“Get out of here,” he whispered. “You have no business in this room, whatever Louisa told you. You don’t belong here.”
The woman seemed to settle even more profoundly into stillness, into silence, as though she could disappear.
“Get out,” he said, and when she made no move, he leaned toward her. He barely breathed the words.
“I’ll haul you … ” This phrase, this dark echo, pounded in his head. He broke off. He had ashes in his mouth. He could taste them. Almost choking, he wheeled around, pushed past Rutherford, and started unsteadily down the hall.
He thought for a moment that he heard the music start up again behind him. But it was only the infernal mechanisms inside his head, repeating their plaintive strains.
The house was silent.
• • •
Ella sank back onto the bench as the thundering quiet of the music room crashed around her. Her legs would not hold her. There. That muted sound was the front door slamming. He was gone. Whoever he was, he was gone.
She had thought, for a split second, when his hands had closed upon her shoulders …
Alfred. He’s come for me.
She stood. The man’s voice rang again in her ears, terrible with threat. Or was it warning? Either way, he was right. She did not belong here. She had sensed, as soon as she’d pushed open the door, that the music room’s spell of silence was not to be broken. It was as though the room were under an enchantment. She had meant to shut the door and slip on down the hall. Yet, despite her will, despite everything, the harpsichord drew her.
Now, as she turned to leave, she could not deny herself a parting look at the harpsichord, so much darker and grander than her own.
Alfred, she remembered, thought music was dull. Any music but the hunting horn put him right to sleep. That’s what he’d always said, yawning, when Papa had her play. He’d have sold her harpsichord by now. Or destroyed it out of spite. Within the little circle of calm she’d created, she felt blank, numb.
She probed along her collarbones, raised and lowered her shoulders.
How could she have believed, even for a fraction of a second, that the hands on her shoulders were Alfred’s? The man’s grip was hard as steel.
She left the music room, relieved that Rutherford was not waiting in the hall. Yet as she turned the corner, she ran smack into Mrs. Hexam, the housekeeper, instead. During the three days Ella had spent in residence at Trombly Place, Mrs. Hexam had never changed her expression. She stared at Ella now with that same look frozen on her sallow, careworn face. That same mixture of fear and suspicion. Ella had endured worse.
Mrs. Hexam said merely: “I’ve laid tea in the sitting room. Mrs. Trombly is just in.” So instead of retreating to the upstairs bedchamber, Ella walked slowly behind Mrs. Hexam to the sitting room. Her soft, kid boots made no sound on the carpet. The hush that prevailed in the house had descended. Music and commotion—both were unthinkable in that heavy silence. She could almost doubt the encounter in the music room had even happened. Except for the slight ache in her shoulders. Except for the voice ringing deep in her ears.
You don’t belong here.
She reached out as she walked, let her fingertips trail along the cool wall. She needed to feel something solid.
Mrs. Trombly was sitting on the green damask sofa wearing a simple but elegant high-necked gown of brown silk. Something fresh clung to her. Remnants of afternoon breezes that she’d brought into the house.
Ella’s stomach twisted with longing. She hadn’t stepped foot outside the house since she’d arrived. At first, she’d been in no state. And then … she hadn’t known how to ask. She wasn’t sure if she could just say to Mrs. Hexam, casual as can be, “The day is so fair. I’m off for a stroll,” and walk out the front door, unaccompanied, to take a turn in the park. Her position was exceedingly peculiar.
“Good afternoon,” she murmured to Mrs. Trombly and took a seat.
“Good afternoon,” said Mrs. Trombly. “I trust you’re well today?”
“Quite well, thank you.” Ella smiled, an uncertain smile she didn’t doubt, and inspected the tray on the table. Sugar biscuits. Six of them. She put one on a plate, her skin prickling.
Whenever she was in Mrs. Trombly’s presence, Ella felt the older woman staring at her hungrily. But when she turned her head, Mrs. Trombly’s eyes were dreamy, fixed on a far-off point. It made her anxious. Sad. Guilty. It made her want to take her hasty leave. But where would she go?
She glanced up, but Mrs. Trombly was smiling shyly into the teacup at her lips. The silence stretched.
“Mrs. Trombly.” Ella rested her plate on her knee. The two of them, sitting so close in the quiet, dim room with few topics near at hand for frothy conversation—it made confession the only course.
“The music room … I went there today.”
