“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.
Chapter Twenty
“Will 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.”
“I should have made you leave. He didn’t need to have dominion over both of us.”
Elissande reached across the narrow space between their seats and touched her mother on the cheek. “I wasn’t altogether a prisoner: I had Capri. I always imagined myself there, far away from him.”
“Me too,” said Mrs. Douglas, tucking her handkerchief into the cuff of her sleeve.
Elissande was astonished. “You also imagined yourself on Capri?”
“No, I imagined you there. There was this passage you used to read to me that I dearly loved. I still remember bits and pieces of it: ‘Like Venice, Capri is a permanent island in the traveler’s experience—detached from the mainland of Italian character and associations,’” Mrs. Douglas recited, her eyes wistful, “‘a bright, breezy pastoral of the sea, with a hollow, rumbling undertone of the Past, like that of the billows in its caverns.’