Sherry Thomas - His At Night

She closed the book and clutched it hard. Three days ago she had taken her hairbrush and smashed her hand mirror. Two weeks before that she’d stared a long time at a box of white arsenic—rat poison—that she’d found in a broom closet.

She feared she was slowly losing her sanity.

She had not wanted to become her aunt’s nursemaid. She’d meant to leave as soon as she was old enough to find a post somewhere, anywhere.

But her uncle had known it. He had brought in the nurses, so that she’d see Aunt Rachel cower and cry from their maniacal “medical” treatments, so that she’d be forced to step in, so that loyalty and gratitude, otherwise lovely things, turned into ugly, rattling chains that bound her to this house, to this existence under his thumb.

Until all she had for escape were a few books. Until her days revolved around her aunt’s regularity or lack thereof. Until she threw her precious guide to Southern Italy against a wall, because her control over herself, the one thing she’d been able to count on, was eroding under the weight of her imprisonment.

The sound of a carriage coming up the drive had her gathering her skirts and rushing out of Aunt Rachel’s room. Her uncle enjoyed giving her false dates for his returns: Returning early cut short the reprieve of his absence; arriving late dashed her hope that he’d perhaps met with a most deserving end while away. And he had done this before: making up a trip only to take a drive in the country and come home in a mere few hours, claiming that he’d changed his mind because he missed his family too much.

In her own room, she hurriedly shoved the travel guide in the drawer that held her undergarments. Three years ago her uncle had purged his house of all books written in the English language, except the Bible and a dozen tomes of fiercely fire-and-brimstone sermons. She’d since found a few books that had accidentally escaped the eradication and guarded them with the fearful care of a mother bird who had built her nest in a menagerie of cats.

The book secured, she went to the nearest window overlooking the driveway. Oddly enough, parked before the house was not her uncle’s brougham, but an open victoria with seats upholstered in jewel blue.

A gentle knock came at the door. She turned around. Mrs. Ramsay, Highgate Court’s housekeeper, stood in the open doorway. “Miss, there is a Lady Kingsley calling for you.”

Squires and local clergy occasionally called on her uncle. But Highgate Court almost never had women callers, as her aunt was well-known in the surrounding area for her exceptionally delicate health and Elissande’s was equally well-known—thanks to her uncle’s strategic public comments—as unspareable from the former’s sickbed.

“Who is Lady Kingsley?”

“She has taken Woodley Manor, miss.”

Elissande vaguely recalled that Woodley Manor, two miles northwest of Highgate Court, had been let some time ago. So Lady Kingsley was their new neighbor. But ought not a new neighbor leave a card first, before calling in person?

“She says there is an emergency at Woodley Manor and begs that you will receive her,” said Mrs. Ramsay.

Lady Kingsley had come to precisely the wrong person then. If Elissande could do anything for anyone, she’d have absconded with her aunt years ago. Besides, her uncle would not appreciate her receiving guests without his permission.

“Tell her that I’m busy caring for my aunt.”

“But, miss, she is distraught, Lady Kingsley.”

Mrs. Ramsay was a decent woman who, in her entire fifteen years at Highgate Court, had yet to notice that both of the ladies of the house were quite distraught too—her uncle had a knack for hiring servants who were loyally unobservant. Instead of holding her head high and conducting herself with a modicum of dignity, perhaps Elissande too should have succumbed to vapors once in a while.

She took a deep breath. “In that case, you may show her into the drawing room.”

It was not her habit to run from distraught women.

* * *

Lady Kingsley was almost beside herself as she recounted her faintly biblical tale of a plague of rats. After her recital, she needed an entire cup of hot, black tea before the greenish pallor faded from her cheeks.

“I am very sorry to hear of your trial,” said Elissande.

“I don’t think you’ve heard quite the worst part of it yet,” answered Lady Kingsley. “My niece and nephew have come to visit and brought seven of their friends. Now none of us have a place to stay. Squire Lewis has twenty-five of his own guests. And the inn in the village is full—apparently, there is to be a wedding in two days.”

In other words, she wanted Elissande to take in nine—no, ten strangers. Elissande tamped down a burble of hysterical laughter. It was a great deal to ask of any neighbor of minimal acquaintance. And Lady Kingsley didn’t know the first thing of how much she was asking from this particular neighbor.

“How long will your house remain unusable, Lady Kingsley?” It seemed only polite to inquire.

“I hope to make it suitable for human habitation again in three days.”

Her uncle was supposed to be gone for three days.

“I would not even think of putting forward such a request to you, Miss Edgerton, except we are in a bind,” said Lady Kingsley, with great sincerity. “I have heard much of your admirable devotion to Mrs. Douglas. But surely it must be lonely at times, without the companionship of people of your own age—and I’ve on hand four amicable young ladies and five handsome young gentlemen.”

Elissande did not need playmates; she needed funds. By herself she had a variety of paths open to her—she could become a governess, a typist, a shop woman. But with an invalid to feed, house, and care for, she needed ready money for any chance at a successful escape. Would that Lady Kingsley offered her a hundred pounds instead!

“Five handsome, unmarried young men.”

The desire to laugh hysterically returned. A husband. Lady Kingsley thought Elissande wanted a husband, when marriage had been Aunt Rachel’s curse in life.

There was never a man present in all her dreams of freedom; there had always been only her, in glorious, splendid solitude, replete in and of herself.

