“What is your desire?”
Blushing, she said, “I feel compelled to admit that, in truth, I really had much rather flit about some wild hinterland, exploring ancient castles. But Little Snoring is rather lacking in wildness and completely devoid of haunted castles.” She gave a sigh.
“You desire intrigue and excitement then. I think we may make an adventuress of you yet.”
“But the vampyres and wicked viscounts I can happily do without.”
“How disappointing. A castle is hardly a worthy setting for a gothic romance without its vampyres and wicked viscounts. I defy you to find a single qualified castle without one or the other in residence.” His voice lowered of a sudden. “In fact, I predict you shall find just such a place soon enough…”
“Then I consider myself duly cautioned.”
“And what shall you do with that caution, Miss Rose? Avoid the castles and monsters in your head at all costs? Or will your lion heart press on regardless?”
She faltered, finding herself transfixed by those primitive black eyes. “I think I would rue a life lived in fear.”
“Yes,” he said, his voice like a cobra charmer. “I think you want a little danger in your life. Or so your literary preferences would have me believe.”
“I only want a happy ending, Lord Winterly.” She turned her gaze from him and continued walking. When had this conversation taken such an unnerving and unnatural digression? “I want only to best the dragons of the world and to live a very long life thereafter. Preferably in a castle with my ten cats—certainly not ten children.”
“Then I wish you the best of luck, for I understand dragons are worthy opponents.”
“I am equal to the challenge, my lord.”
“We shall see…”
“Emma!”
Startled, Emma looked across the street to see Milli already at their front door, gesturing for her to make haste.
Emma waved back, eager enough to escape Lord Winterly and the very strange interlude they had shared. She was intrigued by his smiles, amused by his wit, and enamored of his animal beauty; there was never a moment in which she wasn’t somehow disturbed by him—a perfectly thrilling sensory confusion when she was in his sphere. A woman might be driven mad by such indwelling conflict.
The thought came again that she would see no more of him after today, and she willed herself not to cry. She knew, with the certitude of a women’s instinct, that she would never again meet another man like Markus Winterly.
A few errant drops had begun to fall again, running down her cheeks like farewell tears. Victoria was already making her way back to her brother. It was as though Emma was waking from a trance, the din of the neighborhood suddenly invading. And there was the cause of the accident—two upended carriages; the horses, thankfully, appeared unharmed. She had been so engrossed in Lord Winterly’s badinage that all else had faded away save what was taking place between them.
“Just a collision—no casualties.” Victoria smiled as she joined them, readily dismissing the harried coachmen and their sorry plight.
Emma offered no more than a diluted smile as she thanked them and bade them a hasty farewell before crossing the street. She was very careful to look both ways first, for she would not have Lord Winterly put to the trouble of rescuing her a third time.
“Was not that a lovely excursion?” Milli cried, waving an ardent goodbye to her new friend.
“I never had a better one,” said Emma, stomping mud from her boots.
“Oh pooh! You’re being querulous again. I cannot think why, for Lord Winterly paid you the compliment of his complete attention.” With a suggestive wink, Milli peered behind Emma and looked meaningfully at the pair they had left on the far side of the causeway.
“Don’t wink like that, it’s vulgar.”
Milli ignored the rebuke and gave another wave. “I hope we shall see them again!”
“Not I.”
“Surely you cannot mean that.”
“I should much rather stay in my room all summer reading about wicked viscounts than spend a single moment in the company of one.” What a lie that was. But she reasoned if she told herself that enough times perhaps she might someday become convinced of it.
“That is really too bad,” said Milli, blocking the doorway as Emma moved toward it.
Emma stopped short to pin her sibling with an impatient glower. “No, it isn’t.”
“No, I mean you shall not have your wish, Em.” She was flushing with excitement as she looked over her sister’s shoulder into the street. “Lord Winterly, it seems, has more to say to you.”
At that, Emma whirled around to see the man himself sauntering purposefully over the granite cobbles of Milk Street.
“Milli, stay where you are.” But there was no reply. “Milli?” Emma turned to see that she had been abandoned by the little minx.
“Miss Rose,” Lord Winterly drawled as he finally appeared, taking the steps two at a time. “You forgot to take your novel.” He held out The Castle Of Wolfenbach, a knowing look about him. “You hurried off so fast I scarcely had a chance to return it.”
“Thank you.” She could feel the heat soaring into her cheeks and was eager to hide her head under a pillow.
Despite the light rain, however, he seemed in no hurry to return to his coach. “You see, I would not have you forced to spend a single moment without the adventure you championed so valiantly.” After a moment he replaced his hat onto his dark head, the nap of the suede disarranged by his fingers. “It would be a shame to have no wicked company to occupy you in your chamber…should you indeed cloister yourself there all summer.”
She gawked at him, sure she must look pale with shock. How the devil had he heard her from across the street?
“Although,” he went on, “I conceive you will be doing no such thing.” Thereat he turned on his heel and marched off to join his sister.
Emma slammed the door shut with a sharp groan, disregarding the startled footman. She was so deeply mortified as not even Millli had been able to mortify her. Stupid, stupid, Emma! Just how loudly had she spoken? She resolved then and there to admit herself into that Chelsea Asylum after all if it meant she would never have to show her face again. Especially to him.
