“Brightmore.”
She left, and by the thin trickle of moonlight, I found matches and a lamp by my bedside, which I lit. But despite the long journey and the protracted weeks of grief and uncertainty since my brother’s passing, I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t care that it was dark as pitch and that the servants were abed—I wanted to see more of this Northern house that I would call home.
I shed my cloak and bonnet and left my room, careful to tread as quietly as possible. While I didn’t think there would be anything improper about me walking about the house, I felt certain that Mrs. Brightmore would disapprove.
My corridor was lined with similar doors, all closed and presumably locked, so I went downstairs with my lamp instead. The yellow pool of lamplight did little to drive back the shadows, but I still made my tentative way into the receiving rooms of the first floor. First to the dining room, dominated by a large table and a massive iron chandelier, then to the drawing room, filled with more feminine furniture, armchairs and chaises of a lavender damask, all of it looking almost black in the darkness. In the far corner of the drawing room hung a large portrait set into an elaborate gilded frame. I walked closer and lifted the lamp. It was my dead cousin, Violet Leavold.
Violet Markham. She would have been Violet Markham when she died.
We’d met only twice, in those dreamy, peaceful years when my parents had still been alive. She’d been a few years older than me, and I vividly remembered how worldly and feminine her fourteen years had seemed to my ten the first time she’d visited. She had stayed the summer, and in those months, I had become convinced that there was no girl brighter or more lovely or more knowledgeable than Violet. The second time she came, I was twelve, and she came with the secret knowledge that only girls of sixteen had, knowledge of men and of dancing and of what happened in the secret corners of ballrooms. I’d been fascinated.
But we hadn’t spoken since that last summer—not a visit, not even a letter. She had gone on to live the life befitting a beautiful girl of means and I had gone on to live like a wild thing, alone and strange and wary.
Her yellow hair seemed like burnished gold in the lamplight and the portraitist had managed to capture the preternaturally blue eyes that had always seemed so daring, so bold. A gauzy shawl revealed ivory shoulders and a long, elegant neck. The blue silk gown revealed a small but shapely bust and a slender waist. Even rendered in paint, Violet’s beauty and glamour were unmistakable. Life and fertility and vibrancy radiated from every curve and line of her body.
And she was dead.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to her. Thrown from her horse, the solicitor had said. And I hadn’t even known that she’d gotten married.And to think, there might be a portrait of another dead wife in this house…I shivered.
I turned to leave and found myself face to face with someone in the dark.
“Mrs. Brightmore…” My voice trailed off. It was patently not Mrs. Brightmore. It was someone tall and trim and most definitely male.
“Not Mrs. Brightmore,” the man said, echoing my thoughts. I raised the small lamp, throwing his face into the light. A square jaw, straight nose, clear green eyes. Dark stubble and tousled hair told me that he’d been traveling, but the silk waistcoat and well-worn riding boots told me that he was a gentleman.
He had to be Mr. Markham, yet surely the country gentleman Solicitor Wickes had described was much, much older.
“Pardon me,” I said. Apology always seemed like the best course of action. “I was having trouble sleeping and…”
He didn’t answer. He walked over to a low buffet in the corner and rang a bell. A quiet but uncomfortable minute followed where I wondered if I should speak again, if I was in some sort of trouble, and then Mrs. Brightmore appeared, holding her own lamp with her bloodless mouth already puckered in rage. She saw me first and her eyes narrowed, clearly assuming that it had been me who had roused her so imperiously from her bed, but then the gentleman stepped into the lamplight.
“Mr. Markham!” she exclaimed. “But we weren’t expecting you home until next week.”
“Change of plans,” he said shortly. His voice had a hint of a rasp to it, a huskiness that set it apart from the normally smooth and polished voices one heard in large houses. Only the barest trace of a Yorkshire accent spoke to his roots here in Dalby Forest. “A fire, Mrs. Brightmore. Supper too.”
“Of course, sir,” she said. “Cook is probably asleep and we dined several hours ago…”
“I’ll wait,” he said.
“Yes, sir.” With a serrated glance at me, she left the doorway.
Within minutes a fire was lit by a servant, a handsome young man I hadn’t seen before. He smiled at me before he left the room. Mr. Markham poured himself a glass of port at the buffet.
“Care for a drink?”
A lady would say no. But I’d spent these last years unchaperoned and as my own mistress, drinking brandy in bed and hauling bottles of champagne into treetops so I could taste the sweet fizz at sunset. I was accustomed to drinking, and on a chilly night in an unfamiliar house, a glass of port sounded like perfection.
“Yes, please,” I said. He turned to pour another glass and then handed it to me without a word. There was no judgment or reprobation in his face, but there was something. Curiosity, perhaps.
He settled himself in a chair across from me, his long legs stretched out, his face reflective. “I imagine you are my late wife’s cousin.”
Here was my chance to get it done and over with, the great thanking endeavor, which my lack of social grooming almost ensured I’d be clumsy at. Yet it had to be done. “Yes, sir—”
“Don’tsirme,” he said darkly.
“I apologize—”
“Don’t do that either. Are you Ivy Leavold or not?”
