The Shock Box

by Jill Harris

  There it was then. She had a plan of sorts.

  She lit a candle on the writing desk with her spark lighter, and prepared to make notes on Captain Hughes. First she had to assess his condition, a task which would take an amount of guesswork. Even without examining him properly, she could make several inferences about his well-being from what she'd observed so far.

  Adeline had purchased new sheets of letter writing paper, and a new leather bound notebook before she left London. Earlier she'd fetched them from the trunk along with her quills and ink, and spread them over the desk. So, now she began to scratch out the letters which needed to be written.

  After writing a cheerful note to her cousin requesting a visitation, she sealed it in an envelope and put the letter aside. She'd ask Hoxley to post that for her the next morning. With luck, it would arrive the following afternoon at the latest.

  Adeline turned the focus of her attention to the Captain.

  It was however, hard to begin. There was so much to say about him. His steely gaze and massive arms. His fine hands, with their strong fingers.

  An odd feeling of heat washed over as she recalled the image of them kissing enclosed in the trickery of crystal. On top of that, she was surprised to find her head whirling when she thought of him.

  And it made writing anything objective about him a supreme effort of will.

  For some unknown reason, just thinking of him made the hairs on the back of her neck stiffen. Why did he make her thoughts roil in her mind like a restless ocean?

  She put her hand over her heart as if to stop it racing in her chest. She'd never known such a thing, such a reaction to a stranger. Perhaps it was the way he looked at her when he first stepped out of the shadows in the library? As if all the power of his intellect was trained towards her like a beacon.

  She stood up and paced back and forth from the fire to the desk.

  Adeline Winslow had to keep her head. She knew his type. A man who was always alert to his surroundings, and constantly assessing others for signs of weakness or rebellion. All signs that he was a seasoned soldier, she reminded herself firmly, which meant also that he was a killer. A man who'd looked death in the face many times. She thought of his dark grey eyes, the way they turned blue when he looked at her, as if he could see right into her soul.

  Who was this man?

  He came across as arrogant despite his injuries. Once he'd been a commander of men yet now he lived a virtual recluse in this ancient castle overhanging the sea. Captain Hughes was definitely someone who thought he was above the common herd. A man who liked to control others however he pleased. That was it. Adeline's throat felt dry and she poured another glass of water, suddenly warm despite the chill. He wanted to control her.

  Adeline spoke the truth when she told him she didn't think he was insane. Despite his ranting about ghosts and whatnot, she could tell his feet were on the ground.

  Pain was the key.

  She'd known many men, good men, men who were driven to madness by physical pain. It could break down a person"s critical mind. Push aside their resistance to superstitious ranting. For the mind needed something to cling to when agony plagued it.

  Chapter 22

  She composed herself, patted her hair, and sat back down at the desk, tapping the quill in the ink-pot. Adeline was in no doubt. There was more to Captain Hughes than he dared express. A deep expanse of emotions hinted at by the multitude of small, yet discernible expressions clouding his features from moment to moment. She'd watched him carefully at dinner, noting these things about him, as well as the artful grace of his fine features.

  Her notes however, must maintain a medical tone. She must report only her objective observations.

  She wrote in her graceful, sloping hand.

  Physical Observations.

  The Captain has a pale skin tone, no doubt due to prolonged periods of time indoors.

  He sports a thick, dishevelled head of hair showing signs of greying at the temples.

  His clothes are fine yet somewhat crumbled about the edges.

  It is the conclusion of his nurse that he does not pay proper attention to self care.

  Treatment for this - he is in need of some grooming to bring him to a standard expected of a robust gentleman.

  Despite this, his overall appearance is one of an athletic...

  She paused while she considered his physique.

  ... and well-proportioned body with no obvious loss of musculature despite his injuries.

  Notes on Captain's Hughes' Injuries:

  He has a pronounced limp of the left leg.

  He leans heavily on a cane for support whilst walking.

  This is due to the loss of this limb below the knee.

  It assumed from regarding his discomfort when walking or standing, that he has been fitted with an uncomfortable prosthesis.

  Treatment - the false leg needs examination, and possible replacement.

  The patient complains of a painful wound (on the left thigh?) yet refused an initial examination.

  A need to attend to this injury is the first aspect of the plan for healing the Captain.

  This will be followed by the ordering of a new prosthesis.

  Once he no longer suffers the pain and discomfort in his leg, it is plain that he will be well on the way to a full recovery.

  The Captain is a tall person of a little over six foot...

  Adeline paused once again to consider how he towered her over like an angry troll.

  He must once have been a fine horseman when one considers the powerful muscles of his thighs.

  She did consider them for a while.

  And then she concluded:

  He has a strong back, due no doubt to his time in the military. This has given him years of training his spine into a straight bearing.

  During his recovery, he must learn not lean on his cane so that his balance is restored and he will once again walk upright.

  Adeline wondered idly what Miss Nightingale would make of the Captain. Florence, however, was not a woman much taken by the stature of men. She preferred them lying down in bed where she could attend to them without fuss.

