Page 37 of The Lover’s Eye

“Come with me.”

A cool hand was against Giles’s cheek, the elongated scrape of feminine nails against his skin. He had been on the precipice of sleep—incoherent enough to be thinking through a fog, but shallow enough in restfulness to rouse without a start, without complaint.

“Isobel,” he breathed, taking the fingers and pressing them against his lips. The hand yielded to his affections, and he made more delicate work of his mouth, tending each knuckle and joint with its own kiss. “You’re cold,” he whispered. “Come to bed.”

The hand tethered itself to his own and gave a gradual, increasingly insistent tug.

Without question, Giles surrendered the warmth of his bed to follow her.

She turned to face him, plying him with quick, taunting kisses and pulling him farther away.

He was so engrossed in his wife, he allowed her to lead him blindly until their legs ran up against a bed.

She lay upon the linen sheets, pulling him over her. Warmth radiated from his chest out to his limbs, heat stoking to the point of scalding pain.

Giles’s hand sought out the hem of her nightdress and he bent close against her, searching for her lips. He was confronted by a mouth entirely unlike the one he had just been kissing—a gaping orifice, cranked open in anguish. As if his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Giles could suddenly see.

Aurelia’s corpse lay beneath him with eyeless sockets and waxen flesh.

Where her ear should have been was a ragged surface, and where his hand lay mingled in her hair, saltwater dripped from ribbons of seaweed.

He tried to wrench himself away, but he had lost the ability to move.

Only his hands continued to fidget, fruitlessly pulling torn scraps of cloth from her tattered dress.

“What gives you the right? You think I’ll lie down and let some stranger examine me?”

She was screaming at him now. Every syllable resonated with familiarity, as if it were August again and she had burst into his library. He tried to speak, the muscles of his throat convulsing.

This was his chance, his opportunity to explain, to calm, to reestablish trust, to save her. Not a word was coming out. Not even the insufficient ones he had used that night.

“I should rather die than be reliant upon your protection any longer!”

Giles’s entire body thrust upright in bed, his lungs drinking in the cold air of his own bedchamber with violent, exaggerated force. As if he, too, had been drowning.

His hands clamored to the table beside his bed, fumbling with matches and flint until he managed to light a candle. Only then could he think and begin regulating the distress of his consciousness.

The mantel clock indicated that he had only lain down to sleep two hours earlier, but it felt like years. No, a wider berth than time was capable of—it felt like an event that had occurred in another lifetime.

Giles was alone, save for Smooch, who sat uncharacteristically on the floor and stared up at him with her ears pricked forward.

He patted the counterpane in enticement for her to claim her usual spot at his feet, but she stayed fixed, bearing an uncanny resemblance to a Staffordshire ceramic figurine.

Giles did not feel he could lie down again, and moved to a chair sitting before the hearth.

The fire was nothing more than a few live coals amid heaps of ash, but he let it remain, allowing the drafty air to seep under his nightshirt and relieve the clinging heat.

He was sweating profusely, and his heart was only just now settling from its thoroughbred speed.

He was certain he had never endured a more wretched nightmare in his entire life.

He should have known the dreams would return upon finding Aurelia. But he never could have prepared himself for the cruel contrast his subconscious had conceived, preying on his deepest fear: that being vulnerable with Isobel would one day lead to her seeing all of him.

She would not be able to love who she found.

?

Isobel went to bed reluctantly, despite feeling exhausted. She and Giles had shared dinner together, but he had been reserved, offering little reply to her attempts at conversation. Before long, she’d given up trying.

It had to be the inquest. Aurelia.

The housekeeper, Mrs. Taylor, had given Isobel a tour of the house after breakfast. Cambo House was a cavernous beauty, uniquely fascinating in that each of its rooms managed to retain furnishings and purpose, even if they had long been in disuse and faded from fashion.

When she had asked to see the kitchens belowstairs, she and Mrs. Taylor walked in on a gossiping gaggle of servants. Their arrival had silenced the talk at once, but not before Isobel had overheard some of their remarks.

“They say he ’ad to go an’ identify her body last night. Can you imagine?”

“He’s sure to be devastated all over again. And ’is poor bride … what was he thinkin’?”

