His at Night (45 page)

“I can’t imagine a better way to go through life than with you beside me,” he continued.

“Constantly reminding you not to take me for granted?” she jested. She might start blubbering otherwise.

He chuckled. “Well, maybe not constantly. Quarter days should be fine.” Placing his hands on her arms, he gazed into her eyes. “Does this mean you have said yes?”

“Yes,” she said simply.

He kissed her, and then held her tight a long time. “I love you.”

The words were sweeter than she’d thought possible—and she had exorbitant expectations, having wanted to hear them for so many years.

“I love you, too,” she said. She pulled back a few inches and winked at him. “A second nude portrait to commemorate our engagement?”

He laughed and crushed her to him for another kiss.

Ilfracombe was a severe disappointment. A fog as thick as old porridge had come to make chill, damp love to the coast. Visibility was so reduced street lamps had to remain lit during the day, faint rings of mustard-colored light amidst gray vapors that hid everything farther than five feet from Elissande’s person.

She did derive
some
pleasure from being on the coast: the smell of the sea, bracing and salty; the surf crashing wild and harsh upon unseen cliffs, nothing like the gentle tides of Torbay; the deep tenor of foghorns from passing ships in the Bristol Channel, forlornly romantic.

She decided to stay the night. Should the fog clear, there would be enough time in the morning to see the cliffs and return to Pierce House—she was schooling herself to stop thinking of it as home—ahead of her mother and her husband.

And then she must break the news to her mother and bid adieu to her marriage.

At the sight of the suitcases in his wife’s room, a fist closed around Vere’s heart.

He and Mrs. Douglas had arrived in London in mid-afternoon. There was no question of further travel the rest of the day for the exhausted older woman. Vere put her and Mrs. Green up at the Savoy Hotel, then rushed home by himself. Now that he’d spoken to Freddie, there was so much he needed to tell his wife: how stupid he’d been, how badly he missed her, and how eager he was for their marriage to begin anew.

He pulled open her drawers—empty. He yanked open the doors of her armoire—empty. He glanced at her vanity table, empty except for one single comb. And then a sight that made his stomach lurch: a book on her nightstand entitled
How Women May Earn a Living
.

She was leaving.

He sprinted downstairs and grabbed Mrs. Dilwyn. “Where’s Lady Vere?”

He could not disguise his distress, his voice loud and brusque.

Mrs. Dilwyn was taken aback by his abruptness. “Lady Vere has gone to the Hangman Cliffs, sir.”

He tried to digest this information and failed. “Why?”

“She saw a postcard in your study yesterday and thought the view marvelous. And since you and Mrs.
Douglas weren’t expected until tomorrow, she decided to go first thing today.”

It was almost dinnertime. “Shouldn’t she have returned already?”

“She cabled an hour ago, sir. She has decided to stay the night. It was foggy on the coast today and she wasn’t able to see anything. She hopes for better weather in the morning.”

“The Hangman Cliffs—so she would have gone to Ilfracombe,” he said, as much to himself as to Mrs. Dilwyn.

“Yes, sir.”

He was out of the house before she’d finished speaking.

The sun seared her eyes, the sky so harshly bright it was nearly white. An arid mountain gale blasted. She was desiccated, her skin as fragile as paper, her throat sandy with thirst.

She tried to move. But her wrists were already bloody from her struggles against her chains, chains sunk deep into the bones of the Caucasus.

The piercing cry of an eagle made her renew her struggle, a frenzy of pain and futility. The eagle glided closer on dark wings, casting a shadow over her. As it plunged into her, knife-sharp beak gleaming, she twisted her head back and thrashed in agony.

“Wake up, Elissande,” whispered a man, something at once authoritative and soothing about his voice. “Wake up.”

She did. She sat up, panting. A hand settled on her shoulder. She wrapped her own fingers around it, reassured by its warmth and strength.

“Do you want some water?” asked her husband.

“Yes, thank you.”

A glass of water found its way into her hand. And when she had quenched her thirst, he took the glass away.

Suddenly she remembered where she was: not in her room at home—Pierce House—but at a hotel in Ilfracombe—a hotel that looked out to the harbor, but from the windows of which she had barely been able to see even the street outside.

“How did you find me?” she asked, amazed and baffled, while an excitement, so hot it singed, began pulsing through her veins.

“Rather easily—there are only eight hotels in Ilfracombe listed in the travel handbook I bought on my way. Of course, no reputable hotel would give out a lady’s room number—I had to use slightly underhanded means to gain that information once I found out where you were staying. And then it was just a matter of picking your lock and dealing with the dead bolt.”

