House of Masques

A dark secret hangs over her quest for justice…

Kathleen Donley steps off the train in Poughkeepsie, New York, with everything she has left in the world contained in a lone carpetbag, and one desire burning in her heart. To find Captain Charles Worthington, the man acquitted of murdering her brother during a pitched battle in Indian territory—and put him in a coffin.

Whispers of someone who could possibly aid her quest have lured her from her Ohio home, and indeed she finds herself in the lair of one Josiah Gorman. A man with a card file bursting with men and women who owe him their souls.

Trembling with fear and determination, Kathleen becomes one of them.

Josiah sends her forth armed with a silken wardrobe, a new name, and accompanied by Edward Allen, a man who guards a secret as deadly as the debt he owes Josiah. But once she sets foot on Worthington Estate, nothing is as it seems. And Kathleen finds herself facing the prospect of killing a man she doesn't hate…and falling for another man who is forbidden to love.

This Retro Romance reprint was originally published in 1975 by Ballantine.

House of Masques

Fortune Kent

Chapter One

Kathleen Donley, carpetbag clutched in her hand, climbed down the steps of the railway coach. She paused on the platform to read the black-lettered sign on the roof of the station.
POUGHKEEPSIE.
The word echoed in her mind, and she felt both resignation and fear.
Like a prisoner
, she thought,
when he hears the long-awaited sentence of death.

“Where does he live?” she had asked Mrs. Horobin.

“I'm sorry you ever found out I knew,” the old woman said. “The less you have to do with him, the better.”

“If you don't tell me, I'll leave here and I'll search until I find him.”

Mrs. Horobin sighed and gave in. “He lives in Poughkeepsie,” she said. “Leastways he did when I last heard.”

“Poughkeepsie?”

“In New York State on the Hudson River,” Mrs. Horobin told her.

“Then that's where I'll go,” Kathleen had said. “To Poughkeepsie.”

She walked along the platform toward the waiting room, still stiff and sore from the long journey on the wooden benches of the coach. Passengers jostled her and hurried on without a second glance at the girl in the gray crinoline dress. How beautiful she had thought when she first saw the dress a week ago in the general store in Ashtabula. Now, after seeing the elegant women on the train and in the hotels in Buffalo and Albany, she knew the dress was plain and hopelessly out of fashion.

Kathleen paused outside the door to the waiting room and looked doubtfully about. Beyond the station men and women climbed into carriages, and she heard the clip-clop of the horses' hooves on the cobblestones. To her right, the locomotive hissed and wheezed. A trainman strode past her, clambered up the side of the engine, and grasped a spout which swung toward him from the far side of the tracks.

“Your first train ride, miss?” The white-haired conductor turned from helping a city-bound passenger climb the coach steps and smiled down at Kathleen.

“Ye-yes,” she stammered. She was startled.
Is this how they behave in New York State?
she wondered.
Do strangers speak to you? I'm on my own in a strange land
, she decided,
and I must learn new ways.
She drew in a deep breath and her words came in a rush. “I wondered what the man on the engine was doing,” she said.

“He's adding water, miss,” the conductor told her.

Steam swirled back from the locomotive and obscured the large
39
on the side of the cab. A breeze blew the smoke from the tall black stack toward them and the smoke mixed with the steam and eddied around her, damp and acrid, and for the first time in
years she remembered the pictures in her father's vellum-bound book, a book she had pored over in secret, studying the pictures with fascination and horror until she could feel the heat of the flames spurting from fissures in the ground, smell the fumes drifting over the writhing, naked bodies.

In the warm July evening, Kathleen shivered. She pursed her lips.
No matter
, she thought,
I'll go on. I've made my decision and I can't turn back. And I'm the only one left, now that Michael is dead.

Michael. They had grown up depending on each other, she and her older brother Michael, without a mother and with a father who…
How should I describe father?
she wondered. “He's not himself,” someone had told her. “Hasn't been since your mother died.” And, Kathleen thought, don't forget the War. He was so much worse after mustering out eight years ago, withdrawn, turned in on himself, leaving his two children, Kathleen and Michael, to face the world. And now Michael was gone and she was alone.

“Is someone meeting you?” the conductor asked. She shook her head, eyes on the wooden planking of the platform.
What does he think of me?
she wondered.
Alone, with no luggage except my bag. Strange, he must be saying to himself. Unusual, even for 1871. And if he knew what I have hidden deep in my bag? What would he think then?

