Chapter Twenty-two
The house had long since gone still, that peculiar hush settling after midnight when every tick of the clock sounded unnaturally loud. Catherine lay in the darkness of her chamber, unmoving atop the counterpane, her nightgown clinging where damp with restless heat.
Though she had extinguished the candle over an hour ago, she had not drifted anywhere near sleep.
Her mind kept circling, always returning to Marcus, to what had passed between them, and what remained unsaid.
She turned onto her side, staring at the faint outline of the windowpane.
The moon cast enough silver light within to trace the shapes of the furniture.
She exhaled slowly, then sat upright, her hands clasped in her lap.
I cannot bear this silence another moment, she thought sternly.
She had tried to speak during supper. He had tried not to stare. They had both failed, and the tension between them remained, despite their short time speaking after breakfast.
If only she could explain that she did not regret anything. What unsettled her now was not shame, but the gnawing fear she had somehow disappointed him.
She rose and crossed to the dressing chair, drawing her wrapper around her shoulders. She tied the sash with practised fingers, then stepped into her slippers and opened the chamber door without lighting a lamp. A reading lamp in the library would suffice.
The corridor was cool and quiet. She passed the tall case clock on the landing, resisting the temptation to glance at its hands. Time felt irrelevant in such hours.
The door to the library stood ajar. Lamplight flickered from within, soft and golden against the dark walnut panelling. Catherine paused, startled. She had assumed the house was asleep. Was Marcus wakeful too?
Her first instinct was to retreat and give him space. But another thought quickly followed. If he had also found the night unbearable, perhaps this was the moment—the one where honesty might outrun fear.
She moved quietly toward the door, the runner muffling her steps.
Her hand hovered near the frame as she debated on what she should do.
Perhaps this is the perfect opportunity to apologise for my awkwardness today, she thought.
Perhaps I can tell him that whatever he is feeling about last night, I do not want it to ruin what we have begun to build.
She leaned forward. Or, perhaps I should just turn and return to my chambers and never speak of this again.
The sound that met her ears was not the gentle rustle of turning pages nor the low clearing of a throat. It was sharp and final, like a crack against stone.
She stilled.
There was another sound. A low grunt, then something was overturned. This was not study. Not any form of laborious sorting she had come to recognise as Marcus’s nighttime habit.
Catherine pressed herself to the wood and drew a silent breath before peering through the slender gap between the door and its hinge.
Her vision narrowed to the hearth. The oil lamp on the far table cast a flickering arc of light across the carpet.
Something dark spread beneath it, too wet and too viscous for ink. And too red…
Atop the spreading puddle, a body lay sprawled in front of the fire.
She clutched the edge of the door, her knuckles whitening. At first, she could not look directly at the face. Only the shape. The stillness. A slight gleam of wire-rimmed spectacles crooked beneath the edge of the hearth rug.
Edmund, she realised with sickening horror.
A shattered inkstand lay near his shoulder, its black contents running alongside a trail of deeper crimson.
She did not scream. She could not. From beyond the writing table, a figure stood panting with one hand tight upon the poker drawn from the grate, its iron end red-streaked and faintly aglow.
Harold…
Not the polished, affable collector with tidy cravats and careful smiles.
Not the man who quoted Horace at dinner and laughed at Beatrice’s dry wit.
This was someone else entirely. His eyes gleamed with something feral, hollow and cold.
She stared at him through the gap, rigid.
Her breath stopped. Those were not the eyes of a man clinging to reason.
Harold turned and knelt over Edmund’s body, rifling through the papers that lay scattered near his sleeve.
A bundle of correspondence slid from the table beside him, including authentication records, the red wax of the Society’s seal now smudged across the corner of a page. And Catherine could only watch.
Harold muttered as he worked, shoving items into a satchel at his side. One by one, he removed artefacts from the cabinet nearest the window, careful even now with how he wrapped and packed them.
“Had to interfere,” he mumbled. “Always meddling. Just like Oxford. Just like the rest. They never listened. Never saw the truth. But I know what these are. I know what they’re worth. You never understood that, did you, Edmund…”
His laugh was soft and breathless and entirely detached from the scene before him.
Catherine’s hand rose instinctively to her mouth. She pressed her fingers hard against her lips, barely holding in the cry that threatened to escape.
He is mad, she thought with numb horror. Entirely mad.
Every trace of humanity she had once seen in him, every social grace and scholarly quirk, had vanished. The mask had fallen; what remained was precise, controlled, and unnervingly calm. Edmund had tried to stop him. Now Edmund lay broken by the hearth.
I am next, she thought, trembling. He will see me, and I shall end up like Edmund. Marcus will never know that I love him.
Her throat tightened. Harold turned again, stooping to collect a seal-press and a fragment of glazed pottery.
Catherine took one trembling step back from the door.
Just enough to breathe. Just enough to consider how to run.
The lamp within wavered. His shadow stretched toward the shelves.
She swallowed a sob, silently willing her limbs to obey. Do not move. Not yet.
The wood beneath Catherine’s slipper shifted just then with a faint creak. Harold froze. His head snapped toward the door, eyes wide and white with something beyond surprise. The poker dipped in his grip.
For one terrible heartbeat, he merely stared. Then, his expression rearranged itself into something more unnerving than rage. Politeness.
“Well,” he said lightly, straightening. “This is truly unfortunate.”
