Page 22 of A Lady's Wicked Revenge
A Plan of Action
“There, now,that’sthe Diana I remember!” said Leah with a satisfied smile, her exuberant voice echoing from the high ceiling of the grand entryway to the Leeson house. Her hands were on either of Diana’s shoulders, and she was peering into her friend’s face as though examining it for cracks or chipped paint.
“Were you expecting someone else, then?” asked Diana with a laugh.
Her friend did not seem to share in her joke; Leah withdrew her hands and busied herself with passing her hat and light summer cloak to the footman who had let her into the house. Diana kept an eye on this servant as she was sure he was watching her in equal measure—she could never tell just who Uncle James had charged with supervising her and reporting back to him, but she assumed it was most of the household.
“Well, to be honest, I wasn’t quite sure who I would see after last night’s performance,” Leah said with a wry twist to her words. “The Diana Hann in attendance at that dinner party was rather a different person than I had been expecting.”
Diana wrung her hands together, feeling the blood run out of her face all in a hurry. “Really? In what way?”
Leah gave her a knowing smile, fists on her hips as though she had caught Diana telling a childish untruth. “Oh, come now, Diana, I’m sure you’re well aware of how you were acting at the party! Stiff as a statue, fairly sleepwalking through the ordinary social graces. Except when you were berating that awful Colin Mullens, of course—that was a sight to see! And certainly, there was something very familiar about that temper, but all evening long, I looked in vain for any sign of the kind-hearted, lively,funDiana Hann whom I’ve been so lucky to call a friend for most of my life. That’s the young woman I’ve been missing so for the last month!”
Diana’s eyes flitted to a nearby gilt-edged mirror and tried to circumspectly examine her reflection. She looked different, she realised—paler, older, more tired, even than just a few days before. She struggled to conjure an image of the Diana Leah was describing, but it felt like someone else’s memory or a crude student’s reproduction of a half-remembered painting.
I miss that Diana, too …she thought, swallowing the lump that had formed in her throat.
Spotting the change in Diana’s mood, Leah came forward once more and took her friend’s hands, biting her lip in consternation. “Oh, dear, listen to me! I’m ever so sorry, Diana. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“No, it’s all right,” Diana protested, sniffing back a tear. “I know you were just—”
“Fiddlesticks! It hardly matters my intentions, Diana; I should be treating you with more kindness than that. I know how much you’ve been through.” Leah leaned closer and winked conspiratorially. “… Or I will, that is, once you make good on your promise and fill me in on everything that’s transpired!”
Diana sniffed away her lingering misery and matched her friend’s smile. She looked around the mostly empty foyer and caught sight of Missus Fessler pottering around with a feather duster in hand, showing little circumspection in her supervision. “Come on, let me show you the gardens,” Diana said brusquely, pulling Leah by the hand as she fled towards the back door.
The green rolling hills that made up this suburban arm of London had been blessed with warm, pleasant weather for many days by now, even until this very morning. This afternoon it seemed their fortune was determined to change: though the air was still seasonably warm, the sky was crowded with dismal grey clouds from one horizon to the other, and the frequent gusts of wind were enough to blow skirts and hair alike into wild tangles of colour.
Still, even a monsoon would not have persuaded Diana to bring her friend into the house of her hateful guardian. The friends wandered through the labyrinth of garden pathways, Diana barely pausing save to urge Leah not to fall behind.
“Surely we can talk here amid all these lovely flowers, can’t we?” Leah gestured to the empty grounds that surrounded them. “We could hardly ask for anywhere more private to speak than this.”
Where Leah’s eye had found no one, though, Diana saw a hundred vantage points from which they might be observed. Just the hedges on the garden’s western edge could contain Christopher or any one of a dozen garden labourers. She shaded her eyes and peered at the rows of windows on the wall of the Leeson manor, looking for any stirring in the curtains or shadowy figure looking down at them.
You’re letting fear make a mockery of you, foolish girl. There’s no one there, and even if there were, no one could hear you.Yet all the same, Diana found herself walking away from the house into the garden, fighting against an uncomfortable tickle at the back of her neck that constantly compelled her to look back over her shoulder. Up one rise in the path and down the other side, Diana led them, only dimly realising where she was unavoidably leading them.
“I don’t mean to complain …” Leah panted, struggling to keep up as she carried the edge of her skirts in one hand. “But had I known we would be going on such an expedition, I would have brought a horse. Or at least packed a meal.”
“And there’s the hyperbolic Leah ReidImissed so!” Diana giggled as they came to a stop before the ancient walnut tree. “Just in time, too. Here is a perfect place for us to talk.”
It felt strangely good to be in this place again. She was proud of knowing such a secluded space for them to speak freely—at least, that was what Diana told herself, roughly pushing aside the lingering memories of her thoroughly fraught interactions with Colin earlier that day.
But then Diana watched her friend look up at the huge black Hanging Tree and shudder. “I suppose no one would think to follow us to such an ugly part of the garden, would they? Good thinking, even if the view is quite this distasteful.”
A note of self-conscious disappointment echoed in Diana’s brain. Some part of her was stricken with an impulse to share all that Colin had told her, to extoll the queer virtues of this stark, unloved place. But she put this out of her mind, thinking at once how silly, even inappropriate such a thing would be to share. “It is rather a grim sight, at that …” Diana murmured, at last, taking a seat on the grass beneath the shadow of the tree. Leah smoothed out her skirts, examined the ground closely for any trace of mud or insects, then sat daintily down by Diana’s side.
“Now,” said Leah with an air of self-possessed confidence. She fixed Diana with a determined look. “I want you to tell me absolutely everything.”
A thousand thoughts rushed to be the first through Diana’s mouth. There were so many things she wanted to say that she could not think of where to start. The long nights and longer nightmares; the bullying and belittling from her guardian; the moments of unbearable despair broken by flashes of anger; the confounding, wholly unique mishmash of thoughts and feelings that had been stirred in her by Colin Mullens. After having her mouth hang open dumbly for several heartbeats, Diana was crushed to find nothing but a choked, inarticulate sob escape her lips. Then another wracked her body, and another still, flinging her into a limp, blubbering mess only barely held aloft in Leah’s arms.
Stupid child!snapped the voice of Diana’s good sense.Cease this at once! This is no time for tears—someone has finally come to your aid, so you had better start talking like a sensible woman, and soon!But it was no use; the floodgates opened, the tears Diana had kept bottled up inside her flowing freely in a torrent that wetted her friend’s dress and left Diana shaking to draw breath.
“Oh, poor, poor Diana!” she heard Leah say, her voice dripping with sympathy. She shushed her softly, her hand rubbing circles on her back.
Diana had no way of knowing how long the sorrow took to escape her body fully, but by the time she had recovered her voice and sat upright under her own power, a light rain was drizzling down onto the grey-green grass. Leah proffered a handkerchief, a gesture that felt so ridiculously belated that Diana squeezed out a few more tears through laughter.
“I’m sorry,” Diana sniffled, but Leah shushed her once more.
“Now, now, no apologies. Take all the time you need. You don’t need to hold anything back, Diana, and you don’t need to tell me a thing if you aren’t ready to.”
