Twin Speex: Time Traitors Book II (41 page)

“And take the oh so beautiful Sewal,” they would say in their French-accented English, while pinching her son’s chubby cheeks, “to a cottage by the sea. Yes, you and a handsome husband and make more beautiful bébés, no?” They would shake their heads and coyly shrug their shoulders. “It is sad to lose someone you love, we know, cheri. But life, it goes on, no?”

Lillian would smile and nod and say nothing, but her mind was a whirl of possibilities. Could she do that? Was she not already married for life? When she was but a child? That is what he had told her.

It was her friendship with the old costumer, however, that eventually brought on the nightmare. Her chaperone position was merely window dressing, and Lillian found time to spare. She was drawn to the old man who outfitted the company. Money was tight, and he often had little material to work with, but he seemed always able to create costumes that fit exactly the characters on stage. Much of his work was makeup and prosthetics. He had false everything: false eyelashes, false noses, false hair, false moles, and birthmarks, and other blemishes. She was aghast at how he could transform a beautiful young girl into an ugly old witch.

Lillian would bring Sewal with her to his workroom and watch the old man draw, and design, and sew. She would prop the baby up on embroidered pillows, giving him a large wooden spindle to chew on. Eventually, she tried her hand at creating a costume or converting a perfectly normal face into someone or something unrecognizable. He commented often on her natural talent, passing on to her his knowledge and secrets.

One day, he was tying the thread off a needle when it slipped, piercing his thumb and dabbing the white material with blood.

“Blast!” he cried, wrapping his thumb in an old rag and looking around frantically for anything that could be used to remove the stain.

Lillian had jumped off her stool and run for the outer door. Sticking her arm out into the frigid air, she scooped up a handful of snow that lay banked up against the building. She dropped it into a metal pot and, with a rag, used the melted snow to blot the stain. Lillian had to repeat this several times with fresh snow, but eventually was able to remove it completely.

After they had laid the skirt out to dry on the workbench, the old man took her face between his two rough hands and kissed her forehead. “Thank you, my dear,” he said with a grateful smile, and then shuffled off to the back of the workroom for more supplies. Lillian touched the place where his dry lips had pressed and felt an odd tightening in her chest.

The costumer’s kindness, patient instructions, and gentle thanks presented her with a conundrum. Doubt took hold; it wiggled its way up from her subconscious to wait impatiently in the chambers of her brain to be noticed. It forced her to open her eyes to the relationships around her, to question her own upbringing.

But the ghost of her father’s abuse would not go quietly. It rose up in her dreams to force a cup of poison between her lips. Those nights when his shade walked the earth, she awoke writhing in pain and sick to her stomach.

Who knows what would have happened if her spirit had surrendered to the everyday routine of living. Maybe the girls’ lively friendship and the costumer’s kind mentoring would eventually have healed her soul, or, at least, helped bury her past deep in the impenetrable parts of her mind. Perhaps the nightmare would have faded and become less frequent, and then disappeared altogether. It may be that she would marry a handsome man and live by the sea with her many beautiful babies.

It could have been, except for two events that happened almost simultaneously; she received a letter and overheard a conversation.

The letter was a shock. She had changed her name to Lillian Holt, widow of Darren Holt. She could think of only one reason why someone had written her; the real family of Darren Holt had heard of her, a woman bearing his name and a child she claimed to be his. Her hand shook as she stared blankly down at the fine, cream-colored envelope with her fake name and the address of the inn where the company had taken up residence written across it.

Since fleeing her home, Lillian had lived a constrained life. She had made a deliberate effort to disappear. Sheltered though she had been, she knew enough of society that without the protection of her parents she would be shunned. This way, she had left on her own terms without recriminations from anyone. Had it all finally caught up with her?

She turned the envelope over in her hands intending to open it when she finally noticed the postage from Wales and felt the ground drop away from her. She gasped a little for air and hastily thrust it into her pocket unopened. At the theater, she went about business as usual, checking on her various charges and helping to inventory costumes for the evening’s performance.

In this capacity, she had gone to the dressing room of some of the dancers. She stood behind a dressing screen, hanging costumes and folding the delicate chemises and stockings. Her presence was so accustomed and unremarked that conversation flowed openly between the young women.

