Chasing the Heiress (27 page)

In the evenings, the mistress would read from deportment books or from revivalist sermons while the able-bodied inmates embroidered in the half-dark of the firelight. Lucy found it strange that the matron would read long lists of how to behave at a ball when her audience largely would never have occasion to attend one. The matron would sell the best of their embroidery at a shop in London, so those who were particularly accomplished sewed all day under the matron's watchful eye. Lucy had realized that she would never find a way of escape if she were too accomplished at the needle, so she sewed poorly. Each time she made her stitches uneven or knotted the thread, the matron hit her knuckles hard with a ruler, leaving bruises across the backs of her fingers and hand. But she kept up the illusion until eventually the matron was convinced she lacked the ability to improve, and she was trusted only with the most rudimentary repairs.

While her work was often sloppy, no one could fault her for being disagreeable. In each task, she acted as if she were a bit dim. Meekly apologetic, she never fought back, but instead stood quietly awaiting each blow.

She was afraid, afraid she would have to spend her life here, unremembered, unknown, called by a name that wasn't her own. The worn hands she had been so proud of at Nell's only lent truth to her cousin's tales. No lady would have the hands of a scullery maid.

* * *

She learned quickly that it was safest to agree and, when she couldn't simply agree, to say nothing at all. To bow her head and appear contrite. Silence was safety.

The trick was to avoid offending the mistress. Yet this was harder than one might imagine.

The cold made her fingers clumsy, as did lack of food. If she fell asleep at her sewing frame, she awoke to the hard rap of a switch on her fingers and a lecture on the sins of laziness. The cold made the switch ache to her bones, but if she cried out, more punishment followed.

Matron believed that stern discipline would lead her guests to lives of useful domesticity. She'd been told that Lucy was headstrong and lazy, so she did everything to beat both qualities out of her charge. Whether her charge complied from exhaustion or beatings, the matron didn't care.

* * *

Moll was howling again and beating her head against the wall. Luckily, since the last time, when Moll had tried to strangle her, they had allowed Lucy to move to another corner of the room, one where Moll couldn't reach her.

“She relives the happy moments does our Molly. She sings to her babe, welcomes her man home. They both died in a fire, and Molly was the only one got out.” Smith carried new straw for Moll's bed. “They say she tried to throw herself into the flames, but some cruel man passing by thought it would be better for her to live than die that day. He held her back, and her mind broke with sorrow. She lives in a past that's better than her present. But if I were her, I would too. If I could find a happy moment in the past, instead of this place, I would want to hold on to it. For her, we're the nightmare.”

“Will I go mad?” Lucy was afraid even to voice the words.

“If you do, miss, who could blame you—or any of you? I suppose the way to know if you are sane is if you imagine things in your world that you couldn't know, couldn't imagine.”

“But can't we imagine anything?”

“That's the problem. How do we tell what's real and what's not? Perhaps we're both sleeping now, and you've dreamed me up because you need a friend.”

* * *

On the battlefield, or rather in the camps, which were like the battlefield, she'd learned all the things she couldn't do. Save her mother, her father, James.

She'd learned to take each day's gifts as they came, the flight of a triangle of geese in winter, an alpine flower growing amid the snow, the song of frogs by a pond in spring, the scent of grass after a rain. She tried as best she could to remember those things when her senses were blasted by the acrid smoke of powder, the deafening noise of the cannons.

In the asylum, the only gifts were her memories. More and more, as she worked, she lived in a place that was long past.

* * *

“Come, come, girls. Mind your work.” Matron stood at the edge of the floor Lucy and Rebecca were mopping, holding her switch in her hand. “This passageway will be our visitors' first impression of how well our lodgings are maintained for our guests.”

Lucy and Rebecca had been mopping for hours—every floor in a single day. Delegates of the parliamentary committee on asylums were visiting all the private asylums, and Matron had learned that hers was next on their list. Matron was determined that she would have no criticisms of her care.

Lucy's knees and wrists ached, and her fingers were blue from the cold. Cold stone floors, bitterly cold air blowing across the loggia from the garden, and cold water. She flexed her fingers to force some warm blood back into them, but there was no warmth left anywhere in her body.

“Sally, stop dawdling. That corner behind you needs attention.”

Lucy backed up, pulling the bucket of freezing water with her. Another five feet, and they would be through. Exhausted, she closed her eyes as she scrubbed, back and forth, both hands on the towel, the way that Matron preferred. Then the towel wouldn't move. She opened her eyes to see Matron's foot, holding the towel firmly in place.

