The Painted Castle

by Kristy Cambron

  But justice came at a price. She’d allowed herself to be managed, hidden by a suffocating maternal force that now had no right to hide the truth from her.

  How completely she’d been fooled.

  Invitations to balls were received, yet Elizabeth never saw them. Letters came to her on a silver tray, but only after they’d been opened. Ma-ma accompanied her to every call. And Elizabeth was allowed few, if any, acquaintances outside of the revolving rotation of staff who seemed to sweep in and out of their manor with curious frequency.

  All of this she’d pored over while pushing food around her plate at the viscount’s dinner table or while sipping tea during calls in London, attempting to fit a mask over the absolute fracturing of her world behind the scenes. She was haunted by names like Christopher Churchill . . . Thomas Whittle . . . and above all, the great mystery that was Keaton James.

  The viscount would sit at his dining table and endure the onslaught of syrup-dripping her ma-ma chose to employ—whether complimenting the decor of his drawing room, or the masculinity of the library, or the way he’d managed his staff so precisely as to lay a table with such elegance. There was no doubt, said she, that his London home must be as fine as Her Majesty’s. Why, their upcoming visit to Buckingham Palace would confirm it.

  Yet every once in a while, as Ma-ma droned on and Elizabeth stewed in the mire of her thoughts, Keaton would emerge from behind the veil of propriety and look over at her.

  Without a word passing between them, those eyes would reveal something was at play. As if he knew Elizabeth had begun to question the very fabric of who she was. And after days of demanding answers in her heart but never summoning the gumption to demand them in real voice, somehow, in those brief moments of feeling she was wrestling alone . . . she wasn’t.

  Those looks gave her enough courage to confront her suspicions now.

  To stand in front of a grand floor-length mirror in his London home, wearing a veil so delicate and pure, and to be unafraid to confront what she never had before.

  “You have no answer, Ma-ma?”

  “Elizabeth—you needn’t trouble yourself with the trifle of service staff when you are to be wed next month and must concentrate on the happiness of your husband. Managing your households can be learned after the wedding.” Ma-ma reached for the hand Elizabeth had left dead at her side, squeezed and patted it before she let go. “Do not worry. I will help you.”

  “No.”

  That was the attention-getter Elizabeth had sought.

  One word cut like a knife, searing the air with her defiance.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said no. Not until you answer why our maids never take confidence with me. And if they do attempt familiarity, then they are gone soon after. And why am I disallowed from opening my own mail? Or from taking a coach to town? Or knowing any detail of the finances that govern our provision? And why am I prevented acquaintance with any young women my own age?”

  “You have tea with Lady Everess’s daughters, do you not? Why, we paid call to them just a week ago, now that we are in London.”

  “You paid call to them. I was made to come along in the carriage.”

  “Made to come along? Honestly. Elizabeth, it is your duty as a viscountess-to-be to set an example for society. You must take your place. That requires calls.”

  “You make them then. At your leisure.”

  Ma-ma smiled. Smiled! She looked at Elizabeth through the reflection and actually found humor enough to judge her questions a worthless folly.

  “Oh, you are tired, dear. That’s what this is. As all brides tend to be. Why not rest for a bit? Let me see to the remaining preparations.”

  “I am not tired. And I will not rest.” Elizabeth reached up, sweeping the glittering tiara from her crown, pulling the looping ivy design from her hair until wisps dragged loose from the sleek center part of her coif. The attached train she swept up—carefully, in complete control, not the least bit put off by her mother’s audible gasp—and began looping the airy white fabric around her forearm with her hair in a state of disarray.

  “What do you think you are doing?”

  “Putting an end to this sorry charade.”

  The pastel tailor’s box on the bed was soon full again, as Elizabeth tucked the gauze inside its peachy-pink tissue. The viscount’s family jewels she deposited back inside the velvet box on the vanity, ignoring the shock on her mother’s face as she placed them in the deep plum lining and clamped the lid shut.

  “What charade? I haven’t time to lose. We have many details yet to decide upon.” Ma-ma paused, though the argument in her voice spoke of mounting urgency. It moved to shrill, even, as she watched Elizabeth take dress shop boxes and stack them by the chamber door.

  “I shall assist you in simplifying then—cancel the appointments.”

  She ripped a veil from Elizabeth’s grasp and tossed it to the floor in a heap of fluff. “Stop this at once! Do you not remember that the caterer is to arrive this afternoon—the same chef who has outfitted celebrations for the queen? And the dressmaker coming for a final fitting! What am I to do if we fall behind schedule? Pluck yards of satin from a tree?”

  “Your schedule, Ma-ma. Not mine,” she whispered, then turned back to the mirror to press her hair back into place. “And I do not know if I should marry at all. I’m most aggrieved to have to tell you, but I haven’t yet given the viscount my answer. It seems an ill use of his time and yours to choose from veils that will not be worn in the end.”

  Nails dug into her arm from behind, Ma-ma grasping her so swiftly that a shockwave of pain ripped Elizabeth’s attention from her manufactured busyness.

  “What do you mean you do not know if you should marry? Of course you will wed the viscount. What nonsensical talk is this?”

