His at Night (39 page)

As they reached the ground floor, Elissande was again glancing back at her husband and her aunt, as she had done numerous times during their descent. So it was Vere who first saw the inevitable.

“Lady Vere, I believe your uncle has come to,” he said.

In his arms, Aunt Rachel trembled. Elissande laid a hand on her shoulder to calm her. Her joy at finding her aunt safe and sound diminished: Her uncle was still alive, still capable of hurting them and haunting them.

He certainly appeared so: In the flickering light of the lanterns, his gaze was chilling, his bloodied face as ominously arrogant as ever.

They were now at the bottom of the staircase. “Which way should I turn, my dear?” Vere asked.

His tone alerted Elissande that she should be the one giving directions. She touched him on the elbow to let him know she’d understood. “I’d like you to go to the police station and fetch the chief inspector and as many constables as you can convince to come with you. I will remain here to keep an eye on…things.”

“Right away, my lady.”

“And Mrs. Douglas will go with you. She has been in this house long enough.”

“Of course.” He set down Aunt Rachel carefully. “We’ll just be heading toward the door then, Mrs. Douglas.”

“And so you will gleefully hand me over to the police, when I’ve taken such trouble to come and see the two of you?” said her uncle. He spoke with an uncharacteristic slur—Elissande hoped she’d done serious and lasting damage to his jaw—but as ever his menace was there, a poison that destroyed slowly but inexorably.

“Yes,” she said, with immense satisfaction.

“All these years being the father you’ve never had, and this is the gratitude I receive.”

She smiled, the first time she’d meant it before her uncle in “all these years.” “You will receive exactly as much gratitude as you deserve.”

“No mercy then?” The icy, pure malice in his eyes would have frightened her if he hadn’t been bound tighter than Ebenezer Scrooge’s purse. “Will you come to see me hang also?”

“No,” she said. “I have no desire to ever see you again.”

She turned to Vere. “Please hurry.”

“I will,” he said. He offered his arm to Aunt Rachel. “Mrs. Douglas?”

Aunt Rachel cast a quick, apprehensive glance toward her husband, then placed her hand on Vere’s arm.

“I see vows of marriage mean no more to you than
a game of charades, Rachel,” said Douglas. “But then, they never did, did they?”

Aunt Rachel hesitated. Elissande decided there was no more point in keeping up the lie. “Do not listen to anything he says, Aunt Rachel. I know he married you under false pretenses; he is in no position to chastise anyone on the solemnity of vows.”

Aunt Rachel stared at her. “How…how do you know?”

“False pretenses.” Her uncle sneered. “You have perpetrated your share of false pretenses too, haven’t you, Rachel? I know your lies. I know the truth of what happened to Christabel.”

Aunt Rachel swayed. Vere caught her. “Are you all right, Mrs. Douglas?”

She breathed hard and fast. “If I may—if I may rest for a moment.”

Vere helped her sit down on one of the lower steps. Elissande sat down next to her and hugged her tight. “Shhh. It will be all right.”

Her uncle laughed softly. “You think so? Why should she be all right when I haven’t been in twenty-four years?” He gazed at Aunt Rachel. “Everything I’ve done in my life, I’ve done for you. To be worthy of your hand, to keep you in the style befitting a princess. I worshiped you.
I worshiped you!”

Aunt Rachel began to shake.

Elissande bit into her lower lip. Her hand itched for her reticule. Instead she rose. “Can we gag him?” she said to Vere. “We’ve heard enough from him today.”

“I’ve some chloroform with me,” he answered.

She clasped his arm briefly. He was ever to be relied upon in a situation like this.

“Don’t be rash, my dear,” said her uncle. “I am willing to offer you a deal. If you don’t wish to hear from me again, then let me go with the necklace.”

She laughed out of incredulity. “Such bargains you offer, sir. Allow me to remind you that when you are swinging from the gallows, I won’t ever hear from you again either.
And
we’ll keep the necklace.”

Douglas chuckled. “Perhaps you would listen to a word of advice from your aunt? Mrs. Douglas, won’t you say that our beloved niece, with her contempt and loathing for me, should give much to purchase my silence?”

Aunt Rachel stared blankly at her feet, still shaking.

“Rachel!” her uncle said sharply.

Aunt Rachel jerked and looked reluctantly at him.

“Would you not say, Rachel, that some secrets are better left…buried?”

Aunt Rachel recoiled.

Elissande had had enough of his cat-and-mouse games. “My lord, the chloroform, please.”

“Then I shall divulge it now,” said her uncle, no doubt imagining that he was still the master of Highgate Court and that his merest utterings shook the earth.

“No!” Aunt Rachel cried. “No. Ellie, he’s right. Let him go.”

“Absolutely not!” Elissande’s voice rose with
frustration. Aunt Rachel could not possibly be this easily manipulated, with her erstwhile tormentor bound and helpless, and herself surrounded and protected. “We cannot trust him. We let him go today and he will be back in six months. And think of everyone he murdered: Do those poor souls not deserve some justice?”

“The real Edmund Douglas did atrocious things to and with the natives,” her uncle said smoothly. “So don’t imagine you are avenging some pure, blameless innocent.”

“It doesn’t matter. I am going to silence you. I am going to the police station to turn you in. And I am going to hire private guards, so you will not escape again.”

Her uncle sighed. “Listen to her, Rachel. I should have taken more of an interest in her, don’t you think? The decisiveness, the ruthlessness, the willingness to ride roughshod over all obstacles in her way: She quite reminds me of myself at that age.”

“Don’t you dare compare us,” Elissande snapped.

“Why not? You are my flesh and blood. Why shouldn’t I compare us?”

A terrible premonition tingled her spine. But she ignored it. “Your daughter died when she was an infant. I am not related to you except by marriage.”