“I'm sorry,” she said. She hadn't been listening.

“The stationmaster,” he repeated, nodding toward the waiting room. “See the stationmaster.” He walked away, stopped and glanced back, smiling. “And good luck to you,” he said. He turned again. “All aboard, all aboard,” he called.

The waterspout swung from sight and the man on the engine climbed to the ground, leaping clear as the train lurched forward. Kathleen watched the huge wheels strain, saw the black smoke billow skyward and the lamp atop the locomotive shine feebly in the early dusk. Orange flame spurted from the firebox and the coal car rumbled past her and then the first coach, yellow with black lettering, the couplings jangling as the train moved faster, a second and a third and final coach going by.

The conductor leaned from the steps and waved.
At me?
she wondered, surprised. The train rounded the curve south of Poughkeepsie, and she watched the red light fade and disappear.

Kathleen, alone on the platform, felt tired and empty. She tightened the kerchief about her black hair, picked up the carpetbag, and pushed open the door to the station. The waiting room was small, with a stove in the center and benches along three sides. The office was on the fourth side and on a high stool behind the ticket window a black-suited man sat writing. Kathleen waited in front of the counter, hesitant and unsure, and after a time he noticed her and looked up.

“Yes?” he asked, his voice impatient. “Where do you want to go?”

“Gleneden,” Mrs. Horobin had said. “Go to Gleneden.”

“Is Gleneden a village?” Kathleen asked her.

“No, not a village, a house. Just tell them Gleneden. They'll know.”

“Gleneden,” she said to the stationmaster. He looked at her and she saw the surprise in his eyes. “Are you sure?” he asked. She nodded. One thing at a time. First—Poughkeepsie. Now—Gleneden. And tomorrow? She closed her mind to the future. Think only of today, she told herself, let tomorrow take care of itself.

The stationmaster closed his book and placed his pen in the rack on the top of the desk, rose and opened the door beside the counter. He was a tall, thin man who walked with a stoop. “Come with me,” he said, taking her bag and leading her outside to the carriage shed where he looked along the row of stalls. “No,” he said. “Sunday—no one to drive you. You could wait, there should be someone here to meet the 8:43.”

“Is Gleneden far?”

He pointed down the street leading away from town along the river. She noticed the red-white-and-blue bunting on the lampposts and remembered that the day after tomorrow was the Fourth. “A mile, more or less,” he said. “You could walk there before dark, or you could get a room at the inn a few blocks into town. Our inn is respectable. Why not stay there?”

“No, I'm going to Gleneden. I'll walk,” she said, and took the bag from him and stepped from the walkway to the street. After she had gone some ten paces she heard him behind her. “Wait,” he said and she looked into his gaunt face. He backed away and she sensed his uneasiness.

“Can't you wait, even till tomorrow?” he asked. “I'm sorry,” he went on, “you don't seem the kind that usually comes to Gleneden. You're so, so,” he groped for the right word, “so young. Eighteen?”

“Nineteen.”

“We get lots of travelers going through here to Gleneden,” he said. “Men sometimes, women mostly. Older they are, in their forties and fifties. All kinds. And they travel alone. Always alone.” He paused. “Are you sure you want to go?”
Don't go, don't go
, the tone of his voice seemed to plead.

“Yes,” she said, “I'm positive.”

He shook his head. “Positive, that's what they all are. Every last one of them.” He touched her sleeve and she pulled back. “Take the left fork just past the big barn,” he told her. “And good luck to you.” First the conductor, and now the stationmaster.
I'll need all the luck I can get
, Kathleen thought.

“Thank you,” she said. She walked on and when she came to the first turn in the road she looked back and found him still standing where she had left him, hands on hips, staring after her.

In a few minutes she had left the rooming houses and the shops behind and the cobblestones were replaced by hard-packed dirt. Weeks without rain had left a soft layer of dust covering the road. Fields stretched away on both sides, with here and there small houses with gardens in which roses and hollyhocks competed with weeds. Several carriages and wagons clattered by and Kathleen breathed the heavy odor of the horses, smelled the sweet tang of cut grass from the fields and sighed, thinking of Ashtabula and home. Would she ever see Ohio again?

