His At Night

Chapter Five

It wasn’t a country house party until Vere had mistaken someone else’s room for his own. He had plenty of choices. Miss Melbourne would scream loudest, Miss Beauchamp laugh hardest, and Conrad grumble most forcefully.

So of course he chose Miss Edgerton’s room.

He had been inside her room already: When the ladies had departed for the drawing room after dinner, he’d left the other gentlemen on the pretense of having to retrieve his special Colombian cigar from his room.

He had taken the opportunity to map the rooms and their occupants. But what he had really needed was a moment alone, which he’d spent in the empty passage, his back against his own door, his hand over his face.

He had lost nothing: How could he lose something that had never existed in the first place? And yet he had lost everything. He could no longer think of his constant companion as she had always been—warm, supportive, and understanding. Now he saw only Miss Edgerton’s predatory prettiness, the flattery that gleamed in her eyes as the sun gleamed on a crocodile’s teeth.

Now he at last understood why young boys sometimes threw rocks at pretty girls. It was this wordless fury, this pain of shattered hopes.

He was here to throw rocks at Miss Edgerton.

She was seated before her vanity table, her profile to him, combing her hair slowly, absently. As she raised her arm to reach the top of her head, the loose, short sleeves of her nightdress slid down to expose her upper arm and—for one heart-stopping fraction of a second—the curve of the side of her breast.

“Miss Edgerton, what are you doing in my room?” he called from the door he had silently opened.

She looked up, gasped, and leaped out of her chair. Hurriedly she grabbed her dressing gown and belted it tight about her person. “My lord, you are quite mistaken. This is my room.”

He cocked his head and smirked. “That’s what they all say. But you, my dear Miss Edgerton, are not married yet. No such hanky-panky for you. Now run along.”

She gaped at him. Well, at least she wasn’t smiling.

It had not made him any happier that the rest of the evening she had not come near him, but instead played cards with Freddie, Wessex, and Miss Beauchamp, smiling all too often. The stupid, illogical part of him still wanted her smiles; worse, he felt downright proprietary toward her.

He strolled inside and sat down at the foot of her bed, which brought him face-to-face with the painting that hung on the opposite wall. It was a canvas approximately three feet by four feet, bursting with a single blood-red rose and its razor-sharp thorns. At its edge were the shoulder and arm of a man lying facedown in the snow, one long black feather, next to his lifeless hand—a definite relation to the painting in the dining room.

Vere loosened his necktie and pulled it off.

“Sir!” Her hands held tight to the closure of her dressing gown. “You cannot—you may not disrobe here.”

“Of course I won’t really disrobe, not with you still here, Miss Edgerton. And why are you still here, by the way?”

“I already told you, sir. This is my room.”

He sighed. “If you insist, I’ll kiss you. But I won’t do anything else.”

“I don’t want to be kissed.”

He smiled at her. “Are you sure?”

To his surprise, she flushed. His own reaction was a flash of acute heat.

He stared at her.

“Please leave,” she said unsteadily.

“Penny! Penny, you are in the wrong room,” Freddie, good old Freddie, called out from the open door.

She fled to him. “Oh, thank you, Lord Frederick. I was at a loss to explain to Lord Vere that he’d made a terrible mistake.”

“No, no, I will prove it to both of you,” Vere claimed loudly. “See, I always put a cigarette under my cover, so that I can have one last drag before I go to sleep.”

He marched to her bed and, to her strangled yelp, flung back her bedcover. There was, of course, nothing there.

He widened his eyes. “Did you smoke my fag, Miss Edgerton?”

“Penny! This really isn’t your room.”

“Oh, all right,” said Vere, throwing up his hands. “Drat it. I like this room.”

“Come now,” Freddie urged him. “It’s late. I’ll take you to your room.”

He was ready to walk away, but at the door Freddie took hold of his arm. “Penny, shouldn’t you say something to Miss Edgerton?”

“Right, of course.” He turned around. “Lovely room you have, Miss Edgerton.”

Freddie nudged him.

“And I do apologize,” Vere added.

