“Miss Leavold,” a voice said. I knew without raising my lamp that it was Mr. Markham.
Should I apologize? Explain myself? Or would such gestures further alienate him?
“I was walking outside,” I explained.
“I see that.”
Just then, my lamp guttered, the oil insufficient to sustain the flame. I felt the lamp taken from my hand and set on a nearby table. The expanded circumference of the failing light allowed flickering glimpses of Mr. Markham’s face, of the dark stubble and even darker eyelashes, of the square jaw and the somewhat wide mouth.
“Are you so wild that you cannot even sleep in a bed at night?” There was a lift to his lips as he said it.
“It depends on the bed,” I answered, meaning to jest, and too late realizing the implications my reply made.
His eyes glittered and then the lamp went out, plunging us into darkness. For a moment, there was only breathing and no movement, and then, ever so softly, I felt a thumb brush across my cheek. My breath caught and my stomach flipped, and nothing that I had ever felt before matched this terrified delight that I felt right now.
The thumb moved across my jaw and then finally to my lips, pressing against them, making urges and imaginings swirl through me. All I could think of was how Mr. Markham’s stubble would feel against my cheek or even against my bare stomach…
I shuddered and without thinking, parted my lips and bit his thumb.
He may have flinched, but I could neither see nor feel it in the dark.
“Go to bed,” he said, his voice cold and hard. “Leave me.”
I hurried up the stairs, quickly shutting myself in my room, my breath still coming in erratic rhythms. But it wasn’t fear or regret that tugged at me. It was the memory of Mr. Markham’s thumb on my lips, of his eyes glittering in
the dark.
Sleep was elusive the remainder of the night. Why had Mr. Markham touched me? And why had I bitten him when he did? I knew only that it had been instinct, spurred on by the tightening knot in my belly, a knot he himself had tied by touching me so unexpectedly, so gently. I’d been around men so rarely at home—Thomas and our old gardener being the exception—but even I knew that the behaviors I exhibited around Mr. Markham were far from customary. Presumptuous. Shocking, even.
But though I’d never been touched by man in any meaningful way, my body knew exactly how to react when my new benefactor touched me.
Before the sun had completely risen, I dressed, arranged my hair and went downstairs to the kitchens. I wanted to avoid another lonely breakfast accompanied only by congealed food and Mrs. Brightmore’s scowls. If I went directly to the kitchens and took my food there, they’d see that I didn’t expect anybody to bow and scrape before me. At home, I’d eaten either outside or in the library anyway—just as well, since by the end, only the pottering old gardener and his daughter had remained on to help. There would have been no elaborate, multi-course dinners even if I had wanted them.
The smell of warm bread greeted me. I ducked under the low threshold, the stone walls and floor cool and damp despite the heat coming from the ovens and the fireplace. An older woman sat chopping vegetables for the day’s meals and a young child—seven or eight perhaps—tended the large ovens and the central fire, where turkeys and Cornish hens were being roasted to provide cold meat for the day’s dinner.
“Hello,” I said tentatively. “I thought I’d spare Mrs. Brightmore the trouble of serving me breakfast and come and get it myself. I was thinking about taking a walk; would it be all right if I simply took some bread and some cheese?”
The old cook creaked to her feet. She came up to me and examined me, but without any cruelty or scorn as Mrs. Brightmore had done, only with curiosity. I dredged up her name from an overheard conversation. Mrs. Wispel.
“You do look a bit like her,” the cook said at last.
“Like who?” And then I realized. Violet. She could only mean Violet.
“Different coloring, of course. You look a bit gypsy, if you don’t mind me saying, but you could just as easily claim Italian. But the face—I can see something of her there.” She nodded. “But you’ve got a good heart, I can see it in your eyes. A good open heart. Not like her.”
“I’m sure Violet—”
Her expression tightened. “We don’t speak the names of the dead here. Too close to the churchyard. It will waken them, make them restless.”
This must be some sort of Northern tradition we didn’t have in the south. “Sorry,” I said. “I mean, I’m sure she didn’t mean to give the impression of having a bad heart. I remember her as very energetic and happy.”
“She only lived for pleasure,” the cook said, crooking a finger at me, as if Violet’s Epicureanism had been my fault. “And that always turns a heart rotten, like fruit left too long in the sun.”
She trundled over to the table and gestured to the boy. He pulled a fresh loaf of bread from the oven while she unwrapped a wedge of cheese. “Mind you, she was right unhappy in the end. Like you, sneaking down for her meals so she wouldn’t have to eat with her husband. Claiming she was too hungry to wait for regular mealtimes. And the rows they’d have; I’d hear her cries coming from his bedroom at night, shattering glass from the parlor…it weren’t no surprise when the constable had to ask Mr. Markham all those questions.”
“There was an investigation into her death?” This was the first I’d heard of it. I’d been under the assumption that everybody had accepted the tragic nature of her accident.
The cook nodded, slicing off a thick hunk of cheese and setting it next to the bread. “The saddle had been ruined in some way—cut partially, so that it might tear, especially if the rider was riding at a gallop or at a canter, like she often did. Of course, the constable didn’t have much leeway—it’s difficult to accuse a man like Mr. Markham, you see. In the end, they called it an accident. But the village knows what really happened. Mr. Markham’s been such a cold, unknowable person, ever since he was a young man. Cold and peculiar. When his father died, he was only seventeen, and rather than take on his duties and settle down as he should, he went off to Europe. And the stories that came back…”
