Sherry Thomas - His At Night

Elissande considered it a moment. “Wouldn’t such an angel have white wings and a white robe?”

“Yes, she would, wouldn’t she?” Lord Frederick spread his thumb and his index finger along his chin. “Perhaps she transforms? If I were to paint this theme, I might show her mid-transformation, her white wings and robe turning black as she flies away from him.”

If he were to paint this theme. “Are you an artist yourself, sir?”

Lord Frederick picked up his fork and knife and bent his face toward his plate, seemingly shy about discussing his artistic inclinations. “I do enjoy painting, but I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call myself an artist. I’ve never exhibited.”

She liked him, Elissande realized. He had not been blessed with his brother’s Olympian looks, but he was pleasing in both his features and his demeanor—not to mention he was an intellectual giant next to Lord Vere.

“Was Shakespeare any less a poet before he published his first volume?”

Lord Frederick smiled. “You are too kind, Miss Edgerton.”

“Do you paint portraits or classical themes or perhaps biblical stories?”

“I have done a portrait or two. But what I like best is painting people when they are outside. Taking walks, picnicking, or just daydreaming.” He sounded embarrassed. “Very simple things.”

“That sounds lovely,” she said sincerely. So much of her life had been spent trapped inside this house that the simple activities Lord Frederick took for granted were infinitely appealing to her. “I would be privileged to see your work someday.”

“Well”—his already sun-ruddied complexion acquired an even deeper color—“perhaps if you ever came to London.”

His blush further endeared him to her. Suddenly she realized something else: Lord Frederick would do well as a husband for her.

He was not a marquess himself, but he was the son of one and the brother of one and that was almost as good, with the influence of his family and all their connections behind him.

Furthermore, she could trust him to understand a delicate situation. Should her uncle come calling, Lord Vere would no doubt nod and agree that of course Mrs. Douglas longed to return to her own home and, well, here she was, and could he help hand her into the carriage? Lord Frederick, a far more discerning man, would sense her uncle’s malice and help Elissande secure Aunt Rachel’s future well-being.

“Oh, I shall try,” she said. “I most certainly shall try.”

It wasn’t a country house party until Vere had mistaken someone else’s room for his own. He had plenty of choices. Miss Melbourne would scream loudest, Miss Beauchamp laugh hardest, and Conrad grumble most forcefully.

So of course he chose Miss Edgerton’s room.

He had been inside her room already: When the ladies had departed for the drawing room after dinner, he’d left the other gentlemen on the pretense of having to retrieve his special Colombian cigar from his room.

He had taken the opportunity to map the rooms and their occupants. But what he had really needed was a moment alone, which he’d spent in the empty passage, his back against his own door, his hand over his face.

He had lost nothing: How could he lose something that had never existed in the first place? And yet he had lost everything. He could no longer think of his constant companion as she had always been—warm, supportive, and understanding. Now he saw only Miss Edgerton’s predatory prettiness, the flattery that gleamed in her eyes as the sun gleamed on a crocodile’s teeth.

Now he at last understood why young boys sometimes threw rocks at pretty girls. It was this wordless fury, this pain of shattered hopes.

He was here to throw rocks at Miss Edgerton.

She was seated before her vanity table, her profile to him, combing her hair slowly, absently. As she raised her arm to reach the top of her head, the loose, short sleeves of her nightdress slid down to expose her upper arm and—for one heart-stopping fraction of a second—the curve of the side of her breast.

“Miss Edgerton, what are you doing in my room?” he called from the door he had silently opened.

She looked up, gasped, and leaped out of her chair. Hurriedly she grabbed her dressing gown and belted it tight about her person. “My lord, you are quite mistaken. This is my room.”

He cocked his head and smirked. “That’s what they all say. But you, my dear Miss Edgerton, are not married yet. No such hanky-panky for you. Now run along.”

She gaped at him. Well, at least she wasn’t smiling.

It had not made him any happier that the rest of the evening she had not come near him, but instead played cards with Freddie, Wessex, and Miss Beauchamp, smiling all too often. The stupid, illogical part of him still wanted her smiles; worse, he felt downright proprietary toward her.

