by Lydia Joyce
The footsteps paused, the silence as loud as any noise. Then came a deep thud that made Fern jump and Colin’s heart race with adrenaline, followed by a series of scrapes and thuds.
“He’s tearing the room apart,” Fern whispered. He looked at her—her eyes were huge, her face unnaturally pale.
Colin lifted his hand to take the bar from across the door. “I will send him away.”
Fern shook her head vigorously. “No, please don’t. I fear that he has lost his mind. No one could say what he might do, nor do we know whether he is armed.”
That idea had not occurred to Colin, and the thought of an armed man in his house so close to his wife caused a hot, angry ball to form deep in his gut. “What do you think he is doing? Searching for more papers?”
Fern looked helpless. “He must be. The man is mad for papers. But none of them are worth anything.”
The thuds turned to the sharp sound of tearing cloth. A single feather drifted down through the cracks in the floorboards.
“He’s shredding the pillows and the mattress,” Fern said, a hand fluttering uneasily over her stomach.
Colin’s jaw clenched, his hand straying once more to the door’s bar. He couldn’t countenance the idea of the man rampaging with impunity through his property. Yet he was stayed again—stayed by Fern’s warning and the knowledge that it would be foolish to confront Reston without a weapon, which their bedchamber did not afford him. It didn’t even have a set of fireplace tools.
“I should like to have a knife, at the least,” he said.
Fern shivered. “So should I. We had best not tell Mr. Reston about the second packet of letters.”
Colin snorted. “I had best not tell him I have calling cards. The man is a maniac.”
There was a pause in the noise above, and Colin and Fern both froze automatically. The silence was soon broken, however, by a thin, piercing scream, the sound so inhuman at first that it raised the hairs on the back of Colin’s neck. Slowly, it descended the register, ending in a snarling growl that sounded like it was half a sob.
“Is that Mr. Reston?” Fern whispered.
“It must be.” Colin’s eyes were riveted to the ceiling as heavy, trudging footsteps crossed the floor above. He heard the door open, then held his breath as the man started down the stone stairs. Reston’s boots crunched on the gritty landing. Colin stared at the planks of the oak door that were all that barred Reston’s way, his heart speeding up with a surge of bitter anticipation. Then, after a moment that seemed to stretch into an hour, the footsteps continued, slowly, down the stairs.
Gradually, Colin relaxed, his heart still racing. He realized that he had automatically tensed to spring for the nearest weapon, in case Reston had thrown himself at the door and the old iron bolts securing the bar hadn’t held—a bench, its boards darkened with age and smoke. “I must get a knife,” he repeated to himself.
Fern took a shaky breath. “The man is a lunatic,” she said.
Colin turned toward her. She was pressed into the corner farthest from the door, her arms wrapped tightly around herself. “We are not staying a week,” he said flatly. “I will make arrangements tomorrow for us to leave as soon as possible.”
“Please don’t let the Restons know,” Fern said intently. “You can’t tell what they might do.”
“I don’t intend upon it,” Colin said crisply.
“Where will we go next?” Fern’s voice was small. “After we leave here, I mean.”
Colin grimaced. “I don’t know. Perhaps we can stay unannounced in my town house for a while.” He paused. “Or perhaps we can go to a quiet hotel in one of the more distant social orbits, rather than trying to obtain complete obscurity. Avoiding society is only a secondary concern right now. My primary one is to leave here as soon as possible, before we are murdered in our bed.”
Fern shuddered, and Colin instantly regretted the last addition. “Thank you,” she breathed. She came out of the corner, moving like a spooked animal, and returned to her chair at the table. “I loathe this place,” she said with great feeling.
Colin’s eyes strayed back to the door. “It is not the place I am worried about,” he said.
Another knock made them both jump.
“Who is it?” Colin called though the barred door.
“It’s Abby, m’m, sir,” came a light female voice.
Colin lifted the bar and opened the door cautiously. Sure enough, there was Abby, alone with a tray in her arms. He stepped back.
