The air was cold. Forced to leave the blankets that kept me warm in favor of the wet cloth I used to bathe myself, I shivered as I hastily cleaned what skin I could reach.
I was daydreaming of a hot bath when the knock came at the door.
“One moment,” I called, hastily tugging my nightshift back over my shoulders. The wrapper I’d been given was lavender in color, thick enough to ward away the chill, and so long that I was forced to hike it up on the rare occasion I attempted to walk.
I did not attempt it often. The act only reminded me of my own weakness, which in turn led me to consider how easily I could regain my strength—to wit, with the help of laudanum’s gentle bliss.
A dangerous turn of thought.
I belted the modest wrapper in place and added, “You may enter.”
Ashmore did, leaning around the door first as if to ascertain my whereabouts. Seeing me leaning against the vanity, concern and worry flickered through his initial expression of polite inquiry. “Why are you standing?”
“I wanted to bathe a little.” Truth be told, that I braced myself upon the edge of the vanity only corroborated his concern. I felt as if I’d run a race simply from getting from one side of this room to the other.
Still, I could not help my smile. Not only had I done it on my own, I’d also cleaned myself. For my next endeavor, I would wash my hair.
A task somewhat beyond me, at the moment.
“And your meal?”
“I’ve had enough, thank you.” When he cast a speculative glance to the tray left abandoned upon the bed, I braced myself to contest whatever mother hen he intended to channel.
He surprised me. “Would you care to leave the room?”
“You’ve no idea,” I admitted, relief taking the starch from my overly prepared armor.
When he smiled, it was neither the muted humor of Compton’s rigid control nor the wicked slant of Hawke’s temptation. Ashmore smiled like a man who did not often do so, and whose wayward curve did not wholly suit his face. Yet the shape of it caused the corners of his eyes to crinkle, which in turn made him appear so much more affable.
I stared, my head tilted as I worked out that particular puzzle.
What little I knew of Mr. Oliver Ashmore did not lend itself to such an innocuous countenance. A shame that he did not smile more often, now that I’d seen it. He should. It softened that worldliness about him.
He approached me, hand proffered as I imagined he might offer to a lady upon the ballroom floor. “We shall take this as slow as necessary,” he told me, rather more sternly than his smile warranted. “If you feel yourself tiring, tell me straightaway.”
I nodded, taking his arm with only a slight hesitation.
When he guided me out of the room, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Certainly not the wooden chair waiting just beyond the door.
It was polished to a shine, yet worn from what I could only imagine was years of use. The contraption featured heavy brass wheels on each side, the spokes wide and glistening with oil, with a wooden circle bolted in place on the outside of each wheel. The seat boasted cushions with threading beginning to wear thin, yet seemed comfortable enough for hours of sitting. At the back, two brass handles tarnished by time protruded, and at the base, a footrest. At the forefront, swinging from an overhanging rod, a small lantern glowed.
“A wheeling chair?” The obviousness of this answer did not bear Ashmore’s repeating, so I did not wait for his reply. “’Tis enormous.”
The back rose nearly to my shoulders. Though I was not considered tall by any stretch, the whole of the chair seemed that it would outweigh two or three of me.
I wondered if it might hold up under use outdoors.
Ashmore led me to it. “It was your grandfather’s.”
This caused me to stumble; an act he easily rectified by tucking an arm about my waist with grace. I stared up at him.
“My grandfather’s?” Again, my gaze turned to the chair. “My grandfather sat there?”
“Indeed.”
The reaction this knowledge invoked wasn’t clear. I couldn’t quite grasp what it was I was made to feel. I had no knowledge of the family beyond the parents I’d lost, and rather more knowledge of that particular loss than I was comfortable with. Although I knew that my father had three homes—the Cheyne Walk home in London’s bohemian Chelsea district, an estate rumored to be a castle in Scotland, and one all but unspoken of in the country—I had never considered that I had grandparents to live in any of them.