He strolled inside and sat down at the foot of her bed, which brought him face-to-face with the painting that hung on the opposite wall. It was a canvas approximately three feet by four feet, bursting with a single blood-red rose and its razor-sharp thorns. At its edge were the shoulder and arm of a man lying facedown in the snow, one long black feather, next to his lifeless hand—a definite relation to the painting in the dining room.

Vere loosened his necktie and pulled it off.

“Sir!” Her hands held tight to the closure of her dressing gown. “You cannot—you may not disrobe here.”

“Of course I won’t really disrobe, not with you still here, Miss Edgerton. And why are you still here, by the way?”

“I already told you, sir. This is my room.”

He sighed. “If you insist, I’ll kiss you. But I won’t do anything else.”

“I don’t want to be kissed.”

He smiled at her. “Are you sure?”

To his surprise, she flushed. His own reaction was a flash of acute heat.

He stared at her.

“Please leave,” she said unsteadily.

“Penny! Penny, you are in the wrong room,” Freddie, good old Freddie, called out from the open door.

She fled to him. “Oh, thank you, Lord Frederick. I was at a loss to explain to Lord Vere that he’d made a terrible mistake.”

“No, no, I will prove it to both of you,” Vere claimed loudly. “See, I always put a cigarette under my cover, so that I can have one last drag before I go to sleep.”

He marched to her bed and, to her strangled yelp, flung back her bedcover. There was, of course, nothing there.

He widened his eyes. “Did you smoke my fag, Miss Edgerton?”

“Penny! This really isn’t your room.”

“Oh, all right,” said Vere, throwing up his hands. “Drat it. I like this room.”

“Come now,” Freddie urged him. “It’s late. I’ll take you to your room.”

He was ready to walk away, but at the door Freddie took hold of his arm. “Penny, shouldn’t you say something to Miss Edgerton?”

“Right, of course.” He turned around. “Lovely room you have, Miss Edgerton.”

Freddie nudged him.

“And I do apologize,” Vere added.

With some effort, she wrested her eyes from Freddie. “It’s quite an understandable mistake, sir—our rooms are close.”

Their rooms were close indeed. He was diagonally across the passage from her. The next-closest guests, Freddie and Lady Kingsley, were each two doors away. Yet another indication of her careful planning, to bump more easily into the marquess she’d intended to bag.

As if to demonstrate that she bore no grudges at his faux pas, she directed at him a smile as serene and graceful as any she’d dispensed this entire day. “Good night, my lord.”

He knew very well by now that her smiles had no meaning. He knew she manufactured them the way a forger fabricated crisp twenty-pound banknotes. And he still could not help a new surge of that very old longing.

“Good night, Miss Edgerton.” He bowed. “My apologies once again.”

The height thrilled Elissande at first. A true mountain, so far above the distant plains she might as well be standing on Zeus’s own balcony. The air was thin. A bright, harsh sun shone. A black speck circled distantly in the sky. She raised her hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the sun.

But her hand moved only a few inches. She looked toward it in consternation and blinked. A dark manacle bound her wrist. A chain, each link as big as her fist, protruded from this manacle. The other end of the chain staked into the sinew of the mountain itself.

She looked at her other wrist. The same. Bound like Prometheus. She yanked her wrist. It hurt. She yanked harder. It only hurt more.

Panic, rising as fast as floodwater in a basement. Her heart pounded. Her breaths came in short, inadequate gasps. Please, no. Anything but this.

Anything but this.

A sharp cry pierced the air. The dark speck grew, sinking rapidly toward her. It was a bird—an eagle, its beak as sharp as a knife, and it was nearly upon her. She struggled frantically. Blood trickled from her wrists. But she could not free herself.

The eagle emitted another shriek, its beak plunging into her belly. In her agony she could not even scream, but only thrash madly.

She woke up still thrashing.

It took a few minutes for the residual terror to pass. With still unsteady fingers, she lit her hand-candle and excavated the guidebook to Southern Italy from her undergarment drawer.

“‘West of the village rises the almost vertical wall of limestone precipice that separates the elevated tableland of Anacapri from the eastern part of Capri,’” she read softly to herself. “‘The only way formerly of reaching Anacapri was by an ascent from the beach of eight hundred rude steps, cut in the face of the rock and constructed probably in times anterior to the Roman rule. Now a finely engineered carriage road leads to Anacapri. The views from this road are most beautiful.’”