Fateful (10 page)

Just as he’s attracted mine.

Don’t be stupid
, I tell myself.
Alec is a monster, and no matter how badly he wants to escape that, he never can. A killer is stalking him. You don’t want to be a part of his world.

But all the reasons I have for not wanting Alec Marlowe don’t seem half as real as the stinging knowledge that he would never want a servant girl like me.

I step back from Irene to let Lady Regina inspect my work again. She sniffs, not impressed, but apparently she’ll accept it. “I’m going to see if Layton is fit—I mean, whether Layton is ready to take breakfast with us. You may finish here.”

When Lady Regina steps out, the silence in the room is awful. Irene looks utterly wretched, and her misery draws me out of my own concerns for a moment. Couldn’t her mother have said one kind word to her, just once? I try to make a bit of a joke of it, for her sake and for mine; it’s the sort of thing I do to cheer her up sometimes. “Her Ladyship’s practically picked out your wedding bouquet, hasn’t she?”

Irene’s eyes well with tears.

“Oh, no, Miss Irene. Don’t do that. You’re all right.” Quickly I fetch her a handkerchief and pet her arm. “No need to cry.”

She fans her face, takes a deep breath. “I’m all right,” she repeats. “Let’s find some pretty jewelry. Something really nice, so Mother can’t claim I’m not trying.”

I move toward her jewelry box, but Irene shakes her head and picks something up from her bedside—a key on a chain.

“No, Tess. Something really special.”

We go into the sitting room of the suite, with its gleaming oaken paneling and green marble fireplace. Irene kneels in front of the safe, and I repeat the combination in my head as she turns the dial, making sure I’ve still got it memorized. I take the heavy box out for her, and Irene uses the key to open it.

This is what I was nearly robbed for. This is what Mikhail’s actually after.

This?

It’s a mishmash of fine metalware, gold and silver and bronze: candlesticks, jewelry, an ancient dagger with a peculiar asymmetrical design scratched into it, a few old coins. The Lisles have brought along a fair amount of the family’s heirloom loot. How much are they planning to sell while they’re on this journey? Maybe their family fortune has dwindled even more than I’d realized.

Any single item in that box is worth more money than I’ll see in a lifetime, but the most valuable thing there must be what the Brotherhood needs. I can’t guess why, though. What would the Brotherhood want with a couple of candlesticks?

“There,” Irene says, picking up an ornate gold pin. “We can clip these on either side of my neckline. That will look nice, won’t it?”

She puts the pin in my hand. I trace the whorls of the old-fashioned design with my thumb. It’s extraordinarily beautiful. It’s very familiar.

“But—there ought to be two of them.” Irene begins raking through the box with her hands. “I’m sure there are two. I remember Mother wearing them both at that ball two years ago. Why isn’t the mate in here? Has it been lost?”

“Don’t worry about it, Miss Irene.” My mouth is dry, and it’s all I can do to keep from shaking. “I think these earrings are much more flattering. Sapphires, aren’t they?”

“You don’t think they’re too flashy for morning?”

“Not a bit, miss.” At this point, I’d put a tiara on Irene’s head if it would get her out of here and off to breakfast sooner. I can’t pretend to make small talk much longer. I feel like I want to scream. A long-held fear of mine has awakened into certainty, and I’ve never known anger like this in my life.

Because I know where I’ve seen that pin before. I know where I’ve seen its mate.

I saw it on my sister.

Chapter 9

THE WHOLE MORNING, I GO THROUGH MY TASKS as if I’m sleepwalking. I pay no attention to Horne’s bad temper, or Layton’s bloodshot eyes as he finally saunters out of the suite. Sometimes, the more ghastly moments of the night before flash in my mind—Mikhail’s brutality, Alec as a wolf—but now I have my own horror to add to that.

From the moment I recognized that gold pin, I’ve been trapped all over again, just like I was last night—but this time, I’m trapped in the past.

Four years ago, I came to Moorcliffe with my sister, Daisy. She was three years older than me and had stayed in school; she badly wanted to finish, as did I. But our father had less and less work at the stables as horseless carriages become more popular, and our gran was going to have to come live with us, and money was short. So we trudged all three miles down the muddy country road that led to the great estate of the Viscount Lisle.

