This was very much in line with what Ernest knew about his little sister. Even now, she shed her gloves and hat, tossing them to the ground as though they were worth nothing at all. Rose strode toward Lord Harrington and Renata, placing a firm hand across the older woman’s back.
“Are you feeling quite all right, my lady?” she asked. “It seems to me you should sit.” She turned around once more, staring at the staff members nearby. “Has anyone a clue where the well is? Why hasn’t water been fetched? A lady of the house is on the ground, requiring assistance—and no one is working! Please! Let us all pitch in.”
One of the staff members rushed toward the far edge of the estate, seemingly heading toward the well. Ernest gave Rose a soft smile, hoping to translate just how much he appreciated her. She was a girl—very near woman—cut from the same cloth as he. She was willing and eager to shed all propriety in favour of real human connection, regardless of the situation.
Beside her, Grace drew her arms across her chest and scowled at Ernest. His eyes immediately moved away from her, knowing that lingering too long would fill him with a unique bit of rage. After tearing through a burning building and rescuing this woman, he wasn’t entirely sure what kind of damage he was willing to do to his and Grace’s relationship. An entirely separate fire had started in his belly.
“Please, sit down,” Rose suggested again, both to Renata and Lord Harrington. “See, they’re coming with the water now.”
Before them, the very centre of the mansion crumbled, making one of the halves of the house quake and tilt toward the ground. The noise felt monumental, like a chord played too loud on the pianoforte. All the staff members and family members gaped at it, lost in the chaos. Everything they’d ever known was now destroyed, gone. It was up to Ernest to decide how they all move forward. He knew it.
Chapter 3
Grace had never been interested in the worries of others. Perhaps this made her a villain, arrogant or selfish—but it had worked for her thus far, and she planned to stick with it. Standing in the midst of this wretched, muddy field, gaping up at the enormous, burnt-to-shreds mansion, she felt an anger she couldn’t fully describe.
She forced herself to inhale, exhale, blinking down at the man she’d agreed to marry—the man she’d been “assigned” to marry since she’d been a much younger girl. His cheeks were ashy and black, his hair mangled and wild. One of his sleeves had been burnt to tatters, showing his glowing skin beneath.
Was this really the man she was going to spend the rest of her life with?
Beneath her, Grace’s feet dipped into the mud. She felt she might be buried alive in it. She blinked at Rose, who now hustled to bring water to the lips of this Lord Harrington, this Renata Harrington. After Renata brought her lips over the water glass, she thanked Rose and turned her bleak eyes toward Grace. Grace shifted uncomfortably, unsure of just why, exactly, she was forced to speak with such humans.
“And who are you, darling?” Renata asked Grace, her voice oddly eager.
Who was she? Why did this woman care? Grace huffed and forced a smile—as this was what her mother had said she was meant to do, regardless of the situation. “I’m the earl’s fiancée, my lady,” she offered. “Lady Grace Bragg. We’ve only just popped out from a ball. How lucky that we encountered you. What a wretched situation.”
Renata arched her brow in a manner that told Grace she was quite surprised that the earl was engaged. Perhaps this was due to the fact that her dear soon-to-be husband wouldn’t stop ogling the unconscious woman spread out on the grass.
“That’s wonderful, darling,” Renata said, almost as though she hadn’t fully heard. “Your fiancé is quite a remarkable man. In the wake of this horrific accident, he’s offered us a place to stay! All of us. My brother here, who is quite ill, along with all of our staff. I simply cannot imagine an earl—a man of his title—offering such a thing. It’s as though he’s sent directly from God.”
“Is that so?” Grace heard herself stammer. She blinked at Renata, a smile frozen on her face.
“You can’t imagine how wretched this is for us,” Renata continued, seemingly not catching the hint that Grace wanted nothing more than for her to press her lips together forever. “I grew up in this estate, as did Lord Harrington. And his daughter here—God bless her—”
“Ernest, you’re the hero of this story, aren’t you?” Grace blurted, forcing Ernest to draw his eyes toward hers.
They held one another’s gaze for a moment. Ernest’s expression was rather difficult to read, although Grace felt sure it held a far different emotion than the ones he’d exhibited in recent months, or even at the ball. Throughout the time after his father’s death, throughout their brief courtship and then engagement, Grace had felt she’d had Ernest tied to her with string. She could alter his emotions, change the course of his actions. She even felt herself yanking him away from his wretched sister, little by little.
And yet now, little Rose the spitfire swept a handkerchief across the cheeks of Lord Harrington, instructing him to sit on the grass. “You’re going to faint, my lord,” she warned, her voice as delicate as a young mother’s. “And I won’t be able to catch you then, will I? You’ll be doing us all a great service if you just rest. Including your daughter. When she awakes, she’s going to need you in the absolute best shape of your life. Do you understand?”
