Augustus and the Late Unpleasantness, Episode One

by Kate Gray

wish to know the answer to this, but where did you get laudanum from?”

  He rolled his eyes at her.

  “It belongs to Mary. She won’t miss it, I quite emphatically only used a drop, more than enough for our purposes.” Charlotte stared at him.

  “You really do have the most extraordinary way of sharing information, Ian. I would think you’d have mentioned our cousin’s use of opiates some time ago.”

  “Only spied her using it a short time ago, didn’t think it important. She only uses it before bed, in her hot milk.”

  “I shall ignore the question of how you spied her in her boudoir, and call you thick-headed. We could have been using the night hours to search, instead of having to rely on driving her out of the house!”

  “Ah. Sorry, didn’t think of that.” He dashed off the last of his drink. “Shall we get to it?”

  Charlotte sighed and tried to imagine a future free of her brother.

  “Obviously! The gathering of the coven won’t last for much more than an hour. You should get back into the cellar. I’ll be in the library.”

  “Why can’t I be in the library? The cellar is clammy. I might get claustrophobia.”

  “You mightn’t any such thing. Be a big boy, now. It will be much harder for me to hide that I’ve been in a dirty place, confounded dresses being so long again. You’ll have no trouble dusting off, or if you do, nobody will think much of it. Just say you were peckish, and hunting through the pickles and preserves.” She turned away to head toward the library. He waved his hand after her in disgust.

  “Bah. You had better be nicer to me, Charlotte, or I might just run off with the whole thing if I find it first.”

  Charlotte was left on her own, staring after her brother as he thumped petulantly down the wooden stairs into the cellar below. She certainly hadn’t considered that possibility. Calmly, she proceeded into the library, where she began methodically removing books, tapping on wooden panels, searching for something that might indicate a hiding place.

  She tried to imagine her great-great-grandparents as they had fled this house, willing their shades to come and guide her in her quest. Where would they have chosen to secret their most valued items away?

  Terror and desperation had driven them from the home they had built, back to England. What sort of protection would they have trusted to assure themselves that they had something to come back to? Indeed, everything she had been told led her to believe that they’d had every intention of returning once the “unpleasantness” had been squashed.

  That had not been the case in the end. Jonathon Whitegate, that estimable ancestor of hers, had fled back to England in the early days. Most terribly, he and his family had found themselves surrounded by epidemic after epidemic.

  The scarlatina of 1776 had killed several of his children. Smallpox took much of the household staff and his wife. And in 1782, plague ague swept through and finally took Jonathon himself, who was by that time, a broken man. Charlotte and Ian had descended from one of the daughters who had managed to marry another Whitegate cousin.

  Jonathon had died intestate; without a will. It was attributed to how much loss he had suffered over the years, that a successful merchantman could have overlooked such an obvious necessity. His American holdings and estate had then ceded to a much younger brother, one who had sympathized with the colonials.

  There must have been quite a lot of bitterness involved. The brother, William, had expressly forbidden any of his older brother’s progeny or any of their descendants ever to set foot on the Whitegate estate again. Until now. Charlotte rolled a thoughtful eye toward the ceiling and the upstairs, where the “old girl” currently resided.

  That was cousin Mary’s mother, Prudence, who was in advanced years, and failing. Mary herself was the youngest, and one of few surviving children. Three brothers had presumably died during the war. One sister was in a sanitarium somewhere, feeble-minded, written off. The only other sister had married an aspiring politician, moved to California, and promptly forgotten all about her family.

  Charlotte suspected that Mary had not heard much of the tale of woe between the two sides of the Whitegate family tree. She seemed to have been quietly pleased at discovering extended family. Perhaps it had been from having witnessed the unraveling of her own immediate family. At least she had been, until getting to know Ian a little better.

  He was an unabashed degenerate. Charlotte had dragged him out of India by his bootstraps, leaving behind his gambling debts by selling his commission. At the thought of him, Charlotte rolled her gaze down to the floor, beneath which, she presumed, he toiled as little as possible.

