What Happened at Midnight
Courtney Milan
Chapter One
February 1856, Southampton, England
“YOU THERE. WHERE DO YOU think you’re off to? And where is your father?”
Miss Mary Chartley came to a stop in the hall, mere steps from escape. The servants’ door was only a few feet away. She silently cursed the board that had let out the telltale creak. Her shoulders ached. Her heart pounded. And behind her eyes, a headache had started, brought on by sleeplessness and unshed—
No. Not tears. She was done with crying.
She gathered her composure and her wits, and turned.
Her father’s one-time business partners had started to ransack the house early that morning. She had heard them come in; the constable who had accompanied them had even questioned her briefly. But they’d busied themselves downstairs, leaving her free to do what needed to be done. She had hoped to simply steal out the back door, with nobody aware of her departure.
“Mr. Lawson.” She gave the nearest man a quick curtsey. “Mr. Frost.” Another dip of her head. Only one of the partners was missing, and she couldn’t let herself think about Mr. John Mason. “Good morning.”
It was absurd to observe the forms of propriety at a time such as this, but she’d been steeped in proper manners for most of her life. Five years of a very expensive finishing school in Vienna had trained her to smile at these men in pleasant harmony even while they pawed through her father’s things.
Mr. Lawson and Mr. Frost had made a shambles of the office. Her father’s carefully sorted papers had been strewn about the room; books had been pulled from their shelves and left in uneven, teetering piles. They’d wrested the drawers from the desk and splintered the wooden boards into kindling.
Lawson raised his head from the wreckage to contemplate her. “Where is your father?” he asked again.
“She doesn’t know anything,” Frost said after giving her a brief, dismissive glance. He was methodically flipping through books, searching for some hidden secret within their pages. “Look at her—dressed for a stroll in the park, as if nothing had changed.”
How else she was to dress, Mary did not know. She had walking dresses and riding habits, dinner gowns and morning gowns. But nothing in her wardrobe was marked, “Wear me in the event of disaster.” Her hand clenched inside its glove.
Frost tossed the book he held to one side and picked up another. But Mr. Lawson was still looking at her. Staring, really, in a manner that was anything but polite.
Ignore it, and your better manners will soon embarrass him into behaving properly. That was what the etiquette instructor at her finishing school would have advised her.
Ha. The instructor hadn’t known Mr. Lawson. He set down his papers and stepped toward her.
Her heart pounded faster. His lips were compressed in anger, but his eyes… She didn’t like that unblinking reptilian look in his eyes, nor the slither in his step.
“Where is your father, Mary?”
“Miss Chartley,” she corrected gently. “I think we’ll all be happier if you call me Miss Chartley, and—”
He grabbed her wrist. “You really don’t understand. You stupid creature. ‘Miss Chartley’ is what I’d call a lady, and in case you haven’t discovered it, you no longer fit the description. The sooner you recognize that, the better it will go for you.”
Mary yanked her wrist away. She hadn’t had time for soul-searching. She certainly hadn’t had time to quietly contemplate her new position in the complicated taxonomy of womanhood. All her thoughts since three that morning had been consumed by one thing: getting her trunk and its contents miles away from these men before they discovered the truth.
“No railway receipt, no record of a hired cab,” Frost was saying, shaking his head. “It’s as if Chartley simply vanished. And when I find him—”
No question about it. Mary had to get her trunk away from here, and quickly.
But Lawson took hold of her wrist once more, wrenching her arm around her back as if she were a scullery maid caught stealing the silver. “Where is your bleeding father?”
That twisting motion really hurt, sending stars floating across her vision. Aside from the rap of a ruler across her knuckles, nobody had ever touched her in violence.
But it wasn’t the pinched face of her etiquette instructor that came to mind. It was the round, frowning visage of her piano master.
Weep later, he would have said in a heavy German accent. Play now.
She jutted out her chin. “I don’t know.” True in at least one respect. She wanted to believe that Papa, whom she’d loved so dearly, was in heaven. But if there was any truth to what the curate said, he was likely in hell.
“And what message did he leave you?” His grip tightened on her wrist.
“Nothing.” Lying came easier, the more she did it. Her father might have been a cheat and a thief, but he’d loved her and she’d loved him. She would save him this final indignity.
“You’re getting tiresome, Mary.” Lawson yanked her wrist. She took two stumbling steps toward him before she found her balance. “I don’t think you understand what it means that he’s abandoned you. If he’s gone for good, you’re nothing.”
Her skin crawled, but she suppressed all hint of a shiver. “I still don’t know—”