Sea of Secrets: A Novel of Victorian Romantic Suspense

by DeWees, Amanda

  A slow smile spread across his face, and he gazed almost dreamily at his glass of claret, turning it so that the gaslight glinted off the faceted crystal and set the wine glowing like a drowned flame. “No. I did not burn it.”

  He was enjoying himself, drawing this out deliberately to keep me in suspense, but I had to ask the question he was waiting to hear. “Where is it, then? May I see it?”

  Another long, deliberate pause, and he slowly tipped the last of his wine down his throat. Then, setting the glass on the table, he pushed back his chair and stood. Swiftly, I stood as well, and he rang for Molly to clear.

  “Yes,” he said. “I think you may see it. Since, as you say, you will be leaving soon, it is right that you should look on your mother’s face before you go.”

  Scarcely daring to breathe for fear he would change his mind, so unexpected was his agreeable, accommodating mood, I followed him out of the dining room to the stairs. He paused to get an oil lamp, and then we began our ascent.

  I followed him all the way to the top of the house, to a low narrow door I had never opened. The key Father used was rusty, the lock stiff, and when the door finally opened with a jerk we were greeted with a rising cloud of dust. When it settled, the lamp cast a warm glow on a jumble of disorder: broken chairs, crumbling sheaves of paper, boxes, trunks, crates. Everything was furred heavily with dust so that it blended into a dun-colored mass, and as we moved into the attic, squeaks and scrabbling sounds preceded us. Spiders had made free of the place; generations of webs draped the rafters, and Father, in front of me, had to brush them aside to move forward. The condition of the attic dispelled any notion I might have had that Father made sentimental pilgrimages to visit his dead wife’s portrait, and I wondered why he had not stored it in a place where it would be safe from vermin and decay.

  At least he—or a servant—had covered it, so that it was not naked to the dust that had grown moss-like over every other surface. The tall rectangle standing at the far end of the room was swathed completely in a cloth that may once have been white but was now the same grimy color as everything surrounding it. Father set the lamp on a nearby trunk so that it cast its light on the shrouded shape. Then, with thinned lips showing his distaste, he grasped a corner of the drape and pulled. Instantly he fell back as another choking cloud of dust arose, and I held my handkerchief to my nose as I stared at the painting, waiting for it to emerge from the haze.

  I could feel my heart quickening. After so long, finally to know what she looked like, to see whether I even—oh, please—resembled her. To see in her face what her character was, whether she had been flirtatious, or gentle, or strong, to know what kind of person she had been who had ended her own life when she was no older than I. Through the settling dust came colors first, then shapes: a bright pink gown, a blue bonnet, hands folded over a fan. My heart was beating fast and joyful as my eyes sought her face.

  They met blankness. Beneath the meticulously rendered plumes and frills of the bonnet there was no face, but a hole of vacant white canvas. Nausea touched me and I fell back a step, shaken by the terrible void where I had expected to find the features of a human face.

  “The artist never even saw your mother.”

  I had forgotten Father’s presence. Unable to speak, I looked at him where he stood next to me and saw unmistakable satisfaction in his eyes. “Tragic, isn’t it? The only surviving portrait of your dear mother, and it lacks its subject.” When I still said nothing, he went on, and he was actually smiling. “She was a very sickly little thing, your mother. If she wasn’t taking the waters at a spa she was convalescing in Italy. The artist had to paint everything else first, and she was dead before he so much as met her.”

  “But… the hands?” I asked faintly, finding my voice.

  He waved dismissively. “A model, no doubt.”

  A shiver went through me. Not even these held anything of my mother. All they spoke of was an anonymous shop girl or actress who had worn my mother’s dress for the time it took to be set on canvas. I would never even have the slight knowledge they would have afforded: would she have had long fingers, clever with a needle or at the pianoforte? Or the plump, dimpled hands of a belle? Would she have had a smudge of Prussian blue paint on one finger, or ink from writing letters? Would her grasp on the fan have been languid, tentative, or firm?

