Sherry Thomas - His At Night

“No. The last time I saw Maggie—your Mrs. Watts—she was after having a cable from him. He was stinking rich and coming home to make her a grand lady. Mind you, I was happy for her, but I was mighty sorry for myself. I was wanting her to marry me. She had a few years on me but she was a good woman, Maggie Watts, and sang real pretty, sure she did. But she wouldn’t want a poor sailor like me when her nephew was going to build her a grand place in the country and have her presented to the queen, would she?

“I left on a steamer to San Francisco. And when I came back—” Dooley’s jaw tightened. “When I came back she was already in the ground.”

“I’m awful sorry.” Vere did not need to manufacture his sympathy. He knew it all too well, the grief and bewilderment of loss.

Dooley did not answer for a while, but laid out two cups—the unchipped one for Vere—and sliced half a loaf of dark bread. Although the tea leaves had been boiled with the water, the tea Dooley poured was hardly darker than lemonade—like everything else for sale on the street below, the tea leaves too were secondhand.

“Thank you, sir,” said Vere for his tea.

Dooley sat down heavily. “It bothered me all these years how she died—bothers me to this day.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, sir, how did she die?”

“The coroner’s report said she died of too much chloral. Fell asleep and never woke up again. I tried to tell the coroner that she never had any such thing about. She was a hardworking woman who slept like the dead at night—you should have heard her snoring. ’Course, it didn’t help me any that I said that, made her sound like a loose woman. The coroner—that fool—said that a woman would put that sort of thing away before she entertained a man in her ‘place of domicile,’ and I should leave the cause of death to men of science.”

“You don’t fink it was chloral?”

Dooley’s face was troubled. “I asked all her neighbors. There were two young girls. They said she was cold—not stone-cold but real cool—and still breathing when they found her. They called for a doctor, but the doctor was a quack and didn’t know anything.”

He left his seat again and retrieved the book Vere had thought a devotional from the shelves. It was in fact titled Poisons: Their Effect and Detection—A Manual for the Use of Analytical Chemists and Experts. Dooley opened the book to a much dog-eared portion. “The way she was sleeping, going colder and colder, that was chloral. And if the doctor was himself a proper doctor, some strychnine could have saved her.”

Strychnine caused otherwise deadly muscular convulsions. Yet it was for precisely that reason it was an antidote to an overdose of chloral, aiding the heart’s function and putting a halt to the dangerous slide of body temperature. A shot of strychnine had been what the physician had administered in the Haysleigh case—for which Vere had needed much help from Lady Kingsley—to successfully save Lady Haysleigh.

“So it was chloral after all?”

“It was. I’d have sworn before a judge she never used any. But the coroner said she had a good thirty grams, even showed me the bottle.” Dooley closed the book, his neck bent. “Maybe I didn’t know her as well as I s’posed.”

“I’m sorry,” Vere said again.

As he took a sip of his hot but largely flavorless tea, he was suddenly reminded of a long dormant case concerning a man named Stephen Delaney. Delaney, too, had died from an overdose of chloral. But as Delaney had not been a poor woman carrying on an affair the coroner found distasteful, but an ascetic man of science—not to mention brother to a bishop—his death had received much more attention from the law when his family had strenuously protested that he had never kept any chloral.

Nothing had come of the investigation. By the time Vere had read the file, seven years ago, it had been thick with a decade of undisturbed dust. And even he had to concede, when he finished his reading, that there was nothing for anyone to go on.

“Here I go again,” said Dooley, “getting caught up talking about my poor Maggie when you wanted to hear about your dad.”

“If he’s me dad, then she was me auntie too—me great-grandauntie.”

“There’s that. There’s that.” Dooley set his thick, calloused hands on the book of poisons. “But I can’t tell you much more.”

“Didn’t you say he was going to come and see her and make her a grand lady?”

“He never did. His secretary came, but he never did.”

Vere had to fight to make himself sound deflated. “His secretary?”

“That’s what Fanny Nobb said. She said a real fine gentleman came to see Maggie a few days before she died. Your dad had to stay behind in Kimberley, in the diamond fields, so he sent his secretary to take care of things in London. The secretary was to look for a fancy house for Maggie and take her to buy everything she wanted. Maybe that was why she needed the chloral—too wound up to sleep.”

Vere’s heart thumped. Instead of the brawler Edmund Douglas, “a real fine gentleman” had come in his stead. And shortly afterward Mrs. Watts had died of a substance her lover was certain she had never used.

If his suspicions were right, if Douglas had not even come by the diamond mine by his own luck, then in a twisted way, his hunger for success in other arenas of business made sense. He was trying to prove that he did have what it took to thrive without the help of his criminality—except he didn’t.

“Me dad, did he come for Mrs. Watts’s funeral then?” Vere asked.

“Not enough time, was there? She died in July; had to put her underground real fast. But he did wire the money for her funeral expenses, Fanny said.”

“The secretary, he didn’t come to the funeral either?”

“I can’t tell you. I was in San Francisco, drunk as a skunk. Sure I was.” The old man sighed. “I thought about it a few times—looking up your dad and maybe telling him about my Maggie. But I never did. Never helped him any, and didn’t want him to think I was after his money.”

Vere nodded and came to his feet. “Thank you, Mr. Dooley.”

“Sorry I couldn’t tell you more.”

“It was plenty what you did tell me, sir.”

