Stonecross Hall
October 1866
A decade had passed since the war ended, yet Alaric still dreamed of the Crimea. It was his constant ghost, that distant, nebulous peninsula where so many of his friends had died, mostly of disease, more than a few of gunshot or bayonet wounds. Alaric himself had earned a lamed leg to accompany the experience, and for what profit? None that he had ever been able to discern. He had left part of himself behind on the shores of the Baltic Sea, and part of that dark and unfathomable water had come back with him, replacing some part of him that had once been essential. No one remarked much on the change, not after so many years. But they knew he was not the same man and never would be.
Alaric sat before the fire in his bedchamber, allowing its warmth to dry his freshly bathed skin and hair as he sipped moodily at his pre-dinner aperitif. It was in moments like these, the silent torture of reflection before he took part in yet another meaningless daily ritual, that his memories of war were strongest. He remembered what it was like to eat then, the ravenous hunger that overtook him when he was a soldier and his meals were scanty. Why had they seemed like such banquets? What was it about rations shared with comrades who would not see the light of dawn that made the food taste so much like ambrosia, while the meals he shared with those nearest and dearest to him often took on the flavor of ashes? Perhaps it was as simple as the fact that none of them had ever truly been hungry. They ate for pleasure, and yet would never know the brutal sensuality of eating a meal likely to be their last.
Alaric poured another glass. He drank whiskey greedily enough. He better endured the company of civilians when he had a few drams in him.
They thought they understood war, his friends and relations who had stayed at home, eagerly devouring every word in the press, goggling at all of the photographs plastered across the pages of The Times. No war had ever been so accurately documented in every gruesome particular. No citizenry had ever been so close to a war while remaining comfortably at home, playing the pianoforte in their parlors, smoking and sipping brandy in their drawing rooms after partaking of plentiful dinners, and laughing raucously over billiards while Alaric and his friends were shot to pieces for no reason whatsoever. Parts of them froze and fell off into the bleakness of the Russian winter while less patriotic (and perhaps less idiotic) Englishmen nodded off during church, exasperating their wives into fresh throes of domestic despair. Alaric had never been so cold in his life as he was when he was eighteen, practically a boy soldier. He had never been fully warm since, no matter how the fires of Stonecross Hall blazed and the chandeliers glittered. They were nothing but marsh-lights toward which he wandered, without ever finding their warmth. They taunted him, and still he stumbled after them in the dark.
His dreams were not all gruesome. Many of them were beautiful, full of a peculiar purple light: dawn breaking over the drifted snow, the sun pulling threads of light from the trees and weaving from them fairy stories. In his dreams, he walked between the snow-blanketed bodies of the dead and felt a peace he did not feel in his waking hours. When he dreamed, for one thing, he did not limp. He was as whole as he had been as a child, and just as quick. It was true that the limp was far less pronounced than it had been when he first came home, an invalid, full of fever and rage. He could even dance a quadrille now, if he so chose—but he rarely did. He had quite lost his taste for it now that he spent his life dancing around and between the outstretched arms of the dead, begging for a partner to drag them from their listlessness. He was afraid of how willing he was to oblige them.
He knew it was past time he recovered and moved on with his life. It was more than time that he should be married, a father to the children who would inherit Stonecross after he had gone to his rest. The problem was that he didn’t much like the idea of saddling a defenseless child with the considerable tonnage of his ancestral home. It did not sit easy on his shoulders, and never had, even before the war. Now, it was well-nigh intolerable. It was worse than a ghost, this house of his. Inside of it, Alaric had the uncanny feeling that he himself was the ghost, that he was haunting his house, and it was just biding its time until his life should be done. The house no longer liked him—it only tolerated him. Stonecross knew he was not the same. His dearest wish was to get away, for good. The only time he had ever managed to do so, other than his time away at school—which was only ever temporary—he had come back maimed for his trouble. He had stayed home ever since. He didn’t have much left to lose, and he wanted to keep to himself what little remained.
Alaric rose, and fumbled with his glass, shoving it back in place next to the cut crystal decanter that always seemed to sparkle so alluringly on his mantel. He had long left off the pretense of keeping liquor solely in the drawing room for guests and after-dinner relaxation. Everyone knew the master of Stonecross liked his liquor.