I touched the closest wheel with a finger. The brass was icy cold. “Was he ill?”
“He was,” Ashmore confirmed—though not without a measure of some respect, I think. There was a certain care about his manner as he helped me into the chair. “This allowed him to move through the house without help.” He circled behind me as I tucked my robe tightly around my legs. “He preferred independence. Not unlike a certain someone I’m acquainted with,” he added dryly.
“Did you know him?”
“I did, for a time.” When the chair juddered, a muted clank of a mechanism disengaging, I realized it had been locked. Clever thing, this chair. “I shall go slow, so as not to—”
This time, when I smiled with the full force of my delight, it was he that hesitated. “Slow, my foot,” I chided. “Off we go.”
Whatever he saw in my demeanor, some visual cue that caught him off guard, his regard melted quickly into a courteous kind of amusement. He offered once more that slightly stiff bow. “Aye, aye, captain.” Bracing his feet upon the floor, he seized the handles in both hands and pushed.
Accompanied by the weighted groan of floorboards, we sailed through the hall and into the great beyond.
For all my imperious demand, he did not allow us to go quite so fast. We rattled our way past closed doors and through narrow corridors, a strangely convoluted array of halls that led me to believe this house much larger than I’d thought.
“Did my father live here?” I asked, raising my voice to carry over the accompanied groan of strained flooring and working wheels.
“Only for a small time. He was never one for the bucolic lifestyle.”
I’d just wager. My smile turned to a thoughtful frown as we approached the end of the hall. A wide door waited, its dark wood carved in bold lines. “Did you know him well?”
“Not as such.”
“But aren’t you his executor?” I glanced behind me, just in time to see Ashmore shrug.
“I knew him enough to be given the role,” he replied, not at all an answer.
“Not friends, then?”
A beat of silence, broken only by the creaking of the chair’s springs and the groaning hall. I tucked my feet more securely under the wrapper as the cold bit at my slippered toes. “St. Croix—your father, that is, was a difficult man to know.”
“You may call him St. Croix,” I told him as the chair eased to a stop. “I never knew him as my father.” And certainly had not thought him worthy of the moniker after his attempts to see me murdered. Even then, I had no reason to suspect the absent-minded Professor Woolsey of being my dead father in disguise.
If I were to put a fine enough point on it, I might suggest that this plot of my father’s—the attempt to bring my dead mother back to life utilizing my body as her replacement—signaled the most drastic changes to my otherwise simple life.
To think that before September’s dreary arrival, I had been quite content as a collector of bounties, an heiress waiting to inherit, and a troublesome wart on the face of a Society who did not like me, but did not care to notice me either.
Life had been so much simpler only a few short months ago.
I wondered if I should enlighten Ashmore to these truths, or if keeping the peace between us was better.
It was unlikely he would believe anything I had to say on the matter of my father’s existence. To be considered dead for years, then miraculously appear again under a new name, only to be killed by one’s own assistant
at the climax of the plot was the sort of tale I read of in adventure stories. I had no evidence to say I had not dreamed it.
Even Hawke’s people had not been able to find my father’s laboratory after, much less his body. When I located the hidden laboratory, cleverly concealed behind an alchemical symbol carved into the walls of the tunnel, it was empty. Neither the bodies of my rotted mother nor my murdered father, in the guise of the hapless Professor Woolsey, were in evidence.
I realized that I was plucking at the collar of my nightdress, and deliberately lowered my hand.
“Here is the gradient your grandfather had installed,” Ashmore was saying, forcing me to return my attentions wholly to him. That I found my mouth watering at the memory of my father’s machinations was not a good sign. The serum he’d injected me with had used opium as a base.
A fact I would do well to keep from Ashmore. Talking about such matters would only make him think I was not mending.
I cleared my throat. “Is this a way to avoid the stairs?”
