Page 14 of The Lady Sparks a Flame (The Damsels of Discovery #2)

14

So, then, the sensation I feel on touching a cold body, is in proportion to the rapidity with which my hand yields its heat to that body?

—Mrs. Jane Marcet

Sam slept poorly and woke ready to leave this place far behind.

When he came to breakfast, Karolina and the marchioness acknowledged him but kept chattering like magpies about something in Lithuanian.

Probably goblin penises.

“We are almost finished cataloging anything of worth, Mr. Fenley,” Lady Fallowshall said proudly as he took a seat.

Good.

Time to get them the hell out of this place. The dark was its own beast here. Sam was sick of it wrapping around everything one touched and riding on his heels. It left no room for laughter nor love, for that matter.

“I will take one last look at the music room,” he said. “If we finish this morning we’ll set out this afternoon. I’ve been too long away from the emporium.”

The women agreed and sent Jonas into town to reserve a train car back to London. Funny, there were plenty of horses today and not when Sam first wanted to leave.

“Did you sleep well, Mr. Fenley?” asked Karolina.

What was Sam supposed to answer?

No. I had a raging cockstand all night, thanks to your sister. Ever since I’ve arrived, I’ve had nightmares of being buried alive, a man clad in black laughing all the while. I have never pitied anyone as I pity the three of you, and I miss my family so much, it feels as though I’ve lost a limb.

“I slept fine, thank you for asking, my lady.”

When the cook brought in a platter of fried cheese curd again, Sam made his excuses and walked toward the music room.

“When I get home, I am going to kiss my mam’s feet and eat all the rashers I can get my hands on,” he said as he passed by a portrait hanging slightly askew in the hallway. The potato-nosed man with a lugubrious expression and a hideous peruke stared back at him without comment.

Thank goodness.

The music room was pretty compared to most of the manor. Two sets of French doors in the outside wall looked out over a short lawn and a staircase leading down a slight hill.

“Right, well, I’ll start at the far end of the room, then,” he said to himself. There was no reason to be afraid. Full daylight fell through the windows, and he’d seen no sign of anything eerie or strange in this room, but the sound of his own voice in the preternatural quiet soothed him. “I’ll bet there’s a standup harpsichord beneath those cloths,” he continued.

Carrying a ledger, Sam would write the name of the object and a price range with the pencil first, then transfer it to sturdier parchment and ink later tonight.

“Good morning,” Phoebe said quietly as she entered the room. She was wearing a simple blue woolen day dress reminiscent of the previous decades. No doubt it was part of her adolescent wardrobe. The shoulders and neck of the dress were made from a cotton print of stripes and forget-me-nots, buckled at the waist with a plain leather belt.

This was the first time Sam had seen her out of mourning colors. Had the year of mourning completed or was Phoebe finished pretending she cared?

“Moti tells me we will be leaving late this afternoon,” she said. “I was going to help you, but it seems I must pack.”

She didn’t look directly at Sam. Instead, she wandered past the swaddled instruments, stared out the doors, and regarded the Cumbrian sky.

What happened yesterday weighted the air, but neither of them was ready to speak of it.

Trying to think of something innocuous to say, Sam examined a stack of paintings. While he could tell in an instant if a table linen or snuffbox would sell for more or less than it was worth, the argument he and Jonas had had with the Hunt women proved he was rubbish with anything to do with art.

The first canvas was framed simply with gilt and wood and depicted—wonder of wonders—a still life. A silver bowl sat atop a golden tablecloth, and resting against the bowl’s pedestal were a few winter apples and next to that, a dead rabbit with its entrails removed.

Gah.

“Always the dead animal,” he said aloud. “For heaven’s sake, could they not paint a live rabbit? Or one that hasn’t been eviscerated?”

Phoebe’s reply was lost when he sneezed, the dust circulating around the room now that he’d removed the drop cloths. Sam pushed the still life to the side—probably worth more than anything else in the whole room—and squinted at the painting lying beneath it. Unframed, part of the canvas had come loose from the glue, and he set it upright carefully, wiping it off with a cloth.

There were two girls dressed in pinafores, each a different pastel color, but their sashes were the same shade of blue. They stood to the side of a beautiful woman, barely a woman, really, seated on a stool, dressed in a deep green gown with an embroidered shawl about her shoulders and a small cap covering her head. A man loomed behind them, dull gray eyes staring out from dark sockets, the nose identifying him as the late marquess.

