Sunset came early this time of year, and with it the mists rolled in, turning the dimming outside world to smoky gray well before teatime. And finding my soul gone gray as well. The very thought of descending to the drawing room and putting on a façade of pleasant good manners while Lady Daphne all but sat in Robert’s lap was more than I could bear. Particularly when a perfectly horrid thought had insinuated itself into my mind refused to go away.
An urge to flee the house consumed me—only the cool outside air could steady and clarify my mind. Excusing myself from joining the others for tea, I slipped down the servants’ stairs and into the courtyard by a side door. There was barely enough light to see my hand before my face. Nonetheless, I set my feet toward the center of the flagstoned courtyard and kept on going. And very shortly there it was, the statue of David looming over me in the glorious fullness of his youthful nakedness. David who triumphed over Goliath, armed only with a slingshot. David who represented every young man, beautiful or ugly, who had gone forth to fight, to love, to raise a family and bring forth more young men and women to muddle along in a world both marvelous and chaotic.
Fancy, pure fancy. Yet somehow the Davids of this world were sacrosanct. Untouchable. Impossible they should be villains. Certainly not our Davy—I should be ashamed of myself for allowing such an idea to cross my mind. Neither David nor Robert had killed those girls, I would stake my life on it.
Which is exactly what you’re doing if you don’t consider the possibility.
While continuing to gaze up at the statue, now nearly obscured by swirling mist and the gloom of night, I growled my inner voice to silence. Every bit of progress Vanessa had made was due to David, not to me. Just as she had played at invalid to keep him by her side, she had now come full circle and made him her inspiration for recovery. Somehow all would be well, even if it meant their leaving Moorhead Manor, never to return.
“Penny! Penny!” Robert’s shout drove all thoughts of David and Vanessa from my head. In spite of the chill air, warmth enveloped me. I’d been missed, and my love had thought to look for me in the courtyard.
“Coming!” I called and plunged into the fog. But my headlong dash slowed as the mists suddenly settled close around me, hemming me in, seeming almost to cut off my air. “My lord?” I ventured.
“Penny!” Closer, thank God, and not far off the direction I was heading.
Three more steps and a dark shape loomed over me, enfolded me in its arms, and held me tight. Like the veriest ninny, I buried my face in his chest and fought back sobs of relief. Idiot! I railed at myself, even as I hung on for dear life. There had been no danger. I had walked from the gallery to the center of the courtyard and back. That was all. And yet I was quivering from head to toe, like some faint-hearted female whose idea of horror was a glimpse of a mouse. Yet still I clung, fighting for breath, beset by demons that were wholly in my imagination.
Or so I told myself.
“It occurs to me,” Robert said into my hair, “that we are alone in the dark, shrouded in mist—which seems a most excellent opportunity for this.” He tilted up my chin and put his lips to mine in a kiss that threatened to never end. A kiss that sent my head spinning and roused a sleeping dragon of a totally different kind. Robert groaned and pulled away an inch. “Dear God, Penny, I want to find some warm and secret spot and not go back ’til the sun rises over the moor. No. More than that. I want to take you away from all this—away from death and sorrow . . . and brooding. I want to shut the world out, make love to you from morn ’til night and night ’til morn.”
Abruptly, with a snort of disgust, he pushed me away. “But I am stuck with this great pile. With responsibility to keep the family functioning in spite of blood tainted by murder.”
I wanted to protest his reasoning. And could not. He was the heir, there was no getting out of it. And his father’s guilt seemed almost certain.
“I can never marry,” he continued, twisting the knife. “Though perhaps a melding of Huntley’s good nature with Lady Jocelyn’s may serve to carry on the line.”
“Do not be absurd!”
“Rob, I say, Rob, are you out there?”
“Speak of the Devil,” Robert muttered as Huntley’s voice pierced the darkness.
“More on this later,” I declared. Never would I allow Robert to assume his father’s blame!
“Coming!” Robert called. “The lost is found.” And with Huntley’s voice to guide us, we made it safely back to the house.
As any female who has ever suffered love-sickness must guess, I climbed the stairs to my bedchamber with winged feet, not at all discomposed by my love’s assertion he would never marry. All I had truly heard was that somehow he seemed to associate marriage with me. Penelope Ruth Ballantyne. Surely there could be no other interpretation of his words than he was saying he could not marry me because of his father’s transgressions. Because of a possible inherited tendency to violence, which he had already recognized in himself during long years of war.
And at this I scoffed. Did he think me a fragile flower, ready to wilt at the first sign of adversity? A sheltered maiden who had never known violence and death, the tragedies inherent in living?
Nonsense! I would soon disabuse him of his pretensions to self-sacrifice.
Visions of a rosy future occupied my mind to the exclusion of all else, and I sailed into Vanessa’s sitting room shortly before the dinner hour on a wave of pure fantasy. Robert saw me as something more than another notch on his bedpost, and all would be well. Insulated by my own cloak of euphoria, I was actually surprised to find Vanessa in a similar state. Since she had just dressed for dinner, she was alone, Alice occupied in straightening her bedchamber, Maud and David gone down to early dinner in the kitchen.
