How funny it was that humans could craft so many different realities for themselves. Harriet made a mental note to never trust anyone completely. There was always a possibility of a black cape in the closet. There was always a possibility of a secret.
Harriet prayed again for a slumbering stable boy. When she stumbled into the stables once more, she found him stretched out on the hay—almost as though he’d been there since the previous evening, without budging. His blond hair shone in the moonlight.
Once on horseback, Harriet directed his gallop towards the house from the previous summer—an enormous brown-brick estate close to the Marquess’ estate. The ride stretched across winding cobblestone roads, through a dark and damp London night.
Harriet’s insides quaked with fear. It had been a long time since she’d taken such a hard look at her own inner fear, saw it as something bigger and different than herself. She chose to sit with it, allowing it to fold over her. It couldn’t hurt her if she watched it like this, monitoring it rather than trying to direct it.
The Baron had to be punished for the wrongs he’d committed. Harriet burned this information into her mind as she cantered the rest of the way to the enormous house. Her heart sputtered. He couldn’t very well continue forth the way he had been, as though he was the only creature on the planet with a story, with wants and needs.
Hadn’t he a single bone of morality in his body?
Harriet drew the horse to a standstill just past the entrance of the house, choosing instead to leap off and guide him to the side of the garden. She latched him to the gate, ensuring the horse was out of sight of the stables and the windows. From where she stood, each window reflected nothing but the night. Of course, servants would have lingered on, despite the Baron’s trek to Bristol. Tender steps, not a single sound. This was the plan.
Harriet snuck around the back of the house, hunting for an entrance. She couldn’t very well open the massive front door. She imagined this with a half-smirk—bursting it open and announcing, “I’m here to right the wrongs of London!” This flair for drama would have foiled her entire plan.
Initially, the hunt for a door seemed it might stretch on forever. Harriet’s cape became damp with the dew along the grass as she scoured. Her eyes grew increasingly accustomed to the darkness. Yet still, a small, side-door didn’t reveal itself.
In the distance, she heard her horse whinny. The moon cut out from dark clouds, looking forlorn and almost accusatory. What was she doing out there, in the middle of the night? Did she actually think she could halt the evils of the world?
A wave of terror fell over her. In a last-ditch effort, she rushed to the far edge of the house, lifting her cape as she ran. Out of breath, she staggered to a halt near the far garden, blinking into the darkness. Her toe scraped up against a broken step, casting her forward. She nearly tumbled to her knees, yet caught herself at the last moment. Cursing under her breath, she turned her eyes to the house.
That’s when she spotted it.
Huffing, she all-but leapt towards the tiny servant door, which hung open slightly, revealing a broken hinge. Harriet couldn’t suppress her smile. She pressed her hand across the wood of the door, testing how creaky it was. It revealed a single squeak before allowing her entrance into the shadows beyond.
Harriet dropped into a slight cellar, seemingly located just under the kitchen. Feeling like a rodent, she crept up the rickety stairs, gripping the busted railing. She reasoned that the Baron had probably never been here beneath the kitchen, had never cared at all that it was broken. Why should he care about the safety and health of his servants? If one was injured, he had only to purchase another.
The kitchen was enormous, stretching across nearly half of the back-side of the house, with windows stretching out towards the moors. Harriet shivered in the darkness. Her nose filled with the smell of whatever had recently been cooked there. Baked breads? Stews? She hoped the servants had had a right feast without their master, swapping stories about his treachery. Was there any other way to survive such a man?
Harriet crept from the kitchen, wandering past the dining room, towards the ballroom. Every footfall seemed a bit too loud in her ears. Although she was a small woman, she felt unable to fully control her frame, perhaps due to her inner skitters. She prayed this sort of thing would grow easier—if, God willing, she made it through this second task.
But where on earth would the Baron keep his mighty stash of money?
The question hit Harriet like a punch. She gripped the stairway that led to the bedrooms upstairs, trying—and failing—to remember where, even, in her house, her own father kept his funds. In the study? Perhaps there was some sort of safe.
Harriet guessed that trudging upstairs was a bit too risky. She could almost feel the tremors of slumber from the servants up there. Their ears were trained for the smallest of noises. She swirled back towards the foyer, batting her eyes about until she chose a separate tunnel. Luckily, this led her directly to the study, which, it seemed, the Baron used for business.
She paused in the doorway of the study, her hands stretched out on either side of her. She felt she might faint face-first if she didn’t. Before her, just behind the desk and plopped up on the wall, was an enormous, life-sized painting of the Baron standing alongside the Marquess. Both were dressed in the height of fashion, their moustaches curled beneath their noses and their chests puffed out.