“She will be here tonight, I hear,” said a pretty French brunette, breathy excitement feathering her voice. “I would give much, oh very much, to see her dance. But it is oh so sad; she will only be in attendance.”

“It’s the least she can do,” declared one of the English dancers, a bold redhead, “Leaving the theater in the lurch as she did. I hear Mister Garrick was furious.”

Yet another girl scoffed, “Please, as if you wouldn’t do the same if given the chance to marry a handsome barrister.”

And so their banter went back and forth, with the redhead answering sassily in return to general laughter and raillery. The gentle mix of accents lulled her, and Lillian easily tuned them out, her mind occupied with the possible contents of the letter.

“I’ve heard she was involved in the strange death of that nobleman,” the redhead ventured in a hushed tone, “What was his name?”

“Sir Archibald Brandon,” the third girl responded also lowering her voice to that of conspirators.

Lillian stilled as if the breath had been sucked right out of her; not even her eyelids batted. She had tried to find out what had happened to her father, but with little success. She was met with obstacles at every turn, not least of those being her age and gender. Her father’s old colleagues and friends brushed her questions aside.

“It was a terrible accident—a freak occurrence,” was the most common response. He had fallen off a roof and broken his neck. A roof! She couldn’t imagine what had prompted such a rash action on the part of her father, the most careful of men. She hadn’t been allowed to see his body. It had been nailed into a coffin and interred with unaccustomed speed.

Lillian knew some terrible scandal surrounded his death. This had been made clear to her by the quick retreat of his many friends. By the unguarded relief on their faces when she assured them there was nothing she needed and the lack of any effort to find her when she had disappeared from her home.

She had heard not a rumor during the many months of her disappearance, not a clue. And now, here it was; a trace, a small sign, found in a whispered conversation among a tiny substratum of the population sitting on wooden stools in a dingy dressing room of the Theatre Royal.

“I heard the old theater attendant speak of it,” the redhead continued.

“Topper? The oh so silly little man?” trilled the brunette. “Why he can barely keep his eyes open.”

“Open or not,” the other countered, “he says Odette Swanpoole was involved in all sorts of havy-cavy activity.”

“Oh pooh,” the third girl dismissed this new intelligence, “Addled nonsense from an old man. What would a ballerina have to do with the death of a grand nobleman?”

They were interrupted by an impatient knock at the door.

“Come on you!” the assistant stage manager called through the closed door, “Rehearsal in five.”

Lillian heard them hurriedly finish pinning their hair into place and hooking their garments. They left the room in a flurry of swishing skirts and wafting perfume.

She didn’t know how long she had stood in that exact position. It seemed like hours, the letter completely obliterated from her mind. Lillian finally stirred to life and went in search of Topper.

The story he related to her was confused and likely fantastical, but Lillian grasped at it with gritty desperation. It was a story of a young prostitute grievously injured, of spies and strange foreigners, of a woman who appeared from nowhere, uniquely talented, unusually independent.

“She cut her hair like a boy’s,” he creaked in his withered old voice, “She never thought I noticed.” He shook his white head. “She’s a good, fine woman, Mrs. Wright is… now don’t get me wrong.”

“Sir Archibald Brandon?” Lillian urged him before his mind could drift off in another direction. “How was she involved in his death?”

He looked at her, eyes cloudy with cataracts and furrowed his brow. “Sir Archibald? Where did you hear that?”

She took a deep breath and held her impatience in check. “You told one of the dancers that Odette Swanpoole was involved.”

His brow cleared and he smiled. “Ah yes, Odette Swanpoole,” he said it as if she were someone other than the person about whom he had just been speaking. “She was definitely up to something. Her maid was shot. She and that other one, the red-haired one, thick as thieves they were.” He looked suddenly serious, “I heard them talking to Mister Garrick.”

“Who?” She prompted, “The women?”

He looked at her blankly, and she knew his mind was slipping.

“Who was speaking with Mister Garrick?” she insisted with muted urgency.

“Why Sir Robert Henley and another man I’d never seen before.”

