The Bride of Time [NOOK Book]

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It was happening again. She was running over the patchwork hills through the mist, her heart hammering in her breast. He was gaining on her, his heavy footfalls vibrating on the spongy heath through the soles of her morocco leather slippers. She couldn't see his face, though his hot breath puffing against the back of her neck covered her with gooseflesh. Raw fright forced her to surge ahead, until a clump of bracken snagged the hem of her bombazine frock. It scarcely caused a hitch in her stride. She hoisted the skirt up and kept running-running for her life!

Tessa LaPrelle sat bolt upright in bed, her breast heaving as if she'd run her heart out. He was getting closer. She'd never felt his breath dampening the tendrils on the back of her neck before. Terror gripped her heart like an icy fist. Who was he? What did it all mean?

She glanced about her dingy chamber, half-expecting the phantom of her nightmare to materialize out of the shadows. Mercifully, he did not. She gripped the counterpane tight to her breast in both fists, as if to keep her thudding heart from bursting through her skin. After a time, her heart slowed and she took a ragged breath. It was over again ... at least for now.

Tessa swung her bare feet to the cold wood floor and padded to the window. It was not yet first light. The moon had long since vacated the sky in that ultimatedarkness before dawn. She wiped the damp windowpane and her hand came away smudged with lamp soot and dust. No one bothered to clean the maid's chambers, and when the day was done, the servants were too tuckered to address them on their own time. Once a month the lots were drawn, and the girl who lost was designated and obliged to address the servants' quarters' sleeping cells with mop and broom, but the chambers never got more than a slapdash wave of the duster. Her employer, Jasper Poole, optician extraordinaire-so said the shingle on his little office in Cornhill Street-was a hard taskmaster in every other regard. He couldn't care less about the servants' rooms.

It was a hard life, but what else was an orphaned girl to do, unless she was to beg in the streets or become a Whitechapel lightskirt? At least signing on as a scullery maid in a respectable house was honest work for honest wages, even if it was no more than drudgery for a pittance.

It was Tuesday; her day. As long as she returned to the Poole's home on the fringes of Cheapside by dark, she could do as she pleased. That meant going back to the little gallery just south of Threadneedle Street, where it all began. Was that only a sennight ago? It seemed an eternity.

Tessa had found the little gallery quite by accident on one of her Tuesday jaunts. She'd been on her way back home when it began to rain. Caught without an umbrella, she'd ducked inside the gallery to wait out the storm and had become so enthralled with what she'd found that she nearly got locked in at closing time. As it was, she was late and missed curfew, which earned her a public chastisement before the other servants at supper that evening.

Tessa moved away from the window. There was still some time before her outing. She was too wide awake, thanks to the nightmare, to go back to bed. Mrs. Atkins, the house keeper, and Cook would be up and about in the kitchen. Chores started early at Poole House. Deciding to go down for a cup of tea, she washed with the cold water in her pitcher and dressed in her Sunday-best indigo bombazine frock with the little Brussels lace collar. She ordered her thick chestnut hair-her best feature, so everyone told her-with the aid of three tortoiseshell hairpins, her only possessions of any value, and examined her reflection in a shard of broken mirror glass she'd propped on her dressing chest.

The nightmare was still with her, and her hands shook as she pinned her coin purse inside her bodice, something she always did when going abroad in Cheapside. Cutpurses still existed, the new century hadn't changed that, and they would, she had no doubt, until the end of time. Well, they would not get their greedy hands upon her hard-earned wages. She was far too clever for that-especially as she carried her savings with her wherever she went; she did not trust any hiding place in her rooms. Her toilette complete, she straightened her posture and went below.

Bessie Harper, the kitchen maid, was already scrubbing the kitchen floor on her hands and knees with strong lye soap and a well-worn brush when Tessa entered. Bessie gave her a scathing look, raking her from head to toe in her unofficial togs. The maid was doing Tessa's chores, since it was Tessa's day off-and none too happily, Tessa thought, judging from the girl's clenched posture and staccato jabs of the brush.

"Well," Bessie said, "If it ain't Miss High and Mighty Gallery-goer in the flesh. Up early enough on your day off, I see, 'my lady.' A bleedin' shame ya can't manage it the rest o' the week now, ain't it?"

Tessa didn't reply. The kettle was simmering on the back of the Majestic coal stove, and she made herself a cup of tea and took a seat at the old scarred wooden table in the center of the room. She would not let Bessie drive her from the kitchen. Her day was her own.

Bessie slapped the scrub brush back down on the floor, flinging suds that came close to spattering Tessa's slippers. Tessa pulled her feet back beneath her chair, out of harm's way, and took a sip from her cup. She wouldn't let them chase her. This was common enough behavior in such houses. The lowest servant always took abuse from the rest, and there was nothing lower in the pecking order than a scullery maid. She would not let them ruin her day.