Catherine backed a step away from the threshold. She had seen men unmoored by grief, had witnessed the unravelling of reason in her father’s last days, but this was not sorrow. This was madness.
“Lady Penwood,” he said in the same composed, affable voice he had used over tea and artefact discussions. “You ought not to be here. This is delicate work. Necessary work. And now you have become part of the difficulty.”
His voice did not rise. That frightened her most. She turned to run.
She managed two steps before something slammed into her from behind.
Her shoulder struck the wainscoting as Harold seized her, his hand finding her mouth with brutal precision.
She tried to cry out, to twist free, yet his grip tightened—not with finesse, but with the grim determination of long practice.
“You understand,” he said near her ear. “Cannot allow chaos. Not now. Not when I am so close.”
Catherine fought, but her movements were slow and clumsy with fear.
A cloth pressed suddenly to her face—kept ready and meant for Edmund before steel and fire had proved swifter. A cloying vapour flooded her senses—bitter, sharp, like crushed leaves steeped in oil and thickened with something noxious. Her lungs recoiled.
Cannot breathe, she thought as she coughed and choked. Cannot scream.
She thrashed, her slippers scraping against the boards, her elbows striking blindly behind her, but he held her fast, pressed against him with arms too strong to be reasoned with. The cloth sealed over her mouth and nose. The burn reached her throat, then her eyes. The room blurred.
Marcus. His name rose unbidden, bright and searing. He was upstairs, unknowing and vulnerable.
I have to warn him, she thought groggily as the chemical began to overtake her. Harold will kill him if he gets the chance.
She struggled again, weaker now. Her limbs no longer obeyed with the same clarity. Her thoughts scattered like dry leaves caught in sudden wind. Darkness pressed in from the edges of her vision.
Stay awake, she pleaded silently with herself.
The hearth flickered. Edmund’s body lay still.
The blood no longer shocked her, as it had become part of the room’s pattern.
Catherine clawed at Harold’s arm. Her fingernails connected with wool, flesh, something.
He hissed but did not let go. The smell deepened, her chest heaved and then stopped. Her knees gave way.
Marcus. Please, do not come. Do not let him draw you here. She could not bear for Harold to ensnare him as well. Her vision fractured. Light burst behind her eyes. Her hand twitched once near her collar, then stilled.
He will not know.
The last sound she knew was the faint rustle of paper and Harold’s low murmur, still murmuring to himself, as though she were nothing more than another study fallen into silence.
***
Harold regarded Catherine’s crumpled form for a long moment, his chest rising with quiet exhilaration.
She had seen too much, yet she had not screamed.
Had not even clawed with true intent. Even now, insensible upon the floor like a discarded glove, there lingered some trace of decorum in her—and that, he thought, would serve him well.
Harold knelt beside her and turned her face upward, inspecting her eyelids for flicker, her breath for rhythm. The drug held. He smiled.
“Always too clever,” he muttered. “Always watching. I suppose it was inevitable.”
He reached for the scattered papers near Edmund’s lifeless hand, retrieving the authentication notes and sketching diagrams. Those, he tucked into his satchel with practised economy.
Then he stood, turned, and moved toward the hallway. Two shadows waited just beyond the staircase. They belonged to men accustomed to entering through the kitchen door, who did not pause to consider questions of morality or motive. He motioned them forward, fingers precise and silent.
“In the bedroom—top drawer,” he instructed quietly. “Take care. The rest is in order.”
The taller of the two inclined his head and vanished up the servants’ staircase without a sound.
Harold returned to his victims. With practised ease, he sifted through the disarray upon Edmund’s desk until he unearthed what he sought: fine correspondence paper, embossed with the Society’s seal, and an inkstand already uncorked.
It required little time. Three notes—each fashioned in a hand plausibly belonging to the countess, the forgery deft enough to invite no immediate doubt.
The first, addressed to Edmund, conveyed gratitude for “his continued cooperation” in scrutinising Penwood’s holdings, while urging him to delay his conclusions until she might “secure the influence necessary to direct the collection’s fate.
” The second contained a draft report of supposed discrepancies, annotated with suggestions that certain pieces might be “better catalogued offsite, beyond Marcus’s knowledge.
” The third note, more intimate in tenor, lamented the necessity of deceiving Marcus, yet insisted that “access, not affection” had ever been her true purpose.
Harold read them twice, altering a stroke of ink here, crossing a word there, until the effect rang true. At last, he permitted himself a thin breath of satisfaction. It was not only Edmund who had underestimated him.
He ascended to Catherine’s chamber, where he secreted the forged papers among her effects: beneath a folded shawl, within the drawer that held her writing supplies.
When they were discovered, suspicion would spring to life ere grief could take root.
She had married for access. She had abetted the theft.
She had vanished the very night the expert met his end. What narrative could be more plausible?
One man’s tragedy, another man’s folly. One woman’s ambition, he thought with a terrible smile.
Within the hour, they had carried her limp form to the waiting cart outside the stables. One of his companions draped a travel cloak over her; the other concealed her hair beneath a bonnet.
The old mill would serve — dry, abandoned, and distant enough from the village to avoid interference.
He meant to keep her alive only long enough to ask a few questions.
She must know of other collections, of families with holdings worth reclaiming; her husband’s papers would doubtless mention something.
Afterwards, he would see that Catherine Pemberton, Countess of Penwood, would vanish without a trace—and Marcus would be left to collapse beneath the ruin he had unwittingly trusted.