Chapter 18 Surrey #3
“Are you ready?” Mr. Knightley asked gently.
My shoulders were tight, but I gave him a bright smile. “I am just thinking how much has changed. Harriet might still marry a wealthy gentleman. She will be listed in the next Debrett’s, you know.”
Mr. Knightley’s laugh was curt. “If there is a next Debrett’s.”
“If you say things like that, I will have to scold you again about assuming the worst.” I took a bracing breath. “I am glad you are here, though. John hurt my elbow the last time we met.”
Mr. Knightley’s lip bent, but it was not a smile. He offered his arm, and we proceeded.
The front garden was nicely trimmed and weeded. I usually kept a few field flowers in the brass vase beside the front entry, but it was empty. The first difference.
I stopped at the door. The house was quiet. No one was visible through the windows.
When I returned from outings in our carriage, James, our coachman, would open the house for me. Or if I was simply out for a walk, I would stroll to the kitchen door and find it open, or wave to Serle through a window and she would let me in. Ladies did not carry a key to their own house.
Even if this door was unlocked, it was considered improper—or inadvisable, at least—to barge in on servants unannounced. They deserved a minute to prepare themselves. And what if John had replaced them? I might encounter strangers.
“I cannot believe I am unsure how to enter my own home,” I said.
“Permit me,” Mr. Knightley said as if my confusion were perfectly natural. He knocked.
After a minute, light steps approached. The door opened and a wonderfully familiar face peered out under a maid’s cap.
“Teresa!” I exclaimed. “Oh, what a relief. I was afraid you would be gone.”
“Miss!” she gasped. She curtsied, half-stumbling in shock.
I stepped over the threshold, but Teresa blocked me from going farther, lifting her trembling hands with fingers splayed.
“What are you doing?” I said, confused.
“You must not come in,” she whispered desperately. “Go. Just go.”
“I know John is here,” I assured her.
Her hands flew up to clap her cheeks. “And you came? Oh, Heavens.” She fumbled a dusting cloth from somewhere and began sniffling into it.
Anger rushed into me. “What has he done?” Then weighty steps thumped down the hall, and John strode into the entryway.
Now it was his turn to stare. Only his lips were animated, sucking frantically on his pipe like an excited fish. The house reeked of his tobacco, an obnoxious concoction that somehow involved cherries.
“I have returned,” I announced. That sounded grand.
He fumbled the pipe from his mouth. His empty lips puckered twice more, then unexpectedly split in a wide smile. “What a welcome surprise.” His head ratcheted toward Mr. Knightley.
“May I present Mr. Knightley,” I said. It seemed best to pretend their prior, brief meeting had never occurred.
They shook hands. The contrast was very gratifying, Mr. Knightley’s athletic grace, perfect dress, and solid shoulders beside John’s stooped, wrinkled, pudgy form.
But a civil greeting was not what I had expected.
Nor what Mr. Knightley expected. He uttered a terse “How do you do?” and gave me a mystified glance.
“You should have sent a letter that you were coming!” John exclaimed, seemingly manic with delight.
“I wrote many times,” I said, skirting the question. My earlier letters had not been answered, and it had seemed unwise to announce this visit.
John waved his pipe jovially. “The mails are hopeless. The letter carriers blame the war, but that is nonsense. It is pure laziness.” He scowled at Teresa.
“Go! We will use…” He stopped and gave me a disconcertingly stretched smile.
“What am I thinking! This is your home. Where would you like to recover from your trip?” He pulled out his pocket watch and squinted at it.
“The sunroom,” I said to Teresa. The parlor would feel like I was a visitor. “Tea, please. And sandwiches, if Serle has something to hand. We have had a long walk since breakfast.”
Teresa remained frozen, watching me with wide eyes, the fingers of one hand knotting in her apron. John tore his gaze from his watch and snapped, “Go!” at her before she hurried away.
John gestured for us to precede him down the hall. As we entered the sunroom, he muttered, “I will just check…” and scuttled away down the corridor. A distant door slammed.
I stood, thinking.
Mr. Knightley walked a tense circuit of the room. He ended facing me and said, “I owe you an apology. When I first called on Hartfield, your brother-in-law’s behavior led me to believe—”
I quieted him with a touch. “I have no doubt that he claimed Hartfield. It is this behavior that confuses me. He has never been deferential. Or even civil.” I examined the sunroom.
The decor was homey—a quartet of linens embroidered by me and a few friends, an exceedingly amateur watercolor I painted when I was fourteen, and several screens woven with dried flowers.
But the linens were hung in a different order.
The flowers on the screens were crushed.
And something deeper tickled inside my mind—wrong, wrong.
“Perhaps the law foiled his plan,” Mr. Knightley suggested. “Might he have found instructions from your father saying that you should have Hartfield?”
“If John found those, he would burn them.” Here, the tobacco reek was acrid enough to make my eyes water.
A brass plate was heaped with what must be a pound of tobacco ash.
Why would a man who despised crafts smoke in a room that even Papa called excessively frilly?
“Something is very wrong. Teresa was frightened. And Serle should have come running the moment she heard I was home.”
I left the sunroom and led Mr. Knightley through the dining room to the kitchen. The kitchen door was closed. It would not budge when I turned the latch; it was barred somehow. A bitter scent pricked the back of my throat.
I listened. Silence. The kitchen was never quiet.
I backtracked to the sunroom, almost running now, and tried the garden door. That opened, and I drew a relieved breath as we burst into the rear courtyard, surrounded by shining sun and birdsong.
We followed the flagstone path beside the house around to the kitchen. The windows had been boarded up from the inside. The dirty glass revealed nothing but rough-fitted planks.
