The houses were old here; the entire street smelled of mildew and ill-maintained plumbing. He took Elissande into a narrow three-story house that must have sat vacant for a while. The light of a single candle revealed thick layers of dust on mantels and windowsills—though the floor seemed to have been recently swept.
Behind her the door locked. Now no one would hear her scream when he pummeled the stuffing out of her. She perspired.
But her voice, for the time being, held steady. “Where is my aunt?”
“You think of her so.” Her uncle ambled across the narrow entry hall, his shadow long and stark behind him. “One wonders what she has ever done for you. Has she devoted herself to your welfare? Has she instructed you in the womanly arts? Has she actively sought you a good match? No, she has done nothing for you—other than making you a slave to her invalidity, that is. Yet you come running when she leaves you for a few hours.
“I, on the other hand, have supplied you with a beautiful home and a fortunate life. But you did not bestir yourself to visit me once the entire time I was in custody.”
“I have been on my honeymoon,” she said. “I would have come to your trial, though.”
He gave her a smile that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. “I hope you have brought proper jewels.”
“I want to see my aunt first.”
“But I need a token of good faith first.”
She handed over the diamond-and-emerald necklace her husband had given her. It was the most extravagant thing she’d ever seen in her life, the emeralds bigger than sovereigns, the diamonds as numerous as stars in the sky.
Douglas, accustomed to gems, merely took the necklace from her and slipped it into his pocket.
She was on a heart-ripping state of alert. But still she did not react in time. Her uncle’s punch sent her reeling backward. Had he broken her jaw? She could not tell. The entire left side of her face was on fire.
“Get up, you treacherous bitch.”
She rose unsteadily to her feet. His next punch made her see black. She crumpled again.
“Get up, you worthless chit. You thought you could leave me rotting in jail, didn’t you? You thought you could repay my kindness by turning your back on me. And you thought I wouldn’t notice? Get up!”
She remained on the grubby floor, limp as a piece of waterlogged paper.
Her uncle bent down and gripped the front of her dress. “You don’t learn, do you? A lifetime and you still haven’t learned the kind of love and respect you owe me.”
This was as good a chance as she was going to get. She swung her reticule at his head with all her strength. He screamed—for they had prepared well, she and her husband, and the seemingly delicate reticule held nothing less than a one-pound disk of iron from her husband’s dumbbell set. She had spent her entire train journey reinforcing the reticule’s seams and straps.
He stumbled, bleeding from his temple. But she did not stop: She swung again, hitting him squarely on the other side of his face.
He grunted. Her third swing he blocked with his arm. She hoped she’d broken a bone in his forearm, but he came at her, his face contorted with anger.
“How dare you? You stupid girl!”
Suddenly she too boiled with rage. Of course she dared—did he not know, stupid man who thought himself so clever, that she dared almost anything, when it was her freedom and her aunt’s well-being that were at stake?
She swung her reticule at him hard and fast, at an angle, so that it caught him on the chin. He staggered backward. Now she swung it high, with all her revulsion and loathing behind it. For everything he had done to Aunt Rachel and herself, robbing them of the best years of their lives, keeping them confined and suffocated, and feasting on their fear and anguish like a vampire at an open vein.
Never again.
Never again.
* * *
Vere walked toward the house. In a window on the opposite side of the street, a curtain lifted, and a woman looked out from a grubby, dimly lit parlor. He swayed drunkenly, banging into a lamppost, laying his head down on a postbox, and finally, before the house into which his wife and her uncle had disappeared, he turned his back to the street, and made as if to urinate—judging by the smell in the air, he wouldn’t have been the first man to do so.
Thirty seconds later, the woman had not only closed her curtain but pulled her shutters tight.
He crept up to the door of the house and listened. Elissande and Douglas were talking, their voices too faint for him to make out their words.