“Who are they?” Sam called out.

Phoebe’s footsteps were brisk until she came around the corner of a covered harp and saw the portrait.

“Why are there portraits in the music room?” she asked of no one in particular. She came closer, breath slightly faster as though she’d run from the other side of the room instead of walked.

“This is your mother and father, but these girls don’t look like you or Lady Karolina.”

They looked like opium eaters; the artist having painted them with pupils so dilated, one could hardly see the color of their irises. He peered closer and saw even the marchioness’s eyes were devoid of their extraordinary color. In contrast, Phoebe’s father’s eyes were clear and hard. Dangerous.

“Those are my four older sisters,” she said, her voice level, pleasant even.

There were only two girls in the picture.

Perhaps he’d misheard. “Those are your sisters,” he acknowledged. “The ones you told me about. Alice is now married to a count, and Mari is the widow in Paris.”

Two girls in the picture, not four.

Next to him, Phoebe trembled gently, but enough so a buzz of the strength it took to hold her emotions in traveled through her feet and to the floorboards beneath them.

Sam waited.

“The twins. My father had them painted out.” Phoebe pointed to the space in front of the sitting woman. “They were there, at her feet.”

Half of one of the remaining girls’ black slippers was obscured by a single dash of ivory paint that might have been an overlooked ruffle from a skirt.

The air thickened and the sun fled, allowing the gloom to settle close. Sam had known two of the marchioness’s children had died but assumed they’d died as infants. Why had they been forgotten in such a cruel way?

“If I made a joke right now…” he said softly.

“I would kill you,” Phoebe finished for him. She’d lost color in her face and her eyes had melted into pansies. Bruised pansies, pansies stepped on too many times to count.

Sam took one of her limp hands in his. Her hands were so cold, he felt it through her gloves.

“Will you tell me about them?”

Whatever Phoebe said next would be ugly and haunting. He took both Phoebe’s hands, breathed warm air on them, then chafed them, ready to listen. A gift, listening. An agreement to share the burden of whatever dark and dismal images her words might create. This was all Sam had to give her.

Phoebe closed her eyes and breathed out a long, weary sigh, then rested her head upon Sam’s chest. As if a tiger had come to sit in his lap, Sam stood frozen, caught between terror and tenderness. He let go of one of her hands and put his arm around her waist, pulling her gently against him, and waited to see if she would kill him after all. A cap trimmed in lace and a silk ribbon the same color as the forget-me-nots on her dress covered her thick ebony hair. “Will you…” Phoebe pulled herself a step back and gazed into his face, her own expression shuttered and locked tight. “You have already done so much for us, Sam. Will you do me this last favor and have Jonas come and take this pile of paintings out to the carriage shed? He will know what to do with them.”

She spoke as though she barely knew him, as though he hadn’t tried to find a way beneath her skin last night and touched the deepest parts of her.

“All of this is to be sold away?” he asked. “The secrets never to be told—”

Phoebe’s lips tightened and her eyes flashed.

Dangerous woman. He wanted to sink his teeth into her shoulder and hear her scream his name while she came.

“What do you know, Sam Fenley, about secrets?” Phoebe drew herself up and looked down at him although she was three inches shorter.

“I know enough to lance a festering wound,” he snapped back. “The girls that are missing from the portrait are the ones who died.” Sam paused and took a deep breath. “Did he kill them?”

All color left Phoebe’s skin so it resembled polished stone. The purple of her irises stood out starkly against the gray of her skin. She looked otherworldly.

“No,” she said, shaking her head, brows drawn in confusion. “No, he wasn’t even here.”

Sam waited.

Phoebe turned back to the picture and wrapped her arms around her torso, setting her palms beneath her armpits.

“When the influenza came, rustic as we were, we knew fresh air could be unhealthy. My mother shut the house up tight as a drum against foul humors, but it did no good and we fell ill.”

This was a small relief. Sam hated to think of Phoebe growing up knowing her father was a murderer.

“Poor Rose and Agne, they died side by side in their bed. Alice, Mari, and I recovered, though a secret, shameful part of me was jealous of the twins. They had each other’s loving company for their entire lives and never would be parted nor subjected to the continuation of life at Prentiss Manor.”

