Midnight in Austenland (9 page)

“Mrs. Cordial …” His hands fell away.

She took a deep breath and yelled, “Bloody murder!” Then she dropped to the floor. Mr. Mallery rushed off.

From the carpet in the dining room, she heard the screams and laughs, the pounding footfalls and shouts of warning. When the sounds died out, she stood and moved carefully through the dining room, knowing that Mr. Mallery had left minutes ago but feeling that he was still there, watching her. It was not a comfortable sensation, not as it had been when he'd held her.

All the players had returned to the drawing room and were recounting their various hiding spots and moments of terror with breathless excitement.

“There is our murderer!” said Colonel Andrews, smiling at Charlotte.

“What? I'm the only one he touched?” she said.

“I missed them all,” Mr. Mallery said. “I was clumsy.”

Miss Charming giggled. “Right-o! The bloke nearly broke the stairs with his head.”

Colonel Andrews was smiling at Charlotte, though in the traitorous shadowing of candlelight, the smile seemed full of malice. “Very well then, Mrs. Cordial. You have till the count of fifty.”

“But—”

“One, two, three …” Miss Gardenside began.

Chanting numbers prodded Charlotte from the room, and before she could lose her nerve, she ran into the dark.

She'd meant to hide somewhere close to the drawing room and get it over with, but as soon as she was alone, she just kept running, passing up dozens of hiding places: the dining room with its voluminous drapes and vast under-table territory; the morning room with its concealing chairs and settees, its windows curtained from the occasional buzz of lightning; the ballroom, large as the moon and echoey as a seashell.

Up the stairs she went, counting along in her head—thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three—past the gallery and its creepy staring portraits. Charlotte didn't know she had a plan until she was on the spiral staircase leading to the servants' rooms, which she found in the dark by memory. The second floor.

The far window was like a glint of gray water at the bottom of a well. Charlotte could hear distant thumping, feet running. The count was over. They were on the hunt. She pressed her back to the wall and walked along it, her hands running over the wood paneling, her eyes alert to the shifts in the dark, shapes that could be a person, watching.

Her breath got louder in her own ears. She hated this. She wanted to be wrapped in velvet drapes like Mr. Mallery, not standing naked as a skeleton in the middle of a hall. Hide, hide, hide …

There was a creak to her right. Her breath startled out of her. She pressed her back harder to the wall, kept moving, her hands sliding over the wainscoting.

She felt a notch. Her fingers investigated it. And suddenly the wall at her back wasn't there anymore. She gasped and fell backward, landing on her rear. Something clicked shut.

Charlotte scrambled to her feet, and her shoulders hit a wall. Where was she? Had she entered one of the upstairs rooms? But she hadn't turned a doorknob.

There was a bare window, and the room was filled with murky gray light, thick as oatmeal. This was definitely not the hallway. She pressed her hands to her pounding chest and looked around. There must be a door. Of course there had to be a door. How else did she get in?

She could not walk without bumping into things. This chamber was filled with objects—a storage room perhaps? She put her hands out, feeling her way around, trying to work toward the window and its pale invitation of light. From there she could find the other walls and search for a door.

Her fingers drifted over dusty wood, crates, cardboard boxes, glass vases, fringed pillows. Then something cool and fleshy. She paused.

That is not what it felt like, she told herself.

Of course not. What a ridiculous notion! She'd just take a closer look then laugh at herself and her prickly imagination. She moved aside what appeared to be a heavy velvet curtain from atop a sofa and peered in the half-light at what lay underneath.

Lightning filled the window, piercing the room with an X-ray flash. And she saw. It seemed to be … it couldn't be but it sure looked like … a hand. A cold, dead hand. And in her experience, hands tend to be attached to bodies.

She saw for just a splinter of a second. The room went postlightning dark, but still Charlotte stared. She stared for the count of three, waiting for her mind to come up with an alternate possibility.

It didn't.

Charlotte screamed. She screamed as if her voice could shatter windows. She screamed as she threw herself back the way she thought she'd come, fingers scrambling at the wall, searching for a way out, an escape. Something clicked, a piece of the wall lurched open as if on springs. She was knocked back. She crawled out the opening and kept screaming.

