Seduced by a Stranger

by Eve Silver

  With a frown, Catherine did as she bid, lifting the cover and leaning down to sniff the array of cold meat and cheese and bread. She recoiled in shock. She did smell it. Almonds.

  Dropping the cover on the plate with a clatter, she spun to face Madeline, horror congealing in her breast. Were all Madeline’s fears and terrors true? Was the housekeeper trying to poison her? Why?

  “Madeline—” she began, only to have her friend cut her off.

  “Not now,” Madeline whispered, glancing frantically about. “Did I not tell you the walls have ears? Please, close and lock the door.”

  Seeing no other way to ease her dismay, Catherine did as Madeline asked, pushing the door shut and turning the key in the lock. There was an unpleasant finality to that, as though she entombed the two of them in this dim, dark space. She did not like to be trapped in this room with the door closed and locked and the windows shut tight.

  “Give the key here,” Madeline said, and when Catherine hesitated, she pleaded, “Oh, please, Catherine, let me have it. I will only feel safe if I have it in my hand.”

  Catherine knew that feeling quite well, yet she was loath to part with the key, to give someone else, even a friend, control over her in that way. She wanted to be able to open the door at her will, not at Madeline’s whim. She hesitated, and then laid the key atop the high bureau next to the door. When she looked to Madeline once more, she was startled to see that she was smiling, a tight, ugly smile that Catherine could not understand.

  The firelight danced across her features, painting her skin and hair with gold, coloring her smile as red lips and white teeth, small as a child’s. For a moment, she did not appear at all herself, but rather a doll painted to look like Madeline.

  It was then that Catherine heard the sounds, low but quite distinct, footsteps echoing, not in the hallway but behind the walls. She spun, startled, her gaze flicking to the door, then to the far wall across from the bed, then back to Madeline once more.

  “Do you hear it?” Madeline asked, her lips shaping either a grimace or a smile. She turned her face to the wall, then away. “He is come for me.”

  “No.” Catherine crossed to her and knelt before her, taking Madeline’s hand between her own. “It is only an ancient servants’ tunnel in the wall. I have seen it myself. There are no monsters, no creatures that come for you.”

  “I never said a monster had come for me.” Madeline laughed then, the sound like fragile china fallen from a table to shatter against a hard floor. “I said that he has come. At last. I have waited so long. It was no mean feat to grease their palms and see him free. And then he could not come right away. He had business in London to see to first. But he is here now. He is here.”

  Unease made Catherine shiver. “Who has come? Do you speak of Sebastian?” she asked, though a part of her knew already that Madeline did not.

  Madeline closed her hand tight around Catherine’s, squeezing until bone rubbed on bone. She leaned in, bringing their faces close.

  “Do you think you are sly? And wise and wily?” she whispered. “I am smarter than all of you, dear girl. I always have been. Smarter and more sly than my aunt and uncle, or the headmistress or the teachers at Browning. Certainly wiser and more wily than any of the other girls.” She paused and shook her head. “When I heard what you had done, that you had killed a man, your own guardian, and yet walked free, I thought you were like me. I thought you were wily and sly, that you had tricked them to escape the noose. I thought we could be true friends. That you would understand. But you have proven a disappointment, Catherine. That you have.”

  Yanking her hands free, Catherine fell back, the impetus sending her sprawling. “What do you mean?”

  But she knew. In that second, she recalled exactly why the journals had seemed so familiar; the drawing style was something she had seen before. They were Madeline’s pictures. Madeline’s. She recalled her sketches and paintings from Browning, and the way Miss Chalmers, the drawing teacher, had frowned and shaken her head and taken Madeline’s work to show the headmistress again and again.

  Madeline was the killer? How was that possible? She had been here, at Cairncroft with Catherine when Martha was killed, and here in this very chamber when Susan was murdered.

  Again came the footfalls from behind the wall and then a scraping and dragging sound as the portal swung wide. She jerked her head toward the sound, her thoughts as twisted and tangled as a knot of string.

