An Unwilling Earl

by Sharon Cullen

  She forced herself to relax, to sink back into the still warm water, to close her eyes and think about more pleasant things. But her mind went to the darkened hallway and the kiss.

  Her lips began to tingle again, and she touched them, but they were no different from this morning. They were just her lips.

  But she was different.

  She’d been kissed.

  So many times she had wondered what her first kiss would be like, and now she knew. And it had been wonderful. Frightening. But wonderful.

  There could be no more kisses. She was aware of that. Aware that letting Jacob into her heart would be a grave mistake. She had a plan. A mission. Get to America and become a different person. Only then would she be completely safe.

  But at least she would have the memory of her first kiss.

  Even if her aunt’s voice in her mind had cut it short.

  Mrs. Smith entered with a gown draped over her arm. She had carried Charlotte’s clothes out, pinched between her fingers, her nose wrinkled. When Charlotte had asked what she was going to do with them, Mrs. Smith had said they were not even fit for the burn barrel, but she was putting them there anyway, and she would find Charlotte more appropriate clothes.

  Now she held up a lemon-yellow gown, several years out of date and with far too many bows for Charlotte’s taste. But the thought of new, clean clothes overrode everything else.

  “It needs some taking in and letting out in places,” Mrs. Smith said. “But I’m a fair hand at stitching and I’ll see to it. For now, it will have to do as is.”

  Charlotte grabbed the towel sitting on a stool by the tub and stood, clutching it to her.

  “There are undergarments as well,” Mrs. Smith said. “I put them on your bed. Ring if you need me.”

  Upon closer inspection, Charlotte discovered that white sprigs of flowers covered the yellow gown. The sleeves came to her elbows, and there was a waterfall of lace trailing from the edge of the sleeve. Being raised as an only child by a widowed father, Charlotte hadn’t been exposed to too much in the way of lace and bows. Her gowns had been utilitarian and simple. Probably because she had liked to play outside and she’d ripped or stained most of her clothes.

  She turned her back to the mirror and looked at herself over her shoulder, shocked at how prominent her shoulder blades were. She was withering away to nothing.

  Mrs. Smith entered and looked her up and down. “That’s much better. I’ll have to take the waist in and lower the hem. Maybe a bit of lace at the hem will work.”

  Inwardly Charlotte grimaced, but she would not complain. It was the most color she’d worn since her father had died. Aunt Martha didn’t believe in wearing brightly colored clothes. It was sinful. Although Charlotte could never understand how color was sinful. Hadn’t God created color? When she’d asked her aunt, she’d been slapped and sent to her room.

  Mrs. Smith buttoned up the back of the gown, while Charlotte watched her in the mirror.

  “Where did you get the gown?” Charlotte asked, curious as to why a confirmed bachelor like Jacob would have a woman’s gown in his home.

  Mrs. Smith pursed her lips and tugged a little harder than necessary on that last button. “It was his beloved late wife’s.”

  “Oh.” Charlotte felt shame wash over her. Mrs. Smith turned her around and fiddled with the pleats of the gown, making sure they lay just right. “If it will be too difficult for him to see me in this I can wear the clothes I came in with.”

  Mrs. Smith dropped her hands to her sides. “You most certainly cannot. Besides, those clothes have already been burned.”

  For a moment Charlotte mourned the loss of her trousers and jacket with the wooden toggles. They were ugly and filthy, and they probably smelled to high heaven, but they had protected her, and they had been hers. Practically the only things that she could call her own.

  “Did he love her?” Charlotte asked, curious now that she knew there had been a Mrs. Baker. Jacob had never once mentioned her, yet Mrs. Smith had called her “beloved.” Charlotte felt a strange sensation in the pit of her stomach. Like hunger, but not like hunger. She realized it was jealousy.

  She was jealous of the late Mrs. Baker. How shameful to be jealous of a dead person. Certainly Lord Ashland, or rather Jacob Baker at the time, had lived a full life before meeting her.