He crossed the room, and stood at the window he liked to keep thrown open, though he knew the housemaids clucked and said he would catch his death. Girls like that, plain and good-hearted, would never understand how a man like him could half want something like that, half hope for the kind of death a cold breeze could bring in from the sea that glimmered in the night like an eye that saw all, and cared little. Sometimes he wished he had been born into a simpler life, like the people who took care of his every comfort.
Of course, it was a foolish fancy. He knew nothing of the lives of others. He was rich. He was privileged. He was handsome and well respected, though it was a wary sort of respect. People did not feel about him the way they had when he was a boy, golden and gleaming, but they, too, managed to tolerate him admirably. Any unmarried daughter of bon ton would be more than happy to take him if he asked.
But if he was a ghost, the girls he knew were waifs. They had no substance. No experience. No sense of the great wonder and pain of what it was to be a human animal. They weren’t animals at all; that was by and large the problem with the pampered and ornamented lot of them. None of them had suffered. Alaric had grown to respect the results of suffering on the human soul, if one could suffer sensibly, learn from it, and gain a little wisdom. He wasn’t sure he had managed to do so, but he had an idea that if he was acquainted with a woman who had also suffered, they might, together, learn what to make of it. The girls with whom he was daily surrounded, herded by their ambitious mamas and indulgent papas, draped in jewels, silks, and suitors, were like so many automatons. They were clever marionettes, equipped with all the elegant gestures of well-bred womanhood, the correct demeanors bred into their very bones, but they had no true life-spark of their own. They were only wind-up girls.
He lived with a woman of that sort, if someone who was still so much a girl could properly be called a woman. Ellen Wright was a distant cousin and his family’s ward. They had been famous friends in childhood, and before he went away to war, he had made a fervent declaration to the little chit that he had almost immediately regretted. Even then, she had changed, morphed from a jolly playmate into an ambitious young debutante. To her credit, she had never married anyone else, and Ellen had a fortune of her own. She could have married a dozen times over, but she hadn’t. Instead, she had remained installed in Stonecross, taking her place as the woman of the house after Alaric’s mother died, as though it was quite within her rights. And perhaps it was. He had said as much, once, when he was young and foolish, and hadn’t known yet what life really meant. Then, it was all a splendid parlor game, and he a prince at play. Ellen had always thought to be his princess.
That was quite impossible now, of course, but she had never quite understood that particular message. Perhaps she thought to wear him down. And maybe he should just let her. There were worse things than a pretty, vapid wife who would see to all the entertainments and make sure all the appropriate seasonal sentiments were expressed. She would make certain they went to Town in the correct week, and returned to the country when it was most fashionable to do so. Except that Alaric had no mind ever to go to London again. He was finished with balls and dinner parties, with forays to the opera and the pleasure gardens. He didn’t care to visit the club, or have himself fitted by an exclusive tailor for suits of clothes he would discard after the Season ended. He hadn’t even been bothering to have his hair cut lately—it hung long and thick to his shoulders. It was enough that he remembered to have himself shaved and dressed in a fresh shirt and clean cravat in time for dinner. He better remembered to refill his glass while he moped by the fire, and turn the pages as he read his book. He would be happy to malinger at Stonecross forever if everyone would just leave him in bloody peace.
They wouldn’t, of course. It was about to be his birthday. He would be thirty. There was to be a party. He didn’t want a bloody party, but what he wanted had very little to do with it. Ellen had her heart set on a party, and an engagement announcement, no doubt. Alaric wondered if he would oblige her. He hadn’t made up his mind yet. Everything would be simpler if he did, in many ways. After all, he couldn’t go on living at Stonecross with him with only his father to chaperone, an ailing man who paid little attention to what was happening around him. It simply wasn’t done.
Alaric turned from the window, impatient with the view, which never changed. It was always the same black liquid shimmering in moonlight, with the clouds moving too fast over the sky for him to find any recognizable shape. He was impatient, too, thinking about Ellen. She was not the sort of person who took up much space in a well-stocked mind. She was pretty, and intelligible enough. But Alaric’s mind slipped so easily away from her. She would do much better to marry someone else, someone for whom beauty and wealth were more alluring.