  “I decide. I shall marry whom and when I choose. It is freedom of a sort that Pa-pa’s assets crumbled in the wake of his death. If I came to a marriage offer with a large income, a mill and estates perhaps, then I should have no choice, should I? But the poor artist that I am—she may choose her own fate.”

  “You have no choice. The viscount is the last—your only choice!”

  The day she’d stood up to a wrathful stable groom flooded Elizabeth’s mind.

  Then she’d summoned strength she didn’t know she possessed. It was as if someone else had fled across the meadow at Parham Hill and thrust her arms spread-eagle before the wretched horse. But the animal had been the wounded one then. She’d saved it, or tried to. And now, who would save her?

  Now she was the wounded one.

  The hurt and abused.

  And if she didn’t stand up in that moment, her life would bleed by in an endless parade of dress shops and afternoon tea visits, in a marriage of duty with love having been surrendered for a lifetime of privilege. And household management enforced by a manipulative overseer who hadn’t any true affection for her at all, only subservience to financial security.

  If Elizabeth submitted, justice for her pa-pa would be buried for good. She’d rather die herself than let that happen.

  “Who is Christopher Churchill?” She stared at her mother as if each syllable needed its own infusion of strength to make her point. Folding her arms across her chest helped.

  Ice befell the room.

  No longer was Ma-ma’s primary panic that a wedding would be put off or a viscount’s offer discarded in favor of the next eligible lady in line.

  Stark. Cold. Emotionless . . . Elizabeth saw the worst of her mother’s character bubble to the surface and roil upon her face like a reed tossed in a current. She tipped her eyebrows in cool challenge. In truth, the dowager countess seemed almost impressed that her daughter should challenge with such precision, though she gave the distinct impression that she’d been challenged before.

  Challenged and won—and would win again.

  “Where did you hear that name?”

  Elizabeth tilted her head. “Where did you?”

&nbs
p; “That name belongs to a spurious criminal who sought to profit from your father’s death. Forget it.”

  “How would anyone profit from Pa-pa’s death when we haven’t a quid in our pocket and I have but one good gown to my name?”

  “This is about more than quids. And gowns. And the stubborn streak your father never suppressed in his only daughter. The criminal professed to have knowledge of an earl’s death but would only share what he knew in exchange for money. And the London magistrate had no evidence whatsoever that he was tied to the crime. Just an absurd thespian who thought he should profit from a nobleman’s death.”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “He didn’t appear to want money.”

  “Didn’t appear . . . You mean you’ve met this man?”

  Ma-ma’s fury boiled over like a babe in a fit for a sugar bowl. She pounded her fist on her palm and turned away, as if the view would offer her the chance to build her wall of composure back up.

  “Why would anyone wish to profit from us? We are not prizes. We haven’t any inheritance left to live on, let alone to rise again from the ashes of a crumbling estate. I haven’t a clue why we’d even receive an invitation to Parham Hill in the first place, and yet we did . . .”

  Elizabeth stopped, feeling the shades of truth flash through her.

  Of course.

  She hadn’t caught the viscount’s eye. Hadn’t received an invitation to a ball because of her late father’s name. However she’d managed it, the entire trip had been carefully crafted by her mother’s expert hand.

  “You did this. You arranged this marriage to a man you knew was there the night of the murder. You’ve known who he is all along. And you kept this from me all these years!”

  “Yes. I. Did.” Ma-ma spat out the words with venom flying. She crossed the chamber as though her feet were aflame and tore open the wardrobe. She rifled through a drawer for a split second and retrieved a shiny metal object that just caught the light—the revolver.

  “You think I did not know? You may not have loaded this, but you still carried it. Everywhere.” Slamming it down on the vanity table, ironically next to the velvet keepsake box for a wedding tiara, her ma-ma left the weapon like a snake coiled between them. “And what did you think you were going to do? Behave like a man? Challenge your father’s murderer to pistols at dawn?”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “You were set to ruin your future, that’s what. I sent a letter to the viscount—he being the brother of a business acquaintance of your late pa-pa’s. I posed the arrangement to him and he extended an invitation—why I do not know. But neither do I care. Who would accept a plain and aging daughter with no dowry? She being an artist. So like the drudge of the theater crowd. Unruly and uncouth. Unfit for the gentle world. I would toss every one of your sketchbooks in the fire if it meant you would submit that stubborn will to the duty of your station and forget these fanciful whims and swirls of paint.”

  “It is those sketchbooks that brought us to London after all. Have you forgotten? I am to paint the queen of England.”

  “You are to tag along behind a master. You are to meet the queen and then marry well. That is your aim. Paint is merely a stepping-stone to our future.”

  She’d tripped into finding the name Churchill, and Elizabeth refused to back down without answers. Or some truth that had been denied her for too long. But instead of uncovering truths, it had locked a thousand new doors. And unless she could open them, one by one, she would wither, suppressed and imprisoned, as long as she stayed under her mother’s thumb.

  “Good-bye, Ma-ma.”

  Whisking up her hat and reticule, and the revolver from the vanity, Elizabeth breezed past her, heading for the door.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “To the Adelphi Theater in Piccadilly to ask questions after London’s wretched thespians. And then to every theater I can find in the city until I unravel the web of secrets you’ve spun over us. Care to come along?”