But no, hadn’t he promised to visit her there? A sad state of affairs, indeed, when a woman couldn’t even escape a wicked viscount in an asylum.
Chapter Nine
The Sleepwalker
Milli hated the dark. It had been many years since she’d crawled into her sister’s bed during a thundershower or fallen asleep beneath the watchful safety of a taper when the moon had waned to nothing. She was a child no longer, despite that Emma often asserted otherwise. Still and all, the darkness tonight felt strange and unnatural. It bore down on her with such awful weight, desiccating her courage with its force until it condensed and gathered on her brow and palms like a sickly dew.
Her eyes were full and round—even if the moon was not—and her ears seemed to pick out every sound so that she misgave herself she could hear even the rats colluding in the garret. Outside, the trees were whispering, yet there was no wind to disturb them; nothing but that frightful fog was moving in the streets below. And then came the song of bells, tolling their dirge as midnight crept upon her window and leered through the glass.
Milli threw her feet over the side of the bed and gave an impatient sigh, hoping to convince even herself that she was not afraid of the dark, only vexed that sleep was evading her. “I am not a child,” she said with an emphatic lift of her chin, wiping the clamminess from her hands as she pushed the bedsheet aside. She slipped quietly towards the window and peeked down at the gaslit street below her. There was no street, only fog.
The creak of floorboards outside her room sent her ducking madly behind the sheer drapes with a yelp. “Who’s there?” she hissed, watching the door like a startled thief. There came no answer, only another audible groan of boards as someone passed outside her door.
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br /> Where was the glow of candlelight beneath her door? Surely someone would have a light to guide them down the pitch black corridor on a night like this. And if it was someone—not a ghost or a murderer—why hadn’t they answered her when she’d called out? Though she was reluctant to leave her room, she could not bear feeling like a coward and so she tiptoed to the door and carefully opened it, thrusting only her head out into the corridor. There was no one there. She stood alone. But she could see enough to know Emma’s door was wide open.
“Emma?” The darkness crowded in, drowning out her voice as she crept to her sister’s room. There too, however, she found herself alone. Alone but for that terrible, yawning darkness that perfused the room. Its feral breath clung to her skin. Something felt terribly wrong with the darkness here. Milli could not say what exactly, she only felt desperate to escape it.
Out in the corridor, she called for her sister again, louder this time. Again, there was no answer.
In the morning she would berate herself for being a silly coward, and for being so fanciful as to imagine her sister’s room was steeped in frigid shadows, but the nighttime, at its thickest, had a cunning way of eclipsing one’s bravery. Milli was suddenly possessed of a primeval need to escape the unnatural solitude of the house—as though all were dead save her alone—and to find her sister. Perhaps Emma had taken herself to the library to find a book.
Without a candle? No, Emma was too sensible to risk her neck on the dark stairs. That was the height of foolishness, and Emma was never foolish. Milli carefully navigated down the stairs, her toes fumbling in the dark.
Mind you don’t break your own neck climbing down the stairs in this beastly darkness. For a terrifying moment Milli stumbled and felt her heart drop into her belly with a crash. Dash my wig! It was some moments before she pried the bones of her fingers from the railing and, still gasping, continued her descent. Dash my wig indeed—I’m like to dash my skull on the stairs!
Emma would likely have dismissed the sticky tang of panic Milli had sensed in her room as utter nonsense—a figment of Milli’s unfounded fear of all things dark. Well, she would keep that bit of foolishness to herself then.
She reached the landing with a sigh of relief. She padded along bare floorboards and oriental carpets towards the library, murmuring her sister’s name again. Yet that room too was empty.
A trickle of icy trepidation crept its way up along her neck. Something in this house was awfully amiss. It was then she heard more muffled creaking, but this time it had come from the boards in the entryway. Her hair bristled, alert. The sharp snick of the door bolt followed and then a whine of hinges. Milli was loath to call out again for fear the noises were not, as she’d supposed, her sister’s doing. Emma would have answered Milli when she’d called out. So who then was the nightwalker, and where was her sister?
She snatched up a gilt candlestick from the side table, its heft offering some small comfort, before she finally quit the library. Armed with her bludgeon, she made her way silently to the entryway and there found the front door ajar and the night creeping in. Alarmed, she rushed forward to shut it, but upon closing her hand on the latch she caught sight of her sister outside and already at some distance from the house. Emma was barefoot and garbed in naught but a shift, gliding soundlessly along the street like a White Lady. Her movements barely disturbed the fog and her silhouette was fast becoming consumed by the gloom.
“Emma!” Frantic, Milli abandoned her weapon and sprinted over the considerable stretch of road that separated them. She called out again, louder, but her sister appeared deaf to her own name. Nor did she react, except to freeze, when Milli seized her night-rail. “Answer me, Emma!” She then gave her sister’s wrist a hard tug for good measure.
But Emma appeared rooted. Suddenly she turned to Milli, her eyelashes fluttering sleepily. “Delighted you’ve come at last.”