“I walked!” Vanessa exclaimed. “All the way from the bed to the window. Maud had my arm, of course, but truly I did it all myself. Oh, Penny, I am ecstatic! It’s happening, it’s truly happening. David and I shall be together at last. And it is all thanks to you!” She pushed herself up from her chair and threw her arms around me.
Suddenly, her body stiffened. She stepped back, an all-too-familiar fierce scowl marring her face. “You must not tell Papa, Penny. I know you two are thick as thieves, but he must never suspect. Nor Rob or Hunt or anyone else. You must swear, Penny, swear on your parents’ graves you will not tell a soul. If Papa knew, he would let David go and . . .”
I failed to hear the rest of her words as my visions of both of us paired with our lovers in Utopian splendor shattered, lost dreams falling in shards to the carpet. I caught my breath, swallowed hard, as reality crashed back, making the air around us heavy, as if suddenly filled with lead.
Secrets. So many secrets. Some lethal, some only fraught with potential tragedy. David and Vanessa? Robert and I? We were as likely to come to a happy ending as Lady Hycliffe and Quenton Ridgeway. I stood there, quivering, my hand over my mouth, my eyes seeing nothing, as my brain fought to find a way out of this mire.
I feared I might have a dash of the Celt, for the foreboding that swamped my senses was strong. Overpowering.
“Penny?”
I stiffened my spine, unclenched my jaw and said, “Of course I will tell no-one, Vanessa. This has been our secret from the very beginning, has it not?” But in my heart I could not help but wonder if the stability of her mind had kept up with the increased vigor of her body.
“Forgive me,” she murmured, shame-faced. “You are my true friend and would never betray me.”
Except for not telling you your mother lies under a ton of earth and rock only a few feet behind the garden.
I slammed the door on my inner voice, more than glad to have David reappear at that moment, ready to carry Vanessa down to supper.
Two days later the Durrant family departed for their primary residence in Wiltshire. My emotions were strangely mixed. I took a quite improper pleasure at the sour looks on the faces of Lady Rothbury and Lady Daphne. Clearly, their hopes of announcing a betrothal before their departure had been balked yet again. I would, however, miss Lady Jocelyn’s sweet temper. And with Lord Norvelle departing at last, I realized we might never know if he was involved in the deaths of the four young women. Time would tell, I supposed. If there were no deaths during his absence . . .
Not proper evidence, I knew. No magistrate would charge him on such a flimsy supposition. But I clung to my theory, for I would not allow it to be Hycliffe, Robert, Huntley, Kenrick, or David.
Well . . . yes, it could be Hycliffe. If Robert was so certain his father had killed his mother—to the point of eschewing marriage—then it was likely the earl had confessed, and none of my fine theories were worth the powder to blow them up. And if he had killed two people, what were four more deaths, even though they were separated by a chasm of more than four years?
I suspected Robert thought his father guilty of all six deaths. And if so, who could blame him for refusing to continue the blood line? But try as I would, beyond the earl’s eccentricity of being a recluse, I could find no sign of madness in him. Surely one moment of excessive passion was not madness . . .
At dinner, with the table reduced to family only, not counting that interloper, Penny Ballantyne, I attempted to look at everyone through the eyes of a Doubting Thomas. An exercise in futility, I soon discovered. How could I possibly picture Robert strangling Mary Perkins, casting Nell Ridgeway off a cliff, beating Sal Billings to death, or drowning Megan Flaherty in a bog? It was unthinkable. The thought of Huntley as a killer, equally so. Kenrick exert himself to murder? Indeed not. David, “our Davy,” currently at his customary post flat up against a wall?
Surely life could not be that cruel.
As I applied myself to a fine roast of beef, I assured myself it was over. Lord Norvelle was gone, the deaths would cease. The next uproar would be Vanessa’s revelation . . . or would she and David simply fade away into the night?
With what? Someone would have to support their elopement, for contrary to the stuff found in romantic novels, the hero and heroine must have money enough for a horse and carriage to enable their run for freedom, a roof over their heads, food to eat, passage to the United States. And money to survive until David could find a way to earn a living . . .
What fools we all were. Robert’s pessimism, David’s as well, were not unjustified. They saw reality while Vanessa and I indulged in air-dreams. How could our sad state of affairs possibly come right?
I sang melancholy songs in the drawing room that night, my gaze flicking from Robert to Vanessa to David to Lord Hycliffe and finding nothing but the masks they chose to present to the rest of us. Where to go from here? Or did I simply erase the past from mind and go forward, taking each day as it came? Waiting to see what would happen next? Who would die? Who would run mad? Who would run away?
I had never thought myself a coward, but in that moment I was. I felt fear. A certainty of tragedy to come. And knew no way to stop it. Like a ship caught in a storm, I could not control what was to happen. I could only react and pray survival was possible.