Of course, she had done everything she could to prevent it. For once, it had seemed as though events were conspiring in her favor. Her mother always was an indulgent woman and had breezily agreed to the conditions Lily had desperately set, conditions carefully designed to make it impossible for her to end up as Lily had foreseen—clad in a bright red gown, alone, gazing sightless up into the night sky while jewels glittered in the pool of blood that surrounded her.
It hadn’t mattered.
After all, a white gown could easily turn to the red Lily insisted she leave at home when it was stained with blood. And a necklace of paste and glass, borrowed from a costumer friend, looked even finer in the darkness of Covent Garden as the true jewels she had agreed to forgo for the evening.
She had kept her promise not to go alone, so the costumer had died with her.
Every precaution Lily took turned to dust. Every warning heeded, every circumstance carefully avoided, had instead all conspired to bring about the very horror Lily sought to prevent.
She felt as though she was the one who held the knife. Her guilt was just as real, just as substantial. She had known for two full weeks that her mother’s life was in danger and still she had failed to save her.
The cold, quick thrust of it threatened to swallow her whole.
Around her, London’s players and dancers wept luxuriant tears into black handkerchiefs or bombazine-clad shoulders. Lily remained still and silent, her eyes dry as the pallbearers hefted the black coffin onto their shoulders and carried it down the aisle.
“I’d just like to know what’s going to become of me,” the nurse muttered to the weeping stage dresser beside her as Lily rose to follow the dark box out into the churchyard.
The words rang with a terrible significance, one that put the slightest hitch in her forcefully even step.
I’d just like to know what’s going to become of me.
Deirdre Albright had been as bright and heedless of practicalities as a butterfly. There would be no plan for the future, no contingency to determine what became of her daughter should the unimaginable come to pass.
At the end of this service, the crowd of wailing mourners around her would trudge off to drink or sleep or kick up their skirts on the music hall stages.
There would be no one left.
The cold fear rose up, elbowing its way into a space already tight with guilt and grief, and then they arrived at the dark hole in the ground where her mother would be lain.
The grass of the churchyard was lush and green, the soft-leaved trees whispering overhead in that perfect breeze.
“As for mortals, their days are like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field,” the priest intoned. “For the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more.”
Sunlight dappled down through the dancing branches, glittering on the white marble of the graves. Lily fought the urge to scream.
A hand settled onto her shoulder.
It was warm, steady and solid.
She looked up and he was there—the man who was constantly moving through her life, passing on his way to or from, familiar but always a little distant.
He stood straight-backed, the light moving over the Roman profile and salt-and-pepper hair she knew so well, but something different was carved into the lines of his face, something strange and yet shockingly familiar.
Grief.
He looked down at her as the priest droned out the rest of his psalm, the weight of his hand like an anchor in a storm.
“I know,” he said and she realized that he did—that of all the myriad, wailing mourners pressed around that dark, waiting hole in the ground, there was one who shared her pain, who understood what she had lost because he had lost it too.
His hand remained through all the effusive eulogies, the throwing of roses, the wails and the rattle of earth on the coffin lid. When it was done and the crowd dispersed, he knelt down before her, his steel gray eyes meeting her own.
“All will be well.”
The words had the weight of a vow made as he held the slender bones of her shoulders in his hands.
He stood, murmuring something to the nurse, who had become all sweetness and obedience the moment he appeared. She bobbed her head.
“Yes, m’lord.”
He turned back and smiled at Lily. It was a smile that carried a promise Lily read as clear as if he had spoken it aloud.
She would not be alone in this. Someone would be there—someone who understood.
Then he was gone.
And he did not return.
Three days later, it was not the Earl of Torrington who appeared at the door of the rooms on Oxford Street, but an elderly solicitor. He paid the nurse a generous severance and waited with barely concealed impatience while Lily packed her belongings into a trunk. She was delivered to Mrs. Finch’s, where she spent the next five years of her life without hearing so much as a single word from the man who had been the source of her strength at that terrible moment—the man who had made her a promise she had been foolish enough to believe and which had been thoroughly betrayed.
Unless one counted the bank statements.
The parlor was not a room designed for entertaining. Lily did not have guests. There were two chairs but only one of them was ever used. The other had been purchased on a whim at a flea market and even Cat disdained it, preferring to find some new jacket or Lily’s bedroom slippers to sleep on and leave coated in orange fur. The cushion was stiff, taut enough to bounce a penny near to the ceiling.
A pile of newspapers and a few motorcycle magazines lay in an untidy pile by the fireplace. A handful of exceptionally hardy houseplants, capable of withstanding perennial neglect, crowded the top of the bookshelf. The walls were decorated with just enough art to keep them from being conspicuously bare, and those were mediocre landscape paintings, the sort one never noticed unless the nail broke and they came tumbling to the ground.
There was only a single photograph, set inconspicuously on the mantle—an image of her mother, which Lily kept half-hidden by a brass clock. In it, she was dressed as Cleopatra and her face was a little blurred as she had clearly broken out into a smile at some point during the exposure.