She bustled efficiently inside and set the tray on the table. “That should be everything, m’m,” she told Fern. “Even a lamp vor ye. Will ye be needing anything else tonight? My babies and Sterne are waiting vor me at home, and everyone else has already left the manor house.”
“No, Abby,” Fern said, her voice remarkably steady despite her continuing pallor. “Are you sure you’re quite fine? Going home alone, I mean.”
“Oh, la, m’m,” she said, “I can’t see why I wouldn’t be. Night’s not even vull come yet.”
“I mean, with Mr. Reston,” Fern said.
Abby shrugged, her cheerful expression unchanging. “Meg said she thought he raised a ghost. She heard the strangest sound, then saw him running down the stairs like his pants were afire. He’s back at the village by now, vor sure.”
Fern shook her head in a helpless kind of way. “Well enough, then. You may collect the plates in the morning.”
“Thank you, m’m,” Abby said, and with an awkward, old-fashioned curtsy, she saluted them both and left the room.
“She isn’t mad, at least,” Fern observed as Colin barred the door again. “At least, not the same kind of mad that Mr. Reston is. Taking ghosts as a matter of course might be another kind of illness.”
“Reverend Biggs doesn’t seem too mad, either,” he pointed out. “It’s just those deuced Restons and their relatives.”
Fern gave a quick laugh that had only the slightest edge of hysteria. “Perhaps that is why the village is so empty—the Restons have been driving people away for generations.” She lifted the lid off the tray and gave a genuine cry of delight. “A crown roast! And fresh rolls. Sit, Colin, for I shan’t wait politely tonight.”
With a final glance at the door, Colin joined her at the table. Steam rose from the roast, and his stomach growled loudly enough that Fern looked up at the noise and tittered slightly.
“This must have been intended for someone else’s table,” he said. “There hasn’t been enough time to cook it. And there aren’t any ovens that I’ve seen in the kitchens, either.”
“It was probably the Restons’,” Fern said. “Who else in this village has enough money for a Tuesday roast?”
Colin paused with a forkful of food halfway to his mouth. “You don’t suppose they might have poisoned it?” he said.
Fern looked at him and took a defiant bite of a roll. “I wouldn’t think so, but at this point, I don’t care if they have,” she said around the mouthful of food. “I shall at least die after a hearty last meal.”
Colin ate the food on his fork. “I can’t imagine that they really would, either, but for half a moment … well, I think I am just a bit jumpy after Joseph Reston’s appearance at our door.”
“Understandably so,” Fern said, making a moue of distaste.
They lapsed into silence as they ate their dinner. Fern devoured hers with a single-minded concentration that Colin found covertly amusing—though his wife was far from a glutton, he doubted that she’d ever had a meal delayed for so much as the space of two hours before. For that matter, neither had he. The recognizable, appetizing, familiar meal seemed to be a thread of normality connecting them to the rest of the world in the midst of the chaos of the past several days, and it was with reluctance that Colin pushed his plate away.
Fern primly dabbed her mouth with the napkin, then stretched luxuriantly. “I am clean, I am full, and I have a bed that I can use,” she said. “I feel almost civilized again.”
Col
in nodded at the picked-over bones. “It is a good thing you are sated, for we’ve nothing left to eat.”
Fern rose and went over to the basin, her movements more relaxed than Colin had seen in a long time. She began washing her hands. “You have your knife now,” she said, pointing a damp hand to the meat knives upon the table. “And I have mine.”
He picked them up, casting around for a good place of concealment before sliding them under the mattress. “Now there shall be no awkward questions in the morning when the dishes are cleared away.”
“Good idea,” Fern said, drying her hands on a towel.
Colin washed his own hands as she stepped aside. Fern watched him from a perch on the edge of the bed, a small thoughtful crease between her brows. After a moment, she laughed.
“What is it?” he asked.
She said, “I have realized that I am now decidedly more frightened by the Restons than I am of you.”
