Midnight in Your Arms (18 page)

“Poor Ellen,” Alaric murmured.

Laura stiffened slightly. And then relaxed. “Yes,” she agreed. “You must tell her … something, Alaric. This can’t go on.”

And as if summoned by the sound of her name, the door swung open, and Ellen herself stood in the doorway, her voluminous silhouette standing out in stark relief against the lamp-lit hall behind her. She held a taper high, sending forward a billow of light that illuminated the lovers in their nest of tangled sheets and twined limbs. Alaric threw his arm across Laura’s chest, as though to shield more than her nakedness. Ellen stared at them with an unreadable expression, her mouth working soundlessly. Laura and Alaric stared back

“I have been searching all over the house for you, Alaric,” she said finally, a shrill quaver creeping into her voice. “Do you care to explain yourself?”

E
llen turned to look at Laura, who scrambled up against the headboard, the bedclothes pulled up over her breasts, her eyes dark with conflicting emotions. Everything in her shrank back from this woman who had barged her way in on the most intimate moment of Laura’s life as though it belonged to her, instead. “And you,” Ellen said. “I don’t know who you are, but I think you should know that this man is, for all intents and purposes, engaged to me.”

Laura’s mouth opened, but no words came. There was absolutely nothing she could say. She felt as though her heart had been removed from her body to be served to this woman on a plate, like in a gruesome folktale. There was a raw emptiness, a gaping hole. The overbearing assurance of Ellen in her silk gown and elaborate ostrich feathers seemed to sap every ounce of courage from her body. Alaric didn’t belong to her. He could never belong to her. Not once she left this bed.

She turned to look at him, her face on fire. “Alaric?” she said hoarsely, the word seeming to come from some other person, far away.

“That isn’t true,” Alaric said in a low voice. He laced his fingers with Laura’s and gave them a reassuring squeeze, though her hand was quite limp. “And you know it, Ellen.”

“It is true now,” Ellen said, a steely calm coming into her voice. She came fully into the room, and shut the door behind her. She set the candle on the bedside table, and sat down in the delicate little chair that adorned the corner of the room as though she had every right to enter whatever room in Stonecross she liked. Which perhaps she had. In this time, anyway.

Her spine was as straight as a poker, righteous indignation lending her complexion the flaming color normally reserved for desire. Laura thought her rather lovely, but there was something missing. There was nothing inside of the carapace that made her seem a delightful lady to all who looked upon her. Laura could see that she was nothing but a lovely, stuffed sawdust doll with eyes of glass and cold, porcelain arms. Arms that had more right to hold Alaric inside of them than Laura had.

She felt a tremor of fear wash over her. Women like Ellen were powerful. A lady like that had power simply by birthright that Laura would never know, or want to. It was the power of societal position, and of entitlement. She could not compete with it.

Laura had never felt so humiliated in her life. If only Stonecross would open up and swallow her back to her own time. But Alaric was gripping her fiercely, and it was impossible to push him away while she could still hold on to him for even a few moments more.

“Do you really think I would give you up to some trollop? Did you set this up to be rid of me?” Ellen laughed, her eyes skimming with distaste over the state of the bedroom, their clothes strewn about, and their huddled, naked skin. She seemed to take delight in the way she held them hostage. For as long as she liked to sit there, looking at them, they couldn’t rise and dress. She had them at a distinct disadvantage, which gave her obvious pleasure. “Alaric, take all the trollops you like to your bed, as long as you are discreet and don’t humiliate me in public. Well, any more than you already have over the past ten years. An engagement announcement at the party tomorrow should take care of that part nicely.”

“Ellen, I am not going to marry you,” Alaric said with a steady voice. “I love Laura. I’m going to marry her. You are right, however. I owe you more apology than is possible to convey. I truly am sorry. I should not have allowed this farce to go on as long as it has. I think we both knew that it was no good, only neither of us would admit it. You should have gone and married long ago, and you still can. Any single gentleman you encounter is yours for the taking.”

