“Inquiries have been sent to South Africa. People who knew Edmund Douglas before he left the mines remember him as a man who spoke with a strong Scouse accent, and had a scar slashing through his left eye from a pub fight gone wrong when he was still in England.”
“Why—why has no one else ever suspected my uncle of being an impostor?”
“He is clever. He lives in a remote area and socializes rarely; he has never returned to South Africa; and it’s possible he also murdered the real Edmund Douglas’s sole remaining relative in England.”
She shivered.
“But I think your aunt found out.”
She gripped the back of a chair. “Are you sure I can’t have any more whiskey?”
He fetched a new glass and poured her another finger. She downed it so fast she barely felt the burn. “How did my aunt find out?”
Her husband glanced at her. “I don’t know. People find out all kinds of things in a marriage.”
“That’s your entire explanation?”
“That’s my explanation for why your uncle behaves as he does. He believes himself a romantic hero, willing to go to any lengths for love.”
She shivered again. “He said that to me when we were last at Highgate Court.”
“So he committed the ultimate crime, possibly more than once, for the woman he considered his angel. He impressed himself. And yet once she discovered what he had done, like any sane person, she was not only not impressed, she was horrified and appalled. That was what he considered the angel’s betrayal; that she had no appreciation for the sacrifices he’d made for her, and instead recoiled from him. That was why he painted her fleeing from him, having run him through with a sword.”
“And that is what has driven his cruelty all these years,” she murmured.
“I wouldn’t have told this story to someone with less steely nerves—but you can handle it. And you need to know, so that you understand why your aunt is so frightened of him even when he is a fugitive. So that you recognize what we are dealing with here.”
She pulled at her collar. “Will the police be any help?”
“We will, of course, need the police for his apprehension. But until then, I’m hesitant, especially to involve county constables—hostage rescue is not what they are trained to do. Besides, we have no evidence whatsoever of his involvement. As far as anyone knows, Mrs. Douglas has taken off by herself to London, which she is at perfect liberty to do.”
She dropped into a stuffed chair and pressed her hands into her face. “So we just wait?”
“Your uncle will contact you.”
“You sound very sure of it.”
She heard him take the chair next to hers. “Would you say your uncle is vindictive?” he asked softly.
“Yes.”
“Then trust that he is not finished yet. Merely getting his wife back is hardly vengeance enough. He will want to inflict something on you too.”
She emitted a whimper. “How long will we have to wait?”
“My guess is you will hear from him by the afternoon post. After all, time is not on his side.”
She didn’t want to, but she moaned again in fear. She bent over and hid her face between her knees.
To Vere’s relief, she did not remain hunched in defeat for long. She rose, walked the length and the width of the room, ignored the luncheon Vere asked to have brought in for her, stirred her tea without drinking it, and looked out the window every minute or so.
He’d dashed out several cables and had them sent. He’d had his luncheon and his tea. He even glanced through some of the other letters that had come for him in the morning. And now he, too, had nothing left to do, except to watch her in her agitation.
“Why do you keep a book in your underthings drawer?” he asked.
It was better to keep her mind from the worst possibilities for the remainder of their wait.
She’d been picking out and putting back random items from the mantel. At his question she spun around. “What were you doing mucking about in my things?”
“I had to search every room in the house. Yours was no exception.”
But of course hers had been an exception. He’d rifled through any number of women’s unmentionables in the course of his work, but he’d never lingered as he had among her soft, pristine linens. And that was after he’d already learned that her smiles were but tools.
“Just so you know, I didn’t find anything of interest—except, as I said, I’d never seen a travelogue among a woman’s undergarments before.”
She sat down on the window seat, her entire person stiff and tense. “I’m delighted to have provided you a moment of diversion. And just so you know, the travelogue was only carelessly placed among my undergarments when my uncle was away. When he was in residence, it stayed hidden in a scooped-out volume of something Greek, on a shelf with three hundred other books in Greek.”
He read five languages other than English and had thought nothing of the dearth of English books in Douglas’s library. But to someone who had not been educated in continental languages, visiting that library must have been as tormenting as dying of thirst in the middle of an ocean.
Underneath every detail of her life was a history of oppression. And yet she’d emerged not only with her spirit intact, but with a capacity for joy that he had only begun to understand. That he would now never truly know.
The thought was a stab in his heart.
“The book in your drawer was a guide to Southern Italy. It had something on Capri, I imagine?”
“Not very much. There was a better book, but I lost it when my uncle purged the library.”
Memories of the night came unbidden: her arms holding him, her lovely voice speaking of her faraway island. He realized he’d never given any thoughts as to what his milk-and-honey companion would do when faced with his nightmares. He had simply assumed they wouldn’t exist anymore when he had his gentle, pure paragon.
She’d been looking out the window, but now her face turned toward him. “Why did you make me listen to you sing? You are a horrendous singer.”
“There was a safecracker working in your aunt’s room. Had to keep you away.”
“You could have told me. I would have held the light for him.”
“I couldn’t tell you. You looked very pleased to be living in your uncle’s house.”
“More fool you. You could have saved yourself the ordeal of this marriage.”
He tapped his pen against the desk. Suddenly all he could remember were the moments of surprising joy. Their nap together on the train; her outrageously erroneous soliloquy on jam making that had made him smile half the next day as he walked and walked; last night.
“I wouldn’t quite classify this marriage as an ordeal. It’s been more of a burden.”
She threw a small potted plant clear across the breadth of the room. The glazed terra-cotta container shattered against the mantel. The soil and the orchid growing from it fell to the floor with a resounding wump.
“You have all my sympathies,” she said. “And my sincere condolences.”
His ideal companion did not know what anger was. Her voice would never drip with sarcasm. And, of course, since she was not real, it was easy for her not to have strong emotions, to be only smiles and cuddles and wholesale perfection.
He gazed at the very real woman on his windowsill, battered but unbroken. All her emotions were strong: her anger, her disillusion, her despair—and her love.
He picked up the plate of sandwiches on the desk and approached her. “Don’t starve yourself. It won’t help you and it certainly won’t help your aunt.”
She grimaced as if the plate were full of live scorpions. But just when he thought she’d knock it to the floor, she accepted it. “Thank you.”
“I’ll ring for a new pot of tea.”
“You don’t need to be so nice to me. I won’t appreciate it.”