His heart pounded in a way it never did during his normal investigations: with fear. That nothing seemed to have erupted yet only rubbed his nerves rawer. Inside his coarse driving mittens, his palms perspired: something else that never happened to him.
He tugged off the mittens, wiped his hands on his trousers, and pulled out his lock picks. Douglas would not place his wife by the door. For Elissande to see her, they must move deeper into the house. And when they did, he would get to work.
He glanced behind him. Damn it, someone else was looking out of her window. The light of the street lamp was hazy, almost brown, but still enough for any unlawful action on his part to be seen. He took two steps, gripped the post that supported the shoddy-looking portico before the house, and proceeded to rub himself against it. The curtain shut quickly.
As he turned back toward the door, there came a cry of pain. A man’s cry of pain. Good girl: She’d listened with unwavering attention as he’d demonstrated the best way to wield a weighted reticule.
Douglas shrieked again. Excellent.
And then she screamed.
He fumbled for the lock picks. It wasn’t until the third time he attempted to insert the pick that he realized his hand was shaking.
His hands never shook.
She screamed again.
Sod it.
He pulled back the pick and kicked the door. It didn’t give immediately. He kicked again. The hinges splintered. His shin felt as if it had splintered too. He couldn’t care less.
One more kick and the door swung open.
* * *
Her uncle went down as the straps of her reticule broke. The weight thudded heavily against the floor and rolled a little distance away. A dent marked where it had fallen.
She panted, still seeing red, hardly able to get enough breath into her lungs.
Behind her the door burst open in a thunderous crash. A big, burly stranger with unruly black hair and a handlebar mustache rushed toward her.
Who was this man? Some ruffian hired by her uncle? No, wait. He was the driver of the hansom cab that had brought them to this house.
“Elissande, my God, are you all right?”
She barely recognized her husband’s voice before he enfolded her in a painfully tight hug. She buried her face in his rough woolen jacket that smelled of horse and some sort of strong, foul drink.
He had been here, as he’d promised. And she had not been alone.
He pulled away and checked her uncle’s pulse. “He’s plenty alive. I’ll stand guard over him. There are rope and lanterns in the boot of the cab. Turn left when you get out of the house.”
She picked up her skirts and ran. Outside she experienced a moment of confusion, as there were not one, but two hansom cabs on the street. But one of them still had the driver perched behind, so she went to the empty one, retrieved the rope and two lanterns, and rushed back. Vere took the rope from her, checked her still-unconscious uncle for weapons—pocketing a derringer and the necklace—and bound him hand and foot.
Now he hugged her much longer. “My God, you scared me. All I could hear from the door was this awful ruckus, your uncle howling and you screaming. I feared the worst.”
“Was I screaming? I had no idea.” Perhaps the refrains of Never again! had not been only in her mind.
He cradled her face in his hands. “You will look awful tomorrow morning. We need to get you an ice compress as soon as we can.”
>
“My aunt!” she suddenly remembered. “We must find her.”
The house had a spiral staircase. Vere dragged her uncle near the foot of it, so that they could keep an eye on him from any part of the stairs. They searched through the largely empty house, each giving a brief recitation of what they had done since arriving in Exeter. He had visited a gin house and made a lonesome independent cabbie very happy by overpaying for his horse and his carriage. The cabbie was so delighted he hadn’t even asked for more when Vere wanted his jacket too.
They located Aunt Rachel in the attic—in a servant’s tiny bedchamber—by the muffled sounds she made in response to their shouts. Lord Vere swiftly picked the lock. Aunt Rachel lay on her back on the hard, dusty floor, bound and gagged, but very much conscious. Her eyes filled with tears as Elissande ran toward her.
It was Vere who freed her—he had the foresight to carry a sharp pocketknife on his person. Elissande kissed Aunt Rachel, who wept softly and clung to her, and rubbed Aunt Rachel’s arms and legs to restore their circulation.
“Are you hungry, Mrs. Douglas? Or thirsty?” Vere asked. He had ripped off his black wig and thick black mustache, which had quite startled Aunt Rachel at first.