Gesturing dismissively as if all the single gentlemen in the kingdom were of no consequence, Ellen shook her head scornfully. “Do you truly believe you can just marry this … this chit, and all will be well? Do you think your friends will accept her after I have told what I have seen to all who will listen? No one in polite society will have ought to do with her. She will be shunned in every drawing room and assembly house from Plymouth to London.” She angled her head to stare coldly at Laura, who had not moved during the entire exchange. “Who are you, girl?” she asked imperiously. “Who is your family, and what fortune have you, to set your cap so high? It is a fool’s errand, to spread your legs to catch a husband. If it were not, I would have tried it myself years ago.”

Finally, Laura found her voice. “My love for Alaric isn’t a trap,” she said, her heart hammering as she levelled her gaze. She would
not
let this woman see that she was distraught. “I don’t want to own him, or force him into anything. I only want to love him. If I thought you felt the same way, I might feel bad for taking him away from you. But you don’t, do you? He is simply a pretty plaything to add to your box of trinkets.”

Ellen stared at her haughtily, appalled by her audacity. And then smirked, shaking her head. “
His
love is the trap, you little fool—not for him, but for you. Can’t you feel it closing around you? Escape while you still can, and pray you don’t have a whelp in your belly to pay you back for your folly.”

Laura looked at her, all of her anger deflating. She felt nothing but pity for this foolish woman who thought love was nothing more than a sparring match. She had stood before this woman’s grave. She had seen her pitiful epitaph. It was far different to speak to a living woman over whose remains one has stood and whose future one knows than to commune with a lingering spirit. Ellen, though a living woman, filled Laura with a revulsion she never felt for Alaric when she had thought him a ghost.

“You poor thing,” she said, without thinking. “You have no idea why your life is so empty.”

“I don’t require a lesson from a little slut like you on the subject,” Ellen spat, coloring. If she had been standing closer, Laura had no doubt she would have been dealt a swift slap across the cheek with one of Ellen’s pretty white hands. She could see the way her fingers convulsed into a fist before ladylike grace got the better of them.

“Ellen,” Alaric said, his voice flooding with barely controlled fury. “Do not insult the woman I love. I will marry her, and you will leave this house as soon as it can be arranged. I am sorry for the wrongs I have done you, but malice won’t win back the years we have wasted. It’s time for us each to live our lives. Can’t you see that? And I will live mine with Laura.”

Ellen scowled, her pretty face crumpling like that of a child who has had its best toy taken away. “You won’t!” she said, stamping her lovely slippered foot. “No one will accept her. And a gentleman may not break an engagement with a lady. Everyone knows we were meant to be man and wife, and that you all but offered for me before you left for that bloody war of yours. You
will
marry me, Alaric Storm. Or I will ruin both of you.”

Alaric’s mouth dropped open. “You would really hold a man who doesn’t want you to the childish declarations of a boy who was about to have his head blown off on another continent, just to save face?”

Her face grew solemn. “Yes, I would. In the end, our faces are all we have.” And then, a pious smile twisted her small bud of a mouth. “And what do you think your father would say, Alaric, if you threw me over for this harlot of yours? It would kill him. You know it would. Just as you know he has always wanted me for his daughter-in-law. You know that was always his intention. If you do not agree, I will go to him right now, and tell him everything I have seen, and everything you have said to me. And he will make you do what you know is right.”

Rising triumphantly from her seat, having just dealt her trump card, Ellen looked as priggish and smug as any woman ever had who knew she had a man by a very delicate handhold. “I will leave you now to reconsider your position, and to rid yourself of this … woman. When you have quite come to your senses, Alaric, you needn’t say a word about this matter. We will pretend as though nothing has happened. Our little secret—like a bond to seal our marriage.”

She swept from the room, taking her candle with her, the door shutting so quietly behind her, it seemed like the whole altercation was merely a mirage.

Thunderstruck, Alaric turned to Laura. He looked into her eyes, taking her shoulders into his hands so that she was forced to face him. She turned her face away. If she looked at him now, it would kill her to do what she knew she must. “Don’t listen to her,” he said, in a voice so low Laura could barely hear it. “I love you. I will spend my life with you.”