In the painting, they shook hands with one another, seemingly in the midst of a world-conquering conversation. Harriet shivered, knowing the men had posed for this affair. What had they discussed in the midst of this? Had they swapped stories of how they’d wronged the men and women closest to them? Had they discussed cheating on their wives, reneging on contracts?
And what had the painter thought of them? Harriet couldn’t deduce any sort of judgement from the way the paint had been filled in. It caught the sunlight perfectly, crept across the fine fabric of their outfits, and highlighted the dimples in the Baron’s cheeks. Now, she remembered him from the ball at the Marquess’ the previous night: how he’d leaned tight into Ursula’s ear, making her blush.
Had she blushed with longing? Or had he said something so wretched to her that she’d been unable to do anything else?
Harriet snuck through the study, hunting through the desk drawers. The three on the top right were latched shut, and no amount of searching revealed the key. She felt painfully aware of the passage of time. Her eyes closed. Still knelt on the floor in front of the desk, she demanded of herself: what to do?
Of course, money and jewels weren’t the only thing on-offer in the house.
Harriet forced her eyes open and blinked around her. In the study alone, the Baron had a smattering of valuable decorations. Several of them seemed brought from foreign lands, including an elephant carved from ivory, a collection of candlesticks that seemed almost Italian in nature, although Harriet couldn’t be sure, and various golden figurines atop the fireplace mantle.
Feeling a bit at a loss, Harriet began to tuck these items into the pockets of her cape, unsure, even in the moment, precisely what she took. Her heart beat wildly in her throat. How long had she been in the house? Perhaps 30 minutes? Nearly an hour? She could no longer be sure. She suddenly felt as though insects buzzed around her ears. Anxiety pumped her legs towards the doorway of the study. Her cape felt heavy with the items she’d stolen.
With rapid steps, she scurried towards the back of the house and ducked once more into the cellar. She didn’t dare breathe. Once outside, she broke into a run and found herself in front of the horse, nearly blacked-out with terror. She unlatched the reins and leapt onto him, riding off from the estate. Already, she felt the night breaking into morning, casting grey light across the moor.
Once at home, she was grateful once more to discover that the stable boy had kept himself in deep slumber whilst she was away. She hustled through the back door and up the steps, carefully concealing the items she’d stolen—12 items in all, p
erhaps totalling several thousands of pounds in all—in her clothing in the back of her wardrobe.
She scrubbed her cheeks with water from her washbasin and stretched out beneath the comforter, still feeling as though she was on the brink of being discovered. She felt sure sleep would never find her. It only did when she least expected it, just as the birds began to tweet their bright words into the morning.
And even then, sleep was only a few hours of escape.
The following day, Harriet felt akin to a sleepwalker. Her cheeks grew sallow, almost hollowed out, leading her mother to push several biscuits towards her during tea time. “Eat up,” she told her. “You’re looking as though you might get ill. I don’t wish that on the house.”
Harriet forced herself to form a smile. She raised a biscuit to the edge of her lips, chewing slowly at the rim. It tasted stale, dry. The crumbs fell along the lap of her dress.
“I’m quite fine, Mother,” she said. “Really. There’s nothing to report. No illness. Nothing.”
“You’re ridiculously wretched at lying.” Her mother sighed. “You should talk to your father about that. He was always too pure for this world.”
Harriet wandered around the garden during the day, weighing up what to do that evening. She felt that if she neglected a single night in her newfound ritual, her entire plot would falter. Increasingly, she felt the ache of the homeless and poor outside her walls. It wasn’t as though they could take a day off. Why should she?
Again, after dinner, Harriet excused herself. She’d hardly touched her potatoes and had left one-half of a piece of roasted chicken. Her mother scolded her, saying, “You were all so worried about the homeless and the hungry, and now look. You’re wasting it.”
“I’m going to have it later,” Harriet murmured. Her stomach churned. She felt she couldn’t chew another bite and still push forward on her scheme. “I really don’t plan to waste it.”
Her mother rolled her eyes back and stabbed a fork into a red-brown potato, shining with oil. “Father, won’t you tell her to continue to eat with us?”
“She’s 23 years old, Mother,” Harriet’s father returned. “She can very much do whatever she pleases.”
Harriet took her plate from the table, with a mind to carry it to the kitchen herself. Mary the maid swooped in from the side, latching her hands around it. Harriet blinked at her several times. The force of it nearly made her collapse to the side, another proof of her exhaustion.
“Please, make sure that this is saved for me for later,” Harriet said, her words inarticulate. “It’s essential.”
Upstairs, Harriet spaced out the 12 objects she’d stolen from the Baron’s the previous evening. The ivory elephant she placed in the very centre of the bed, with its trunk swooping towards the ceiling. She touched it with a tender finger. It was uniquely beautiful, the sort of thing that could be traded at a market for more money than poor families earned in a few months.
