The Lady in Yellow: A Victorian Gothic Romance Read online

  Rafe clasped Veronica's hot hand in his large cool ones. Physical contact sent a shock through her. She glanced up hastily and caught his eyes, then immediately looked at the floor.

  He almost whispered in her ear, “I’m pleased to meet you, Miss Everly. If you don’t look at me, I will be afraid you’re hiding something. I’m not an ogre, you know.”

  “I’m sure you’re not.” Veronica looked up at him and felt another flush spread over face. “I’m sorry, sir. I am terribly afflicted with shyness meeting people for the first time.”

  Rafe smelled of fresh, open things like trees and meadows and foreign air, and something else she couldn't place, but that set her pulses racing. She hadn't expected him to be so disconcerting.

  He was laughing at her.

  “I think we shall get along fine. A girl who blushes like that can never lie. Am I right, Mrs. Twig?”

  “Right you are, sir.”

  Veronica made an effort not to raise an eyebrow at Mrs. Twig. Never lie, indeed!

  “So where is Jack?" Rafe looked up the stairs. "I’ve brought those dolls they were so desirous of, and a few other treasures.”

  He opened a satchel and pulled out two identical china dolls, both creamy white with pale blond hair, both dressed in faded courtly finery.

  “I found them in the house. In one of the old rooms." Rafe turned to Veronica. “The children are fond of dragging things about where they don't belong and leaving them there.” He winked. “Drives the maids quite beyond the pale.”

  “I'll keep that in mind, sir,” Veronica said.

  “Splendid!” Rafe said.

  “How is the chateau?” Mrs. Twig asked.

  Veronica sensed Mrs. Twig was rather fond of the old property, and would regret its sale.

  “It still hasn’t sold. The folk around there don’t think it ever will. The place is cursed or something, they say. There are too many staircases. Confounded stairs had me cursing, I’ll tell you.”

  He and Mrs. Twig exchanged cryptic glances.

  “The children are away. As you know,” Mrs. Twig said.

  “Oh, that’s right. The moon followed me here while I was on the train. Damned if the telescope wasn't in the baggage car.” Rafe looked at Veronica, his smile fading. He seemed a bit on edge. “So what have you been doing to while away the time, Miss Everly? Do you draw or something?”

  “I’ve been exploring a bit..."

  "Exploring?"

  "I only just arrived myself and wanted to see the gardens.”

  "Oh, yes. They are beautiful, aren’t they?”

  “Oh, yes. Very lovely. Especially the orchard.” Veronica flashed a look at Rafe, then looked at the floor. She wanted to tell Mrs. Twig about the apples she’d harvested, that were out there, somewhere, in a basket on the wall, but she stayed silent. She had the uncomfortable feeling that the horseman on the moor was standing before her, but it couldn't have been he. Rafe had been en route from France at the time.

  Rafe glanced swiftly at Veronica, then handed the dolls over to Mrs. Twig. “Take these dolls, Mrs. Twig. Make sure Jack doesn’t lose them. Their clothes were copied after something in Le Petit Albert, so I’m told.”

  Mrs. Twig nodded sharply.

  “Those dolls look like the twins,” said Veronica. “What is Le Petit Albert?”

  Mrs. Twig gave Veronica a guarded look. “Le Grand Albert is a grammar book, Miss Everly. For learning grammar. Le Petit Albert is his little brother. The children study them both.”

  Veronica smiled. “How funny they sound. I’ve never heard of Le Grand Albert before. Or his little brother.”

  Doubting she would get any more out of the now dour-faced Mrs. Twig, she turned to Rafe. “Are they books for learning French grammar?”

  “They’re grimoires,” said Rafe. “Grimoires.”

  Mrs. Twig's eyes shot wide, but she stayed silent.

  Veronica shook her head and smiled. “My French is rather good, but I don’t think I know that word.”

  “It’s old French, Miss Everly,” said Mrs. Twig. “Out of use these days.”

  “It’s quite remarkable. Dolls copied after something in an old grammar book,” Veronica commented. “I’m sure I've never heard of such a thing before."

