The Cinderella Countess

by Sophia James

  ‘Where is Mother?’

  ‘I asked her to stay in her room.’

  ‘She is being impossible this morning. I wish she might return to Balmain and leave me here with you. How old is Miss Smith?’

  ‘See for yourself. She is right here.’

  The blanket stilled and then a face popped out from the rumpled wool. A gaunt face of wrecked beauty, the hair cut into slivers of ill-fashioned spikes.

  Belle hoped she did not look surprised, the first impressions between a patient and a healer important ones.

  ‘You are not too...old.’ This came from Lucy.

  ‘I am thirty-two next week. It seems inordinately old to me. But what is the alternative?’

  Unexpectedly the young woman smiled. ‘This.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Belle said quietly. ‘When did you last eat?’

  ‘I am no longer hungry. I have broth sometimes.’

  ‘Could I listen to your pulse?’

  ‘No. I don’t like to be touched.’

  ‘Never?’ Surprise threaded into her words. ‘Who has examined you then?’

  ‘No one. I do not allow it. It can be seen from a distance that my malady is taking the life from me. All sorts of medicines have been tried. And have failed. One doctor did touch me against all my will and bled me twice. Now I just wish to die. It will be easier for everyone.’

  Belle heard the Earl draw in a breath and felt a huge sorrow for him.

  ‘Could I sit with you for a moment, Miss Staines? Alone?’

  ‘Without my brother, you mean. Without anyone here. I do not know if...’

  But the Earl had already gone, walking like a ghost towards the door, his footsteps quiet.

  Belle waited for a moment and closed her eyes. There was so much to be found in silence. The girl’s breathing was fast and a little shallow, but there was no underlying disease in her passageways. She moved her feet a lot, indicating a nervous disposition. She could hear the sound of the sheets rustling and Lady Lucy sniffed twice. She was coming down with a cold, perhaps, though her constitution sounded robust.

  Opening her eyes, Belle looked at her patient directly, the golden glance of the Earl’s sister flecked with a darker yellow.

  ‘Why do you lie, Miss Staines?’

  ‘Pardon?’ A shocked breath was drawn in with haste.

  ‘There is no disease in your body. But what is there is something you need to speak of.’

  ‘You cannot know this.’ These words were small and sharp.

  ‘Today I shall run camphor across your chest and peppermint under the soles of your feet. If I was you, I should then begin to take an interest in the world. Tomorrow I shall return with different medicines. A week should be enough for you to start getting up again and then we can face the problem that is the true reason why you have taken to your bed.’

  ‘Problem?’

  ‘Think about it. Your family is suffering from the charade you are putting them through and if the physicians they have dispatched to attend to your needs have never delved deeper into the truth of what ails you then that is their poor practice. But it is time now to face up to what has happened to you and live again in any way that you can.’

  ‘Get out.’

  Belle stood, her heart hammering. ‘I am sorry, but I will not. Only with good sense can you face what must come next because, believe it or not, this is the way of life. A set back and then a triumph. Yours will be spectacular.’

  ‘Are you a witch, Miss Smith? One of the occult?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Her reply came with a fervour. This girl needed to believe in her words or otherwise she would be lost. ‘Magic is something that you now require so I want you to unbutton your nightdress and I will find my camphor.’

  * * *

  Ten minutes later she was downstairs again and the Earl of Thornton had recalled his conveyance.

  ‘I am sorry I cannot accompany you back to Whitechapel, Miss Smith, but I have other business in the city. You said that you’d told my sister that you would be back on the morrow so I shall make sure my conveyance is outside your house again at nine.’

  ‘No. Tomorrow we shall find our own way. But have the maid bring up a plate of chicken broth with a small crust of bread for your sister. Tell her that such sustenance will do her good and I will be asking after how much she has eaten.’

  ‘Very well. Thank you.’

  The Earl did not believe that his sister would deign to eat anything. He was disappointed in her short visit, too, Belle could tell, the smell of camphor and peppermint the only tangible evidence of her doctoring. He imagined her a quack and a charlatan and an expensive one at that and would continue to do so unless his sister took her advice.

  She tipped her head and turned for the pathway, unsurprised when the door was closed behind them.

  * * *

  Once home she sought out her aunt where she sat in the small alcove off the kitchen.

  ‘I recognised the Earl of Thornton’s house, Tante Alicia. I think I knew one just like it.’

  Her aunt simply stared at her.

  ‘It was similar to the house in my dreams. The one I told you about.’

  ‘I always said that you were an auld one, Annabelle, a traveller who has been here before in another lifetime.’

  ‘Who are they, Alicia? The people I remember who are dressed like those at the Thornton town house.’

  ‘I have told you again and again that there are no ghosts who stalk you and that I do not know of these people you see.’

  ‘Then who were my parents?’

  ‘I never met them. I took you in when a nun from the convent in the village asked it of me. A sick child from England who was placed in the hands of the lord when a servant brought her there, to the church of Notre-Dame de la Nativité. Maria, the nun, was English herself and spoke with you every day for years until your French was fluent and you could cope. That is all I know. I wish there had been more, but there was not. I’d imagined you would stay with me for only a matter of weeks, but when no one came back to claim you and the months went on...’ She stopped, regathering herself. ‘By then you were the child I had never had and I prayed to our lord every day that the situation would continue, that I would not have to give you up because that would have broken my heart.’