Dooley offered Vere his hand. “Good luck to you, young man.”

Vere shook Dooley’s rough hand, aware that this was where his disguise might fall apart: He didn’t have the hands of a workingman. But Dooley, still in the grips of the past, did not notice.

For Dooley there would never be justice enough: He had already lost the woman he loved. But Vere might yet uncover the whole truth of what had happened to Mrs. Watts.

And that was what he would do.

The interior of the church was stone, the architecture Norman Romanesque. A gray, damp light fell from the windows of the clerestory. Here and there the cool gloom of the sanctuary was dispelled by the golden light of fat white candles, held aloft on candelabra as tall as Vere.

Freddie, who had been waiting outside, entered with Mrs. Douglas, helping her into a pew. Lady Kingsley came up to the altar and gave Vere a small nod—she would act the part of the matron of honor.

The church door opened and closed again, accompanied by a draft of humid, nippy air—the arrival of the woman who was to become Lady Vere in short order. Vere swallowed, agitated despite himself—and not merely with righteous indignation.

She was halfway down the aisle when he at last looked in her direction.

She wore the plainest wedding gown he’d ever seen, unadorned by anything lacy, feathery, or glittery. Her accessories consisted of a bouquet of violets in her hands, a veil covering her hair, and her smile.

He did not like her but he had to admire her, for it was the most beautiful smile he’d ever seen on the face of a bride. Nothing gloating or boastful to it, only a simple and shyly serene joy—as if she were marrying the man of her dreams and could not believe her sheer good fortune.

He turned his head away.

The ceremony lasted and lasted—the clergyman was the wordy sort who saw no reason to abbreviate his homilies, even though the irregular nature of the proceedings must be obvious. The rain, which began at the same time as the ceremony, had intensified to a steady shower by the time Vere and his bride emerged from the church, arm in arm.

He handed her into the waiting carriage, then climbed in himself. She was surprised when the carriage door closed behind him. Her gaze flickered to him. In the sudden tightness of her posture he sensed her understanding—deep down—of what being married meant. That she would now be alone with him, and there would be no one to chaperone them.

No one to say what he could or could not do.

She smiled at him, a very proper, blissful-new-bride smile—it was her method of exerting control over any given situation. And yet he, who should—and did—know so much better, experienced once more an unwarranted flutter of happiness.

He tried to call to mind his once-constant companion, but he could no longer form an unpolluted image of her. Her simplicity had been spoiled by Lady Vere’s complicity, her warm ease distorted by his wife’s cold calculation.

He did not smile back at the woman he’d married. It occurred to him that there was quite enough time on the drive to the hotel—only two miles, but the rain was certain to cause delays in the traffic—for him to take her.

That would wipe the smile from her face.

Her fingers flicked away drops of rain that had landed on the glossy silk of her skirt. The material was heavy and chaste. She was swaddled, every single inch south of her chin. Even her hair was largely invisible beneath the veil. But he already knew what his sweet-faced liar looked like undressed, didn’t he?

If he lowered the window shades, he could disrobe her this moment, from the top down—or bottom up, if he were so inclined. Actions had consequences. These would be her consequences: horror, revulsion, and eventually arousal; her nakedness separated from the elements by nothing but the black leather-padded walls of a Clarence brougham; the sounds she’d make, under him, muffled by the hard drumming of the rain on the roof, the clacking and grinding of a torrent of carriages, and the continual din that was London being London.

She turned and looked out the rear window. “Ah, they are right behind us.”

As if it mattered.

He did not answer her, but turned his face toward the soggy world outside, while his bride sat still and breathed with quiet, meticulous care.

* * *

Elissande stood on the balcony of her suite at the very top of the Savoy Hotel. London was a muted, distant murmur. Light from Victoria Embankment rippled on the dark waters of the River Thames. The great spires of the city rose tall and black against the shadows of the night.

She had been married four hours.

She’d describe her marriage thus far as hushed.

She’d also describe it as long.

His silence had been nerve-wracking on the drive back to the hotel. There she’d discovered that neither Lady Kingsley nor Lord Frederick would join them for dinner: The former was in a hurry to get back to her guests, the latter, having recently accepted a commission, needed to gather the necessary matériel to begin his work. After she’d seen to Aunt Rachel’s dinner and put her to bed, she and Lord Vere had dined alone in a private room and he’d said not a word to her—not a single word—beyond a barely audible “Amen” at the end of grace. And now this interminable wait in their suite, which, while in terms of absolute time had yet to surpass the length of dinner, already had her in a state of head-throbbing tension.

Or perhaps that was the three glasses of champagne that she’d tossed back one after another.

Had she never read the book on matrimonial law that had once been in her uncle’s library, perhaps she would now be tentatively rejoicing that she was both married and blessedly left alone. But with knowledge came fear: an unconsummated marriage carried severe risks.

Had her uncle returned to Highgate Court yet? Had he learned what had happened and set out in pursuit? Was he even now hunting them in London?

And where was Lord Vere? Smoking? Drinking? Gone elsewhere by himself, even though a small suitcase of his had been delivered to the suite?

What if her uncle should locate her husband, sit him down for a talk, and point out all the obvious reasons why he did not want to be married to Elissande? Once he had Lord Vere convinced, it was only a short hop to an annulment, which would leave her with no husband, no protection, and not even the right to brag of having ever been married.