Page 4 of Caging Darling

“What have you done?” Edward’s shouting in the parlor.

Peter’s voice is silky, cruel. Amused. “Nothing, yet. But I have plans. Ideations. You know about those, Edward.”

“What’s going on?” asks the limp woman in the chair across from me.

“Which one of you wished to move to Develi?” I ask.

She frowns, crinkling her forehead. “It was me. I wanted to be by the ocean.”

“But why here? In Develi. A little town no one’s heard of. Why did you choose it?”

Her breathing grows labored. “Edward found it for me. Said it was the perfect place for the two of us.”

“And the ghost stories? When did you hear about those?”

She frowns. “Not until we arrived.”

“No,youdidn’t hear of them until you arrived.”

“I don’t understand. They’re just stories.”

“For now,” I say, trying to drown out the commotion in the other room. Edward is whimpering now, but if I can keep talking, I can distract Lady Estrias from the worst of it. “But they won’t be—wouldn’t have been—for long.”

“I don’t understand,” she whispers. A statement they always mean as a question.

“You never do.” I bite my lip, then lift myself from my seat. Taking the chair next to the trembling woman, I put my hand on hers once more. She flinches—a twitch of her brow, a tightening of her painted lips. But after a moment, she relaxes.

“Your husband has an affinity for violence,” I explain. “It stems from the relationship he had with his aunt.”

The woman swallows. “How do you know about Pearl?”

“Peter and I…” I shouldn’t have to search for the words. I’ve explained this often enough. “Well, I’m not just a slave to him. Nor him to me.”

“Someone sent you,” she says.

“Yes. It’s not important who. It’s not even important that we know about your husband’s past.”

Lady Estrias shakes her head as much as she can manage in her drugged state. If I were her, I don’t think I’d be concerned with avoiding the past. But shame runs deep in the aristocracy. It’s one thing to gossip about the prostitutes down by the docks. Another thing entirely to admit that your husband’s aunt had an affair with his father, breaking up his parents’ marriage.

“The abuse he endured at the hand of his aunt, his stepmother, is irrelevant,” I explain. “To our benefactor, the past is of no consequence. Only the future. Rather, what would become of the future were it allowed to play out.”

The woman scans my face. They do this sometimes. Like they’re looking for a defect. Like one might experience in a dream. A face whose features you can’t quite make out. A person who was once a friend and in a moment’s time has morphed into a family member.

I’m not a defect in a dream. I’m a ghoul of a girl. Just as terrifying, though.

“I look like her,” says the woman, her look far off now, focused everywhere and nowhere at once. “I didn’t know. Not until after we wed. I was exploring the attic one day, seeking family heirlooms we might use to decorate. Edward’s style was so drab when he was a bachelor. And then I found it—a portrait of her. He hadn’t needed to tell me what she’d done. The town had tried to warn me off from him. Said he came from an undesirable family. No one told me I looked like her. She died long before we met. I always wondered,” she says, “how he could stand me. How he could possibly look at me without seeing her.”

A memory from the past tugs at me. A rough voice in a bedroom full of windows.When I look at you, do you know what I picture?

I shut him out and answer the confused Lady Estrias with a sigh. “He tried. For a long time. Your husband couldn’t stand his fascination with you. But he couldn’t be without you either.”

“My husband loves me.”

I’m uncertain who she’s attempting to convince. I nod.

She nods back, biting her lip. It smudges some of the red paint, staining her teeth. “But he hates me, too.”

“Yes.” I pause. There’s a commotion in the other room, and the woman is becoming distressed, so I speak louder. “Your husband doesn’t wish to hurt you. He’d do anything not to. Anything. Including moving you to a quaint seaside village where the inhabitants are superstitious. A place where, when blonde girls start disappearing, they’ll blame the ghosts. Not the wealthy nobleman who just moved in.”

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