Shadows of the Night Read online

  “I don’t think I could ever get used to that,” she confessed.

  Colin snorted. “I should hope not. Getting used to something like that would show a suicidal degree of complacency.”

  He reached past her and pushed open the door to the front room. Inside was Dorcas Reston, scowling over a woman who was polishing the heavy oaken table and chairs. A fire burned on the hearth, a kettle hanging over the flames.

  Mrs. Reston looked up as they entered, her expression changing to a pasted-on smile, her hands fluttering as she spoke.

  “I had a new mattress and clean linen brought, even though I had to buy them vrom Mrs. Poll,” she said. “That’s vour pounds at your convenience, Mr. Radcliffe. I brought down your valises vrom above, and my man had your trunks a-carried up, too.”

  Colin imagined the procedure involved in getting their two substantial steamer trunks up the narrow stairs and suppressed a shudder. “Thank you, Mrs. Reston,” he said, with some sincerity, for once.

  Mrs. Reston made a noise that was half snort, half sigh. “That’s Abby,” she said, nodding to the other woman. “She’s to be Mrs. Radcliffe’s lady’s maid vor now. She ain’t done no lady’s maid work, but she once worked vor a big house in Lincolnshire, and so she’s seen it. Old Jim will be the valet, but he’s working with the men until my husband sends him to you. He used to be a batman in the cavalry.”

  “Thank you,” Colin repeated.

  Mrs. Reston paused, then said to Colin in a much lower tone, “I heard vrom my ma that ye didn’t know about our arrangement.”

  Colin looked at her in distaste, unable to bear her hints and posturing any longer. “There is only one arrangement between us, Mrs. Reston,” he said, at his chilliest. “I am to pay you and your husband a substantial sum every year, and you are to use it to maintain my property. Since I have come, I have discovered neglect, filth, and disrepair to the point of catastrophic structural failure. That arrangement, therefore, has been abrogated, and badly. All I want is a forthright relationship between a master and his dependent staff. But you—you didn’t even stay on the premises you had been hired to watch.”

  The woman’s face grew even tighter. “Ye should know that there were an arrangement,” she repeated. “Another arrangement, one that ye’d best continue, if ye know what’s good vor ye. My man and me, we weren’t asked to do much of anything until ye showed up. After a spring bubbled up under a corner of the little lodge and made the side of it sink, we thought it’d be best to stay in my ma’s old house in the village.” She paused. “We’ve done everything that was asked of us. We haven’t broken our end of the agreement.”

  “You are trying to assert that my family have knowingly paid you for nothing for generations. Why would any sane person do that?” Colin demanded.

  She shook her head, looking frustrated, and dropped her voice even more. “It’s the papers, Mr. Radcliffe,” she said. “We have the papers.”

  Fern shook her head, her expression baffled. “The papers in the hut? But they were all rubbish.”

  The woman looked offended. “Not the papers,” she said, as if that answered any objection.

  “What is in these papers?” Colin tried to steer the conversation in a more rational direction.

  “Everything,” she said darkly; then she pressed her lips together and left.

  Fern gaped after her, giving Colin a look of complete astonishment, but he just shrugged and went to the bed, pulling back the blankets.

  “It’s clean now, just as she said,” he announced, waving to the white sheets.

  Fern came up beside him. “Thank you for checking,” she said. “I don’t think I would have had the nerve to pull the blankets down myself. I still have the chills from the last surprise.”

  The woman that Dorcas Reston had called Abby looked up quickly at that, then down again at her work.

  Fern exchanged glances full of significance with Colin. Abby knew something about it, Fern was certain of that, and she was equally certain that the woman would have to be questioned if any answer were to be had of her.

  Colin raised his eyebrows and nodded toward the door. “I will leave you to freshen up and change, shall I?”

  “That would be nice,” Fern said. She cleared her throat. “Abby, would you attend me, please?”

  “Of course, m’m,” Abby said, while Colin left the room, shutting the door behind him.