“Do you think, Sally, that you can adequately scrub this floor without watching your work?”

Lucy shook her head meekly as Matron raised her switch. Rebecca tried to move out of the range of Matron's ire, but in doing so, caught her rag under her bucket and tipped it, and its dirty water, onto the floor. And Matron's new black slippers.

Matron screamed for Smith and for the men who dealt with difficult guests. Then she beat Rebecca's back with the switch, punctuating each word with another blow. “We . . . will . . . see . . . if a night or two in the basement doesn't teach you to be less insolent.”

But when the men came, Matron sent both Rebecca and Lucy to the basement.

* * *

The basement was dark, pitch black. Lucy could hear movement, the sounds of mice—she hoped they were mice—squeaking at the corners of the walls, felt a spider's web trail across her face. Lucy pulled herself into a ball, tucking her feet under the edge of her dress and pulling the fabric under her as much as she could. For the first time at the asylum, she was truly afraid: of the dark, of what lived there, of the men who might choose to visit them, of never being allowed to be Lucy again, of having no place to hide.

Each time the camp had moved, Lucy's father or mother would always find a place for the two women to hide—“just in case,” her father had always said. When she was young, it had been a game, but as she grew older she understood more fully what the stakes were if they didn't hide—or if they were found. They had never used the hiding places, until one day—after her mother had died—a battle five miles away had turned into a rout, and an officer had ridden ahead to warn the camps, sounding the alarm as he rode on.

The hiding place she had chosen was in the large rocks at the edge of their camp. Hidden behind brush and twigs, she'd found a declivity under one of the larger boulders big enough for her to crawl under. She'd wrapped herself in a brown wool blanket, and then she'd curled in as far as she could, pulling the blanket over and around her. Behind the brush, she could only see out from a small space close to the ground.

The memory was so clear that she could still feel the cold rock through the wool at her back. She could smell the wool, wool the color of dirt and stone, heavy with the grit of a thousand miles, grit one could never completely beat out of the cloth.

The horses had come first, the beat of their hooves resounding in the ground beside her face. Then the foot soldiers had passed before her, yelling to each other, falling, screaming. Then nothing, but the terrifying silence of the battlefield, where, in protest, even nature refused to speak.

If no one came for her by nightfall, then no one would come. Dead or captured.

Once more, she had heard her father's voice: “If you are ever hiding, Lucy girl, you stay quiet. Close your eyes, and listen. But breathe slow and long, letting your breath take your fear away, so that you can be ready if someone finds you. Friend or foe, you must be ready. If you have a long wait, then sleep when you can, so that if you need to run, you have rest on your side.”

She'd waited, forcing her body to calm, to half-sleep. She'd watched the light change, as morning became afternoon and afternoon began to spread into evening.

Eventually she'd heard steps, then a low patterned whistle much like the English nightingale's. Her heart had risen and fallen in the same moment. Their signal, but not her father's pitch.

A pair of boots approached, scuffed and dirty, the bottoms of the trousers sewn with buckskin. One of Wellington's men. But she'd waited.
Caution
, her father's voice reminded her.
Strategy. Don't reveal your intentions until you are ready to act.

She'd heard her name, pitched low. “Lucy. All's well. It's over. You're safe. We're all safe.”

James. The kind-eyed young officer who had begun to smile shyly at her—always respectful James. He'd pulled aside the brush and twigs, and she'd pushed aside the wool blanket, looking up into his broad open face. His wide smile had reassured her that her father was yet alive. He'd sunk onto one knee to help her out, her body stiff from the cramped quarters. His hands in hers had been warm, comforting.

He'd pulled her to her feet, and when she wavered, her feet not quite under her from the hours of inactivity, he'd pulled her into his arms and held her upright. She'd leaned into him, his warmth, strength, kindness. Their mutual relief—at finding themselves still alive—filled the first time they'd touched, giving it an unexpected sweetness and poignancy. He'd kissed the top of her head as she leaned her face into his chest. Then, he'd let her go. He'd picked up the blanket and folded it briskly, then offered her his arm to escort her back to the camp.

Tears welled, and she allowed them to fall. All her losses seemed to lead her to this dark place—and the monsters without.

She'd lost her father and James on the same day. It had seemed ironic even then: they had lived through every battle, only to die in the last.

The battle had been horrific, so many dead, so many wounded, maimed. She'd focused on caring for the wounded, the dying. Hours had passed without her being able to think of anything but the broken body in front of her.