  “Oh, yes,” Mrs. Baker said. “They were a lovely couple. So much in love. ’Twas heartbreaking when she died.”

  “Wh—what did she die of?” Charlotte was almost afraid to ask, afraid it would be too personal, that she was prying too much.

  “Childbed fever. It was quite tragic. The poor thing suffered so at the end, and his lordship was near inconsolable.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Charlotte whispered.

  Mrs. Smith wiped a hand across a leaking eye. “It was just terrible. Poor man didn’t leave the house for weeks.”

  Charlotte felt like a heavy, wet blanket had been draped across her shoulders, as if she could feel Jacob’s pain at losing his beloved wife. He was such a kind and gentle soul that it must have nearly killed him.

  “And the baby?” she asked softly.

  Mrs. Smith sniffed. “Died a few days after his mum of the same fever. Took them both. They’re buried together, the babe in his mother’s arms.”

  Charlotte blinked back tears, thinking of her own mother dying while struggling to push Charlotte into the world. Her father had never made her feel as if she were the cause of her mother’s death, but there had always been something inside Charlotte that blamed herself.

  “Now don’t you go blabbing to his lordship that I told you. He’ll be right angry at me. I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s just that looking at you in that gown, well, it reminded me of her. She was such a beautiful lass.”

  Charlotte smoothed down the skirts of the yellow gown. It felt strange to be wearing a dead woman’s clothing.

  “He’s waiting for you,” Mrs. Smith said. “In his study. Just down the hall on the right.”

  Charlotte nodded, thinking about the Bakers and the love they had for each other and how it had ended so tragically, and then about her parents and their love for each other and how that had ended tragically. Maybe love wasn’t meant to last.

  But no, she refused to believe that. If she fell to that thinking then all was lost. There was no hope for humanity at all.

  After Mrs. Smith left, Charlotte stared at herself and the gown in the mirror.

  “I know why you have this need to save me, Jacob Baker-Lord Ashland. It’s because you couldn’t save your wife.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Jacob entered his study and pulled up short. His heart stopped in his chest.

  Charlotte was standing by the bookcase, perusing the titles on the shelves, but for a small moment he didn’t see Charlotte. He saw Cora. Cora when they had first been married, before she became with child, before the fever had whittled her away to nothing.

  In that moment he thought that it had all been a horrible, terrible nightmare and she really hadn’t died. That she was alive and looking at his books, waiting for him to go into dinner.

  But then Charlotte turned her head, and the spell was broken and the grief came raging back, consuming him like it hadn’t in a long time. It was the gown. Only the gown that brought it all back.

  The woman looking back at him was not Cora. Cora had had dark brown hair, long and shining, and hazel eyes. Cora had been quiet, introspective. She’d listened, watched, and drew conclusions that she’d discussed with him later.

  Charlotte was a doer. Charlotte took life by the horns, and if she didn’t like the way things were going, she changed it. Charlotte took control and wrestled a problem to the ground.

  “By the shocked expression on your face I imagine you never thought you would see me clean.” She held out her arms. “And in a gown, no less.”

  Jacob licked dry lips and pushed the image of Cora away. “You could say that.”

  “Mrs. Smith burn
ed my other clothes. She said you wouldn’t mind if I wore this.”

  By the concern in her eyes he guessed that Mrs. Smith had told Charlotte far more than that. “There is a trunk full of gowns that you may wear.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  He hesitated. “They’re just moldering away.”

  “Mrs. Smith told me—”

  “I can imagine what Mrs. Smith told you.”

  Charlotte blinked at his curt tone. “If it’s too uncomfortable for you—”

  “It’s fine. Truly.”

  She nodded. “Very well. Thank you.”

  “Yellow looks good on you.”

  She pulled at the short ends of her hair. “It’s strange being in a gown again. Stranger still to be wearing such a bright color. Aunt Martha didn’t allow color.”

  “Well, that’s depressing.”

  “To say the least.”