  Fern’s heart beat a little faster despite herself—she was not used to even the most harmless of dissimulations. She unbuttoned the front of her bodice rapidly. “I suppose you must have been the one to take those sheets away upstairs,” Fern said, attempting to sound casual. “Do you have any idea what caused such a mess?”

  “No, m’m, not for sure,” Abby said slowly. “But there be a story …”

  “What is it?” Fern asked, curiosity winning out over delicacy.

  “Well, m’m, it had to have happened a bit before the second John Radcliffe built the new manor,” Abby said, beginning to loosen Fern’s skirts. “The old hall were shut up then, and nobody used the upper vloors ever again. People still talk about how much he hated that old place. He ran away when he were a boy of sixteen to join the Royal Navy and didn’t come back till his mother were dead.”

  “Yet this was two and a half centuries ago, was it not?” Fern asked.

  “Near enough, m’m.”

  “But you know all this?” The casual way with which people in Wrexmere referenced ancient events was a little hard to become accustomed to.

  Abby’s efficient hands slowed on the tapes to the last petticoat. “Wrexmere’s an old village with an old memory. We have stories going back to the time of the Conqueror. There’s certain times that stick in the mind, times when things go strange and everything changes.

  When the virst John Radcliffe came and married Charlotte Gorsing were one of them, and everything that came after. When the vourth John Radcliffe became a viscount and left the estate vorever—well, that were another.”

  “I see,” Fern said. “What happened, then, that could account for the … the stain upstairs?” she asked, stumbling slightly over the words. Abby stepped back, and Fern began to pull her taffeta skirt over her head.

  “Well, m’m,” Abby continued, more freely now, “after the second John Radcliffe had left the manor, a girl came to the hall, all secret-like. No one was supposed to know she were there, but Charlotte Radcliffe—the second John’s mother—and Lettice Gorsing, his spinster aunt, had a cook, and the cook told the village.” Abby sniffed, probably at the futility of secrecy in such a close-knit community, as she helped Fern pull the second petticoat over her head. “The girl were carrying a brat, and she’d been sent out to Wrexmere to give birth to it.”

  “Who was she?” Fern asked, despite feeling that this story was going to turn very unpleasant very rapidly.

  “Neither Charlotte Radcliffe nor Lettice Gorsing ever said her name, but no one but family would send a girl out to them to be delivered of a bastard, and the Gorsing-Radcliffes had only one other relative.”

  “Their sister Elizabeth,” said Fern, remembering the name from their visit with the vicar.

  “She were Elizabeth Fitzhugh by then,” Abby said, showing no surprise that Fern knew who it was. “Everyone thinks it must have been her girl what came.”

  “Did the girl die?” Fern couldn’t help the question.

  “No. No, after a vew months, she left—without a baby,” Abby said seriously as she took the last petticoat and set it aside. “And none were left behind, neither. There were a vresh grave, though—my grandmother said her mother once showed her where it were—and though the vicar would only look sad when people asked about it, we think the baby must have died soon after it were born.”

  “Murdered?” Fern gasped.

  Abby shrugged. “Some say aye, others nay. I don’t think the poor scared girl killed nobody. No, I reckon it must have been a very hard birth for a girl so young.” She began to work on Fern’s
corset laces. “If that were the birthing room up there, well, ‘twere a miracle that it didn’t take the girl, too.”

  “But the room was just left …” Fern said, bracing against Abby’s brisk unlacing.

  “You have to understand, m’m, that Charlotte Radcliffe and Lettice Gorsing were old women by then, and they hadn’t been quite right in the head since the second John up and left. For all they knew, he was dead. Elizabeth had been the youngest, and if the girl were hers, she were a child of her middle age. I don’t reckon the sisters ever climbed they stairs to the top vloor after the girl what had the baby came.”

  “There was a cook,” Fern said doubtfully.

  “One of the Restons, sure enough,” Abby said. She paused. “That’s the other odd thing, why that time sticks so in everyone’s minds here. The Restons have worked at the manor house vor as long as anyone can remember, but something happened in they years that made them change. After the virst John Radcliffe came, the Restons became more and more airy in their ways and held themselves apart, and the Radcliffes seemed afraid to stop them.”

