Four years later
Mrs. Wrayburn did not ruin her life in the pursuit of honor. Rather, she temporarily marred it in pursuit of Mr. Richard Templerton, who, after one too many drinks, had suggested a game of midnight equestrian hide-and-seek through the streets of London. In between protectors, and willing to oblige the young, wealthy, and dimwitted Mr. Templerton, the equally inebriated (and arguably dimwitted) Mrs. Wrayburn had scarcely made it out of the mews before falling from her horse and breaking her leg.
According to the physician, the injury would heal in a few months’ time. According to Mrs. Wrayburn, life as she knew it was
over
.
“I am ruined, Anna.
Ruined
.”
Anna shifted slightly in the seat next to her mother’s bed and calmly placed another stitch in her sampler. “So you say, Madame.”
And so Mrs. Wrayburn had been saying—or wailing, to be precise—for the better part of forty-eight hours. Madame’s ever loyal housekeeper, butler, and lady’s maid had all found urgent matters to attend to outside the home after the first twenty-four. Anna couldn’t blame them. Had she not, shortly thereafter, convinced her mother to finally take the laudanum the physician had left, she would have followed suit.
That convincing had been no mean feat. Her mother had a particular distaste for opiates. She rarely partook and never supplied it at her parties. She claimed it was both the expense and the danger of addiction that kept her free of the drug. But Anna suspected it was because the effects of the drug on her mother were unflattering. On the rare occasions she ingested laudanum for medicinal purposes, Madame became loud, loose of tongue, and prone to slurring for a half hour or more before suddenly dropping into a long slumber, during which she drooled rivers and snored with enough volume to wake the dead.
Anna was most eager for the snoring to commence. She glanced at the clock on the mantel. The last dose had been given twenty minutes ago. Ten long minutes to go.
“Weeks!” Her mother wailed. “Months! The season will be over and I have nothing to show for it but…
this
.” She waved a hand at her bound leg in disgust. “Oh, that damned Mr. Templerton.”
“He sent roses this morning.”
Madame scowled at her. “One cannot pay the butcher with roses.”
“One might consider selling a diamond necklace or two,” Anna suggested, knowing full well her mother would never consent to such drastic measures. Madame did not relinquish her personal possessions for any reason. Ever. When something had outlived its usefulness, it was stored away, even if that something was torn, or broken, or hopelessly out of fashion. Even if she’d never cared for the item to start, Madame kept it…because it was
hers
. Templerton’s roses would be hung to dry before the day was out.
Madame gave her a disgusted look. “I cannot believe you would even suggest such a thing.”
“And how else to you propose to settle your accounts?”
“You are missing the point, girl. It isn’t about what I must do now. It is my future of which I speak.”
Lord, the woman was dramatic. “It is a minor break, Madame. You’ll be fit to dance again before you know it. A few weeks—”
“
Weeks
, she says,” Madame cut in with a disgusted and graceless wave of her arm, “as though it’s but a trifle to disappear from society for such a time. As though that grasping Mrs. Markhouse isn’t plotting to dispossess me of my hard-earned popularity as we speak, and here I am, powerless to stop her. What do you suppose will become of me when she succeeds, hmm?”
“I suppose you will become the second most notorious woman in London.” Anna pulled her needle through fabric. “I shall try to hold my head up through the shame of it.”
“She mocks me. My own daughter mocks me in my grief.” Madame jabbed a shaking, bejeweled finger at her. “You’ve your father’s cold heart.”
“And his plain eyes,” Anna added for her. Madame did so despair of her only daughter’s drab eyes.
“Nothing of the kind,” Madame slurred. “Engsly had beautiful eyes. Not so bright as my own, mind you, but a lovely blue in their own right. I don’t know where the devil you acquired that dreadful gray.”
“Engsly now, is it?” Anna inquired with a small smile. Her mother had named her father countless times. Without, to Anna’s best recollection, having ever used the same name twice. Engsly was but one more gentleman in a long list of sires. “I am a biological wonder.”
“You’re an ungrateful little monster, is what you are.”