Alaric kept hoping that if he bored her to death on a daily basis, Ellen would decide to leave, and make her own way with the fortune she had come into on her twenty-first birthday. That had been a damnably long time ago. What was she now—twenty-eight or nine? She was getting dangerously close to being left on the shelf. Only her beauty and her fortune stopped people’s tongues wagging—much. An unmarried woman her age with a perfectly eligible bachelor in her daily midst would always set people talking. No doubt people thought them secret lovers, and that he refused to marry her and she had nowhere else to turn, or some scandalous rubbish of that sort. Such things did go on, he knew. Which was why he should perhaps just marry her and have done with it. A gentleman would have done so years ago. She had certainly earned it, living with him as he was for so long, putting her best face on while the ladies of the ton whispered behind their fans.
Another reason he ought to marry her was that perhaps she actually loved him. Stranger things did happen. She made all the pretty little gestures and unspoken declarations that maidens in love affected. Could it be real?
He didn’t think so.
There was a coolness to Ellen, something he thought of as innocence and virtue when they were children. He thought she would warm up when womanhood came upon her, but she never did. There was something calculating about her. She was slightly … serpentine. That was the bare truth of it, and he was repelled by her manner, which was unnatural. He didn’t love her. He couldn’t. And he still harbored a childish fancy that he would like to marry a woman he loved.
Certainly he didn’t need to marry. No gentleman did, except for the getting of progeny, which concerned him not at all. His nephew Freddy would inherit Stonecross, though the child had more than enough estate and fortune of his own. Alaric’s sister, Lizzie, had married very well indeed. They would be coming to Stonecross for the party, of course, even though he had written Lizzie not to. Why not, darling? she had written back gaily. I’ve nothing better to do, after all. London is frightfully dull this time of year. Alaric was of the opinion that the sooty city was frightfully dull at every time of year, but he hadn’t bothered arguing. Like Ellen, Lizzie would do as she liked.
Alaric sighed as the bell gonged to signal the family to dress for dinner, though it would be a dismal affair, with only himself and Ellen. His father didn’t eat in company any longer, but took his meals on a tray in his bedchamber. Alaric wished he could get away with doing the same. He didn’t feel like eating but he would not do Ellen the discourtesy of failing to appear. He was still something of a gentleman, if only a paltry one, and she had done nothing to deserve rudeness. It wasn’t her fault that she had become so tiresome. No doubt he had, too. Staying too long buried away at Stonecross would transform even the most sparkling personality into that of a complete dullard. No wonder Ellen wanted a party. He would let her have it and be as gracious about it as he could.
Jeffries, his valet, came silently into the room with the shaving set he kept in perfect order. Alaric allowed him to scrape away the prickling stubble, evidence of one more day spent in aristocratic indolence. He was shaved daily because Ellen liked to see him clean and smooth. Alaric wouldn’t bother if it wasn’t for her scrutinizing gaze, any more than he would bother putting on the dark blue dressing gown she had given him for Christmas. He knew how much it would hurt her feelings if he didn’t wear it, even though she never saw him in it.
He sat down before the glass to allow Jeffries to brush his damp hair, ignoring the man’s disapproving throat noise as he handled its unfashionable length. Alaric gazed at himself by the light of the lamp that had been turned high on the dressing table, noticing how little shadow it managed to dispel. October really was the gloomiest month. He wondered why he had had the perversity to have been born in it. He much preferred May. Had he been born in May, no doubt he would have had a much more delightful personality.
When he was a child, his nanny had told him the most appalling stories about children who were born on All Hallows, as he had been. “They ain’t like other children at all, Master Alaric,” she liked to tell him, with an ominous tone in her voice. Certainly, he didn’t feel like an ordinary person with ordinary cares, and he always felt strangely restless in October, his skin creeping and crawling beneath his clothes. The world seemed suddenly uncanny, and watchful. He felt as though he was walking between worlds, which was how one was meant to feel, if one put any stock at all in the folk superstitions of people like Nanny, who was the granddaughter of a Devon hedge witch, if she was to be believed. As a child, Alaric had always believed her. In October, he believed her even now.