  Luck would be the only way he discovered what they sought, but his sort of luck could not be entirely discounted. He could have been a wealthy man at the tables, without his penchant for drink. Soon, she knew, she would have to decide what to do about him.

  A plan had begin to formulate itself, but she would need assistance, wherein lay her true difficulty. The staff could not be trusted, clearly, if Ian had enticed the cook to bring alcohol into the house against the orders of her own employer.

  The clock ticked noisily into the half hour and chimed tepidly. Mary would be home soon. Raising her heel, Charlotte tapped firmly on the floorboards three times, and retired to a chair to read in front of the fireplace, where banked coals glowed meekly from under their ash layer.

  Ian could be heard clattering up the stairs a moment or two later, in time to meet the cook returning. Charlotte could hear them carrying on a murmured conversation, which sent prickles of suspicion from her abdomen down her legs. It was probably just his attempt to wrangle some special dish out of the red-faced harpy. But once aroused, Charlotte’s fears would not lie back down to sleep again.

  The front door opened and shut again briskly, causing Charlotte to jump up out of her seat. Mary strode into the room, looking in much better humor, energized, in fact. Her hair glowed in the late afternoon sun, which shone brightly through the large bank of windows.

  “Why Mary, you look so well right now!”

  “Do I? Well, I must, because I tell you, I think I’ve had some sort of fantastical revelation.” She pulled the sash off her shoulder and stared at it blankly, before depositing it gently into the hearth.

  “Whatever are you doing? Are you quite all right?” Charlotte watched with some sense of dread as her cousin grasped the poker, and stirred up the coals until the sash caught fire.

  “Yes, Charlotte, I am quite well and in my senses. I have suddenly become aware that I have been living someone else’s life for some time, that’s all.” She watched as the flames consumed the satin fabric. “This was my mother’s cause, not mine. Everything I am is her. I find I am tired of standing in judgment of others, and of being judged.”

  “Cousin, what has inspired these thoughts? I do hope that Ian’s importunate teasing has not wrought some upset on you.” Charlotte simpered at her cousin, hoping that her face was not as drained as it felt.

  “Oh, his words may have triggered some discomfiture, but the truth of his needling is more to the point. I had not realized how blind I’ve been until I witnessed, just this afternoon, a most extraordinary event.”

  As with most people who have begun to feel that they are in sure control of their footing, only to find they are not so certain after all, Charlotte began to feel the foreboding of unpleasantness yet to pass. Mary’s next words did little to alleviate this sense of dread.

  “You recall, cousin, when I alluded to your nationality earlier in the day?”

  “Indeed. I gathered that you were making toward some point of humor, which did escape me, I must confess.” Charlotte did her best to appear all innocence, to which Mary only shot her a canny look.

  “My true point, if I had been thinking less of words and of their potential sting, was right in front of my nose. Now and again, we must needs throw off dictators and shackles of inequity. Or is it iniquity?” Mary frowned, closing one eye to ponder closely for a mom
ent. Charlotte declined to respond. This did not bode well so far.

  Mary took to a perching seat, which overlooked the south side of the gardens. She was quiet for some time, while Charlotte worked a cold lump of disquiet from her throat in order to inquire further.

  “I am afraid, dear Mary, that I still do not discern your meaning as of yet. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind clarifying just a bit?”

  “Not at all. This event to which I refer initiated almost as soon as I exited this house.” She went on to describe what had happened. Obviously, it was with some agitation that she tumbled onto the lane outside, some hour or so ago.

  After what she had felt was a panicked exit, she had begun her walk down the drive, until approaching an intersection with another private drive. There Mary had paused, feeling some reassurance then that she could have an unseen moment whilst hid behind a gnarled crabapple tree.

  “I stood for some time, feeling weak and foolish, but altogether unobserved, thankfully. Our neighbor there was said to be eccentric and invariably inebriated, and I had no cause to doubt that, nor that he would have any interest in me anyhow.”

  Charlotte raised a genteel brow, declining to remind Mary that she had only recently warned her cousin of this very neighbor. She was therefore very much discomposed to hear the rest of Mary’s impassioned tale.

  After a matter of some minutes, during which