Lillian knew Sir Robert. He had been a friend of her father’s and also a member of the King’s Privy Council.”

“Sir Robert? Here?”

“No, miss. At Mister Garrick’s grand house, it was. I was there picking up flowers from the gardener and heard them among the gravel walk. Sometimes we use flowers from his gardens for display on stage and the like. Mister Garrick don’t like spending money where it can be saved.” He nodded sagely.

“What did they say?”

“Oh, only that Mister Garrick needed to make less of a fuss over Miss Odette leaving the theater. Up to then, he’d been hopping mad, talking to the newspapers and such. It was a right scandal how she up and left.”

“Sir Archibald. What did Sir Robert say about him?”

“Oh, it weren’t Sir Robert, it were Mister Garrick, ‘Its Sir Archibald and all them dead lords, ain’t it?’ he says.”

“And…?”

“And what?”

“What else?”

“Nothing else, miss. They moved on down the path, and I had to get back to the theater.”

Lillian felt as if a fever had ignited within her. Sweat beaded on her forehead. Something that had lain dormant inside her began to multiply and race through her bloodstream. It seemed as if even her breath inhaled hot and dry to fill her lungs to bursting.

She nodded absently and left the old man to his duties, walking without direction or notice. Lillian found herself standing alone in the costumer’s workroom. She brushed a hand across her brow to wipe the sweat and reached into her pocket for a handkerchief, only to pull from its depths the cream envelope.

Wales. Memories came flooding back. The weight of them forced her to sit down, and she slumped onto a wooden bench against the wall. The first time her father took her to Wales she was only four, but she remembered it well. He had built the castle just for her, had begun the construction when she was still a baby. Like a giant playhouse all her own, she was its sole mistress. Her mother was never allowed to visit; she would only interfere with the fun, her father had told her. Lillian had understood. She knew even at so young an age that her mother was jealous of her, jealous of her father’s love.

Lillian opened the letter with shaking hands. It was from Doctor Knightly Davis. She remembered him too. He had been a servant of her father’s. An upper servant, to be sure, but someone she had easily dismissed and rarely deigned to notice. Yet he had always been near, close to her father, close to her.

Knightly Davis had been searching for her, he wrote. From Wales, he had sent out investigators to scour the country for any trace of her. And now, he wanted her to come to Wales. He wanted to tell her all her father’s secrets.

She read it with equal parts dread and desire—to be once again in that beloved house, to feel her father close, to be safe. Lillian closed her eyes and rested her head back against the wall. It would have been impossible to detect from the serene expression on her face the war that raged within her.

“My child, are you quite well?” The old costumer had come in, carrying baby Sewal. “You look as pale as the snow,” he commented with some concern.

She held out her arms for her son, and he came to her, warm and laughing. She rested her cheek against the sparse down of his hair and tears leaked out to mat the blond softness. It was as if the feel of her child had brought with it a veneer of sanity. The virus that raged through her blood quieted. Some ancient knowledge, something that had lodged in her cells before she was even born, surfaced. She would save her son. She would save him from the madness that burned inside her.

“I’m fine,” she assured him, “I may be coming down with something, though.”

He nodded and laid a gentle hand on her forehead. “You do feel a bit warm. Go home and rest,” he declared. “I can take care of this performance.”

When it came time for the company to depart for the colonies, Lillian had joined them. She left the letter behind as ashes in the grate of the fireplace at their lodgings.

Her grasp on sanity, however, was a tenuous thing, always dependent on circumstances outside her control. And circumstances took a disastrous turn. The company’s tour of America was ruinously unsuccessful. Laurent abandoned them in Philadelphia, taking what money was left and sailing back to England.

In the beginning, she and the costumer were modestly successful. They set up a tailoring business, exhibiting some cachet as the purveyors of authentic English style. But he died less than a year later, and Lillian struggled to meet customer demand and deadlines. Then Sewal sickened, and her existence reduced to the pinpoints of light shining from his eyes. She did anything and everything to keep him alive. She spent, and scrimped, and begged for the medicine and expertise that would cure him, but to no avail. Sewal died in her arms, gentle and placid to the end.