“Even if I can never be anything more than a ghost, Alaric?” she said softly. “We don’t know if we can even stay in the same era together, except at this time of year. I know I seemed so certain last night, but dawn is coming. And nothing seems very possible in the cold light of morning.” She lifted her hand. It quavered in the slowly breaking light. She was turning into a shaft of light herself, dimming and shimmering. “Look at me. It’s taking all my concentration just to stay in this bed with you. If you let go of me, I will simply disappear.”

He gripped her still tighter, his fingers digging deeper into her shoulders. “But tonight,” he said urgently. “Surely tonight will be different. It’s All Hallows. If we can just find a way to keep you here.”

“And then what?” Laura said, trying to hold back her tears while her heart quietly broke. “You heard what Ellen said. I will bring you nothing but disgrace. Eventually you will hate me for it.”

“No. Never. We can go away. We can start a new life, somewhere else.”

“And your father?”

Alaric said nothing. He set his mouth in a line. “I’m not going to let you go.”

Laura smiled, leaned forward, and kissed him more deeply than she ever had. Their lips melted into a single mouth, and for that last moment, they were inseparable.

“You have no choice,” Laura said, breaking away. “I love you, Alaric. Good-bye.”

She closed her eyes then, and though Alaric dragged her against him, shaking her as though trying to rouse her from the dead, she shimmered for a moment, and was gone.

L
aura opened her eyes to her own Stonecross, the tableau of peeling paper and falling plaster seeming ugly to her for the first time. She had willed herself to emerge in her own bed, rather than in the bed in which she and Alaric had been lovers. She preferred this bed, because it belonged to Alaric. Three decades after his death, it was still his. Everything was. Stonecross itself would only ever belong to Alaric in her mind. It was redolent of him. He permeated every crumbling inch of plaster, each yard of rotted silk that hung in beckoning tatters from bedposts and window frames. Laura was one small fragment in the midst of it all, and she, too, would always belong to Alaric.

She curled into a small ball in the great bed, drawing the musty bedclothes over her nakedness. She had left her clothing behind, crumpled on the carpet like shreds of discarded skin. The only thing he would ever have of her, unless those paltry textiles had disappeared with her, as they no doubt must have. The thought brought hot tears welling up in her eyes, and she squeezed them shut, letting the salted water fall. It felt good to cry. She never cried. Now she would cry enough to last her the rest of her life, and then she would stop. She didn’t think there would be much worth weeping over after this. She would be dry as a rain cistern in a time of drought. Nothing would grow in her heart. She could feel it shrinking in, curling on itself and pressing everything so tight it could do nothing but suffocate the things it held inside it.

After a long, sodden interval, Laura sat up and wiped the tears away, scrubbing her swollen face with her hands. She ignored the way she could still smell Alaric, smell the salted perfume of sweat and sex that clung to the creases of her fingers. There would be other lovers. They would help erase the imprint his body left on hers. Laura would launder her body as if her skin was a stained sheet. Each time she took a man to bed who wasn’t Alaric, there would be less and less trace of him left. She would scrub herself raw with the flesh of other men until she was again a nameless, anonymous woman who had sex for any reason but love.

She would go back to London, and become that woman again as soon as possible. The flat in Piccadilly was still waiting for her, as were her midnight companions in the dance hall below. She would be along again with the cat, who was at that moment snuggled at the foot of the bed, his belly upturned. She could hear him purring. She would have to ride into the village after she packed, and arrange for a car to come collect her and take her to the station. There was a train at midday, thank God. If she had to wait any longer, she would have hired the car to take her all the way to London. Either that, or walk, carrying the cat’s basket as he yowled all the way. Laura would do whatever she had to do to make sure she never laid eyes on Stonecross again.

She got up, shivering in the heatless room. She had left the fire behind with Alaric, and Stonecross was as frigid as a sepulcher in the chilly dawn. The cat stretched, unperturbed in his fur coat as Laura struggled into several layers of clothing. She wore trousers again, and her brother’s old sweater that had begun to unravel even more. She didn’t bother glancing into the mirror, or taming the riotous curls that stood out all over her head. She needed to get to the village as fast as possible. If she didn’t leave Stonecross that morning, she might never leave it at all.