  On a new page of the notebook, she continued:

  Character Observations.

  Before Adeline could write down what she thought of the Captain"s personality, she took time to think deeply on the matter. She blotted the previous sheet.

  The wind roared.

  She dipped her quill in the ink, wiped it on the side of the ink-pot.

  Captain Hughes has an overbearing presence. It is difficult to separate the emotional effects of this from the actual reality of his true self.

  Adeline chewed the tip of her quill for a moment.

  He was an arrogant and annoying man.

  Of that she was assured. His watchful nature led him to play ridiculous tricks on his unsuspecting guests. His reasons for doing this were probably beyond simple amusement. Perhaps, she wondered, he wanted to see whether he could trust a new acquaintance or not.

  It occurred to her that the Captain's dislike of social pleasantries probably came down to a naturally rebellious and awkward nature. This was something she had no intention of meddling with or criticising. It was the part of him which kept him from diving head first into the slough of despond, indeed probably the part of him which would have led a lesser man to follow his mother off the cliff to his untimely demise.

  The Captain is for the most part, self-contained, and aloof.

  He projects a restrained attitude, rather like an over-trained stallion. Yet every so often the guarded facade slips. When that happens, he is prone to fits of rudeness and morbidity.

  He appears to be of the opinion that he is being plagued by a demon.

  He was overheard talking to someone who wasn't there - in other words, the Captain has conversations with himself - and is convinced he is talking to a spirit.

  A simple explanation for this mental aberration is that he himself has a demonic or
dark side to his character. One that he pretends is nothing to do with him and which is therefore beyond his control.

  This is consistent with his past experiences.

  As the child of notoriously unconventional parents, he had no siblings to help him cope.

  In the opinion of this nurse, he probably developed an attachment to an 'invisible friend' of some kind during early childhood. This would have helped him overcome his solitary condition.

  This 'friend' has been reborn after the Captain's traumatic experiences on the battlefield and re-appeared as a 'demon' after he nearly died at Balaclava. This 'demonic being' now provides him with a useful prop, acting as a separate identity upon which the Captain can blame the worst excesses of his temperament.

  It should also be considered that Captain Hughes is a man who was reported by an army physician as having died during the notorious massacre of cavalrymen at Balaclava.

  This mistake in diagnosis has given him a good excuse for brooding, and an unnatural fascination with ghosts and suchlike.

  Moreover, all these things can be explained when one considers that men of his class, background, and breeding are often highly strung, impatient, and ill-at-ease in the company of others.

  When she finished her notes, Adeline tidied away her things, got into bed, and blew out her candle. The mattress was hard. She wriggled about, but it remained rather like lying on a stone floor.

  The wind moaned, and the house seemed to close in around her. There were plenty of creaking, scuttling, banging noises, such as one would expect from a rapidly disintegrating mansion hanging over a raging sea.

  She realised she should also have written a letter to her Aunt, whose company she missed greatly. Theodora would know exactly how to deal with the Captain. However, Adeline reassured herself with the knowledge that she'd had an excellent teacher in the ways of difficult men, and would definitely send off a note to her Aunt to that effect as soon as she had time.

  Adeline tossed and turned, unable to sleep on the lumpy mattress. But it was more than just the bed. She had a creeping feeling up her spine, an inexplicable sensation that something was out there in the wind and the rain.

  Something that was coming for her.

  Yet, despite the fear rising inside her, eventually she closed her eyes, and the peace of slumber descended.

  Chapter 23

  Branwell Hughes sat through the night, wide-awake in the library. The wind raged around Raven's Nest. The fire was smoking because he hadn't had the chimneys swept in a decade. His thigh had ceased its infernal throbbing agony for the last hour, although that was almost as much of a concern as if it had just carried on hurting him as it always did.

  He glared out the windows as another flash of lightening cracked the night open. Branwell glowed inside as thunder shook the house. He liked the storm. Revelled in it.

  What worried him was that the demon was quiet that night, and dinner had been exceptional. On the surface, all was well in his world.

  Yet the woman in his house was disturbing his reverie.

  Ever since the fateful day when he was wounded and the demon attached to him, Branwell had been an insomniac. Often, the long night hours were filled with pain, so mostly he didn't bother to go to bed at all. His habit was to fall asleep sometime in the early hours in his favourite chair by the fire with a book open on his lap.

  Adeline's arrival had played havoc with this routine. For instance, he never used the dining room, always taking his meals in the library. Yet, for some unearthly reason, he'd wanted to make a good impression on her. Heaven knew why.

  She was only another servant.

  Branwell rubbed his chin. In actual fact, according to all records, Miss Winslow was not only a servant - she was also, confusingly, a lady. It was obvious from her voice, her fine accent softened slightly by Devonshire rolls of the tongue, which excited his blood more than he cared to admit even to himself. Her soft, enunciated vowels rang with the diction of the upper classes but not too harshly.