She'd been in the surgery when she received the news of their deaths. She'd just finished bandaging the wounds of a young sergeant when the room had grown silent as it always did when Wellington and his adjutants entered the tent. But this time had been different. She'd known from the moment that Wellington approached and took her hands in his. She'd heard the words, received her father's pistol and sword from a young officer. She'd felt the grief, waves of grief, but she had stood, without crumbling, an officer's daughter to the last.

Then another young man—one of James's men—stepped forward. Only a bit younger than she was, he held out a piece of folded oil cloth, and she knew what was inside. James had written her a letter and carried it in his boot, another “just in case.” She took it and laid it with her father's effects. She shook each officer's hand as he offered words of condolence. It had seemed like an endless stream of officers and condolences. She'd heard each one as if from a great distance. Then she'd listened as they outlined the plans to return her home, nodded to the officer who'd volunteered to ensure her safe return to her family. From their faces, she knew they grieved with her: her father had been well-regarded, well-loved, and they had all, in some fashion or other, seen her grow up. In some way, she was each officer's daughter.

Her father's body had been brought to her later, delivered to the camp because he was an officer and because his men knew she waited for him. He looked as he had in life, but pale, killed by a bullet to the chest, the kind of wound that would have killed him almost instantly.

Her lover's body she never saw. His men said they wished for her to remember him in life. And she knew what that meant, that what remained had been too damaged to bring back.

She'd read James's letter in the wagon back to Lisbon. It had been brief,

She'd carried the letter as James had done, in the lining of her boots. And then once she had it memorized, she didn't need to carry it at all. It was hidden with her other treasures in the base of a rotten oak, already buried as she was.

She laid her head on her arms, folded across her knees, and wept.

That night, she dreamed of Colin loving her, of a bright sun-colored room like the one at her great-aunt's house, of awakening in his arms as he kissed her forehead. And no one disturbed her dreams.

Chapter Thirty-One

After a month, Colin accepted that Lucy had made another choice, one that did not include him. She had simply vanished, and because he had searched for her in every town and kitchen within ten miles of London, he had to acknowledge that she did not want to be found. Even then, he collected her things from the boardinghouse and stored them in a trunk in Sophia's attic. Aidan would have argued for a clean break, but Sophia simply pointed the way to the attic, then gave him a copy of its key. Eventually, he would give the dresses back to Em if she wanted them, but for now, he kept them—a memory he was not yet able to release.

Then he'd taken Dart, his favorite, fastest horse, and ridden to Hartshorn Hall, stopping only to let the horse rest, speaking to no one at the inns, enveloped in a sorrow as black as his overcoat.

Em had welcomed him without question when he'd ridden up alone in the rain, drenched to the bone.

She'd met him in the stable yard, having already called for a small army of groomsmen to unsaddle and brush down his horse. Her eyes had searched his face for only a moment before she put the house into motion, preparing the room he always occupied, drawing a hot bath, sending for dry clothes. Then she had stood beside him as he ensured Dart was dry and fed, holding his hand in hers.

“She didn't come, Em.” He turned away, but Em could see his eyes were wet with tears. “I never considered she wouldn't be there. That she didn't want me.”

Em had never considered it either. She'd seen Lucy's face, and she had been sure she'd read love there.

She wrapped him in her arms, as he had her so many times in their youth. “She must have had a reason. Wait. Perhaps something delayed her, perhaps she's there even now, hoping you will return.”

“I waited a month, Em. I went to every lodging house, tracked out every road. No one had even seen a woman of her description. I went back to the inn where I met her, but no one had seen her since I took her away with me.”

“I don't believe it, Colin. Something isn't right.”

But he didn't hear her. As she watched, the mask he'd worn since Belgium stiffened back into place. Some might believe it a function of his military training, but she knew better. “No, we made no promises. Even when I told her I loved her, she said nothing. The fortnight's delay was clearly a way to let me go easily. I must accept her decision.”

“Stella is here with her usual retinue. But I will make your regrets at dinner. Tell them you have caught cold in the rain.”

“No.” He clasped her hands in his. “I failed you on Stella's last visit. I will not fail you now.”

* * *

“Sam has escaped to the cattle markets with his valet.” Jeffreys stood at Colin's bedroom door, with a pressed suit over his shoulder. “So, I have taken the liberty of finding you suitable dinner attire out of his closet.”

Colin allowed the butler to enter. “Thank you, Jeffreys. I should have considered that the Hall might be entertaining a house party.”

“If Lady Em would allow it, I would have put out Stella's guests sometime last week. As usual, they are a vapid lot. Field, stream, and dinner—their only interests.”

