Satisfaction Page 5

  Want Jancie for himself. .. that son of a bitch bastard . . .

  He shook his head disbelievingly.

  . . . how the hell had the bastard known . . . ?

  Olivia was napping again. They'd spent the morning looking through Olivia's pattern books, after having summoned the dressmaker, and now Olivia slept while Jancie ran down the hall to wash her face, comb her hair, and check on Emily.

  Oh damn—Emily was nowhere around.

  Be careful, Emily.

  She ought to write to Edmund.

  Dear Father—I've negotiated a wage and a new wardrobe, and I've deduced what it is you intended me to do.. ..

  No. That would distress her father. Besides, she had nothing to report except Olivia's kindness, Hugo's wariness, the way Lujan made her feel uneasy, how much like him his younger brother was . .. except that Kyger was Lujan as he should have been: responsible, welcoming, kind, and quick with his friendship, even if his emotions were wrapped tight.

  Well, she hadn't seen him since yesterday, and she had to assume he was out and about most of the time, doing whatever it was Lujan ought to be doing, and taking the burdens of managing the estate off Hugo's head.

  On the other hand, Hugo could afford to hire people. But as she knew from yesterday's tug-of-war, Hugo was tight with a pound note, even though, presumably, he had sequestered away many thousands of them from the proceeds of the Kaamberoo strike.

  And so she came back to that again. Everything, every observation, anything anyone in the household did, from now on, would be colored by her comprehension of how much was taken from her family.

  To think she'd had only an inkling of it when she had arrived.

  38 / Thea Devine

  But Hugo would keep nothing visible for anyone to find; he would be doubly cautious with her in the house. He would be watching her. He was watching her. So her father's expectations would never be met.

  Probably everything Hugo had was in the bank, in the funds, and there was nothing left of the diamond lode he'd brought out of Kaamberoo. Probably he'd converted everything into cash years ago. Why wouldn't he? There was no one to contest his find, no one to question the number and quality of the gems.

  But still and all, putting that many diamonds on the market all at once? It might have looked as if he'd stolen them. So perhaps he had been more prudent, and sold them in small lots.

  God, she wished Edmund could have remembered how much, how many they'd taken out of the mine before the blast. At least she would have some idea of what she was looking for. As she envisioned it, Hugo would have kept what was left of that fortune in a cache box, or a pouch, or perhaps in a small, tabletop chest laid out in velvet so he could easily pick and choose among the stones which ones he would next sell.

  Maybe he had sold the largest ones first. Or maybe a large, then a small, and so on.

  This was crazy. She was groping blindly, making up theories out of whole cloth like a dressmaker working without measurements. Mining someone else's memories as a road map to divine the truth, which, after so many years, had been twisted, turned, and rearranged to suit the wont of whoever was telling the story.

  And so, in truth, Hugo had already paid ... for her schooling, her pittance of a salary, the fifty or so quid for some dresses for her, and done.

  Sorry, Father—/ can't think of a thing more I could find; I couldn't even think where to look. . . .

  A bell rang, the one wired from her room to Olivia's. The bell meant Olivia was awake and wanted to see her. It was lunchtime. Olivia would ring for tea and sandwiches and they would eat while they waited for the dressmaker to arrive.

  A desperately ill woman and her companion.

  There was no time at all for any further speculation, which was useless at best, and futile altogether.

  Sorry, Father—there's just nothing else I can think to do . . .

  Satisfaction / 39

  ***

  For the rest of the afternoon, she was measured, draped, pinned, and tucked, while Olivia directed everything, chose the fabrics, and conferred with the dressmaker over the ornamentation. She was to have two good day dresses, two shirtwaists and two skirts that she could interchange one with the other, and one serviceable evening dress, not too fancy, not too plain.

  With that, a new set of undergarments, a half-dozen stockings, and two pairs of shoes—one pair for every day, one pair suitable for day and evening. Oh, and a practical wool coat, because the winter could be hard.

  This was beyond generous, and Jancie said so after the dressmaker left.

