They located Aunt Rachel in the attic—in a servant’s tiny bedchamber—by the muffled sounds she made in response to their shouts. Lord Vere swiftly picked the lock. Aunt Rachel lay on her back on the hard, dusty floor, bound and gagged, but very much conscious. Her eyes filled with tears as Elissande ran toward her.
It was Vere who freed her—he had the foresight to carry a sharp pocketknife on his person. Elissande kissed Aunt Rachel, who wept softly and clung to her, and rubbed Aunt Rachel’s arms and legs to restore their circulation.
“Are you hungry, Mrs. Douglas? Or thirsty?” Vere asked. He had ripped off his black wig and thick black mustache, which had quite startled Aunt Rachel at first.
Aunt Rachel shook her head. She looked too embarrassed to speak. He understood right away. “Let me go check on your uncle again, Elissande,” he said.
Elissande helped her aunt to the chamber pot. After she had relieved herself, Elissande pinned her hair as best she could, smoothed her wrinkled clothes, and put on her shoes for her. Then with Aunt Rachel’s arm about Elissande’s shoulder and Elissande’s arm around the older woman’s middle, they shuffled out of the room and slowly started down the stairs.
Her husband met them one flight of steps down. “May I?” He gave his lantern to Elissande and gently lifted Aunt Rachel into his arms.
He waited for Elissande to precede him down the stairs, lighting the way. She gazed at him a moment, this striking, complicated man. In the blaze of happiness that had come with her aunt’s successful rescue, she’d forgotten that she’d lost him—or rather, that he had never, not remotely, been hers.
One could not have everything. It was enough, today, that she had Aunt Rachel back.
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.”