Accustomed to her mother’s sharp tongue and unpredictable temper, Anna registered the sting of the words and set them aside in the blink of an eye. “Yes, you ought to send me packing to my father’s. Let him stomach me. Better yet, allow me the dowry you promised when I was a girl and you may be free of me—”
“Dowry?” Madame stared round-eyed at Anna as if she’d grown a second head. “I did no such thing.”
“Five hundred pounds,” Anna reminded her, just as she had reminded her at least once a month since the estimated age of sixteen.
“Nonsense. What would you do with such a sum, anyway? Hide yourself away in the countryside? Good God, what would people say if Mrs. Wrayburn’s daughter was left to such a fate?”
For a woman who had spent her entire adult life bucking convention, Madame was inordinately sensitive to the opinions of others. And for a woman so keen on acquiring the good opinion of others, she was lamentably stubborn in her ways. Anna knew she had as much chance of convincing her mother to hand over the five hundred pounds as she did convincing her to sell a piece of jewelry. Which is to say, no chance at all.
She glanced at the clock. Five minutes. “Tell me of this Mr. Engsly. Is he a gentleman, a tradesman, a—?”
“Oh, for…” Madame threw her a disgusted look. “It is not Mr. Engsly. It is
Lord
Engsly. Phillip Michael Haverston, the fifth Marquess of Engsly. Don’t be deliberately stupid, girl.”
“I beg your pardon, Madame,” Anna replied calmly. “In the future, I shall endeavor to separate my stupidity from my gullibility.”
“See that you…What the devil does that mean?”
“Nothing.”
One finely arched eyebrow winged up. “You don’t believe me, is that it?”
Not a single word.
“Of course I believe you, Madame. Why would you lie?”
“Oh, I lie for all sorts of reasons,” Madame replied with a breezy wave of her hand. “Mostly for my own amusement.”
“That, I believe,” Anna murmured.
Her mother appeared not to hear her. “But Engsly…I lied about Engsly for your own good.” She sniffed dramatically and adopted a tragic expression. “I’m not so terrible a mother, you know. I don’t look to hurt you.”
“I’m certain you don’t.” That would require an expenditure of time and energy Madame had never appeared inclined to spend on her only child.
“You’d have sought him out,” Madame explained. “I didn’t want that.”
“And why not?” Anna inquired without even a remote interest in what answer her mother might care to offer. Lord Engsly was not her father and there was only one reason Madame wouldn’t want Anna to seek out other family…She didn’t want to share.
“Coldhearted, just as I said.
He
would have looked for ways to hurt you.”
Anna tugged on her thread, completing a tight French knot. “Then I am grateful for your protection.”
Her mother made an unpleasant noise in the back of her throat that Anna hoped indicated she was nearer to sleep and snoring. “Don’t believe me. No one ever believes me.”
Only those with sense.
“That is not—”
“I’ve proof, you know.”
The hand holding the needle stilled.
This was new.
Her mother had given her plenty of names over the years, and a variety of fantastical stories attached to those names. Her father was Robert Henry, the courageous officer killed in battle whilst defending Wellington himself. He was Charlie Figg, the sweet son of a vicar who met with a tragic fate at the end of a highwayman’s pistol. He was Raphael Moore, the dashing highwayman who’d met his somewhat less tragic fate at the end of the gallows’ rope.
Anna had taken the stories with a grain—or bucket, as need be—of salt, but never before had her mother offered proof.
Curious but skeptical, Anna narrowed her gaze. “What sort of proof?”
“A contract,” Madame replied with an airy smugness. “Made him sign one, same as the others.”
“You had a contract with my father?” She’d never considered that a possibility. She’d been born before her mother had married Captain Wrayburn and, shortly after his death, become the
Notorious Mrs. Wrayburn
. It had never been clear (nor of particular interest) to Anna whether or not her mother had made official arrangements with men in the distant past.
“Much good it did me,” Madame grumbled, her voice becoming notably more slurred. The glaze over her eyes grew thicker.
“Where is it?” Anna demanded, but her mother’s gaze had tracked to a corner of the room where it remained, unfocused and unseeing. Anna tossed her embroidery loop aside and reached out to give the woman a quick shake. “Madame, where is it?”
“What?” Madame blinked at her like a sleepy, irritated owl. “Where is what?”
“The contract you had with my father, where do you keep it?”
