by Edith Layton
Her promised recommendation from Mrs. Colfax, doubtless prized from her by Lady Malverne, had finally come by post. But it was such a poor, feeble thing that Miss Parkinson had been entirely right to send it back to Victoria with a terse note about seeing if she might not ask the woman to work up some more enthusiasm, as the testimonial (if it could even be called such) wouldn’t do for a new employer at all, the halfhearted way that it was worded. The Ludlows had accepted it without looking at it for their neighbor the earl’s sake. And for the earl’s sake, Victoria wouldn’t send it back nor would she attempt to have it written anew in any way. To do so would be to contact the Earl of Clune again, and that she wouldn’t do even if she were to learn that he held her personal fortune in his hands, and was waiting to present it to her just for the asking.
He’d said she was not welcome in his home; then he’d kissed her. Which meant, she understood, that she was only good enough for his bed.
It was true, for Victoria had heard of it, that some gentlemen regarded some females just as they might regard certain public conveniences, as things necessary to bring physical easement, but therefore also as insensate objects fashioned for the sort of lower functions one did not discuss in polite company. Certainly, then, they wouldn’t regard such receptacles as being remotely human. She’d not thought that of him, though she’d scarcely known him. But she’d imagined him wise and kind. Now she saw that had been only her wish overlaying the truth of the man, even as all the complicated fretwork and brickwork overlaid the few rooms that had been the original whole of the house she now resided in.
But he’d kissed her with passion to show her why she was not acceptable in his home, and so as he’d wished, she saw the whole of it now. And nothing, nothing in the mortal world, would induce her to cross his path again, even as nothing could erase the thought of him or his touch from her mind ever again.
When Victoria thought of how her life had run since her papa had died, except for that one brief month’s interlude under the earl’s care in London, which turned out to have been unreal as a dream, she found it hard to know how she was supposed to get through the next several decades she was supposed to have coming to her. The children were the last pleasure she had left, and she couldn’t even go to see them, for she never knew when the earl was in residence at High Wyvern Hall and dared not risk being seen by him.
But Alfie would often visit her; as a known familiar of the earl, he was always welcome at the Manor, and sometimes he’d have Bobby or Sally and even Baby in tow. That was almost the whole of what she had to look forward to for personal pleasure. When she thought that she was only twenty years old, she wondered if the earl had done her any favor, restoring her to life and health. So it was fortunate that she had so little time to think in her new position.
Miss Charlotte was seventeen and supposedly had needed a companion, but all she really required to make her happy was a large enough looking glass or a suitor who’d tell her what her mirror could not when she had to leave it. And Miss Sophrina was sixteen, and supposedly needed a governess, but since she’d somehow already learned to read love letters and could sign her name to a dance card, she had no interest in further scholarship. So Miss Dawkins, her employers firmly believing that the only idle servant ought to be a dead one, had many other duties to fill up the vacant hours when her charges eluded her, rejected her, or locked her out of their rooms and lives entirely. This soft summer’s morning found her in the gold salon carefully tracing out the needlepoint design on a tall-back chair onto a piece of parchment so that she could then work it on a hoop and repair the damage to the tapestry covering there.
“Now they ’ave you teaching the chairs to chat, do they?” a cheeky voice inquired, and she spun around, letting the stiff sheet of paper slip to the floor so that she could bend to embrace the fair-haired boy who stood before her.
“Ah, Alfie, don’t you look fine?” she sighed, holding him at arm’s length as he suffered both her embrace and her inspection with admirable fortitude. But he did, she thought. He wore a blue jacket remarkably like the sort a gentleman such as the earl might choose for such a day’s visit, his shirt was still pristine, and his pantaloons were uncommonly clean and of a fine nankeen. Even his boots retained a vestige of a shine. His hair was clipped and combed, his face was clear, and his eyes the shade of the summer’s sky she’d seen at dawn. In all, she could see that one day he’d grow to be the magnified image of the miniature fine gentleman he appeared to be now.
She beamed at him until he frowned and said, “But you don’t look so fine, Miss Victoria. Don’t they never let you out? You’re pale as a ghost, and you look about as ’appy as one too.”