With some effort, she wrested her eyes from Freddie. “It’s quite an understandable mistake, sir—our rooms are close.”

Their rooms were close indeed. He was diagonally across the passage from her. The next-closest guests, Freddie and Lady Kingsley, were each two doors away. Yet another indication of her careful planning, to bump more easily into the marquess she’d intended to bag.

As if to demonstrate that she bore no grudges at his faux pas, she directed at him a smile as serene and graceful as any she’d dispensed this entire day. “Good night, my lord.”

He knew very well by now that her smiles had no meaning. He knew she manufactured them the way a forger fabricated crisp twenty-pound banknotes. And he still could not help a new surge of that very old longing.

“Good night, Miss Edgerton.” He bowed. “My apologies once again.”

The height thrilled Elissande at first. A true mountain, so far above the distant plains she might as well be standing on Zeus’s own balcony. The air was thin. A bright, harsh sun shone. A black speck circled distantly in the sky. She raised her hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the sun.

But her hand moved only a few inches. She looked toward it in consternation and blinked. A dark manacle bound her wrist. A chain, each link as big as her fist, protruded from this manacle. The other end of the chain staked into the sinew of the mountain itself.

She looked at her other wrist. The same. Bound like Prometheus. She yanked her wrist. It hurt. She yanked harder. It only hurt more.

Panic, rising as fast as floodwater in a basement. Her heart pounded. Her breaths came in short, inadequate gasps. Please, no. Anything but this.

Anything but this.

A sharp cry pierced the air. The dark speck grew, sinking rapidly toward her. It was a bird—an eagle, its beak as sharp as a knife, and it was nearly upon her. She struggled frantically. Blood trickled from her wrists. But she could not free herself.

The eagle emitted another shriek, its beak plunging into her belly. In her agony she could not even scream, but only thrash madly.

She woke up still thrashing.

It took a few minutes for the residual terror to pass. With still unsteady fingers, she lit her hand-candle and excavated the guidebook to Southern Italy from her undergarment drawer.

“‘West of the village rises the almost vertical wall of limestone precipice that separates the elevated tableland of Anacapri from the eastern part of Capri,’” she read softly to herself. “‘The only way formerly of reaching Anacapri was by an ascent from the beach of eight hundred rude steps, cut in the face of the rock and constructed probably in times anterior to the Roman rule. Now a finely engineered carriage road leads to Anacapri. The views from this road are most beautiful.’”

Vere had joined the Douglas case at Lady Kingsley’s request. He was willing enough—he owed her a favor for her help on the Haysleigh case—but he was not entirely convinced as to Douglas’s guilt. Douglas had been staying at Brown’s Hotel both times, when the trail of the extorted diamonds led there. Each time he also traveled from London to Antwerp, where a large number of diamond dealers had been subjected to extortion tactics.

But Douglas had legitimate reasons to visit both London and Antwerp, important centers for the diamond trade. And even Lady Kingsley, who was sure they had the right man, could not explain why someone who swam in diamonds wanted more diamonds.

“One reason is that he has less than we think he does—he must have exaggerated the richness of his find,” Lady Kingsley whispered to Vere, after a three-hour examination of Douglas’s papers in the latter’s study. “The rumor was that the vein was so extraordinary, any bucket of dirt yielded the fortune of a lifetime. But the reality, not quite.”

Vere hefted a box of documents back to its proper cabinet. “Perhaps there has been theft by the management.”

“There is always that possibility. But if he thought so, he has not gone back in person to check. At least the foreman and the accountants never referenced a visit from him.” Lady Kingsley lifted her lantern high so that Vere could better see where the next box should go. “What about the household accounts?”

Lady Kingsley had a special facility for business documents; Vere had come as her valet this night, his main purpose to stand guard and lift heavy items. But she had needed a rest from reading in the scant light they dared, and Vere had taken the opportunity and checked the household records.

“There is not much land attached to the estate: very little income, and a great many expenses,” he reported. “But still, normal expenses. Nothing that would give him a motive for engaging in criminal activities.”

“Some do it for the thrill.”

“And most don’t.” Vere adjusted the boxes to sit flush with one another, the way he’d found them. “Did you see anything at all that mentioned artificial diamonds?”