She followed the road as it angled upward and away from the railroad and the river. Near the crest of a long wooded hill she felt a pain in her side, and her hand ached from carrying the carpetbag. She sat on the grass with her back against a stone wall. Her breathing was quick and labored and she wanted nothing more than to lie on the cool grass, but the sun was already low in the west, so she rose to her feet and trudged on.

That's the barn
, she told herself when she saw an old and deserted structure with a chewing tobacco sign on its side. She turned off onto the narrow track to her left. There were no houses here, only the enclosing woods, and no sounds except the muted evening cries of the birds. The road narrowed until it was little more than a path, and the branches entwined over her head to form a dark tunnel. A creek churned down the hill to splash noisily beside the path; Kathleen knelt on a flat rock, scooped water into her hand and drank.

How many times had she and Michael cupped water with their hands from the creek beyond the barn?
“Always drink where the water runs fast,”
Michael told her. And they drank and lay on their backs, hands behind their heads, watching the clouds float from horizon to horizon. Michael, Michael. Never again would he taste the cold water of the creek, never again see the clouds white against the blue sky.

Kathleen shook the vision from her mind. She went down a steep hill and smelled the river and saw daylight through the trees ahead. The ground leveled and she came from darkness into twilight and crossed a stone bridge, the creek rushing beneath her and away to the left.

The house waited a hundred feet ahead.

The path ended at the house. An old, old house, unpainted, framed by trees. A dark and brooding house built on a bluff over the river. Only two stories high on this, the land side, but as she approached she saw that the building clung to the hill and what she had thought to be the entire house was actually only the upper portion.

The roofs were steep and their symmetry was broken by a proliferation of chimneys jutting into the reddening sky. Something about the porch which circled the building bothered her. What was wrong? she wondered. The furniture, she decided. Rather, the lack of furniture—there were no chairs or tables, the porch was bare.

Kathleen climbed the steps. The massive double door was open and a fire blazed on a hearth deep within the house. She hesitated in the doorway and tried to brush the dust from her long skirt and her shoes. She found and pulled an iron ring on the wall next to the entrance. No sound followed, but a moment later a door opened and closed inside and a slender woman in a flowing, orange-patterned robe moved noiselessly toward her over the thick carpet.

“Come in, come in,” she said. The woman was just over five feet tall, some three inches shorter than Kathleen. “I'm Clarissa,” she said. Kathleen introduced herself.

She followed the woman down a hallway to the large room where fire flared in a stone fireplace. Kathleen felt perspiration dampen her face.

“Wait,” Clarissa told her, “leave your bag here in the closet.” She went to a table along the wall. “Let me light a lamp,” she said. Kathleen studied her. Clarissa's face was fair, thin yet attractive, pale, an indoor face. She looked older than Kathleen, perhaps twenty-nine or thirty. Clarissa's hair fell in waist-length waves. How beautiful, Kathleen thought, the color of gold.

The woman looked at Kathleen expectantly.

“His name is Josiah Gorman,” Mrs. Horobin had said. “Yes, I'm certain he goes by the name of Gorman now.”

“I—I came to see Mr. Gorman,” Kathleen said.

Clarissa nodded. “I'll show you the way.” She led Kathleen to the top of a steep and narrow stairway. She stopped and Kathleen envied the hair glinting in the light from the lamp.

Kathleen looked into the other woman's hazel eyes and thought she saw a haunting sadness there. And a warning. “You can still turn back,” the eyes seemed to say. Kathleen trembled. Had Clarissa come to this house many years ago, alone, as Kathleen now came? Had she once stood where Kathleen stood?

Clarissa started to speak, then shook her head and turned and descended the stairs. Down, down they went, the stairs zigzagging back and forth into the depths of the house. The steps creaked under their feet and their shadows danced on the walls. When they finally reached the bottom of the stairs they walked along a corridor to a paneled door.

“I'll leave you here,” Clarissa said. When Kathleen hesitated, the other woman nodded at the door. “Go in,” she said. Kathleen lifted the latch and the door swung open.

The room was windowless with the only light glowing from the embers in the fireplace. The air was close and hot, but despite the warmth, she felt a tingling course through her arms and legs.

“I've been expecting you,” a man's deep voice came from near the fireplace.

She searched the gloom, and as her eyes became accustomed to the dark she saw the outline of a chair drawn to the fire. Someone shifted in the chair; a tall figure rose and went to the hearth and the flames leaped higher, licked along a birch log, and the man's shadow filled the room. She waited just inside the door and, her face flushed and warm, she shivered.