This was not her fancy. Mrs. Trombly’s face drained of color.
“Yes?” said Mrs. Trombly. She was holding her breath. She covered her long exhalation by blowing across the cooling surface of her tea.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have,” said Ella. “It felt … ”
Now Mrs. Trombly’s whole face was alight. She leaned forward, hand trembling so violently the tea lipped the edge of the cup.
“It happened again,” she said. “You felt it. The connection. As Miss Seymour promised you would. You sensed her, there in the music room. She came to you.”
“No,” said Ella. “That isn’t what … Rather, I … ”
“Tell me everything,” said Mrs. Trombly. “Please.”
Mrs. Trombly’s eyes were glittering. She was waiting. Hoping. Yearning. Ella found it difficult to meet her gaze. She wanted to say something, anything, so that Mrs. Trombly would stop looking at her with that naked need.
She said, “The harpsichord … ”
“It called you,” said Mrs. Trombly, with something like triumph in her voice. Ella tried to ignore this insistence, to stumble on without falling into avowal or denial. It was a horrible game, and she scarcely knew how to play.
“I shouldn’t have touched it, though,” said Ella carefully. “Not without your permission.”
“Ah.” Mrs. Trombly leaned back against the sofa. The mist had settled on her face. She had lost focus again. She peered through veils toward what? Another world? Then Mrs. Trombly’s misty eyes found hers.
“When I imagine her,” said Mrs. Trombly, “I often see her in that room.”
“The harpsichord was hers, wasn’t it?” whispered Ella, curious now, unable to stop herself, leaning toward Mrs. Trombly in turn. “Your daughter who … ” She swallowed.
Slowly, Mrs. Trombly nodded. Her eyes were shut. Her chin was trembling. Here it was: the perfect opportunity. Ella knew what she should do. Pitch her voice low. Speak with the throbbing authority of the spirit world.
I saw your daughter in the music room. She was standing by the harpsichord. She was waiting, and then, when I sat down to play, she moved. She moved, and the melody carried her from the shadows to the light.
That was what Mrs. Trombly hoped to hear. Was paying her to hear. She could not say it. God help her, it would be a mercy to them both, but she could not. It was a lie. She could not prey on Mrs. Trombly’s pain.
What do you think you’re doing? Living here? Accepting wages?
Playing a role, she answered herself. Pretending. Not lying.
“What happened next?” asked Mrs. Trombly, and Ella blinked, marshaled herself.
“I sat at the harpsichord. I started to play, a sonata,” she said. “A man interrupted me.”
“A servant?” Mrs. Trombly’s eyes widened slightly.
“No,” said Ella. “A gentleman. He must have come to call on you. He found me in the music room. He was not … ” She paused. “Pleased.”
She felt the heat rising to the surface of her skin. The man had leaned so close above her. She had looked for a moment into his face, dark featured and bold, contorted by some emotion she could not fathom.
/> Who could he be? What gentleman would charge past Rutherford, barrel deep into Mrs. Trombly’s house, and berate an unknown woman in a closed chamber? Who would have the audacity? A family member? But Mrs. Trombly had said her family was far away. That peremptory—no, furious—man who had burst into the music room, he could hardly be Mrs. Trombly’s husband, home early from Brazil. He had exuded strength, vitality, something she could not associate with this wilted woman or her distant husband.
“A tall man,” she said. “Young.”
Mrs. Trombly’s attention sharpened. “A tall man?” she asked. “Black hair?”
“Black hair,” Ella said. “Yes.” He had given the impression of storm. Dark, massive, unpredictable. His black hair had been tousled by the wind. Wild. “He must have left a card?” she asked. “He wasn’t a housebreaker. I’m sure that Rutherford admitted him.”
Mrs. Trombly’s lips parted. A word puffed out.
“Isidore.”
It was as though Mrs. Trombly were the one who had trances. Ella fought the urge to snap her fingers. What was it about this house that invited reverie? She feared that she was sliding into that in-between state, joining Mrs. Trombly in a kind of half life. She tried to center herself in the quiet sitting room while she waited for Mrs. Trombly to continue. She picked out sturdy, average items and stared at them. Tea service. Sugar biscuit. She lifted a biscuit, bit off a corner.
“They were going to be married,” Mrs. Trombly said. “Phillipa and Isidore.”
Now it was Ella’s turn to stare. The man who had grabbed her … Phillipa Trombly’s betrothed? She opened her mouth then closed it.
