What Happened at Midnight

by Courtney Milan

  Lady Patsworth swallowed. “But—”

  He glared at her. “I won’t have my wife exposed to such rubbish.” He motioned the maid over and handed her the pieces. “Burn this,” he commanded. “Burn it immediately.”

  She ducked her head and disappeared. After a long moment, Sir Walter followed her into the house.

  Lady Patsworth stared after him in stunned silence. “I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t do this without something to take my mind…” Her hands were shaking.

  Lady Patsworth was not the sort of person who encouraged her companions to share her confidences. She kept her distance.

  Still… “Lady Patsworth,” Mary said, “is there not something that can be done?”

  The other woman shook her head slowly. “That is what it means to be married. There is no escape. Even if I could send word to my brother…what could he do? I’m married to Sir Walter. I’m his responsibility, his charge. Legally. And there’s nothing anyone else can do about it.”

  “Can that not be changed? He’s not…not faithful, is he?”

  They’d never talked of anything so intimate. Lady Patsworth stared straight ahead and then shook her head.

  “So you have cause for divorce.”

  “Divorce.” The other woman said the word viciously. “Who is granted divorces? A handful every decade, and then only to the most wealthy, the most powerful. I have nobody who would even introduce a bill on my behalf in Parliament.” She spoke in low, vehement tones. She punctuated the last by spearing a piece of kipper with her fork. But she didn’t eat it; she just stabbed it again and again.

  “Lady Patsworth.”

  “Don’t try to help,” the other woman snapped. “He’ll only send you away if you do.”

  Lady Patsworth’s shoulders were rigid, her eyes focused on something far away. She took a deep breath, and then another, and then another. Mary knew all too well what it was like to be trapped, to dread every coming day. She’d been on the verge of breaking when John appeared. If he hadn’t come…

  “There must be something I can do,” she finally said. “Something to make your life bearable.”

  Lady Patsworth let out another ragged breath. “Yes,” she said finally. “You can help me to design my own gowns.”

  Chapter Seven

  “DID I EVER TELL YOU about the time my mare stopped sleeping?”

  Mary had not expected John to start with such a question when she met him that next night. She wasn’t sure what she expected from him any longer. They’d walked. They talked of old times. Sometimes, they touched—glove to glove, glove to sleeve. It was welcoming, to be able to forget for a few minutes every day what waited for her back at Doyle’s Grange.

  “I thought of it,” he said, “because this is the fifth night when we’ve foregone sleep, and I was wondering if the effect on humans would be much like it was on horses.”

  “I don’t understand,” Mary said. “Aren’t horses always sleeping? Every time I walk by one, it seems to be dozing off on its feet.”

  “That’s just napping,” he said, with a wave of his free hand. “Horses sleep curled up on the ground, too. Like dogs. They don’t need much sleep, but they do need some. I first noticed something was wrong because she had a scrape on her front fetlock. The next morning, another.”

  “Poor thing.”

  “And then there was her personality. She was always a placid, sweet thing. But she began to shy from shadows. I thought the stable manager was abusing her, actually. So that night, I silently climbed into the hayloft to observe.”

  “And?”

  He guided her around a tree, keeping her in the shade of its branches. “I stayed up half the night watching for my hapless employee, nursing my wrath. And what I saw was this: around two in the morning, she started to collapse.”

  “With nobody there?”

  “With nobody there,” he confirmed. “She fell where she was standing, striking her fetlock against the stable floor. Then she scrambled to her feet. Precisely as if she had nodded off while on watch duty.”

  “Oh, goodness. But why did she not just sleep?”

  “That took a little longer to determine. You see, I had just built a windmill to pump water from the south field. The noise it made was different, and it was frightening her. She was waiting for whatever was making those odd creaking sounds to catch up to her and devour her.”

  Mary gave a little laugh. “I’m sorry. That shouldn’t be funny.”