Aunt Rachel shook her head. She looked too embarrassed to speak. He understood right away. “Let me go check on your uncle again, Elissande,” he said.
Elissande helped her aunt to the chamber pot. After she had relieved herself, Elissande pinned her hair as best she could, smoothed her wrinkled clothes, and put on her shoes for her. Then with Aunt Rachel’s arm about Elissande’s shoulder and Elissande’s arm around the older woman’s middle, they shuffled out of the room and slowly started down the stairs.
Her husband met them one flight of steps down. “May I?” He gave his lantern to Elissande and gently lifted Aunt Rachel into his arms.
He waited for Elissande to precede him down the stairs, lighting the way. She gazed at him a moment, this striking, complicated man. In the blaze of happiness that had come with her aunt’s successful rescue, she’d forgotten that she’d lost him—or rather, that he had never, not remotely, been hers.
One could not have everything. It was enough, today, that she had Aunt Rachel back.
* * *
As they reached the ground floor, Elissande was again glancing back at her husband and her aunt, as she had done numerous times during their descent. So it was Vere who first saw the inevitable.
“Lady Vere, I believe your uncle has come to,” he said.
In his arms, Aunt Rachel trembled. Elissande laid a hand on her shoulder to calm her. Her joy at finding her aunt safe and sound diminished: Her uncle was still alive, still capable of hurting them and haunting them.
He certainly appeared so: In the flickering light of the lanterns, his gaze was chilling, his bloodied face as ominously arrogant as ever.
They were now at the bottom of the staircase. “Which way should I turn, my dear?” Vere asked.
His tone alerted Elissande that she should be the one giving directions. She touched him on the elbow to let him know she’d understood. “I’d like you to go to the police station and fetch the chief inspector and as many constables as you can convince to come with you. I will remain here to keep an eye on…things.”
“Right away, my lady.”
“And Mrs. Douglas will go with you. She has been in this house long enough.”
“Of course.” He set down Aunt Rachel carefully. “We’ll just be heading toward the door then, Mrs. Douglas.”
“And so you will gleefully hand me over to the police, when I’ve taken such trouble to come and see the two of you?” said her uncle. He spoke with an uncharacteristic slur—Elissande hoped she’d done serious and lasting damage to his jaw—but as ever his menace was there, a poison that destroyed slowly but inexorably.
“Yes,” she said, with immense satisfaction.
“All these years being the father you’ve never had, and this is the gratitude I receive.”
She smiled, the first time she’d meant it before her uncle in “all these years.” “You will receive exactly as much gratitude as you deserve.”
“No mercy then?” The icy, pure malice in his eyes would have frightened her if he hadn’t been bound tighter than Ebenezer Scrooge’s purse. “Will you come to see me hang also?”
“No,” she said. “I have no desire to ever see you again.”
She turned to Vere. “Please hurry.”
“I will,” he said. He offered his arm to Aunt Rachel. “Mrs. Douglas?”
Aunt Rachel cast a quick, apprehensive glance toward her husband, then placed her hand on Vere’s arm.
“I see vows of marriage mean no more to you than a game of charades, Rachel,” said Douglas. “But then, they never did, did they?”
Aunt Rachel hesitated. Elissande decided there was no more point in keeping up the lie. “Do not listen to anything he says, Aunt Rachel. I know he married you under false pretenses; he is in no position to chastise anyone on the solemnity of vows.”
Aunt Rachel stared at her. “How…how do you know?”
“False pretenses.” Her uncle sneered. “You have perpetrated your share of false pretenses too, haven’t you, Rachel? I know your lies. I know the truth of what happened to Christabel.”
Aunt Rachel swayed. Vere caught her. “Are you all right, Mrs. Douglas?”
She breathed hard and fast. “If I may—if I may rest for a moment.”
