The Changeling Bride

by Lisa Cach

  “Is this where you always eat?” she called down to him, feeling alone in the dark.

  “Breakfast is served in the breakfast parlour, as is luncheon, and tea wherever one happens to be.”

  “But dinner is here?”

  “This is the dining room.”

  “And very lovely, I’m sure,” she said in reply. “If only I could see it.” She felt a cool draft blow across the back of her neck, and she shivered. A creaking door heralded the arrival of the first course, soup carried by a male servant in ancient livery that looked as if it was held together more by cobwebs than threads. Elle thanked him quietly when he served her and thanked the young girl who poured her wine. She was aware of their scrutiny, and their curiosity. She smiled politely at them and waited until they had left before she spoke again.

  “I take it no one will be joining us for dinner?”

  “No, not tonight. Freddie—my brother, if you recall—will not be coming for several weeks yet. Other than family, Brookhaven does not see much in the way of visitors.”

  The cool draft once again played with the hairs along her neck. She glanced into the darkness off to her side, but could see nothing but shadows. The room was silent but for her own breathing, and the clink of Henry’s spoon in his consommé. It was as if the loneliness inside her had spread out into the room, surrounding her in a black well of isolation.

  She abruptly stood, shoving her chair back with a rumble of wooden legs. Henry looked up at her, spoon halfway to mouth. She picked up her own bowl and spoon, and walked quickly down to his end of the table, set them down to his right, then returned to retrieve her chair and the rest of her flatware.

  “I’m sorry. I was getting the creeps down there.” She looked down the table at her empty place, a pocket of dim light in the darkness, the candle flickering in the draft.

  “And here I thought you desired my company,” he murmured and took another sip from his spoon.

  “You wish.”

  “Clarence and Matilda, when they return with the next course, will—”

  She interrupted him, her voice catching. “Clarence, you say?”

  “Yes, Clarence and Matilda, the two servants—”

  Her eyes filmed with tears. That was the name of Jeff’s oldest child. Why did she have to be reminded, when she was already feeling so far from home? Her rotten, annoying little nephew, the first baby she had ever fed, the first diaper she had ever changed.

  “Sorry,” she said, blinking away the tears before they could fall and giving him a wavering smile. “I knew a little boy by that name once. He . . . was very special to me.”

  “He died?”

  Elle waited a moment, then nodded. It would have been more truthful to say that she herself had died, but what sense did that make?

  “I am sorry,” he offered, and she thought she could hear a note of sympathy in his voice, the first true emotion other than anger or lust that he had shown her.

  “Yes, well, never mind. It was silly of me to react to a name like that. Could we talk about something else?”

  “It is lovely weather we have been having, do you not agree?” he asked, eyebrows raised in polite inquiry, voice back to its insufferably controlled tones.

  Elle gave a short laugh. “Yes, my lord, quite lovely. And will it be the same tomorrow?”

  The remainder of the meal passed in polite discussion, Henry describing the estate and some of his plans, proving himself a master at maintaining the flow of a harmless conversation. She discovered that the trunks she had noted in the hall were full of Eleanor’s things, which were waiting for her directions to be unpacked. He did not reveal any further hints of emotion throughout the meal, much to her disappointment.

  After dinner they adjourned to the room where Tatiana still lay by the fire, awake now, her tail thumping in greeting.

  “We’ll have to get you something to eat, won’t we?” Elle asked the dog, as she sank down to the floor beside her.

  “I have already spoken with Abigail. She will be sure that enough bones and scraps are found to feed her daily.”

  “Thank you,” Elle said without turning to look at him, touched that he had thought of Tatiana. Now that she thought on it, even when angry he had been unfailingly solicitous, and she wondered for a moment if perhaps that was because he cared a bit for her. But, no, that was ridiculous. He hardly knew her, and her face was not one that inspired passion. Doubtless all young earlets were taught from the nest onward to be polite at all times, and she was, after all, his new wife and yet to be bedded.

  Henry took a seat on one of the dilapidated settees, and watched Elle as she scratched Tatiana’s stomach. The dog was flat on her back, forelegs bent, hind legs spread obscenely wide as her tail swished back and forth over the floor. Elle continued to scratch her, then stopped and blew on Tatiana’s nose. The dog sneezed and flipped over onto her belly, leaning her head on Elle’s leg and snapping playfully at her mistress. Elle giggled and contined to play, and soon white hair was flying and Elle was prone on the ground, laughing and fending off enthusiastic licks.

  Henry watched, seeing not so much Tatiana as Elle’s playfulness. She was the first countess he had seen roll about the floor with an animal. These past two days she had been lacking in pretension to the extent that there was almost something foreign about her. If he did not know better, he would swear she was not even English. But perhaps it was just that strange accent she had picked up that made him feel so. In time she would begin to speak normally again, and she would learn the rules of being a countess. She would cease surprising him, and life would become ordered and predictable, as it should be. He did not need the inconvenience of passions.