“Is that really just a house?” I whispered to Daisy as we walked toward the back, where servants and tradesmen entered. Moorcliffe was so enormous, so splendid with its marble columns, that I thought surely it must be some kind of church. Maybe the great Salisbury Cathedral I’d always heard about, but never seen. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, that’s where the Lisles live. Where we’ll work, if we’re lucky.” She gave me an encouraging smile. Daisy’s fair hair, even more golden and curly than mine, caught in the spring breeze, and I thought she looked like an angel. She was a few years older than most girls were when they entered service; at thirteen, I was just the right age. But I never doubted that the Lisles would want someone as pretty and clever as Daisy to work in their house. Both of us “spoke proper”—thanks to our mother’s education, and her tireless correction of any errors, our accents betrayed less of our country origins than our neighbors’ did. I figured that was my main advantage. Though I was scared to walk into such a grand place, much less start in service, I felt safe knowing she was by my side.

I didn’t realize she was the one who needed protection.

“No!” Little Beatrice throws her silver spoon across the nursery, spattering Horne’s apron with applesauce. I manage to dodge it. Beatrice giggles in delight. She’s getting too old for such naughtiness, but nobody seems willing to bring her in line. Which is a shame—her high spirits will turn nasty if she’s spoiled.

“Honestly!” Horne’s face shrivels up in a grimace that makes her look like a dried apple. “Why they couldn’t have brought Nanny along on this trip is beyond me.”

“Because they couldn’t afford it,” Ned calls from Layton’s bedroom, where he’s busy shining shoes. “We’re lucky we’ve got cabins to sleep in at all. Probably Lady Regina would just as soon have tied a rope around us and towed us to America.”

“I don’t want to hear that disgraceful rumor again, Ned.” Horne draws herself upright and looks as imperious as it’s possible to look with applesauce on her apron. “The way some of you talk. The Lisles are among the noblest and most ancient families in England.”

Ned replies, “And soon to be among the poorest!”

On any other morning, I’d be hard-pressed not to laugh at his joke, or at Horne’s indignant face. This morning, I just keep darning Layton’s socks, seeing not the tasks before me but the labors of long ago.

When I came to Moorcliffe, I started as a housemaid—sweeping grates, beating the rugs, washing the floors, that sort of thing. Daisy was brought on as a nursery maid, the assistant to the nanny, to help with then newborn Beatrice.

We both worked from before dawn until almost midnight, seven days a week, with one afternoon off a month for walking back into the village and visiting our parents. At least they let us share a room, which was the only thing that made that attic bedroom bearable. It was at the highest point of the house, but with no window to provide a pretty view of the grounds. Hot in summer, so cold in winter that the water in our bedside jug often froze overnight—the first thing we did, on waking up in December and January, was take a stone and crack the ice, so we could wash our faces in the frigid water beneath the surface. The bed was rather small for both of us, but we’d shared one as small at home; the crowding was worse only because we were growing older, and in my case, growing taller. At least at home we’d had the luxury of packing our mattress with clean, fresh straw once a year. From the musty smell of the one we had at Moorcliffe, it had last been restuffed decades ago.

“Look on the bright side,” Daisy said to me one night, when I was crying. I’d had to scrub the front steps with lye, which had blistered my hands. The pain of it bothered me less than the fact that I’d have to scrub the back steps the next day, and blister them again and even worse. “We don’t have to listen to Dad preaching at us day and night, not here.”

“It wasn’t so bad.” But I didn’t really mean that. Ever since our little brother had died of influenza a few years before, our father had become almost frighteningly religious. We were never naughty anymore; instead we were wicked, or sinful. It was hard to be told you were sinful all the time. But it was also hard to feel the skin on my hands cracking from the lye.

“We’re making money to send home to Mum,” she said, stroking my hair. The light of our one candle flickered, blurring the silhouette of her hand against the wall. “And we have chances to get ahead here, you know. Ways to improve our station.”

“If I work very hard, maybe someday they’ll make me a head parlor maid.” So I could wear a slightly less ridiculous uniform, and instead of burning my own hands, I could make the poor little housemaids under me burn theirs. It didn’t sound so marvelous to me.

“That’s not what I mean.” She pulled the thin blanket more snugly over me, as if the chill was my biggest problem. “I just mean—chances, is all.”

I ought to have asked her what she was really speaking of, but I didn’t.

