Chapter Four
Annalise did not go to the masquerade as a platypus, but neither did Phoebe go as a shepherdess. Annalise had an inspired idea that Phoebe should be Titania from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Annalise spent the day putting together Phoebe’s costume and helping her aunt transform into Queen Elizabeth. It seemed that her aunt knew only that Queen Elizabeth wore a large dress.
Annalise, Phoebe, and Mrs. Bailey spent the morning running about finding ingredients to redden her aunt’s hair and whiten her face, as well as locating sheer muslin for Phoebe’s wings. Annalise appreciated keeping busy, because it fended off her homesickness. Yet, she found that sometimes, out of nowhere, she would pass a certain tree or home, and a memory of Patrick would rush over her like a blast of wind, bombarding her afresh with recollections of textures, scents, and magic from another time.
Annalise waited for last-minute inspiration for her own costume as she dressed her cousin and aunt. To create Queen Elizabeth’s costume took two of Annalise’s old dresses and some stained brocade drapes that were stored in the attics. For Titania, Queen of the Fairies, Annalise cut leaves from green cotton and created vines from long lengths of brown cloth. She and Mrs. Bailey stiffened the wing fabric with the starch they used to create Aunt Sally’s ruff.
Phoebe danced with excitement when Annalise finally let her turn and look at herself in the parlor mirror. Her cousin gasped at the wings, headpiece, and mask that Annalise and Mrs. Bailey had fashioned.
“I could be on the stage!” she squealed. “You are simply brilliant, Cousin.”
Not a moment later, the house filled with her uncle’s booming steps. The door to the ladies’ parlor flew open.
“Annalise, you will not make a mockery of this family,” he said when he saw Phoebe.
Annalise looked up innocently at him. “It’s Shakespeare, you know,” she said in the tone that indicated he was an idiot if he did not know.
Annalise had only half an hour to dress for the masquerade after completing the others’ elaborate costumes. She thought about saying she wouldn’t go, but then she would spend the evening thinking of her old home, or Patrick, with only her uncle to keep her company. Then, gazing down at the discarded string and thread from Phoebe’s wings, that annoyingly elusive inspiration finally struck.
“Perfect,” Annalise muttered to herself.
However, when she came downstairs all dressed up, her Aunt Sally said, “Good heavens, would you care for Phoebe’s unused shepherdess costume?”
“But I’m Ariadne,” Annalise said.
Her aunt and Phoebe stared at her.
Annalise tried to elaborate. “From the Greek myth, you know.”
More vacuous stares. Alas, it was too late to change, and the carriage had pulled up.
* * *
Annalise didn’t want to admit that London had lost its charm. She wished she could be as joyous as Phoebe, who flitted about, all smiles and laughter. To Annalise, the costumes had a scary grotesqueness about them. The perfumes hurt her nose, and the air felt like breathing in the famed thick London fog. Amid the loud laughter and music, she felt painfully alone. She loitered about the walls for the first hour. The only attention she received was curious glances at her costume, which was hemorrhaging string. Finally, a young gentleman dressed as an Arthurian knight approached.
“My friends and I are quite puzzled.” He gestured to a group of more knights clad in various forms of armor and crowded in the corner. “May I ask, what is your costume exactly?”
“I’m Ariadne.”
“Who?”
She stifled a groan. What had she been thinking when she made this costume? “The character from the Greek myth.”
“Sorry.” He shook his head. “Would you care to dance?”
She hesitated, but his smile was a pleasant one beneath his half-mask, so she consented.
The dance floor was a crush of people poking each other with protruding costume parts. Annalise sometimes danced alone in her room, but she hadn’t danced with a partner in a long while. As the music began and people started to turn, she realized she had forgotten the steps. She panicked and slid her mask up to glance at her feet.
Her partner stiffened. “Are you… are you Miss Annalise Van Der Heer?”
“Keer,” she corrected, pretending not to hear the alarm in his voice. “Van Der Keer.”