He tolerated being dressed with his customary indifference, allowing Jeffries to move him about like a child deploying a toy soldier. When he was perfectly presentable according to Jeffries’s impeccable eye, the valet stood back and allowed Alaric to survey himself in the mirror. He did so as though it meant something to him, his face and his physique, the perfectly starched collar and beautifully tailored tailcoat that enclosed his body. He took in his reflection, noting that his jawline and hair were equally smooth, his clothing elegant and perfectly brushed. He looked as he always looked in the evenings, and that was all he asked. He nodded. “That will do, Jeffries. Thank you.”
Alaric followed him out a moment later, turning left where Jeffries turned right. He descended the staircase just as the bell gonged a second time, signaling the imminence of his dinner. He tried to imagine hunger, but he hadn’t been hungry in years. He had only been fed. He felt like a pet, a lapdog, listless and without use. He had once killed for his keep, and as little as he liked it, he had at least felt entitled to his dinner in the Crimea. That was something every man should feel at the close of the day.
That night, he ate even less at dinner than usual. Ellen chattered away animatedly, and he heard not a word she said. He didn’t even bother making polite noises in his throat or wearing the expression of bemused inquiry that usually did the trick. He could see the irritated, troubled look come over her face again and again, the one she saved for when he was not behaving the way she wished. She wore that expression a lot lately.
“Alaric, have you heard a word I’ve said this whole blessed evening?” she demanded, after the third one of her amusing anecdotes fell flat.
“No,” he said, before he could stop himself.
She stared at him, her expression souring slightly. “I see. I’m terribly sorry to be such a bore.”
He sighed. “It’s not your fault. You can’t help it.”
She gasped as though he had slapped her. “Really, Alaric!” was all she could manage. She never responded in kind when he snapped and bit at her heels. It was rather dull of her. He was spoiling for a good fight, even if it bore a veneer of politesse.
“I am a frightful bore, too,” he said wryly, pushing her a little further. “It’s this bloody house. It sucks all the luster out of life this time of year.”
“Well, why don’t we go away?” Ellen said, brightening, taking the opportunity he had opened for her to argue for yet another of her manias: travelling to fashionable resorts and watering holes, as if they didn’t get quite enough of the sea where they sat, with it moaning through the very walls and windows that contained them. “We could go to Bath, or Brighton. The winters here are far too dull, you are right.”
Alaric shook his head. “Why don’t you go to Bath or Brighton, Ellen?” he said quietly. “Why didn’t you go, years ago? You aren’t growing any younger. Neither of us are.”
Ellen lowered her head, tears standing out in her clear green eyes. “That is very unkind of you, Alaric, after all I’ve done for you.”
“Ellen, I don’t want to you to do anything for me. Can’t you see that? I just want to be left in peace.”
“I thought I could bring you peace,” she said in a small voice. “I thought I could brighten your life. That is why I am throwing this party, you know. For you. I thought being surrounded by your friends might make you happy.”
Alaric sighed and smiled warily, chagrined by her words. “I know,” he said softly, as the gentleman that still resided somewhere inside of him rose again to the surface and took control. “Thank you, Ellen. It’s very kind of you.”
She reanimated immediately, taking what he said as a far more meaningful encouragement than was his intent. She chattered on through dessert, buoyed by his words, and he pretended to listen with more interest than he really felt. Bloody hell, he thought, with gathering apprehension as he looked at her glowing face. If I am not careful, I really am going to have to marry the girl.
“Why not simply marry the girl?” His father’s voice was hoarse, ragged with pain and the weariness of a death too long postponed. Alaric frowned, looking down at the face he no longer knew, spotted with age and worn away until it was little more than skin stretched over a bone frame. “After all, she cannot live here with you after I am gone, Alaric. You strain the boundaries of propriety as it is.”