  With her hair pulled back in that unfashionable, yet flattering style, curls spilling wildly over her shoulders, and the golden light from the fire warming her skin, he had to admit she was looking far from undesirable. Lust was not an unfamiliar sensation to him, but it was one over which he preferred to have mastery. He did not want his physical desires to interfere with his rational plans.

  Already it was clear that when he backed off, Elle came forward. A plan had been slowly building in his mind since their wedding night. She had struggled today when he’d foolishly obeyed his whim and kissed her, but witness her behavior at dinner, when he had arranged for her to sit alone at the other end of the table. Of her own volition she had come to him. So, he would not play the part of her foe, pressuring her and giving her someone against whom to fight. He would, instead, back off and let her come to him.

  Elle sat up, and Henry’s eyes fell to the tops of her breasts. He was almost able to look down the bodice of her gown from his vantage point. Well, maybe he would not play too hard to get. He imagined touching the soft skin, kissing the two mounds, having her press her breasts together with her hands as he slid his manhood between them. . . . He gave himself a mental shake, and raised his eyes to her face, relieved to see she had not caught him staring. If women had any notion of how truly base men’s thoughts were, they would spend their lives in nunneries.

  He gave an internal sigh, and looked into the flames of the fire. It was going to be a long, lonely night.

  Elle gave Tatiana a final pat and looked up at Henry. Jane Eyre’s Rochester could not have brooded better. His posture was relaxed, languid even, his face without expression, but his eyes said he was a thousand miles distant. For all she knew, he might have forgotten she was there.

  She couldn’t sit on the floor scratching the dog all night. These people must do something for entertainment without television. Even talking was better than this. “Henry?”

  “Hmm?” He came back from wherever his mind had gone.

  Making conversation with this man suddenly seemed a daunting proposition. “Do you want to do something?”

  He raised an eloquent eyebrow. “What did you have in mind, my dear?”

  She lifted a diffident shoulder. “I don’t know. Play cards, maybe?”

  “Cards.” He sounde
d letdown.

  “Do you have a deck?” she asked, getting off the floor to sit in one of the old settees.

  “I believe so.” He at last stirred, getting up and going to a battered cabinet, where he rummaged in a drawer. “Voilà. Cards.” He held up a deck, then picked up a small table by its top and carried it over to where she sat.

  She picked up the cards while he pulled the opposite settee closer. The cards were a little larger than she was used to and not quite as stiff. There were no numbers written in the corners. Apparently you had to count the number of symbols for yourself.

  “Paper, to keep score?” she asked just as Henry sat.

  He gave her a look, then pushed himself up again, returning shortly with paper, ink, and a quill. “Anything else, madame?”

  She waved him to his seat and shuffled the cards. “What shall we play?”

  “Your choice.”

  “Gin rummy, then.”

  “I fear I do not know that game.”

  “I’ll teach you.” She went through the rudiments with him and a practice hand played with their cards face up on the table. He quickly learned the rules, and they settled in for a real game.

  “What stakes shall we play for?” he asked.

  She looked up from her handful of cards. She was having the devil of a time spreading all ten out so that she could see them. Without the corner numbers, she had to use two very awkward hands to keep them visible. “Oh, I never play for money.”

  “Nonsense. Everyone does, even if it be only a ha’penny a point.”

  “I don’t like to gamble, even for pennies.”

  “The sums cannot make any different to you.”

  She shrugged and picked up a card from the deck, trying to fit it into her hand. “Maybe it’s not rational.” She started to make her discard and ended up spilling half of her cards onto the table. “Bother! How do you play with these cards?”

  His eyebrows went up. “They are a trifle old—”

  “No, no, it’s not that.” She spread the rest of her hand on the table and took up the quill, dipping it in the ink.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Making a much needed improvement.” She took her ten of diamonds and penned in the appropriate number and symbol in opposite corners.

  “Elle, you cannot write on the cards!”

  “Why not?” she asked, blowing gently on the wet ink. “It would be better with red, though. Do you have red ink, Henry?”

  It was a long moment before he finally got up and went to rummage in the cabinet, coming up at last with a small square of solid red watercolor paint. “Will this do?”

  “Perhaps. Come back here and sit down. You can paint in the symbols while I do the numbers.”

  He scrounged up a brush and went for a glass of water, and then came back to sit down, looking for all the world, she thought, like a boy set an unpleasant task in a schoolroom.

  “Are you going to tell me why we are destroying a perfectly good deck of cards?”

  “Not destroying, Henry. Improving. You’ll see when we finish.”

  She explained what she wanted, and he bent to his assignment, filling in the diamond she had drawn with neat, even strokes of paint. “You still have not explained why you will not wager on cards.”

  “It’s just an irrational fear of losing even the smallest sum of money. Surely you have irrational fears, yourself? Everyone does.”

  “I cannot think of any,” he said, examing his work, then setting aside the card and reaching for the next.

  “When you were a boy, then. What were you afraid of?”

  “My father.”

  She stopped and looked up, but his eyes were on the card under his brush. “That does not sound good.”

  “He was violent when drunk. I do not count my fear of him as irrational.”

  “No, I imagine not,” she murmured, not knowing what else to say.