Mrs. Trombly continued: “That night … I lost a daughter and a son.”
“But certainly … ” Ella hesitated. The way the man, the way Isidore, had charged into the music room and seized her, the interloper … His violent emotion, his odd actions—they had been strange, and frightening, but they had been born, she could see now, of pain. Pain and a protective instinct. Isidore was protective of Phillipa’s memory. Of Mrs. Trombly.
“He’s lately come back to London,” said Mrs. Trombly. “His father died. Just a few months ago.” She paused. “I doubt he would have returned otherwise. Ever since the night we lost Phillipa, he has been … different. He left England almost at once. He lived for a time in Italy, for a time, I think, in Cypress. Then in Egypt. He wrote. He returned to England, not often, but a few times. Even when I was in his company, nothing was the same. I don’t know how to explain it.”
It was too much. After three days of tiptoeing around the house, trying to keep herself open to forces she didn’t understand, or even fully believe in, Ella had reached her limit. After three days of skirting in conversation the edges of a tragedy that defined everything about this household, she had to know.
“How did your daughter die?” Ella whispered, unable to keep her lips from forming the question.
“It was an accident.” Mrs. Trombly did not seem to find it rude that she’d asked. She seemed to have forgotten Ella’s presence all together. “She fell from a balcony.”
“How?” Again, a word slipped out without Ella’s volition. Mrs. Trombly was still gazing into space.
“Phillipa had so much energy,” she said, almost as though she hadn’t heard. “She was irrepressible. She preferred to run instead of walk. She liked to throw windows open and lean as far out as she could. ‘Outside air is better than inside air,’ she’d say. ‘Even in London.’ She always sat on the balustrades of balconies and kicked her heels. She was so charmed.” Mrs. Trombly’s eyes came to rest on Ella. “She could be careless. She slipped. She lost her balance. It was the middle of the night. My husband and I were asleep. We didn’t even know she hadn’t come home, that she wasn’t already upstairs, when Isidore brought her back to us. He carried her. He sat with her until morning.”
Ella felt as though her blood had turned to ice.
Did he lay her out here? In this house?
She kept perfectly still, but she had turned a dark corner in her mind and she did not like what she saw there.
The dark man, Isidore, holding Mrs. Trombly’s daughter, stiff and cold.
Her papa’s deathbed. She had sat by his side until the end and after. How strange it had been to gaze on that familiar form, the livid face framed by tufts of oakum hair, and know that Papa was gone from it.
And before that, her brother, Robert. She had not seen his body. By the time it came back to them, there was not enough intact. She had seen her papa after he saw. That was enough.
She shook herself. That’s when she realized Mrs. Trombly was smiling, a lovely, luminous smile.
“Phillipa guided you to the music room,” she said dreamily. “And you played at her harpsichord. You played, and Isidore came. He came back to us.”
She took Ella’s hand, her fingers soft and cool as sheets.
“I’ve missed him,” she said. “Almost as much as I do Phillipa. We share a property line with the Blackwoods, in the country. Isidore was often with us, even as a boy. He had no brothers or sisters, and the lure of playmates proved irresistible.” Her dreamy smile tightened. “Nothing could keep him away.”
“What would have kept him away?” Ella felt that strange prickling, the hairs on her neck lifting. Mrs. Trombly’s tone told her that something had tried to keep Isidore away. “After all, it’s very natural,” she said with a studied offhandedness, “and very fortunate for children to make friends of their neighbors.” She didn’t think she sounded wistful, but Mrs. Trombly’s look was suddenly penetrating.
“The old viscount didn’t share that view,” she said slowly. She drew her fine brows together, forming a deep crease in the middle of her forehead. She paused again. “He was a rather … controlling man.”
She squeezed Ella’s hand.
“It’s working,” she said, eyes bright. “I never gave up hope. You can help her. I know you can.” She raised Ella’s fingers to her lips.
“And if you can help her,” she said, “you can help Isidore.”
Ella’s heart was hammering again. She should get up, leave, now, at once. Put as much distance as she could between herself and Trombly Place. She had to go. If she stayed any longer, she would crush Mrs. Trombly’s hope. Inevitably, she would reveal something about who and what she really was. That luminous smile would fade forever.
I don’t belong here. I must leave. I must leave now.