After a moment’s hesitation, Harriet whirled towards her own wardrobe, lifting her jewellery box from the top. The jewels within it were passed down from her grandmother—and thus weren’t the sort of thing she could really get away with giving away. But the jewellery box itself hadn’t much of a story.
Renata had given it to her after she’d been gifted a better one. With a firm nod, Harriet pressed the jewels within the jewellery box into her top dresser drawer and then placed the jewellery box atop the bed. She hadn’t a clue if it would be worth much—but she felt a tinge better, knowing she was delivering something of herself to the homeless and poor population of London.
It wasn’t enough to thieve.
Harriet waited until her parents had retreated to their bedroom before acting. Again, she slipped the items she’d taken from the Baron into her cape and then added the jewellery box to a large bag, which she then slipped over her shoulder. Once outside her bedroom, she crept down the steps, taking the same route to the stable as she had the previous two nights. Despite her aching fatigue from earlier, she now felt alert and vibrant.
Perhaps this was like anything else. It took practice to become perfect.
Harriet took the horse to one of the poorer neighbourhoods in London, an area just south of the Thames. When she dropped from the horse, her eyes circled her surroundings, looking for dangerous men, beggars, shadowy figures lurking in doorways looking to harm her. All she found was yet another beggar woman, wrapped tight in a ball near her feet. She hadn’t noticed when she’d approached on the horse—and the woman had been too fatigued to make any motion.
“Oh, my goodness!” Harriet said in a harsh whisper. Her head thudded with surprise. “I didn’t see you.”
Harriet knelt to the woman’s level. The woman’s eyes flickered open, revealing themselves to be almost crystal-blue, shining despite the darkness of the night. Harriet reached into her pocket, searching for the smoothness of the elephant. She extended her hand, so that the elephant rested on her palm.
“Take it,” she murmured.
The woman scrunched her eyebrows together. She tossed her head to and fro, seemingly unable to trust such an honest, giving gesture. Harriet brought her hand closer to the woman, bowing her head.
“Please. Please, take it,” she murmured.
The woman’s lips parted. They were cracked, showing her dehydration. Harriet cursed herself for not bringing water, food.
“This belongs to you, now,” Harriet whispered. She then placed the elephant atop the woman’s rickety knees, balancing it. She forced herself to stand, hearing her knees creak. “Do with it whatever you please. Just make sure you’re well.”
Harriet whirled away from the woman after that, walking slowly alongside the crooked doorways, her shoulders hunched. Light rain sprinkled itself over her shoulders. Occasionally, when the mood struck her, she leaned down and placed a trinket beside the door. Then, she reached up, struck her knuckles against the door, and rushed away to a dark doorway, where she could watch.
Ordinarily, the person who appeared at the door was the mother—worn-out, her eyes rolling back in the skull and the skin sagging. She would wrap a torn robe tight over her breasts and turn her eyes back and forth in the street, hunting for whoever had knocked. Then, the light would catch on whatever it was Harriet had left behind—forcing the mother’s eyes down.
The gasp that rang out from the woman’s lips filled Harriet with a sense of longing. How she wished she could give the woman still more—as much as the Baron had, as much as she, herself, had! But she dropped back, forcing herself to continue on her course. Already, the night had begun to flicker away, shoving her towards dawn.
Harriet made a little loop around the neighbourhood, grateful she didn’t stumble into anyone apt to harm her. She tried to push wretched thoughts away—thoughts about what might happen if someone did approach her midway through the night. She imagined her mother and father learning of her newfound pastime through the worst-possible news of all.
How stupid that would be. How absolutely unfair to her mother and father, who’d done nothing wrong. All they’d wanted was a sweet girl, one to call their own. All they’d wanted was a girl who would ultimately marry a man with a decent title, carry a few children, appear for teatime once in a while.
They hadn’t wished for the sort of raggedy individual of her current state: one who’d thieved from two of the most powerful men in London and cast their belongings to the streets.
When she put it like that to herself, she felt overwhelmed with a strange sense of horror mixed with pride. These were things she could never tell anyone about; a completely private, inner life.
But she knew that secrecy led to a certain level of loneliness.
Harriet bowed her head, her pockets now emptied of the items she’d stolen. She ducked through a passageway, keeping eyes on her horse, still latched up near the yonder church. The horse tossed his head back, making his black mane shimmer in the moonlight. Again, Harriet felt a strange sense of adrenaline, one that caused her feet
to surge forward faster. Her heart pumped. She was doing it.
A Ravishing Beauty in Disguise: A Historical Regency Romance Book Page 11
