Moonlight Mist

by Laura London

  At the top of the paper Lynden had carefully penned the sundial poem. She had first studied it as a whole; attesting to this were the several elaborate and ill-executed doodles of castle turrets and horses surrounding it. After this, Lynden had been seized by a dramatic inspiration: Hidden in the poem might be a code. She threw herself into the task of uncovering it with the enthusiasm of a spaniel chasing a soap bubble. Reading the poem backward, she found that it was unintelligible. Next she tried reading every other word of the poem:

  Grave secret clasp’d in heart

  stay me forgotten impart;

  or, alternatively,

  and mem’ries quietly my

  eternally nigh and pasts.

  Neither version revealed anything not already explicit in the verse, so Lynden scanned the lines for anagrams. But other than the discovery that the letters of heart might be rearranged into earth, and that forgotten could become not get for, no enlightenment was to be gained from this avenue, either. Deep in contemplation, she sat brushing the soft feather of her pink-dyed quill pen across her lips when a knock at the door interrupted her reverie.

  Quickly she raised the surface of her writing desk, pulled out a narrow drawer beneath, and whisked the paper into it.

  “Yes? Come in.”

  Melbrooke entered the room, impeccably dressed, as always, in a coat of rich king’s blue and breeches that fit without a wrinkle. Closing the door quietly behind him, he crossed the floor to rest one casual hand on Lynden’s shoulder, tilting her chin up toward him with the other. He told her good morning and brushed her pink lips lightly with his own. Lynden felt a smarting whip of pleasure lash inside her chest and then, angry with his easy control over her emotions, she slid from his gentle grip and stood, setting her little mahogany armchair between them, her fingers tight on the top rail carved with oval paterae.

  “So. You are angry with me,” said Melbrooke, surveying her with his calm gray eyes.

  Lynden was startled in replying with more heat than she would have liked, “Next time, if you want to know if I’m angry with you, you can ask me! You don’t have to experiment with kisses!”

  The gaze hardened to tempered steel. “Let me correct that misapprehension, my dear. I don’t have to experiment with kisses because, unlike you, Lynden, I know what I want!” It was the first time the tight choke chain on his control had loosened in her presence.

  Umbrage rose in Lynden’s deep-brown eyes as she exclaimed wrathfully, “Well! I apologize for my lack of premarital experience, My Lord! And what you want, you can so easily find elsewhere! I won’t be sneered at so! Pray, have the goodness to leave my bedchamber.”

  Lynden spun her diminutive frame and marched toward the door with the firm determination to eject her husband, but he moved forward more quickly than she would have thought possible, and catching her rigid shoulders in his firm grip, he said, “No! Little one, I…”

  “There’s another thing!” cried Lynden, cutting off his words. “Why do you persist in calling me little? Are you referring to my lack of size or my lack of significance?”

  The tension around Melbrooke’s mouth lessened as he studied his affronted bride. She wore a morning dress of rose pink that matched the soft color of her cheeks. The gown was cut high and belted with a wide satin ribbon under a small, pretty bosom heaving with indignation; the décolletage and ankle-length hemline were trimmed with ruffled, snow-white Campaine lace. Her curls were brushed away from her face and spilled from her inkily lustrous crown which was strewn with knots of narrow ribbons in rose pink and white. To Lynden’s surprise Melbrooke touched her forehead with a kiss and held her at arm’s length, his lips spreading in a smile.

  “Whatever, my dear, it couldn’t be your lack of beauty. You wear my patience more than you know. Having given you an awareness of that, I will also give you my apology, if you will accept it,” he said placatingly.

  Lynden had been more indignant than wounded over his actions. She had also been both alarmed and intrigued by the force of his temper, appearing as it did so soon after she had reached the conclusion that he was immune to such strenuous emotions. Her inclination was to forgive him; in truth, she knew that she had provoked him. But there was his larger crime, his intrigue with Lady Silvia, which stood between them with the inflexible, stony finality of the Crant Castle walls. Better for her jaws to be forever fixed shut than to apprise him of that greater hurt. The pain was too private and raw for his sophisticated consumption. It might have been safer to maintain the argument, she knew, and yet how could she when he would apologize? Why must he put her in so difficult a position?