  “Is your room to your liking?” He felt like he was removed from the conversation and watching from a distance. Definitely not like he’d just kissed her.

  “I slept on an uncomfortable pallet for weeks. It’s quite luxurious compared to what I’m used to.”

  “If you need anything, let me know.”

  She considered him for a moment. “This is awkward.”

  He looked down at his toes and realized that he was still standing in the doorway. The sight of Charlotte had stopped him in his tracks. “You just look so different.”

  “And I’m wearing your wife’s gown.” She held up her hand to stop what he was about to say. “I know you don’t want to talk about it. I’ll say no more.”

  In the hallway, when he was showing her the rest of his home, he’d acted on instinct, something he rarely, if ever, did. He’d wanted to kiss her and so he had. She’d been right there. And he’d been right in front of her, hemmed in by the narrow hallway. She’d looked up at him with those large, luminous eyes, and he’d kissed her. And it had been fantastic.

  But now, seeing her in Cora’s gown, he felt guilty.

  Armbruster kept telling him it was time to move on, but Armbruster didn’t understand the grief that still overtook him at times—although less frequently now. Oliver didn’t understand the love that Cora and Jacob had shared. Jacob knew that he would never find another woman like his Cora.

  “Dinner should be soon,” he said to break the awkward silence and to distract his mind from kissing Charlotte.

  She drew in a deep breath and pressed her hand to her stomach and looked at the bookcase that she had been perusing.

  “They’re not exactly entertaining,” he said.

  She looked back at him. “What?”

  He nodded toward the bookcase. “The books. They’re not light reading. Mostly law books.”

  She ran a finger over the spine of one. In the firelight her skin was like alabaster, glowing from the scrubbing that she’d given it. “For the past few years, the only book I was allowed to read was the Bible, so anything else is a nice change.”

  “Well, you’re welcome to read them, but they’ll put you to sleep. They even put me to sleep. If you’d like, we can go to the bookstore, and you can buy something more to your liking.”

  She looked longingly at the books one last time and let her hand drop to her side. “Thank you, but I don’t think I’ll be around long enough to read a book.”

  The thought of her leaving left his heart heavy, and he wanted to curse himself. One moment he was mourning Cora, and the next he was mourning the imminent loss of Charlotte.

  He confused himself.

  …

  The next morning Charlotte made it downstairs rather early only to discover that Jacob was already gone.

  “Meetings with important people,” Mrs. Smith had said as she’d hurried about, waving her dust cloth.

  The night had not gone as well as Charlotte hoped. One would think that sleeping in a comfortable bed would have meant a dreamless sleep, but that had been far from the case. She’d tossed and turned, thoughts of Jacob filling her mind. Jacob in the hallway. Kissing Jacob. Jacob in his study, looking at her as if he were seeing a ghost.

  She’d seen the hope, then the grief flood his eyes when he’d seen her in his wife’s gown and realized it was Charlotte.

  Just Charlotte.

  The way Jacob had looked at her when he thought she was his dead wife had done something to her. She wanted someone to look at her that way, so full of love that he could barely contain it.

  Mrs. Smith had given her another gown, this one a pale peach, and it fit much better.

  “Mrs. Smith, please tell me you didn’t stay up half the night taking this gown in for me?”

  “Aww. Get on with you.” The housekeeper had blushed and scrunched her eyes in pleasure. “It only took me a few hours in the evening.”

  Charlotte turned this way and that in front of the mirror. It was styled essentially the same as the yellow gown—too much lace and too many ribbons—but it was pretty, and it was well made, and better than that, it was clean.

  “Truly,” Charlotte said. “Thank you. You didn’t have to do this.”

  Charlotte took her coffee in Jacob’s office, sitting by the window as the weak sunlight filtered in. It seemed so normal to sit here and drink coffee and look at the street and the people passing by.

  Normal had been missing from her life for a long, long time.

