An Unnatural Daughter: A Dark Regency Mystery (2 page)

Two stories of windows faced me. All dark, their secrets were screened by the bright reflection of the garden. A shadow moved in the corner of my eye, but I told myself it was one of the trees.

Once disturbed, my unease remained and I found I could not settle back into the calm I had felt earlier. Dozing was no longer an option and I felt too on edge to read, so it was a relief when Tristan approached through the trees with a canvas bag slung over his shoulder and a rug rolled up under his arm. His shock of blond hair gleamed near white in the sun, and fell over his eyes as he squinted in my direction.

He was taller than I had realized, and thinner too. He raised his free arm in a salute to me, and I waved back, assailed now by a new kind of nervousness.

‘Mind if I sit with you?’ he asked, his voice as lilting and melodious as I had remembered.

‘No, no.’ I fluttered my hands uselessly.

‘How are you today, Alice?’ A blush stained his cheeks. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve remembered a second name? It seems terribly presumptuous of me to use your given name when I don’t know you.’

‘That can be forgiven, I think, considering that I barely know myself at the moment.’

He smiled, and I saw pity in his eyes. Tristan unrolled the rug on the grass beside me and sat at my feet. It felt strange to look down on him, only a few feet away, all long limbs and pale skin.

‘You can call me Tristan, then. It seems fair, don’t you think?’ He smiled and shook the hair out of his eyes. ‘Mother tells me you haven’t remembered anything else. How you came to be out on the road that night, where you came from, anything?’

I shook my head, but I must have hesitated momentarily.

‘There is something?’ His doe eyes were filled with curiosity.

‘Ah, only… nothing recent. Just… I remember… my Mother.’ I finished, triumphantly.

‘Tell me about her. If it would help. I don’t mean to pry.’

‘Yes.’ I wanted to tell him something – anything to assuage my conscience. ‘She died when I was born.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘So I never knew her, but my father told me about her. She was a dancer.’

I looked at him through my lashes, wondering how he would take it.

‘How marvellous.’

I stared at him, and couldn’t decide whether or not he was genuine. I decided not to risk telling him she was French.

‘And your father? Do you remember anything about him? Was he in the theatre too?’

‘No, I-’ I stopped myself just before I revealed too much. ‘I can’t remember. I don’t think he was but…’

‘Ah.’ Tristan looked awkward for a moment and busied himself with laying out his brush roll and unscrewing the cap from a jar of water. ‘A dancer, eh? I’ve always had a thing for the theatre. I’d have loved to be a leading man, travelling the country – nay, the world, painting my face up and donning outrageous garb. What a lark it would be! I say, I wonder if you can dance – if you can’t remember, that is?’

I shook my head.

‘We shall have to try it out some time. Once you’re better, I mean.’ He glanced towards my feet, which were shamefully free of stockings or shoes. I curled my toes, but was too embarrassed to draw his attention further by making a show of covering them with my skirts.

Tristan began sketching and we fell silent. I realised I had grown used to Edwina’s gentle, non-probing conversations. How easy it would be for me to make a mistake. One slip and my lies would unravel and they would hate me. I couldn’t bear it. And to think, it would all have been caused by the careless mention of my father.

CHAPTER 2

The Beginning, or the Middle

I first saw Mr Raynor when he visited my father. He didn’t see me then, and wouldn’t until some days later, but I watched him as he left the house that day. I had been working in the garden, the skirt of my old cotton smock hoisted to my knees, and my hair tied up in a scarf like a beggar woman. Streaked as I was with mud and dust, I chose to stay out of sight of the windows once I had heard the door. Father very rarely had visitors, but when he did I never knew who they were. Generally people from his publishers, or an enthusiastic student delivering specimens. Nobody remotely interesting to me, and Father never expected me to be present. He preferred it if I kept out of the way, so he didn’t have to go to the fuss of introducing me and answering the inevitable questions about Mother. The arrangement pleased me, as I didn’t really know how to behave in company.

I took my time in the garden. It was something of a relief to know I wouldn’t be wanted to write up notes or label drawers or dust cases for a while. I had plenty of work to do – there were always weeds. A woodlouse scurried from beneath a pile of mulchy leaves, and I let it run over my fingers, enjoying the feather-light tickling feeling. I didn’t mind insects in the garden, where they were alive. It was the ones in Father’s cases that unnerved me.

The stranger, as he was then, was with Father for such a long time. I had cleared the border down the side of the house and washed my hands under the pump before I heard the front door open. Dropping low, I crept up behind the big hedge and watched the gentleman emerge. I could make out little more than a pale triangle of face visible between the brim of his hat and his up-turned collar. Nothing remarkable. A few moments later there was the sound of horses’ hooves, and he was gone. I went back to the house and changed my clothes before starting to make dinner.