  She frowned in frustration and said, “I forgive you, of course, if you wish it, because it is one’s Christian duty, but I felt I was being pinched by a giant lobster when you grabbed my shoulders! I suppose they are set with bruises now and my maid will be very shocked when she helps me undress for my bath. There’s no doubt that you might have entered the boxing ring and made your fortune—if you hadn’t been born with one!”

  One could not tell whether Melbrooke cared for his placement in the realms of professional pugilists and edible crustaceans, as the opaque gray shield of polite withdrawal had once again covered the expression in his eyes. He released her shoulders, begging her pardon with no visible remorse.

  “But you haven’t answered me,” he said in a remote, courteous tone. “What have I done to incur your enmity?”

  “Why—Can you mean before this morning? Nothing! What could there be?” replied Lynden, checking a question with a question.

  “I’m not omniscient, Lynden. You’ll have to tell me. I don’t flatter myself that you have any special regard for me, but there has been an unmistakable hostility in your attitude since the night I told you that I wanted our marriage to have more intimacy than the occasional greeting in the hallway. The night before last you made it clear that it would be impossible for you to accompany me to Penrith, with such revulsion did you regard the anticipation of a day spent in my company.”

  “Penrith!” cried Lynden, seizing on that with desperate gusto. “You must have come home late last night—I didn’t hear you. Had you a nice day? Did you have a pleasant intercourse with His Grace, the Duke of Wellington?”

  “Yes. But it isn’t my intercourse with Wellington that I’m trying to discuss,” Melbrooke said with careful emphasis.

  “Well!” Lynden felt as though the volume of her blood had deserted her internal organs, coalescing in a burning mass on her cheeks. “Well! You’re very frank, I think! But I can’t discuss anything with you now. Truly I can’t! Lorraine and I promised Mrs. Coniston that we’d carry a good-wishes basket of fruit and sweetmeats to Mrs. Robins, the gardener’s wife, you know, who was brought to childbed only last night. Though Mrs. Coniston says that, as Mrs. Robins has had twins, it ought to be a sympathy basket! She only said it to tease Raine and me, of course—isn’t she sly? We’re used to that sort of thing. Why, back in Yorkshire we were used to being called Miss Ruckus and Miss Peace. But Mrs. Coniston said she’d have the basket ready at eleven o’clock and here it is three minutes of the hour. You will have to excuse me, you know.”

  “If you wish,” said Melbrooke, his level voice touched with irony. “And to think that I worried that you might be bored here, when you seem to have more to occupy your time than Pomona pruning her walled garden.”

  After Lorraine and Lynden delivered their basket to Mrs. Robins and had taken turns holding the new babies, the sisters climbed Loughrigg Fell to the smuggler’s cabin and found Kyler there, industriously skinning a large hare that he had poached earlier that morning from Lord Crant’s property. Lynden at once demanded that he leave off his grisly task and accompany them inside the cottage, where, she said with a theatrical flair, she had Something Important to show him. Kyler laughed and said that he hoped it was not Lord Crant’s head that Lynden was guarding so jealously under her cloak. He stroked Lorraine with his warm, brilliant smile before turning to wash his hands in th
e rain barrel.

  Lynden eyed him with disfavor. “I can only hope,” she told him austerely, “that you will remember later not to drink the water from that barrel!”

  Kyler laughed at her again and tweaked one of her dark curls, saying she was a brat. He accompanied them inside, grinning and teasing, but his good humor ceased abruptly when they told him about their visit to Crant Castle and showed him the treasured rubbing. Full-blown wrath kindled in his exotic, dark-lashed eyes. He grabbed the nearest twin, who happened to be Lynden, and shook her by the shoulders with enough vigor to rattle her teeth. Then, after choking back an old army oath, he proceeded to deliver a lecture of epic proportions on the insanity of women of their young age and innocence embarking on schemes to hoodwink a man of Crant’s caliber. Kyler voiced grave doubts about their intelligence, their maturity, and their common sense, and ended by pointing out that on the occasion of their last encounter he had firmly denied them permission to interest themselves actively in his affairs.

  Lorraine recognized the source of his anger as concern for their safety and self-reproach for having confided his story to them. But Lynden had already been handled roughly that day, and in much the same tender spots; she glared at Kyler furiously and pulled out of his arms.