My God, to be envious of death? Sam wanted to hold Phoebe in his arms again, but she was barely aware of him now.

“My father did not come to Prentiss Manor often, and for that my mother was glad. Each time he left she was pregnant. Each time he came home, she had produced a disappointment.”

“Girls,” Sam said softly.

“Worse.” Phoebe sank to her knees in front of the picture, heedless of the dusty parquet. Leaning close, she traced the lost piece of lace with a finger. “Rose and Agne died, but what you don’t know is that we had brothers.”

She turned to regard him with a blank and frozen expression when he gasped.

“There were boys born before and after Alice. The last boy, Karolina’s twin, was named Markus. All were stillborn.”

“I’m so—”

“When Jonas came to live with us, he was meant as a rebuke to my mother. He is my father’s natural child from an affair. A living reminder of how my mother kept failing him,” she said quietly. “It is a testament to Moti that she loves Jonas as she does.”

Jonas, the enigmatic giant who drifted along the hallways like a silent specter. Had he remained here in hopes his natural father would name him the heir?

“She used to paint,” Phoebe said. “The doctor told my father that Moti should not have more children after Karolina. Father was furious. He took away Moti’s brushes and her paintings. That is why the walls are covered with portraits of men and dead animals.”

Phoebe stood, brushing her skirts. She left the painting and walked to the French doors, then pressed her forehead against the glass.

“You can’t see it from here.”

Sam went to her side but kept a few feet’s distance between them, reflecting on the way Phoebe’s mother spoke to Jonas, as though he were still a boy.

“What can’t I see?” he asked.

“The icehouse.”

Dread. Sheer freezing dread clamped Sam’s spine straight and shook him to his toes.

“Agne and Rose survived together and died together. It went quickly during one of the worst winter storms anyone could remember.”

Sam immediately thought of the two high voices laughing out in the corridor at night. The tail end of whispers coming from empty rooms.

“It took most of the day for the servants to clear a path from the manor to the icehouse.”

Unbidden and unwelcomed, the image came to Sam of two little girls, curled up together, skin blue and lips purple, alone in the dark. Sweet Jesus, of course there were ghosts here.

“When the snow thawed, the ground was still frozen. They had to light fires, wait until they went out, then dig as far as had melted. The girls stayed in the icehouse for two months. My mother…”

The suggestion of frailty about the marchioness, her anxiety about strangers in her house, her habit of standing utterly still; all this made sense now that Phoebe was telling Sam the story.

“Lithuania was converted to Christianity, but certain beliefs still remain.”

Phoebe turned her body toward Sam, keeping her face to the glass. The tiniest film of frost sat in the corners of the windowpanes, but she showed no sign of suffering from the cold.

“When someone dies, a v?l? , a soul, comes from the head of the corpse and goes to live with the ancestors in a place full of windows and gates. But the girls, their bodies lay without touching the earth, and my mother became convinced that rather than v?l?s , their souls had been twisted by early death and improper burial, and they returned as ghosts.”

“Not only your mother,” Sam pointed out.

“No.” Phoebe’s smile was a cup for the tears standing in her eyes. “She had the entire household convinced. She would leave open windows and doors so the ghosts could find their way out, but they wouldn’t go. Every mishap, every raindrop, every bad dream was the result of the twins not being laid to a true rest.”

She shook her head and sucked in her cheeks. “I believe this is at the root of my fascination with science. It is absolute. It is eternal. It is consistent and there is nothing in science that depends on a God, on a person, on any living thing.”

This made sense. Sam’s sister Letty said something similar about mathematics. You could not tell lies when you used math to tell a story.

“Is that why the food is bad?” he said, the realization making him ashamed of his criticisms. “Cook stopped using the icehouse?”

Eyes wide, Phoebe’s smile twisted like a rope, up and down, until a hoarse croak issued from her throat.

A laugh.

“No. The food is bad because Cook is a terrible cook.”

“Oh. My apologies, I wasn’t making a joke on purpose,” Sam promised, setting a hand over his heart. “It would be difficult to store food there when…”

Phoebe had stopped paying attention, though. She’d flung open the doors and walked outside, heedless of the wind that blew her skirts and yanked her hair.

