Midnight in Your Arms (15 page)

Or the man on his other side.

He was a taciturn man, but he knew he was being ridiculous.

He turned to Ellen, who had just finished laughing merrily at the slightly risqué joke told to her by the gentleman on her right. “These … centerpieces are very … elegant,” he said, gesturing slightly to the masses of fruit and flowers festooning the length of the polished table.

She smiled brilliantly, her teeth a row of polished pearls, and he was chagrined by how obviously grateful she was for his attention. He was a bastard. She deserved better. He had known her so long—too long, perhaps—that he often treated her as though she was little more than another piece of furniture decorating his parlor. Even though he didn’t want to marry her, he really was rather fond of her, in a nostalgic sort of way.

“You’ve done a remarkable thing, Ellen,” he continued. “I have never seen the old pile looking so festive.”

“Only wait until you see it tomorrow,” she breathed. “I have some surprises in store for you yet. This is merely the preliminary show.”

He smiled as genuinely as he could. “Wonderful.”

She returned his smile with true pleasure and lowered her eyes, blushing as though she was a debutante and he her most desirable suitor. He studied her while her gaze was lowered demurely. Did she really feel that way about him? Was he truly the trophy for which she had waited so long, or was he not, by now, a desperate consolation prize? Had he allowed himself to be so blinded that he truly didn’t know?

After the ladies rose and withdrew, leaving the gentlemen to their port, Alaric rose and slipped from the room while the footmen were busy with decanters and cut crystal glasses, and the gentlemen were dusting off their bawdier jokes and loosening a few of the buttons on their straining waistcoats. How relieved everyone always seemed to be when left alone with members of their own sex. Alaric didn’t particularly enjoy being left alone with anyone, other than his father. He had so few friends. None, really. His truest friends were either dead, scattered to the corners of the kingdom, or shimmering back and forth between nothingness and negligible existence.

He walked silently down the corridor, until he saw a few lady stragglers gossiping on their way to the drawing room. He ducked into the nearest doorway, and slunk down the back stairs. Inevitably, he nearly ran into a maid on the third story—he was forever running into servants. She was a skinny young thing with bright black eyes and a rather fearsome expression to go with her beak of a nose. She put Alaric in mind of a crow, if there was a corvid equivalent to a scullery girl.

She gave him a penetrating look, the audaciousness of which brought him up short. She didn’t drop her eyes, though she graced him with a curtsy, her wilted apron clutched in her chapped fists. “Tara, is it?” he said, examining her oddly handsome little face.

His mouth quirked at the barely concealed mutiny that rose in her expression before it subsided into something slightly more suitable. He didn’t enjoy the way her eyes glazed over, as though she was deadening herself. “Tess, sir.”

He didn’t know why he had stopped to speak to her. It was foolish of him. Servants didn’t like to be condescended to. No one did. It was best if they just pretended not to see one another, when at all possible. Jeffries had a marvellous way of acting as though Alaric was an animate mannequin when he bathed and groomed him. He was not given to gossip, any more than Alaric was himself. His entire life seemed to be the thankless pursuit of perfection. Alaric really had no business keeping him shut away at Stonecross, where all he had to do was keep the clothes of a gentleman who never went anywhere or did anything to showcase his precision with a razor and flair with a neckcloth. Poor Jeffries. He would have to give him a pay raise, or let him fly back to London, where his talents could be put to better use.

He nodded at Tess, whose eyes had drifted to the vicinity of his beautifully polished shoes. “Well, off you go,” he said gently.

She gave him a look that sent a terrible chill through him, though he had been sweating through his shirt only moments before in the blazing dining room. It was an expression that reminded him of Laura: too wise and aware, as though all the secrets of existence were laid out before her eyes. As though she could see the whole truth of him, and what was to become of his life. It was not an altogether delightful sensation, and Laura clearly managed to dilute it. This girl hit him with the full force of her unearthly awareness. Why had he never noticed how strange she was before now? She had been just another scrawny kitchen maid, and now she commanded the full force of his attention.

