Chapter 3
“Right this way, Lady Vane,” Mrs. Scott said as she guided Nell up the grand marble staircase to the second-floor corridor. “On this side we will walk toward the West wing,” she gestured and then turned. “Over here, you will see the East Wing. It is to remain closed and—”
Well, this is a surprise.
A door from the shadowy East Wing opened slowly, and a small face peeked out.
A girl, no more than twenty, stepped out and just barely entered the hall.
She was pale and thin, but pretty beneath what appeared to be some sort of illness.
She wobbled for a moment and placed a hand on the threshold to steady herself.
No one had told me there was a girl living here during all the introductions…
And yet, here she was. She had assumed the closure of the wing was merely the whim of a powerful man, presented now with a different scenario entirely.
“Cassandra.” The earl appeared and crossed the gallery before Nell had the chance to gather her thoughts properly, his voice low, fast, and urgent. “You should not have risen. You know you are to rest, that it is what is best for you.”
“If you need something, Lady Cassandra, you need only ring for it,” Mrs. Scott said warmly.
“I wished to see her. I think it is only natural to wish to meet my brother’s future wife.
” The girl did not let go of the doorframe, but she did not retreat from it either.
Nell quickly noted and admired a thread of stubbornness in her.
“You were not going to bring her to me, so I came to her instead. It is not so very far.”
“It is exactly far enough,” the earl said, and put a hand gently under her elbow.
It is not a madman’s secret, but a sister he guards. Nothing I heard of the Earl of Ashcroft matches the man in front of me now…
She watched him steady his sister with no performance in it, no awareness of being watched at all, because there was no one here to perform for.
She was just a stranger who didn’t need impressing.
Nell understood, then, at least in part, what the closed wing was for, what the whispers were about.
He guided her into her room, and Nell trailed behind, stopping just outside the door.
“You’ll forgive my brother,” Cassandra said as she sat in an overstuffed chair next to her bed. “He thinks a closed door is a kind of medicine. Lady Vane, is it? Come in, come in, don’t stand there being gawked at by both of us. It isn’t fair to you.”
The earl made a sound that resembled a growl, but Nell didn’t think he possessed that kind of emotion.
All she had seen of the man, beyond his glaring good looks, was cool, calm, collected and in perfect control.
Cassandra had already taken Nell’s hand and gestured for her to sit on the stool next to her chair.
“Sit with me a moment,” Cassandra said. “He’ll fret the whole time, but he does that regardless, so you may as well ignore him along with the rest of us. I am so glad to have someone new in the house.”
Nell sat down. She could feel the earl standing just behind her shoulder, not seated but not leaving.
“You’ll want to know what’s wrong with me,” Cassandra said, with flat, unflinching frankness. “Everyone does, eventually. Four years now.”
“That is a long time,” Nell offered.
“The room turns on me if I turn my head too quickly. It turns and will not stop turning, sometimes for the whole of a day, sometimes for a week together, and there are mornings I cannot so much as sit up without the floor deciding to join in. Every physician my brother could bring from London and beyond has had a look at me. They’ve bled me.
Dosed me with I couldn’t tell you. They are unanimous, at least, in one assessment. ”
A small, dry smile, more armor than humor, crossed her face. Nell knew that look, her patients wore it often, as she did when necessary. She admired her fortitude in the face of what clearly pained her.
“The affliction is permanent. Nothing to be done. I believe the word incurable was used by no less than three of them, each rather pleased with himself for saying it definitively.”
Nell had stopped listening to the words at all. She was observing, her training coming to the forefront of her mind, clicking into motion. She watched the careful, deliberate way Cassandra held her head level on her neck, as though it were a full cup she dared not spill.
There were also subtle movements she avoided. She had turned to speak to Nell using her shoulders rather than her neck alone. She had also reached for the arm of the chair to grasp, and the color had gone out of her face for the length of two breaths before it steadied again.
It was a pattern Nell had seen before, once, years ago, on a ship’s surgeon’s ward her father had let her sit in on when she was young enough that no one thought of sending her away.