  Without further ado, when dinner was over, Branwell had come to his library to look her up properly in his Burke's Peerage, the finest encyclopaedia of the landed gentry. Turned out that Miss Winslow was the last descendant of what had once been a fine Devonshire family. A family which, until a few generations back, had been a wealthy branch of the Winslows of Exeter. Good stock with a sturdy lineage, the Winslows had been landowners since Doomsday, with acres of fertile red soil, and a grand mansion on the Devon/Somerset border.

  That was all before some dissolute eldest son gambled it all away. Miss Winslow's great-grandfather owned half of the southern coast of Devon, and retired a much respected admiral of the fleet. By the time her grandfather inherited it all and discovered the gin palaces, whore-houses and gaming hells of London, it was already too late. When the money was gone, Miss Winslow's father, a younger son, was left virtually penniless. He'd bought a small cottage on Dartmoor, and raised his family there.

  There was even a Duke on Miss Winslow's maternal side. Branwell raised his eyebrows at that, since even his own family tree had not come quite so close to the Crown. Branwell traced Miss Winslow's erstwhile relatives through its many threads, turning the pages and straining his eyes at the thick, parchment pages of Burke's Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage. Her tarnished reputation after that affair with a married man, did nothing to smear her blue blood credentials in Branwell's eyes.

  He considered her once proud lineage was reason enough to dine with her. Naturally, his father would be rolling in his grave at such a thing, but this new knowledge of Miss Winslow only gave Branwell another good reason to break bread with her. And actually, he reasoned to himself, even if her blood had been as ordinary as Hoxley's, he would have done so.

  For Adeline Winslow, with her skin like porcelain, and her flashing dark eyes was most certainly not the average serving wench with an eye on his fortune, and a heaving bosom. Which is of course, exactly how his father would have seen her.

  Not that. Branwell sighed, glaring around the cluttered the room. Perhaps Miss Winslow was something worse, something far more dangerous than a woman in search of an easy fortune by way of marriage to an invalid.

  For Branwell could not forget the fact that Miss Winslow had seen something in the scrying ball. And when she did, a delicate triangle of green, a loving emotion burst out of her chest followed swiftly by orange circles of confusion, tinged with black. She had seen them both kissing and was filled with love, sorrow, conflict. It made no sense. Branwell's mother always told him that only those touched by magic would be able to see things in the crystal. The ball had been a game, something to entrance the new nurse over dinner, but he'd never expected anything to happen. Branwell himself, a man cursed with the gift of second sight since birth had stared into for many hours over countless years - and seen nothing.

  What was she? He pondered this question until a throbbing headache seemed to spread throughout his body. Perhaps she was in league with the demon?

  He looked up as a shadow flickered on the edge of his vision. The smell of Miss Winslow's perfume had stubbornly remained in the room. He hauled himself up from the chair, stalking across the room to refill his glass with more brandy. Infuriating woman, looking down her nose at him as though he was some poor boy trapped in a thorn bush. At the same time, the sight of her made his heart pound, despite the drab clothes she wore. His mind kept wandering off to what she might look like in colourful silk until he thumped his tumbler of whiskey down on the desk, spilling most of it in the process. Branwell mopped at it with his sleeve.

  How much more of her presence in his house could he take? Could he stomach her bothering him beyond despair with her constant questions about his health?

  Possibly.

  But her requests to see his cursed wound were beginning to get to him. He'd been expecting a matronly type to turn up at his door, not this siren of beauty with her clear-minded intellect, and her disturbingly sensible attitude towards the invisible things
that plagued him, and her dismissive attitude towards his metaphysical troubles burned a raging hole in his stomach.

  He poured himself another drink and gulped it down. The fiery liquid gave more fuel to his smouldering irritation. How dare she doubt his word?

  There were more things in heaven and earth than in her restricted, and humdrum philosophy. He decided to tell her that when they met the next morning. In an effort not to forget it, he wrote it down in a notebook he kept to record his most illuminating insights.

  And the way she set her pert little chin when she thought he was wrong.

  Him. Branwell Henry Fortescue Hughes. Wrong. In his own house.

  Who did she think she was? He was her superior socially and in every other way. She was a mere woman. A nurse.

  A nurse should be passive and docile, receptive and gullible. Everything, in other words, that Miss Winslow was not. She was more like an angry bluestocking who had read far too many books for her own good.

  Yet, his mind kept drifting to the idea of running his hands over her dark hair. Brushing her lips with his. Kissing her neck and moving downwards. Undoing her corset, button by button.

  He wondered how soft her skin might be, how it would taste...

  Determined to distract himself from such thoughts, Branwell picked up his favourite book on Egyptology. The agony of his wound abated even more, which was rare as to be uncanny. He glanced around the room.

  Perhaps the demon had finally given up wrestling for his soul and left. Or perhaps it really had been no more than a mental apparition, one that had run its course. Branwell sank deeper into his leather chair with a sigh, propped his feet - one real, one wooden, upon on the hearth. The sound of the flames spitting as the wood burned, sent him into a light slumber, which was a pleasure he'd almost forgotten.