by Lex Croucher
‘Miss Campbell, this is none of your concern.’ There was not an inch of give in Thomas’s voice, which was rough with fury.
‘Hmmm . . . Not entirely true, I’m afraid, but I’ll leave you to your lovers’ tiff.’ Frances picked up both abandoned glasses of champagne and saluted them as she went. ‘Good luck, George.’
Georgiana’s hair was half undone. Her sheet was listing off one shoulder, exposing part of her shift. Her lips were stained with wine, her mind foggy with gin, and an excruciating headache was beginning to pick away at her left temple.
In contrast, Thomas seemed perfectly sober – upright and resplendent in his anger. The only fault she could find with him was that one curl had fallen out of place, and despite his expression, all she wanted to do was push it back behind his ear.
‘I didn’t poison her,’ she said, her head finally forming the words and transporting them to her lips.
‘Then what happened?’
‘It’s not . . . It’s not poison, Thomas. It’s just something Frances took – I took. She’s not dying. She’ll be all right.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Thomas said, pressing his fingertips to his forehead as if he had a headache just as hideous as Georgiana’s. ‘Let me get this straight – are you saying that you did slip something into her drink?’
Georgiana did not seem to be explaining herself very well, but her grasp on their conversation was so insubstantial; all she wanted to do was lie down right there on the patio and sleep, or die – whichever happened to come first.
‘No! No. It was Frances. Frances did it, she told me to take it to her, I just gave her the drink – but I didn’t know there was something in it.’
‘So it didn’t seem at all suspicious to you that Frances Campbell wanted you to give Betty Walters a drink, out of . . . What? Out of the kindness of her heart?’
‘No!’ Georgiana said, but he was right – how could she not have seen it? ‘You’re not listening to me. It wasn’t me. It was Frances’s fault, it was all Frances—’
‘So Frances forced you to stand Miss Walters up, and leave her alone, waiting for you, at a party at which she knew next to no one? Frances held you at gunpoint, I suppose, and forced you to say dreadful things to Betty when clearly the poor girl has been nothing but kind to you?’
He didn’t just look angry anymore; he looked disappointed and hurt, which were both infinitely worse.
‘No,’ Georgiana said, desperately. ‘No, but if it weren’t for Frances—’
‘You can’t blame Frances for all the world’s ills, Georgiana – and nor for all of yours. Betty Walters is extremely upset and might be gravely hurt, because she was abandoned and belittled and – and let down, by somebody she considered a friend. And it wasn’t Frances, Georgiana. It was you.’
Tears coursing down her cheeks, Georgiana tried to speak – stopped – opened her mouth again, then realised she had absolutely nothing to say in her defence.
Thomas shook his head, and then left her standing there without another word.
Chapter Twenty-Four
G
eorgiana could not imagine that anybody in the world was more pitiful than she was at this very moment. She thought vaguely that plague-stricken orphans might have come close to feeling this destitute – but then, they had probably never been to a party, and perhaps it was better to have never been to a party at all than to have experienced one as disastrous as this. She could hear all manner of merriment taking place around her, but she was so thoroughly miserable that not an ounce of it could raise her spirits; if anything, it irritated her further to know that others were still enjoying the night, without worrying that they had angered almost everybody they held dear in the course of one short evening. Tears fell freely as she staggered through the house forlornly, feeling like the drunken ghost at the feast.
She wanted to leave immediately, but there was the small matter of transport to deal with. She had arrived in Cecily’s carriage, but so far, Cecily was nowhere to be found. She spotted many fair and golden heads among the dancers, but none of them belonged to her friend. She wasn’t playing cards with any of the suspicious-looking men and women in the drawing room; she wasn’t in the horse’s bedroom; she wasn’t swimming in the lake half-dressed or harassing the swans, although quite a few people were.
