Gilded: The St. Croix Chronicles (29 page)

I could not see what was invisible.

“I am a woman,” Hortense rasped. Stone grated. Somewhere to my left? I peered hard.

There! A flicker of droplets where rain did not strike the terrace itself.

And a muted sound beneath. Rock grating. Fingers scrabbling.

I tossed one leg over the balustrade. “Stay where you are, I’m going to—”

“Don’t you dare!”

I ignored her, reached until my weakened shoulder screamed with the effort. My fingers found flesh; I grabbed hold, joints popping.

She wrenched at me. “For years I’ve been forced to endure the scorn from these worthless jackanapes. Placed beneath the boot of men less than myself. I will not go back to nothing!”

“You cannot give up,” I countered through my gritted teeth. Rock crumbled as an ornamentation gave way beneath her weight. I cried out as the limb in my grasp pulled, dead weight. The railing grated beneath my leg. “Hortense, you must . . . listen . . .”

“I am
tired
of listening,” came the half-screamed words beneath me. Fingers I couldn’t see pried at mine. “You should have died below! Why didn’t you die?”

I took a deep breath.

Smelled lilies.

The same fragrance I’d caught while trapped in the closet. Organic, sweet, as out of place in this driving force of mania as I was in this sopping pink confection. More of the material gave way like wet tissue, and I jerked as my weight slid to the side.

I winced, muscles burning. “Why?” I demanded. “Why kill the others?”

“They were in my way. All of them, in my way!”

“Even Lambkin?” I demanded. Her limb twisted, slipped. “Hortense, I need your help!”

“Never,” she spat, and a grip made of molten steel seized my wrist. I could not see it, only feel the pain of it. See the indentations left by invisible fingers. “You . . . You don’t understand! I’d given him everything . . . The position, the knowledge. He filled the tenure that should have been mine and all I ever received was a toss when he wanted it. He laughed at me. Laughed!”

“Hortense—”

“
No man will ever laugh at me again!
”

And with that ragged scream, as the weight held in my grip thrashed, something cracked. The bone beneath my fingers, I think, although I had no way of being sure. Stone gave way. My wrist popped, sending searing agony up my arm; my fingers loosened as I bit back a cry of pain, even as my other hand curled around the balustrade and clung with all my might.

Hortense Hensworth plummeted to the courtyard below.

Saplings snapped beneath the weight of a woman whose very blood had taken on the qualities of the tincture she’d fed it. I heard the sound of flesh striking earth.

And I screamed in the rain as the same indifferent force of gravity pulled me after her.

“
Cherry!
”

Fingers locked around my ruined wrist. Another scream, this one made of pure pain, stripped the flesh from my throat. My ribs collided with the anterior stone facing, pushing every last bit of breath I had left from my lungs. “Oomph!”

Rain drove into my eyes, blurred the air above me to a subdued glow of lantern light, yet I heard clear as a bell the genteel curse of a man who’d spent more time with an uncouth navy than the civil company he currently kept.

“Hold on!” Lord Compton ordered, and it
was
an order. I gritted my teeth as fire and gaswork lights popped through my vision. Each press of his finger, each pull twisted my arm until agony was all I could see or feel or breathe.

Until stone scraped at my hips, my legs, and gave way to the banded steel of arms warmer, but no less confining for it.

For a long moment, I shuddered, gasping, my arm aching as I stared over Compton’s shoulder and saw nothing. Only a void where the rain could not reach the earth. Nothing at all, in the shape of a body.

The invisible corpse in King’s College. The woman who would make her mark on the university after all.

Miss Hensworth had achieved her wish. Even if no one would ever see it.

“Are you hurt?”

My shoulders, already slumped, shook as Earl Compton’s effortlessly authoritative tenor cut through my shock. My numb dismay. I was soaked through, the pink confection I wore now a sodden, ruined mass of lumpy cloth and sheer tissue.

My hair clung to my neck and shoulders, half pinned and mostly plastered to my skin, inelegant hanks. My wrist ached, a throbbing pain that warned of deeper damage.

I braced for a lecture, for questions.

One came, but it was not the one I expected. “Miss St. Croix,” he said as he guided me away from the ledge that had nearly claimed two tonight, “are you all right? Do you require aid?” Something warm draped across my shoulders.

