Sherry Thomas - His At Night

“But I’m tired.”

“Then I shall perform for you under your window. Is that not romantic?”

She’d rather stick sharp objects into her ears. “In that case, I’ll stay here and listen.”

He sang interminably. Long enough for a Hindu wedding. Long enough for a snail to scale Mont Blanc. Long enough for Atlantis to rise and sink again.

It was windy and chill—the temperature was in the forties. She shivered in her inadequate dinner gown, her bare shoulders and arms prickled with cold. He was loud and drunkenly off-key. And even the night sky conspired against her: no rain to force him back inside into his bed, and too much cloud haze to offer any stargazing.

Suddenly he stopped. She regarded him, astonished: She’d already accepted the possibility that he’d never stop. He bowed—nearly falling over in the act—and then looked at her expectantly. Apparently she was to clap. She did. Anything to get rid of him.

Her applause made him happy and he did not hesitate to tell her so. “I’m so glad to be a source of enjoyment to you, Miss Edgerton. I shall sleep better knowing your life is richer and more beautiful for my voice.”

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.

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.