  “Because of the papers,” Fern murmured.

  Abby shrugged. “So I hear them muttering to each other now and then. I ain’t seen any papers, though, m’m, not in all my years here.”

  Fern undid her busk and slid the corset off, her mind in turmoil but with no more answers than she’d had before. Did the papers have something to do with the girl? If so, what? Perhaps she wasn’t a relative at all but someone despoiled by the second John Radcliffe. Perhaps the cook found out, and since then, they had held the Radcliffes hostage with threats of blackmail. But over generations? Perhaps a son would pay to keep his father’s name unblemished, or a grandson would pay to preserve his grandfather’s name, but it scarcely seemed likely that a tarnish any more distant than that might sway a family to permit the level of freedom that the Restons had been taking for over two hundred years. Fern looked at the pile of discarded clothing, where her pocket lay tangled among her petticoats. Perhaps the answer lay in those letters. Even knowing that, though, she did not want to pick them up and hear the voice of Elizabeth Gorsing Fitzhugh again.

  Abby had begun to hum under her breath as she mixed hot water from the kettle with cold water from a pitcher in a basin, as if the maid had already forgotten the macabre story she had just told. Fern reminded herself that these were legends to the villagers, the fireside stories they had grown up with, their strangeness having grown hackneyed long ago.

  Without seeing any other profitable line of questioning, Fern finished undressing and took the clean cloth that Abby offered. Determined to fix her mind on less morbid things, she said, “What I wouldn’t give for even a hip bath now!”

  “There must be some hip baths in the new hall somewhere, m’m,” Abby said seriously. “Except my man Sterne said that they’d only got so var as to take out some of the bits of roof that were holding the rest steady, so it’s best to stay away.”

  “I wouldn’t ask you to go inside,” Fern said. “Not until the men have firmed things up a bit, at least. I was merely wishing. I haven’t had a proper bath in four days.” Since the night before my wedding, she added silently. Had it truly been only four days? It seemed like a lifetime.

  Fern scrubbed the sweat and peaty dirt from her body, her tired muscles relishing the heat of the wet cloth even as the memories from last night’s wash played in her brain. Abby gave her fresh underclothes and laced her corset. Fern pulled on her dressing gown and sat at an angle on one of her tall chairs to have her hair brushed.

  “Can you dress hair?” Fern asked. Her question was almost pathetic—she knew it was, and she wished that she were less helpless. But wishing did not solve anything, and though she resolved to have her new lady’s maid, whoever she might be, teach her how to arrange her own hair, she had no time, energy, or patience for it now.

  “I can’t do nothing vancy, but I can do good enough vor the likes of me,” Abby replied stolidly.

  “It will be plenty well enough for me, too,” Fern assured her.

  Abby was putting the last pins in her hair—which was smooth and even for the first time in two days—when the door opened and Colin came in. He looked subtly different, and it took Fern a moment to realize that his chin was clean-shaven again.

  “I found my valet,” he said. “He was bringing in peat blocks. I stopped him long enough to get a shave and then told him to carry on. I’d rather have a good fire than a straight necktie.” Despite the emptiness of his speech, the gaze he swept the room with was keen, and Fern felt the undercurrent of words left unsaid.

  “Thank you, Abby,” she said. “If you will have dinner sent up, I believe we will eat here tonight. I won’t need any more assistance until morning.”

  “Yes, m’m,” Abby said, and she left, picking up the thread of the song she had been humming earlier, the haunting tune floating wisplike up the stairs as she descended.

  Fern looked at Colin expectantly.

  He blew out a gust of air. “Dorcas Reston didn’t say the batman was her husband’s cousin. I did think you were perhaps being a trifle hasty in your dislike of that family, but I tell you, with that man’s razor just a fraction of an inch from opening my neck, I began to share your judgment.”

  “Did he say anything?” Fern asked, her heart beating fast.

  “Nothing at all,” he said. “I hope that you at least had the conversation you were hoping for.” He rubbed his hand across his chin and grimaced. “Tomorrow, I will be shaving myself.”

  Fern briefly related what Abby had said. Colin just shook his head.