Alaric sighed, slumping down in his chair. He massaged his temples. Damn, but he had a headache. “I don’t love her, Father. And I don’t think she loves me. She loves … I don’t know what she loves. But it isn’t me. At best, it is some idea of me, a fantasy that will never come true. I think she believes somehow that if we were only married, the man she actually wants will appear out of the ether and take my place. Sometimes I feel as though when she looks at me, she sees that man’s ghost.”
He thought his father would dismiss his moribund notions with a frail wave of his hand, but to his surprise, the old man stared at him with a penetrating gaze. “If Ellen was capable of so complex a thought—and I am not convinced that she is—she would be right, would she not? As I am myself so close to becoming one, I think I am becoming rather adept at recognizing a ghost when I see one. My son, you’re no more alive than your dear mother, God rest her.”
Alaric stared. He might be sick unto death, but the old fellow was as astute as ever. To be so easily read touched a nerve, and Alaric spoke before he thought. “I do not know what you’re talking of, Father,” he said evenly, his tone light but humorless. “Perhaps the laudanum Doctor Wakefield prescribed is a little stronger than it should be.”
“Don’t condescend to me, boy. I am still your father, even if I am nearly dead.” The old mad coughed, reddening, though whether from the effort of scolding his son or from emotion, it was difficult to say.
Alaric’s heart gave a painful tug, contrition taking a firm grip on him. He leaned forward to take the old man’s hand awkwardly in his own. They weren’t much given to demonstration. “Forgive me, sir—I didn’t mean what I said.”
Alaric Storm the elder, second of his name, maintained his piercing gaze. He looked into his son’s eyes, and the younger man flinched, pulling away to stand at the window. No one looked at him like that anymore—as if they could see straight into his core. He wasn’t sure what resided in that ransacked place where, so he had been taught, his soul resided. He didn’t think much on his soul anymore. He told himself he didn’t believe in it, that when he was finished with his body, everything he was would go out like a snuffed candle. He didn’t know whether the notion terrified or relieved him. This time of year, the spirit world seemed oddly close, as if he could reach out and touch it—or it him. He shouldn’t make light of such things, or so Nanny had always told him, the old terror.
“We should never have let you go,” his father murmured from the bed. “If we had known what it would do to you, we would have tied you to the bedstead until you saw reason.”
Alaric stared out at the sea. The mullioned windows were salt-stained, and he felt as though he looked through a bleary eye that could perceive little more than the shifting of light over the bay. “If I wasn’t so damnably weak, I would have forgotten, and gone on with my life by now,” he replied. “It must shame you to have a son who cannot bear to live with things of which other men are deeply proud.”
“Few men are made for war, Alaric. Those who are made for it are something more or perhaps less than human. Do not desire to be like them.”
Alaric grimaced. “Father, please. Don’t patronize me.”
“It isn’t patronage, it’s good common sense.”
Alaric shrugged noncommittally. He really didn’t want to talk about it any longer. He began sketching a childish tracing on the glass. After a moment, he rubbed it out, and through the scrubbed glass he glanced down into the courtyard, in which the huge and ancient stone cross that lent its name to his ancestral home leaned against the sky in an ominous pose.
It had always frightened him as a child, when he saw its silhouette propped up against the darkness, and he was none too fond of it now. In his more restless moments, he fantasized about having it pulled down, but it was said to be a relic of a tenth-century monastery that had once stood on the site over which Stonecross Hall had been built. He didn’t like the idea of disturbing any further the bones of the long-dead monks who once bent their knees to the cross below.
He shivered, and looked away from the lichen-encrusted monument.
From his periphery, Alaric suddenly saw a flicker of someone moving down below.
There was a person coming up to the great doors laden with parcels, or … was it luggage? He frowned, staring harder. Had one of the guests misread the invitation and come too early? He hadn’t heard a carriage, and none of the servants were scurrying forth to offer assistance.
Most strange.
The figure came into better focus, and he saw … what was it he saw? A strange personage, dressed very oddly. A woman, he thought. The person had a certain gait, an elegant yielding of her figure to motion that could only belong to a female. Her clothing, from what Alaric could espy from his rather awkward vantage point, was more than outlandish—it was decidedly scandalous. Was that … a bare calf he saw, flexing beneath her skirts? Even the thought sent a little thrill, like a small jolt of light, coursing through him. The woman’s head was equally bare, out of doors in broad daylight, with one of the oddest coiffures he had ever seen blowing in the breeze. He had never seen a lady with shorn hair before—though perhaps the woman (for she couldn’t be a lady) had recently been ill.
