That Silent Night (7 page)

“Adelaide!” She had embraced her with such force I feared the poor girl would break in half. “You look exactly the same, only taller.”

“As do you,” Adelaide said.

“I shall never be able to make up for these awful years we have been apart. Had I known you were alive—“

“None of it matters now.” Mr. Leighton entered the room, Colin behind him. “You will live with us and want for nothing ever again.”

Adelaide shook her head. “I could never impose on you in such a way. My life has been—“

“Your past, dear sister, is no concern of mine, nor should it be of anyone else's,” he said, putting a friendly arm around the girl. “You are family, and I shall stand by you.”

“We will not, however, be going to Essex for Christmas,” Mrs. Leighton said. “Aunt Clara will have to earn her way back into our good graces.”

“Forgiveness is a Christian virtue, my darling Pen,” Mr. Leighton said. “And we shall endeavor to apply it, even to this awful situation. She lied because she could not find Adelaide and did not want you to worry. It was wrong of her, but I do believe she did it without malicious intent. Have we all not suffered enough?” He pressed his wife's hand and her cheeks colored.

“Yes, I suppose we have,” Mrs. Leighton said and turned to me. “I shall never be able to thank you adequately, Lady Emily, for bringing Adelaide back to me. It is nothing short of miraculous.”

“Not at all,” I said. “Adelaide is the one deserving of praise. It is she who found you. And now you must all dine with us tonight.”

“Your invitation is so kind,” Mrs. Leighton said, “but I am afraid we must refuse. Adelaide and I have much to discuss and I am not quite ready to share her just yet.”

“Of course,” I said. “We shall leave you to your reunion.”

Colin and I watched as they walked back to their house, Adelaide between the newly married couple. “Does he have any idea of what she has been through?” I asked.

“I believe so,” Colin said, “but he is too discreet to ever mention it. We discussed the situation at length, as you must have gathered from the time of my absence. He is a good man who would do anything for his wife. And Dr. Holton, when consulted on the matter, told him that Mrs. Leighton is bound to begin to recover almost immediately now that the source of her problems has been identified.”

“She will still struggle with guilt, no doubt,” I said.

“Yes, and her sister is likely to have a less than straightforward path to an ordinary life after what she has suffered but, for now, they will have the happiest of Christmases thanks to your persistence.” He pulled me close. “As shall we. We have lingered too long in London. I think we must return to Anglemore. I miss the boys.”

“When is the next train?” I asked.

“We shall go first thing in the morning,” he said. “I would not object to one more evening of having you all to myself.”

Although I would never be so crass as to discuss the particulars, I will say the evening was a spectacular success. The mutually expressed affection of two happily married individuals is, without question, one of the greatest pleasures in life. Despite my satisfaction, however, I woke up sometime deep in the night, consumed by a chill sense of dread. I lay still, willing myself to fall back asleep, but Morpheus would not come. A sound—a low sort of moan—only barely audible, seized my attention, and I rose from bed and slipped into the room across the corridor.

I had made no conscious decision to go there. It was as if some other force had control of my body and led me to the window, where, when I pulled back the curtain, I saw her, still there. Her face was pale and drawn, and her dress was a near match to the one Adelaide had been wearing when I found her. This time, the woman did not hold a locket in her hands, but then,
she
had never had a locket, had she? Instead, she pressed her palms together, in front of her chest. I could only just make out the slightest hint of a contented smile on her lips as she bowed her head, and then, in a flash, she was gone, and with her the chill that had surrounded me, leaving in its place a rush of warmth.

I knew without question what I had seen. Adelaide and Penelope's mother could now, at last, rest in peace.

I also knew without question that this information would be best kept from my husband. There is no point in trying to convert those who don't believe.

Author's Note

It is common knowledge that many of the Christmas traditions we observe today come from the Victorians. Dickens solidified and immortalized the image of a perfect family Christmas—much of which the English had adopted from the Germans via Prince Albert—and set them against the backdrop of his famous ghost story. Christmas and ghosts have a long association, and one that may have its roots in Britain rather than the Continent. Families and friends would gather around the fire on Christmas Eve after tiring of charades and other games and start the serious business of the evening: telling creepy stories as gaslights cast long shadows in a dark room.

The best ghost stories, of course, are the ones told in person by a narrator who knew at least one of the central characters in the tale, lending it a sense of veracity. Even better if one could give a first-hand account of a ghostly apparition. But one must not discount the multitude of stories penned by writers eager to provide readers with suitably eerie fare for the holiday. Along with Dickens, M. R. James, provost of King's College, Cambridge, became famous for his stories, which he shared with students and eventually published (
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
was his first collection). Mrs. J. H. Riddell, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Edith Wharton, and Amelia B. Edwards (yes, the Egyptologist who gave her first name to Amelia Peabody) all contributed to the craze. Henry James' magnificent
The Turn of the Screw
is one of the best:

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be
 …

Emily, I am confident, would not be able to resist telling her own tale on a snowy Christmas Eve, regardless of Colin's feelings on the subject. She would, however, wait until the boys were just a bit older before sharing it with them. Heaven knows what it might inspire Henry to do.

 

Read on for a preview of the newest Lady Emily mystery,

The Adventuress.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright © 2015 by
Tasha Alexander

1

“The English duke is dead.”

The words, muffled and heavily accented, hardly reached me through the voluminous duvet that, while I slept, had somehow twisted around me with such violence that it now more closely resembled mummy wrappings than a blanket. Struggling against its bonds, I managed to extricate one hand before realizing my head was under a stack of pillows. I flung them aside and sat up, turning to discover my husband was no longer next to me. The words came again, and this time vanquished in an instant all of the confusion clouding my mind after being awoken from a deep slumber.