A coat. His.

I clutched it to me, even as I knew the rain would soak it, too. Drench him, beside me. “I  . . .” My breath escaped on a whispered sob. “I think I’d like to go home. I don’t feel well.”

It was a lie. Sort of.

The earl let me go, but only enough so that he could grip my upper arms and glare down at me. “What possessed you to run off like that?” he demanded, yet it wasn’t a sharp sound. An angry sound.

Instead, it bore all the hallmarks of a man who worried. Who’d been . . .

I looked up at him in sudden surprise.

Had he been afraid for me?

He had.
Even as the rain coated him in icy rivulets, his hair now as sodden as mine and dripping tendrils into his eyes, his demeanor was not one of anger.

Not, anyway, of true anger. I’d frightened him.

“I . . . I saw the murderer come this way,” I managed. “I called, but no one came. So I . . . I  . . .”

I tried to collect her.

I closed my teeth around the words trembling between my lips.

His mouth tightened to a hard line.

“Never again,” he said, his arm tight around my shoulders. “Do you understand me?
Never
are you to take such matters into your own hands. What possessed you to think you could—!” His question cut off so quickly, it left my ears ringing.

Exhaustion, sorrow, filled me. My head lowered, until my temple came to rest over Lord Compton’s chest. His heart beat steadily beneath my ear.

Steady.
That was it. He was steady. Always the same, Earl Compton. Even when frightened, when forced out of his formal coat and soaked to the skin, he was the same: stalwart, not stiff as I’d unkindly called him. Balanced. So sure.

His other gloved hand curled around the back of my head, cradling me. As near a gesture of possession as I’d ever allowed.

“Let us find your chaperone,” Earl Compton said, bowing his head over mine. Much quieter, now, more in control than I. “It’s time for you to return home.”

“But what of—”

The fingers at my nape tightened. “I will handle it.”

And he would, wouldn’t he? Everything in its place.

Just the way it always would be.

“Cornelius—”

He stiffened, and I stepped back suddenly as the rigidity of his body translated to my cold, sluggish mind. His arm tightened; I would not allow the confinement any longer.

As I found balance upon my own two feet, I clutched the warmth of his coat to me and raised my chin to meet his eyes. Pretty eyes, he had. They were appraising, I expected nothing less. Guarded, as if he expected me to do something rash.

Something
else
rash.

Would this qualify? I didn’t know. All I could think was that I had reached my quotient of heartache. Perhaps forever.

I cleared my throat. “My lord, it would . . .” The air pulled from my lungs. I fisted my hands into the coat, took a deep breath of the misted rain and said quickly, “It would please me to accept your proposal, sir.”

His jaw moved. The golden line of his mustache tilted somewhat as he worked something I could not read through his mind, his expression. Uncertainty, perhaps. Doubt.

“If,” I continued, and watched his eyebrows beetle tightly, “you answer for me one question.”

“Miss St. Croix, now is hardly the time,” he demurred, gesturing to the warmth inside, only ten paces away.

“One question,” I pressed stubbornly, all too aware of the icy water dripping into the collar of my borrowed coat. He must be frozen without coat or hat. But I could not give.

I would not, no matter how much my overwrought thoughts begged to let it be.

His lashes flickered. “Ask.”

“Why me?” I demanded. “Truthfully, my lord. Why?”

My knees trembled in the intervening silence. Shock, I thought rather clinically. Delayed reaction to nearly taking a tumble, certainly the aftereffects of watching—hearing—a woman die in front of me.

Trepidation, certainly.

The earl turned away from me. “You will think me childish.”

“I will not.” There could certainly be no comparison to myself, in any regard.

One long-fingered hand, gloveless and pale in the shadows, speared through his rain-flattened curls. “You are many things, Miss St. Croix. Pleasing to the eye, clever, and certainly you are no fortune-seeker.”

Dry humor forced a thin line to my lips. It was no smile, but I felt it ease the first hint of warmth into my chilled insides. “Well, you are honest, at least.”

He turned, hands clasped behind him in military fashion. Even as the rain slicked across his angled cheek, he looked at me with the kind of forthright precision I imagine he studied his navy men with.

I swallowed hard.