“There you are!” John cried behind us, huffing as he jogged awkwardly around the corner. He pulled out a handkerchief to wipe his sweaty forehead. “Oh, you discovered the kitchen renovations. That was to be a surprise—”
“That is absurd,” I interrupted. “What are you really doing? Where is Serle?”
John pasted another unsettling grin on his face and reached for my shoulder. The gesture stopped abruptly midair. Mr. Knightley had caught his wrist, the motion so deft his hand seemed to materialize from nowhere.
“Do not,” Mr. Knightley said simply.
John’s grin drained like whey through sour curds. He pulled his hand back and patted his disarranged coat, eyeing us both. For the first time, he looked authentic—irritated and self-important.
“You were always clever, Emma,” he said grudgingly “Very well. I will speak frankly. But inside.” He turned and stomped away.
“What do you wish to do?” Mr. Knightley asked, crossing his arms and watching my brother-in-law’s retreating back.
“I wish to speak frankly,” I said and followed John.
John had cluttered Papa’s study with magazines and loose papers. The odor of pipe smoke was less intense, but the stale undertones were sour. John collapsed heavily into Papa’s chair. Mr. Knightley drew out a chair for me, then took a seat himself.
“First,” John announced, wagging his finger at me, “remember that I have been working myself to exhaustion. While I hardly sleep from worry, you gallivant about spending money willy-nilly.”
I was not sure how to answer that. “You have not provided a penny for my survival in a year. A penny that would come from my funds.”
He glowered from Papa’s chair. “You nagged enough, though. You and Isabella are the same. Do you think I withhold money for selfish reasons? Nothing could be more untrue.”
“Why, then?” I asked.
He dug out his pocket watch and plunked it on the desk, then spun it like a top, sulking like a child.
“He has lost your funds,” Mr. Knightley said, his tenor voice as cold as a judge pronouncing punishment. “He has lost everything. He only lacks the courage to admit it. Look at his coat—secondhand, not even re-tailored. Or his watch. Copper plate.”
John plopped his fleshy palm over the watch, but not before I noticed the dirty fringe of verdigris.
“I did not lose the funds! They were as good as stolen from me. It is those miners and weavers extorting their exorbitant pay. They infect workers with unreasonable expectations. I have written an excellent letter to The Times—well, I plan to write it—explaining that the government must rise to the occasion and assist gentlemen investors who selflessly assume risk…”
My swelling emotions washed his words away.
More than once in the last months, I had found myself holding a forgotten book or ignoring a conversation while privately considering the unthinkable: John had stolen my fortune.
Discovering that the Woodhouse fortune was literally destroyed provided icy finality…
but strangely, the emotion rising the quickest was relief.
If the money was gone, John no longer had power over me.
He was now ranting about Luddites. When he took a breath, I said, “I am reclaiming Hartfield. It is time you left.”
“No!” John cried desperately. “Not yet! You have not heard my plan! Our fortune can be restored!”
Mr. Knightley shifted to the edge of his seat. He seemed eager to assist John’s departure. That was tempting, but the nagging sensation in my mind had returned—wrong, wrong.
Like the sunroom, this room was disarranged. The books on Papa’s shelf were out of order. Some were even upside down.
An ephemeral black rope flickered through the room’s wall and vanished.
Nobody else batted an eye. Was this some new form of the miasma?
I had not answered, so John resumed talking. He seemed unable to abide silence. “The complication is that Isabella refused to come to Hartfield. She whined about exposing the children to war. I do not understand it. She is usually such an obedient creature, but she argued endlessly.”
That did not surprise me. Isabella obsessed about her children’s safety. But I had forgotten that she and her children were victims as well. I would need to reach out to her through some channel that John could not intercept.
John’s chin was flushing from his desperate chatter. “Women do not understand that war is a tremendous boon for all parties involved! The Crown opened their vaults. Military spending is sky high. Why, commodity prices have risen—”
Mr. Knightley, apparently, could no longer listen in silence. “And yet, you lost your fortune and another that was entrusted to you.”
John sputtered, “In hindsight, anyone can see that prices rose. But at the time, the very best gentlemen at my club agreed that Parliament’s spendthrift policies would cause a glut. The speculative opportunity was tremendous.”
I was thinking about my sister. “Why is Isabella’s absence a complication?”
“Oh.” John blinked furiously. “I had promised to bring her. When she refused, I had no choice but to come alone. That… uh… disappointed people.”
“At last, something I believe,” I said. “I do not wish to hear any more. I think you should return to my sister. And you had best confess to her, as I shall visit.”
John fell silent. Then, with surprising dignity, he rose. He retrieved his pocket watch and tucked it into his waistcoat. “Do not think you have achieved a victory.”
He strode out of Papa’s study. Mr. Knightley and I exchanged a look and hurried after him.
We caught up at the front door, where John turned and said, “I promised you frankness, so here it is. Isabella had one merit. She was born a Woodhouse. When she refused to come, I had to barter whatever value I could find in your precious Hartfield. That was yet another disappointment. The search turned up nothing.” He smirked.
“However, there will be no ‘confessions.’ Because you came. The other Woodhouse.”
Again, an inky rope slipped through my vision, twining like the questing tentacle of a sea creature. This time, I recognized it. It was a binding, like those pent up within unbound draca, but perverted. Diseased. The untethered tip crept close to my breast, then shied away as if burned.
The twitching root led toward the kitchen.
“What did you search for?” Mr. Knightley asked. His voice was deadly soft.
“They searched for an amulet.” John opened the front door.
Armed soldiers had filled the carriage drive—French troops with their elaborate white crossbelts and tall plumed hats, and, standing to one side and scowling in gray uniforms, American soldiers from the newly formed Southern Confederate Alliance.