Against the backdrop of the unending sky, she stood like a barren tree, a monument made of straight lines; endurance and vulnerability.

“Why did he have them painted out?” Sam asked finally, coming to stand in front of her. She’d lost weight since he first saw her weeks ago in his office, and the hollows of her cheeks gave her an ethereal look—like one of the ghosts. He wasn’t sure why, but the look in her eyes scared him. As if she saw past this world and into the next. He needed Phoebe to stay here, with him.

“Moti went mad,” Phoebe said, her lips barely moving, eyes still unfocused. “When my father came back, he found us in disarray. His solution was to pretend the twins never existed.”

Sam’s head reared back. “What? What do you mean?”

“He erased them. He burned their belongings like he burned my scientific papers and Moti’s paints. He threw them away.” Phoebe’s voice went thin and high, and nausea squeezed Sam’s stomach.

“So, when your mother mourned those girls…”

“He would become angry and say, ‘What girls? Who are these Agne and Rose? You cannot mourn people that never existed.’?”

Setting his hands on Phoebe’s shoulders, Sam lowered his head and looked her in the eyes.

“You know your father was the mad one, don’t you? That what he did amounts to torture. You know he was in the wrong.”

Her eyes flicked to Sam, then back to wherever she’d been the past few minutes.

“Yes,” she said dully.

But she had been a child. How could she have known a father would be so cruel? What did they go through, these women, at the power of a man so twisted?

Tilting his head toward the sky, Sam took in a deep breath, trying to find the right words, to find any words, to convince Phoebe she was safe. That the world was not a terrible place.

“No,” she whispered. “He was wrong, yes, but Moti—why couldn’t she appease him? Why not lie and say she didn’t remember, either?”

Phoebe wasn’t looking at him, she was looking at whatever memories had sucked the weight from her bones and the sense from their heads.

“Every time she said their names, he grew angrier and angrier.” She shook her head slightly.

A profound and terrible rage woke at the lack of inflection in those words. At what that monster had done to these women.

“Perhaps…” Sam hesitated. He had no conception of what living with such a person might be like, but he’d observed Phoebe’s mother, the way she looked at her daughters. “Perhaps she wouldn’t go along with it because she worried if she did, your sisters truly would be erased. Perhaps it was worth whatever punishment your father doled out to keep their memory in at least one person’s mind.”

Her regard weighed him down, but Sam locked his knees against the weight.

“It may be why she treats Jonas with affection, no matter why your father brought him here in the first place. I think…”

Sam wasn’t certain Phoebe even heard him, but he said the last part aloud. Because he needed to remember the good in the world, or this house would have done its job and crushed him.

“Your mother is a truly strong woman to love the way she does,” he confessed.

“Everything is ready.”

Sam had been so focused on Phoebe, he hadn’t heard Jonas approaching from around the side of the house.

Here was another person who had suffered at Fallowshall’s hands. Would Jonas remain after the rest of the family had fled? What was to become of him?

Her half brother’s appearance brought Phoebe back to the present, and she said something to him in Lithuanian, causing him to blanch and head back into the music room.

“He will burn it so Moti never has to see it,” Phoebe said.

“I need help.” Jonas stuck his head out the door and nodded to Sam.

Sam did not want to leave Phoebe’s side, but she waved him away.

“Help Jonas, please,” she said, her skin so white, it looked smudged against the watery sky.

“It’s not…” What could he say?

What he wanted was to wrap his arms around her and warm her now that he understood why she lived encased in ice. Sam had seen people do terrible things in the streets around his home in Clerkenwell, but nothing so evil as what Phoebe’s father did.

Sam’s admiration for the marchioness and her daughters grew tenfold. To have survived such a man, such a home, and continued to thrive was nothing short of a miracle. If Sam could, he’d shoot the marquess without a second’s thought.

Phoebe’s anger had resulted in the creation of a chemical bomb.

A bomb was exactly what Sam wanted to level at the world when he heard Phoebe’s story. Phoebe wasn’t a villainess. She was an avenger whose anger had been misdirected because the man who hurt her was beyond her reach. Sam drew closer but Phoebe held up a hand, palm facing him, to stop him.

“You shall not pity me, nor my family, Sam Fenley,” she said, turning her palm down, then pointing her finger at him.