He paused in drying his hands. “You are frightened of me—still?”
“Of course,” she said flatly. “Though this afternoon … not so much.”
“Why?” he asked, feeling a slow, unfamiliar stirring of curiosity. And a more familiar sense of satisfaction, though he wasn’t sure it was caused by her fear of him or the lessening of it. Perhaps both.
“Because you scare yourself,” she said. “I would be a fool not to be frightened of a man who is frightened of himself.”
Colin dropped the towel next to the basin. “That is an odd way to choose whom to fear. I doubt Joseph Reston is scared of himself.”
Fern’s expression was wry. “I did not say that I am not also frightened of raving lunatics.”
Colin leaned back against the edge of the table. “Scared.” He tried the word out. “You think that I am scared of myself.”
She looked awkward then, shrugging and dropping her eyes. “So it seems to me,” she said in a small voice.
“I wouldn’t say scared,” Colin said. “Uncertain, definitely. Perhaps a little angry, as well. Lost? Maybe. I do not think, though, that it even occurred to me to be afraid.”
“Then perhaps I am just not very brave,” Fern confessed. “I find it hard to face your confusion, as you call it, especially as the outcome of your struggle shall have such drastic ramifications upon every aspect of my life.” She looked at him, her gray eyes clear in her soft face. “I have ever been dependent upon others. My father’s house was a gentle tyranny, the yoke so light that I scarcely noticed it, especially as it was one I was born into. I listened to what he, my mother, my governess, and my nurses told me, and I accepted that dependence was to ever be my lot in life. Except a part of me couldn’t accept it, couldn’t believe it, chafing against a destiny of always being a daughter-sister-wife and no more.”
“And then you married me,” Colin said, awake to the irony of it.
Fern’s expression was troubled. “For the most wrongheaded and deluded of reasons.”
“Which were no worse than my own,” he reminded her.
“Even so,” she said. “I discovered, swiftly, that the life of a wife is much more circumscribed than that of an indulged daughter. I might throw parties, choose charities, pick out flowers and dresses, and even turn your household staff upside down … but it is freedom inside the cage of your will. Whatever you allow, I may do. Whatever you do not, I cannot. It is only sane, then, that I fear your desires and your whims and what they might do to my small freedoms.”
Colin digested this, feeling his mind turn sideways to understand a world in which such a view made sense. “Fern,” he said, and stopped.
“You want the control,” she said softly. “I know you must. It is yours by every legal and social right. Why should you relinquish it, even if you could? I know that I shouldn’t care to, were I in your place.”
Colin looked at his wife, seeing the sinew under the softness, the clarity under her kindness. “There are social requirements that are outside of either one of us,” he said.
She sighed. “Yes. You must be a good viscount and I a good viscountess. I am not saying that I do not want to be. I like parties and pretty dresses, babies and charity subscriptions. They are so much a part of my world that I would not know what to do with a life without them. What I am frightened of is … stiflement, if that is even a word. I am frightened of swallowing dissatisfaction until it chokes me. I am frightened of not being able to speak—or worse, not being heard.”
“I hear you, Fern,” he said gravely.
“You begin to hear me now,” she agreed. “You did not before, but over the past two days … Even before Mr. Reston’s rampage, you promised me a week here, no more. But when we leave—will you still hear me then? When you have your solicitor’s meetings and your fox hunts and political clubs again, will you still listen?”
Colin thought of his life as it had been before—self-directed, independent … And yet, in a very real sense, it had been none of those things. It had been directed not by a father or a master but by nothing more than social expectations. He had possessed the self-determination that Fern longed for, and he had done nothing with it.
His automatic reaction was to reject what she asked for out of hand, soothing her with meaningless assurances. Yet how much freer would he be if he chose to let her have the voice that she longed for than he had been before, when all of his choices had been made by default? It would be a kind of circumscription that he was unaccustomed to, but it would be one taken upon himself consciously, out of care for his wife, rather than one stumbled into by chance. That consciousness would be in itself an exertion of control.