  “Mrs. Twig, just to be safe.” Rafe pulled an oversized folio out of the satchel with Le Petit Albert curling over the white leather cover in red script. “I brought the book.”

  “I’ll see to it, sir,” said Mrs. Twig. She grabbed the book quickly from Rafe, holding its front cover against her body as if to it. “Are you…?”

  “I’ve had some bad dreams,” he said.

  “Oh!” Mrs. Twig clutched the dolls to her bosom, and almost fell backward in shock. “How did you sneak up so quietly?” She was looking beyond Veronica's shoulder.

  Veronica spun around.

  The twins were standing in the doorway dressed in ladies evening dresses that hung on them like medieval robes.

  “Papa! Papa!” They shouted with one voice, running to hug their father. Their hands shot out, covered in antique leather gloves.

  Rafe lunged toward them for an embrace.

  “My two dear Jacks,” he said, and kissed the tops of their heads. “I’ve brought lots of presents. Some things you’ll remember from the chateau.”

  “Those books and things?” Jacques asked.

  “With pictures?” asked Jacqueline. “We do love old books, Miss Everly. And dolls.”

  “Well, I’ve brought a troop of tin soldiers,” said Rafe. “And that telescope you so adore. Those little birds, and other things.”

  “Oh, yes! Thank you Papa,” they both cried.

  Mrs. Twig held the dolls up so the children could see them. “Come now children, for luncheon. Give your father a rest.”

  Eyes fixated on the dolls, the twins followed Mrs. Twig out toward the kitchen.

  “Well, Miss Everly, I’m so glad you’re a gentle, attentive girl. The twins need someone like that after their mother….”

  He held Veronica’s eyes as he spoke. His eyes were so large and blue she swore she heard surf breaking on a shore.

  

  Worrying she’d made a terrible impression on her new employer with her blushing and staring and making obtuse remarks, Veronica paced about her bedroom. She sighing, sat on the edge of her bed, and looked out at the tops of the trees. The clock was gonging midnight and she still couldn’t settle down. She picked up a candle and went to look in on the twins.

  This time, they were both in their beds, sound asleep. Their new dolls lay beside them on their pillows, scenting the air with lavender. Their cloth bodies must have been stuffed with it. What a lovely way to remind the children of their mother and her house in France. No wonder they slept so peacefully. Lavender was known to induce pleasant dreams.

  Veronica wondered if Rafe would ever tell her what had happened to Sovay.

  With this thought, she felt suddenly superfluous. Rafe coming home with his heirlooms from France, sharing his little family stories with Mrs. Twig, the twins coming in to close the circle, reminded Veronica that she was, and always would be, an outsider.

  Veronica went out to her balcony to look at the moon. Just past full, it had the thinnest yellow veil over its face. The moon seemed extra powerful here, more magnetic than she'd ever known it to be, its light washing shadows over the grass like long-leggity beasties.

  The night deepened. The moon grew lustrous.

  Could it be, that in that same moment, Rafe de Grimston was standing on the tower, gazing at the same golden orb, the telescope trained to his eye, able to see more deeply into its craters and seas, to penetrate more profoundly their mysteries?

  Rafe was a fascinating man. He seemed so worldly and experienced. What could she teach his children that he could not? They'd lived abroad, had seen things she could never have dreamed existed. Yet here she was, child of deprivation, of stark limitation, taking on the task of enlightening them. How absurd she felt.
How unnecessary! The only world she knew inside and out was the theater, and the twins certainly needed no lessons in drama.

  The one thing Jack and she did have in common was the loss of their mothers. Protected by money and class, Sovay's death had not put the twins into jeopardy, had certainly not imposed the hardships that Veronica'd had to endure. Really, the only thing she could offer such children was a certain hard won instinct for survival, a worn cobble from the streets of London to slip into the golden bowl of their mythologies and fancies, lessons they would probably never need.

  *Fourteen

  A Persian carpet the color of spilled wine covered the floor of the classroom. With a fire in the grate, books on the shelves, full inkpots and fountain pens on the desks, the room was transformed into a cozy den. As twilight faded in, the atmosphere was truly beautiful, evoking the peaceful stillness of a library, perfect for study.