I didn’t see Father until he faced me over the dinner table. I’d managed to cobble together something with the last of the smoked fish and a few vegetables, but there really wasn’t much in the house. Father seemed displeased, and I worried he’d not eat much. At length he rose, leaving his plate barely touched, and began to pace.

After a few lengths of the floor had been completed, he stood by the window and did his best to ignore me for about ten minutes. His eyes darted about the room as he wrung his hands and the corner of his mouth twitched slightly. I was dutiful, as I have been taught, for at least a further ten minutes before I ventured to ask –

‘Who was the gentleman?’

Father stopped fidgeting and deflated down into his chair and onto the table, his head landing on his hands. Moments later he jolted upright, as though someone had held a candle beneath his chin. His mouth split into a grin.

‘Did you see him, Fleur?’

I nodded.

His grin wilted at the corners and a vertical line appeared between his brows.

‘Did you speak to him?’ There was a fraying, high-pitched edge to his voice.

‘No. I don’t think he saw me.’ I hoped that was the answer he wanted to hear.

Father nudged his discarded knife and fork with shaking hands.

‘His name is Mr Raynor.’ He paused as though the name ought to mean something to me, but it didn’t. “He’s very rich. He’d like to marry you.’

‘Oh.’ I said. My mind seemed to have stopped working.

‘Wouldn’t you like to get married? I think you’d like it.’

I’d never thought of marrying. Not really. I thought I was a bit too young.

‘I don’t know, Father.’

‘I think you would.’ He stared at me, his eyes watering slightly.

He looked desperate, and I didn’t understand. It wasn’t that I wanted things to stay the way they were now, or that I was happy, exactly. I just didn’t understand. Strange though it may seem to girls my age, marriage just hadn’t been a thing I expected to do. We’d never mentioned it.

‘Who is he?’

Father lifted his fork and began to tap the handle against the table, watching intently as little drops of gravy flew and spattered onto the wood. He stared for so long, I wondered if he’d heard me.

‘A gentleman of my acquaintance,’ he said, eventually. ‘I knew him before you were born. Hadn’t seen him in years.’ Father laughed, a high-pitched sound at odds with his furrowed brows. ‘Didn’t think he’d know where we lived, after all these years, but here we are.’

He was old, then, this Mr Raynor. I had thought him of indeterminate middle age, but it had been hard to tell from the triangle of his face that had been visible between the low brim of his hat and the collar of his greatcoat, which came up higher than his ears.

‘Are you sure he wants to marry me? Has he seen me?’ I looked doubtfully at my hands, and the lines of dirt beneath the crescents of my nails. I wasn’t a beauty, although my mother had been. I took after my father, with his long, straight nose and thick, dark hair. Mother had been fair, like sunlight in a darkened room, I had been told.

‘That sort of thing isn’t strictly necessary. He knows me, he knew your mother, and now he wants to marry you. Really, Fleur, I don’t see why you’re making such a fuss about it. Girls want to get married, don’t they?’

I supposed they probably did. The truth of the matter was that I didn’t know any girls my own age. I didn’t really know anyone at all. But in the books I read it seemed as though marriage was a thing girls wanted to do, and some of those marriages had been to people they didn’t know, or at least didn’t know well. I felt I was probably being unreasonable and worried I seemed ungrateful.

‘I had thought to stay with you, Father.’

His face softened into a weak smile and his eyes seemed to water a little more.

‘As had I, dear one. But this is for the best, really. You’ll be safe and secure.’ He wiped a shaking hand across his brow. ‘Otherwise, what would you do when I die? You can’t live alone.’

I began to see his reasoning. I had never thought of the future. All of my life had been constant. Just me and the quiet, background figure of my father, and so I had thought it would continue forever. How foolish I had been.

‘What will you do without me?’ I asked, and immediately regretted the question. For the first time in what must have been years, the deep line between Father’s brows smoothed and disappeared.

‘I’ll manage, Fleur.’

CHAPTER 3

Vulnerable, Beautiful Tristan

Tristan and I sat in silence for a long while, and I leaned back in the bath chair, staring at the clouds that passed slowly overhead and the changing shapes and shadows cast by the trees. I tried not to look at what Tristan was painting – it seemed almost akin to reading someone’s correspondence over their shoulder, and Father had always hated that. I tried not to look at him at all, although his face drew me like a magnet, with its high cheek bones, white, white skin and pouting, pink lips.

‘It must be strange,’ he said at length, startling me out of my reverie. ‘To lose one’s past. That’s what’s happened to you. Strange but, in a way, exciting. You have the opportunity to start again with no ties or boundaries. You could be anything. Anyone you wanted. Is that not wonderful?’