The scream lasted as she went down the spiral stairs, down the main staircase, and zipped into the drawing room, though by then it was breathy and restless, a scream that wouldn't stay put in her throat but kept slipping down into her middle or floating out harmlessly on an exhale.

The candlelight was a bronze haze hanging in the room, earthy and solid-seeming. The five others were staring at her. Colonel Andrews and Mr. Mallery seemed a little winded, as if they'd only just run into the room themselves.

“I didn't hear anyone shout ‘bloody murder,' ” said Miss Gardenside.

“Who found you?” asked Colonel Andrews. “Did you touch someone?”

“I … no,” said Charlotte. Except a dead hand. But she felt supremely silly now that she was back among living people in the security of candlelight. Sure, she thought she'd found a dead body on the second floor, but why couldn't she be clinical about it? Simply shout, “Hello everyone! There's a dead body here. Come take a look, please, and someone perhaps should ring the coroner.” But no. Thanks to her brother in a mask, she was a quivering ball of feminine terror.

“You know you were screaming?” Eddie came up to her, holding the candle. “You do look a bit mad. I suppose that is the point of this game though, eh, Andrews?”

“There was something, I touched something …” Charlotte looked at Mr. Mallery as she spoke. His eyes were hooded in the dim light, strong arms ill at ease in this setting. They were arms fit for
doing
, not playing children's games. The danger of him made her trust him now. A dead body on the second floor was something Mr. Mallery could handle.

“You are frightened,” he said.

She nodded. “I think there was a body …”

Miss Charming gasped. Miss Gardenside tittered nervously.

Mr. Mallery didn't respond for a few moments. Then he offered his arm and said, “Mrs. Cordial, if you would, show us what you found.”

She took his arm and immediately felt safe. Whatever might lurk upstairs, it couldn't be more dangerous than the man on her arm.

I'd like Mr. Mallery to rescue me, Charlotte suddenly thought.

That's a weird thought, said her Inner Thoughts. You'd never catch me thinking stupid thoughts like that.

Charlotte didn't lash back, because it was, frankly, a stupid thought. She didn't need saving. And why would a woman fantasize about being rescued at all?

With Mr. Mallery beside her and a lit candle in her hand, Charlotte led the way up the main staircase, down the hall to the spiral stairs, and up to the mysterious second floor. She took the candle from Colonel Andrews and examined the hall.

“There was a door here. I remember going past the table …” She shoved her shoulder against the wall. Nothing.

A door across the hallway opened. Mary peered out, her pallid skin and hair absorbing the tint of the dark, making her seem a ghostly blue.

“Mary, is this your bedchamber?” asked Mr. Mallery.

Mary nodded. Her large, unblinking eyes didn't leave his face.

“Good. Mrs. Cordial is a bit upset. Can you tell us if there is a room on this floor that is …”

He looked to Charlotte for more information.

“It's filled with furniture,” said Charlotte. “And boxes and stuff.”

Mary pointed to the other doors. “That's Kitty's and Tillie's room, there's Edgar's and Hamilton's—”

“Not a bedroom,” said Charlotte. “Like a storage room.”

Mary shook her head. She still hadn't looked away from Mr. Mallery.

“Thank you, Mary,” he said.

She offered him a brief, hopeful smile then slowly shut her door.

Colonel Andrews yawned. “Well, good jest, Mrs. Cordial. I think our game has beat me. I am off for some shut-eye. You all go on without me.”

“No!” said Charlotte too loudly. She checked herself. “I mean, I'm tired too.”

“As am I,” said Mr. Mallery.

They all agreed and made their way downstairs, Charlotte and Mr. Mallery going a bit slower than the rest.

“Sorry,” she said. “I don't know what I was … I don't know.”

“Mrs. Cordial, I do not care to hear an apology from you. You are the one coerced into running blind through an unfamiliar house. In the dining room, I should have realized that you were genuinely agitated. I should have put a stop to this before it went too far.”

He thinks I'm crazy, she thought. He thinks I was so terrified of the game that I imagined a dead body in a disappearing room.

And perhaps, in fact, she had.

Mr. Mallery stopped on the landing and put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Are you all right?”

