“And have I mentioned yet,” continued Lady Kingsley, “that one of the young men staying with me—in fact, the handsomest one of them all—also happens to be a marquess?”
Elissande’s heart thudded abruptly. She did not care about handsome—her uncle was a very handsome man. But a marquess was an important man, with power and connections. A marquess could protect her—and her aunt—from her uncle.
Provided that he married Elissande within three days—or however short a period of time before her uncle returned.
Very likely, wasn’t it? And when she’d hosted ten guests her uncle had not invited—a blatant gesture of rebellion such as she’d never dared—and fallen short of her goal, what then?
Six months ago, on the anniversary of Christabel’s death, he had taken away Aunt Rachel’s laudanum. For three days Aunt Rachel had suffered like a woman forced to endure an amputation without chloroform. Elissande, forbidden to go to Aunt Rachel, had pummeled the pillows on her bed until she could no longer lift her arms, her lips bloody from the bite of her own teeth.
Then, of course, he’d given up on his attempt to detach Aunt Rachel from her laudanum, an evil to which he had introduced her. I simply can’t bear to have her suffer anymore, he’d said, in the presence of Mrs. Ramsay and a maid. And they had believed him, no questions asked, never mind that it was not the first, the second, or even the fifth time this had happened.
At dinner that evening, he had murmured, At least she is not addicted to cocaine. And Elissande, who hadn’t even known what cocaine was, had been so chilled that she’d spent the rest of the night huddled before the fire in her room.
The chance of success: infinitesimal. The cost of failure: unthinkable.
She rose from her seat. The windows of the drawing room gave a clear view of the gates of the estate. It had been years since she last ventured past those gates. It had been at least twice as long since her aunt last left the manor itself.
Her lungs labored against the suddenly thin air. Her stomach wanted very much to eject her lunch. She gripped the edge of the window frame, dizzy and ill, while behind her Lady Kingsley went on and on about her guests’ civility and amiability, about the wonderful time to be had by all. Why, Elissande didn’t even need to worry about securing provisions for them. The kitchen at Woodley Manor, well removed from the house, had been spared from the rats.
Slowly Elissande turned around. And then she smiled, the kind of smile she gave her uncle when he announced that, no, he wouldn’t go to South Africa after all, when she’d finally come to believe that he truly would, following months of preparations she’d witnessed with her own eyes.
Lady Kingsley fell quiet before this smile.
“We shall be only too glad to help,” said Elissande.
Chapter Three
Aunt Rachel showed no reaction at the news: She dozed on.
Elissande smoothed limp strands of graying hair behind the older woman’s fragile ears. “It will be all right, I promise.”
She laid an extra blanket of soft wool over Aunt Rachel—Aunt Rachel, thin as poorhouse porridge, was always chilled. “We need to do this. It is an opportunity that will not come again.”
Even as she spoke she marveled at the remarkable timing of Lady Kingsley’s plague of rats, almost as if the rats had known the hour of her uncle’s departure.
“And I’m not afraid of him.”
The truth didn’t matter one way or the other. What mattered was that she should believe in her own valor.
She knelt down by the bed and took Aunt Rachel’s small, fine-boned face into her hands. “I will get you out of here, my love. I will get us both out of here.”
The chance of success was infinitesimal, but it wasn’t nil. For now, that would have to do.
She pressed a kiss to Aunt Rachel’s sunken cheek. “Congratulate me. I am to be married.”
“We need to get married,” said Vere to his brother.
Lady Kingsley had two carriages but only one team of horses. So the ladies had gone off first to Highgate Court, leaving the gentlemen behind to wait for their transport.
“We are still young,” said Freddie.
Messieurs Conrad and Wessex played a game of vingt-et-un; Kingsley sat on his luggage, reading a copy of The Illustrated London News; Vere and Freddie strolled slowly along the drive.
“I’m almost thirty. And I’m not having any successes.”
It was easy to fail when one proposed exclusively to the most sought-after debutantes of the Season, especially easy when the proposals were accompanied by copious spills of punch upon said debutantes’ bodices. Vere felt strongly that he should be perceived as a man eager to settle down: the effort lent his role greater authenticity—the poor, sweet idiot too dumb to see that he ought to set his sights lower.
“Let a girl know you better before you propose to her,” said Freddie. “I don’t see how any woman can fail to love you, if you would but give her a little time.”
Thirteen years, and Freddie still spoke to Vere as if nothing had changed, and Vere had remained the same brother who had protected Freddie from their father. Vere had expected the usual stab of guilt; what he had not expected was that he had to turn his face away to hide the tears that were suddenly in his eyes. He’d best take a long sabbatical after the Douglas case—this life was taking its toll on him.
But Freddie’s answer did give Vere the opening he’d sought. “Do you think I should propose to Mrs. Canaletto then? She’s known me all her life.”
“No!” Freddie cried, then immediately flushed. “I mean, of course she does love you, but only as a brother.”
“Dash it. What about you? Do you think she also only loves you as a brother?”
“I…ah…um…”
The talent for lies and pretenses that Vere possessed in such abundance had bypassed Freddie altogether. He was no good at prevarications of any sort.
“I don’t know for certain,” Freddie finally said.
“Why don’t you ask her and find out?” Vere said blithely. “I know; we can both ask her at the same time. How could I be sure, otherwise, that she hasn’t harbored some great, big, secret tendresse for me all these years?”
Kingsley, bored with his newspaper, came up to ask Vere for a cigarette, and Freddie was spared from having to reply to Vere’s question.
But Vere already had answers enough.
The amiability of her guests overwhelmed Elissande. They were so happy to meet her, so grateful that she had opened her home to them, and so delighted to be put up, on such short notice, in the style and comfort to which they were accustomed.
L’affaire des rats had indeed been traumatic, to a one they confirmed to Elissande. But they were younger and of shorter memory than Lady Kingsley. Already they thought it a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Miss Kingsley made fun of herself, of how she’d screamed so unstoppably that if Lord Vere hadn’t told her later, she never would have known that he’d had to slap her to interrupt her hysteria. Miss Beauchamp likewise recounted how she had half fainted by the time Lord Vere had come to her rescue and had to be carried out in his arms, clutching at his lapel all the while.
Their gleeful laughter astounded Elissande. They did not seem quite real to her, these rosy, robust young women, so entirely free of dread and fear, as if the thought had never crossed their minds that enjoyment carried consequences and should therefore remain as hidden as misery.
She hardly knew what to do in their cheerful company. So she fell back on the familiar and smiled. They, on the other hand, made a to-do over her. Her teeth, exposed by her smiles, were admired. The pallor of her skin, unsullied by the cumulative effects of riding, boating, and lawn tennis playing, quite envied. As was her tea gown, which Miss Kingsley declared she’d seen on a dummy in Madame Elise’s shop on Regent Street, but which her mother had refused to buy for her. Elissande wondered how long Miss Kingsley’s interest in fashion would persist if she had to wear the latest styles to daily tea and dinner with Elissande’s uncle.