“You ought to be the expert on that, my lad,” she said merrily, ignoring his comment, very well aware that she hadn’t sufficient peace of mind or outdoor exercise to look her best, but determined to divert him from something she could do nothing about, “since all the chatter here is about how the Hall is chockablock with ghosts. I’m all over envy,” she sighed sadly, rising from her knees; “we haven’t so much as a headless midnight mouse to disturb us here at the Manor.”
“Then I can’t imagine why you ’aven’t been sleeping,” Alfie commented, still looking at her critically, in his usual terrier fashion not sidetracked in the least from his major concerns. But then something in her face must have answered him, for he shrugged his shoulders before he said, with more animation, “Aye, it’s all the chatter at the ’All too, so it’s a major disappointment to me that there’s not been a sign of ’em about.”
“Oh, too bad,” Victoria commiserated, stooping to pick up her fallen pattern, “but it’s early days yet, you might still ’appen upon one.”
“Aye, ’appen I might.” Alfie laughed before he went on more seriously, becoming quite coherent in his enthusiasm, “For I’ve been told of all sorts of haunts to expect in the night—there’s supposed to be an ‘’orrible curse’ on the family, you see. S ’truth,” he said, crossing his heart and looking much offended at Victoria’s quizzically lifted eyebrow. “Even Mrs. Haverford said so.”
She grinned at him, for no matter what game he was up to, he never omitted the H in his benefactress’s name, and it was apparent from the way he spoke it that he thought of her in almost sanctified fashion. Although the Stanleys were supposed to be nominally in charge of Alfie and his siblings, there was no longer any doubt that they’d become Mrs. Haverford’s charges.
“Well, I don’t envy you,” Victoria said with a shake her head. “There’s a great many things here in the countryside that I hadn’t known in London town, from badgers to bees’ nests, and I delight in them all, however odd or dangerous they might be, but you can have the ghosts, my friend, every one of them.”
“Nothin’ to ’em, Jack says,” Alfie went on, following Victoria and watching her resume her intricate tracery. “If you meet up with one, just cross yourself and say, ‘Peace be with you, friend,’ and they’ll sail right past you with a nod, like meeting the vicar when you’re out for a walk. Unless,” he said consideringly, “of course, they’ve got a curse to work off, or a score to settle.”
“Thank you,” she said firmly, “but I’ll leave that sort of sociability to you.”
“Scairt of them, are you?” he asked in a suspiciously light voice of unconcern. “Is that why you don’t never come see us at the ’All then?”
From the way the color came and went in her cheeks, he had his answer, so he went on to say in the same blatantly artificial accents he used whenever his real emotions were involved or he was up to something.
“The earl, ’e’s been asking after you. Oh, aye, ’e’s been at the ’All for a few days now, seems ’is mama don’t like the feel of the place when she’s alone there. Not that she’s ever really alone, mind. Not with us and all the servants and Mrs. Stanley and ’is wife and Old Comfort ’overing about all the time. But she’s the only real Haverford in residence, and so maybe the ghosts are only after ’er, though she
swears not.
“But ’e’s back, and almost first thing, ’e’s asking after you. Seems ’e even wrote letters asking after you. But she says as ’ow you never ’ave time to come, no matter ’ow often she invites you, and,” he added, dropping his voice to ape elegant phrases and a false soprano, “that she can’t bear the Ludlows enough to come back to see you. But,” he went on, sufficiently agitated to lapse into thick accents again, “she says as ’ow she came here twice anyways, and never got a peek at you neither time. Now, that’s odd, Miss Victoria, you never tole me ’bout it,” he said in a rough aggrieved little voice, “and it do sound like you’ve been doing a disappearing act better than the ghosts we’re supposed to ’ave cluttering up the place over at t’ ’All.”
“I am very busy, I assure you,” Victoria said, staring at the pattern again, with her stub of charcoal arrested over a line of it, “and it seemed pointless to mention that I didn’t see someone. How is he?” she asked quickly before she realized that she would.