Who was she, and whatever was she doing at his door in such a state of dishabille, carrying what could for all he knew be the entirety of her worldly possessions?
Alaric’s pulse began to pound erratically. There was something very strange about the figure, something nearly uncanny that had little to do with the eccentric state of her dress. He almost felt as though she wasn’t quite there, and it wasn’t the distortion of the ancient window glass that obscured his vision. There was something else between them, like a drapery of transparent gauze distorting the air.
Suddenly, the figure looked up at the window, straight at him, and though he had the distinct impression she could not see him clearly through the distorted glass, he could make out her features fairly well, despite the distance. She resembled a watercolor sketch, a swirl of color and form. He perceived the outlines of her straight black brows, elegant as dashes of calligraphy, and her full red mouth pursed in consternation. She was thin as an exclamation point in her loose, rather plain dress. She grew clearer somehow, as if the gauze that had obscured her from his sight had begun to burn away in the moment she looked up at the window. Her dark eyes registered but seemed to look through him, as though he wasn’t quite there.
It was a terrible feeling, as if he was shimmering into a state of invisibility as her outline grew starker against the flagstones below. He felt as though his organs must be clearly visible, pulsing within him, his blood a surging tide within tangled veins. His heart leapt against his ribs, a mad animal trying to get away.
He was afraid. He hadn’t been afraid in years. He had been far too bored.
Now, he was exhilarated, the inexplicable surge of excitement was headier than any liquor. Who was she, and why was she here? He felt as if he should know her face. He did know it, and yet he knew he had never seen it before.
“Father,” he said calmly, despite the cold sweat that had broken out on his brow and the jangle of his pulse. “There is someone at the door.”
“What?” the old man wheezed, startled awake. He had begun to tire even more easily of late. Alaric was surprised at the number of sensible sentences their conversation had garnered, and though the subject matter was not entirely to his liking, he felt as if he had been given a small and perfectly chosen gift. He strode over to the bed and stroked the old man’s hair—a liberty he took only because his father was barely sensate.
“Never mind, sir,” he said gently. “I’ll make them go away.”
He marched from the room, not bothering to close the door, and took the quicker, narrower route down the servants’ staircase, nearly colliding with a chambermaid encumbered with a pile of fresh linens in his haste. He didn’t know why he was in such a lather to confront a person who made him feel as if he might not exist, a madwoman walking about the countryside in a state of undress. At the back of his mind was the thought that she might need his help. Help that only he could give her. An illogical thought, considering he had helped absolutely no one in many years, least of all himself. He had told his father he would make her go away. He wondered if he would be able—or would even want—to do so.
At the bottom of the stairs, he nearly collided with yet another of the several dozen servants who cluttered up the back stairs of Stonecross—a footman, in this case. He scowled at the young man, who looked suitably cowed by the direct eye contact. “What are you about, Danby?” he demanded. “Do you not know that there is a person at the front door, carrying her own luggage up the walk? I could see her clearly from my father’s window.”
The footman stared, his impeccable livery pulled slightly askew in his effort to avoid crashing into his master. “No, sir, there can’t be! I was only just out there meself. Are you sure it weren’t me you saw?”
“It most certainly was not,” Alaric said firmly. “I distinctly saw a young woman coming up the walk with several heavy valises. I cannot believe that the members of my staff would be so remiss as to ignore a guest’s arrival.”
The young man stared at him in open disbelief. “No, sir, I would never do such a thing,” he protested. “Honest. There is no one outside.”
Alaric strode toward the door, grasping the handle just as he heard the sound of a key fumbling its way into the keyhole. He frowned. What the devil was happening? No one but the upper members of his staff possessed keys to Stonecross. Alaric himself didn’t have a key to the front door. And why would it be locked in broad daylight?