Grace couldn’t envision herself crafting a similar sentiment. Her mother had termed her “the ice queen” at a young age, a title given with respect. Her own mother was similarly cold, yet had frequently cited this to be the reason she’d gotten so far in her life. “Do not allow anyone to see weakness, Gracie,” she’d chirped countless times. “The moment they see it, they can do whatever it is they want with you.” Of course, in the same breath, her mother would instruct her that she could pinpoint this vulnerability in others and utilize it for her benefit. “People will allow you to do anything you want, if you only demand it.”
The young girl, perhaps Grace’s age, with long, raven locks, began to stir in the grass. Ernest returned his gaze to her. The poor sap looked as though he was mid-prayer. Grace smashed her foot into the grass, a wave of anger throttling through her. Her wedding to Ernest was a mere four weeks away. She couldn’t have this sort of scandal.
“I suppose we’ll be spending a great deal of time together, then,” Grace offered to Renata, her teeth clenched.
“Won’t that be wonderful?” Renata gushed. Tears had begun their expected course down her cheeks, showing this heightened weakness in the wake of the fire. “It’s always such a pleasure to have new friends. It will be the perfect antidote to so much sorrow.”
Grace vowed to herself now that she wouldn’t allow the likes of Renata, of Lord Harrington—and especially of this strange girl stretched out on the grass—to ruin her plans to marry Ernest Bannerman. Her emotions for Ernest were lacklustre at best, yet she’d plotted her entire life around the title of countess, which she was inches from receiving. When she’d met with her mother for tea the previous week, she’d announced that she’d never felt a part of a simpler scheme. “He’s made of water, Mother. He’s weaker than I could have anticipated.”
“Darling, of course he is. His father just passed. This is the best time to strike. To carve out the life you’ve always wanted for yourself. Do not allow anyone or anything to get in your way.”
Now, Grace forced herself to dip lower, smearing her knees into the mud on the other side of the unconscious girl. It was as though the girl’s supple frame was the table, and she was perching across from Ernest, prepared to speak. Instead of parting her lips, however, she simply glowered at him, forcing his eyes to rise to hers.
She crafted a stoic, firm expression, one that told him she knew precisely what he was up to—and he wouldn’t get away with it. In response, he dropped his eyes to the ground. It seemed like the ultimate admittance. It seemed as though he knew precisely how trapped he was, and that she held the key.
Very good, Grace thought to herself, more-or-less gloating in that smoky, sombre field. She hadn’t lost yet, after all.
Finally, the doctor arrived. With his assistance, the unconscious girl was carried back to Ernest’s carriage and splayed out on the seat. Rose leapt into the carriage after her and held Diana’s head on her lap, ensuring she didn’t roll to and fro.
Grace and Ernest and Lord Harrington and Renata piled into the carriage, as well, with Ernest announcing to the rest of the staff that he would have his stable hands come with carriages within the hour to pick everyone else up. As he said this, Grace saw the way his cheeks twitched with sorrow, as though leaving these wretched, good-for-nothing creatures in the field actually muddled his psyche.
Grace had a sudden, child-like yearning to reach up and yank on his ear, to tell him just how ridiculous his behaviour was. She forced her hands to link up on her lap.
When the carriage neared Grace’s estate, she was surprised to hear Ernest announce to the driver that they would still be stopping off at the Bragg’s to drop Grace at her home. Grace felt she was being shoved from the proverbial ship.
“How wonderful. You can get some sleep,” Renata offered, mid-way through her own yawn. “I suppose the rest of us will be up for quite a while, waiting on the news from the doctor.”
“Yes,” Grace replied. “It will be good to lie down after so much chaos.”
As she spoke, Rose tore her eyes toward Grace, lending her a wry, teenage smirk. It was rather true: no one could alter the emotion in the air like a teenage girl. At 23, Grace remembered this well about her own life, almost wished she remained in that sort of power.
Outside her estate, Max the carriage driver hopped from his seat and yanked open the door, assisting her onto the muddy path. Candles flickered from the main rooms, an assurance that her mother, at least, had waited up for her, as she so frequently did. She longed for the sort of gossip Grace brought home from countryside balls. This time, however, Grace wasn’t entirely sure she felt comfortable administering the tales of the night. They made her look incredibly weak.
“Good night, Ernest, my love,” Grace called into the carriage, feeling as though she was screeching it into an empty cave.
Ernest gazed back with sombre, cow-like eyes. Her stomach churned with anger. She tipped her hat to the rest of them, then swirled back toward her mansion, her nostrils fully flared.
Something would have to be done. She just didn’t yet know what.
Chapter 4
The first snippets of light generated very little beyond mere ideas of dreams. Diana felt sunlight sweep across her cheeks, felt her legs kick like a child’s beneath too-tight sheets. But each time, her eyes felt clamped closed, as though her eyes were still in the midst of a rebirth, still unable to reveal themselves to the world.
