Lady Be Good (27 page)

Miss Everleigh lay insensate amid a pile of pillows, her unbound hair a pale tangled cloud around her slack face. Mrs. Barnes laid a hand on her brow, frowning at what she felt. “I’ll take first watch,” she said to Lilah. “Come fetch me at half four. And leave those instructions.”

“Yes, ma’am.” All sickrooms smelled the same. It was impossible not to think of Fiona. Gratefully, Lilah started to retreat.

A faint call from the bed made her turn. Miss Everleigh was squinting in her direction. “Is that . . . Miss Marshall?”

Mrs. Barnes clucked. “Yes, that’s right.” She stroked Miss Everleigh’s hair from her face. “Quite a scare you gave us, miss.”

“Tell her . . . stay.”

“What?” Lilah approached, panicked. “She can’t mean it,” she told Mrs. Barnes. She could not bear this stuffy little room. “You have far more experience in a sickroom than I!”

“Mean it,” Miss Everleigh rasped. “Miss . . . Marshall. Stay.”

But they loathed each other! In disbelief, Lilah stared down at the girl. It was madness, of course, to imagine that Miss Everleigh intended to punish her by this request. Selfish, paranoid madness. But what a talent the girl had for hitting a sore spot!

“Seems she wants you,” Mrs. Barnes said. “Did you take heed while the doctor was explaining the dosage? Here, read it again.”

Lilah took the paper with a trembling hand.
Turn down all the lights
. That was the very first line the doctor had written.
Nothing must disturb her
.

“Are
you
all right?” Mrs. Barnes asked.

Heat burned in Lilah’s cheeks. No doubt she looked a fine coward.
She
was not the one whose life was at stake. “Yes. I’m fine.” Girding herself, she settled on the little stool. Miss Everleigh’s eyes had closed again. She looked as waxen as a corpse. “Leave the medicine on the table.”

She waited until the door had shut. Then, with a shaking hand, she turned down the lamp.

There. Darkness was not so bad. Miss Everleigh’s pallor made her dimly visible. The smell of sickness, sour and pungent, hung sharp in the air.

Miss Everleigh dragged in a rattling breath. Her hand twitched once on the counterpane.

A memory came to Lilah. How desperately she had longed, that faraway night, for Uncle Nick to reach her. To pull her to safety, or simply . . . to grip her hand, so she would not feel so alone.

She laid her hand over Miss Everleigh’s. “I am with you,” she whispered. “I won’t go just yet.”

Minutes might have been hours. A crack in the curtains showed her the moon for a little while. Then it passed out of view, and time crawled.

Each random creak, each whisper of wind against the windows, made Lilah flinch and remember tales of the ghost who haunted the halls. But no specter appeared to disrupt the darkness. Gradually, as Lilah listened to Miss Everleigh’s pained breaths, she found herself wishing
otherwise. She would welcome the appearance of a spirit—even a demon, slobbering blood. Proof of Satan’s wickedness would not frighten her. If his evil was real, then so, too, was God. If some souls were cursed after death to roam the earth, then others surely were lifted into heaven.

She hadn’t abandoned Fiona. She had done her best; she wouldn’t blame herself for what had happened. But it would be so much easier to bear if she felt certain that her sister had not died afraid—or that afterward she’d woken from fear into God’s arms.

Bring on the ghost, then. She prayed for it.
Show us we can hope for better in the hereafter. Show me that you mean to save her, if you let her die
.

But this heretic philosophy went unnoticed by the heavens. Meanwhile, four times Miss Everleigh choked in her sleep, requiring Lilah to lift her onto her side so she might expel noxious fluids. “It’s all right,” Lilah murmured. “I’m here.”

Once, Miss Everleigh opened her eyes and spoke. “Poisoned,” she rasped. She tried to lift her head before collapsing back into the pillows.

“Shh, don’t sit up, now. You’re sick, but you’ll be all right.”

“He isn’t . . . here. Is he? Please check! So . . . dark.”

Lilah turned up the lamp. “Nobody’s here but me, miss.”

The girl’s bright, feverish eyes made a sweep of the shadowed room. “Yes,” she said. “Alone. Don’t . . . let him in.”

“Lord Palmer, do you mean?”

“My . . . brother. He’ll . . . kill me.”

“He’s not here,” Lilah said slowly. “I won’t let him in.”

The girl’s eyelids dropped shut. Her face grew slack again.

Fever could produce delusions, of course. But Lilah still felt chilled an hour later, when Mrs. Barnes came tapping at the door. Everyone knew Peter Everleigh resented the terms of his father’s will. She had never seen him exchange a warm word with his sister. Who knew how he treated her behind closed doors?

As she stepped into the hallway, she felt as though she were waking from a nightmare. Palmer rose from a nearby chair, a burned candle at his feet. “How is she?” he asked.

She rubbed her eyes and leaned back against the wall. “She’s better, I think. Awake, on and off.”

“Speaking?”

She opened her mouth, then thought better of it. Catherine’s sickbed rambling was not hers to share. “Only nonsense. She’s feverish, still.”

Palmer gripped the back of the chair. Veins stood out on his broad hand; his knuckles looked white. “She’ll make it through,” he said flatly.

“Yes, of course.” His mood seemed as bleak as her own. God above . . . had she figured him wrong? Did he truly care for Catherine after all?

She had no energy to wrestle with her stupid, shameful jealousy. “Step in and have a look, if you like.”

“No, I’ll stay here. You should get some sleep.”

A strange laugh slipped from her. She felt edgy and haunted, the last thing from fatigued. “A drink would suit me better.”

He studied her a moment. “All right,” he said. “I could use one as well.”