“No, nothing.”

The case against Edmund Douglas had begun quite by chance: A suspect the Belgian police arrested for an unrelated matter had boasted of fleecing the diamond dealers of Antwerp on behalf of an Englishman. It had not ranked as a top priority for the Belgian police to investigate what they’d considered an instance of bald braggadocio, though Vere suspected that their lack of concern also had something to do with the fact that the diamond dealers of Antwerp were a community of Jews.

Notwithstanding the apathy of the Belgian police, the equal indifference of Scotland Yard, and the resolute silence of Douglas’s supposed victims, the case had somehow managed to pluck Holbrook’s notice and subsequently found a champion in Lady Kingsley, whose father had committed suicide when he could no longer keep his extortionist happy.

She’d been doggedly on the case for months, compiling an extensive dossier. And one thing in the dossier that had puzzled Vere from the beginning was the reason the Belgian criminal had given for extorting from the diamond dealers: that they passed off artificial diamonds as the real thing.

As far as Vere knew, while the French chemist Henri Moissan had published on his successful synthesis using an electric arc furnace, no one else had been able to duplicate his results. Synthetic diamonds were not yet a reality. And even if they were, the world was in no danger of running out of real diamonds. The diamond dealers of Antwerp and London had no reason to traffic in man-made ones.

Lady Kingsley left the study first. Vere waited several minutes before heading up the service stairs. The door from the stair landing led out to the eastern end of the house, where the master’s and the mistress’s apartments were located.

He listened at the door of the master’s apartment, then slipped inside. A man’s bedroom saw a steady stream of servants to make the bed, clean the grate, brush his clothes, and dust the furniture. It was unlikely Douglas would leave anything particularly important there, but Vere hoped for some insight into Douglas’s character.

He retrieved a fountain pen from his pocket and carefully unscrewed it from the middle. The pen held a small amount of ink and could write a few paragraphs, but its true purpose was in the dry cell battery and the tiny lightbulb mounted where the ink chamber should have been.

He swept the apartment quickly with the small stream of light—much neater than carrying a candlestick or a lantern, although the light did not last long and the battery always needed rest. His light came to a stop at the framed photograph on Douglas’s nightstand, the only photograph Vere had thus far encountered in the house. He crouched down for a closer look.

It was a wedding photograph of an exceptionally handsome couple. The woman possessed an ethereal, dreamlike beauty; the man, of medium height and slender build, had a similarly refined appearance. On the frame were engraved the words How do I love thee; Let me count the ways.

There was something half-familiar about the woman’s face. He’d seen it somewhere, and rather recently. But where? And when? He had a good faculty for faces and names. But even if he hadn’t, he would not have forgotten a woman with a face like that.

It came to him: the strange painting in the dining room. The angel’s face.

Was the bride Mrs. Douglas? If so, it would imply the bridegroom was Edmund Douglas. Of course, it would be ridiculous for a man to display another man’s wedding picture on his nightstand. But Vere had trouble reconciling the sleekly, almost delicately handsome man in the photograph with what he knew of Edmund Douglas.

Shouldn’t he be heftier in size? If Vere wasn’t mistaken, Douglas had been a boxer. And even if he had been a wiry fighter, where were his scars and his crooked nose?

In Mrs. Douglas’s room the smell of laudanum was strong and distinct in the air. Mrs. Douglas slept, her breaths laggard, her person so thin as to be almost two-dimensional.

He shone a little light next to her face. Beauty was a commodity of notoriously unreliable endurance. Still, Mrs. Douglas’s appearance shocked him. She was a mummified parody of her former self, her hair scant, her eyes sunken, her mouth half-open in her laudanum-induced torpor—a face that would frighten small children were they to come upon her unawares.

But such was the nature of life. All the diamonds in Africa could not guarantee a man a wife who wouldn’t turn into a scarecrow in time.

On her nightstand there was also a photograph. A portrait of a very young baby in a tiny coffin, surrounded by flowers and pale lace: a death memento. At the bottom was written Our Beloved Christabel Eugenia Douglas.

