Midnight in Austenland
Page 24

“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.
The rain had stopped, but the night was wet and cloudy, with no moonlight to glint on the puddles and shaking leaves. She stared, trying to determine the source of the noise. It hadn’t been a sharp sound, like a falling roof tile. It hadn’t been flat, like a slamming door. It was a thud, like something heavy but not breakable dropping onto the front walk below. But she couldn’t make out anything in the dark and gave up, returning restlessly to Miss Charming’s bed.
Around five in the morning, gray light replaced black, and Charlotte found she could keep her eyes shut and sleep.
I didn’t know I was so scared of the dark, she thought as she began to drift. I didn’t know I still believed in monsters.
Home, ten months before
Charlotte sat on a love seat in her family room, the mail strewn around her, and stared at the wedding announcement. James’s mistress-soon-to-be-wife was named Justice. The glazed ivory card stock and cursive raised lettering slapped so much dignity on the name that it seemed to mock it.
Emotional responses aside, let’s be careful not to vilify Justice. Just because she had a prolonged sexual affair with another woman’s husband doesn’t mean she was rotten to the core. Here’s a woman who donated all her discarded clothing to the Salvation Army—why, she even boxed up her old, stained Tupperware and empty egg cartons in case schoolchildren wanted them for crafts projects. She knit scarves. She drove slowly through duck crossings. She observed Yom Kippur even though she wasn’t technically Jewish.
As a general rule, Charlotte loved her fellow human being. So in a gesture of acceptance, Charlotte pinned the announcement to the corkboard. Then Charlotte pinned a flyer from a yoga studio over it. Thank goodness she was still numb.
Justice …
Austenland, day 6
If there had been a body, then whose was it?
Charlotte sat at her vanity as Mary did her hair. Mary’s movements were skittery, and yet her eyes were always wide open, looking around. Little happened that she would miss.
“Will all the guests be at breakfast today?”
“I believe so, ma’am.” Mary had a high voice. It scraped the ceiling.
“And what of the staff …”
“Ma’am?” Her expression was smooth, but her voice remained suspiciously squeaky.
“It just seems like someone is missing. For some reason. Did anyone … leave the manor recently?” Or get offed and stuffed in a disappearing room?
“Not that I know of, ma’am.”
Mary caught Charlotte watching her in the mirror and looked away.
Dressed and fitted up, Charlotte started to head down the stairs for breakfast in the dining room. But then, looking back to make sure no one observed her, she hurried to the spiral stairs instead.
Truth is rarely more horrible than imagination, she told herself.
Then she started imagining scenarios where the truth really was more horrible. That’s a thought cycle that never ends well.
The second-floor corridor seemed narrower in the daylight. It was the darkness itself that had made the corridor seem cavernous, filled with frights from her own overactive brain.
Pipe down, brain, Charlotte commanded. I blame mystery novels for your bad manners.
As she left the safety of the stairs, goose bumps prickled her arms. She took silent, careful steps down the hall, passing the table with the empty vase. The entrance to the room would be between the table and the next bedroom. The wainscoting created panels about the height of a door. She pushed against a panel, then the next, the next—