“What is it?” he said sharply, taking hold of her arm. It was as thin as a matchstick in his hand, and he was careful not to squeeze it too hard.

“I’ve seen her again,” she said. “The lady what don’t belong.”

“Where, Tess?” he asked, tilting her chin so that she had to look at him with her glazed eyes.

“Now,” she said insensibly, as though she was in a sort of hypnogogic state. “And then. And always.” She blinked blearily, her brow furrowing, her fierce little face gathering into a scowl. “She’s in the kitchen, cracking eggs. She’s waiting. Waiting for you.”

She swooned against him, and Alaric gathered her up, making sure she didn’t fall—the girl weighed absolutely nothing.
In the kitchen, cracking eggs. What the devil did
that
mean?

One of the chambermaids came down the corridor, and Alaric waved her over. “I want you to take her to her room and put her to bed,” he told the awestruck girl, who gaped at him with her mouth open. He didn’t know her name, and didn’t ask for it. “She isn’t feeling herself. Can you manage her?”

“Yes, sir,” the girl said, dropping a curtsy.

“Never mind that,” he told her. “Just take her.”

When he was satisfied that the girl wouldn’t drop her charge on her head, Alaric left Tess in her care, and strode off, his leg aching slightly after the exertion. The pain told him that a storm was gathering, despite the heat welling up inside the house that made him forget the time of year. As if he could truly forget. October had a way of making itself felt, in every moment.

He ignored it, and charged down the back stairs toward the kitchen.

In his agitation to see if Tess was correct or merely babbling, he nearly didn’t notice what had happened.

It was the single most unsettling thing that he had ever witnessed, even given that he had been lately falling rather deeply in love with a specter.

As he descended the final staircase, Stonecross changed.

It wasn’t a trick of the light, or the product of an errant shadow. He saw his way very well. And his way was littered with refuse. The plaster was crumbling along the plain whitewashed walls of the servants’ stairwell, and the woodwork bulged in the places where unchecked moisture had ruined it. The banister felt like a grossly misshapen limb beneath his hand, and he jerked away from it, wiping his hand reflexively on his waistcoat, as if to rid his skin of its memory. The plain wool runner had disintegrated beneath his feet, and his nostrils were assaulted with the brackish stench of decay. It was as though the house had died around him, and he was standing inside of its moldering corpse.

Heart racing, Alaric crossed the remaining few yards to the doorway of the kitchen. The doors hung loose on their hinges, and when he pressed his shoulder against them, the one on the left shuddered open with a god-awful screech that sent talons of irritation raking along the back of his neck. He glanced wildly about, taking in the wreckage of what had been a very orderly kitchen the last time he had had occasion to visit it. Now, he barely recognized it, with its peeling walls, grime-crusted floor, and broken windowpanes. Only the long plank table in the center was wholly familiar, with his own initials carved on one rickety leg.

Carved when?
he asked himself.
A hundred years ago? Two?
The notion sent an arrow of fear ricocheting through his bowels. Was he dead now, wherever he was? And what would happen to him if he couldn’t go back? Laura always did. That was true. Even when he didn’t want her to.
Always
when he didn’t want her to. For the first time, it was a comfort.

In the dimness, he barely saw the figure that darted out of the pantry, cradling something against its chest. Before he could help himself, he let out a yell. The figure froze, staring at him.
Who on earth would be living here?
Alaric moved forward, and picked up a lantern someone had lit and left there unattended. It threw a feeble light over the dimness of the room as he held it up high, barely dispelling the dense shadows. He squinted, and moved closer.

“Who is there?” he said, his voice a low growl in the dimness. There was another flicker of movement, and Laura gasped, dropping what she was holding.

An egg.

It splattered onto the floorboards and over her feet.

Alaric stared at her, stunned.
She’s in the kitchen, cracking eggs.

She pressed her fist to her heart, as if to stuff it back in. “She said you couldn’t,” she said. “That only I could.”

He frowned. “Who said?”

“Tess.”

Rivulets of unease trickled down the inside of his collar, but he shrugged them away. Surely he was beyond that. He lowered the light, replacing it on the table before he dropped it, adding his own contribution to the mess on the floor. “She told me you were here. She said you were cracking eggs.” He shook his head at the impossibility of what he was saying. “I saw her not a moment ago.”