The images appeared next: shadows of a tall, wide-shouldered man; a flapping white lace curtain, which concealed and then revealed the glow of the lush green moor just beyond. Sometimes, she heard voices—deep, gravelly ones, alongside higher-pitched, more familiar ones. All the while, she felt like a spirit, lurking in this unbelievably beautiful, yet still mostly unseen room, as though she’d completely left her body and was able to hover, feeling the ambiance of a place without actually seeing it in physical form.
Finally—some impossible time later—her eyelids creaked open to reveal a handsome man at her bedside. His knees were tucked close to the bed and he leaned tightly toward her, his brow furrowed. His eyes were severe and centred upon her, as though they knew one another and he wanted nothing more than to see her awake again. Although Diana felt far from the physical realm of the world, she felt no level of recognition in this man.
This only added to the confusion. The world became off-kilter, forcing her eyes to close once more. Perhaps she lost memories; perhaps this man—this incredibly warm presence beside her—could fill in the gaps of her mind. She felt the gaps almost like physical caverns, as though she was hiking through mountains and discovered a dip in the ground between her and the rest of the path. Her toes crumbled against it, casting stones to the darkness beyond.
She simply wasn’t yet ready to return to the world.
She was cast into a round of strange, nightmarish dreams. Her body transformed itself, becoming slight, short—the sort of thing she’d carried around when she’d been eight or nine years old. Back then, she’d spent her days as a wild-haired monster, scraggly and eager for adventure. The woods behind her father’s estate were rife with potential fairy book stories, the ones she and her sister could craft themselves. Her sister—Margery, the greatest friend she had in her life, a mere one year older than Diana—with electric green eyes and an unrivalled sass.
Of course, Diana had been the one to discover her in the woods.
Now, mid-dream, she stumbled into her: her ten-year-old sister, stretched out and cold across the damp forest ground, her skin losing its colour, becoming sterile and white. Her lips were parted just so, as though she was poised to speak her mind for the last time. Her dress was lightly torn at the base, yet more or less spotless. Her feet were bare, the white flats of them leaning toward the twinkling creek just beside her.
Even at nine, Diana had known her sister was dead.
Diana’s mother and father had been frightened at Diana’s silence after the mysterious incident. Not the doctor, nor the hired psychic, could decipher just exactly what had happened with Margery in the woods. It seemed that something had simply come and sucked her soul from her body, without any sort of regard for the only human who loved her more than she loved herself—Diana.
The house had taken on an echoey quality after that: voices in hushed whispers, ensuring they didn’t alter the delicate mental state of Diana’s mother. For weeks at a time, Lady Harrington refused to dress and marched about the grounds and mansion in just her nightdress, her greying hair swirling behind her.
In mere weeks, she dropped several pounds, forcing her hip bones to protrude from her skin. Diana and her father took their dinners together, knowing Lady Harrington wouldn’t be led from her room unless the spirit moved her.
When her mother passed, as well, Diana had imagined them all to be at the end of the world, surging toward a darkness that both her sister and her mother already understood. She spoke of this in her nine-year-old language to her father, who’d gripped her arm with a surprising inner rage and stammered, “No! Not us. We’re going to stay. We have to stay.”
In the midst of this dream, her mother and her sister—both in the same form they’d been just before their deaths—perched at the side of her bed, as though they were friendly with the handsome, dark-haired man who refused to leave her side. In this alternate reality, Diana gave her sister an incredulous look, tilting her head toward the stranger.
“Who is this man?” she asked Margery, knowing, somehow, that Margery would understand how essential it was for her to discover the truth.
Ten-year-old Margery—now with rose-tinted cheeks and the same bright smile she’d had mere hours before she’d died—gave the strange man a grin. She giggled in the style of a little girl, kicking her feet up and down without touching the ground. “He’s going to change everything, Diana,” she said, half-snickering. “Everything you always thought was true about the world is about to shift. You have only to be brave.”
At this, Diana felt an enormous wave of strength. It felt as though a fountain of energy was thrusting itself up from her inner gut, through her lungs and up her throat, making her face twitch awake. Her eyes parted and she stared once more at the man at her bedside, yet knew, this time, she wouldn’t only linger for a moment before departing from the shore of consciousness once more.
This time, the man at her bedside wasn’t fully looking at her. He’d drawn himself into his book. His lips slowly formed the words as he read, although he didn’t speak the syllables out loud. This was surely a habit he’d brought over from his youth.
Diana hadn’t a clue how long she’d
been whirling through near-constant dreams. It could have been days, weeks, months. Her body ached from lack of use, her muscles becoming nearly nothing—her arms like strings. She shifted a bit, trying to gauge if anything else was wrong on her frame, and yanked the handsome stranger’s eyes toward her. Immediately, he snapped the book closed, delivering an enormous, white-toothed smile.
A Seductive Lady Rescued From Flames (Historical Regency Romance) Page 4