“And have I mentioned yet,” continued Lady Kingsley, “that one of the young men staying with me—in fact, the handsomest one of them all—also happens to be a marquess?”

Elissande’s heart thudded abruptly. She did not care about handsome—her uncle was a very handsome man. But a marquess was an important man, with power and connections. A marquess could protect her—and her aunt—from her uncle.

Provided that he married Elissande within three days—or however short a period of time before her uncle returned.

Very likely, wasn’t it? And when she’d hosted ten guests her uncle had not invited—a blatant gesture of rebellion such as she’d never dared—and fallen short of her goal, what then?

Six months ago, on the anniversary of Christabel’s death, he had taken away Aunt Rachel’s laudanum. For three days Aunt Rachel had suffered like a woman forced to endure an amputation without chloroform. Elissande, forbidden to go to Aunt Rachel, had pummeled the pillows on her bed until she could no longer lift her arms, her lips bloody from the bite of her own teeth.

Then, of course, he’d given up on his attempt to detach Aunt Rachel from her laudanum, an evil to which he had introduced her. I simply can’t bear to have her suffer anymore, he’d said, in the presence of Mrs. Ramsay and a maid. And they had believed him, no questions asked, never mind that it was not the first, the second, or even the fifth time this had happened.

At dinner that evening, he had murmured, At least she is not addicted to cocaine. And Elissande, who hadn’t even known what cocaine was, had been so chilled that she’d spent the rest of the night huddled before the fire in her room.

The chance of success: infinitesimal. The cost of failure: unthinkable.

She rose from her seat. The windows of the drawing room gave a clear view of the gates of the estate. It had been years since she last ventured past those gates. It had been at least twice as long since her aunt last left the manor itself.

Her lungs labored against the suddenly thin air. Her stomach wanted very much to eject her lunch. She gripped the edge of the window frame, dizzy and ill, while behind her Lady Kingsley went on and on about her guests’ civility and amiability, about the wonderful time to be had by all. Why, Elissande didn’t even need to worry about securing provisions for them. The kitchen at Woodley Manor, well removed from the house, had been spared from the rats.

Slowly Elissande turned around. And then she smiled, the kind of smile she gave her uncle when he announced that, no, he wouldn’t go to South Africa after all, when she’d finally come to believe that he truly would, following months of preparations she’d witnessed with her own eyes.

Lady Kingsley fell quiet before this smile.

“We shall be only too glad to help,” said Elissande.

Aunt Rachel showed no reaction at the news: She dozed on.

Elissande smoothed limp strands of graying hair behind the older woman’s fragile ears. “It will be all right, I promise.”

She laid an extra blanket of soft wool over Aunt Rachel—Aunt Rachel, thin as poorhouse porridge, was always chilled. “We need to do this. It is an opportunity that will not come again.”

Even as she spoke she marveled at the remarkable timing of Lady Kingsley’s plague of rats, almost as if the rats had known the hour of her uncle’s departure.

“And I’m not afraid of him.”

The truth didn’t matter one way or the other. What mattered was that she should believe in her own valor.

She knelt down by the bed and took Aunt Rachel’s small, fine-boned face into her hands. “I will get you out of here, my love. I will get us both out of here.”

The chance of success was infinitesimal, but it wasn’t nil. For now, that would have to do.

She pressed a kiss to Aunt Rachel’s sunken cheek. “Congratulate me. I am to be married.”

* * *

“We need to get married,” said Vere to his brother.

Lady Kingsley had two carriages but only one team of horses. So the ladies had gone off first to Highgate Court, leaving the gentlemen behind to wait for their transport.

“We are still young,” said Freddie.

Messieurs Conrad and Wessex played a game of vingt-et-un; Kingsley sat on his luggage, reading a copy of The Illustrated London News; Vere and Freddie strolled slowly along the drive.

“I’m almost thirty. And I’m not having any successes.”

It was easy to fail when one proposed exclusively to the most sought-after debutantes of the Season, especially easy when the proposals were accompanied by copious spills of punch upon said debutantes’ bodices. Vere felt strongly that he should be perceived as a man eager to settle down: the effort lent his role greater authenticity—the poor, sweet idiot too dumb to see that he ought to set his sights lower.

“Let a girl know you better before you propose to her,” said Freddie. “I don’t see how any woman can fail to love you, if you would but give her a little time.”

Thirteen years, and Freddie still spoke to Vere as if nothing had changed, and Vere had remained the same brother who had protected Freddie from their father. Vere had expected the usual stab of guilt; what he had not expected was that he had to turn his face away to hide the tears that were suddenly in his eyes. He’d best take a long sabbatical after the Douglas case—this life was taking its toll on him.

But Freddie’s answer did give Vere the opening he’d sought. “Do you think I should propose to Mrs. Canaletto then? She’s known me all her life.”

“No!” Freddie cried, then immediately flushed. “I mean, of course she does love you, but only as a brother.”

“Dash it. What about you? Do you think she also only loves you as a brother?”

“I…ah…um…”

The talent for lies and pretenses that Vere possessed in such abundance had bypassed Freddie altogether. He was no good at prevarications of any sort.

“I don’t know for certain,” Freddie finally said.

“Why don’t you ask her and find out?” Vere said blithely. “I know; we can both ask her at the same time. How could I be sure, otherwise, that she hasn’t harbored some great, big, secret tendresse for me all these years?”