  I stared at the portrait with numb eyes, then moved to retrieve the discarded cloth and covered the painting up again. When I turned around my father was watching me with folded arms and the same satisfied expression.

  “All this time,” I said, “you let me believe that you loved her—so much that you had no love left for me. But if you’d had any love for her you would never have used her portrait to try to hurt me.”

  His smile split in half, into a wolfish grin of gleaming white. “Brava, my girl. Very good.”

  “Why, then? If she meant nothing to you, then why do you hold her death against me still? What have you lost?”

  “You spoke of jewels, earlier. For years I have been waiting for you to ask to wear your mother’s jewels. It would have been a natural request from anyone less timorous, not to say spineless. The fact is that your mother’s jewels, and everything else she possessed of value, were merely lent her. She owned no property; she left no inheritance.” His voice was losing its restraint and beginning to take on an edge of remembered fury and resentment. “Her family pulled the wool over my eyes beautifully. A modest dowry, and her allowance, were all I ever got. She would never inherit anything, nor I through her; her father was too cautious. If I had known when I married her that the family money would be tied up…”

  The numbness was receding. A white tide of anger was rising in its place, and I even thought I could hear its roaring in my ears. “That is what you’ve mourned all these years?” I said, not caring if I was interrupting. “Money? How can you dare to blame me, when it was your gullibility and greed that led to your disappointment?”

  The look he leveled at me would have made me quail at any other time. “You stupid girl, when she died, her allowance died with her. All that magnificent income, and a place in society, destroyed by a colicky brat. Do you think her family cared after that if I had enough money to live on? Do you think they continued to sponsor me in society, to give me entrée into the class I’d married into? In one blow I was robbed of wife, money, position.” His voice had dropped to a vicious whisper. “Now do you understand why I hate you?”

  I was shaking, but not with fear or grief. I had always assumed that, even in his contempt for me, he had never spoken less than the truth. Now I saw in one searing glimpse how he had manipulated me by fostering such an assumption. The one thing about him that had seemed to draw us together—his feeling for my mother—was perhaps the most irreconcilable gulf, and he had used my sympathy, had nurtured it as he seemed to reject it.

  “I can well understand,” I said, and my voice trembled. “If there is one thing you have taught me to understand, it is hate. I have always feared you—for all you think me a fool, I am too intelligent not to fear you—but I have never hated you until now. Now I know that I hate you.”

  I turned, fumbling away from him out of the reach of the lamplight, and as I felt my way to the door I heard him laugh. It was the sound of delight, of gratification, and of triumph.

  “So I have succeeded in teaching you something,” he said, his voice almost purring in its deep contentment. “You have inherited something from me after all—the capacity for hate. That will be your legacy.”

  I stumbled out of the attic, but his laughter followed, a soft delighted crooning that sickened me. I flung myself headlong down the stairs to escape it, to lock myself in my room and huddle on my bed until daybreak, to tell myself again and again that I had not become what he wanted to make of me, that my newborn hatred did not brand me his creature and his kin—his daughter.

  Chapter Three

  Next morning I departed for Ellsmere.

  Looking back much l
ater, I would realize how little prepared I was when I embarked on my new life. I was armed with a strange combination of learning and inexperience: from my unorthodox reading (unorthodox, that is, for a young woman) I had culled an accumulation of worldly knowledge but, having led a sheltered and mostly solitary life for more than twenty years, I was nevertheless hugely naïve.

  I knew that evil existed, and that the world was not always a just place; had I not just received shattering proof of this? I knew also a great deal more than I should have about matters considered improper for ladies’ sensibilities—the earthier aspects of love, for example (here I was indebted to Catullus and Byron).

  Of real human evil, though, I was ignorant. My father’s tender mercies had taught me that parents could be unnatural, that where I should most expect caring I might find only calculation. But I thought him an isolated case, an extreme—certainly not one of a multitude. If only there had been some wiser soul to warn me that other families hid secrets just as malignant.

