Happily Ever After

Chapter 10

10

THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO – THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO, HORACE WALPOLE

I followed, but he’d vanished into the dark and the rain. Thunder growled overhead again and another stab of lightning speared the air. ‘Hugo!’ I called, but there was no answer.

‘Bloody idiot.’ I hovered in the doorway for a moment, looking out at the savage night. He’d looked so desperate, so horrified, I ought to try to tell him that it was all right, that I understood. Well, maybe I didn’t understand, as such – this was a whole psychology that Jane Austen and the Bront?s had somewhat skated over – but I didn’t want Hugo to do something reckless under the belief that I was going to go straight to his mother with my tale. So, with one last hopeless look at the weather, I plunged out after him.

I was barefoot, but Hugo was wearing heels. Nobody could run in heels, I thought, picking my wincing way over the gravel to the grass. He couldn’t get far, particularly as the weight of water the sky was throwing down would saturate his full-length dress and slow him down.

‘Hugo!’ I shouted again into another thunderclap.

No reply. No sign. I hoped he wasn’t sheltering under a tree. Getting up in the morning to find her son and heir fried to a crisp in a ballgown and stilettos would probably rid Lady Tanith of what little sanity she had left.

I had to find him. Had to tell him that his secret was safe with me, and that, actually, discovering it had made me feel a good deal better. I knew enough to know that wearing women’s clothes didn’t necessarily mean that Hugo’s sexuality put him completely out of my reach, but the fear of discovery would have put a crimp in any desire he may have felt for me. It wasn’t that I was a hideously unlovable monster, even given my rather top-heavy figure. The problem had all been on Hugo’s side. It was, I had to admit, a rather different ‘hero flaw’ than I’d been led to expect – those had leaned far more toward the ‘questionable morals re smuggling’ or ‘seeming attachment to lady of good fortune’ than a predilection for frocks – but it did make Hugo more relatable and more approachable now.

I was soaked and the ‘refreshing, after a muggy night’ coolness of the rain had given way to ‘bloody freezing’. These poor pyjamas, that had suffered the indignities of the fountain incident, now were being subjected to a midnight dousing and I was going to have to invest in some new ones if this sort of thing carried on.

I stood near the pond with the wind thrashing my pyjama legs around my thighs and looked. Nothing moved out there in the blackness, apart from the undergrowth which was flailing as the wind passed, carrying yet more rain. I turned a small circle, my feet freezing in the sopping grass, which was beginning to squelch quietly; the rain falling on its hard-packed surface wasn’t draining away but was sitting and puddling. There was no Hugo to be seen.

My gaze fell on the rise of land that was the icehouse. Maybe I could go up onto the top and get a better view? Without being struck by lightning hopefully. I ran, muddy water splashing up my legs as I went, meeting the overflow from my hair coming down the other way. Wet cotton flapped against me and gave inadequate coverage against the weather, my shoulder straps had stretched until my once-cute camisole top was now more of a bust-bandage and the pyjama legs encircled my calves in clinging desperation as I reached the top of the hillock and looked out across the carefully mown acres.

It was too dark to make out much. I had hoped that a bloke in a ballgown and heels might stand out against the night, but I hadn’t really counted on the sheer darkness out here. No streetlights, no stars, no illumination at all. Just sheets of rain and the occasional blinding flash, and now my hair was in my eyes. I could hardly even see my own hands, let alone a figure in the distance.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ A voice came from somewhere around my ankles. ‘You’re going to get fifty thousand volts through the head if you keep standing there.’

Tonight had already been so far outside my experience that, for the tiniest second, I entertained the idea that some particularly earthy branch of the fae was speaking to me, but then I looked down.

‘What are you doing in there?’

‘Restoring a 1975 Ford Escort, what do you think I’m doing in here?’

It was Jay. It was one in the morning in the middle of a thunderstorm, and here he was, standing in the entrance to the icehouse fully dressed, as though this were the most normal thing in the world.

‘More to the point, what the hell are you doing out there ?’ He held out a hand to arrest my slide down the small waterfall that the icehouse mound had become, and pulled me into the cubby of an entranceway. ‘There’s a thunderstorm going on.’

‘Well I thought I’d take an evening stroll,’ I said, sarcasm dripping almost more than the rest of me. ‘I was…’ No. Hugo’s clothing-confusion was nothing to do with Jay. ‘I thought I saw someone out here.’

‘You did. Me.’

‘And, again, what are you doing out here?’ He’d got both his hearing aids in, I noticed, although they were largely concealed by his hair, and I wondered who he’d been talking to in this brick-lined tunnel.

‘I am a dark, tortured soul who walks the grounds by moonlight to ease my… err… dark torturedness.’ Jay shuffled back further into the little porchway until his back was against the locked metal gate of the icehouse proper, which gave me room to get further in. He was dry and warm and I began to shiver.

‘Cobblers,’ I said, trying to stop my jaw wobbling.

‘Probably. Are you all right?’

It was an unexpected question and, in my soaked, frozen and worried-about-Hugo state it reduced me to tears. ‘No! I want to go home, but I haven’t really got one, and I thought…’ I stopped. Again, this wasn’t Jay’s business. ‘And I’m tired and there’s a cat in my bed,’ I finished, sniffing heftily.

‘I just meant, you’re cold and wet. You should get in and dried off before – well, before your clothing disintegrates.’ Jay nodded towards my chest, where the midriff of my top had rolled up when I’d sat down and my boobs were now only covered by a strip of wet fabric.

I sniffed again. ‘I’ll just wait for the rain to ease off.’

We sat in silence for a while. After a few minutes, Jay took off the jumper he was wearing and draped it over my shoulders, without saying a word. We sat a bit more. Trickles of water began to slide from the entrance down to where we were crouched, like little muddy tongues trying to lick us.

‘It’s not easing off,’ Jay observed at last. ‘Are you going to stay here all night?’

‘Are you?’

‘You just asking me the same question doesn’t count as an answer, you know.’ He sounded amused. ‘I only live over there, in the estate village. You’ve got to get all the way back to the house. Look, the storm seems to have passed over, it’s just the rain now. If you run really quickly you can get back inside and into a shower or something.’

‘Are you trying to get rid of me?’ I had no idea why, but the presence of Jay in this little stone building was reassuring. As though he represented a normality that everything else about tonight was severely lacking.

‘Not really, but I’m going to head home to bed and I don’t really want to leave you here. You might die of hypothermia and I’m running out of garden to bury the bodies in.’

‘Shut up,’ I said mildly.

‘Come on then.’ A hand closed around my wrist and pulled me to my feet, which slithered slightly on the muddy channel of a floor. ‘Get on inside and out of those wet… whatever they are.’

‘All right, Dad.’

Now he grinned. ‘And put my jumper on. No daughter of mine is going to be wandering around with, well, it’s noticeable that you’re cold, put it that way.’

I smiled back, pulled his jumper over my head and, with the extra layer of reinforcement against the elements, I made a dash for the kitchen door, which stood slightly open in the courtyard wall.

I turned to look back, just once. Jay was still standing in the shelter of the icehouse, watching me go and I wondered again what he had been doing out in the storm. But then I thought of Lady Tanith’s twenty-four-hour work ethic and maybe there were jobs that could only be done at night?

I pattered soggily back up to my room, stripped off my soaking pyjamas and, snuggled up to the furry warmth of the cat, I fell asleep.