  A man stood there with a candle, and behind him yawned a great, black hole. Catherine blinked against the light, and she saw long honey-gold hair and eyes of liquid topaz and chiseled features painted in light and shadow by the small flickering flame.

  “Gabriel,” she cried and scrambled to her feet, her heart pounding, her mouth dry. Never so glad to see anyone as she was to see him, she stepped toward him as from the corner of her eye, she saw Madeline rise and cross to the door. But she thought it did not matter now. If she fled, Gabriel would catch her.

  Taking deep, shaking breaths, Catherine trembled with the horror of what she had only just come to know.

  “The journals. They were Madeline’s. I remember now.” She held his gaze, cold and flat, and a chill started deep inside her, though she could not say why. Words tumbled free, faster, more urgent. “She used to draw sketches just like that when we were at school. Terrible pictures that made the other girls cry. She said she only drew the world as she saw it—”

  “—for the spider does eat the fly, and the ants the dead worm. The fox eats the mouse.” Madeline cut her off as she stepped close behind her. “I have always wanted to know what it feels like to die. But no one would tell me. Not until the day I saw my cousin kill the bird in the woods. And then I knew. We were destined to be together, to share our fascination. I was meant to see what he did that day. First he killed the bird, then he almost killed his brother. The blood, Gabriel’s blood… it was everywhere.”

  Catherine jerked to the side, feeling hemmed in and trapped and horrified by the words tumbling form Madeline’s lips, by the cunning knowledge in her eyes.

  “I followed him that day. I saw all he did. I shared my thoughts with him. My ideas. And he took them and used them as thread to embroider his tapestry, ever more intriguing and complex.”

  Catherine could not bear to look at her. The thoughts Madeline shared were horrific in and of themselves, but to look into her guileless blue eyes as she spoke of such things was too terrible. She jerked her gaze to Gabriel’s face, a thick lump choking her throat. He did not reach for her or touch her or close his fingers upon hers. And she didn’t expect him to, didn’t want him to, for as he only looked at her with his head tipped to the side, she knew.

  “Are you afraid?” he asked, and smiled.

  Her blood turned to ice in her veins.

  His voice was wrong.

  His eyes were wrong.

  She saw that clearly now. It was as though Gabriel had shed his skin and someone else entirely had stepped inside to wear it like a suit.

  “Geoffrey,” Catherine whispered, horror congealing in her gut like cold blood pudding.

  “Geoffrey,” Madeline mimicked her, and stepped forward to press a kiss to his cheek. “Aren’t you astute?”

  Catherine backed away another step, and Geoffrey followed her, two strides for her one.

  “How did you get away from Hanham House?”

  “He told you about Hanham House? How unexpected.” He shrugged, a sharp, angry movement. “Gabriel’s precious Dr. Vincent left recently. The doctors there now know their business well and care to keep their income more than anything else.” His eyes grew colder still. “In all the years I have been there, no one has come to visit, save Madeline. And when she paid them to set me free, she said they had only to continue to charge my brother for my care and he would pay, none the wiser. That way, they got twice the coin for none of the work.”

  “Sebastian went,” Madeline said.

  Geoffrey’s gaze slid to her. Cathe
rine stepped back, stepped away, but Madeline shifted to block her escape.

  “But you were already gone. He told Gabriel they said you were too ill for a visit.” Madeline laughed, high and shrill.

  Geoffrey lifted a lock of Catherine’s hair from where it had come loose to lie along her shoulder. Then he leaned in and pressed her hair to his nose, breathing deeply.

  With a gasp, she turned her face away and yanked her hair from his grasp, horrified to have him stand so close and touch her at all, even her hair.

  “She is not for you, dear,” Madeline said, inching between them.

  “She is.” He snarled and grabbed Catherine’s arm as she tried to sidle away. “You promised.”

  “There is no time. We must be away.” Madeline patted his shoulder and gave a brittle laugh. “We shall find you another. Did I not guide you to Martha? Was she not a lovely treat? This one must be sacrificed to the fire. We discussed it. You recall. It is the only way.”