“There is a heart in you that I admire,” he said quietly. “A fierce spirit that refuses to break. Despite your ill-conceived attempts at heroism and nonsense, you are the one weakness I will allow myself, no matter what Mother demands. It will be you, Cherry St. Croix, or it will be no other, for I will not tie myself to a simpering maid with neither intellectual wit nor a thirst for life.” He gestured passionately. “You will grow to have affection for me, I am sure of it.”

I found myself blinking under this outburst of honesty, blinking away the rain and the surprise and the . . .

Pleasure?

Some, I could admit it. Pleasure that for the brief moment, I found in Earl Cornelius Kerrigan Compton a kindred spirit in the fight against the world that would take from us our freedoms. Our happiness.

He understood. As only a man could, of course, in a very limited sense, for the world would not strip very much from him, but he understood.

“You will study,” he told me, offering one hand. “You will have tutors, the finest there is. You will outshine every countess England has ever seen, and you will do my name”—he hesitated, and then, ever so softly, smiled at me—“and yours,” he added pointedly, “proud.”

I would have no choice. To earn the right to be a woman of intellect and stature, to be as Lady Rutledge, I would have to play by the rules.

Freedom would mean nothing if I lacked the status to use it.

No man shall ever laugh at me again.

With his name, I could be all but guaranteed.

Slowly, I set my hand in his. My stomach knotted, a vicious thing of apprehension. “Then I accept,” I whispered.

“Come. Leave everything to me.”

“But there will be banns, time—”

“Leave it to me, my future countess,” he repeated firmly. “I will take care of you.”

Chapter Twenty-two

T
he masquerade became the talk of London; the event where the dean of the University of London was murdered by an unknown assailant and a terrible malfunction caused the gold cannons to go off prematurely.

There came no cry, no article or speculation, about a corpse in King’s College, nor did I hear of anyone complaining of the smell such an untended thing could instigate.

Whatever happened to Miss Hensworth’s altered body, I did not know of it.

To my surprise, I learned nothing of myself in the papers, no gossip of my behavior, recognized or otherwise. Instead, what brain matter was not devoted to the masquerade’s endless supply of speculation was turned to the next and final event of the season—an event that would not be open to the public, but whose ramifications would stretch forever into history.

The wedding of Lord Cornelius Kerrigan Compton, Earl Compton and heir to Northampton, to Miss Cherry St. Croix. Heiress. Mad doctor’s daughter.

No longer a collector.

I had reformed.

The gossips had taken the news of the Compton’s sudden engagement and run mad with it. The sheer amount of speculation now hounding me was enough to paint every mistress and kept woman in London, much less innocent me.

But LAMB, I noticed, had changed their tactics. The marchioness was far too sophisticated to smear her own forthcoming daughter-in-law, no matter her opinion on her son’s choice of brides. No, her campaign would be subtler.

The salon’s columns these days were filled with deliberations on the perfect wife. The perfect hostess. The perfect, in a word, countess.

That which I would become upon my marriage vows.

“Message noted,” I murmured, and put the paper down.

I could not dwell on the fact, the obligations, the
weight
any longer than I had to.

Fanny, simply overjoyed at what she’d always assumed an inevitable thing, kept busy making plans. A gown, flowers, decorations for the event; anything she could possibly stick her meddling fingers in, she did. Lord Compton was nobody’s fool—he favored an intimate gathering in his Northampton home and a special license to wed over banns posted for weeks and a large event.

I understood his mother was not pleased by the decisions. I also understood that Compton might understand slightly more of my nature than I had previously credited him. He’d wasted no time in placing an engagement ring on my finger.

I’d never seen the like. Emeralds, richly hued, three set in a tier across my finger. His mother’s, he claimed.

The lady must be beside herself.

I allowed Fanny and Mrs. Booth their ignorant bliss and spent the next hour composing a letter.
Dearest Teddy
, I wrote, and stared at the two words in my practiced script for a long time.

What could I say that would not seem as if I took a knife to his back?

I sighed.
I know you will think me foolish, and possibly even mad. Much has happened in the month since you departed for Tollybridge Court.

I’d always loved the name of his family’s rural estate.

The metal nib upon my quill scratched quietly in the parlor as I wrote the words I would never have imagined myself writing, and not in conjunction with the Northampton name.