His eyes began to dart about behind his mask. “I didn’t realize—that is, I didn’t know you were in town.”
“I only just arrived.”
“Oh.”
Still holding her hand, her gallant knight took a step back from her, as if she were contagious. He didn’t say another word to her for the entire dance, even though she tromped on his toes and bumped into him several times. When the torture was mercifully over, he bowed and scurried back to his friends. She watched him animatedly speak to them as they took discreet glances in her direction.
It seemed London hadn’t forgotten her. Or forgiven her.
The clock on the chimney-piece chimed the eleventh hour. These parties lasted well past midnight. She just wanted to go home. Not her aunt’s house, but her true home, miles and miles away, where someone else now lived.
Through the windows, she spied the large, fat moon shining in the heavens. It was the same moon she’d watched shine through the trees by her window at her old home. Tonight, the cold, distant heavenly body felt like the last thing tying her to the past. She followed it, going through double doors that led to a terrace, where she came across lovers escaping the din. She passed them, heading to a spot of solitude at the back.
There, she rested her hands on the railing and drew in a deep breath of the cool night air. The moon was luminous in the silent sky. She studied its contours, remembering her father’s sketch explaining the different phases in relation to the sun. It had made sense when she’d stilled herself and finally listened to him.
“You have lost a part of your costume,” a man said.
A cold tickle raced down her spine at having her quiet refuge invaded. The voice was rich and slightly blurred, as if he were drunk. She turned to find a heavily bearded and masked musketeer peering out from the shadows. He sat on a stone bench under the eaves. Had he been there before? Perhaps she was the invader of his peaceful space and not the other way around.
“I fear this costume was not the best choice.” She picked up a length of string that had fallen from her gown. “It’s been shedding all evening.”
“May I hazard a guess at who you are?”
She chuckled at his phrasing. She almost wanted to say, Yes, do tell me who I am, for I don’t know anymore, and I’m feeling particularly lost tonight. Instead, she said, “No one else has been able to guess.”
“Ah, a challenge. I shall succeed where others have failed you.” He made a dramatic show of rubbing his faux beard as he thought. “Ah!” He raised a finger. “I have it. You are a shedding Egyptian mummy.”
She feigned disappointment. “Oh, had I only thought of that.”
“I see that you are cleverer than I thought upon first impression. But I will discover your mystery.” He leaned forward. The light from the burning sconces reflected in his dark eyes. “Yes, of course, I have it now. You are a very confused writing spider.”
She laughed. A deep, true laugh that reached to her belly, breaking up some of the tension she held. “Again, another brilliant costume I didn’t think of. Perhaps I should have consulted you before the ball.”
He tossed up his hands. “You defeat me, kind lady. Give me the answer.”
She shook her head, chuckling. “Yet, I adore your guesses.”
“I endeavor to always please the ladies, of course.” He rubbed his beard again. She could see an amused smile peeking below its whiskers. “But of course. You are a butterfly trying to break from a poorly constructed cocoon.”
“An awkward metamorphosis of sorts? Sadly, not in this case. Here, I shall relieve your misery. I’m Ariadne.”
“From the Greek myth, of course.”
“You know it!”
He stared at her for a moment and then blinked. “Of course. Doesn’t everyone?”
She smiled, warmth flooding her body. “That’s what I thought. Yet, everyone else has looked at me when I told them as if… well, as if I should have dressed as an inmate of Bedlam.”
He tilted his head. “I quite enjoy the charming inhabitants of Bedlam. One of the very few places you can hold an intelligent conversation in London. Do you ever feel the sane are locked up and the insane are roaming the streets and known as the general population of London?”
What an odd thing for a stranger to say. But she laughed. She hadn’t truly laughed, it seemed, in months, maybe years.
“Very clever, indeed, Ariadne.” He reached out and touched a string on her skirt. The touch wasn’t intimidating, but friendly. Another string fell away at his light touch.
