Chapter 9 The Death of Lord Jasper #2
A door opened above them. Both women moved apart as if pulled by invisible threads. Jasper appeared at the head of the stair in a dark dressing coat, one hand resting lightly on the rail. In the dimness, his face had the elegance of a portrait and the warmth of one.
"How touching," he said. "Scholarship has discovered the staircase.
My dear Helena, I had wondered whether the architecture of the house would be sufficient to draw you out, or whether I must send a footman with Latin labels pinned to the walls.
Miss Brown, I hope my wife has not been delaying your rest with domestic concerns.
Ladies often imagine private anxieties to be more interesting than professional duties.
It is one of the many vanities marriage attempts, with limited success, to refine. "
Helena became still in the way marble is still when it has been carved under pressure. "Miss Brown was returning from the library. I delayed her only by standing where she needed to pass."
"How generous of you to make obstruction sound like etiquette." Jasper's gaze moved to Constance. "You have been working late?"
"Yes, my lord. The catalogue required comparison with several shelf marks. I found more irregularity than expected."
"Irregularity is an accusation when spoken by a cataloguer. Shall I be alarmed?"
"Only if you prefer your books to remain mysterious for the wrong reasons."
For an instant, Jasper's pleasantness thinned.
"There are wrong reasons for mystery? I had thought mystery merely the name ignorance gives to property it has not yet acquired.
Still, I am glad you labor. Tomorrow, we shall review the east cabinet together.
I dislike strangers discovering family history without a family member present to correct their enthusiasm. "
"I would welcome clarity."
"No doubt. Clarity is beloved by those who have not inherited consequences." He turned to Helena. "My dear, you look tired. Go to your rooms. I will come presently if I require you. Or perhaps I shall not. Anticipation, properly managed, is a useful discipline."
Constance felt Helena's silence like a wound opening in the air. She could do nothing without making the wound public. That was the genius of Jasper's cruelty. It turned decency into another trap.
Helena inclined her head. "As you wish."
"Always," Jasper said softly.
He withdrew from the landing. Helena did not move until his door closed above. Then she looked at Constance, not with pleading, not with fear, but with a severity that demanded obedience more effectively than Jasper's command had done.
"Go," she said.
Constance went.
She did not sleep. The room assigned to her had a narrow bed, a washstand, a chair upholstered in faded green, and a writing table placed beneath a window that admitted a view of chimney pots and a strip of wet slate roof.
It was comfortable in the way guest rooms in rich houses are comfortable when no one expects the guest to feel at home.
Constance sat at the writing table with her wrapper drawn close and her satchel open before her.
She took out the hidden scrap and copied its marks again by the last inch of candle: H.D.
not to see. M.D. insists. Book with red fore-edge. Dead husband entry removed.
The phrase troubled her most because it seemed absurd and deliberate at once.
Dead husband. Jasper was not dead. The words might refer to some older Dacre, some previous widow, some theological title, some legal joke written by a man who enjoyed private cruelties.
Yet the phrase had lodged in her mind with the pressure of prophecy.
Agnes would have hated that thought. Words called misfortune because they told it where to come.
A clock struck eleven. The sound passed through the walls with the solemn confidence of machinery. Shortly after, Constance heard footsteps in the corridor. A man's tread, controlled and unhurried. Then another, lighter, or perhaps the echo of the first. A door closed. The house held its breath.
She waited.
Voices rose and fell somewhere below, distant enough to be indistinct, close enough to prove that silence had failed.
Jasper's voice she recognized first because it carried authority even when softened by walls.
The other voice was lower than she expected, a woman's voice perhaps, or a man speaking carefully.
She crossed to her door and opened it an inch.
The corridor outside was dark. From below came a fragment.
"... not yours to use."
Then Jasper, clearer: "Everything in this house has been mine to preserve because others lacked the courage to be cruel in time. You mistake possession for vulgar appetite. I mistake nothing. I understand what things cost when they are allowed to become public."