Georgiana almost tripped over a huge form lying across the grass by the patio, and went to apologise tearfully to whoever she had almost kicked, before realising that it was not a horizontal drunkard; it was an absolutely enormous dog. It did not seem at all perturbed by the goings-on around it, and was looking up at Georgiana quite calmly, its head resting on large brown paws. She looked around for an owner, and saw none. She assumed this must be part of Lord Haverton’s menagerie, probably dislodged from its palatial kennel by people looking for a clandestine place to hide.
‘Good evening, dog,’ she said, and more tears sprang to her eyes.
She sat down beside it and buried her fingers in its thick, musty fur. The dog gave a little sigh of contentment.
‘Everything has gone so terribly wrong,’ she whispered in its ear.
The dog did not judge her, and it did not get up and walk away. It seemed to accept her completely, no matter how dreadful a person she was starting to suspect she was, and she spent a while enjoying its quiet, sighing company and petting it by way of thanks.
When she finally got up to leave, the dog giving her a gentle farewell lick on the hand, inspiration struck; she had seen Cecily eyeing up horsey James earlier, and the orangery was still glowing attractively in the distance. If they had gone looking for somewhere more private, surely that would have been their destination? Georgiana set off across the garden with purpose, swearing under her breath each time she stumbled over the end of her sheet, which was occurring rather frequently as it became more hem than dress.
The orangery was vast, and beyond the entryway where she and Thomas had spoken earlier there was a small wooden slatted path, which wound through the trees and presumably continued on to the other side. Branches and leaves pressed against her as she walked along it; the heat only intensified the farther she went, and the smell of citrus was so overwhelming that Georgiana felt as if she had genuinely been transported to some tropical locale. She pushed past a rather obnoxious tree that had almost cut off her route, and turned a corner to find another circular clearing.
It was occupied. Not by Cecily and James, but by Jeremiah Russell, who seemed to have ridded himself of his friends and was smoking moodily, his shirt half-undone, the leaves that had adorned his hair rumpled and mostly lost to the exploits of the evening.
He turned to look at Georgiana with mild interest as she knocked some dirt off her glove, and she felt a rush of fury and indignation at the sight of him.
‘That’s probably bad for the oranges,’ she spluttered angrily.
She had quite a lot she wanted to admonish him for, and smoking something pungent was the least of his sins, but she supposed she had to start somewhere.
‘It’s probably bad for me, too, but that doesn’t seem enough to stop me,’ he replied.
He did seem genuinely morose and withdrawn compared to his usual self; but if he was at all upset by how things had turned out between him and Frances, then that was entirely his doing.
‘Well . . . good. I hope you keel over and . . . and die of consumption,’ she said, crossing her arms and scowling at him. ‘I heard what you said to Frances, you know.’
‘Oh, did you indeed?’
He got to his feet and Georgiana suddenly realised how inebriated he was – even more so than her. He wore it differently – he did not stumble, or fumble his words – but his eyes were so bloodshot they looked crimson in the low light, and every movement was undertaken in slow motion, as if he were wading through water. He still walked with purpose despite it all, while she trembled with exhaustion, feeling that her legs might give out at any moment.
‘I did, and I think it was foul. You are foul. Y
ou can’t pretend you didn’t know what you meant to her, Jeremiah, and we all saw how you were together. You don’t understand—’
‘No,’ he said, and his voice was suddenly a lot less languid. ‘You don’t understand. You are not the sole heir to a vast estate, Miss Ellers. You are not . . . There are things I cannot . . . I know you think it’s all terribly glamorous, terribly easy, but there are responsibilities upon my shoulders that you could never dream of. When I marry, it will not be a matter of love, or attraction – it will be a matter of business. You cannot enter a partnership with someone . . . someone irresponsible, someone constantly on the verge of passing out in a hedgerow, someone who has no limits. She’s simply not the right sort, Georgiana. But then’ – he narrowed his eyes and sneered a little as he cocked his head to one side to consider her – ‘you cannot see the difficulties – you, I imagine, being heir to . . . what . . . ? A single cow? A single cow and a lightly used box of your father’s chewing tobacco?’