“I feel like an idiot, but I'm fine.”

“Get some sleep. And I promise you a more peaceful day tomorrow.”

He took her arm, walked her to her chamber door, bowed, and left.

Colonel Andrews lingered at Miss Charming's door, whispering. He kissed her hand before departing to his room. Miss Charming placed a hand on her bosom and sighed.

“ 'Night, Mrs. Cordial.”

“Goodnight.” Charlotte stayed where she was. Outside her circle of candlelight, the house was excessively dark, and in the wind it creaked like a ship. Charlotte pictured the night as an ocean, and imagined that she alone was floating in that vastness. Lost at sea in the midst of a storm.

Miss Charming popped her head back out her door. “Hey, Charlotte?”

“Hm?” Charlotte took a few steps closer, only too glad to stall in the presence of another human.

“Do I look pale to you? Kind of sickly, like I've been half-choked or something?”

“No … why?”

“Because you do, and I wondered if everyone looks like that in candlelight.”

Charlotte laughed. “I really, really spooked myself tonight.”

Miss Charming gestured for Charlotte to follow. “Come on, honey lamb. There's room for two in my bed. Nothing hokey—I don't swing, thanks. You just look like a sad little puppy tonight.”

“You don't mind?” Charlotte ran back to her room, shivering as she entered the darkness, as if she'd passed through a cold, wet veil. She grabbed her nightgown from a hook in her bathroom and was back in Miss Charming's room in a flash.

“My kids …” Charlotte stopped, knowing she wasn't supposed to speak about the real world. She chose her words carefully, so that she might have been speaking as Mrs. Cordial. “My children are of sturdier stuff than I am. When she was little, my girl loved thunderstorms, and I'd pretend to as well so that I wouldn't scare her. But sometimes I wished she was a little scared so she'd snuggle in bed with me at night.”

Miss Charming sniffed. “I'm not offering a snuggle.”

Charlotte smiled. “I accept all the same.”

“You sleep left or right?”

James had slept on the right, Charlotte cramped up on the left, afraid to move and disturb his fragile sleep. “You point to a spot, and I'll sleep there all night without so much as a snort or rustle.”

Miss Charming put her hands on her hips. “Is that right?”

“If I have one superpower, Miss Charming, it's silent, motionless sleep. You'd almost think me dead.”

“Well, if we're going to sleep together, Mrs. Cordial, you'd better call me ‘Lizzy.' ”

They took turns helping each other out of dress and corset and jumped into bed. Charlotte pulled the covers up to her chin. A giggle started in her belly and tickled up her throat.

“What's funny?” Miss Charming asked, giggling too, as if she couldn't help herself.

“I haven't had a sleepover in … I don't know, almost thirty years.” Had her brother-in-mask birthday party been the last? In retrospect, it had felt ominously final.

“Me too. Or in ten years anyway. Since I'm only twenty-eight.”

“Oh,” said Charlotte. She hadn't realized they could fudge their age as well as their name. Age seemed like such an indisputable thing, something branded into the wrinkle between her eyes. If she was in a place where a woman of fifty could just say, “I'm twenty-eight,” then what else was possible?

They said goodnight, and Miss Charming blew out her candle. Charlotte rolled onto her side, and the good feeling the laugh had traced through her dissolved into the dark behind her lids. She saw again the handlike image flashing in the pop of lightning. A gray hand irradiated by moonlight, mysterious, neither feminine nor masculine. A hand was unmistakably human.

Had she been mistaken? No. Impossible. But then, where had the storage room gone? The uncertainty made her want to pace. She hugged the blanket to her chest.

All through the night, each time her thoughts peeked into consciousness, she saw again the hand, felt it in memory, and opened her eyes, sure she would see a ghostly figure in the room, watching her. Sometimes the figure wore a monk's robe, like in the painting on the second floor. Sometimes it was missing a hand.

It's hard to get much sleep when you're checking for a menacing presence every twenty to thirty minutes. It's also hard to sleep next to Miss Charming when she's on her back. Either her snores or the wind rattled the window. Then, as Charlotte lay awake trying to paint the darkness in happy sunshine and rainbows, she heard a thud from outside. She slid carefully from the bed and tiptoed to the window.