  They had been through all this before so many times. It all made perfect sense and yet...

  Today Lady Lucy had made perfect sense to her as well, hiding there in her bed in a darkened room where no one could get to her. She had stopped eating. She had ceased to want to live. The anger in Belle surfaced with a suddenness that she did not conceal.

  Everyone was lying.

  Her aunt.

  Lady Lucy.

  Even the handsome Earl of Thornton with his succession of mistresses and his bitter mother.

  Taking leave of her aunt and walking to her own room, Belle lifted up a paintbrush, dipping it in oil and mixing it with red powder after finding a sheet of paper.

  Nothing was real. Everything was false. She liked the banal deceiving strokes she drew as they ran across the truth and banished it. Lives built on falsity. Paintings borne on fury. Lady Lucy was young and well brought up. Belle wanted to kill the man who had left her the wreck that she was, but as yet there could be only the small and quiet steps of acceptance before the healing began.

  * * *

  Lytton spent the afternoon entwined in the arms of the beautiful widow Mrs Susan Castleton in the rooms he had provided for her in Kensington.

  She had impeccable taste, he would give her that, but what had been wonderful, even as recent as last week, now was not.

  His mother’s words had stung and the look on Miss Annabelle Smith’s face had stung further.

  Why did the healer have to be so damned unusual? His sister had gulped down the broth and the crust and
asked for a cup of tea to finish her lunch with. She had not eaten properly in weeks and now after a ten-minute visit with the contrary Miss Smith she was suddenly pulling herself out of the mire. Lucy thought she was a witch and had told him so, a woman of fearful evil and unspeakable power. She did not wish for her to visit again.

  Well, if a witch could cajole his sister into re-joining the real world then so be it, and her alchemy would certainly be welcome in his town house after the disappointing efforts of all the other renowned physicians. He would be asking her back.

  ‘You are so very well formed, Thornton.’ The whisper in his ear had him turning, Susan’s chestnut curls trailing across his chest when she tweaked his nipple, her body nudging his own in further invitation.

  God, she was insatiable. When he had first met her he could barely believe his luck, but now...now he wondered if she might squeeze all the life from him and leave him as much a wreck as his sister.

  ‘I want to eat you up. All of you.’

  Her words were so like what he had just been thinking that he pushed her from him and sat up.

  He didn’t want this any more, this salacious liaison so far away from what he knew to be right. Even a few weeks ago he would have found such passion exciting. Now all he wanted to do was escape.

  ‘I need to go, Susan. I am not sure if I shall be back.’

  If this was too brutal for her then he was sorry for it, but he disliked lying. To anyone.

  ‘You joke, surely, Thornton. We have been here all afternoon feeding off one another.’

  The further reference to food made him stand and find his clothes. Fumbling with the one ring he wore today, he twisted it from his finger.

  ‘It is worth the price of the rent on this place for at least another year. I thank you for your patience with me, but now it is finished. I can’t do this any more.’

  Tears began to fall down her cheeks. ‘You cannot possibly be serious, Thornton. I love you, I love you with all my heart and—’

  He stopped her by placing a finger across her generous reddened lips.

  ‘You loved Derwent a year ago and you loved Marcus Merryweather before that. There will be another after me.’

  As he walked away, garments in hand, she picked up a vase and threw it at him hard, the glass smashing against the side of his head and drawing blood as it shattered.

  ‘You will regret this, I swear it. No one will ever make love to you in the way I have, especially one whom you might take as a wife. They are all cold and wooden and witless.’

  Hell. Had Aurelian or Edward said something publicly of his plans to be married before the end of the Season? He hoped not. If that happened he would have a hundred mamas and their chicks upon him, courting him with guile and hope.

  The day that had begun strangely just seemed to get stranger. He could feel warm blood running across one cheek and yet he couldn’t go home because his mother was prowling through the corridors of his town house and Lucy had spent almost the entire morning crying.

  His younger brother was in trouble again with his school and Prudence, his oldest sister, was in Rome seeing the sights with her new husband. He would have liked to talk with her, but she was not due back for at least a few months, skipping out of England with a haste that was unbecoming.

  No one in his entire family was coping. His father’s death the Christmas before last had seen to that and here he was, bogged down by the responsibility of a title he’d little reason to like and a mistress who had just tried to kill him.

  Once he had been free and unburdened. Now every man and his dog wanted a piece of him. Once the most reading he had done was to glance at the IOUs from the gambling tables where his luck never seemed to run out. Now it was writing reports, filling out forms and doing all the myriad other things a large and complicated estate required.

  He had barely come up for air in weeks save in the bed of Susan Castleton, but that was now also lost to him. He couldn’t regret this even a bit, he thought, as he finished dressing and made his leave.