Lilah huddled on a loveseat by the fire, watching Palmer move around his study—shifting papers from chair to table; procuring glasses from the cabinet; uncorking a bottle. It was soothing to watch him. His body spoke of competence, power. He moved with economical grace, loose and easy, a man trained to fight.

“Here you go.” He offered her a toast glass. “Brandy, neat.”

She rolled the glass by its stem, feeling the sharpness of the cut edges. The beveled crystal captured the firelight and splintered it into dancing points. “You were waiting in the hallway all night?”

He prowled over to the window. Lifted aside the curtain to look out. “Couldn’t sleep.”

That jacket fit him a shade more loosely than his normal suits. The left pocket hung a fraction of an inch lower than the right. In Whitechapel, she would have noticed that telltale sign immediately.

He was armed.

“I never sleep very well here,” she said softly. Nor, she was coming to suspect, did he.

“Why is that?”

She looked into the depths of her brandy and shrugged.

“Ah. The lady rebuffs me.” His tone was gentle. When she glanced up, he offered her a slight smile. “Another secret for me to pursue.”

She thanked God he could not guess her most troubling secret: how difficult it was to look away from him. Standing against the dark curtains, with firelight gilding his leonine hair and drawing shadows beneath his cheekbones and full lower lip, he looked like a mythic figure. Some medieval tapestry: the hero who had been bloodied, his long scar left by a dragon’s claw.

To prove she could look away, Lilah turned toward the fire. “It’s not a secret why I can’t sleep. It’s too dark. In the city, there’s always light somewhere, isn’t there? Even in the rankest rookery, you’ll find a lamp burning in a window, or a public house shedding light across the lane. But here, once everybody is asleep, there’s only darkness.”

“Some count that a blessing.”

Not he. He traveled armed in his own house. “Who?”

His footsteps were soundless. A hunter’s prowl. He sat in the chair opposite. “People who want quiet,” he said. “People who value peace.”

She remembered the interview in the newspaper in which he’d claimed to be one of those people. But he’d lied. “Were you merely waiting tonight? Or were you standing guard?”

“Both.”

His honesty startled her. She remembered Miss
Everleigh’s fears about her brother. “Are you here to . . . protect her?”

He sat back in his chair, pulling his face into shadows. “Wouldn’t that be noble?”

She considered the question. Were her suspicions correct, he was playing some deep game that involved spying on Catherine Everleigh—to say nothing of the “assayers” who prowled the estate with knives and guns. That endeavor could not be upright. Yet he had given her just as much evidence to consider him decent, and to like him, against all odds.

Like
did not quite capture it.

The table between them was littered with papers that might have helped her decide about his motives. But she did not care to look at them. Her mind, she realized, was already made up.

He lifted his glass to the light before he drank, admiring the effect as she had. “They’re Irish eau-de-vie glasses,” she told him. “Very rare. Well over a hundred years old.” She had wrapped up an identical glass, yesterday. “You should probably fetch me something else to drink from. It would take a year of my salary to repay you if I dropped it.”

He tossed back half the glass, then wiped his mouth. “Break it, if it makes you feel better. I don’t give a damn.”

From another man, that would have sounded like a boast of wealth. Instead, it seemed a comfort.
Your feelings are worth more than the cost
.

She set down her glass. “Whom were you guarding against tonight?”

“Back to interrogation, are we?” He offered her an unpleasant smile. “Very well, let’s play. Why are you afraid of the dark?”

“I’m not! Of course I’m not.” She felt embarrassed that he had guessed it.

“A pity,” he said after a pause. “I prefer fears like that. Simple fears, that can be cured.”

“Your fears aren’t so simple, I take it.”

He shrugged. “Do heroes have fears?”

“I imagine they have enemies. Is that why you’re armed?”

His surprise showed only in the slight hesitation as he lowered his glass. “Am I?”

“Your left pocket. A pistol, by the weight of it.”

Holding her eyes, he rose and stripped a knife from his boot, which he laid across the nearby desk. With a roll of his shoulders, he shucked off his jacket, tossing it beside the knife. Then he turned to his waistcoat, holding her eyes as he flipped open the buttons.

She had never seen a man undress. It was a different process, more aggressive, than a lady’s careful unlacing. He yanked open the buttons. Shrugged out of the waistcoat and tossed it aside. His wife, one day, would watch him undress. She would admire how his shirt clung to the heavy bulk of his shoulders, the leanness of his waist.

“Do you like what you see?” he asked softly.

“Yes.”

He’d not expected bravery. His head tilted a fraction. A line formed between his brows. “Are you all right?”

Her mood was indeed strange. So many hours spent reliving what had happened to Fiona—and what it meant to be alone, helpless, in the face of death. The sickroom clung like a pall to her. “You know,” she said on a breath, “I’ve come to like this house.” She glanced around, taking in the scrolled woodwork that trimmed the ceiling—the Turkish carpet—the handsome wooden
screen in the corner. “Six generations born and died here. There’s history in the walls.”

“And skeletons, no doubt.” Palmer settled into his chair again. “The ghost, still pounding to escape.”

No. There were no ghosts, to her sorrow. “I doubt it. The Hughleys loved this house. They explored the world so they could bring back treasures to fill the halls. It strikes me as very . . . .”

“Morbid?” He was watching the fire, his mouth a grim line. “All their treasures bound now for auction. All their adventures, forgotten.”

She frowned. “Comforting, in fact.” Why . . . perhaps Miss Everleigh wasn’t alone in her wish for a place to belong—somewhere she might always be welcomed, not for her skills and accomplishments, but simply for the person she was. “No matter how far they traveled, they always had this house to welcome them home.”