“Be careful with that!” Horne demands as I restitch the lace on the sleeve of the gown Lady Regina wore last night. Really, this is Horne’s job, but she’s busy doing the absent nanny’s job and wrestling Beatrice into her pinafore. “She’ll inspect it today, probably as soon as she comes back to the suite.”

I’m a better seamstress than Horne, and she knows it. But the truth is, my fingers are shaky, and it’s all I can do to keep my stitches straight. I try to focus only on the lace in my palm, only on the needle between my fingers.

I need sleep. I need a proper meal. I need to feel safe from Mikhail. I need to know what the Brotherhood wants. I need Alec to—to be someone he can never be. I need to go back to before, to warn Daisy. The things I need, I can’t have.

When it began, just over two years ago, I thought Daisy was merely sick. No great surprise, given the coldness of that winter and the chill in our attic.

She was losing her breakfast nearly every morning; I’d awaken to the sound of her vomiting into a basin. “Tell Cook,” I would say, as I held back her hair. “She’s not as mean as old Horne. She’ll save you something easier for tea. Chicken broth, maybe.”

“Don’t tell Cook,” she choked. “Don’t tell anyone. Not anyone, Tess.”

We had so little privacy with our small room and our one chamber pot that I should have guessed before. But it wasn’t until spring, until the morning I realized Daisy’s uniform was becoming tight in the waist, that I realized the truth.

“Oh, my God,” I said, staring at her. At first she didn’t understand, but then she saw my face, and hurriedly tied on her apron. But it was too late. “Daisy, you aren’t—are you—are you going to have a baby?”

“Don’t say anything!” she hissed.

“I wouldn’t! But Daisy, if I can see it, others can too. Horne will see. Everyone will eventually.” And what did she expect to do when she actually had it?

Daisy slumped onto the corner of the bed. I’ll never forget the utter desolation in her eyes. “We have to hide it as long as we can. I know it can’t be much longer. But help me, Tess. Please.”

I knew how women got with child; you can’t grow up surrounded by farms without noticing what the rams and ewes get up to. But I couldn’t imagine who the father might have been. We were discouraged from having male “followers,” and with only one afternoon free a month—spent at our parents’ home—how would she even have found the time to meet anyone?

That answer, at least, came to me quickly enough. “It’s someone here at Moorcliffe. The father, I mean.”

“Don’t ask me about that.”

“Is it Ned?” He was nearly the only young man we knew, and always friendly to us. Was he maybe more than friendly to Daisy? I’d never thought there was anything between them, but then again, I’d never suspected Daisy wasn’t a virgin.

“It’s not Ned,” Daisy spat back at me. “Don’t be absurd.”

“Holloway?” He was the under butler, and a handsome figure of a man, though a few years older than her.

“No.”

I racked my brains. There were nearly forty servants at Moorcliffe, most of them male, so the list of suspects was rather long. The chauffeur was always winking at us. “Is it Fletcher?”

“No! Good God, Tess, do you think I’ve slept with half the household?”

“I didn’t mean that, Daisy! I just meant—whoever he is, he has to help you.”

“He won’t.” She spread one hand across the faint swell of her belly. “I asked. Repeatedly. If I name him, he’ll just deny it and hate me so much there’s no chance this child will ever—he’ll deny it. So I’ll never tell, not you nor anyone else.” The way she said it, I knew she truly never would.

I started to cry. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.” Daisy leaned her head into her palm. “I don’t know.”

Horne figured it out two weeks later. She called Daisy a slut and a whore, and of course she went right to Lady Regina with the information. Lady Regina did what any other fine Christian noblewoman would have done upon learning that one of her unmarried servant girls was pregnant: She fired Daisy and threw her out of the house that very day, with only a fraction of the wages she was entitled to. I cried as I watched her walk down the long path away from the back of the house, until Horne boxed my ears and told me to get back to work.

I knew there would be no question of her returning to our parents’ house. As soon as my father learned she’d become pregnant out of wedlock, he’d call her worse names than Horne did, and throw her out even faster than Lady Regina had. On my next afternoon off, instead of going home, I sought her out in the village. What few coins she’d had, she’d used to rent a room in a disreputable boardinghouse. When we saw each other, she was so much bigger, and so much paler and wearier, that I sobbed just to look at her.