“Never,” he promised. This was the truth. Never pity. Only admiration.

“Now,” Jonas said in a deep bass voice. “Before the mistress comes.”

Without saying anything else, Phoebe turned away and walked on the gravel path that looped the house.

···

Jonas and Sam carried the entire stack of paintings out into the carriage shed and threw them in a pile. Neither of them had bothered to check if the paintings were of family or not. Sam couldn’t stomach looking at another one, and Jonas, mouth set in a grim line, didn’t show interest in what the canvases held, either.

“Where will you go?” Sam asked the other man once they’d piled high every canvas found in the music room.

Crossing his arms, Jonas peered up at the sky as though the answer lay there. He wore a loose-sleeved linen shirt and a brown canvas waistcoat, but no jacket. His boots, however, were of fine leather and his clothes were clean and well-fitting.

“I may follow Lady Fallowshall to London,” Jonas answered eventually. “When all is finished here.”

Sam waited a beat “Why…why did you not fight it?” Sam asked.

Jonas cocked his head in question.

“The sale of Prentiss Manor?” Sam said. “If you prove your parentage, you might—”

Eyes wide, Jonas stared at Sam as though he’d turned bright pink. “Fight for this house? This house is built of misery and pain.”

“Cor,” Sam said, impressed. “That’s poetry right there.”

“If that is all it takes to impress you,” Jonas said, wiping his hands on his dusty canvas trousers, “it says much of why you are bad with chess.” He left the barn without looking back, head shaking in disapproval.

“I am not bad with chess,” Sam shouted after him. Something scurried across the loft overhead and gave him a start. Hoping no one would disturb the paintings before Jonas added them to a bonfire, Sam walked quickly out of the stables. Who knows what might fall on his head if he—

Feck.

A crooked board in the plank floor had crept up on him and Sam fell forward, throwing his hands out in front of him, then turning to the side to avoid a face full of horse dung. He lay on his back, waiting for his breath to return and ready to shout the filthiest of curses when Karolina’s head came into view.

“Oh, Mr. Fenley,” she said sadly, shaking her head. “You’ve fallen. Again.”

Damn.

“Let me help you…”

“Please, my lady.” Sam ignored Karolina’s hand and sat up by himself, hoping there was no dung clinging to the back of his shirt. “I am perfectly fine.”

Hands clasped, palm to palm, in front of her chest, Karolina regarded him with round eyes, frowning, her expression the same as one might see on a surgeon about to amputate.

“Won’t you consider seeing a doctor when we arrive back in London?” she asked sweetly. “It cannot be good for you to suffer so many falls. Perhaps…might you need spectacles?”

“I need something ,” he said wryly, rubbing the back of his head.

Karolina bit her bottom lip, stifling a smile. Not a my, aren’t you charming smile.

More like a yes, indeed you do smile.

Taking a seat on the slanted bench set against the wall of the carriage shed, Karolina placed her hands in her lap. She wore a dark gray woolen pelisse with a matching winter cap, the brim of which was naked of decoration as becoming a daughter in mourning. Her hands were tucked into a white rabbit-fur muff, and from the hems of her skirts and petticoats, two tiny sets of cream leather boot–shod toes peeked out.

Karolina looked lovely and Sam ought to have said so. Instead, all he could think as he carefully stood and brushed off his trousers, was what Phoebe might have said had she been here now. How the blue wool of Phoebe’s dress made her skin pale, and whether Phoebe had a warm pelisse and muff as well.

“My mother is of the opinion twenty is past time for a woman to be married,” Karolina announced.

Sam’s stomach plummeted faster than if he’d swallowed a brick. “Is that so?” he asked rhetorically, voice cracking.

Dear God. Was Karolina proposing to him?

Karolina shrugged. “You might think Moti would concern herself more with Phoebe, considering she is thirty and still unmarried, but…”

A crack echoed in Karolina’s voice and broke her last word in half. Sam stilled. Karolina’s smile stayed fixed, her eyes downcast and shoulders bent forward.

“…but Phoebe is the exception to every rule?” he guessed.

Her eyes flicked up at him, then back down again.

“I’m not jealous,” she said. “Only…sometimes it is a unbalanced equation.”

Gingerly, Sam sat on the bench, but a good two feet away from Karolina. Not because he worried they would cause talk by sitting close. He worried if their weight wasn’t balanced, he’d fall over again.