“Sadly, I don’t think I’ll be rescuing Theseus with my poor thread. The Minotaur will surely eat him.”
The man dismissively waved his hand. “He deserved it for how he treated you, leaving you heartbroken after you saved his sad hide.”
“Ah, but I get Dionysus in the end.”
“And Dionysus is Bacchus to the Romans. I think all stories that end with Bacchus are good endings.”
“I agree.” She felt herself smile and then became self-conscious. While she was wildly delighted to discuss something other than balls and gowns, she shouldn’t have been alone on a terrace with a male stranger. She glanced toward the door, where light and noise from the party spilled out. She couldn’t help but think that this party was a modern version of the Minotaur’s maze.
“Aren’t you going to venture a guess at who I am?” the man asked. He affected a hurt tone. “How rude not to ask.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said dramatically. “I didn’t mean to offend. Hmmm, let me see…” She narrowed her eyes, pretending to concentrate. He was costumed from head to toe, his intense eyes the only part of him unconcealed.
“I’ll give you some hints. I’m exotic, loyal, and very dangerous.” He raised his sword. “And I possess most excellent props.” He set his sword between his teeth.
She made a clucking sound. “A poor adventure-seeking musketeer such as yourself must find English ballrooms a bore.”
He removed the sword from his mouth. “I admit there isn’t enough intrigue, mystery, threats of revenge, hidden treasure, or swordplay to pique my interest, so I had to come out in the moonlight to pine for my Spanish home.”
“I find this ball full of intrigue and mystery. For instance, it’s been so long since I’ve attended a ball that every dance has become a mystery, and as for intrigue, I feel like I’m in some miniature version of the court of Louis XIV.”
“Tell me, where have you been? Say it was Spain.”
“You make me laugh,” she said. “I love to laugh.” Then she shook her head and turned serious. “I’ve been at home in the country caring for my parents. They recently passed.”
She could feel his penetrating gaze on her face, as if he knew her throat was burning and that her heart hurt.
“I’m truly sorry,” he whispered, all hints of drunkenness gone from his voice.
“Thank you.” It was the first true acknowledgment of her parents’ deaths since she’d come to London. Her aunt and her family had flitted briefly on the matter and then changed the subject as if death were some vile, embarrassing secret, and by speaking of it, they hastened their own demises.
“I’ve recently had a death in my family,” he said quietly. “Well, it’s been a few years now. But it never leaves my mind for long. Memories lie in wait for me at almost every turn.”
“It’s very disorienting,” she admitted, feeling her emotions gushing as if a lock on a canal had been opened, letting the waters rise. “I’ve lost my parents and my home. It was all in the natural course of things, yet now… now…” She paused. She shouldn’t admit such emotional things to a stranger, but she felt as though she had been secreting away words for years, with no one to share them with, except in letters she never sent to Patrick. “I spent years caring for my parents. It consumed all my hours and thoughts. And now that I’m back in London, I feel like I’m on a beach, trying to find the seashell that I once fit in. But it’s gone. Washed away. I’m different, but I don’t know how.” She brushed her hand on her gown. “I’m a costume of broken threads. I’m sorry, I should say—”
“Were they sick for very long?”
Only after she had sat on the bench beside the man, did she think that perhaps she shouldn’t have. But why did it matter now? She didn’t know how much longer she would remain in London anyway, stewing in memories of Patrick, who wasn’t coming back... at least, not for her. Maybe her future rested across the ocean in Holland with her father’s family. She had never been there, but her faithful moon companion would follow her.
“My mother passed quickly, painfully,” she said.
“That must have been hard to watch.”
“Yes. She was so vivacious… like me. Or so they tell me. In the end, I was overwhelmed with sadness, of course, but she wasn’t hurting anymore. My father’s death was much slower. Cancer. I only truly got to know him in his last months.” She paused, remembering reading to him as he rested on a sofa in his study, while brown, twittering finches hopped about the vine growing along the sill. “He was very quiet. My mother’s world was among other people.” She gestured to the guests lingering about the door. “But my father lived in nature and his books. Funny the worlds we inhabit. Am I boring you?” She knew if she’d uttered such things to her aunt or cousins, she would receive only useless blank looks.