  "Well, you have practically nothing, my girl, so at least you shall have proper clothing. Everything will be ready by next week, and we'll have another fitting then. Now, you may read to me while we have tea."

  And it was while she was reading, and Olivia sipped her tea, that Emily tiptoed into the room with her long, elegantly sinuous cat walk.

  I'm here.

  As if Jancie hadn't seen her out of the corner of her eye. Dear Lord, don't let Olivia see her . ..

  Owww. ..

  Hungry, that meant. Loud enough so that Olivia could not ignore it. Jancie closed her eyes as Olivia jumped up.

  "Is that the cat?"

  "Yes, ma'am."

  Mr now.

  "The one who is supposed to be outside."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "Is now in my room?"

  "Yes, ma'am. She must have found her way inside."

  Emily was now rubbing against her leg and sent up an indignant OOWWW at this comment.

  "Get her out of my room and out of the house right now."

  Jancie was not of a mind to argue. She picked Emily up and scurried out of the room with a handful of thrashing cat. Immediately she cleared the threshold, Emily bolted from her grasp

  40 / Thea Devine

  and tore off down the hallway in the opposite direction from Olivia's room.

  Damn . . . Jancie took off after her, past the door to her room, past other doors that she had no idea where they led, down to the other end of the house where Emily suddenly skittered to a stop and sank onto her haunches.

  MRRROOWWWW.

  A definitive howl, as Emily sat there like a statue, her hairs bristling.

  There was nothing there. A window with a chest underneath it. A staircase winding upward to her right—to the attics, she thought. A door on the opposite wall, closed, as were all the doors on this side of the house.

  It was still daylight, as she could see through the window, though the sun was low. There was nothing threatening at this end of the hallway, nothing to make Emily so emphatically anxious.

  She bent down to pick her up again.

  Mmmrrrrooowwwww.

  Emily swiped at her hand, hissed, twisted away, and shot down the hallway in the opposite direction, and disappeared down the main staircase a moment later.

  Jancie flew down the hall after her, with Olivia's voice calling to her frantically as she raced past her bedroom door, and barreled down the steps, and right into Kyger, almost knocking him over.

  He grabbed her around the waist and turned them both in a wobbling waltz step against the banister for balance before they could topple down the steps. "Jancie—"

  "My cat . . ."

  "Oh lord. Your cat... ?" He let her go and raced after her down the steps, with Olivia's voice a Greek chorus behind them. Down to the reception foyer, into the parlor, into the library, the dining room, the morning room . . . Jancie calling frantically and no immediate sign of Emily anywhere.

  "Your mother will send me away for certain now," Jancie fretted, "and she's just spent a good lot of pounds on some clothing for me. And now Emily off and gone . . . What am I going to do...?"

  Satisfaction / 41

  "You'd better go to her, then," Kyger said. "Tell her I got the cat outside."

  She looked up at him. God, he was so much like Lujan, but without the veneer, the dissolute worldliness, the oily, sexual overtone. At second glance, she liked him even b
etter because he was so sensitive to her distress and what Emily meant to her. But there was no time to think about the ramifications of that. Olivia was agitated, Emily was missing, and she had to go.

  "Thank you," she whispered.

  "She hates cats."

  "Can I know why?"

  "There's really no time to tell you now."

  She nodded, touched his arm. "Thank you."

  Olivia was in a temper. "That cat. . ."

  "Yes, ma'am. Kyger caught her—and put her out."

  "She's dead if I see her again."

  Jancie was horrified—and just when she was thinking that she was coming to like Olivia, a little. "Surely not, ma'am."

  "Continue reading, Jancie."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "Dead," Olivia muttered, over her teacup, as Jancie picked up where she'd stopped reading.

  So vicious. So angry. So unlike Olivia. Why?

  She had better not touch Emily, Jancie thought. If Emily went missing, and Olivia was involved—

  I'd kill you first, she thought, and she didn't even feel remorseful at the thought, nor did she skip a syllable as she continued reading down the page.