Vere put down the photograph and raised his light. The next thing he saw gave him a long pause. It was the third iteration of The Betrayal of the Angel, painted from a vantage point halfway between the other two. The man lying inert in the snow occupied most of the canvas; at his side, where his blood would have pooled, the dark rose bloomed furiously. Of the angel there was only the sweep of a black wing and the point of a bloody blade at the upper-right corner.

With the tips of his gloved fingers, Vere felt against and under the edge of the frame. There, the release latch. The painting swung outward to reveal a wall safe. It made sense: Mrs. Douglas’s ill health gave a legitimate excuse for keeping the servants out, and therefore her room was a better place to hide things.

He pulled out his lock picks from the inside pocket of his waistcoat. Holding the light between his teeth, he set to work, feeling for the pins. After a few minutes or so, the lock clicked and he opened the door of the safe—only to find a second door with an American combination lock inside.

Footsteps pattered in the passage outside. Vere closed the safe, pushed the painting back until it latched, then retreated to the farther side of the bed, stuffing the pen into his pocket as he went.

The door opened. The footsteps headed directly for the bed. He flattened himself against the wall, behind half-drawn bed curtains, willing the woman—the light footsteps belonged to a woman—to come no closer.

She stopped at the opposite edge of the bed. There she stood a long minute. He found it difficult to breathe quietly. Her presence agitated him.

“I won’t give up, you know,” she said, her voice strangely bleak.

It took a skipped heartbeat to realize she was not addressing him, but her semicomatose aunt.

“It is possible, isn’t it?” she asked the unresponsive Mrs. Douglas.

What was it? What did she want?

She leaned down, kissed Mrs. Douglas, and left.

In the morning, Elissande ordered breakfast sent to everyone’s room except Lord Frederick’s. Then she settled down in the breakfast parlor to wait for the latter to come, so that they might enjoy a leisurely time together.

She would ask him to tell her more about art, and perhaps something about London. She’d listen attentively, nod her head, and take an occasional ladylike sip of her tea. And then—what? She liked Lord Frederick. Very much. But she had no innate grasp on how best to court him, unlike…

There was no point denying it. With Lord Vere, she had not worried at all about the specifics of courting. The only thing that had mattered was that they decrease the distance between them—her whole person had yearned to be closer to him.

Until her whole person had been repelled by him.

Even so, when he had stated cavalierly that he would kiss her—

No, she had felt nothing at all at his inappropriate flirtation, nothing except outrage and disgust.

Lord Frederick appeared at the door. Excellent, her plan had worked. She smiled at him. In the next moment her smile froze. Lord Vere followed him into the breakfast parlor—Lord Vere who had copious mud on his boots and sticks of straw in his hair.

“Oh, hullo, Miss Edgerton,” Lord Vere trilled. “I was out for a long walk. Came back and met Freddie coming down the stairs. So here we are—we’ve brought our appetites and our captivating company for you.”

She should pity him: He could not help being an idiot. But the only thing she felt was a burning irritation. His presence was spoiling her carefully laid plans.

“How sweet of you,” she made herself say. “And here I was all by myself. Do please fill your plates and sit down.”

But how to salvage breakfast? She would need to bombard Lord Frederick with questions about art—his art in particular—the moment he took his seat.

But Lord Vere thwarted her yet again by commencing his monologue while still standing before the sideboard, loading his plate with fried eggs, broiled herring, and buttered muffins. The topic of his dissertation was animal husbandry. Apparently he’d been to an agricultural fair or two and considered himself an authority.

He expounded at considerable length on the Shropshire mutton sheep, its merits and demerits, and then compared it to the Southdown, the Oxford Down, and the Hampshire mutton sheep, the rams of which possessed something of a Roman nose, in his opinion.

Despite her country upbringing, Elissande knew nothing of sheep. But she could just imagine the atrocious mistakes he was making. She still wanted to shake him by the shoulders and ask him how she could possibly have Raphael’s Deliverance of St. Peter in her dining room when it was a wall fresco at the Palace of the Vatican—part of the architecture of the papal apartment itself.