“With the others, of course. Must you be so loud?” She pushed away Anna’s hands. “Let me be.”
Anna flicked her gaze at the ceiling. The others were no doubt in the locked sitting room off the master bedchambers. Madame liked to keep her most prized possessions nearby.
“I want to see it. I want…Madame?” Anna watched in frustration as her mother’s eyes slid closed.
“Madame.”
It was no use, Mrs. Wrayburn had succumbed to the laudanum at last.
Damn it.
She scowled in defeat at the sleeping form.
Damn, damn, damn it.
“
Now
you give me peace?” she groused. “Confounded, disagreeable—”
“I wish to see that contract.”
Anna started at the husky voice that sounded behind her. Turning in her seat, she found her companion, and one-time governess, standing in the open door of the room.
A remarkably large-boned woman of advancing years who towered over Anna by more than half a foot, Mrs. Culpepper possessed hands that looked strong enough to crack walnuts, shoulders broad enough to be mistaken for a man’s, and unbeknownst to most, an enviable mane of thick black hair she kept tightly bound beneath a frilly cap.
Anna had heard the nickname “Ogress” whispered by a gentleman once. It was the only occasion in which she had requested her mother remove a specific guest from the house. The request had been denied, but she’d felt the better for trying.
Mrs. Culpepper was no ogress. She was a friend and confidante, a woman of uncommon intelligence and admirable character. Had the offending idiot troubled to set down his drink and look beyond what was merely different, he’d have seen she was also quite handsome, with a well-proportioned nose, large brown eyes, and full lips that were more often to be found smiling than not.
Anna gave her mother one last look of disgust, then left her seat to meet with Mrs. Culpepper in the hall.
“Were you eavesdropping just now?” Anna teased, pulling the door shut behind her.
“Nothing of the sort. I overheard the two of you speaking whilst passing in the hall.”
“You overheard an entire conversation in passing?”
“Indeed.” Mrs. Culpepper took her arm and ushered them both down the hall at a clipped pace. “Come along, dear.”
“What? No.” She took a fretful glance over her shoulder, half expecting her mother to come stalking out the sick room. “We cannot go snooping about Madame’s chambers.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s wrong.” She’d have thought that fairly obvious.
Mrs. Culpepper threw her a bland look without slowing her pace. Right and wrong were primarily academic considerations in Anover House.
“Very well,” Anna conceded, “because Madame will hear of it and rain hell upon our heads.”
“By locking you up like a princess in a castle?” She pulled Anna up a back stairwell. “Yes, we should hate to see that happen.”
“She might ban me from the library.”
“The marvelous thing about libraries is that their contents can be easily moved.”
“But what if she—?”
Mrs. Culpepper stopped at the top of the stairs, turned, and took Anna by the shoulders. “Now you look at me, and you listen carefully. Your mother is on another level of this house, where she will remain unconscious for the next eight hours, thank you, heavenly Father. Anyone else who might give a fig is out of the house and fully occupied devising the means that will allow them to
remain
out of the house for as long as possible. Everyone else can be bought off. You are not likely to see this opportunity again.”
All valid points, but before Anna could nod agreement, Mrs. Culpepper turned and marched resolutely down the hall. Anna followed cautiously, casting furtive looks behind her, then watched in awe as the woman who’d once been paid to be a child’s moral compass slid a key into the lock of the most sacred, most forbidden of rooms at Anover House.
“Where did you get that?” Anna demanded in a whisper as her friend opened the door.
“Never you mind. Suffice it to say…Oh…” Mrs. Culpepper went still at the sight of the sitting room. “Oh, saints preserve us.”
Anna peeked around Mrs. Culpepper and sucked in a quick breath. “Good Lord.”
The room was filled, positively filled, with…
everything
.
Boxes and chests, furniture and clothing. There were crates and trunks, and odds and ends—some odder than others, and some of them unidentifiable—covering the crates and trunks. An épée peeked out from behind an armoire, the familiar glitter of diamonds spilled out of a hat box, and everywhere one looked, there were piles upon piles of paper.
Some women used their sitting rooms to write correspondence and receive friends. Mrs. Wrayburn used hers as a vault. These were the items she considered too valuable to be stored in the attic. These were her most meaningful, most treasured possessions.