To a man like the Earl of Torrington, it must seem like a tawdry little garret.
Not that it mattered to Lily. She was beyond being judged by him.
Fourteen years.
He had changed and yet he was the same. Those carved-from-marble features were as she remembered them, though the lines around his mouth and eyes were heavier now. His hair had turned more salt than pepper, but his back was still straight, his gray eyes just as sharp.
Why was he here? What possible reason could there be for him to break fourteen years of silence and turn up in her parlor?
Deveral.
Lily’s visit to his townhouse must not have gone unnoticed.
It still didn’t make sense. If Torrington wished to warn her away from his family, he certainly didn’t have to do it in person. A letter would have done just as well or he might have trudged out another solicitor. The one who brought her to Mrs. Finch’s was almost certainly dead by now, but she was sure he must have several on his payroll.
She wondered what consequences he would threaten were she to refuse to comply. Revoking the allowance she refused to accept?
She owed him nothing. He could do nothing to her.
She dropped her walking stick into the holder by the door, collected her filthy, earth-stained skirts, and made an elegant and entirely formal curtsy.
“My lord.”
There was a flicker of response in his familiar gray eyes. It was not the irritation she had expected to elicit but something else. Something sadder.
“Is this your chair?” he asked, indicating the plush, comfortable piece he stood before.
“No,” she lied and lowered herself onto the seat of the flea-market acquisition—slowly, so that it did not promptly bounce her back out. The springs dug int
o her thighs.
He took his seat opposite her.
“I apologize for the hour. I know it is unsociably early, but I am expected at Parliament by nine and the matter is of some urgency. Your housekeeper told me you had just stepped out and would be back in a moment.”
Lily was sharply aware of the filth staining her second-hand skirts and the mud caked onto her boots, flaking from them onto the carpet.
“My landlady.”
“Sorry?”
“Mrs. Bramble is my landlady. Not my housekeeper.”
“I see.”
Silence descended. She could hear the brass clock ticking on the mantle. She offered him nothing. If that left him feeling awkward or unwelcome, so be it.
Traffic rumbled along outside the window, the sound muffled by the glass.
“Lilith . . .” he began at last, but stopped at the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs.
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in,” Lily said without taking her gaze from the man in the more comfortable of her two chairs.
Mrs. Bramble entered, carrying a laden tea tray. It was the silver one, an item which had never found its way to Lily’s flat before, laden with a fine porcelain teapot and biscuits glazed with chocolate.
She set it down on the table by the fire with uncharacteristic grace, the cups barely rattling against the saucers.
She stepped back.
“Anything else I can fetch you?”
Lily wondered what rabbit hole she had fallen into. Then again, it probably wasn’t often that Mrs. Bramble had a peer of the realm in the house. She felt quite certain that the fib about Lily’s imminent arrival had been designed simply to get Lord Torrington upstairs so that Bramble could brag for the rest of her life that she had served tea to an earl.
“That will be all, thank you,” Lily replied flatly.
Mrs. Bramble curtsied and then slipped out of the room, closing the door gently behind her.
Lily let the service sit there. She did not offer to pour.
Let him think her rude.
How dare he turn up in her parlor? How dare he invade her life? And for what? Simply to tell her to stay entirely out of his?
He would not have to ask her twice. She would do it and gladly.
“Perhaps you had best get to it,” she said, once Bramble’s footsteps indicated she was safely out of earshot. “It is nearly eight.”
He leaned forward and took a biscuit.
“You called on Lord Deveral yesterday.”
“I did.”
“May I inquire what prompted the visit?”
She considered how to answer. She quickly dismissed the notion of presenting a falsehood. There was simply no plausible reason she would suddenly try to visit the half-brother who hated her on the day he was accused of murder and she felt rather certain her father was extraordinarily good at spotting a lie.
Movement flickered in the corner of her vision. She glanced over and saw Cat slowly creeping toward the earl’s chair. Lily found herself visualizing a stone’s weight in orange tabby leaping onto his lordship’s noble lap. Why not? The morning could hardly get any worse.
“I wished to speak to him about the events of last evening.”
“You refer to the death of Mrs. Boyden.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “I wanted to know if he had seen or heard anything unusual when he was there.”
She could see his sharp mind working behind those familiar gray eyes.
“You speak of him as though he were a witness. You do not believe he was Mrs. Boyden’s killer?”
“No,” Lily admitted, since there was little alternative. “I do not.”
He leaned forward, picking up the teapot and pouring a cup.
“Tea?”
“No, thank you,” Lily replied.
He took it black.
“How well do you know Simon?” he asked.
“Not very.”
“So your belief in his innocence is not based on your faith in the quality of his character. Have you some sort of evidence that indicates another was responsible for Mrs. Boyden’s death?”
“No.”
“Which leaves . . . what, exactly?”