  “I moved her to a pasture where she couldn’t hear the carnivorous windmill, and she was good as new after that. So I understand the dangers of not sleeping. You risk your knees—and your dignity. Tell me if your knees suffer, will you?”

  She laughed again.

  “There,” he said, “Now that’s what I like to hear. You have the most beautiful laugh, Mary.”

  She pulled away. “Save your compliments for your horses.” But she was smiling.

  Deep inside, she knew that she was only setting herself up for a fall. He would leave. He would remember that he hadn’t really forgiven her. And having tasted friendship once again, having remembered how sweet it was to trust someone else, it would be all the more bitter to have it wrested away. But even knowing that she was being foolish—knowing that this would end, and she would be hurt—she couldn’t make herself push him away.

  She’d been right. She’d missed him—missed the life she had once had—too much to be anything other than very foolish when it came to him.

  “So,” Mary said, as lightly as she could manage, “why did you build a windmill?” As she spoke, she rested her hand against his arm.

  He started walking. “I was sixteen,” he said. “And my father had given me a piece of land.”

  “A gift?”

  “A threat.” He sighed and turned his head to look out over the valley. “He didn’t want me to think so much about farming. There was no money in land anymore, he said. We had some wealth remaining, and he was throwing it all into investment—that, he said, was where all the money lay. But I kept coming to him with my head in the clouds, spouting ragged bits of advice I was learning from books and farmers’ magazines. He was sick to death of my hopeful burbling, and so he told me that I could make all the changes I wanted on the farm, if only I could do one thing.”

  Next to her, he smiled in memory. It was a deep, dark smile, one that drew her in.

  “He gave me a piece of land where all the water for miles drained. What wasn’t fen in the plot was taken up by bulrushes. And he told me if I could make a crop of rye grow there, I could do as I wished, instead of going into business.”

  “Didn’t you want to go into business?”

  He shrugged. “Not particularly. It seemed to involve a great deal of sitting around and talking to others. Rather dull, actually. I’ve always liked working with my hands. I gather he gave me that plot of land to beat my misplaced ambitions out of me. To give me an impossible task, just so I could fail at it.”

  When he’d been sixteen, she would have just started in Vienna. She’d been full of hopes about her playing—that she’d become so brilliant that she might play anywhere, despite the unfortunate deficiency of her sex. They’d both taken on impossible tasks. But he’d succeeded at his.

  “I didn’t believe them,” John said. “Not even when all the available choices failed. Tile drains, laid at reasonable intervals, simply covered in water. There was too much mud to manage a proper drainage canal. It took me two years to convince myself that no passive draining scheme would serve. And even then, I wouldn’t give up. That’s when I began to consider an active scheme. I ordered architectural drawings from the Netherlands, from drainage windmills in Kent.”

  “And so you built a windmill and showed them all.”

  “It wasn’t that easy,” he said. “I built it, and it didn’t work. It took me another six months to work out the details. By that time, my father…”

  “Was he urging you to give up, to move on?”
r />   There was a long pause. “No,” John said softly. “But I remember the moment when I finally got the machinery in the tower to work right. It looked right. I examined it from every angle, and it matched the specifications I had. I took it apart and put it back together three times, and still the bloody thing wouldn’t work. I was beginning to lose the light, and the oil lamp was not bright enough to show intricate detail. I had told myself I was going to finish that day. And that’s how I figured it out—because I was too stubborn to leave. It got so dark I couldn’t see—so I heard it instead. Just a faint grinding. Enough for me to realize the wood pump rod wasn’t seated properly. It was so close to straight I couldn’t see that it was off. But I could hear it. I fixed it in the dark, and the next morning, when I came to look at the results, my reservoir was filling and my land was drying.”

  “What did your father have to say to that?”

  “As I recall, what he said was, ‘What are you showing me all this mud for? Haven’t you got seed to sow?’” John quoted. “He wasn’t much for talking. But after that he said no more of my going into business and leaving the farm to others to manage.”