“Allow me, sir,” Danby said humbly, gaze averted as he attempted to open the door for Alaric, who shrugged him off impatiently, tugging at the door. It felt as if it had been soldered shut. The brass handle twisted in his hand, as though someone was attempting to open it from the other side, each of them thwarting the other’s efforts.
“Just wait a blasted moment!” he muttered, muscling the handle as it shuddered, nearly tearing out of his grasp. Whoever she was, she had a firm grip, despite her willowy shape.
Finally, the door gave way, whooshing inwards as though a wind had pushed it open. Alaric used the momentum to fling it wide, preparing for his encounter with the unannounced, and very peculiar, guest. The mottled October light meandered across the threshold into the dark foyer, barely illumining the polished marble floor beneath his feet.
Alaric immediately began rambling, as he usually did when confronted with a stranger. “Good morning. Please allow my footman to take your things. I am afraid we weren’t expecting guests quite so soon—” he said cordially.
To no one.
There was no one there, as Danby had said. The front step was quite abandoned. Fallen leaves strewed the scrubbed stone, and there were no fresh wheel marks disturbing the gravel drive. No one had pulled a carriage up to the house in several days, other than deliverymen, who drove their carts around the back. Alaric stared, baffled.
“Danby,” he said. “I swear to God there was a very strange young woman standing not two feet from this spot a few moments ago. What is more, I heard the very distinct sound of a key turning in the lock just as I was opening the door. And as I turned the handle, there was someone on the other side, countermanding my efforts.”
He turned to look at the young man, to gauge how Danby was taking what he was saying. To his credit, the footman did his best to retain an expression of polite credulity, but his visage clearly betrayed a more practical sentiment. “Sir,” he said, his eyes widening slightly. “Mayhap you don’t know it, but there’s no key to that door—never has been, as long as I’ve been here. Mr. Crawley locks up at night and unlocks it in the morning, all from the inside. Once I was locked out on me day off, and I had to sleep in the stable.” Danby blushed furiously at that confession, and looked down at his feet, clearly expecting a reprimand. He looked immensely relieved when none was forthcoming.
Alaric stared abstractedly out of the door for a few moments longer, before patting him on the shoulder. “Alright, Danby,” he said. “You may close the door. And Danby”—he cleared his throat, glancing sidelong at the flustered footman—“you needn’t mention this to anyone. Especially Miss Wright.”
“Mention what to me?” Ellen said brightly, wafting into the room in one of her many morning gowns that looked more like confections in a patisserie window than they resembled items of clothing. Her hair was elegantly coiffed, her cheeks rosy, and her figure pert. Alaric felt a minute stirring of affection for her that didn’t quite bloom into anything more endearing than an appreciation for the pleasant freshness of her complexion. Was it enough? He didn’t know.
“That the front door will need polishing and the hinges oiled before our guests arrive,” he replied smoothly. “I am afraid the staff has rather been neglecting it of late, and I didn’t want to trouble you with it, with all you have to do.”
Danby nodded, and bowed, melting away in that singular fashion of servants without needing to be dismissed.
“Thank you, Alaric. That was most considerate of you.” Ellen smiled, clearly pleased that he was taking an interest in the party preparations. She took his arm, placing her fingers lightly on his sleeve as she looked up into his face. Thankfully, he had shaved before noon that morning, even though he would only have to do so again before dinner. He wondered idly what Ellen would think if he were to grow the sort of patriarchal beard some sea captains of the region favored. He doubted she would tolerate such an affectation. Facial hair seemed to be the one thing about which she put down her elegantly slippered foot. Indolence and ennui paled in comparison to her aversion to unsightly stubble.
Ellen’s eyes shone with the sort of admiration to which most gentleman felt entirely entitled. Alaric only felt unequal to the task of living up to her expectations. He patted her hand absently, his gaze straying again to the door as she began to chatter about party decorations and French desserts. He walked with her into the morning room, which was filled with a watery light. He allowed it to dispel the last cobwebs of unease that still clung to his thoughts.
He had imagined it. That was all.
Clearly he had not been getting enough sleep or exercise. He had been penned up too long in the dreary rooms of Stonecross Hall, which, like all houses of its size and antiquity, was somber at best during the autumn months. Perhaps Ellen was right—a party would do him good.