"So," Bessie taunted, "are ya goin' back to that fancy gallery, then?"

"A little culture might be beneficial to you, also," Tessa said sweetly. "You might try it on your day off, Bessie."

Cook flashed a gap-tooth grin and Bessie bristled. "Well, ya won't be goin' nowhere till the missus finds her pearl brooch what's gone missin'."

"What brooch?"

"I dunno," said Bessie. "I ain't seen it. She come in here all out straight an hour ago. 'Nobody leaves this 'ouse till my brooch is found!' she says. She's checkin' the chambers right now. So, Miss High and Mighty Gallerygoer, ya ain't goin' nowhere till this coil is unwound."

"Do you mean to say she believes one of us took it?" Tessa asked, incredulous.

"Well, it didn't walk off by itself, did it?" Bessie shot back. Wisps of brown hair had escaped her mobcap, and she brushed them back from her eyes.

"That cannot include me," Tessa said. "I have no access above stairs."

"Makes 'erself out better'n us, don't she, Cook?" Bessie taunted. "Puttin' on airs. We all has 'access' if we wants it. Them upstairs can't watch us every minute, can they? That ain't goin' ta save ya."

"I hardly need saving, Bessie. I've nothing to hide."

"So she says, la di da, with her voice so refined," Bessie said through a snigger to Cook, who was larding a pheasant at the other end of the table, and getting more lard on her pendulous bosom than the poor flaccid bird. "Ain't she a regular funnyosity, though, voice like a lady, goin' about in threadbare togs? That pearl brooch would look right nice on that raggedy old bombazine frock, now, wouldn't it?"

Tessa shouldn't rise to the occasion, but she would not stand being accused. "Are you suggesting that I took the brooch, Bessie?" she asked coolly. "If you are, you'd best have proof. And I speak as I do because I had someone to teach me, who cared enough to hope it would help me better myself."

That had been one strike against Tessa the minute she entered Poole House. Thanks to the upbringing she'd had with her aunt before the woman died and she'd been forced into a life of servitude, she'd learned at least to talk like a lady. It hadn't helped her in her current circumstances, and she said no more. Hopefully, the missing brooch would be found, and she would be on her way to gaze once more upon the painting that had captured her eye so severely, and the formidable, darkly brooding self-portrait of its creator, one Giles Longworth, among other of his works on display. It was titled "The Bride of Time," a large-almost life-size-canvas of a naked woman, scantily draped in what appeared to be a bridal veil that looked no denser than spider silk and hid none of her charms. She was lounging upon an opulent couch, gazing reverently toward a gilded hourglass in her hands. Through an open window behind the woman, rolling patchwork hills had been painted draped in fog, with the crenellations of a manor house of great proportions, reputed to be the artist's Cornwall estate, poking through the distant mist.

There was nothing remarkable about the painting. It was typical of the artwork of the era. Tessa wouldn't have given the canvas a second thought if several patrons hadn't gasped and called attention to the fact that the girl in the painting resembled her. One had gone so far as to ask if she might have posed for the artist!

Scandalous!

This was 1903. That painting was done at the turn of the century, around a hundred years ago, at the social and economic beginning of the de cadent Regency period. Those times, and the people who lived then, had long since fascinated Tessa. The world had changed so much in a mere hundred years, but not enough to blur the edges between the classes. Boundaries still existed that could not be breached. C. D. Gibson may have created an image of the new woman for a new century with his famed Gibson Girls, but some things would never change. Scullery maids still wore bombazine and threadbare faille for Sunday best, and mobcaps beneath their unadorned bonnets.

Tessa finished her tea and helped herself to a cheese biscuit besides, but she refused to continue the conversation. When Mrs. Atkins floated into the kitchen sometime later, her countenance no less scathing than the others, Tessa excused herself and went back to her chamber to fetch her cloak and bonnet. She would stop to feed the pigeons in the little gated park in the square, and by time she reached the gallery it would be open. She could relax there. She could escape, pretend she lived in that grand abbey in the painting. She could pretend she had posed for the portrait of that bride from a different time. It was a pleasant fiction that lifted her out of the doldrums of her everyday existence, even though she wasn't convinced of the likeness. Oh, the woman in the painting had her coloring, her long chestnut hair and eyes more violet than blue, but that woman was beautiful. Tessa had always considered herself plain.

Besides, it wasn't the woman in the painting that drew her back to the little gallery time and time again. It was the view through that little painted window of the rolling patchwork hills and the manor house half-hidden in the mist. There was something familiar about those hills. She would stare and stare, praying for the mist to lift so she could have a better view, wishing she could walk those hills; if she could only escape to that wild Cornish wilderness of misty moors in a time gone by.