“Just so.” Ashmore opened the door, revealing a hall whose gentle decline was wide enough for the chair. “Fortunately, he installed a working mechanism by which the chair may be guided up and down this corridor. I will see to its maintenance today.”
“Can I help?” My voice echoed down the corridor, to vanish into a sprinkle of lilting reverberations.
Ashmore raised his eyebrows. “If you’d like.”
“I would,” I assured him. “It will give me something to do.”
“You may have more to do than you think,” he replied, once more circling behind me. “Hold fast.”
I did, and he carefully guided the wheeled chair down the incline, only occasionally muttering when a wheel scraped the wall beside us.
I had never been one to fear closed spaces. By the time Ashmore’s man had plucked me from the good Monsieur’s circus show, I had been locked in any number of small boxes for the delight of a crowd. Some had been pierced with swords.
The air inside this hall was musty, laden with enough dust to set my nose twitching. I clapped both hands over it, barely catching a sneeze as it erupted from my mouth.
“Bless you,” Ashmore said behind me. “I’ve a kerchief to offer once I no longer need to ensure your slow descent.”
“I’m all right.” Fanny would be downright outraged to hear me deny the offer, but as I wiped at my eyes, I didn’t much care. I watched the shadows flee from the lantern, just far enough out of reach that I could not see the landing.
Ashmore offered nothing else until we left the hall, wide door swinging closed behind us.
The atmosphere of the house did not change overly much from its hollow, gloomy character. As he guided me down the hall—a servant’s corridor, unless I missed my guess—and into the wide foyer, I saw furnishings covered by protective sheets and gray light streaming through unwashed windows caked by disuse. Shadows clung to every corner, filled the open spaces beyond doors left half ajar, and made the whole seem rather smaller than it should be. The sheer pall of the place infected my mood, until I felt walled up and jittery.
I expected nothing particularly grand when we approached a large set of doors. Unlike the others we’d passed, these porticos were left wide open. A flicker of gold turned into a breath of warm air as he pushed me over the threshold.
Into heaven.
“A library,” I cried, all vestiges of my prickly mood stripped away.
Shelves upon shelves lined the walls, as far up as to require a ladder to gain the highest tomes. The room was much larger than the study I’d spent hours reading within, large enough that it might fit three or four of such rooms within it. A large desk occupied one portion of the floor, but it seemed as if my grandfather had been something of a social man. Sofas arranged together near the fireplace must have been the site of meetings; gatherings, perhaps, like-minded souls to discourse over a good book or social agenda.
The fireplace was so large as to allow a woman of my stature to stand upright within it, and its blaze crackled merrily in welcome refrain.
Ashmore had taken care to ensure the room would be warm and bright.
I turned in my chair, bracing a hand upon the back of it to smile at the man with all the joy placed within my heart.
His gaze, fixated somewhere over my head, flicked to me. His eyes widened.
“Thank you,” I told him, as sincerely as I knew how. “I will never be bored again.”
He cleared his throat. “That is the idea.” Though his glance turned upward once more, it did not linger. He circled the chair to offer a hand. “I’ll see you situated on the sofa and acquire for you any books as you may like before I leave you.”
When I turned to follow him, a swatch of white caught my attention beyond his shoulder. I leaned to the side, the better to see the large rectangle hanging upon the wall. Whatever was beneath it had been covered by a protective cloth, like most everything else outside the library.
“Did you forget a cloth?” I asked, taking his hand.
His fingers tightened around mine for a brief moment before loosening. “No,” he said simply, and helped me stand. “Can you walk?”
“I’ll bloody well try,” I returned without thinking. His chuckle took my attention from the cloth on the wall, earning him a sheepish smile as I added, “My apologies.”
He nodded, though I saw none of the censure I would have expected. He helped me situate myself upon the sofa with remarkable ease. “I’ve already collected a handful of books for your perusal,” he said. “Do you require anything of a different subject?”