The group had scattered, like a wave striking the cliffs and diverging into a thousand droplets. But their voices beat a refrain in Isobel’s mind, as did the hungry glint of excitement she had seen in their eyes. No doubt her name was often upon the well-oiled machinery of their tongues.

Isobel had attempted to reassure Mrs. Taylor, who was kind and seemed truly humiliated by the scene.

Having no one to comfort herself, Isobel had concocted her own soothing proposition: go for a walk; avoid everyone.

She had been married for all of a day; she refused to go running back to Marriane, already knowing her response would be something akin to ‘trudge onward’.

Experiencing the grounds of Cambo House was something she’d hoped to share with her husband, but he was not home and she was not of a patient mind.

No sooner than Isobel had exited the confinement of the walled garden and started out on the moors, rain began to fall in plump, cool drops. She had been soaked and shivering when she returned to Cambo House, and Giles had still not returned.

She lay limply beneath the bedcovers now, staring up into the darkness. Every cell in her body called her to go to him, while each thought opposed it. She recalled how he had reached to touch her at breakfast and decided against it.

When she heard movement in his bedchamber, Isobel held her breath. She willed the logs to stop popping and the flames to extinguish so that she might listen. Footsteps, undoubtedly, and now the opening of a door.

Is he coming to me? Her body wanted to soar above the quilts in exhilarated glee.

But the door connecting her chambers to his did not open. Instead, the heavy footfalls removed to the corridor, slowly passing her room.

With movements light as a bird’s, Isobel reached the door and strained to listen beyond it. The steps had ceased.

Unable to resist the temptation, she eased her door open and peered into the shadowed corridor.

She caught the barest glimpse of Giles as he entered the next door down from hers. The one he had locked upon her arrival.

She recognized the broad angles of his shoulders, and flushed at the bareness of his legs under his nightshirt. He disappeared into the room, closing the door behind him.

?

The following day, Isobel checked the corridor to ensure she was alone before going to the ambiguous door. To her surprise, it had been left slightly ajar. Giles’s earlier request that she not enter paled in comparison to her curiosity.

Isobel pushed the door open with her fingertips, her eyes rushed by a shade of blue simultaneously pale and blinding. The windows were without draperies, allowing the fair light to multiply the vibrancy of color. The uncarpeted floors creaked beneath her feet.

There was a bed stripped of its linens, and sheets willowed over the few pieces of furniture in little ripples and swags.

Her tour of the rest of the house fresh in her memory, Isobel recognized this was the only room of Cambo House that seemed to be under alteration.

Its entrancing blue was at odds with the rest of the house, too—bold and unflinching.

“May I assist you, my lady?”

She jumped. Her fingers had gone to one of the sheet swathed pieces of furniture, as if to unmask it, but now shot up to her throat. Mr. Finch stood in the doorway.

“You gave me a fright,” Isobel said, plastering on a smile as her breathing calmed. The butler’s expression stayed neutral, his hands folded before him. The analogy to a toy soldier seemed more apt than ever.

She moistened her lips, her own expression faltering. “What is this room being prepared for? Giles mentioned it was undergoing renovations.”

“Did he?”

“Yes. I wondered … well, if it might be a nursery.” Embarrassment rushed in as she spoke the thought aloud. “What with the shade of blue and all.”

“The room has not been altered in nearly a year, my lady.”

A thread of sick suspicion pierced her stomach. Had it been a nursery for Giles and Aurelia’s future children? Blue for the male heir he hoped his bride would provide him? She and Giles had not even spoken of children, not even consummated their marriage.

Good heavens, did this prove the rumors from the ball true?

“Oh,” she managed to say. “I see.”

“I came to inform you that a letter has arrived for you,” Finch said. “From Kittwick.”

Isobel latched onto this distraction with all force, leaving the room in long strides to find a sealed letter awaiting her in the entry hall. She would have recognized her father’s loopy scrawl anywhere.

She made for the walled garden, wanting privacy before she dared consume the letter’s contents. Mr. Finch’s implication about the blue room had already incited a nervous stomachache, and she knew her father’s words would be brutal in severity.

She walked a florid path, arches of climbing vines winding above her head as she found the secluded iron bench that had fast become her favorite reading nook. She turned her eyes upward, taking a shaky breath, and slashed the letter’s seal.

What the devil is the meaning of this?