  “There was one thing I feared, though, that you might call irrational.”

  “Oh?”

  “I thought it lived under my bed.”

  “A witch? I was afraid there were witches under my bed. Sometimes I thought there were sharks, but mostly witches.”

  “No, this was worse. A shark, you could tell yourself there was no water in which to swim. Witches, there would not be enough space for them.” He stopped, using the edge of his finger to remove a smudge of paint that had gone outside the lines.

  “What then? What was it?”

  “The chicken.”

  She opened her mouth, frowning at his bent head. “A chicken? You were afraid of a chicken under your bed?”

  “Not just a chicken. The Dreadful Chicken.” His tone was utterly serious.

  She started to laugh. “How could you be afraid of a chicken? What was it going to do, cluck at you?”

  “My nurse had to sweep a broom under my bed before I would go to sleep, and even then I could not rest easy. A chicken is a guileful creature. Perhaps it hid while she swept and crept back into place when she had gone.”

  “But it’s a chicken!”

  “Can you imagine, Elle, being alone under your blankets, the room dark, the coals in the grate all but dead, and hearing, coming from the shadows beneath your bed . . . braaaa brock brock brock, braaa. . . .”

  She could almost imagine it, could almost feel the terror a small child might feel, and then he finally looked up at her, and she saw the merriment in his eyes. “You rat!” She threw a card at him. “I believed you.”

  He smiled crookedly. “Actually, I am told I was afraid of such a thing, only I was too young to have any memory of it now. Although sometimes, when the clock strikes twelve, and all is quiet—”

  “You still hear the clucking of the Dreadful Chicken.”

  He grinned at her, then gestured to the cards. “Are you going to explain this now?”

  She picked up a handful of those that had dried, and spread them in a narrow fan in her hand, showing Henry.

  “My dear, what a wonderful idea.”

  She shrugged. “It wasn’t my own. I’m afraid I stole it from someone else.”

  “Do not discount yourself. It takes a certain intelligence to know which ideas are worth stealing.”

  “I suppose I shall have to take that as a compliment.”

  There was an unfamiliar, warm light in his eyes when he looked at her. “I suppose you shall.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Elle woke late the next morning, having laid tensely in her bed into the early hours of the morning, waiting for Henry to appear in her bedchamber. He never did, though, and in the end it was just she and Tatiana, the same as it always was. Perhaps he’d decided she wasn’t really worth the effort to bed, now that he had her money.

  She could hear the omnipresent Marianne rustling around in the dressing room, and rolled her eyes at the draperies overhead. She missed the perfect privacy of her own bedroom and bathroom, where she could make rude noises or pick at her skin, if she felt like it. Perhaps it was just as well that she couldn’t.

  Still, she was a countess now. That ought to be good for something.

  “Marianne?” she called.

  The maid bounced out of the dressing room, stays and stockings in hand. “Yes milady? Did you sleep well, milady?”

  “Yes, very. Are you settling in all right yourself?”

  “Mostly. I have my own room, did you know? I have never had my own room before; always had to share, either with sisters or other servants.”

  “That’s a nice change for you, then.”

  “I appreciate it and all, but it is kind of lonesome, and in an unfamiliar house, when you do not know the noises, and you hear the floorboards creak like there is someone outside your door, and you lie there in the dark waiting to see if the knob turns, only you cannot quite make it out in the dark, so you do not know if it is your imagination saying it is moving—”

  “Yes, I see,” Elle interrupted. She did not want a reminder of her own lonely night, and the
disappointment she should not be feeling. “I suppose you could always ask to share a room with someone, if it would make you more comfortable.” It was a good thing the maid did not know about the Dreadful Chicken that haunted the house. She smothered a giggle.

  “They would think me a fool, milady, that they would, what with all the spare rooms in this place. Not that I have one of the fine rooms meant for guests, of course. I just have one of the servant rooms. All the servants have one. No one sleeps in the long attic rooms, the ones with all the beds.”

  “Who are all those extra beds for, if there are enough rooms?”

  Marianne laughed a bit at that. “Well, there are not all that many rooms for servants, milady. If his lordship hires on the proper number, those attic rooms will be plenty full.”

  “I thought we had more than enough people to take care of things,” Elle said, perplexed. “I must have met twenty servants. Surely that is sufficient?”

  “For the house as it is now, yes. Many more will be needed if the house is to be returned to a livable state.”

  “Forgive my ignorance, Marianne. About how many servants would you estimate are the normal number for a place like Brookhaven?”

  “For just the house, or for the stables and gardens and livestock, the dairy, the laundry, all of that?”

  “Everyone.”

  “Oh, well, I would not really know. Maybe a hundred? Maybe more?”

  Elle’s lips parted in shock. “A hundred?”

  “It is only a guess, milady,” Marianne backtracked quickly. “I know your home only had about thirty, if that, but Brookhaven is much larger.”

  “And we’ve only twenty employees at present . . . oh, my God.” As mistress of the house, would she be expected to oversee the hiring? Was she expected to manage them? What did they all do? She had no idea.