Marriage.
To think that only a month past, I stood in this very parlor and assured dear Teddy that I would not marry.

When I had little more to say that I had not covered in the previous four pages, I finished my letter with a plea.

Have faith,
I scribed carefully,
when I tell you that I am doing what I believe is right and correct for myself and my house. You know as well as I the fate of a woman like myself in this, London’s own Society. I am well, dear friend, and I am at peace with my decision. Please, do not fret on my account. We will still have our Wednesday debates, this I promise you. Although you may be forced to defend your theories against a countess, now.

I signed it with my usual cordial address, and made sure Booth would find it to deliver to the post.

“Cherry,” Fanny called, “ ’tis almost time for another fitting!”

Of course it was. Rubbing the back of my neck, I prepared for another lengthy—even endless—session with the seamstresses who were to perfectly fit Madame Troussard’s creation to me.

This marriage was no love match, as the papers claimed, but it was the right choice. My household would be stable, Fanny would be secure for all her days. I could find a harmony with my future husband, I was sure of it.

Love was the kind of vacuous emotional state that turned perfectly reasonable sorts into tragic figures. I had no need of it. I respected the earl, certainly. As a man, as an independent being of thought and reason.

It was enough.

Or so I convinced myself as the day of the wedding approached and I stood in front of the large mirror in the rooms the marchioness had graciously, if coolly, supplied. I rubbed my bruised wrist idly, aware that it ached at intervals and uncertain what to do about it. A splint, perhaps. Or was it too late, now? I should have seen a doctor when the pain was fresh.

Perhaps I would do so after the wedding.

Lady Northampton had not warmed to me. It was a burden I would be forced to carry until I could somehow right the rift between her and the memory of my mother.

A task for another time, I thought, and perhaps more knowledge.

Fanny flitted about me, arranging a fold of my gown just so, tucking a stray curl into place. She hummed cheerily, while Mrs. Booth dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief and swore she’d never seen anything quite so pretty.

I stared at myself and confessed to the same.

I had never seen anything like the reflection I saw. Never imagined it to be me.

It wasn’t.

I did not see Cherry St. Croix in that three-part mirror with its gilded frame and shimmering reflection. Cherry was a girl whose hair was always a little wild. Whose fingers were often stained with the ink of newspapers and periodicals.

Whose eyes often strayed to the books in the room, or the laudanum in its faceted crystal flagon.

This was someone else. Someone poised and polished, someone who had been covered with gold leaf and shined to perfection. Her hair was pinned to within an inch of its life, her gown pristine and perfect in every way. Her cheeks were a little pale, but I could sympathize with this gilt-framed stranger.

Was this what my mother had seen when she looked into the mirror on her wedding day? Had she fretted?

The gown Fanny and Madame Troussard had concocted was white, in the style of Her Majesty at her own wedding. I would have chosen something much less affluent and perhaps a darker color, but as I was to be a countess—a prospect that filled me ever so steadily with a mounting, fiercely guarded terror—it was decided that I would choose the fashion of the Queen over that of more common use.

The bodice was embroidered by gold thread, each stitch hand-sewn by the seamstresses whose faces I had learned to recognize even in my haunted dreams. White lace painted with gold leaf along each scalloped edge clung from neck to wrist, cascaded from my complex chignon with tamed curls arrayed on either side. The same gilt edged the bustle gathered tight at my waist and draped behind me.

I was, to be frank, sick of the stuff. If I never wore gold again, I would consider it a boon beyond measure.

I would not, as a countess, ever be so lucky.

My skirt, in a fashion Madame Troussard swore was just on the horizon—and so I would, rather shrewdly on Fanny’s part, be considered the trendsetter for such a thing—remained tight to my thighs, shaping my figure in an hourglass whose base flared from my knees in ruffled white lace and chiffon.

I was white and gold; purity and wealth. I wore no jewelry but simple earbobs of white pearl. My silk stockings were embroidered up the front, and my delicate slippers rose my diminutive stature an inch in height.

Fanny met my gaze in the mirror, her own gown of smoky lavender only forcing a stark contrast between us.

The uncertainty I nursed in my stomach pitted sharply.

“You are beautiful,” Fanny said. Tears filled her pale blue eyes. “Truly, I had always hoped to see this day.”