  Catherine jerked from Geoffrey’s grasp and stumbled back until she was pressed against the wall. Martha. Madeline had told this monster where to find Martha. And Catherine had given her the direction. She had written to Madeline about her friend, told her Martha’s name and that she ran a school in St. Giles. It would have been an easy matter to make inquiries with that.

  Dear God. She had handed Martha to a killer.

  No, not a killer. A pair of killers. Monsters.

  But why Martha? Why would Madeline have targeted Martha?

  Her chest heaved and her palms were slick with sweat. She felt sick, bile crawling up her throat.

  And the smell of smoke stung her nostrils.

  She looked about and realized that the smell was carrying from the tunnel. The smell of smoke and the heat of fire.

  Geoffrey and Madeline were locked in a silent battle of some sort, expressions set, eyes on each other.

  She could scream, cry for help, hope to be heard. But she had tried that before when she had been a prisoner in a locked room, and her cries had been for naught. Too, she and Madeline were the only ones housed in this wing. Who would hear her? She would not pin the hope of her safety on others. She must escape this on her own.

  Edging to the side, Catherine tried to reach the bureau to retrieve the key that would open the door and see her flee this chamber and whatever horrors they planned. Geoffrey watched her now with a hawkish gaze, but made no move to stop her. Frantic, she fell against the bureau and reached up for the key, disappointment lodging in her gut like a lump of coal.

  It was not there. Of course. Madeline had taken it.

  Her gaze flashed to the open panel of the servants’ tunnel, but Geoffrey blocked her way.

  With remarkable strength for a woman who claimed to be an invalid, Madeline yanked the coverlet from her bed and dragged it across the floor, tossing one end into the crackling hearth and leaving the other to trail over the piles of books.

  She was no more ill than Catherine. It had all been a dupe.

  “What of the laudanum, the poison?” Catherine asked, hoping against hope that if she kept them talking long enough, Gabriel would come searching for her. Would he know to look here, or would he go only to the ruined tower to search for her?

  Madeline slanted her a glance. “Oil of bitter almonds, cooked to make certain it was harmless. I had to make sure that you found no allies here, trusted no one. Making you suspect Gabriel, Mrs. Bell, even Sebastian was the easiest way.”

  “And the night Mrs. Bell came to give you the extra dose of laudanum? The night she said Gabriel instructed her to do so?”

  “Geoffrey looks exactly like his brother. Even you were fooled for a moment, just now.” She looked to Geoffrey, who stood with arms folded across his chest, blocking Catherine’s path to the open door of the tunnel. “This place will go up like a tinderbox. I shall enjoy watching it burn. Did you set the other wings alight?”

  “Yes. As you say, the place should go up like a tinderbox,” Geoffrey replied, his attention fixed on Catherine, his expression hungry.

  “Now here is a question,” Madeline said, whirling to face her. “Will you scream for Gabriel as you burn? Or will you leap from the window to your death?”

  “Why do you do this?” Catherine asked, her gaze darting about, desperation clawing at her. If only Gabriel would lose patience with her delay in coming to him. If only he would come looking. Her resolve to save herself was waning in the face of limited choices. “Why burn Cairncroft? Why kill Martha? Why kill Susan? Why?” Her voice rose with each question, her words running together and she dug her nails into her palms, willing herself to be calm, to don her mask once more.

  “I like to kill,” Geoffrey said, and Madeline laughed.

  Smoke began to fill the room now as more and more of the books caught the flames that snaked and writhed from the hearth to lick at the carpet and the edge of the curtains.

  Catherine screamed then, long and loud. They only looked at her as she drew breath to scream again.

  “Go ahead,” Madeline said, weaving her fingers with Geoffrey’s as she smiled gently at Catherine and nodded her head. “Go ahead and scream. No one will hear you.” She laughed. “Tell me now how you will stay with me and keep the monsters at bay, how you will let none harm me. You fool. You would have done better to think of how to keep them from coming for you.”

