Chapter 27
Chapter 27
The evening seemed to go on forever.
The six-course dinner Lady Hyde had devised for her guests was eaten largely in silence (or not eaten, in Lady Hyde’s case), and every course felt like an eternity.
At the end of each, removing the wine that had been served with it, Jem had paused in the darkness of the hallway and drunk from the bottles, swallowing down Riesling, Burgundy, Sauterne, and champagne with grim defiance. Now, with the house finally quiet and the alcohol warming his blood, he stood outside the back door, dragging on a cigarette and thinking of his first night there. That fool Cox, showing off and getting a dressing-down from Kate for swigging champagne. It made his breath catch to remember how she’d appeared to him then—beautiful and disapproving, intimidatingly remote. Until the moment she touched him.
He inhaled deeply, making the tip of the cigarette glow, then expelled a slow breath which turned to silver in the frozen air. He couldn’t afford to think about her touch. Not yet, not with Hyde still in the library with the drinks tray and his filthy French lithographs spread out over the desk. Earlier, Kate had taken a tray of dirty crockery from Jem and her eyes had met his, a brief inclination of her head acknowledging that she’d got the note. That the door would be unlocked, and she would be waiting.
But for how long?
He’d thought it wasn’t possible to hate Randolph Hyde more than he did already, but it turned out he was wrong. Why didn’t the bastard just go to bed?
At that moment, the bell in the passageway behind him shattered the silence. Usually he hated to jump to a summons upstairs, but tonight he wasn’t going to let anything delay him from getting to Kate. He ground out his cigarette and ran along the passage, taking the stairs two at a time.
The hallway was as cold and dark as the kitchen yard. The huge Christmas tree gave off the resinous scent of the forest, which made him think of Davy again. As he passed, he looked up at the portrait of the second baronet; the man who had taken a boy from his family in India and brought him here to hunt like an animal. A surge of rage washed through him, mingling dangerously with the wine.
Steady… he told himself. He couldn’t afford to do anything stupid. Not until he’d seen Kate. Not until he’d got the last quarter’s wages in his hand.
The library was warm and bright compared to the draughty darkness of the rest of the house. Hyde was slumped in the chair behind the desk, which was littered with the debris of his evening: teetering piles of books, smeared glasses, and a decanter, drained to the dregs. The lithographs were scattered everywhere, some stained with sticky rings of port. Hyde was peering through a large magnifying glass at a cluster of diamonds clutched in his hand. He didn’t look up when Jem came in.
‘Ah, Thomas—’ He grunted. ‘More coal on the fire. Blasted perishing in here.’
God, he was steaming drunk. So that was why he hadn’t gone to bed. He probably couldn’t stand up.
‘It’s not Thomas,’ Jem said coolly, deciding he could afford to dispense with the ‘sir.’ Hyde was in no fit state to do anything about it.
Hyde raised his head stupidly and blinked his small, bloodshot eyes. ‘It’s Thomas if I say it is,’ he snarled. ‘You’re all bloody Thomas to me. Now get that bloody fire going.’
Jem added coal from the box on the hearth and poked the embers to rouse a flame. Straightening up, he looked back towards Hyde and noticed that the safe, built into the panelling by the window, was open. On the pretext of gathering up the empty glasses and removing the decanter, he went across to the desk and stooped to pick up one of the lithographs that had slid onto the floor. A shudder of revulsion went through him as he glanced at the scene of graphic depravity it depicted. He was about to place it on the desk when Hyde dropped the magnifying glass and made a lunge for it.
‘How dare you touch those papers, boy? How bloody dare you? Know your place!’
The diamond necklace he’d been holding slithered onto the desk, and another jewel that must have been taken from the safe skidded across the scattered papers and fell to the floor, lost to the darkness. Hyde’s face was puce as he spluttered helplessly, dropping to his knees and floundering around on the carpet.
‘You bloody fool—look what you’ve done! You’d be horsewhipped for this in my father’s day. You’d have your bloody marching orders, man…’
From where he stood, Jem could see a glint of gold on the carpet. Calmly, he went forward to pick it up, enjoying Hyde’s disadvantage and the spectacle of his impotent, port-soaked rage.
‘Quite so,’ he said blandly. The jewel was set in a heavy gold surround, and he placed it on the desk, beneath the lamp. It cast a pool of clear green light with a dark shadow at its centre. Almost like a…
Realisation slammed him in the stomach.
A very ancient and valuable emerald, fashioned to look like a tiger’s eye…
He stared at the jewel and felt his mouth open. Drunk as he was, perhaps Hyde felt the shift in the atmosphere, or perhaps some spark of memory ignited a subconscious recognition.