  “How horrid.”

  “No. It just wasn’t his way to give praise. Not to my face. After he passed away, though, I heard that he’d crowed about it to all of his friends.”

  That put Mary in mind of her piano master. But thinking of Herr Rieger only made her sad. Maybe that’s what she’d liked about John, when first they met—that automatic understanding of what it was to take on an impossible, years-long task. She’d met him long after he’d built his windmill. At that point, there had only been talk of all the things he’d done—and no hint of how difficult they might have been. The other girls had spoken of him in hushed tones, as if he were some sort of magician, and a handsome one at that.

  But he was real—real and warm. And he wasn’t with any of those other girls. He was here in the dark with her, holding her arm, losing sleep to talk with her at night. He’d achieved so much on his own. And what had she done?

  Once, that question might have made her throw up her hands in despair. But perhaps it was because she was so close to him. Perhaps it was because they’d resumed their friendship, and the world no longer seemed as impossibly frightening as it once had been.

  Crickets sounded again, thin and reedy in the night.

  Perhaps she had given up hope too easily. She’d let Sir Walter take everything from her without a fight. Maybe she didn’t need to be devastated when John left. Maybe she was strong enough not only to face her world, but to change it.

  Herr Rieger came to mind again, his mouth narrowed to a flat, white line. Not right, the image of him barked in her head. Try again. This time, slow—once your fingers know the way of it, you can speed it up.

  “I was wondering,” she said quietly. “Could you perhaps do me a favor?”

  “What is it?”

  A little step. She’d play it slowly at first. Once she knew the way of it…

  “A paper,” Mary said. “Bring me a newspaper.”

  IT WAS NOT UNTIL NOON three days later that Mary had a chance to reveal her bounty. Lady Patsworth was sewing; her husband had left the two women alone to answer letters. He sat in the next room over, close enough to hear, but hidden by the door. It was as good a chance as either of them would ever get. The front room, papered in a delicate pink and gold, gleamed in the morning sun.

  “Now,” Lady Patsworth was saying, “white ruffs might seem too much like livery, but—”

  Mary adjusted her skirts, rescuing the paper from its place in her petticoats. She slid it into Lady Patsworth’s sewing basket and gestured for the woman to continue. But Lady Patsworth had stopped talking. She looked at the paper; she looked at Mary. She reached out and touched it with the edge of her fingertips, as if she were afraid it might reach up and bite her.

  And then she gave Mary a brilliant smile.

  Keep talking, Mary mouthed, tilting her head toward the door behind which Sir Walter sat.

  Lady Patsworth glanced in her husband’s direction and then picked up the paper.

  “Of course,” she said loudly, “now that I’m designing my own gowns—”

  She stopped again as she unfolded the pages. Sir Walter always read the news of the world while handing the middle page of fashion and gossip to his wife. But she was staring at the front page—not the fashion column.

  “Now that I’m designing my own,” Lady Patsworth said more quietly, “I can do…anything I want?” Her voice raised in a question.

  “Of course you can,” Mary soothed her.

  Lady Patsworth’s hands were shaking. She turned the paper around.

  Mary hadn’t had the chance to look at it yet. When John had given it over last night, it had been too dark to make out letters. If she’d tried to read it herself in daylight hours, she would have risked losing her contraband. So this was the first time that she’d seen the headline.

  Queen Grants Royal Assent to Matrimonial Causes Act.

  Mary drifted over, skimming paragraphs, trying to take it all in. No wonder Sir Walter had canceled his subscription. The gossip pages wouldn’t have been safe any longer. The new bill had created a civil court to hear cases of divorce, allowing anyone to bring suit. Anyone—not just those with access to Parliament. And when that court came into existence…oh, the gossip that the paper would print.

  Mary raised her eyes to Lady Patsworth. The woman was staring at the words in confusion.