  “All men are brutes!” she announced with strong conviction. “But I’ve known that since I was five when Cousin Elmo bloodied my nose with his cricket bat after I beat him in a foot race. You’re lucky I don’t kick you where Father taught me to kick Elmo so he’d never bully me again!”

  “Try it,” snapped Kyler, “and I’ll make sure you won’t sit down for a week.”

  “That,” declared Lynden triumphantly, “would only further prove my point. I don’t know why you should be so put out. We were only trying to help you.”

  Kyler frowned. “Aye. And if you continue helping me that way, you’ll soon find yourselves in need of help. How stupid do you think Crant is? Don’t you realize that a man so quick to commit infanticide would dispatch the two of you in nothing flat? Do you think I want to see you martyred in my cause?”

  Lorraine stepped between them, as if physically to block the flow of their disagreement.

  “Then you ought to shake me, too,” she said to Kyler. “I’m as much to blame as Lynden.”

  “That I can believe, Little Miss Butter-Would-Melt-In-Your-Mouth. I’ll bet you’re very adept at letting your other half talk you into things that you want to do yourself anyway.” Kyler put his hands on Lorraine’s shoulders and rocked her gently back and forth with the slightest of pressures. “You’re lucky I’m not mad enough any more. There’s only enough viciousness in me to shake one girl a day.”

  “You can thank your lucky penny for that, Lorraine,” said Lynden. “And Mister Highwayman, you ought to be more careful what you say about Lord Crant, because evidence bears out that you are Lord Crant, and Lord Crant is plain old Percy. Besides, I’ll bet you’re angry in part because we were the ones clever enough to think of taking a rubbing from the sundial and not you!”

  “Clever!” Kyler glared at her, then grinned reluctantly. “Little hornet! I could think of another word for it. If you think I’m going to say thank you, you’ll be disappointed. But since you’ve got the deuced thing here, I suppose we might as well take a look at it.”

  Lynden and Lorraine exchanged relieved glances; they had both secretly entertained the fear that he would have nothing to do with any activity carried out by them on his behalf. But things were moving along fairly well; their initiative, undertaken without his prior consent, had gotten them an expected scold and now they had gained his begrudging acquiescence to a discussion of it. Lynden spread the rubbing out on the table; Lorraine placed clay cups on the four curling corners to keep it flat.

  Kyler stared at the page for a good five minutes while the twins waited patiently. Finally he spoke. “I can’t make anything out of it. Have you got a theory?”

  Lorraine was standing next to him, hands behind her back, gazing at the rubbing contemplatively. “No theories, but we have eliminated some possibilities. Lynden worked at it this morning. There’s no code in it to be broken, nor does scrambling the letters provide a clue. We do think this, though: ‘Grave and secret mem’ries’ refers to your mother’s marriage certificate. Lady Irmingarde must have been using the sundial poem to tell your stepparents that she was keeping the information safe. Unfortunately, they were too overset by all that had happened to understand her.”

  Kyler nodded, still looking at the poem. “It’s possible,” he admitted. “According to the poem, though, the grave and secret memories that unfold forgotten pasts ‘stay nigh me.’ Could ‘nigh me’ mean near the sundial?”

  “I don’t see how it could,” said Lorraine, her finger thoughtfully tracing a pattern on the cold silver surface of the top button on her cloak. “You see, the sundial sits in the middle of the courtyard garden. It’s solid stone—we tapped it—so there’s no hollow place inside for anything to be hidden. There are no structures in the garden, either, so the only way to hide anything would be to bury it in the ground. But surely a garden would be the last place to bury anything important, since the ground is always being cultivated and one of the gardeners might have accidentally turned up a buried object at any time. Lynden thinks that the ‘me’ the memories eternally stay nigh must refer to Aunt Irmingarde.”

  Lynden, standing opposite, leaned on the table and looked at them significantly. “Yes! At first it seemed to me if she kept Kyler’s documents near her that it must mean she kept them with her gardening journals. If they were, then they’d be destroyed now since Lord Crant’s mother had the journals burned. But listen, if they were kept in her gardening journals, why would she say ‘eternally nigh me’? Eternally means forever, doesn’t it? So this morning, when I was in the kitchen getting the basket to take to Mrs. Robins, I asked Mrs. Coniston where the Crants were buried. Well, they have a mausoleum, in back of that little church at the curve of the main road, St. Andrew’s. So I propose…”

  “No!” said Lorraine so emphatically that her listeners jumped.