The other voice answered, too low for words.
Constance stepped into the corridor with bare feet, the candle shielded by her hand.
The sound seemed to come from the direction of Jasper's private study, though Dacre House carried voices strangely through its old service vents and polished stairwells. She heard a sharper sentence.
"You will not put it on her."
Her heart struck once, hard.
Jasper laughed. "My dear, the world put it on her the day she took my name. I merely understand the convenience of what society has already prepared."
The words that followed were lost beneath a gust of rain against the glass. Then came the sound of something falling, not large, not yet terrible. A chair perhaps. A book. A drawer pulled too hard. Constance moved to the head of the stair and saw a slice of light under the study door below.
A figure crossed the lower hall.
For one suspended moment, Constance saw only the movement of dark fabric and a pale hand gathering a sleeve close at the wrist. The figure turned away from the study passage and toward the smaller stair that led to the family rooms. The face was hidden by shadow.
The height could have been Helena's. Or Marianne's.
Or any woman taught by the house to make herself narrow when moving at night.
Constance took one step down.
A door opened sharply below. Jasper's voice came out, not loud, but edged. "Enough. You have always mistaken restraint for virtue. It is only fear with better posture."
The reply did not carry. The study door closed again.
Constance remained on the stair until her candle burned her fingers with a bead of wax.
Then she retreated, not because curiosity had been satisfied, but because she suddenly understood Agnes's warning.
Corridors after dark belonged to those who could lie about them.
Constance could not lie well enough yet.
If she were found outside her room, she would become part of whatever story Jasper wished to tell in the morning.
Midnight approached. The house quieted. Rain softened to a steady tapping.
Constance sat fully dressed on the edge of her bed, the candle extinguished, listening until listening became a kind of sickness.
She thought of Helena's hand on the banister.
She thought of the dark sleeve crossing the hall.
She thought of Jasper saying that the world had put something on Helena the day she took his name.
Then the scream came.
It was not loud at first. It began as a broken cry somewhere below, a sound cut short by disbelief.
Then a bell rang violently, not the measured bell of service but the frantic wrenching of a hand that had forgotten order.
Feet struck the passage. A servant called for Mrs. Harrowby.
Another voice cried, "Doctor Bell, send for Doctor Bell.
" Then Agnes, unmistakable even through walls, shouted Helena's name with such naked terror that Constance was moving before she had decided to stand.
She took her lamp, fumbled with the match, failed once, succeeded, and ran toward the stair.
Doors opened around her. Mrs. Harrowby emerged with her cap askew, demanding sense from people who had none to give.
A footman hurried past without coat or dignity.
Roland appeared at the upper landing in shirtsleeves, his face grey beneath yesterday's charm.
"What is it?" he demanded of no one. "For God's sake, what has happened?"
No one answered him. The answer was gathering below.
Constance descended with the others and followed the noise toward Jasper's private study.
The door stood open. Light spilled into the corridor from two lamps and the low red mouth of the fire.
In the threshold, Agnes held Helena by the shoulders as if trying to keep her from falling or from returning to the room.
Helena wore the same deep blue silk, but one sleeve was darkened near the cuff.
Her face had no color at all. On her right glove, along the seam where thumb met palm, blood had dried in a thin line.
Inside the study, Lord Jasper Dacre lay on the carpet beside the large mahogany desk.
Death had made him both less and more himself.
The handsome discipline of his features remained, but the authority had gone out of them, leaving an expression almost surprised by its own interruption.
One arm lay bent beneath him at an unnatural angle.
Blood darkened the rug near his temple and had spread into the pattern so that crimson roses in the weave became impossible to distinguish from the real stain.
A heavy brass lamp lay overturned nearby, its chimney cracked but not shattered.
Several papers had slid from the desk. A small decanter stood uncorked.
The private catalogue was open, face down, as if someone had dropped it in haste or contempt.