  Veronica and the twins established a routine of five class days per week, beginning at nine, breaking for luncheon at eleven, and finishing at two. It helped her work immensely that they clearly enjoyed learning, were quick, and always amusing.

  One morning, Veronica walked into the classroom to find the twins on the edges of their seats with barely suppressed excitement.

  Arriving at her desk, she found a small, blue, coffin-shaped box. Inside, wrapped in a shroud of sheer silk and lying in a nest of rose petals, was a dead nightingale. Though the object seemed very old, and the mummified bird long dead, its feathers were glossy, its little toes curled like golden threads, its yellow beak slightly open as if it might still sing of love and death in some dusky, chivalric realm.

  “What is this?” she asked.

  “Nightingale,” said Jacqueline.

  "I see that. But..."

  “They were given as love tokens in medieval France,” said Jacques. “We present one to you, fair lady.” He stood up and bowed in a courtly manner.

  Veronica glanced from one child to the other. "Thank you. It's lovely."

  Imagine giving a dead bird to a lover, she thought, its death symbolizing, perhaps, a lost, or unrequited, love, its song of love silenced forever by indifference or disdain.

  “Mamma collected them,” Jacques said, interrupting Veronica's thoughts. “Some are as old as our chateau.”

  "So, this nightingale reminds you of your mother?"

  "Yes," they both said.

  "Well, I'm very flattered that you would think to give me something so personal. Are you sure?"

  The twins looked surprised, as if they hadn't considered how unusual it was to give a governess a memento of their mother.

  "We just like things like that, I suppose." Jacqueline spoke softly, narrowing her eyes intently. “There is also, at our chateau, a lady’s hand that, when the moon is full, turns into a wolf’s paw."

  "Oh, yes! And toads with jewels in their foreheads, and moths as large as swallows, with wings like silken cloaks,” Jacques shouted. “Those are the best, though I suppose they are too much part of our chateau to be taken away from it.”

  These sounded like fairy tale things, magic and witchcraft.

  Veronica masked her concern with a warm smile. “I should like to see your chateau some day. It sounds very intriguing."

  “Oh, very!” they said together.

  Veronica gazed down at the nightingale, touched its silken shroud. It was exquisitely embroidered, the little bird inside so perfectly preserved. There was something strangely romantic about it, in a poetic, French sort of way.

  “I suppose the toads will be changed into Princes if you love them enough,” she said in a rush.

  The twins fell silent and glanced at each other as if she'd said something terribly sad.

  

  That evening, Veronica headed for the roof of the tower. Since her employer was home, she could no longer easily slip through his private rooms to get there, but had to go outside and enter the tower through a little-used portal at the bottom. A dank, cobwebbed passage led to a stairway that curved up to the familiar landing at the tower door.

  Veronica paused on that landing to gaze over at the three steps going down to the passage that led to Rafe's rooms. The tall, pointed windows cast patterns of light and shadow over the floor. Veronica fancied her tall, dark master pacing from shadow to dust-filled light, brooding, like Hamlet, on the mysteries of existence. It seemed funny that she saw him so melancholy when, on first impression, he'd seemed rather jovial.

  In a fey, distracted mood, she’d put the strange little love-token of the mummified nightingale in her pocket. Walking slowly up the stairs up to the roof, she let her fingers linger over the small coffin shape of the box. It was well to remember the fleetingness of life, the preciousness of time. Death always steals from us, she thought, destroying our homes, our loves, and our dreams.

  By the time she reached the roof of the tower, twilight was gathering in, holding the trees and flowers in a deep blue light. A live nightingale sang among the white stems of the birches. What a mysterious place Belden House was! Strange and beautiful and somehow unreal, as if it could vanish on contact with the ground over which it seemed, sometimes, to hover like a mirage. Veronica tuned her ear for the high eerie voices of children singing, or the bell ringing, but heard only the trill of the nightingale. Far below, things were quiet, the soft air scented with leaves and grass and fading flowers. The moon wasn’t up yet. When it did rise, it would be empty of nearly half its light.