  She spied a stack of newspapers on a corner table and fetched them to settle back in the window seat and enjoy her morning as she hadn’t enjoyed it since her papa had died.

  But the headline screaming at her made her heart flutter, and she put down her coffee, her stomach churning.

  She quickly scanned the story, her breath coming faster, her brain unable to keep up with how fast her eyes were moving across the page.

  Four women dead.

  Beheaded.

  Two with their hands cut off.

  All found in the Thames.

  She grabbed the next newspaper, but there was no mention of it. Two more newspapers into the stack she found another article, but it seemed that Scotland Yard had no real clues and no direction in which to go. They assumed the dead girls were servants, but that’s all they knew.

  Charlotte let the paper drop to her lap, and she closed her eyes, thinking of a dismembered head and sightless, glassy eyes.

  She pressed her fist to her mouth to keep the coffee from coming back up and thought of the dark basement at Aunt Martha’s house and how Charlotte had refused to go down there, even if it had meant a beating for disobedience.

  …

  Jacob didn’t want to miss his longstanding appointment with Armbruster that afternoon, but neither did he want to leave Charlotte alone for much longer. He’d already left her to her devices for the better part of the day, and he was uneasy. Who knew what mischief she could get herself into?

  He told himself he missed her because she was vulnerable and needed his help. Not because she was easy to talk to and he enjoyed her company or that he wanted to kiss her again.

  “April fifteenth,” Armbruster said.

  Jacob paused, halfway to sitting down, and frowned at his friend. “Is that date supposed to mean something?”

  “Put it in your book. Mother has organized a get-together, just a few hundred of her closest friends. You’re invited. In fact, it’s in your honor.”

  “A few hundred friends is not a get-together. That is a ball.” His honor?

  Armbruster shrugged. “Call it want you want, but you better be there.”

  “I don’t go to those things. You know that. I know nothing about balls. What do I do? How do I act?”

  “Like you do and act now. No different.”

  “So not show up?” Jacob asked, perking up.

  “Except that.”

  He did not like parties. Even small parties. Intimate dinners, maybe, but large affairs made him nervous. He wasn’t very good at small talk, and he always felt like the biggest fool.

  Armbruster lea
ned forward. “I have information on the dead women.”

  It took a moment for Jacob’s mind to switch topics. “The women found in the Thames?” he asked.

  “Yes. I spoke to Detective O’Leary.”

  Detective O’Leary had been an unexpected boon to Jacob and Oliver. Jacob had met O’Leary while trying to run down a witness to a case that he’d been working on. He and O’Leary had had a drink at a local pub, and Jacob had asked him a question that had been vexing him and Armbruster regarding a murder at a local boarding house. O’Leary had supplied some information, and after that he had become somewhat of a friend of Jacob and Oliver’s. They were a strange trio—the earl, the solicitor, and the detective. Although now Jacob supposed there were two earls and a detective.

  “All of them were stabbed repeatedly,” Armbruster said.

  “Stabbed?” This was not something Jacob had heard before, but he was going by the newspaper articles which were deliberately holding information back per the request of Scotland Yard. “Is that how they were killed?”

  Armbruster shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Interesting,” Jacob murmured.

  What a strange, macabre mystery. Who was killing these women and why? None of them seem to be related in any way other than that they were of the serving class.

  “It seems that removing the heads and hands means he doesn’t want them identified. The first two were missing only their heads so they couldn’t be identified. Then Scotland Yard reasoned they were servants by their worn and cracked hands, so he started cutting off their hands, too.”

  “Why should the killer care if we know he’s killing servants? Killing is killing no matter the class of the person.”

  “Because it narrows his hunting ground,” Oliver said. “Wherever it is that he’s hunting has to be a place where serving girls congregate. If they’re scared, they won’t go there.”

  “Whoever is killing them has to be someone stronger. More likely a man. He’d subdue them quickly. Make sure they can’t fight. I can see stabbing them once to kill them. Maybe twice, if you didn’t do the job correctly the first time. But repeatedly?”