  “And what will you do at a theater? Find more names that do not matter? Unearth the past that has been buried in peace these ten years? You haven’t a carriage. And you haven’t a ring on your finger with which to demand anything.” She stared, her eyes trying their last and best effort to exert control. “You need me. Or else how will you survive?”

  It was Elizabeth’s turn to smile.

  To find the challenge of a bitter dowager countess a folly and her words nothing but the imperious conjecture of a fool tugged the corners of her mouth up to where Elizabeth was powerless to stop it.

  “Perhaps I will survive on my own.”

  “Those are the only intelligent words you have uttered. The viscount will not allow his bride to go traipsing all over the city, associating with the guttersnipes of London’s underbelly and thereby sullying his name. You dishonor your father by your defiance. Do you hear me? You would be dead to him.”

  “Then perhaps I was never meant to be someone’s bride or have worth because of someone’s name,” Elizabeth whispered, the hinges crying out like punctuation when she turned the knob. “Perhaps God whispers my name instead, and gave me an artist’s heart all along.”

  The shouts were drowned out as Elizabeth closed the door.

  * * *

  June 9, 1843

  216 Strand

  London, England

  It took little convincing for the coach to be let. None at all, in fact.

  Keaton’s promise when they’d arrived in London had been true. Elizabeth was given every right of property—to his home, his staff, even his coach and four he’d left behind. With a mere request the coachman set them out upon the streets of London, asking no questions as to why she’d ventured out without her mother in tow. He’d simply readied the horses and they were off within moments, with only his nod and an assured, “Very good, milady,” as he steered them toward the theater district.

  The coach turned up Strand Street, the horses’ hooves clip-clopping like the ticking of a clock. That was what it amounted to—counting the minutes until Elizabeth might continue her quest in the open. Seeking out unknown men . . . asking after names in theater back halls . . . Perhaps she’d return to the Theatre Royal and beat her fist upon the frosted glass of Mr. Churchill’s door until he let her in, then point the revolver at him until he finally surrendered answers.

  And then perhaps she’d go back to St. James’s Park, to the townhome of the man who was still a mystery, and even without the companion of a loaded weapon, bluff well and demand better until he told her the truth.

  The Thames roiled outside the coach, churning as the bright June sun shone down on the way. Her mother had taken them to all points of London, to every dress shop and milliner and perfumery in the new parts of the city—those rebuilt after the Great Fire had torn through and eaten centuries’ worth of London’s history.

  But they’d always avoided the Strand.

  Until that moment Elizabeth hadn’t realized how well she still knew it.

  The haunts and hollows were familiar as the coach rolled by, most buildings unchanged from the dark blot upon her memory. She gripped her sketchbook in her palms, pressing hard to the worn leather as the coach moved on. And remembrance began a slow clawing in her midsection as the coach eased to a stop.

  She could feel the release of the coachman’s weight when he jumped down from his perch. And she remained frozen as he opened the door and waited for instruction.

  “216 Strand, milady.”

  Talons shredded her insides as memories seized upon her.

  Elizabeth hadn’t a clue as to how long she sat there. Staring out when she should have been brave and stepped down to the sidewalk. But ensconced in the safety of the velvet interior, she couldn’t move a fraction.

  Twining’s still stood, the one-story shop sandwiched between two multistoried brick structures on either side. She remembered the façade, its frame so petite it was not much wider than the front doors. The polished wood gleamed out from b
ehind the waves of falling snow. The gaslight lamp shone on the cobblestones beneath the coach wheels. And the warm glow of shop windows revealed how far back the interior stretched, with row upon row of leaves tucked in jars and bins, and patrons weaving their way through—both men and women, unlike the rule of “men only” posted at London’s coffeehouses.

  And then the crack of a firearm discharging through the night.

  Cathedral bells chiming.

  The wind howling.

  A body falling . . . and her world shattering into pieces.

  Elizabeth gripped the windowsill with one hand, fingers grasping for something solid to cling to, with the sketchbook hugged to her chest in the other.

  How was it she could still feel the coldness prickle her skin? Could see the passersby not in light linen or cotton fashions of the mild summer afternoon but bundled and rushing about through the harsh December wind? And was that a young man with eyes of gray and a jagged line of gold leaning against the lamppost, tapping a walking stick against his boot, top hat shielding his face from the gaslight’s glow?

  “Elizabeth?”

  She started at an outstretched hand that had reached through the coach’s open door.

  The coachman had been replaced—unbeknownst to her—and not by an apparition of memory, but by the ten-years-older version of Keaton James. Without top hat or cane. And no candy-striped ascot dancing on the wind. Just him in a deep-ink coat and white shirt, his tie discarded somewhere, as though he’d loosed it and neglected to tie it up again. His dark hair stirred in the gentle summer breeze that filtered through the streets, and he waited, hand outstretched, as he searched her eyes, palm patient as it asked to receive hers.

  All she could do was stare at it, unable to move unless to slink back from him.

  “Elizabeth . . . may I help you?”