“Why, that you’ll see for yourself, and soon,”—he grinned—“for ’e’s come with me today. In fact, I think I ’ear ’im coming now, wiv your employers too.”
As Alfie laughed, Victoria looked up, standing frozen in place like a deer hearing hunters nearing. Then she made out the faint and distant sound of many voices and light laughter and then footsteps coming nearer on the hardwood hall floors that separated every room on the main level of the Manor. Victoria looked about, her face very white, her hands clenched so hard upon her paper pattern that it buckled in her grasp, and the bit of charcoal crumbled in her fingers. “I must go, Alfie,” she murmured. “I’ve no choice really, please say nothing, please understand,” and so saying, she bent to kiss his cheek lightly and then stepped to one of the doors that led into the hallway. But she drew back quickly, as though she’d met a wall of fire instead of only the approaching sounds of the company. Then she spun around, and as Alfie frowned in incomprehension, she went quickly to the wall by the side of the fireplace mantel. He thought she was going to pull the bell rope that hung on the stretched silk wall covering there, but she bypassed it and her small white hand reached out, visibly shaking, to touch a carved wood rose upon the paneling to the side of the hearth. As Alfie gaped, he saw the paneling swing open to reveal a low and narrow doorway, and just as the last sight of her gray gown whisked through the opening, he regained his wits and leaped after her, so that as the door swung closed again on her hem, he was also inside the narrow passageway he discovered her to be bent within.
It was a dark bare wooden passage, and he could see that it stretched out into the darkness on one side, while a faint flickering wall lamp illuminated the long narrow tunnel that spread out in the other direction. It was cold, even on this summer’s morning, and dank, with enough cobwebs to please any ghost from the Hall. Although he fit within comfortably enough, he could see that Miss Dawkins, although of no great height herself, had to crouch down to fit, and though of no great bulk, had scarcely enough room to turn herself about. But she didn’t even attempt to do so. She only stood very still with her eyes closed.
“’Ere,” he said angrily, “what’s ’appening?”
Before he could say more, she put her small cold hand over his mouth and bent so that her lips were near his ear.
“Ah, Alfie,” she whispered, both the pain and the sibilance in her words and the sighing of her warm breath causing him to shudder, “please. Say nothing. They mustn’t see me or hear me. It isn’t just my wish. It’s the rule here, you see. Now we must stay, or we’ll be heard, until they leave. Please be still, for me.”
He stood with her in the dimness, and said nothing. Not a word. Not even when he heard the earl’s laughter, or heard him wondering in some annoyance as to where that rascal Alfie might have taken himself off to. Nor even when he heard the squire’s lady ask where the governess was, or when he heard Miss Sophrina giggle that she might be so deep in one of her fusty old books that she hadn’t hear the summons, or even when Miss Charlotte, after thanking the earl for his pretty compliments, opined that the way London-bred servants were, her absent companion might be on her back in the wine cellar for all they knew.
For a half-hour on that bright summer’s morning, Alfie stood silently at Miss Dawkins’ side in a ragged aura of small flickering light, and heard the company at their play as though he were in the room with them, instead of impacted in the skin of the walls around them. And at the last, when he felt a drop of wetness fall upon his cheek, he didn’t even look up, for though he knew it was not his tear that had fallen there, it just as well might have been. For there in the half-darkness he’d found another old companion, one that he’d thought he’d left behind forever, but it was only despair, his old playmate, come to call again.
*
Pretty, giggly little Miss Sophrina, the earl thought as his horse trotted down the gravel drive, should be strangled, and if her sister didn’t do it as she so clearly wished to, he would be happy to hire anyone who might. And Miss Charlotte, he mused as he steered his mount through the long meadow that separated his property from the Ludlows’, for all her lovely little bosoms that she so frequently accidentally almost let peep over the top of her little white debutante’s frock, and with all her violent eyelash play, wouldn’t net half so much in a week at the trade which seemed most suitable for her as Melissa Careaux would in an hour. As for the squire, the perpetually sozzled head of the neighboring family, he, the earl thought sourly, belonged in a bottle. That way he could be totally immersed in the same spirits which already filled him to the brim, and it would not only save him time, it might spare his company the bother of trying to make sense of what he slurred to them. And if the Manor had no specters, such as his own Hall supposedly harbored, Mrs. Ludlow’s overpainted face and artificial smile would do just as good a night’s job of terrifying the unwary, he decided bitterly.