‘Get out,’ he slurred, his face darkening. ‘Get out of my bloody sight and don’t come back.’
‘Very good, sir .’ Jem’s hatred rose from him, like heat. ‘I’ll say good night.’
Up in the attic, the frost crept in curlicues across the black windowpane and the candle flame stuttered in the icy drafts. Hours after the house had settled and the girls’ muted voices across the landing had fallen silent, Kate waited, pacing the floor to keep warm and to work off her agitation.
Her indecision.
She had vowed never again. What had happened in the summer was the kind of madness that led to nothing but trouble. She had allowed her judgement to be impaired, her professionalism compromised. She had rediscovered something in herself, but lost sight of her responsibilities. She should count herself lucky that she had come to her senses before anything truly disastrous happened. What was she doing, unlocking the door and opening herself up to that risk again?
The creased scrap of paper was on the desk, but she didn’t need to read it again to remember what it said; the words had been echoing around her head all evening. There are things I need to say. He may not actually have added before I leave , but still she heard it, and it chilled her.
It was inevitable, really. He’d never belonged at Coldwell. He wasn’t like Thomas, or the Twigg boys: someone who would keep his head down and plod on, accepting what he was given without question. He would never settle in this out-of-the-way old house, nor have his will bent to the tyrannical rule of Sir Randolph and Henderson. He didn’t have to explain that to her.
Perhaps it would be better if he didn’t.
The key to the dividing door between the attics was on the desk, beside his note. She imagined herself picking it up, tiptoeing out into the corridor, and sliding it silently into the lock. In less than a minute, she would be back in her room and could undress and slip between the cold sheets, and leave it all behind: the summer of madness they had shared, the thrill of secret glances in the servants’ hall, brushed fingertips when passing a cup or a laden tray. She could forget, in time, that a handsome footman called Jem Arden had ever been at Coldwell and had brought her briefly back to herself. After a while, the pleasure and exhilaration and sense of possibility she had felt with him would become a faded dream.
The candle flame swayed in a sudden current of air. Her taut nerves hummed. She stood up, reaching for the key, but a soft step on the landing told her she was too late.
Swiftly she crossed the room and opened the door. It need not be too late: she could tell him to go back—he wasn’t like Henderson, he would do as she asked. But every sound seemed vastly magnified in the listening house; the creak of the old floorboards as he slipped into the room, the squeak of hinges and the click of the latch as he closed the door behind him. She pictured Eliza and Abigail, Susan and Doris lying a few feet away, heaped beneath their eiderdowns, and couldn’t trust herself to speak.
And besides, she couldn’t think of the words. Not when he was standing only inches away, half-hidden by the shadows, the gold of the candle glinting in his eyes, gilding the ridge of his cheekbone, the edge of his upper lip.
‘It’s so late… I thought he’d never go to bed.’ His voice was a breath. ‘You’re shivering…’
In one fluid movement, he slipped off his jacket and came closer, putting it around her shoulders so she was enveloped in his warmth. Neither of them moved, and their eyes held as the silence pooled around them, the ripples of sound spreading outwards and dying away.
‘Kate—’
She knew what he was going to say. She wasn’t sure what form his goodbye would take, only that she didn’t want to hear it. Perhaps it was pride as much as anything that made her press her finger to his lips; the fact that she would be left here, in this stagnant backwater, while he rejoined the current of life and was carried away from her. Perhaps it was some perverse instinct for self-preservation that made her want to put off the moment of parting, not just from him but from the woman she had been when she was with him. Or maybe it was simply a childish refusal to accept reality that made her take his face between her hands as she kissed him, the need to snatch a few more moments in her blissful fool’s paradise before it was lost to her forever.
With a soft moan he kissed her back, grasping the lapels of the jacket and pulling her against him, where she fitted the contours of his body.
It was as if she was watching from outside herself. Marvelling at the abandonment of the woman in black, who fumbled at the buttons of his shirt and slid her hands inside and pushed it off his shoulders, so his bare skin gleamed like burnished ivory in the candle glow. Envying her as he worked free the small buttons of her dress and unhooked her corset, bending his head to brush his lips along her collarbone, to press them against the swell of her breast above her chemise. Storing up the images, the memory, to feed on later, when he was gone.
But then the watching part of her was pulled back into her pulsing, shivering, arching body, and there was nothing but that moment, stretched and exquisite, and the darkness beyond the circle of candlelight.
Outside the window the silent stars went by.
Eliza woke.
At night, the baby—freed from its tight-laced restraints—rolled and flipped inside her like a fish in a barrel. And yet it wasn’t that, nor the burn of acid at the base of her throat that had jolted her from sleep, but a noise. A cry.
An owl perhaps. Or a fox? Something high and primal, quickly hushed.