She shook her head. “You
could
have just knocked.”

“I have a bad habit: After midnight I don’t knock.”

She heard the smile in his voice. Her heart thudded. She dropped her hand, which had been clasped about his. “What are you doing here?”

He did not answer her, but only spread his fingers on her shoulder. “Was it the same nightmare you told
me about—the one in which you are chained like Prometheus?”

She nodded. He would have felt her motion, for his hand had moved to just below her ear.

“Would you like me to tell you about Capri, to help you forget it?”

He must have stepped closer to her; she became aware of the scent of the fog that still clung to his coat. She nodded again.

“‘Looking seaward from Naples, the island of Capri lies across the throat of the bay like a vast natural breakwater, grand in all its proportions, and marvelously picturesque in outline,’” he spoke softly, his voice clear and beguiling.

She started. She recognized those lines: They were from her favorite book on Capri, which she had lost when her uncle purged his library.

“‘Long ago, an English traveler compared it to a couchant lion,’” he continued. “‘Jean Paul, on the strength of some picture he had seen, pronounced it to be a sphinx; while Gregorovius, most imaginative of all, finds that it is an antique sarcophagus, with bas-reliefs of snaky-haired Eumenides, and the figure of Tiberius lying upon it.’”

He eased her back down on the bed. “Do you want to hear more?”

“Yes,” she murmured.

He undressed, tossing down one garment after another, the clothes landing with the softest of plops that made her throat hot and her heart wild.

“‘Capri is not strictly a byway of travel.’” He
removed her nightdress and skimmed his fingers down her side. “‘Most of the tourists take the little baysteamer from Naples, visit the Blue Grotto, touch an hour at the marina, and return the same evening via Sorrento.’”

He kissed the crook of her elbow, the pulse of her wrist, and gently bit the center of her palm. She shivered in pleasure.

“‘But this is like reading a title-page, instead of the volume behind it.’”

His hand moved up her arm and kneaded her shoulder. His other hand cradled her face. Lightly, ever so lightly, disturbing not at all the bruises that had mostly faded from their unruly colors but were still sensitive to pressure, he traced the outline of her cheekbone.

“‘The few who climb the rock, and set themselves quietly down to study the life and scenery of the island, find an entire poem, to which no element of beauty or interest is wanting, opened for their perusal,’” he recited, as his thumb pulled down her lower lip.

She emitted a whimper of need. His breath caught.

“But you are more beautiful than Capri,” he said, his voice at once fervent and wistful.

She crushed him to her and kissed him fiercely. From there, Capri was forgotten and they had lips and hands and minds only for each other.

“What are you thinking?” Vere asked, his head in his palm, lying on his side.

He could not see her. She was only the rhythm of her breaths and the warmth of her skin.

Her hand traced the scars on his rib cage. “I was thinking that, one, I have never, ever, not once in all my years of reading travelogues, realized that they could also serve as tools of seduction. And two, that this must be the first time we’ve both stayed awake afterward.”

He made the sound of snoring.

She chortled.

“If you are not too sleepy, I’d like to tell you a story,” he said.

It was time.

“I’m not sleepy at all.”

He wanted to give her some warning. “My story, it isn’t always happy.”

“No story is. Or it wouldn’t be a story; it’d be a paean.”

Very true. So he recounted for her the events that had led to the creation of his double life, starting with the night of his father’s death. Despite his warning, her whole body turned rigid with dismay. Her hand clutched hard at his arm. But she listened quietly, intently, if with breaths that caught and trembled.

“And perhaps my life would have continued indefinitely on that path—it was a well-worn path, after all—if I’d never met you. But you came along and you changed everything. The better I knew you, the more I
had to ask myself whether things I thought were immutable were truly set in stone, or simply seemed so because I was afraid of changes.”

As his story moved away from the initial devastation, her person had gradually relaxed too. Now his hand upon her shoulder no longer detected as much tension.

“Two days ago I confessed everything to Freddie. It was a terribly difficult conversation going in, and yet afterward I felt light and free, as I haven’t been in the longest time. And for that I have you to thank.”

“I’m very, very glad you and Lord Frederick had your talk, but I don’t see what I have to do with it,” she said, her befuddlement genuine.

“Remember what you said a few nights ago about Douglas? ‘I will not let him diminish me from beyond the grave, just as I never allowed him to take a piece of my soul while he yet lived.’ Those words shattered me. Until that moment I had not understood that I
had
let a piece of my soul be taken from me. And until I recognized that I was no longer whole, I could not begin to put myself together again.”