“Is a freedom deliberately not exercised more or less real than one that is never seized?” he mused aloud.
“What?” Fern asked, shaking her head.
“It is a strange thought, that,” Colin said. “Particularly for one like me, who is not accustomed to flunking at all. What I mean to say is that I will hear you, Fern. I will not always agree with you, nor will my decision always be the one that best pleases you, but I will hear you. Even if your freedoms are to be defined by my indulgence—by law and custom, as you say—I will still respect them.”
Fern sat in silence for a long moment, looking at him. He knew her well enough to know that her placid exterior concealed a tumult of thought as she weighed what he said. Finally, slowly, she nodded, her eyes intent and liquid as they fixed upon his face. She slid to her feet and padded softly across the room toward him. “That is as much as I could dream of in this world. Thank you, Colin.” Tentatively she rose to her tiptoes and closed the space between them with a kiss, her lips moving across his with a timidity that stirred him and then, with more confidence, ending in a sharp nip upon his bottom lip, sending a jolt of reaction through his limbs.
She pulled away, looking up at him shyly.
Colin raised a hand to his lip. “I do not need this anymore, Fern,” he said. “But I still want it.”
She shivered a little, her hooded eyes fixed upon the mark she had made. “So do I.”
She reached for the belt of his dressing gown, untying the slick silk, and pushed the fabric off his shoulders. She worked quickly down the buttons of his shirt, as if afraid of thinking about what she was doing, loosening each. Pausing as she saw that he wore no vest beneath, she looked up at him, pressing the cool flat of her hand against the bare flesh of his chest.
“You prepared,” she said, her expression conflicted, as if she were not certain whether she was pleased or disturbed. “I had not noticed.”
He put his hand on top of hers. “I expected.”
“Expected this?” Her tone was skeptical.
“Expected something,” he answered. He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her palm, running his tongue and teeth across her soft flesh. She made a noise deep in her throat, half closing her eyes in pleasure, but after a moment, she shut her fingers and pulled away.
“It is my turn,” she insisted.
She finished the last buttons down the front o
f his shirt and loosened his cuffs, pulling the fabric down over his wrists. He was naked to the waist, and she looked at him consideringly for a moment before lacing her fingers behind his neck and pulling his mouth down to hers.
Her mouth was sweetly gentle under his, her tongue teasing him, her teeth catching at his lips just on the threshold of pain. He had to fight the urge to crush her against him, gripping the edge of the table behind him in both hands. He wanted to pull her into his arms, but even more badly, he wanted to find out what she would do next if he did not.
What she did was slide downward, moving under his jawline and across his neck as her fingers traced delicately, teasingly down the muscles of his back. Her nipples, pressed against him, brushed his chest through the fabric of her dressing gown. Her kisses grew harder, nips turning to bites, and Colin’s breath sped up involuntarily. Her shoulders shook, first slightly, then harder, and with a start, Colin realized that she was giggling.
“Now, that is enough,” he growled, wrapping his arms around her and using his weight to bear her to the bed.
She went without resistance, collapsing upon the bed as her silent giggles erupted into a burst of laughter. She lay half pinned under him, clutching her sides helplessly as peal after peal seized her. Looking down at her, Colin could not help but chuckle, too, though not a little befuddled at what she found so very funny. Finally, she regained control of herself, though she still gasped for breath, wiping her streaming eyes.
“I hope you intend to let me know how exactly I was so unintentionally hilarious.”
“Oh, it was not you,” she said, still slightly breathless. “Or rather, it was at first, because I could hardly believe that I was making you … well, want me like that. It was so incredible, and I felt so silly that I began to laugh, and once I started, it felt so good …” She shook her head, rocking it back and forth across the counterpane. “I don’t think that I have laughed like that or felt like that in years.” Her expression turned rueful. “But I suppose I still make a terrible seductress.”