  ******************

  Dinner was quiet. Lujan was gone, and it was obvious: for some reason, his leaving sucked all the air dry. Kyger was a restrained presence across the dinner table, at least tonight, and Olivia was preternaturally quiet because Jancie had just given her her nightly dose of medicine.

  The meal was simple, with just the four of them: a clear soup, roast lamb with mint jelly, cucumbers in a piquant sauce, potatoes and sprouts as sides, plain cake topped with fruit and whipped cream, and tea and coffee to finish.

  Hugo drank wine. Olivia barely ate. The silence around the

  42 / Thea Devine

  table was thick, deep. No one could think of a thing to say, and it didn't seem like the right moment to ask about Olivia's aversion to cats.

  Besides, she seemed rather disoriented—the laudanum, in all probability—and after about twenty minutes at the table, Hugo suggested she go to bed. Jancie helped her upstairs and summoned her maid, and then returned to the table.

  "Is there nothing more I could do for her?" she asked Hugo as she seated herself.

  "If you keep her occupied, if you take her mind off the progression of the disease, that is more than enough," Hugo said.

  Good, he was feeling rather grateful to her. Maybe now was the time to ask about Olivia and cats.

  Jancie plunged in. "And why is it that she hates cats so much?"

  Kyger looked at Hugo. Hugo looked at Kyger.

  "Emily got into her room today," Kyger said. He looked at Jancie and shook his head. "I haven't found her. I assume she knows when to keep out of sight."

  "She's probably in my room," Jancie said. No reason they shouldn't know, really. Someone would find out eventually—the maid, the paper-thin butler. Olivia, if she were of a mind to snoop.

  "I see," Hugo said. "I thought it was clear that the cat was supposed to be outside."

  "Well, she's not, and probably she won't be. It isn't something you can tell her to do. And she's accustomed to being with me, anyway. She always has been. So I should know why Olivia is so upset about it."

  Her question dropped into a dead silence.

  She sipped some tea, ate a piece of the plain cake without the embellishments. Waited. Watched with interest the looks passing between Kyger and Hugo, as if they were battling between them who would speak, who would tell.

  Hugo, finally. "We were blessed with three sons, not two. Our third child was Gaunt, the baby. We had dogs, we had a cat, we had family close by. It was a happy time, a happy house. And everyone was here for Christmas that year. Gaunt was—four?"

  Kyger nodded.

  Satisfaction / 43

  Hugo went on, "They were playing hide-and-seek all over the house with their cousins, Noisy, as only children can be at Christmas. We were at the table in here, the adults, and we'd left them to their own devices. We could hear them running, shrieking, laughing. No one thought anything of it.

  "Later, we were gathered in the parlor while we were having wine at the end of the evening—and the cat wandered in and began meowing. Such a nuisance. She wouldn't stop—she was so insistent, and no one could figure out why, or what she wanted. We put her out, and she stood by the doors, howling while we tried to finish up our celebration on a joyful note. It wasn't possible. The cat wouldn't stop that deep-in-the-throat sound they make when they've killed something.

  "It put a damper on the rest of the evening. We all decided to go to bed. We weren't halfway up the steps when the children's maid came racing toward us. She couldn't find Gaunt. He wasn't in his room, he wasn't with his cousins or his brothers. He wasn't anywhere, and everyone was still searching—the children, the staff, everyone. They—they had just been hoping to find him before they had to tell us . . ."

  He stopped for a moment, blew out a breath, seemed to be quelling his emotions so he could finish the story.

  "We didn't find him. We looked everywhere, just everywhere, cellar to attics. No Gaunt. We tried tracking him with the hounds the next day, but there was no scent. They kept coming back to the house, and yet, in the house, they lost the scent.

  "There was just the infernal howling of that cat. And my missing son." He looked at Kvger and caught himself. "... A missing child."

  He closed his eyes as if he could still see, feel, and taste the terror.

  "We never found Gaunt. We got rid of the cat."

  Deafening silence.

  "She says she still hears the cat," Kyger said. "She says that sometimes she can hear Gaunt crying."