Laura shook her head slowly, with a strange little smile. “No, Alaric. You saw her sixty years ago.”

Her words broke over him like powerful waves. He felt like he was drowning in them. He was in Laura’s time now. Was it really possible? If it was improbable when
she
did it, now that he was following suit, it seemed utterly unthinkable. He wasn’t like her. He was just an ordinary man. It wasn’t his place to go traipsing about in time, like a Sunday picnicker in the park.

Alaric reeled drunkenly, flinging a hand out to steady himself on the table. Laura reached out reflexively, as if to catch him, but her hand slid through him. It was almost painful. He could practically feel her fingers slipping through him to the other side of his skin.

“Good God,” he said. “So this is what it feels like to be dead.”

“Y
ou aren’t dead,” Laura said, patiently, and then hesitated. “Well, not in so many words.”

Alaric frowned at her, his hands cupping the mug of tea she had given him. It was good simply to know what to do with his hands. “I don’t understand any of this,” he said.

“No one understands it,” Laura said, reaching out to touch his hand.

“Where exactly am I?”

“With me.” Her voice was gentle. “Isn’t that enough?”

He stretched out his fingers beneath her hand, gazing down at the place where she touched him. “I can nearly feel that, you know. I can very nearly feel
you
.”

Laura blinked, her smile a slow, sensual caress that sent a thrill through his basest regions. Desire battled with unease as he savored the simple comfort of sitting across a table from her. “Why can I feel you, when I could barely graze your skin before?”

Laura picked up her shoulder, and dropped it. “Because it’s just past midnight,” she said. “And it’s nearly All Hallows Eve.”

“Is it midnight?” he said, pricking up his ears to listen. “I didn’t hear the clocks chime.”

“That’s because no one’s wound them in many a year,” Laura said.

He started up, knocking his knees against the underside of the table. “My guests!” he said, with a self-conscious grimace, though he didn’t understand his sudden solicitude. “I’ve left Ellen to take care of them alone!”

Laura’s expression darkened, though she recovered quickly, pressing her hand harder upon his. “Alaric, they’ve
long
gone home. There is no one here but the two of us.”

“What is it?” he asked. “Did I say something to offend you?”

“Ellen,” she said softly, gazing solemnly into his eyes. “You
do
have a lady. Are you married to her?”

He cleared his throat, and took a sip of tea. His throat was suddenly dry as the Sahara. “No, not yet.”

“But you
want
to marry her.”

“Not precisely, no. But I
should
marry her. I should have married her years ago.”

Laura nodded, smiling to herself, that same strange little indecipherable smile she wore when telling him how many years had passed in the time it took for him to descend a flight of stairs into the kitchen. “Alaric, that is precisely what you do. And I don’t want you to.” Her eyes glimmered with tears as she looked at him. “I want you to marry me.”

A fierce joy flooded through him, followed by an anvil crashing down, settling somewhere in the region of his bowels. “What do you mean, it’s what I do?” he said in a low, dangerous voice. “Why do I have the distinct impression that you understand much more of the situation than I do, much more than you have led me to believe? I thought we were both struggling in the same darkness.”

“We are,” Laura said. “But I have a torch.” She reached into the pocket of the trousers she was wearing. Trousers. He had never seen a woman wearing them before, except in bawdy pictures of sapphists. She was no sapphist, he knew, and though distinctly masculine, the trousers only seemed to heighten her femininity. She could wear a paper bag, for all he cared, and she would still be the loveliest woman he had ever seen.

He watched curiously as Laura pulled out what looked like a trio of playing cards.

She laid the cards one by one on the table, like a gypsy fortune-teller at an autumn fete.

Alaric didn’t need to look at them to know they were no ordinary cards. They filled him with a sense of dread. He looked at them, and saw fragments of his own life, the one he was living, and the one to come. The cards knew all. They saw him well. They were a mirror in which he might decipher something other than his face. He didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to see what Laura saw.