Her uncle smiled, a smile that would make a glacier of the Mediterranean. “No, my child, your cousin died. My
daughter
never did.”

It was as if Goliath had struck her on the head with her very own reticule.

“You are lying!” she shouted reflexively.

“You see, your mother found me out,” he said calmly. “And I wept and begged her not to leave, if only for the sake of our unborn child. And she lied to me—oh, how sweetly she lied. She vowed that of course she would always be mine, till her dying day.”

“You said you’d kill me if I left,” Aunt Rachel said, almost inaudibly.

Douglas turned toward his wife. “Did you expect me to simply let you go? To give up my wife and my child? I believed your lies of faithful love, until you spit in my face and told me it was
my
daughter who had died, instead of your niece.

“You would rather my daughter grew up thinking that her father was a wastrel and her mother a whore. You would rather that she believed herself a penniless orphan. I should have killed you then, but I loved you too much.”

Elissande felt faint, but curiously calm, as if surrounded by thick castle walls, as if the din and mayhem outside those walls—Genghis Khan and his ransacking army—had nothing to do with her. She was not there. She was somewhere else entirely.

Her husband placed his hand on her back and murmured words of concern. She only extended her palm for the chloroform. He gave her the bottle and a handkerchief. She soaked the handkerchief, walked to her uncle, and pressed it into his face.

W
ill Lord Vere be able to handle everything?” asked Aunt Rachel, as the train pulled out amidst much whistling and steaming.

Vere remained on the platform, watching their departure. Still in his cabbie guise, he had driven Elissande and Aunt Rachel to the rail station, so they could leave Exeter and its ordeal behind.
Much better that Mrs. Douglas recuperate at home than at a police station
, he’d said.

But his home was not
theirs
, was it?

“He will be fine,” said Elissande.

He receded farther and farther from view, his absence a sharp emptiness within her. Finally the train station became only a buoy of light in the darkness and he was lost from her sight.

“I suppose…I suppose you will want to know everything,” said her aunt.

No, not her aunt, her
mother
. Elissande turned her gaze to that familiar face, less gaunt than before but
still aged far before her time, and felt a wave of terrible sadness.

“Only if you feel strong enough for it, ma’am.”

She didn’t know if
she
was strong enough for it.

“I can manage, I think,” said Aunt Rachel with a weak smile. “But I don’t quite know where to start.”

Elissande thought back to what her husband had recounted earlier. It was an effort not to shudder. “I’ve been told that my uncle—my father—had painted you as a good, kind angel long before you were married. You did not know who he was?”

“He said he first saw me in Brighton, on the West Pier, and was so taken with me that he bribed the owner of the studio where we had a family portrait taken to tell him the address we’d written down for our portraits to be sent to—and also to sell him a photograph of me. I never saw him before he called on me. He claimed to be an acquaintance of my late father’s and I did not doubt him. I was in reduced circumstances and Charlotte had run away from home—people lied about why they no longer wished to receive me; it didn’t occur to me that anyone would lie to get
close
to me.”

Elissande’s heart pinched: her gentle, trusting mother, all alone in the world and utterly vulnerable to a monster like Douglas.

“When did you learn the truth?”

“Shortly before you were born. I found his old diary when I was looking for quite something else—I don’t remember what. Had I known the diary belonged to him, I wouldn’t have opened it. But it had
the initials G. F. C. embossed on the cover and I was curious.”

Mrs. Douglas sighed. “I was so naïve, so stupid, and so completely thrilled with my handsome, clever, rich husband—even his jealousy I’d thought romantic. When I realized that George Fairborn Carruthers’s handwriting looked just like my husband’s, and some of the events from this stranger’s life were identical to what Edmund had recounted from his, I asked
him
, of all people, about it.

“He must have panicked. He could have fobbed me off with some cock-and-bull story, but he told me terrible things. That was when I first saw his true nature—when I first became afraid of him.”

That was why she had been so distressed by the news of Stephen Delaney’s murder, Elissande realized: Douglas must have vowed to her that he would never take another life.

“When you were one month old, your cousin was delivered to our doorstep by a Salvation Army sergeant. I’d lost touch with Charlotte over the years. I had no idea she’d died in childbirth or that her husband had perished already. The sergeant said that she tried to give the baby to the Edgertons, but they absolutely refused. I was terrified of admitting another child into my house—under my husband—but there was nothing else I could do.

“The baby was adorable. She was only a week older than you, and you two could have easily passed for twins. But less than ten days after she came to live with us, you both caught a fever. She had seemed
stronger, while I feared for your life. The jubilation I felt when your fever broke…you could not imagine. But only a few hours later, in the middle of the night, your cousin died in my arms. The shock of it—I could not stop crying. I thought surely she wouldn’t have died had she been with the Edgertons. I was petrified that the Edgertons had realized their mistake and would arrive in the morning to claim her. What would I tell them then?

“That was when it occurred to me. Your uncle—your father—was away on business in Antwerp, and the nursemaid had been dismissed because the housekeeper had caught her with the footman. If I claimed that you had died instead of your cousin, nobody would be the wiser. Then when the Edgertons came, you could go with them and live free of your father, the way I could not. Once I made my decision, I sent out death notices to everyone I knew—it was before your uncle moved us to the country, and I still had some friends and acquaintances. That made it official. No one doubted that a mother wouldn’t know her own child.”

She dabbed a handkerchief at the corners of her eyes. “I must say the Edgertons disappointed me terribly. I sent letters. I sent your photographs. They never even wrote back.”

Elissande had to wipe at her own eyes. “It’s all right, ma’am. You did your best.”

“I did not. I have been an awful mother, a useless burden to you.”

Elissande shook her head. “Please don’t say that.
We both know what kind of man he is. He
would
have killed you had you tried to leave.”