  “What’s no?” demanded Lynden. “You haven’t heard what I was going to say!”

  Lorraine crossed her arms in front of her and studied her sister with some severity. “I don’t need to hear it. I know what you’re going to say, and we’re not going to do it. Lynden, I’ve done everything with you: I helped put Lady Shillingworth’s London bonnet on the statue of the Magdelene at our village church, I carried the key when we locked Elmo overnight in the gardener’s shed, and I even asked Uncle Monroe to explain a newspaper item to me so that you would have time to sneak that can of rove beetles into the pen drawer of his desk, but I won’t, Lynden, won’t stand by while you dig up dead bodies! No and no and NO!”

  “Not bodies, Raine, only one body,” said Lynden, directing her most appealing smile at her largely immune twin. “You see, I believe that Lady Irmingarde had the documents sewn into the lining of her funeral gown. She probably had it picked out years before her death, you know, as Mama has done, and she decided that would be the one place Kyler’s documents would be safe because, bizarre as he is, Lord Crant wasn’t likely to fool about with the dress of a dead…”

  “Wonderful!” interrupted Kyler. “Crant isn’t bizarre enough to rifle the garments of a dead woman, but I suppose you think I am! I’m obliged to you! Devil take you, hornet, do you think I’m a man to bother my great-aunt’s remains on some farfetched purpose? Now this is final, child: We’re not going to make a project of exhuming my ancestors, so you might as well set the whole thing from your mind!”

  Lynden dropped her chin to her open palms, opened her eyes to their widest dilation and conceded handsomely, “Very well, if it wounds your sensibilities, there’s no more to be said. Naturally, if you don’t like the scheme, it’s forgotten. Eternally.”

  * * *

  The Crescent clock on her mantelpiece chimed the last stroke of midnight as Lynden slipped out a side door
way from Fern Court on her way to St. Andrew’s churchyard. The night was damp, and the air was thick with a throbbing mist, the light from the blue-haloed moon fracturing silver on millions of tiny droplets. The fog made sounds close, as close as the chill, and Lynden pulled the hood of her cape snugly around her cheeks, both to ward off the creeping dampness and to muffle the magnified rustlings in the dark trees behind her, the high-pitched skittering of unseen bats, and the rhythmic crush of her footsteps on the gravel. Her normally keen vision was neutralized by the glimmer; landmarks were indiscernible, and her only guide was the lighter color of the road beneath her. She kept her head down so as not to miss her step, thinking, as she trudged along, that it was best not to stumble on the stairway to nowhere.

  At last the tumorous, spidery growth of bilberry bushes told her that she was nearing her destination. She looked up to a hilltop before her, where, above the slowly circling mist, the steeple and box of St. Andrew’s stood black against the luminous purple night sky. It was a small parish, too small to support a clergyman on its own; the Reverend Hewitt rode in from Ambleside to bury the dead, christen the newborn, marry the courageous, and once a week rebuke the faint-hearted from the pulpit. A local shepherd and his sons were charged with the upkeep of the church and yard, but as they lived more than a quarter mile away, no human scrutiny disturbed Lynden’s solitary climb.

  Reaching the summit, she paused to glance nervously at the fifteenth-century church. Its south doorway lay like a giant keyhole under brick-crenellated offsets. The heavy oak doorway had not moved, of course; surely the slight change in its shadow had been only an illusion of the weak sparkling moonlight. And the soft rustle was only the magic wind rubbing branch on bare branch. Lynden forced herself to walk past the church, down the dark hillside to the churchyard, where sickly greenish mist rolled in quiet wisps between the motionless gravestones. Around her slept the silent, waiting spirits of the long dead… and those whose footsteps, until recently, had trod the sandy Lakeland soil. To her right was the dark pit of a freshly dug grave, emitting the musky odor of newly turned earth; behind that lay the sulking, domed Crant mausoleum, squatting in the dark like a malevolent toadstool.