“Oh, Fanny.” I turned, enfolded her thin figure in my arms. She was taller than I, but she hunched so that we might hug companionably. Familiarly, as a mother and daughter might. Mrs. Booth burst into tears behind us, and I turned to smile upon the woman. “I could not ask for any set of family so kind as you have all been. The house will remain yours,” I added firmly. “I’ll hear nothing of it, Mrs. Booth.”

“Yes, miss.” She sniffed, and then added quickly, “My lady. Oh!” Another torrent of tears turned her plump cheeks red, and to my horror, my own eyes prickled in sympathetic warning.

I cast about me, twitching my skirt aside. When I attempted a step, however, I nearly pitched over.

Fanny steadied me. “Tiny steps,” she chastised, “tiny or you’ll fall.”

“Of all the— Who came up with this fashion?” Swallowing the sharper invectives, I forced myself to take smaller steps, searching the suite. “Where is Zylphia?”

“Gone, and this on a day we need her most.” Fanny sniffed.

“Gone?”

“She was not in when we prepared to go,” Mrs. Booth added. “She’ll turn up, I’m sure. Now, your veil.”

Mrs. Booth, tucking aside her well-used handkerchief, wrestled the sweeping material of my veil into place. It was a task that required my own hands as well as hers.

A perfunctory knock at the door earned Fanny’s attention.

Her gasp warned me before the Marchioness Northampton stepped inside.

As the mother of the groom, her gown was elegant and tasteful. She would command every eye, no matter the bride who claimed the day. It was a fact I simply accepted.

In a pastel orange, reminiscent of the orange blossoms holding the veil in my hair, she certainly commanded
my
attention.

Her cool gaze flicked over Fanny, Mrs. Booth, and dismissed them just as easily. “A moment of your time, Miss St. Croix.”

“Granted,” I allowed, drawing every ounce of composure I had ever possessed around me now. “What may I do for you, my lady?”

Fanny drifted away, a modicum of privacy. Mrs. Booth busied herself among the many boxes that comprised my trousseau.

“I cannot say that I am delighted by my son’s decisions in this matter,” came the lady’s abrupt and matter-of-fact commencement.

I held my tongue, studying the woman through the patterned lace veil.

“I requested that he wait a full six months, perhaps even a year, and that banns be utilized, yet he has his own mind.” The lady approached me, her thin mouth set in a recognizable line.

It bemused me, how like her the earl appeared.

And yet how unlike her he acted, in so many ways.

“I understand,” was all I trusted myself to say.

“Do you?” Surprising me, she straightened a fold of my veil, arranged it easily and without fuss. “He has decided to wed you, and privately, with special license. People will talk, yet in this regard, I believe people will talk anyhow.”

An olive branch?

I did not frown; it took all I had to refrain. “Your son is of great interest to Society,” I said cautiously.

“Yes.” The Marchioness Northampton stared at me, unblinking. “He is. Are you prepared for that life, Miss St. Croix?”

No.
“I will do everything in my power to make your son proud, my lady,” I murmured.

Her eyes narrowed. “My son is the least of your concerns. You will learn, I’m afraid. Let us hope you learn swiftly and with grace.” She turned, then. “The ceremony begins shortly. Be ready. I would have this over without consequence.”

That frigid
— I bit my tongue. “Wait.”

Lady Northampton paused, one hand on the door latch.

It was the only welcome I expected to receive. “My mother, my lady. Were you ever friends?”

Her mouth pinched. Then, as she glanced at me, I was surprised to find something like regret shaping her brow, her eyes. “Once. A very long time ago.”

“What happened?”

Her jaw firmed, as near a scowl as I’d ever seen on the lady’s visage. “A final note, as you are to be my daughter-in-law in a few short hours.” I waited, held myself still. “This family will
not
tolerate scandal. Do not disappoint me in this.”

The threat inherent in the low, chilly warning was clear enough.

She did not wait for my confirmation, sailing out with as much aplomb as she’d come in.

“Oh, dear,” Fanny sighed. She hurried to me, plucked at this fold or that bit of seam. “Never fear, you’re a bright, charming girl. She’ll come around.”

“Hurry, now,” Mrs. Booth added seriously. “We can’t be late to your own ceremony.”