  At the time, though, I would not have heeded any such warning. I was eager to trust, and to love. Only later would I learn the dangers of both.

  When my necessaries had been loaded into the hansom cab I stood for a long moment before the door to my father’s study. He was keeping his normal schedule; no need to interrupt it to bid farewell to someone who was no longer his daughter. He had easily made the transition from father to childless widower. Molly already had orders to move the furniture out of the room I had occupied so that it might be made into a library.

  But I could not sever myself from him so easily. It did not matter that there was no love between us, that he had never shown the slightest interest in me other than as a reflection upon him; for all that, he was my father, and something like loneliness swelled painfully beneath my ribs as I stood ready to leave him.

  If only I could have won his respect, if not his love; I had always hoped somehow that I could achieve something that would win a fraction of the approval and commendation he gave Lionel. My translations for Lionel, I had thought, might impress him; but when I made the mistake of telling him of them, he reviled me as a jealous liar, trying to steal the credit for my brother’s accomplishments, and in the same breath derided me as a bluestocking. My skill in sewing he turned to good use, since if I made my own dresses he did not have to pay a seamstress, but he dismissed it as a brainless accomplishment, the only one elementary enough for a girl who could not play or draw. It had taken me time to learn the futility of running to him with every small accomplishment in hopes of winning his admiration.

  Even so, in spite of the years since in which I had told myself that it was best and easiest to help him to forget my presence rather than to draw attention to it, there was still a part of me that longed for his approval. I wondered if he would be proud of me, even for a moment, if I told him of my acquaintance with the duchess and of her patronage of me. He would be impressed, that was certain; his dearest wish was to move among the aristocracy, and he might even spare a morsel of admiration for me, knowing that I was to achieve what he so prized.

  I raised my hand to knock. I would tell him. But then the memory of the faceless painting of my mother came before my eyes, and a return of that flush of anger and revulsion. He might be proud of me—but it would be because he thought I was using the duchess to foster my own ambition, as he would have done. I would be no better than him if I tried to plume myself on the acquaintance. Heat rushed to my face as I realized how close I had come to lowering myself to that level, and I turned and almost ran out the door and to the waiting cab.

  When I reached the railway station the duchess had named, I discovered that I had no need to ask anyone for directions to her car. The duchess literally had her own, identified by her coat of arms and teeming with liveried footmen. Newly awed, I made my way to it, followed by a porter who carried my boxes. As I neared it, I could read the motto on the family crest: Esse quam videri. I translated it automatically: “To be, rather than to seem.” A sentiment I admired; I hoped it was an apt one.

  While I was thinking this, Lady Montrose—Aminta—emerged at the top of the steps.

  “Why, good morning!” she exclaimed warmly. “I did not know if we would meet. I was just seeing Aunt and Felicity off.” She swept her voluminous skirts expertly down the steps and came to meet me. “I am glad I was able to see you before you left.”

  “You are not traveling with us?” I felt a dart of disappointment; even though we had only met once before, I had been impressed by Aminta’s calm, pleasant manner and unobtrusive good sense. She made an attractive counterpoint to her more ebullient sister and stepmother, and I would miss her company.

  She smiled and slipped a hand through my arm to give me a reassuring squeeze. “Oh, you needn’t think you’re rid of me for good. Now that we know we have a cousin, Felicity and I won’t be so easily avoided. In any case, my family and I will be coming to Ellsmere for Christmas.”

  “How nice,” I said, thinking how companionable that sounded. I had never known what it was like to have such a family gathering. “How many children do you have?”

  “Two. Freddy is five, a perfect cherub, and India is my two-year-old tempest. But I must let you get settled,” she added, walking me toward the railway carriage; “I’m certain Aunt Gwendolyn is waiting for you, and Felicity will be impatient to ask you all the questions she has thought up in the last three days.”

  Smiling at the likelihood of this, I mounted the narrow steps to the door through which my porter had already disappeared, then stopped as I heard Aminta call out again. “I almost forgot. Do you mind?” She handed up a heavy square package wrapped in paper. “Charles asked me to find some books for him, and I did not remember to give these to Aunt Gwendolyn. If you could take them to him…? Thank you. And give him my love.”