“While most dry English sorts bore me to flinders,” he said, “you are an exception and do not. Please continue. Tell me more about your father. He sounds fascinating.”
“He was a naturalist. He was captivated by the smallest detail, the kind most people would rush over.” She turned and looked at the man, whose eyes now glowed with sympathy. She wondered if her musketeer was perhaps a kind, old man, wizened by age. Perhaps that was why she felt so comfortable with him. “Did you know the true miracles are in the smallest of things?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
“He saw all the miracles. I’m still learning, but I fear I haven’t my father’s talents for observation.”
“But he showed you where to look.”
Her lips spread into an appreciative smile. “You put it so neatly. I have kept his drawings to remind me. When I finally find a new home, I shall put them on the wall so that I will see them every day, like my mother’s necklace.” She touched the small ruby at her neck. “I want to keep them near me.”
“You have no home?”
“I’m currently staying with my aunt, but…” She shrugged. “I don’t know where I’m going. I live day to day now.”
“I understand.”
Silence crept over the conversation. It was that kind of silence she’d learned from her father. When no words were exchanged, yet meaning filled the void. She instinctively knew this stranger lived day to day as well. She knew he hurt in a way he wasn’t conveying. She couldn’t articulate how she comprehended him. She just felt him.
A cluster of people on the side of the terrace broke into loud laughter, destroying the quiet.
“Might I recommend Madrid as a home?” the musketeer said. “Excellent climate and charming people.”
She shrugged. “Madrid, Timbuktu, Saint Petersburg, Dover.”
“Dover is far too remote. It’s a treacherous half-day trip from London by coach and sled dog.”
“And I understand the roads are strewn with highwaymen, Mongol hordes, and, of course, the famed blood-thirsty pirates.”
“Have you no protector, fair maiden? No hopeless romance? You see, to a musketeer, all romances are conveniently doomed things, because, well, a musketeer must dash off to the next adventure. He can’t be tied down when a quest calls.”
“Once,” she admitted, hearing the brittleness in her own voice. “Long ago.”
“It—it sounds as though you still have emotions for him.” The amusement had left his voice. The question was a serious one.
She studied him. Who was he? His gaze was as mesmerizing as the moon above them. She knew it was reckless to admit her secrets to a stranger. But were they truly secrets if they burned to be known?
“I fear my Theseus has abandoned me,” she confessed. “He has sailed away. My heart hurts, and no Dionysus awaits on the horizon to comfort me. Perhaps I should—”
“My wife died.” His words spilled out, broken and raw.
She seized his hands. “I’m so sorry.”
He didn’t draw away but tightened his hold on her fingers. His palm was both soft and rough—not what she’d expected from an older man. The warmth of his clasp radiated through her. She hadn’t touched many men, only Patrick and her father. The musketeer’s touch reminded her of neither. It was kinder, lighter—the touch of a sympathetic friend.
A woman’s voice broke the silence. “Lord Exmore, there you—oh my, am I interrupting something? I do hope so.” She gave a light, tinkling laugh.
Annalise gasped. Exmore! The man holding her hand was Exmore!
The musketeer—Exmore—bolted up from the bench, concealing Annalise behind him. “What do you want?” he rudely responded to the woman. A hardness had entered his voice. It was the voice she remembered from years ago. Annalise began to shiver. What had she done?
“Oh, I shan’t get in the way of your seduction du jour.” The woman disappeared in waves of blue silk, her laughter trailing behind her.
Exmore slowly turned. Dizzying heat rushed to Annalise’s head.
“I’m sorry, Miss Van Der Keer. I—”
“Wait!” The realization burst in her mind. “You knew it was me! You knew! H-how long have you known?”