At some point Lord Vere shifted his focus from sheep to cattle. He had not only attended agricultural fairs, he wanted Elissande to know, but he had seen actual scorecards. “My, those fine animals were put through a rigorous judging—head, body, forequarter, hindquarter. But do you know what the most important aspect of judging a dairy cow is?”

“No, I’m sure I don’t, my lord,” she said, stabbing her knife into the muffin on her plate.

“Mammary development, Miss Edgerton, worth a whopping thirty-five percent of the overall score. The udder must be very large and very flexible. The teats must be of a nice size and evenly placed. Milk veins, extensive; milk wells, capacious.”

He was no longer looking at her face but at her chest. “I don’t believe I’ve viewed a dairy cow quite the same since. Now when I see cows, instead of just saying to myself, ‘Oh, look, cows,’ I study their udders and teats for their conformity to the principles of animal husbandry—and for the sheer enjoyableness of studying udders and teats, of course.”

Elissande could not believe her ears. She opened her eyes a little wider and nodded a little more vigorously. Then she slanted a look Lord Frederick’s way, certain that the latter must be frowning at Lord Vere, trying to warn his brother that his speech had quite smashed through the bounds of acceptability.

But Lord Frederick was not paying any attention. He ate slowly, his eyes on his plate, his mind obviously elsewhere.

Lord Vere went on about udders and teats, his gaze fixed to her torso. In his enthusiasm he dropped two forks and a spoon, overturned his teacup, and finally caused a fried egg to land directly onto his own lap, at which point he jumped up, loudly upending his chair. The egg on his trousers flopped to the floor, but not before leaving behind a perfect round of sticky yellow yolk just where no one ought to look.

The commotion finally brought Lord Frederick out of his reverie. “Penny, what the—”

“Oh, dear,” said Elissande. “You’d best change fast, my lord, if you don’t want your good clothes ruined.”

For once, Lord Vere did the sensible thing and departed. Elissande slowly unclenched her hands underneath the table. It was, however, another few seconds before she could master herself enough to smile at Lord Frederick.

“And how are you this morning, sir?”

The breakfast tray in his room and the lack of one in Freddie’s told Vere everything he needed to know: Miss Edgerton had meant to have breakfast with Freddie, just the two of them.

He could not fault her taste: Freddie was the best of men. She with her plentiful smiles and scheming ways, however, was not remotely worthy of Freddie. But let her try. He would thwart, foil, and destroy every last one of her plots.

But for now he needed to speak to Lady Kingsley. He slipped a note under her door. She met him five minutes later at the turning of the grand staircase, from which point no one could approach them unobserved.

“I’ve asked Holbrook for Nye,” said Vere.

Nye was a safecracker. After Vere had left Mrs. Douglas’s room, he’d changed, written a seemingly rambling note that Holbrook would know how to decode, and walked into the village just in time for the telegraph office to open. On his way back he’d caught a ride on a hay wagon and laid his head down for a pleasant nap after a sleepless night, arriving at Highgate Court as Freddie came downstairs for breakfast.

“Where is the safe? And you still have straw in your hair.”

“In Mrs. Douglas’s room, behind the dead-man painting,” said Vere, running his fingers through his hair. “Do you have the servants’ movements?”

“They don’t go into Mrs. Douglas’s room unless called for. Twice a week Miss Edgerton puts her in a wheelchair and walks her up and down the passage. That’s when the servants go in to clean and change the bedding and so on. Otherwise only Miss Edgerton—and I imagine Douglas himself—enters the room.”

“In that case, Nye can start working as soon as Miss Edgerton comes down for dinner.”

Lady Kingsley glanced up and waved at her niece, who returned her wave before disappearing down the passage, probably to visit one of her friends. “How long will he need?”

“He has opened a combination-lock safe in as little as half an hour. But that was when he could drill. Here he cannot drill.”

Lady Kingsley frowned. “Last night when the ladies retired, Miss Edgerton went to Mrs. Douglas’s room before she went to her own.”

“We must make sure then she doesn’t retire so early tonight.”