‘How can you stand there with a smile on your face and be so atrocious!’ Georgiana suddenly had no idea what she, or Frances, or Annabelle Baker, or anybody at all had ever seen in this arrogant, pompous arse. ‘You
. . . You utter bastard!’
‘Oh, don’t be like that, George.’
He was suddenly standing much too close to her, although Georgiana hadn’t even really seen him move. The smell of alcohol on his breath was so potent that she felt dizzy just from the fumes. She was uncomfortably aware of how truly alone they were – how entirely concealed from view. It made her shiver, even in the warm, humid air, as Jeremiah looked her up and down. He seemed to be seeing her for the first time – noticing how precariously wrapped her dress was, how dishevelled and unsteady she looked.
‘Don’t call me that,’ she said weakly, taking a step back and self-consciously pulling the sheet up so that it covered more of her chest. ‘You don’t get to call me that.’
He laughed, and the sound grated against her nerves. She felt desperate panic beginning to constrict her lungs; it felt ridiculous to run, to scream, when he hadn’t done anything. He was just drunk. Maybe this uncomfortable moment would be over in an instant.
‘Christ, what are you wearing? Come here,’ he said, his voice a low, dangerous rumble.
Georgiana took a small step backwards. ‘No.’
‘Come here,’ he repeated sharply – and this time Georgiana did try to run.
She didn’t take her dress into account, and her legs tangled in it immediately; she braced herself for the impact of the ground, but it didn’t come. Instead he caught her painfully by the wrists, and dragged her upright. Still, she thought wildly – perhaps he was just steadying her. Perhaps this was all a misunderstanding, and any second now he’d let her go. She tried to pull away, but his hands gripped her like a vice, and she felt all the breath go out of her in her shock. She realised she had been waiting for something to interrupt them, for somebody to come to her rescue, as Frances had inadvertently back at Bastards’ Cottage when Christopher had cornered her – but it didn’t come.
He pulled her to him and kissed her, hard. She froze in place, hoping that it would discourage him, but her lack of reciprocity did not seem to inconvenience him in the slightest. One hand still held her tightly by the wrist, but the other went to her neck, ignoring the fact that she shuddered at his touch, tracing down to her collarbone, then gripping her so hard that she wondered distantly if he had broken the skin, leaving her shot through with wounds the exact size and shape of his fingertips.
His hand started to move farther down her chest, and she gasped indignantly against him as she felt his fingers move under the fabric of the sheet and grope wildly at her. Some part of her mind reassured her that this could not be happening – but the pain insisted that it was. He pulled at her sheet one-handed and it occurred to her that he might be trying to take it off. She took a deep breath so she could scream – so she could try something, anything – and then suddenly, mercifully, she heard the sound of someone crashing through the trees behind them. Whoever it was, they were moving away, but it was enough of a distraction that Jeremiah loosened his grip for a moment, whipping around to see who might have discovered them.
A moment was all Georgiana needed. She picked up what remained of her skirts and ran clumsily in the opposite direction, unable to feel relief even when the night air hit her, unable to stop until she had put some distance between her and the smell of the orange trees. One of her shoes caught on the lawn and fell off, and she paused briefly to kick off the other, sprinting in her stockings until she couldn’t run any farther.
She had made it close enough to the house to be within shouting distance of other people, and that point of relative safety was where she finally collapsed. She sank onto a low wall, trying to breathe, her sobs catching in her throat.
Jeremiah did not seem to have followed her. She couldn’t see him – he wasn’t at the door of the orangery, wasn’t coming back up the slope towards her – there was no imminent need to escape. She couldn’t quite imagine him running after her, trying to grab her in full view of the guests, but then he was so well respected and well loved by all; perhaps they simply would have watched, silently, as he dragged her away.
This thought, however irrational, made her blood run cold. She got unsteadily to her feet, anxious to be home, wishing more than anything that she had arranged for the Burtons’ carriage to provide her an easy exit. Her chest felt constricted, and there was something urgent and searing rising from her stomach as if she might vomit at any minute; no matter how hard she tried to breathe evenly, she couldn’t stop taking rough, gasping gulps of air instead.
