will,” said the marquess, his spite inexorable. “Or the world would finally learn why you are the confirmed bachelor you are. For shame, Reverend Somerville, carrying on with a married man, damning his eternal soul to hell even as you damn your own.”

  Vere turned and walked. He could not stand to listen to the marquess have his way one last time, not after he already got away with murder.

  The marquess’s funeral was a dreadful occasion, thickly attended, his lofty character and good deeds lauded to the rafters by those who either didn’t know or didn’t care what he truly had been: a fiend.

  The night after the funeral, Vere had his nightmare for the very first time. Never mind that he’d never seen the scene of his mother’s death; he would
now find her cold and broken at the foot of the staircase again and again and again.

  * * *

  Three months later, Vere broke down and confided in his great-aunt Lady Jane.

  Lady Jane listened with sympathy and sensitivity. And then she said, “I’m so sorry. It devastated me when I learned of it from Freddie. And yet it devastates me no less to hear it again from you.”

  Her revelation shocked Vere almost as much as the truth behind his mother’s death.

  “Freddie knew? He knew and he didn’t tell me?”

  Lady Jane realized her mistake but it was too late. Vere refused to allow her to retract her knowledge. Eventually she gave in.

  “Freddie was worried about your reaction. He feared you might kill your father if you knew—not an unjustified concern, based on what I’ve seen so far,” said Lady Jane. “Besides, he believes your father already adequately punished.”

  When Freddie was thirteen, so the story went, he had gone to their father’s room one night, after the marquess had confiscated one of his favorite sketches, in the hope of stealing it back. Apparently the marquess, believing the sounds Freddie made to indicate the presence of his first wife’s ghost, had been terrified.

  Vere was beside himself. How dense could Freddie be, to think that their father suffered any twinge of regret, let alone fear? The man who’d threatened to expose the rector’s homosexuality had been no penitent and deserved no one’s forgiveness.

  Two years Freddie had known it, two years during which Vere could have made his father’s life a living hell. That, to him, would have been Justice, or at least some measure of it. To have been denied it…to have been denied it by Freddie of all people…

  Perhaps Lady Jane saw true potential in Vere. Perhaps she only wished that he would stop with his rants on Truth and Justice. In any case she returned his confidence with one of her own: She was an agent of the Crown whose life’s work had been to unearth truth and restore justice. It was too late for Vere’s mother. But might he find some solace in helping others?

  He said yes immediately. Lady Jane advised that in order to turn himself into someone no one took seriously—an enormous asset to a covert agent—he should adopt a pose. She suggested the guise of a hedonist. Vere balked. He’d never been one to overindulge his senses. More important, despite his loneliness, he did not want to be near crowds any more than he must. And who’d ever heard of a secluded hedonist?