  Mary tilted her head, reminding the other woman that her husband was near. “What sort of gown do you think you will make first?”

  Lady Patsworth was staring at the black ink before her.

  “I don’t think…” Her fingers plucked uselessly at the pages. “That is to say…” She let out a breath and shook her head. “I believe I will make the same sorts of gowns that I always have. Nothing has changed, really.”

  How many years had Lady Patsworth suffered under her husband’s rule? More than Mary knew. She knew that the other woman hated his restrictions—but maybe, after all this time, she’d forgotten how to live without them.

  “I think you should make a riding habit,” Mary said. “With divided skirts so you might be able to challenge anyone to race—and dash away quickly so that they might never catch you.”

  The other woman’s eyes widened at those words. She stole another glance in the direction of her husband. “I…I couldn’t. I haven’t the slightest notion how to cut the cloth.”

  It wasn’t right. The last few days, talking with John in friendship…they’d been a real balm for Mary. But John would leave, and when he did, Mary would find herself all the more aware of the bars that made up her cage. This was her chance to prove that she could do something besides wait to be released.

  “Let me sketch you how it is done,” she said, reaching for a pencil. She wrote in tiny letters in the margin of the paper.

  Would your brother help you?

  Lady Patsworth bit her lip and took the pencil from her. But how am I to get word to him? Even if he came—he did two years ago—Sir W will simply not let him on the property.

  “With the right riding habit,” Mary said, “you might even take a horse over an obstacle. Just jump over it if it gets in your way.”

  He has a pistol, Lady Patsworth wrote. I’m afraid he’ll use it.

  They stared at those words and then Lady Patsworth turned away. “It’s a silly project.” She sniffed. “I don’t ride, I’m afraid. I haven’t since I was a girl. No sense in countenancing such waste.”

  There must be some way to change matters, Mary wrote. Her hands were shaking. If Lady Patsworth could break free, Mary might as well.

  But the other woman shook her head vehemently.

  “Make an evening gown, then,” Mary suggested. “One you might wear to an elegant party at a neighbor’s house.”

  “Alas,” Lady Patsworth said coldly. “My health does not permit such excursions.”

&nb
sp; We could make it happen, Mary wrote.

  Lady Patsworth looked at those words for a very long time before reaching for the pencil. How?

  Mary let out a breath of relief.

  I have an idea.

  Chapter Eight

  “I NEED TO TELL YOU something.”

  John had been meeting Mary for a half hour or so every night for more than a week, now. It was easy to be patient, to pretend to be her friend. It was easy to fall into their old camaraderie—so easy that most of the time he forgot that he was pretending. In fact, he’d stopped probing after the first days. He had time, he told himself, and it would go better if she trusted him…and he was enjoying himself.

  He only remembered that he was lying to her at moments like this—when she looked at him with her eyes round and solemn, and he recalled that she had secrets he wanted to uncover.

  There was a luster to her eyes, something more than the reflection of starlight. There was something about the way she looked at him that made his chest feel tight.

  “I need another favor,” she said. “Two favors, this time, and rather larger. But in order for my requests to make any sense, you have to understand who—what—Sir Walter is.”

  One confidence was good. It might lead to another, after all, the one that he truly desired. But that didn’t explain the warmth that filled him at the thought of her trust, the smile that he felt come onto his face.

  “He’s an ass,” John said simply. “That much I can tell. But I’m sure you have specifics.”

  “He has not let his wife be in company for six years. Not to go to church; not to visit the shops. The last time her brother came to see her, Sir Walter threw him off the property and threatened to shoot him if he returned.”

  “What is his reasoning?”

  Mary shook her head. “Does it matter? His reasoning is flawed. He says he wants to keep her safe. I think he’s afraid that she will be as unfaithful as he has been.”

  It matched what little he’d seen of the man. Mary’s voice was scornful, but when he looked down, her hand was a little unsteady on his sleeve.