“How much longer do you anticipate them staying?” The jacket Jeffreys had chosen fit well, if not perfectly. Colin held out his arms for Jeffreys to help him into the waistcoat; he felt a stiffness in his side where the bullet had gone through, but no pain. Lucy's ministrations . . . no, he turned away from the thought.

“I am hoping for rain. That usually sends them packing their bags for drier climes—or London. Last time, I hid all the dice and cards. But this time Mrs. Cane has thwarted me by bringing her own. So, I've been burning the London papers as soon as they arrive, hoping the lot will grow desperate for news of the
ton
and take their leave. I'm sure Lady Em will be grateful to have one friend to bear some of the brunt of Mrs. Cane's pettiness.”

“Has Stella been uncivil?” Colin lifted his chin for Jeffreys to arrange his cravat.

“She has grown more so now that she has a son and Lady Em remains unmarried. Lady Em indulges Mrs. Cane and her guests because she believes her father would wish her to be gracious.”

“I will do my best to divert Stella from tormenting Em.” Colin pulled on the ends of his waistcoat to straighten it.

“May I take away your wet clothes?” Jeffreys held Colin's suit and trousers in his arms.

“Yes, but just a moment.” Colin slipped his finger in the inside waistcoat pocket and transferred the ring—Lucy's ring—into his new one. He had been carrying it with him since he'd bought it, and—like her clothes—he was not yet ready to let it go.

Jeffreys held open the dressing room door. “You should find the party gathering in the drawing room.”

* * *

“I've been waiting to ask you for some time, Mr. Somerville, what your intentions are toward my dear cousin,” Stella declaimed loudly enough for the whole company to hear.

The room grew quiet. Stella loved an audience for her performances, and Em kept her in check by not having large dinners unless she knew Stella was in London or Northumbria.

“It seems my dear cousin has lost even your regard,” Stella continued, “though I suppose no one can blame you, disfigured as she still is.”

Em watched Colin's face, hoping he would not rise to Stella's challenge. She was too far from him to place a warning hand on his arm.

“It's lovely that the scars have faded as they have, and certainly they are not so bad as those on poor Miss Feather-stonebaugh. She's retired entirely from society I've heard, and her young man has begged off.” She turned to the crowd, who nodded sympathetically. “But I can't complain really. If you have no wish to marry our Em, my son will make a fine lord. It's a foolish thing, letting Em inherit instead of a man fit to manage.”

Em had heard the speech many times in recent years, but never at a public dinner. And Colin had never before been present when Stella arrived to “inspect” Em's management on the justification of needing to ensure her son's patrimony. It had made Em wish her father would marry his French mistress and provide Em with a stepbrother who could take over the estates. But it was her father's and her grandfather's wish that Em have the estates after his death, and they had both spent a great deal of money to ensure she would inherit.

Colin's smile widened, and Em's heart sank. It never helped to challenge Stella; she would only find some petty revenge.

Colin turned toward the room and held up his glass as if to toast. Had the room not already been silenced by Stella's cruelties, his presence—honed by his military bearing—would have done so. Even then, he waited for several seconds before he began to speak.

“I had hoped to have this conversation first with Lady Emmeline. But perhaps surrounded by our friends . . .” He paused and looked sharply at Stella. “. . . and family. I should address my intentions. From our childhood, it has been expected that we would marry, though we have never been formally engaged. My time in the wars and this past year have made me reconsider all my commitments, my obligation to Lady Emmeline included.”

Em stood taller, preparing for the aftermath of his speech, preparing for the look of victory on Stella's face. But Colin was right: it was time to make their relationship clear.

He walked toward her, all eyes in the room following him until he stood in front of her. She breathed in as he took her hands in his, his strong hands giving her strength.

“Would you, Lady Emmeline Hartley, do me the great of honor of becoming my wife?”

She watched, stunned, as he took a ring from his inner breast pocket. Lucy's ring, not hers. No, not hers.

He knelt on one knee and placed the ring on her finger as she searched his face. She saw nothing but resolve and kindness.

“Say yes, Em.” He squeezed her hand.

“Are you sure?” she whispered, aware of their gazes.

He nodded seriously, his hands tight on hers. He rose and held her to her chest, as always a safe refuge. “Say yes,” he whispered.

She pulled away, pitching her voice so everyone could hear.

“Then yes, Colin Somerville, yes.”

He picked her up and swung her in his arms, as the room cheered. As he put her down, he whispered in her ear, “It was always supposed to be me and you, Em. I know that now.”

His smile was wide and sincere. No one, not even Stella, questioned his sincerity.