“The fewer rules Phoebe follows, the more I am expected to obey.”

A flock of swallows murmured above them, weaving a parabola across the pale gray sky. They listened to the echo of Karolina’s complaint and watched the black dots forming, falling, then re-forming wave after wave above the horizon.

“My sisters feel the same way about me,” Sam confessed. “I am a man, and I do not face the same pressures. I am given freedom and responsibility simply by virtue of my sex, while they must fight for every opportunity to do what they love or say what they believe.”

Karolina nodded. “Even Jonas has more privilege than me.”

He’d no argument to this.

“I don’t want to be married right now, Mr. Fenley,” she said, her eyes fixed on him. “I’m sorry if you expected—”

He held up his hand, palm facing her. Sam shook his head. “I was under no expectations, my lady. You have no reason to apologize.”

“Moti thinks highly of you,” she told him. “She will worry Phoebe did something to drive you away. Or you were repulsed by the state of Prentiss Manor.”

Well, Prentiss Manor was repulsive. It wasn’t the reason Sam was relieved by Karolina’s declaration, but if he never saw the outside of this cursed house again, it would be too soon.

Before he could assure Karolina of this, however, she continued. “I know the truth.”

Had she discovered he’d set a chest of drawers in front of his door the past few nights?

“The truth is you do not want to marry me, either.”

“Oh, my lady. That’s not so,” he insisted. The entire reason he’d come here was to charm Karolina. Wasn’t it?

Wasn’t it?

“You possess a multitude of admirable qualities,” Sam said. “Your beauty, your grace, you—”

“The truth is you are fascinated with my sister.”

His mouth snapped shut with a click, and Sam nearly bit off his tongue. How had Karolina known? Had he given himself away somehow?

She stood and shook out her skirts. “As formidable as she may seem, the more I come to know her, the more I understand how fragile she is beneath her thin coat of ice.”

“Fragile?” Sam echoed.

“Yes.” Karolina returned both hands to inside her muff, her jaw jutting forward, giving her a look of determination. “Fragile. I know she wants to protect me from the cruelty of the world. Well, I want to protect her.”

So did Sam’s younger sisters. They might squabble from sunup to sundown, but their loyalty to one another was unquestioning.

“I admire your sentiment,” he said.

“Good.” Karolina sent him a sweet smile. “Because I have a pistol.”

Sam watched the young woman walk away and shook his head. While he doubted Karolina would shoot him with her pistol, he made a silent wish that the next time he had the stupid idea to try and charm an aristocratic gentlewoman, Karolina might hit him over the head with it and knock some sense into him.

···

In the end, it wasn’t until the next morning they piled into the carriages. Cook had said her goodbyes in the form of curiously salty scones. Only Jonas stood outside when they left, one hand raised in farewell, motionless as they drove out of sight.

No one spoke the entire journey to Liverpool, nor did they speak much on the train, the marchioness drawn into herself and Karolina pretending to read a book of poetry.

Phoebe sat opposite Sam and stared straight through him.

Neat trick, that.

Not at all lowering.

When the train pulled into the London station, Phoebe rose and went to her mother’s side. Lady Fallowshall had insisted on keeping the windows shut, and the air was close and humid. Sam wanted to open the door and let in the air, no matter how much it smelled of ash and sulfur.

“Mr. Fenley,” Karolina called from the back of the car. “Can you help me with my hatbox?”

Sam got up and shuffled toward where she stood, when a familiar face passed by on the station platform outside of the window—his brother-in-law.

What the hell was Greycliff doing here?

Sam turned back toward the open door and caught sight of the Earl Grantham’s enormous shoulders blocking the exit to the train car, a grim expression on the man’s face.

“Grantham?” Phoebe had also gotten up. She held her mother’s hand, her bonnet sitting slightly skewed. “What is this?” she asked.

Grantham looked to the marchioness, then to Sam, and sighed. “Phoebe, you need to come with Greycliff and me, please.”

What the hell?

Sam pushed past the earl and made it to the platform without tripping. Greycliff walked toward him and held up a hand halfway, shaking his head before Sam opened his mouth.

“There’s been another bombing, Sam,” Greycliff said. “Three people are dead, and Phoebe is a suspect.”