He released a breath and raked his hands through his hair. “Since you entered the ballroom with your aunt.”
She glanced down. Her hands were shaking. She felt violated. He had been playing with her. He’d pretended to be so sympathetic, but a true sympathetic, kind person wouldn’t carry out such mean trickery. She was humiliated thinking about all she had confided to him… about her father, about Patrick…
“Forgive me,” he whispered.
“Get—get away from me.” She bolted for the door.
Forgive? As if he had accidentally stepped on her toe or bumped into her, instead of ripping her beating heart from her chest. She didn’t give her forgiveness so lightly. To Hades with London and Exmore. She just wanted to get away from London and all its heartbreak as fast as she could. There was nothing for her here… not anymore. She had been stupid to come back.
All the inhabitants of the refreshment room looked up when she entered. Their gazes felt like a splash of cold water on her face. News of her presence had pervaded the party. Everyone knew that beneath the stupid costume was Annalise Van Der Keer, the silly girl who’d disgraced herself chasing after Patrick Hume. She could see the malicious laughter trembling on the guests’ lips. She glanced back at the terrace, where Satan waited. She was cornered. She swallowed, raised her head, and walked across the room, ignoring the whispers.
The ball continued until two. Annalise thankfully didn’t spy Exmore again. She spent the rest of the masquerade wandering from room to room, pretending to look busy. All the while, she planned. It would take several weeks to arrange for a stay at a relative’s home in Holland. Tomorrow, she would write the letters. Upon receiving a positive response, she would buy a ticket on a boat and tell Mrs. Bailey that she didn’t require her employment. Dear, loyal Mrs. Bailey would be miserable away from her motherland. It was time Annalise truly grew up and left her memories of Patrick behind. He wasn’t coming back. He was gone forever. Her love for him was like having an amputated limb—she had to go on living despite the pain, scars, and missing part.
After Mrs. Bailey removed Annalise’s hideous costume and left her alone to sleep, Annalise opened her portfolio and drew out her last letter to Patrick. She turned the letter, writing across it.
Dear Patrick,
Sadly, our correspondence must end. I will always love you. But you do not love me, and I need to let go of the fantasy that someday you will again. Good-bye.
She read over her words as the ink dried. No! She wadded up the letter and then stopped and pressed it out. Why couldn’t she let go of him? Why had she chased his memory to London when he clearly didn’t love her? What was wrong with her?
* * *
Nothing could blot out what happened. The smoke and noise in the gaming hell hurt Exmore’s head. He couldn’t seem to add up his cards or remember what card led. Alcohol didn’t bring the sweet numbing sensation he craved for his self-loathing. Having lost ten pounds, he gave up and ambled home, hoping the cold air would clear his mind. He carried on a logical argument in his head as he wove through the streets
He had tricked Annalise. Why did he follow her to the terrace? Because he had to solve the mystery: Had she truly changed?
Yet, why did he keep talking once he had determined that her temperament had indeed calmed? Why did he ask her intimate questions when he had known he was violating her trust?
He looked up. The swollen moon was directly above him.
Because she made him happy. For the moments that he was with her, he felt lifted above the despondency that followed him. He hadn’t thought the conversation would go very far. He hadn’t thought he would have to admit who he was. He had wanted only to keep her near him. He could tell she hadn’t known happiness in a long while. She hadn’t appeared to know that Patrick was returning. She was simply lost, as he had been after Cassandra died—unsure of who he was and the world he inhabited. She had wanted to talk, and he had been the wrong gentleman at the right place and time. Like him, she was surrounded by people, yet she was painfully alone. He wanted to make her happy too.
Of course, he had ended up making her feel worse. Damn him.
He was sober by the time he entered his home. He kept his eyes averted from his wife’s portrait as he climbed the staircase to his chamber. He lit the candle on his writing desk and sank into the chair. He drew out a clean sheet of stationery from the drawer, dipped his pen, and wrote.
Miss Van Der Keer…