  She gave herself up to the beauty of the evening. Frogs began to sing, night gathered in the hollow of the woods, the moon rose into the lower branches of the trees.

  There was that tap on her shoulder again, a sense of being watched. Turning slowly round she saw, standing in the darkness at the top of the stairs, the tall, shadowy figure of a man. He was so still, so silent and focused upon her that her first instinct was to run. But she couldn’t run. Rather, as he came toward her out of the shadows with long, loping strides, she froze. Raw, unthinking fear possessed her. She shrank as if to hide in the shadow of the battlements, was pressed hard against the stones when he walked into the moonlight.

  It was Rafe.

  His low voice caressed the darkness.

  “Did I startle you, Miss Everly?”

  Turning away and gripping the stones of the battlements, she breathed out, "No."

  His presence was like fire at her back.

  "I must apologize," he said. "I wasn't sure who you were."

  As if to prevent her jumping off the roof, Rafe grabbed her arm, and tugged her around to face him. Dazed by his touch, Veronica mumbled, “I don’t know what came over me, sir. For a moment I thought…. For a moment I didn’t recognize you either.”

  “I’m not used to seeing anyone up here in the evenings,” he said. "I should have announced myself sooner."

  Averting her eyes, Veronica nodded. Her brain felt full of cotton wool. She surrendered to Rafe's pull, and moved closer to him. Her face came to the height of his loose, open cravat revealing smooth skin and soft, black chest hairs. Veronica breathed him in. Then, surprised at her reaction, she blinked.

  Rafe leaned back against the battlements beside her. Encased in tall, leather boots, his legs were long and well shaped, his coat falling open to reveal a lean, supple torso under his white lawn shirt.

  “Are you all right? You look faint, as if you’d seen a ghost or something,” he said.

  Veronica waved him away. “It is I who should apologize, sir. I’ve taken the liberty to come up here without asking permission. And then I behave like a child whose been caught with her hand in the biscuit tin.”

  He was staring at her. She wondered if she were blushing again.

  “Its... its just so wonderful up here," she said. "The view, I mean.”

  “Yes, it is. I love to stand up here and watch the stars come out, one by one." He turned and raised an elegant hand to the stars. "To see Orion rise aloft. Followed by his dog.”

  “Does Orion have a dog?
” she asked.

  Rafe pulled the long, slim telescope out from the deep, inside pocket of his coat and trained it on the sky.

  “Of course. All hunters have dogs. This one is called canis major.”

  Veronica smiled. “Canis major belongs to Orion? I had no idea.”

  “It's his wolf.”

  “His wolf?”

  “Yes. The ancestor of all dogs. Even your garden-variety pug or Pekingese, even your silly French poodle, began as a wolf. Want to see?”

  Rafe held the telescope in the air with one hand, and with the other, guided Veronica to the exact position where her eye met the lens. He gave it to her and stepped away. Faint at first, but brightening in the deepening twilight, was the three-stared belt of Orion.

  “He has a great club, hasn’t he?” she said.

  “Yes. And the lion’s skin. The true Golden Fleece. Robe of kings.”

  “You don’t say! I never heard that version before. I was taught that the Golden Fleece was a ram’s skin.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense, does it? What is a ram but a sheep and what is a sheep but a subject? Who is more worthy of gold than a king? It is a lion's skin.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way. We were taught at Saint Mary’s that the ram with the Golden Fleece was a pre-figuration of Our Lord.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, sir, if Jesus Christ is God, He has always been and always will be. Throughout history He has made His presence known to us through such miracles as rams with golden fleeces. And the Lord is Our Shepherd, of course.”

  Rafe smiled at her as he would smile at a child who thought she was being cleverer than she actually was.

  Frowning, Veronica turned her back to him, put the telescope again to her eyes and looked out over the trees, then aimed it down through the shadows of the birches with their glimmer of marble in the center: The de Grimston’s tomb.

  She veered back up to gaze at the now pitch black sky.

  “The moon is sparkling through the tress,” she said. “It's quite brilliant tonight.”