“Monsieur, the duke, the English duke, he is dead.”

“Jeremy?” I leapt from the bed, dragging the duvet with me (I had not been quite so successful in the removal of it from my person as I had hoped), and started for the narrow patch of light coming into our room from the door, held open by my husband, his dressing gown pulled around him. A chasm seemed to open inside me, as if my heart were splitting and filling me simultaneously with intolerable cold and heat. Jeremy Sheffield, Duke of Bainbridge, my dearest childhood friend, who had tormented me in my youth not quite so much as I had tormented him, could not be dead. I tried to step forward, but my limbs would obey no commands.

“Is he in his suite?” my husband asked. The man standing in the corridor nodded. “I shall come at once.”

He must have closed the door, but I have no memory of him having done so. I collapsed in an undignified heap, my legs no longer able to support me.

“Emily.” Colin knelt at my side, scooped me into his arms and deposited me back onto the bed. “I must see what has happened and will return as quickly as possible. Will you be all right?”

“Yes, of course.” I rubbed my face. “No. No. I must come with you.”

“I don't think you ought.” His dark eyes locked onto mine, and I could see pain and worry and just a bit of frustration in them.

“I have to see him. I—”

“No.” He squeezed my hand and slipped the dressing gown from his shoulders, finding and putting on the stiff boiled shirt he had discarded earlier in the evening with entirely no regard for its subsequent condition. After retrieving his trousers from the back of a chair and locating his shoes—one had disappeared under the bed—he shrugged into his tailcoat and walked to the door, pausing to turn back and look at me as he opened it. Had I not been so upset, I would have better appreciated the handsome dishevelment of his cobbled-together evening kit. “I am so terribly sorry, Emily.”

The tears did not come before the door clicked shut behind him, but then my eyes produced a worthy monsoon. Sudden storms are short, however, and this was no time for succumbing to emotion. I splashed water on my face and pulled on my dressing gown. There could be no question of returning to my own previously discarded garments: Ladies' gowns are designed to require assistance, and while this may allow for a more beautifully designed bodice, it proves an immense frustration when one finds oneself on one's own.

Fortunately, no one saw me slip out of our room as there were not yet other guests meandering through the Hotel Britannia, the most fashionable place to stay on La Croisette in Cannes, and arguably on the whole of the Côte d'Azur. A clock near the curved marble staircase told me it was nearly half five in the morning. Anyone awake now would either be a servant or someone staggering in from a long evening, probably spent playing baccarat at the Cercle Nautique. I climbed one flight to the top floor, where Jeremy had insisted on staying. The view, he said, was incomparable. His door was closed and locked, so I tapped on it, and a man I did not recognize opened it without delay.

“Madame, you would not wish—”

I pushed past him and went straight through the sitting room to the bedroom, where I saw my husband standing with two other men. On the bed was the prostrate form of a gentleman in evening kit.

I recognized the wiry individual closest to the supine figure as the hotel doctor. He adjusted the tortoiseshell pince-nez on his long nose and placed his unopened bag on a bedside table. “We will need to further examine him, of course, but there is no question—”

“There is no question,” I said, stepping forward with no regard for any of them, “because this is not the duke.”

“Emily—” Colin reached for my arm, but I pulled away and moved to the opposite side of the bed, closer to the body, determined to confirm the identity of the man. It was harder to move him than I had anticipated, but I managed to roll him over and reveal his face, the eyes staring and vacant.

“Chauncey Neville.” I was shaking rather violently now, and realized that I was barefoot and my teeth were chattering. “It is not Jeremy. Not Jeremy.” Mr. Neville, a shy, soft-spoken gentleman from Cornwall, had always seemed an unlikely friend for Jeremy, but the two had been close since their days at school. We often joked that they tempered each other, Chauncey reeling in Jeremy when he got too out of hand, and Jeremy prodding Chauncey to embrace joviality. Shy though he was, Mr. Neville never proved awkward in social situations, but instead was kind and thoughtful, always on hand to support his friends in any of their schemes.

“Come, my dear,” Colin said. “You will catch your death of cold. You know how chilly the seaside gets at night.”

Any person who has had the privilege of forming even the barest sort of acquaintance with Colin Hargreaves knows he is not the sort of gentleman to make such trite remarks. Rather, he is the most trusted agent of the Crown, a particular favorite of Queen Victoria's, and the individual most frequently called upon by the palace to assist in delicate matters that threaten the state of our great empire. My eyes focused better on the room now, and I saw the manager of the hotel wringing his hands.

“Fear not, Monsieur Fortier, this is not the first body I have seen,” I said. In fact, I had seen many. The work my husband and I shared—sometimes in official capacities, sometimes when we chose on our own to help those in need of assistance—had led us to reveal the identities of no fewer than nine cruel murderers. I was not a stranger to violent death. Whether my words soothed the concerned hotelier, I do not know. Colin removed me to our own suite of rooms before I could gauge the man's reaction. Regardless, the untimely demise of one of our party would dramatically alter what had been intended as a celebratory holiday on the Côte d'Azur.

Nearly four months ago, at Christmas, I had received a telegram from Jeremy, announcing his engagement to Miss Amity Wells, an American heiress who had realized her parents' dearest hopes by catching an English duke. Miss Wells's mother, a veritable battle-axe of a woman, far better suited to roping steers on the range than moving in high society, insisted on throwing an engagement party to celebrate the match, but would not content herself with a ball in Mayfair. Instead, she had planned a trip to the south of France, where all the closest friends and family of the bride and groom would spend a fortnight, culminating in a party she assured us would be more spectacular than any we had ever seen. England, she explained in a coarse whisper, was such a little island it could not possibly be expected to hold all her big ideas.