I looked past him, drinking in the sight of all the shelves, all the spines placed outward in various shades of red, green, blue and brown. Some were so old as to be nearly black with age, some had gilded letters that still glinted in the firelight.
There were so many to choose from, I couldn’t possibly decide. “Are there any personal journals of my grandfather’s?”
Ashmore’s smile turned to a serious line. He shook his head. “No.”
“He wasn’t the chronicling sort, then?” My hopes turned to disappointment. “I would have thought—” I caught myself.
It didn’t matter what I’d thought. I hadn’t expected such a desire to know the family beyond the parents I’d lost. I folded my hands in my lap and shook off the threat of discontentment. “What of any fictional adventures? Penny dreadfuls, gothic horrors, or anything of the sort?”
“You enjoy that sort of nonsense?”
“I do,” I replied, spine straightening.
“I should have guessed.” He waved a dismissive hand. “I believe I saw some while I was looking for more scientific pursuits. Remain here.”
I did, watching him as he moved from shelf to shelf, collecting a stray tome now and again. Within moments, he’d returned, five books cradled in his arms. He stacked them beside me.
“I’ll bring you tea and check in on you regularly.”
“Thank you,” I told him, already opening one of the books he acquired for me. The Monk: A Romance. I’d read my copy of it perhaps six times over, though this book was dated earlier. 1796, rather than the 1798 version I’d possessed.
“Miss St. Croix?”
I looked up, my finger tucked under the following page.
Ashmore’s scrutiny was rather more forceful than I felt I deserved. “You will mind yourself, won’t you?”
I refrained from making a face, choosing instead to craft a serene smile. “I will be the quietest of mice.”
“Given your latest encounter with a mouse, perhaps I might convince you to play the part of an invalid with grace?”
This time, I did make a face. A woefully unattractive one. “If I must.”
He did not smile again. “I would consider it most kind.” With that, he left me alone in the vast library, a book held open in my lap and my slippered feet tucked beneath my wrapper.
Within moments, I was already lured into the convoluted—and rather more dis
reputable than I recalled—dealings of the monk Ambrosio. By the time I’d reached the middle of the first chapter, it became clear that what I read was a first edition—whose following editions had been carefully cleansed of all passion and reason for offense.
I held in my hands the most sordid tale I’d ever been allowed to possess.
When I burst into laughter, I smothered it guiltily against the edge of the book, its pages rasping against my ineffectively sealed lips. Though I glanced about the library, automatically assured that Fanny would be the first to bring me to heel with a stern glare, the room was empty.
Of course. I’d forgotten myself.
If only Fanny could see me now.
My amusement faded beneath the painful slice such nostalgia caused in my heart.
I missed her.
My staff was, in the hindsight afforded me by enforced lucidity, the kindest I could have ever hoped to have. Fanny had always been stern, but she was strict for the purposes of my upbringing, and it was not her fault that I’d turned out the way I had. I’d always been an independent thing, thanks in no small part to the criminal childhood my father abandoned me to.
Fanny, Booth and his wife, and even Betsy, who had left my employ after she had been kidnapped to gain my attention, remained the brightest stars in my life.
It hurt abominably to know that I had allowed that light to extinguish beneath the wash of opium I’d consumed to forget.
Slowly, the book slid to my lap, and then to the plush sofa cushion beside me. I had developed a habit of inserting the edge of my thumb between my teeth and worrying at the nail the way a dog worries a bone, and this I did now. Unease filled that space within me that remained empty; a portion of myself that seemed unable to react to laughter, comfort, joy. As if there was some part of me that only would rise when I felt something painful or sad.
As if it gloried in the feeling. Welcomed it.
It encouraged me to mend the hurt the only way I knew how. All I needed to do was take a draught, chew a bit of the tar, smoke it as I’d done in the Chinese dens in London’s murky Limehouse. So easy.
Tempered: Book Four of The St. Croix Chronicles Page 6