A sailor who’d taken a fall from the rigging and come up swearing the whole world had gone around him like a carousel.
Every physician aboard had called it permanent brain damage until her father, observing him the same unhurried way she was watching Cassandra now, had said quietly that he did not think it was the brain at all. She said it before she had thought better of saying it.
“They may be wrong.”
The room went very still.
“I’ve seen this called permanent before,” Nell said as she rose to her feet and began to pace. “It was not.”
“Whatever do you mean, Lady Vane?” Cassandra asked quickly. “How can you tell?”
“There’s an organ in the inner ear that governs balance.
I couldn’t tell you the whole of how it works.
My father only half understood it, and I’ve understood less than he did, but I’ve seen a man they said was ruined for life walk steady again inside a fortnight.
That is, once someone thought to treat the ear instead of bleeding the head. ”
“Is it the very same? Truly?”
“I dare not say it’s the same in your case, at least not yet. I say only that I’ve watched you a minute and a half and I already doubt what they have told you, and I would like…if you’re willing…to try something.”
“Lady Vane.” Adrian’s voice cut through the room like a cold knife before his sister could so much as draw breath to answer that question. “You’ve had a long journey. My sister tires easily, and this has already been more than she ought to manage in a day.”
“But Adrian—” Cassandra started.
“I think it best you go now, Lady Vane, and rest.”
Nell heard the warning in it, clean and unmistakable, aimed at her like an arrow. She understood then that she had overstepped herself. She had said far more than a woman who had all but just entered a house had any right to say, if at all.
“Good day, Lady Cassandra,” Nell said with a smile.
He did not wait until they were out of Cassandra’s hearing to turn on her, only far enough down the gallery that the words would not carry back through the open door. Mrs. Scott had the foresight to have excused herself, and was nowhere to be seen.
“What was that meant to accomplish, Lady Vane? My sister has been told the same thing by every physician of standing in London. What do you imagine you accomplish, filling her head with hope that isn’t yours to give? You have been in this house mere hours and have managed to turn it upside down.”
“I imagine I accomplish very little, if I’m wrong,” Nell said, holding still under it. “And a great deal, if I’m not. It was worth my—”
“And how, precisely, does a widowed viscountess come to have opinions on what London’s physicians can and cannot cure?”
This close, and turned full on her, her breath caught in her throat.
She was standing near enough to have to tilt her chin up to touch his face, his tall frame looming over her like a shadow.
She felt his coldness wash over her and knew in that moment it was not the whole of the man at all.
It was a fa?ade, a thing held down over something else.
His stillness is like a hand is held flat and steady over a wound to keep it from bleeding out.
His gaze had settled on her, dark and unhurried, weighing her the way she weighed a patient whose story did not match the wound in front of her.
She knew he could see past her careful answers, that she intrigued him.
She felt the pull of it, distinct and unwelcome, a full second before she made herself look down.
“I nursed my husband through a long last illness,” she explained.
“A woman learns to watch closely, at a sickbed, if she means to be of any use at all rather than merely present. The physician also told me stories, as did my father who was skilled in the medical arts. That’s the whole of my qualification, my lord. I don’t claim more than that.”
There, that is a good enough reason, she thought to herself proudly. It is the kind of thing any widow might say, plain and unprovable, and impossible to press on without cruelty.
She watched him weigh it and, after a moment, he let it stand. Yet she also saw, somewhere in the flicker of his deep blue eyes, that it had not fully satisfied him.
His eyes stayed on her a moment longer than the answer warranted, weighing still, as though a woman’s long vigil at a husband’s deathbed did not quite account for the particular, practiced way she had looked at his sister—not with a stranger’s pity, but with a physician’s attention, the kind that came from years at it rather than one hard winter. She would have to be very careful.
“Very well.”
He did not press further. He only inclined his head, a small civility, turned on his heel, and let her go. Nell stood there for a moment in silence. Somewhere in the minute and a half she had spent watching Cassandra hold her head level against a world that would not stop turning, it came to her.
Whatever was to transpire with the forged name, the borrowed jewels, and the three or four weeks she’d promised herself she would survive before vanishing, she promised herself one thing.