  Lord almighty . . . What could she say? "I see. Thank you for telling me."

  Hugo seemed as if he were having trouble controlling his emo-

  44 / Thea Devine

  tions. "You'll have to excuse me,” he muttered finally. "The memory sits very hard."

  He left them abruptly, throwing his napkin on his uneaten dessert.

  Kyger removed it. "It's a horrible story, a terrible memory. For all of us. You had to know."

  "Yes." It went beyond terrible. It was inconceivable, the loss of a child that young all those years ago. Poor Olivia. And the poor cat.

  But Emily wasn't that cat. And Emily had nothing to do with the loss of Gaunt.

  Gaunt. Strange names that Olivia and Hugo had given their sons.

  She felt a welling of sympathy for Olivia. Olivia still held that long-lost child close to her heart.

  "Did you assume Gaunt had run away?"

  "We had no idea. Have no idea to this day."

  "Awful."

  Kyger took a sip of wine. "There are no words for it. Even after all this time. And now she's dying, and she'll never know."

  Jancie felt a rush of anguish.

  "She's losing so much so soon .. . and she's lost so much already. "

  "Yes."

  "And that's why no cats."

  "Yes." There was hardly anything else to say. She ached for Olivia, for everything she'd gone through. For everything yet to come. There were some things you couldn't bury in the past. Some things that lived with you always.

  "It was so absolutely the right thing to do, bringing you here."

  Wait—what??

  "Why is that?" she asked, her voice laced with wariness at the abrupt change of topic. Why was she looking for shadows and suspicions after the wrenching story she had just heard?

  No, he wasn't his brother. There was nothing slick or crafty about him.

  He got up from the table and came around to take her hands. She looked up at him, the tall, darkly handsome, tightly con-

  Satisfaction / 45

  trolled Kyger, and she was just a little shocked by her rush of feeling for him.

  "You understand," he said, pulling her to her feet, pulling her close to him, so close that she could see the light glimmering in his eyes, could see the deeply etched lines of worry and care in hi
s face that proved that he, too, was affected, he, too, was moved.

  But he wasn't Lujan—he wouldn't push anything further than she wanted him to. This much was enough. More than enough. He sensed the free spirit in her; it echoed his own.

  "Good night, Jancie."

  You understand. . . "Good night," she whispered on a breath. She couldn't move. Her hands still tingled from his warm grip. Her body resonated from just being near him. She had been so wrong about him. He did have the magnetism of his older brother, had even more because he was sensitive, he was respectful, and he was so tightly contained.

  He was gone.

  What had just happened here?

  She moved.

  She pulled her wits together as she walked slowly into the hallway. Something else had happened in there. And it had nothing to do with her response to Kyger. It was something else, and she couldn't shake the feeling that her tightrope walk had just gotten trickier.

  But just what had happened?

  They had told her a tragic story, and with it, her feelings about Olivia had changed radically. Hugo evinced some appreciation that she was there to keep Olivia occupied. Kyger told her she understood.

  You understand . ..

  Something—what? What did she understand?

  Everything was getting in her way. Sympathy. Gratitude. Attraction.

  Kyger. She closed her eyes. Kyger.

  She could just see him in her mind's eye.

  And then she could finally breathe.

  Chapter four

  Suddenly everything was infused and colored by the story of the devastating loss of the child.

  Jancie felt as if she could not do enough for Olivia, who really needed nothing more than light diversions to keep her mind off her illness.

  So, within hours of the third day of Jancie's arrival, there emerged a pattern to how they spent their time. Breakfast was at eight, with Olivia's medication. The balance of the morning was spent outdoors—walking, in conversation, sitting in the garden. Noon, medicine again, and a nap. After, tea, a light luncheon, an afternoon of reading, usually with Jancie reading out loud to Olivia. Six o'clock, dinner with Hugo and Kyger, no more than two courses, usually one. After, Jancie was on her own, which gave her time to explore the library, read books of her own choice. She could write letters, if she so desired, though she hadn't—yet.