  “I think this place must drive people to madness. Papers, bastards, secrets, madwomen—none of it makes the slightest sense.”

  Fern sighed, rubbing her forehead. “I know. I just wish that I could forget about all of it.”

  Colin smiled slowly, predatorily. “I believe I might be able to arrange that, at least temporarily.”

  “After dinner,” Fern said firmly, even as her stomach fluttered in reaction. “I’m light-headed with hunger and exhaustion, and I must fix at least one of the two first.”

  He began unbuttoning his coat. “In that case, I hope you will pardon me as I get clean.” His movements were economical, his undressing rapid and businesslike, and yet Fern felt a slow, sullen heat stir deep in her midsection as the lean shape of his body was uncovered layer by layer.

  He paused as he dropped his shirt upon his coat and something crinkled. He retrieved the coat again and pulled a letter out of its pocket.

  “I had forgotten about this.” He grimaced at the handwriting on the front. “A neat, impersonal legal hand.” He opened it and scanned its contents as Fern watched, then dropped it with a bark of laughter. “It is in my solicitor’s name, but most of the words are my parents’. It seems that my actions have shocked them, and they fear for my mental well-being. My solicitor only reiterates his ignorance of all Wrexmere affairs.” He gave her a look of suppressed irony. “I am afraid that when we return, you will be treated with some suspicion by my family, for it seems that my mother thinks your wiles have driven me out of my senses.”

  “Oh, dear,” Fern said with a surge of dismay.

  “Don’t worry. My parents recover quickly from any small trauma. If things appear as they expect them to, they will not question what happened.”

  Fern nodded, but her mind was elsewhere. She wondered, for the first time, what her own family would be thinking. She had never imagined that they would consider that she might be anywhere other than in Brighton, but if Colin’s parents knew, it was only a matter of time before hers found out. How they would worry … “I must send my family a letter. They will be mad with concern.”

  “You can send it when we fetch the mail tomorrow,” Colin said. He finished undressing, emptied the basin into the waste bucket and poured more water from the jug and the kettle, sending up a billow of steam. He scrubbed himself briskly as Fern watched, then rummaged in his trunk for new trousers
, a shirt, and his dressing gown. He had just shoved his feet into his slippers when a knock on the door interrupted him.

  “Dinner. Finally,” Fern said, dragging her eyes away from her husband’s body with some effort.

  Colin opened the door, but instead of a village woman bearing a dinner tray, Joseph Reston stood in the doorway, his brow lowered in anger as he dripped puddles onto the wide board floor.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Out of the corner of his eye, Colin saw Fern jerk to her feet, her chair scraping noisily out of the way. He reacted more subtly, shifting his weight to the balls of his feet as he angled his body to simultaneously put himself between the man and Fern and block his entrance.

  “Where did you find those letters?” Joseph Reston snarled, his face purpling. “Tell me!”

  For an instant, Colin thought the man must mean his correspondence.

  “The old letters?” Fern echoed the words. “They were in the bedroom—”

  “It is no concern of yours where we found documents belonging to my family,” Colin cut in, easily overriding Fern’s answer. He narrowed his eyes at the burly man, bracing himself in the doorway. “You have no business here, man. Leave—at once. I do not want you see you again until morning.”

  But Reston’s gaze had grown distant as soon as Fern had said the word bedroom. “The bedroom, the bedroom!” he muttered. “Why would the old man have put papers in the bedroom? He kept nothing in bedrooms.” Looking dazed, he blinked several times before he focused on Colin again. “Good night,” he said roughly, then bolted for the stairs—lumbering up to the third floor rather than down.

  “Ought I follow him?” Colin asked himself aloud, staring at the empty landing.

  “Please don’t,” Fern said. “He’s gone mad. He’s left now—that’s all that matters.”

  With a suppressed snort, Colin shut the door and slid the bar across to secure it. He turned to deliver a retort to his wife, but he was interrupted by sudden heavy footfalls from above. He paused where he stood and stared up at the ceiling—which doubled as the bottom side of the floorboards of the third floor, lying across the thick, blackened rafters above their heads.