Colin Haverford was in a vile mood as he rode through the long sunlit meadow. He didn’t blame his mama in the least for declining to accompany him on this visit, and though he was put out with Alfie for his sudden disappearance, being both surprised and disappointed at his desertion, he could at least understand the boy’s reluctance to do the pretty with that lot of fools he’d just endured a polite hour with. He grew even more depressed when he thought that he’d have to return again, perhaps even many times again, if he ever wished to discover what had happened to Victoria Dawkins.
She hadn’t wanted to see him, that was manifestly clear, he thought, scowling fiercely as he rode through the sweet clover. He hadn’t wished to pursue her either. But he’d discovered that with all the diversions that London offered to a gentleman of his new rank and fortune, he could neither get the thought of her out of his mind, nor the sight of her from his mind’s eye. And, he admitted, it seemed no wine or more tangible substitute could take the taste of her from his mouth. He might have stayed on in town continuing in his attempts to effect such a mental and physical erasure, but, he supposed on a sigh, it was all for the best that his patience had run out before his health had. He enjoyed wine and women very much, but there was no question he disliked feeling as though he were being forced to constantly partake of both.
He had, in the end, after waking to yet another morning with a throbbing head and an unappreciated bedmate, to admit he was either ensorcelled or obsessed by Miss Dawkins. And what amazed him the most was that he hardly knew the girl. There was no mystery as to why he’d been attracted to her at first sight—he had eyes, she had undeniable assets—but he wasn’t such a boy as to lose his head over that. He believed he’d become interested in knowing her because he’d admired her courage, compassion, and honesty after seeing the way she’d handled her impoverishment, his dishonorable offer, and the Johnson children’s fate.
But all the while, he understood that it might be that after an hour’s calm conversation he’d discover her to be underbred or undereducated, or he might find himself bored, or even put off by her chatter.
Even though he’d obviously been haunted by the memory of her, he knew that he never knew her at all. Achieving firsthand knowledge of precisely who Miss Victoria Dawkins was, was clearly the first step he must take to resolve his problem.
But this was difficult to do if the chit had resolved to hide in the Ludlows’ attics every time he showed his nose at their door. She’d been cast from his own house because of the talk her proximity to him would cause in light of the fact that there was no longer any real reason for her presence in his household, and because, he had to admit, of his realization of how true that gossip might turn out to be if he remained that proximate to her. He’d attempted to illustrate that very salient point to her when they’d last been alone together. But now, as she wouldn’t even meet with his mama, how he’d get to hold that essential exploratory conversation with her, short of moonlight abduction, he did not know.
The earl’s thoughts were all gloom on that bright morning as he rode through the fields toward his newly inherited home. The thought of that legacy to which he was returning made him even more despondent. There was nothing essentially the matter with High Wyvern Hall—it was majestic, it commanded hundreds of fertile acres that rolled all the way down to the gleaming sea. Famous men had worked and visited there, it had beautifully proportioned chambers which held multiple treasures, and certainly no more drafts than any other stately home in the land.
But though he hadn’t seen any of the spirits said to hold uneasy vigil there in the two months since he’d opened the Hall again, there was still no doubt that it was, inexplicably, a depressing place. The high-ceilinged rooms seemed shadowed even in sunlight, and even that sunlight seemed paler once it had tentatively crossed over the windowsills in its futile attempt to lighten the atmosphere. He would have thought it was only because he remembered the previous earl and that nothing associated with him could bring him pleasure, but the Hall affected everyone so, from the least kitchen skivvy to his own irrepressible mama. Even Alfie, although awaiting a glimpse of his first ghost as eagerly as other children awaited Father Christmas, couldn’t deny that the place seemed “sad-like, and queer.”