She thought of Cecily and her carriage again, immediately exhausted at the prospect of having to resume the hunt, but wanting to be as far away from Jeremiah Russell as possible. She knew that in time, she would be angry beyond words – she could feel it curled up inside her, just out of reach – but now that the worst of her fear had begun to abate, all she could feel was nausea and fatigue.
She was so very done with this night, and by extension with everybody here. She could not bear to experience one more thing, one more inebriated person or inane conversation or glass of wine; she needed her house, her bed, and the familiar sound of Mr Burton’s snoring through the wall to lull her to sleep.
It was strange to feel claustrophobic on an estate that must have spanned seven or eight hundred acres. She looked back compulsively over her shoulder as she walked, to make sure there was still no shadow behind her, no footsteps gaining on her – and instead, she saw Frances.
She was quite a distance away, standing at the edge of what had been the makeshift battlefield, looking out over the sloping lawns that led down to the lake; but it was unmistakably her, the moonlight picking out the delicate outline of her white, flowing dress.
Georgiana thought for a moment that perhaps she should go to her. Not to try to unravel the mess of their friendship, all the necessary apologies and arguments and explanations – she was too far past the point of exhaustion to even know where to begin – but because it was dawning on her that Frances might be the only person who would truly understand. She remembered the dreadful expression on Frances’s face when she and Jonathan had run to her aid back at the cottage, and all at once knew with grim certainty what Jeremiah had truly done.
She realised with a wilting of her shoulders that she could not find the words to speak to Frances tonight. Her wrist was raw and red, her neck smarting where Jeremiah had gripped it. It would all have to wait until the morning. She was utterly spent.
‘You look dreadful.’
A voice jolted her from her thoughts, and she looked up to see Lord Haverton standing there, magnificent in a new costume of what looked like real leaves coated in a thin veneer of gold. His tone was not accusatory or cruel, he was simply stating a fact.
‘Yes,’ she replied, knowing she sounded wholly defeated.
‘You’re not having fun,’ he added.
This was not phrased as a question.
‘Er . . . No, not really,’ Georgiana said, thinking that this was the understatement of the century.
‘You must go home, then. The party is over for you.’
Georgiana smiled at him weakly. ‘I have no carriage,’ she replied. ‘I cannot find my friends.’
He studied her for a moment.
‘I have a carriage,’ he said. ‘I want it back, mind. I’m quite fond of this one. And the man who drives it.’
Georgiana felt such overwhelming relief that she took a clumsy step forward and hugged him. She realised a second too late that this was probably a vast overstep, and began to apologise as she let go, but he just patted her fondly on the head as if she was an unruly dog and then sent her on her way.
His handsome carriage driver did not question her, did not even look at her askance when she climbed into the ornate white vehicle looking as if she had crawled out of her own grave; he simply asked for her address, and then they were away.
She was extremely grateful to him for this small kindness, and for his continuing silence as she lay back against the cushions and closed her eyes, happy to be putting distance between herself and the most hideous night of her life.
Chapter Twenty-Five
G
eorgiana arrived home long after the Burtons had gone to bed, and awoke early the next morning with a deep sense of unease, courtesy of a lurching stomach and hours of disjointed nightmares. She kept returning to the terrible images of Betty, hurt and betrayed; Frances’s hands, shaking in her bedroom at Bastards’ Cottage; Jeremiah, leering at her through the dark; Betty, tricked and poisoned and sobbing hysterically as good Samaritans carried her away.
The sun was only just rising; even the soft, pink light of it was vaguely offensive to her pounding head. She dressed quickly and quietly, then went downstairs to request the carriage be brought around in hushed tones, before her aunt could awaken and forbid it.
Of all the people Georgiana had ever encountered on earth, Miss Walters deserved cruelty the least. Her mind was still in disarray, but she knew that if she was going to put anything in her life right, she had to start with Betty.