  “Don’t do this.” Catherine looked about desperately, seeing no way to escape, her eyes and nose and throat stinging from the gathering smoke. “Do not. You saved my life once…”

  “And you repaid me by lying with my enemy,” Madeline snarled. She shoved both hands against Catherine’s chest, sending her stumbling back. As she righted herself, she saw them disappear into the yawning black tunnel. She dove for the opening, too late. They pulled the portal shut. Catherine rushed to the door and closed her hand on the doorknob, twisting and yanking in desperation. Locked tight. And Madeline had taken the key.

  Panic surged. She snatched a towel from the washstand and held it over her mouth and nose as she flew to the portal they had closed behind them. She ran her hands along the wood, but whatever trick would open it evaded her.

  The fire roared and the smoke churned and she thought that Madeline was right.

  She could scream again, but no one would hear her.

  * * *

  Geoffrey led the way through the narrow, dark passage, the single candle he held sending out fingers of light to touch the shadows. Madeline was close behind him, breathing fast.

  He wanted to turn and strike her.

  She had cheated him. Anger churned in his gut, a simmering rage. Catherine was to be his. He wanted her. Wanted to lead her through the steps of his dance. She would be his most satisfying partner, one who fulfilled him. One who could assuage his need, soothe the burn that coursed through his veins. Because she was strong. Because she was brave.

  And because his brother loved her.

  It would be excruciatingly sweet to take her from him.

  But Madeline said no. There was no time. Did he dare go against her?

  Somehow, over the years, they had become intertwined in a way that made them equal, but not. He was the stronger, the more deadly. But she was cunning and wily.

  It was always Madeline who helped him hone and channel his urges, helped him create a lovely finesse in his work.

  It was Madeline who saved him during the years he was at Hanham House when the urge to kill was so strong he thought he would go mad in truth if he did not have a partner for his dance. Madeline had brought him three victims, drugging them and bringing them to an isolated shed deep in the grounds, disposing of the bodies when he was done. He had not liked that. He had wanted his pretty girls close, but Madeline had said he dared not risk putting them in the ground in a place they might be discovered. Those encounters had been exercises in planning and timing such as no other. But Madeline was ever so good at planning.

  Perhaps that was why the episode with Susan Parker had devolved so
quickly. Because Madeline was not there to guide him, to calm the power of his need. Susan had been an aberration, an unplanned kill. Not since the first time had he been alone like that. Not since the first time had he made such a mess of things.

  Madeline had not been there when he killed Martha. Not in person. But they had discussed it at length, and so she was there in his thoughts, in his heart, in the surge of electricity that thrilled his blood. Her voice was there in his mind, guiding him.

  She had promised to be by his side when he played with Catherine. She had promised.

  He stopped dead, and turned to face her. She was so close at his back that she bumped against him.

  “Geoffrey, we must hurry. Do you not smell it? The smoke?”

  He did. But he could not squelch the growing urgency to go back, to fetch Catherine.

  “I want her,” he said. “In the confusion of the fire, we can bring her away.” They could do it. And he could slake his urges upon her. The thought made him shiver, made his hand stray to his blade, his fingers playing over the hilt.

  Pushing Madeline aside, he paced back the way they had come, the tunnel dark and narrow around them.

  Madeline caught his arm and tried to make him stop, but he would not. Could not. He shook her off with a snarl. Catherine was the jewel in his brother’s heart. There was no surer way to strike him than to take her. Savor her. Cut her and make her bleed.

  Aside from the sheer delight of taking her life, she would serve a second purpose. One of vengeance. He owed Gabriel for all the years at Hanham House.

  Behind him, Madeline coughed. The sound made his own chest feel heavy and scratchy, and he too began to hack, his nose and eyes stinging.

  “Geoffrey, the smoke rises from below,” Madeline cried, clutching at his arm once more. “Where did you set the second fire in this wing?”

  He paused, looked about. She was right. The air was thick, the smoke curling about their heads and shoulders. “The library,” he said, and realized that he had made a poor choice. The tunnel from the library joined with this one. Madeline tugged at his arm, agitated, and Geoffrey froze, undecided now.