“I believe in you,” said Mrs. Trombly. “I have to believe.”
When Ella freed her hand, it was only to retrieve her sugar biscuit and take another bite.
Chapter Five
The Benningtons had moved into the Bennington House on Dering Street, Hanover Square. Isidore knocked with the heavy ring then waited on the front steps. Daphne, Ben—they were good friends. Old friends. Clement had reminded him that he’d broken a dinner engagement with no word of explanation.
How does a man stop running? How does a man pick up his old life?
He makes amends. He repairs bridges.
Yesterday had been a disaster. He’d lost his head at Louisa’s. That melody. That slender woman at the harpsichord.
He didn’t want to think of that encounter, or what had come after. He’d fled the house in disgrace, mood black and growing blacker. He hadn’t returned to his apartments, hadn’t stopped by the club. He’d gone to a tavern and drank his lunch—five flips, so maybe that counted as a meal. Each flip had at least part of an egg stirred into the gin, and sugar. Dinner … dinner had been more of the same. But without the eggs and sugar.
Maybe I shouldn’t have ripped up that ticket. That’s what he went to sleep thinking. Maybe I should buy another.
But somehow—though he woke late in the morning, head filled with sand and glass, body aching—he was determined to try again. London. The ton. All of it. He wasn’t giving up. His visit to Trombly Place had been a false start. Today would be different.
He rocked on his heels, looking up, up
the façade of Bennington House. The sky above was blue. He tried to keep his mind sunny and blank.
He wouldn’t tell Daphne and Bennington the truth. Why he’d failed to keep the engagement. He’d give them an airy, charming excuse then launch into an off-color anecdote from his travels. The one about the dancing girl who stripped off her clothes and folded herself until she could have fit in a hatbox. Or the one about the Albanian cavalryman who shot his friend in the hand over a mummified crocodile phallus.
He wouldn’t say what he could now admit to himself. That the people he’d cared about and who’d cared about him before—those were the people he had the most trouble facing. They had also been friends with—he didn’t want to think her name. Not today. For today, let him be free of her.
But she was suddenly there, on the step beside him, a presence he could almost see out of the corner of his eye, could almost touch. Phillipa. Bennington was the only core member of their set who hadn’t been at the party when Phillipa died. He was kept at home with a headache. He’d been spared that final scene. But Daphne had been there. He made his hands into fists, resisting the urge to bring them to his temples. He heard, again, Daphne’s screams. Saw her, kneeling, arms twined around her own neck. She had sobbed until her face had purpled.
When the butler opened the door, he managed to smile.
He was shown through an imposing hall—gleaming white marble with Roman statues in the wall niches striking martial poses—and into the sitting room. This room too was imposing, decidedly masculine in its décor, with heavy mahogany furniture and gilt-framed oval portraits of the Bennington forbears, all soldiers, on the navy blue-papered walls. No feminine touches softened or brightened the space. Even the curtains that hung over the tall windows were thick and somber. There was a massive portrait-book and a few cheaply printed newspapers on the low table, the only items in the room that looked moveable, as though they hadn’t been in the same spot for fifty years. Isidore was reaching toward them when the door opened. He turned.
“Sid,” said Daphne Bennington in her sweet, high voice and held out her hand. He took it. She smiled, a dimple flashing in her creamy cheek. She wore a low-cut gown of green silk that left a great deal of her breasts exposed and little to the imagination as to the luscious contours of the remainder. “We wondered if you were halfway to Dar es Salaam by now.” She gestured to the leather settee, and he sat while she moved to take the armchair opposite. She was a petite woman, almost child-sized, although her lush figure told quite another story. The chair dwarfed her, and he was struck again by the ponderous, uninviting quality of the room and by the incongruity between that room and its mistress. The furnishings weren’t to Bennington’s taste, either; he’d bet his life on that. Bennington was too much of a dandy. He’d always favored style over substance, form over function. He and Clement had called him “Knees” at Cambridge because he used to wear trousers so tight he couldn’t sit down. This room—this whole house—reflected the style of his father, General Sir Henry Bennington. The general had died over a year ago, but clearly Bennington hadn’t yet made the house his own. Or maybe he was trying to become the kind of man who’d be at home with sabers on the walls and bookshelves filled with leather-bound tomes of military strategy. Maybe he wanted to remake himself in his father’s image. Like a tulip pretending to be a hickory tree.
Dark Season Page 5