I am not leaving Ashcroft until I help that poor girl.
She was about to call for Mrs. Scott when a servant reached the top of the stairs. It was a boy, breathless, a letter held out in both hands as though it might otherwise get away from him. The earl, who was at the other end of the hall now, turned to face him.
“For his lordship. Come express, the rider’s only just—”
The earl took three long strides and grabbed the letter from the boy without waiting to hear the rest. He broke the seal where he stood, and Nell watched his face come apart.
It was not dramatic. There was a stillness as his eyes roved over the words, then a tension gave way, as if a rope under strain was finally cut. Then he remembered she was there and folded the letter quickly, tucking it in his jacket pocket.
“Goodnight, Lady Vane,” he said sharply. “Mrs. Scott, please bring Lady Vane to her quarters now,” he called out over his shoulder as he disappeared down the hall.
The woman materialized, clearly accustomed to the whims of her mercurial employer. She held a candle and an expression that suggested countesses did not generally linger in corridors after dark, motioning for her to follow.
“Just this way, Lady Vane,” she said as they strode down to the opposite wing.
She opened the door and Nell took in the most beautiful bedroom she had ever seen.
It was painted a pale green with gilded frames of landscapes and floral paintings.
A large four-poster bed was on the opposite side of the room with a lush jacquard eiderdown.
There was also a large window that led out to a balcony, the curtains drawn tight and the fire roaring.
“I have sent for a tray, with the day having all but finished. Some tea, crusty bread, fresh soup, and stone fruit. Will that do, Lady Vane?”
“Most nicely, Mrs. Scott,” she said, her mouth watering after her long journey. “Thank you.”
“As you can see, your trunks have been brought up and your clothes laid out in the wardrobe. I will send for a lady’s maid to help you prepare for bed.”
“That won’t be necessary, I can manage,” Nell said.
“Oh…of course, my lady,” Mrs. Scott replied, and Nell realized she had once again said the wrong thing.
“It is only that the journey has been so long, and I am much in need of some quiet. I hope you understand and I do appreciate all the hospitality.”
There, that is better.
“Of course, my lady,” Mrs. Scott said with a smile as a servant entered with the tray. “Here is your supper. I will leave you. Please ring the bell should you require anything else.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Scott.”
Nell wasted no time and finished what was on the tray without tasting much of it.
There was cold chicken, a wedge of cheese, and fresh bread.
It was better than she had eaten in weeks, and none of it was more than fuel to be gotten down before she could rest. She was so tired, both emotionally and physically.
The nightdress Honoria had packed was finer than anything she’d ever put against her skin.
It was made of fine silk, soft from proper washing, with a thread of lace at the collar that had cost more, she guessed, than she’d earned in a month of setting bones.
She felt like a fraud just pulling it on, as though the fabric itself might sense the imposter and refuse to sit on her shoulders.
She crossed the room and sank into the bed. She let the lush pillow take the weight of her head, too heavy to hold up a moment longer.
She looked up at the elegant canopy, a dark green fabric with bits of golden thread swirling embroidered into it, catching what little candlelight remained in the room. Her mind was still turning over the day as she traced the patterns with her eyes, unable yet to let any of it go.
The Earl of Ashcroft was a man of contradictions. Broad-shouldered and imposing, his tall, powerful frame commanded whatever room he entered, impossible to ignore. He was watchful, unreadable, and as cold as ice. And, despite her better judgment, he had begun to intrigue Nell.
It had been so long, if ever, since she had granted herself the time to consider the opposite sex. Her life was about using her skills to help others, her own survival secondary.
There was something about Ashcroft that drew her gaze back again and again. Beneath the thick sweep of his rich, dark hair lay warm, deep brown eyes, which only mocked his icy exterior, his solitary state.
The East Wing, his sister closed off and guarded like she was made of glass, contradicted by the tenderness with which he guarded her.
The false name she’d have to learn to answer to, that is until she was married and assumed a new one.
She closed her eyes then, and sleep took her before her thoughts could catch up.