  I promised to deliver both books and love, even as I wondered who Charles was. Perhaps her brother, and my fourth cousin? I would have to ask Felicity. Surely she would not mind if I posed a few questions after having run the gamut of hers. I felt every bit as inquisitive about my new family as Felicity had shown herself to be about me.

  Preoccupied with these thoughts, I entered the car, and was abruptly startled out of my abstraction by its appearance. Could this really be a railway car? The interior looked astonishingly like the duchess’s sitting room. The only thing lacking seemed to be a fireplace: otherwise the interior of the car had the same elegant complement of sofas, chairs, dainty side tables, and mirrors, and was coordinated in soft shades of Wedgwood blue and ivory. The duchess, Felicity, and Miss Yates were enjoying what seemed to be a late breakfast at one of the tables, and as I entered, a footman came briskly up to take my wrap.

  “My dear, there you are!” exclaimed the duchess, waving me to a seat next to her. “I had begun to worry. You had no difficulty in finding us? Good. Do have something hot to drink. How glad I am to leave London behind! For all its lovely shops, no place on earth is so dismal in cold weather.”

  I sat down with them and accepted a cup of tea; the china pattern repeated the blue and ivory of the decor. “Will it take us long to reach Ellsmere?” I ventured.

  “We should arrive in good time to dress for dinner,” said the duchess comfortably. Unaware of the dismay this prospect struck into my heart, she went on, “Since I gather you have no maid at present, I will ask Jane to wait on you, if that is agreeable. She’s a good girl, and knows how to keep quiet about one’s waist measurement.”

  Felicity, perhaps guessing the nature of my silence, asked bluntly, “Have you a dinner dress?”

  “…with you?” added the duchess smoothly.

  “I am afraid I don’t,” I admitted, even as I appreciated her tact. “None of my dresses is truly suited for evening.” But surely it would not matter if I had nothing to compare with her wardrobe; indeed, there could be few who could match her in the magnificence of her dress. Today she wore a less elaborate gown for travel, but it was of lilac shot silk, and the
skirt and sleeves were edged with a design of flowers in cut velvet. She was even wearing one of the new crinolines, whose steel or whalebone hoops lent her skirts the coveted bell-shaped silhouette. I was wearing the dress in which we had first met, over my two meager petticoats.

  “I knew it!” exclaimed Felicity. “You are a Quaker, aren’t you?”

  “Felicity!” The duchess was half shocked, half laughing. Even I could not keep from smiling, though the laughter was at my own expense.

  “I am sorry to disappoint you, but no,” I said. Felicity subsided, disappointed, and her aunt patted my hand.

  “Of course we know you are in mourning, my dear. But that does not mean you must deny yourself pretty frocks,” she said coaxingly, and I realized she too had misunderstood my unfashionable dress. Evidently the only reason she could imagine for the style of my dresses was that they had been made expressly for mourning clothes; the truth was that I had simply dyed my everyday dresses black. “I would dearly love to see you in a deep wine color, or violet. Nothing too elaborate for mourning, of course, but with a bit of décolletage… we shall see what we can do.” She smiled with such sly delight that it would have been churlish of me to object to her designs. Clearly she did not see them as charity, but simply enjoyed indulging her generosity.

  The dingy views of London gradually gave way to brighter shades of landscape as we traveled farther into the country. It was another grey, rainy day, but there had not yet been a hard frost to blanch the countryside, and through the windows of our traveling parlor, streaming with rain, I could see an enchantingly dimmed and rain-softened landscape, whose emerald greens glowed mysteriously through their veil of grey. The duchess wrote letters and gave instructions to the footmen, and when Miss Yates began to doze, Felicity came to perch next to me on the couch from which I watched the changing scenery.

  “It isn’t much of a view,” she said. “There won’t be anything interesting to look at for ages and ages yet.”