The clock ticked on the mantle. Her leg itched. Cat had made it across the room and now sat at the foot of the earl’s chair, gazing up at him with rapt attention.
She was weary to the bone, frustrated and angry and half-starving. She wanted to climb into her bed, not sit here and be interrogated by the father who had deserted her over a decade ago.
“Call it a hunch,” she snapped dismissively.
Cat leapt. He landed on Lord Torrington’s lap. Lily waited for him to swat the animal away. Instead, her father’s hand went to the back of Cat’s thick neck. He scratched at it absentmindedly.
Cat began to purr.
Cat never purred.
Lily heard a coal fall in the fire, the crackle of the flames.
“So you still have them, then. Those hunches.”
Her senses snapped into alertness. She could hear the motor engine rumble from Cat’s throat. She could smell her father. It was a familiar smell, like cedar and bergamot. How could it be familiar?
Her thoughts flew back to the flat on Oxford Street. Burying her nose in the wool of his coat where he’d tossed it over a chair before going into her mother’s room. The lingering scent on the pillows when she curled up with her mother the next morning.
She had forgotten that smell.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she replied evenly.
He stroked the animal on his lap, hand moving absentmindedly along its sleek orange fur.
“I didn’t always know when I would make it to Oxford Street. Sessions might end early or some obligation be canceled . . . but no matter how unexpected I was, you always managed to be playing on the floor in the drawing room when I arrived.”
Her pulse thudded and the memory came flooding back.
How she would know. That simple, unquestionable awareness that he was coming would announce itself and she would connive a way to escape her nurse and be in his path when he turned up at the door.
The memory was shocking, hitting her with all the force of a train. There had been more—what was coming in the post. That a night’s performance would be canceled. That rain would ruin plans for a picnic. She had known it the way astronomers know a star is about to rise or seafarers that the tide will turn.
It hadn’t always been visions, waking nightmares she knew were destined to become truth. It had been something else once, an easy awareness of what was around the bend that she had been surprised those around her did not share.
It shook her to the bone. She reached for the teapot to cover it up, pouring herself a cup. It clattered only slightly against the saucer as she lifted it.
“Of course. Children always like to play where they are most underfoot, I imagine,” she said easily.
“Indeed. Though from the reaction of your minders when they discovered you there, it was not a place you were generally permitted to loiter. So it is quite a remarkable coincidence that you always managed to be there just when I made an appearance.”
Lily sipped her tea.
“Indeed. Quite remarkable.”
“Your mother certainly thought so.”
Lily’s teacup rang against the saucer. She forced her hands to steady.
“Pardon?”
“She called you her little telegraph. Bragged about how you always knew before the rest of the house when a package would be delivered, or that an acquaintance would be dropping by. I remember one time I brought a little bauble for her—not for any occasion, just something I knew would brighten her eyes. ‘Lily told me you had something for me,’ she said. You quite ruined my surprise.”
His tone was light, but his gaze was fixed on her, pinning her like a butterfly to a board. She summoned every ounce of her self-control to keep her face and form stea
dy, to revealing nothing of the tumult his words were opening up inside of her.
“The nurses always said I was rather difficult,” she replied easily.
“You come by it honestly.”
She felt a quick flash of anger. She latched on to it—it was safer than the other emotions that were threatening.
“You refer to my mother?”
“No. I do not.”
She looked at him, sitting in her chair by her fire, stroking the clearly rapturous Cat. This man with her nose and her eyes who had no right to be anything other than a stranger to her had showed up here in her sanctuary and threatened to blow the walls apart with his casual recollections.
“Not so honestly, then,” she remarked.
His fingers were the tell—the slightest hitch in the rhythm of their attentions to Cat’s neck. It was a subtle indicator that her words had hit their mark.
It did not leave her feeling very victorious.
Cat jumped down and her father stood. He moved over to the gable that housed the window, looking down at the street.
“Simon is difficult.” His words were bald in their honestly. “He always has been. I have tried to teach him to manage it, but he is not inclined to learn. There is only so much a father can do, even one with the resources I have at my disposal. Yet I do know him—your brother—and he would not murder a woman in her bed.”
His figure was straight, stiff, every inch the proper aristocrat even in her cramped little parlor. But Lily could see there was more than aristocratic training in that stiffness right now. There was tension and something else—fear. And perhaps a little guilt.
He turned to face her, arms folded neatly behind his back.
“I take it your interest in this matter does not lie in Lord Deveral’s welfare?”
“No,” Lily replied.
Or in mine?
He might have asked it. He did not.
Lily stared down at her hands. They were clenched into fists in her lap.
“I do not like to see an injustice done,” she ground out. “No matter how unsympathetic the victim.”
The little brass clock chimed the hour. It drew his gaze to the fireplace and he moved closer, stopping at the small, ebony-framed image of Deirdre Albright. He brushed one long finger along the side of her blurry smile, then returned his hand to his side.
The Fire in the Glass Page 18