  He’d spend the evening at White’s and when the place closed he’d go to Edward Tully’s town house. At least Derwent would understand his fading interest in a woman whom he, too, had once been intimate with.

  * * *

  ‘You need to go abroad, Thorn, and escape your family.’ Edward’s words were said with the edge of strong cognac upon them.

  ‘Easy for you to say with your father still hale and hearty and an older brother who will take on the heavy mantle of the title.’

  Edward laughed as he upended yet another glass of cognac and gestured to a servant going by to bring another bottle. ‘How are the marriage plans going?’

  Lytton swore.

  He’d confided in Lian and Edward about his intention to marry as a result of Lucy’s ill health, his own mortality staring him in the face. He now wished he hadn’t.

  ‘Wide hips and a passable face wasn’t it?’ Edward plainly saw a humour that Lytton himself did not. ‘The first girl you saw with both qualifications?’

  ‘I was drunk.’

  ‘More drunk than you are tonight?’

  At that Lytton laughed. ‘More drunk and also happier, possibly.’

  ‘Well, Lian is happy and so is Shay. Perhaps a wife is the answer. A woman of substance. No shallow-brained ingénue or experienced courtesan.’

  ‘And where are those women?’ Lytton asked. ‘Shay found Celeste in the underbelly of Napoleon’s Paris and Lian’s Violet was thrown up from the greed of treason and lost gold.’

  ‘Stuart Townsend said he saw you this morning in a carriage with a woman he did not recognise, Thorn. He said she looked interesting?’

  Lytton shook his head. For some reason he did not want to talk of Annabelle Smith. His whole family must have disappointed her today and he did not wish to continue the trend. He stayed silent.

  ‘And the fact that you will not speak of her makes it even more interesting.’

  He stood. ‘I think I need to go home, Edward, and sleep. For a hundred years, if I only could.’

  ‘There’s a masked ball at the Seymours’ tomorrow evening. Come with me to that and blow away a few cobwebs.’

  ‘Perhaps I might. I will send you word in the morning.’

  Outside the sky was clearer and the stars were out. A vibrant endless heaven, Lytton thought, enjoying the fresh air. He had meant to stay at Edward’s, but suddenly wanted to be home.

  Annabelle Smith was due tomorrow again at the ungodly hour of nine and he did not want to miss seeing her. That thought worried him more than any other.

  Chapter Three

  This morning Belle did not take her basket. Instead she brought a book, tied in blue ribbon and inscribed. Rose stayed at home.

  The Earl of Thornton was waiting for her in the entrance hall when she arrived at his town house. Today there was no other servant present and he took her coat and hat himself and hung them on the brass pegs to one side of the front door.

  A gash across his temple was the first thing she noticed.

  ‘You have been hurt?’

  ‘Barely,’ he answered and swiped at his untidy fringe.

  ‘It looks like more than that to me, your lordship.’

  ‘Your patient is upstairs, Miss Smith.’

  She smiled at the rebuke. ‘And your mother?’

  ‘Is behaving in her room.’

  ‘Did your sister eat anything yesterday?’

  ‘More than she has in weeks. She imagines you to be of the occult. A blooded witch, I think it was she called you.’

  ‘There is strength in such imagination.’

  At that he laughed out loud and dipped into his pocket. A ten-pound note lay in his palm. ‘For you. You have done more in fifteen minutes for my sister than all the other physicians put together.’

  ‘Oh, I could h
ardly take that much, your lordship. Ten pounds is a fortune and more than many people in Whitechapel might make in a whole year.’

  ‘It is not for you, per se. I thought you told me yesterday you use your exorbitant fees for good in your parish.’

  ‘I would and I do, but...’

  He simply leaned forward to extract the velvet purse from the pocket of her coat on the peg and slid it inside before returning it. She could do nothing but concur.

  ‘Thank you. I shall send you receipts for exactly what I have spent each penny upon. Your lordship.’ She added this after a few seconds.

  They had reached his sister’s sitting room now, the place where Rose had waited yesterday, and he stopped.

  ‘I think you would do better to see my sister alone today.’

  Taking a breath, Belle nodded and went in.

  This morning Lady Lucy was not hiding from her, but sitting in her bed gazing out of the window. She looked small and thin and pale.

  ‘I hear you ate both lunch and dinner?’

  The girl turned to her, anger in her eyes.

  ‘As I am not used to being threatened, I deduced it good sense to eat something, Miss Smith. Just in case.’

  ‘Then you would not mind if I read to you, either?’ Pulling the ribbons from the book, Belle sat unbidden on the seat at the side of the bed and opened the first page.

  Mary, the heroine of this fiction, was the daughter of Edward, who married Eliza, a gentle fashionable girl, with a kind of indolence in her temper which might be termed negative good nature...

  * * *

  Half an hour later she stopped.

  ‘Who wrote this?’

  Belle was heartened by the question. ‘Mary Wollstonecraft. The writer truly believed that feminine imagination could transport women from cruel circumstance.’

  Silence abounded, the tick of a clock in the corner all that could be heard in the room.

  ‘I want to gift this book to you, Miss Staines. I hope we might discuss its possibilities next time I meet with you.’