Vere helped her sit down on one of the lower steps. Elissande sat down next to her and hugged her tight. “Shhh. It will be all right.”
Her uncle laughed softly. “You think so? Why should she be all right when I haven’t been in twenty-four years?” He gazed at Aunt Rachel. “Everything I’ve done in my life, I’ve done for you. To be worthy of your hand, to keep you in the style befitting a princess. I worshiped you. I worshiped you!”
Aunt Rachel began to shake.
Elissande bit into her lower lip. Her hand itched for her reticule. Instead she rose. “Can we gag him?” she said to Vere. “We’ve heard enough from him today.”
“I’ve some chloroform with me,” he answered.
She clasped his arm briefly. He was ever to be relied upon in a situation like this.
“Don’t be rash, my dear,” said her uncle. “I am willing to offer you a deal. If you don’t wish to hear from me again, then let me go with the necklace.”
She laughed out of incredulity. “Such bargains you offer, sir. Allow me to remind you that when you are swinging from the gallows, I won’t ever hear from you again either. And we’ll keep the necklace.”
Douglas chuckled. “Perhaps you would listen to a word of advice from your aunt? Mrs. Douglas, won’t you say that our beloved niece, with her contempt and loathing for me, should give much to purchase my silence?”
Aunt Rachel stared blankly at her feet, still shaking.
“Rachel!” her uncle said sharply.
Aunt Rachel jerked and looked reluctantly at him.
“Would you not say, Rachel, that some secrets are better left…buried?”
Aunt Rachel recoiled.
Elissande had had enough of his cat-and-mouse games. “My lord, the chloroform, please.”
“Then I shall divulge it now,” said her uncle, no doubt imagining that he was still the master of Highgate Court and that his merest utterings shook the earth.
“No!” Aunt Rachel cried. “No. Ellie, he’s right. Let him go.”
“Absolutely not!” Elissande’s voice rose with frustration. Aunt Rachel could not possibly be this easily manipulated, with her erstwhile tormentor bound and helpless, and herself surrounded and protected. “We cannot trust him. We let him go today and he will be back in six months. And think of everyone he murdered: Do those poor souls not deserve some justice?”
“The real Edmund Douglas did atrocious things to and with the natives,” her uncle said smoothly. “So don’t imagine you are avenging some pure, blameless innocent.”
Her uncle sighed. “Listen to her, Rachel. I should have taken more of an interest in her, don’t you think? The decisiveness, the ruthlessness, the willingness to ride roughshod over all obstacles in her way: She quite reminds me of myself at that age.”
“Don’t you dare compare us,” Elissande snapped.
“Why not? You are my flesh and blood. Why shouldn’t I compare us?”
A terrible premonition tingled her spine. But she ignored it. “Your daughter died when she was an infant. I am not related to you except by marriage.”
Her uncle smiled, a smile that would make a glacier of the Mediterranean. “No, my child, your cousin died. My daughter never did.”
It was as if Goliath had struck her on the head with her very own reticule.
“You are lying!” she shouted reflexively.
“You see, your mother found me out,” he said calmly. “And I wept and begged her not to leave, if only for the sake of our unborn child. And she lied to me—oh, how sweetly she lied. She vowed that of course she would always be mine, till her dying day.”
“You said you’d kill me if I left,” Aunt Rachel said, almost inaudibly.
Douglas turned toward his wife. “Did you expect me to simply let you go? To give up my wife and my child? I believed your lies of faithful love, until you spit in my face and told me it was my daughter who had died, instead of your niece.
“You would rather my daughter grew up thinking that her father was a wastrel and her mother a whore. You would rather that she believed herself a penniless orphan. I should have killed you then, but I loved you too much.”
Elissande felt faint, but curiously calm, as if surrounded by thick castle walls, as if the din and mayhem outside those walls—Genghis Khan and his ransacking army—had nothing to do with her. She was not there. She was somewhere else entirely.
His At Night Page 25