‘I…’ I stuttered and struggled for words. ‘I hadn’t thought of it. I suppose it would - well, it would depend on what I had forgotten.’ I fiddled with the fringe on my shawl, rolling it between my fingers and looking at it intently. ‘It wouldn’t be just me who lost my past. It would be the past who lost me, too. Don’t you think?’

‘That’s true.’ Tristan paused in his drawing and stared at his paper. ‘I shouldn’t like to leave Mother. But everyone has things they would rather forget.’

‘I suppose they do.’

He threw down his brush and paper and lay back on the blanket, staring up at the sky. He was perfectly placed for me to look at him. The long column of his neck was stretched out, almost as pale as his linen shirt, open just enough to reveal a hint of the fine bones at the top of his chest. I caught myself looking and blushed furiously. What had happened to me that I had become so voyeuristic? I wondered if it was part and parcel of becoming a married woman, and having one’s eyes opened. But more likely, I feared, it was part of my transformation into a being of vice and evil. I couldn’t stop myself from looking at him again, his long legs stretched out over the blanket, his delicate wrists and long, artist’s fingers. He cleared his throat and I worried he’d caught me staring, but he began to speak.

‘There was a girl, you know.’

‘Oh. You don’t have to tell me anything.’

He smiled weakly.

‘It seems only fair – I’m trying to find out things about you.’

A shot of heat suffused my belly, and I felt myself blush again.

‘She was a friend of mine – our families were friends, all my life. My first love, if you like.’

Jealousy. It shot through me, burning my throat and clenching my stomach. It was as though I had regained consciousness as a different person. I had been jealous before, but never so powerfully it shocked me. Never about a man.

‘We were engaged. The happiest people alive. Do you know that feeling? Sorry – you probably don’t remember. But I wanted to see the world, and I ended up in the army. Didn’t even see any action. Too late for the war, and when I returned it seemed I was too late in that as well.’

‘What do you mean?’

A muscle in his throat contracted, and he raised a pale hand to cover his eyes as he turned his face away from me.

‘She had married someone else while I was away. I was only gone a year but… She’d promised she would wait for me.’

I was surprised again by the pang of hatred I suddenly felt for this girl. I stopped looking at vulnerable, beautiful Tristan and lay back in my chair.

‘How awful,’ I whispered.

‘Yes. But maybe it was for the best. I tell myself that. That we probably wouldn’t have suited. That we would never have been happy, that we would have fallen out of love and made one another thoroughly miserable. But that’s the thing – I’ll never know how it could have been. There are so many roads we leave untraveled. So many paths our lives could take, filled with options we never explore. Have you considered that, Alice?’

Tristan sat suddenly and twisted to face me.

‘That every choice we make alters our lives in some way? Whether I salt my dinner, whether I go to town this day or the next, it seems like nothing of moment but it alters the path of our future, and we don’t know how much. Who would I have met that day? What money did I spend that I could have saved if I’d gone the next day? It’s enough to drive a person mad, wondering what might have been.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ I chose my words carefully, wishing to have his eyes on me for longer, with such fervour in them. I couldn’t look away from him. ‘I wonder what could have been different in my life that I wouldn’t have ended up here. I shall never know.’

He smiled then, and I was glad.

‘But the unfortunate circumstances of your injuries aside, let us just be happy then that you are here, for the moment.’

I thought he might kiss me. We looked at one another, smiling. Him so pure and good, me so dark and vile. I looked away, leaned back and closed my eyes. I heard him sigh, then there was the tinkling sound of him washing his brush in the water jar.

It would be easy to forget who I was. Easy to go along with my lie, to pretend never to regain my memory and stay here forever. I could marry Tristan, maybe, and we could travel the world together, and nobody would ever know I was a murderer, or had all these vile thoughts. Maybe the memories would fade, and I would become the person I longed to be. Clean and new, refreshed by Tristan and Edwina’s innate goodness.

But there would always be the threat of discovery. God only knew how close I was to Gabriel’s house, where at least his mother and his servants still knew of me, and my villainy. My picture would be in the London papers. There was probably a price on my head. All of a sudden, the trees and the house and even the air around me seemed very close, closing in around my neck like a noose. I didn’t trust that Edwina and Tristan could remain in ignorance for long.

That night I dreamed again of the strange man in my room. Only once, and briefly, marking the divide between two of my nightmares. The blood and the bridle, the fear and the pain. I expected him to look like Gabriel Raynor. Who else should I be haunted by but the face of my dead husband? But even through the darkness that covered his face, I could make out that he was taller and broader than my lean, sparse husband. His jaw seemed squarer in the gloom, and he was a hulking presence I did not know whether to fear or hope for. I almost felt that he was protecting me, but that could never be so. He withdrew into the blackness as I felt our eyes meet, and I felt his loss. Then the blood returned.