“You are?” Milli faltered, confused. A frisson of dread coiled inside her to see her sister thus—eyes wide but insensate. “What in God’s name are you doing out here?”
“Heavens! I quite forgot the time.” Emma turned a faraway gaze into the fog, her fingers reaching out to something only she could see. “This way.”
“Gads, are you ill?” Or was her sister lost in some febrile dream. She certainly didn’t seem lucid. Milli gave another insistent tug, her eyes bouncing furtively up and down the street for fear a carriage might materialize out of the mist. Or Erebus himself. “Do get out of the street before you get us both killed.”
“Don’t mind the bird,” said Emma, grinning blankly. But she allowed herself to be lead home by the hand like a child.
“Yes, you are an odd bird. Next time you decide to ramble about in your slumber, I would as soon you do it indoors like a normal person.” To her knowledge, respectable people did not just go sleepwalking off into the night, in their unmentionables no less. Milli could only imagine the spectacle they presented—two scantily-clad madwomen capering about in the fog at midnight—and she hoped fervently that no one was about spying from their windows. Fortunately, there was no watchman about to bear testimony to Emma’s queer behavior. When at last they reached the stairhead, Milli hurriedly shoved her sister through the door and shut it with a great sigh. “I can’t think what our uncle would say if the neighbors saw us.”
“A devilish temperament.”
“Uncle? Yes, I suppose he does have at times.” Wait a moment, why was she bothering to talk sense to the senseless? “I wish you will stop maundering, Emma. You sound ridiculous.”
“Curse you, thief!”
Milli made a sound of impatience as she bent to retrieve the candlestick she’d dropped earlier when she’d rushed outside. The gilding had chipped away from the wood in several places where it had hit the floor. “Faugh!” She marched off to the library, her sister in tow. “Look at what you made me do.”
Emma gave a sleepy nod, her eyes unfocused as she watched Milli return the misused gimcrack to the side table in the library. “Take care, Miss Rose.”
“Too late now.” It was obvious she would get little sense out of Emma tonight. Mayhap her sister would be herself again in the morning. “Either you are drunk as a wheelbarrow, Emma,”—pulling her sister up the stairs—“or you are still asleep, and I am not sure which I ought to be disturbed by more.” She had never known her sister for a somnambulist.
In Emma’s chamber, Milli drew back the counterpane and guided her sister into bed. “For once, I am the adult and you are the child.” She tucked the covers under her sister’s chin and then straightened to leave. But she found she could not bear to return to her own room where, no doubt, the clammy darkness now awaited her. She paused, knitting her fingers in her hair as she glared into the shadows beyond Emma’s door. “Perhaps…perhaps I ought to sleep here, Em.” She glanced back at Emma and then, resolved, moved to shut the door. “Just in case you take it into your head to leave the house again.” She lifted the covers and climbed in beside her sister. “For your own sake, you understand.” It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that she was still afraid of the dark.
“You walk among monsters,” said Emma.
The words touched Milli like a chilling claw. “Stop it, Emma, you’re frightening me.”
Unexpectedly, Emma sat up with a start. “What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Are you not too old to sneak into bed with me, Milli? I thought you had outgrown that silly habit.”
After some bemusement, Milli said, “I just saved your life, you goose.”
“Nonsense, you’re scared again.” Emma turned onto her side and gave her pillow a good fluffing. “There is nothing to fear from the dark, you know.”
“How very ungrateful you are. We could have been dashed to pieces by a coach, or murdered by that mad butcher or wicked monk or whatever.”
“What an imagination you have.”
“You ought to thank me, not scold me.”
“I liked you better when you were maundering.” With a mutter, Milli rolled over and gave her back to Emma. “See if I save your life again.”
“Lord Winterly saved my life,” Emma sighed, her words slumberous.
“Well, where was he tonight?” Milli turned to shoot a glare over her shoulder. “Hmm?”
But Emma had already succumbed to sleep again, her breathing soft and even.
“I’m sure I don’t know of any gentlemen, at least no respectable ones, that stalk about late at night in such dreadful weather when there are murderers about.” The last was cut off by a yawn. “Perfectly strange behavior for a viscount, I say.” Then, with a long sigh of her own, Milli sank deeper into her own pillow and was soon lost to fitful dreams.
Chapter Ten
An Invitation To Dinner
Dear Mad Emma,—Do stop reading all those gothic romances, they’ll only give you nightmares. Yours affectionately,
Mary.
Nearly a sennight after that last vexatious interaction with Lord Winterly on her doorstep, there was still no relief from the intractable humiliation Emma harbored. How insulted he must have felt! How abominable he must think her! Even the night at the theater they had lately enjoyed had done little to distract her from her shame.
“You are being dreadfully tedious, Emma,” Milli repined after breakfast as they withdrew to the parlor. “You know very well Aunt Sophie will not allow me to attend any assemblies if you are not with me. How shall I leave the house if you are determined not to? That is unless it’s in your sleep.”
“I did no such thing.”
Milli crossed her arms. “Why would I lie?”
“To vex me.” Emma released a sharp sigh. “Why don’t you ask Mrs. Stapleton’s niece to chaperone you?”
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