“We’ll do that,” said Lady Kingsley. “And I can invent a reason to keep her with me for a while even after the ladies retire, but not for too long.”

Miss Kingsley reappeared at the top of the stairs. “Lord Vere, could I borrow my aunt a moment? Miss Melbourne simply can’t decide what to wear today.”

“You do what you can and I will take care of the rest,” Vere said with just enough volume for Lady Kingsley to hear. Then he raised his voice. “Of course you may have her, Miss Kingsley. Here, she is all yours, with my compliments.”

It was a good talk, about the places in London and the surrounding countryside where Lord Frederick liked to paint. But it was not an exciting conversation. Not that Elissande was overly familiar with exciting conversations, but still she felt the missing spark.

Lord Frederick did not look at her as if he were a hungry head of cattle and she a fresh, fragrant bale of hay—and goodness, why was she thinking in terms of animal husbandry when she’d never done so in her whole life? Lord Frederick was polite and obliging, but he betrayed no sign of a preference for Elissande.

She blamed it all on Lord Vere, especially when he returned much too soon, still wearing the same egg-stained garments. His endless discourse on mutton sheep must have drained all life and verve from Lord Frederick, who’d had to listen to him for God only knew how many thousands upon thousands of hours over a lifetime.

“Penny, you forgot to change your trousers,” Lord Frederick pointed out.

“So that’s what!” Lord Vere cried. “I got up to my room and for the life of me I couldn’t remember why I went. Bother.”

Idiot!

“Perhaps you should give it another try?” Elissande suggested, curving her lips and wishing that smiles were arrows. Lord Vere would be more perforated than St. Sebastian.

“Oh, no use now. I’ll just forget again,” Lord Vere dismissed her idea breezily. “I might as well wait until I change for the shooting. And how is the shooting here, by the by, Miss Edgerton?”

Was he looking at her bosom again? His eyes certainly did not meet hers. “I’m afraid we don’t keep a game park, sir.”

His eyes remained precisely where they were. “No? Hmm, I suppose we shall have to play tennis.”

“I’m sorry, but we lack a tennis court also.”

“How about archery? I’m not so terrible as an archer.”

Beside him Lord Frederick squirmed.

“With my aunt’s health and my uncle’s consideration of it, we do not have anything that would produce noise or excitement about. Perhaps you’d like to go for a walk instead, my lord?”

“I already went for a walk before breakfast—do you not remember, Miss Edgerton? I suppose I could settle for a game of croquet instead.”

How did he do that? How did he carry on a conversation with her while his eyeballs were firmly ensconced between her breasts?

“I apologize. We do not have the necessary equipment for croquet.”

“Well,” said Lord Vere, finally exasperated enough to return his gaze to her face. “What is it you do around here then, Miss Edgerton?”

She sent him a smile that should have damaged his vision. “I look after my aunt, sir.”

“That is exceedingly admirable, but unbearably tedious, is it not, with no amusements nearby whatsoever?”

She managed to sustain her smile but not without putting some effort into it. How he irked her, like a rock in her shoe.

“Tedium does not enter into it at a—”

She stopped. The dreaded sound: a carriage arriving. “Excuse me,” she said, rising.

“Are you expecting someone?” Lord Vere followed her to the window.

She said nothing, wordless with relief. It was not her uncle. She did not recognize the carriage. She also did not recognize the middle-aged, sharp-featured woman in a blue traveling dress who exited the carriage.

“Is that not Lady Avery, Freddie?” said Lord Vere.

Lord Frederick came swiftly to the window. Lord Vere yielded his place.

“What is she doing here?” Lord Frederick growled. He swore under his breath, then remembered himself and turned to Elissande. “I beg your pardon, Miss Edgerton. I did not mean to speak so rudely of your caller.”

What a perfect gentleman he was. “You may speak as rudely of her as you wish, sir. I assure you I have never met this particular caller.”

“Oh, look. She has brought luggage,” said Lord Vere, unperturbed. “Think she’s come to stay?”

Lord Frederick smacked his palm against the windowsill, then again begged Elissande’s pardon.

“It’s quite all right,” said Elissande. “But who is she?”