My Plain Jane (The Lady Janies #2)(90)

A chill ran up Alexander’s spine, like someone had just stepped on his grave. “David Mitten is dead. I captured him for Wellington just earlier this month.”

“It was soon after we began tracking the deaths in the Society that your father died. Then Rowland took possession of me, and then locked Mrs. Rochester in the attic, hoping we might be useful again one day.” Rochester’s voice shook slightly.

Mrs. Rochester closed her eyes and reached for her husband’s hand. “Mr. Blackwood, do you know what Wellington was doing with the ghosts he didn’t take to the Move-On Room?”

Alexander shook his head, but a sense of doom niggled at him.

“The duke is ambitious,” said Rochester. “He was always power-hungry.”

Alexander’s mind still felt full of river water, so the answer didn’t come as quickly as it might otherwise.

“He had George IV possessed,” Mrs. Rochester said. “The king was under Wellington’s control—at least until he died and William ascended the throne.”

“Oh.” Alexander recalled the David Mitten job again. The ghost who wanted to be captured. The signet ring. Wellington’s urgency. “Good God,” he muttered. “He’s going to have Mr. Mitten possess the King of England.”





THIRTY-ONE


Charlotte

Charlotte stared up at the ceiling, unable to sleep. At Lowood, she’d slept lined up in rows with at least thirty others girls, and she’d fallen asleep each night to a chorus of their fretful sighs and gurgles. At Haworth she’d had her own more comfortable bed to rest in, a quilt her mother had sewn for her, and her sisters all cozy in the same room. When they couldn’t sleep they’d told one another stories, whispered tales of dragons and the handsome knights who arrived to slay them. And after her sisters had gone back to school, Jane had taken Emily’s bed. Jane had snored a little. (Don’t tell her. It was hardly snoring. It was very delicate.) Charlotte had found the sound immensely comforting. But now everyone had gone: Bran to the parsonage, Emily and Anne to Lowood, Jane to London on some vastly important mission for the Society, and Charlotte found herself in a squeaky little bed in the teacher’s cottage in the village. Alone. No one had ever been so alone, she thought.

And Mr. Blackwood was dead.

She turned onto her side. A tear rolled across her nose and dropped soundlessly onto the pillow, which was already quite damp.

Mr. Blackwood was dead. Part of her would not believe it. How could Mr. Rochester have bested him? How had it happened? How was it possible that she would never see him again?

She stifled a sob. She’d never see him walk that way he did when he meant business, his strides long and his shoulders thrown back, his black coat billowing out behind.

She’d never see the glitter of determination in his dark eyes.

He’d never again offer his hand to help her down from the carriage.

He’d never make tea. Or catch a ghost. Or play charades. Or argue with her.

He’d never say, “Go home, Miss Bront?.”

The tears flowed freely now. It was aggravating, the way she could not seem to stop herself crying over Alexander Blackwood. He was just a boy, wasn’t he? They’d had no attachment to speak of. What she’d felt for Mr. Blackwood hadn’t been romance, as Charlotte had previously defined romance. There had been no stolen glances—not that she would have been able to see them. No flirtations. No tortured yearning of her soul, the way Jane felt for Mr. Rochester. No, between Charlotte and Alexander there had only been the highest level of regard, a camaraderie, a mutual enjoyment of each other’s company. But when she’d heard Mr. Wellesley say that Mr. Blackwood had been killed, something had seemed to break inside her, and it remained broken day after day. So she wept, and after the tears came a fierce ache in her chest, even worse than the crying.

Our Charlotte was floundering in the true depths of despair, dear reader, although this time she felt no urge to write about it. This time it felt like she could clearly see her entire life stretched before her, and it was a lonely life, a tragic one, where the people she loved all died, first her mother, her two older sisters, then her father, now Mr. Blackwood, and soon perhaps her sisters would succumb to the Graveyard Disease at school—Anne was always coughing these days, Emily looked pale—and Bran was so accident-prone, something could happen, and then she’d be alone forever. Or maybe she’d die young, too.

She wiped her eyes. It was absurd, but what she wished for most right now was the ability to simply speak to Mr. Blackwood again. You should tell Mr. Blackwood all that’s happened, some wayward part of her brain kept insisting. She had numerous questions she’d like to ask him. What was his opinion, for instance, on the silly way that she kept crying over him?

She took a shuddering breath. Crying, she told herself sternly, does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive.

The shutters rattled. Outside an October storm was blowing in. The wind was escalating into a howl, an eerie, lonesome sound. When she was a little girl that Yorkshire wind had frightened her. She’d known it was only the wind, but her overactive imagination had produced a theory that the sound was the ghosts of England’s past, a menagerie of the dead stretching back through history, all of them come to bang at her window. But she hadn’t known about ghosts then. She’d never seen a ghost, but what Charlotte had gleaned from this whole Society experience was that ghosts were just like regular people, with typical thoughts and feelings. They were dead, was all. It was almost like nothing else had changed. If you could see them, that is.