She lay in the darkness, listening, as the child inside her arched and stretched, nudging her bladder and pushing the air from her lungs, but the noise didn’t come again.
The silence settled, like snow.
Jem watched the stars, and the shadows flickering on the walls as the candle burned itself down.
He should get up and blow it out, but he couldn’t move. Kate’s cheek rested against his chest and her body was tucked into the crook of his arm, one leg across his thigh, pinning him down. He hadn’t meant for her to fall asleep, but in the aftermath of what had happened between them, he’d felt spent and scoured out, and he couldn’t find the words.
He hadn’t meant for any of it to be like this.
All the things he had intended to say were scattered now. They made no sense. The restless purpose that had driven him before had dissolved and it seemed like a miracle to find himself there in the early hours of Christmas morning, with her hair like silk across his chest and her skin warm against his. A shiver of reflexive pleasure convulsed him as he remembered her mouth on his flesh, the expression of abstracted intensity on her face as she’d looked up at him.
How could he leave?
But then he thought of the jewel that he had picked up from the library floor. The same jewel that the policeman had described; the one that Jack was supposed to have stolen but was securely hidden away in Sir Randolph’s safe.
How could he stay?
The candle was almost burned out. The last of its light glinted on the chatelaine beside it, a puddle of silver. His eyes came to rest on it, and he examined the idea that was forming in his mind; tentatively, like someone probing an aching tooth. The prospect of getting up, of leaving the warmth of the bed and relinquishing her delicious body, was unappealing in the extreme, but this was his last chance to prove Jack wasn’t a thief, that he hadn’t disappeared voluntarily. If Jem had the jewel, Henderson’s story would be proved a lie and Hollinshead would have to investigate what had really happened that night, wouldn’t he?
Love was a physical ache in his chest. With infinite care, he drew the blanket more securely over Kate and slid out of bed, dropping a kiss on her pearly shoulder. The cold wrapped around him as he dressed in the clothes that had been so quickly, so eagerly discarded. It made his fingers stiff as he picked up her chatelaine and unclipped the ring of keys from its chain.
He blew out the guttering candle and paused to look back at Kate. She slept on, her inky hair spilling over the pillow, her face softened by sleep. In the cold, clear, Christmas sky, the moon was bright enough to cast sooty shadows on her cheeks beneath the sweep of her lashes. He had to grit his teeth and steel himself not to slip back into the bed beside her, to make the most of the precious, secret hours they had before dawn. It was only the thought of being with her properly once this was all over that allowed him to tiptoe from the room.
He would ask her tomorrow. Somehow, he would find the time, even if he had to request, in front of the others, to talk to her alone in the housekeeper’s parlour. He was so tired of the petty rules and invisible barriers of the servants’ hall. He was so tired of all the things that he knew and felt and wanted being obliterated by duty, and of having to surrender everything that mattered for twenty-eight pounds a year. Once he had the jewel he would go to Scotland Yard, where the officers weren’t in the pocket of Randolph Hyde at the big house, and he would say what Mullins had told him and hand over the emerald Jack was supposed to have stolen. And then he would set about finding work somewhere he and Kate could be together, where no one knew them. He could go back to working with horses, on an estate where they’d have a cottage of their own. She could have his name, even if they couldn’t marry. He would keep her safe and devote his life to making her happy. If only she would come with him.
Dear God, he would move heaven and earth to make her happy, if he was lucky enough to have the chance.
He hadn’t dared risk putting shoes on and his bare feet made no sound on the icy flags of the basement passage. The moonlight spilled across the floor like thin blue buttermilk, making it easy to see what he was doing. It was only the cold, and the burden of his own guilt that hampered him. It felt wrong to be unlocking the housekeeper’s parlour with Kate’s keys and slipping into the room that was her domain. Like a violation.
He pushed the uncomfortable thought away, avoiding his own spectral reflection in the mirror as he stole across to the desk and lit the lamp. Unwillingly, he recalled that midsummer afternoon when he had stood in the same place and some latent sense of honour had made him dismiss the idea of doing exactly what he was doing now. He had wanted to be better than this. To be worthy of her.
He still wanted that.
Once he was done, he would go back to his room and collect the dragonfly brooch he’d hidden in his pack. A Christmas present. The thought offered a faint glow of consolation as he unlocked the drawer of her desk. There were so many keys, but each one had a small ivory tag bearing the name of the room, or a paper one for the cupboards, trunks, and chests. It didn’t take him long to find the one for the library, and he had just shut the drawer and locked it when a noise set his heart hammering.
He didn’t have to turn round. In the mirror above the desk, he watched the door open, letting in moonlight.
And Frederick Henderson.