Last Tuesday, standing before that canvas, she'd almost mesmerized herself into believing she was able to feel the thick, sweet grass under her feet. She could almost smell the heather-laced wind drifting past her nostrils from the splotch of violet the artist had suggested peeking through the mist. How far would her imagination take her today? Far enough to escape her meager existence-far enough to reach those double doors on that sprawling manor?

As she climbed the back stairs to her little cell, the image of the artist who had created the painting ghosted across her memory. It almost made her misstep on the narrow winding stairs. Giles Longworth looked a man to be reckoned with, with his eyes as black as sin, his mahogany hair that appeared to have been combed by the infamous Cornish wind worn rather long, waving about his earlobes, and his broad shoulders straining the fabric of his poet's shirt. The curator had described him as a mysterious fellow. But then, he would have to be in order to conceive the work of art that had so taken her over, for it had done just that. She'd thought of little else since she first clapped eyes upon "The Bride of Time."

The curator had said some accused Longworth of sorcery, that dark, evil things were attributed to him, not the least of which was the murder of several local women, as well as Longworth's wife and her lover, and that he'd kept his nephew locked away in the Abbey. Some even said Longworth was a werewolf, because of the way the women were savaged, with their throats torn out. But the Cornish folk were at best a superstitious lot, and none of this was ever proven, of course. However, as with most colorful tales, they grew over the years and only gained notoriety after Longworth's mysterious disappearance following the completion of "The Bride of Time."

Tessa never mentioned Giles Longworth to the others at Poole House. He was her secret. She would not share him with the vicious, jealous cats she'd found a home amongst. She was becoming more and more sorry she'd mentioned the little gallery and the painting at all. At four and twenty, she was still naïve enough to imagine she could win over folk like Bessie, Cook and Mrs. Atkins. It would be her undoing one day; she was certain of it.

Having reached her chamber to find her door ajar, Tessa slowed her pace. Reaching with one finger, she eased the door open wider and peered inside. "Is someone there?" she asked, coming face-to-face with Mrs. Poole and Gibbons the butler rummaging through her dressing chest. She opened the door wider still. "I beg your pardon?" she said. "Those things are mine!"

"Are they, then?" Mrs. Poole asked loftily. "Then perhaps you might like to explain how you've come by this?" She held out her hand, palm upward, exhibiting a pearl brooch.

The woman reminded Tessa of a hooded cobra. Her reptilian eyes were glaring down her nose accusingly, her piled-high, Gibson-style coiffure trembling as she bristled, emphasizing her overlong neck. Could the woman actually imagine that she, Tessa LaPrelle, had stolen the brooch, or that she was dunce enough to have left it in an unlocked drawer if she had? Stupid with astonishment, Tessa stared.

"See that?" Mrs. Poole said to the butler. "Not a blink of remorse! That is the thanks I get for hiring a French girl!"

"I beg your pardon, ma'am," Tessa said, her back ramrod-rigid. "I am as English as you are. My father's father was half- French, and even he was born here. I am not ashamed of my French ancestry, since I take from it what little culture my English ancestors have denied me." It was bold talk, of course, but that didn't matter. Her situation was lost no matter what; that was obvious. "Speak to me as you will, but I will not allow you to malign my name."

"Well!" Mrs. Poole erupted. "I never did! Here you stand, caught out red-handed with my brooch, and you dare to speak to me in that manner?"

"I did not take your brooch, ma'am. I do not presume to know how it got in that drawer, but I did not put it there. Never once in all the months I've been here in your employ have I gone beyond the green baize door!"

"This is the thanks I get for giving you this fine room to yourself!" Mrs. Poole railed. Fine room? The window glass was cracked, as were the chamber pot, pitcher and basin, and the mattress was nothing but a bag of straw. Fine room indeed! "I should have put you in with Lizzie and Bessie, and made you sleep two to a bed, but no, I let you have this here, and this is how I am repaid-with thievery!"

"I beg your pardon, ma'am, but perhaps you should have done. You did me no favors putting me here. I have been punished by the others below stairs since the day I came for being 'privileged.'" She gestured toward the brooch in the woman's outstretched hand. "If you want to sort that out, you might inquire of them as to which one put it there to be rid of me!"

"I've heard enough of this," Mrs. Poole said, thrusting Tessa's cloak and bonnet at her. "Take her below to the wine cellar and lock her in, Gibbons. Then fetch the bobbies from the Yard. Let the magistrates sort her out. I wash my hands of her."

The butler had hold of Tessa's arm before she could blink. Steering her out into the hallway, he led her farther down the darkened stairwell toward the lower regions where the wine was kept. Tessa's mind was racing. This couldn't be happening, but it was. She was innocent, but there was no way to prove it. She couldn't let them lock her away.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Bride of Time by Dawn Thompson Copyright © 2008by Dawn Thompson.Excerpted by permission.
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