Page 19 of Happily Ever After
I was quite proud of that. Given that I felt as though I could faint, my blood was so full of adrenaline that I could taste it, and the sound of the storm beyond the narrow windows of the kitchen was adding a shovel full of pathetic fallacy to the scene, I thought I’d been nicely succinct in my summation of the circumstance.
‘Oh, shit,’ said Hugo, crumpling further over the table, his wig sliding around his head to a comedy angle. ‘Oh, shit.’
The wig had gone sideways, so he was peering out from half a curtain of hair, looking pale and frightened. The off-the-shoulder ballgown he was wearing had come down and rested in his armpit, exposing a line of chest hair and a lot of pale, bony sternum.
‘What the hell?’ I said, although, to be honest, it was pretty obvious.
Hugo shot to his feet. ‘I can’t talk about this!’ Suddenly he pushed past me in a haze of French perfume and ran, surprisingly nimble in what looked like designer high-heeled evening shoes, down the corridor and out through the back door into the night.
10
THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO – THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO, HORACE WALPOLE
I followed, but he’d vanished into the dark and the rain. Thunder growled overhead again and another stab of lightning speared the air. ‘Hugo!’ I called, but there was no answer.
‘Bloody idiot.’ I hovered in the doorway for a moment, looking out at the savage night. He’d looked so desperate, so horrified, I ought to try to tell him that it was all right, that I understood. Well, maybe I didn’t understand, as such – this was a whole psychology that Jane Austen and the Brontës had somewhat skated over – but I didn’t want Hugo to do something reckless under the belief that I was going to go straight to his mother with my tale. So, with one last hopeless look at the weather, I plunged out after him.
I was barefoot, but Hugo was wearing heels. Nobody could run in heels, I thought, picking my wincing way over the gravel to the grass. He couldn’t get far, particularly as the weight of water the sky was throwing down would saturate his full-length dress and slow him down.
‘Hugo!’ I shouted again into another thunderclap.
No reply. No sign. I hoped he wasn’t sheltering under a tree. Getting up in the morning to find her son and heir fried to a crisp in a ballgown and stilettos would probably rid Lady Tanith of what little sanity she had left.
I had to find him. Had to tell him that his secret was safe with me, and that, actually, discovering it had made me feel a good deal better. I knew enough to know that wearing women’s clothes didn’t necessarily mean that Hugo’s sexuality put him completely out of my reach, but the fear of discovery would have put a crimp in any desire he may have felt for me. It wasn’t that I was a hideously unlovable monster, even given my rather top-heavy figure. The problem had all been on Hugo’s side. It was, I had to admit, a rather different ‘hero flaw’ than I’d been led to expect – those had leaned far more toward the ‘questionable morals re smuggling’ or ‘seeming attachment to lady of good fortune’ than a predilection for frocks – but it did make Hugo more relatable and more approachable now.
I was soaked and the ‘refreshing, after a muggy night’ coolness of the rain had given way to ‘bloody freezing’. These poor pyjamas, that had suffered the indignities of the fountain incident, now were being subjected to a midnight dousing and I was going to have to invest in some new ones if this sort of thing carried on.
I stood near the pond with the wind thrashing my pyjama legs around my thighs and looked. Nothing moved out there in the blackness, apart from the undergrowth which was flailing as the wind passed, carrying yet more rain. I turned a small circle, my feet freezing in the sopping grass, which was beginning to squelch quietly; the rain falling on its hard-packed surface wasn’t draining away but was sitting and puddling. There was no Hugo to be seen.
My gaze fell on the rise of land that was the icehouse. Maybe I could go up onto the top and get a better view? Without being struck by lightning hopefully. I ran, muddy water splashing up my legs as I went, meeting the overflow from my hair coming down the other way. Wet cotton flapped against me and gave inadequate coverage against the weather, my shoulder straps had stretched until my once-cute camisole top was now more of a bust-bandage and the pyjama legs encircled my calves in clinging desperation as I reached the top of the hillock and looked out across the carefully mown acres.
It was too dark to make out much. I had hoped that a bloke in a ballgown and heels might stand out against the night, but I hadn’t really counted on the sheer darkness out here. No streetlights, no stars, no illumination at all. Just sheets of rain and the occasional blinding flash, and now my hair was in my eyes. I could hardly even see my own hands, let alone a figure in the distance.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ A voice came from somewhere around my ankles. ‘You’re going to get fifty thousand volts through the head if you keep standing there.’
Tonight had already been so far outside my experience that, for the tiniest second, I entertained the idea that some particularly earthy branch of the fae was speaking to me, but then I looked down.
‘What are you doing in there?’
‘Restoring a 1975 Ford Escort, what do youthinkI’m doing in here?’
It was Jay. It was one in the morning in the middle of a thunderstorm, and here he was, standing in the entrance to the icehouse fully dressed, as though this were the most normal thing in the world.
‘More to the point, what the hell areyoudoing outthere?’ He held out a hand to arrest my slide down the small waterfall that the icehouse mound had become, and pulled me into the cubby of an entranceway. ‘There’s a thunderstorm going on.’
‘Well I thought I’d take an evening stroll,’ I said, sarcasm dripping almost more than the rest of me. ‘I was…’ No. Hugo’s clothing-confusion was nothing to do with Jay. ‘I thought I saw someone out here.’
‘You did. Me.’
‘And, again, what are you doing out here?’ He’d got both his hearing aids in, I noticed, although they were largely concealed by his hair, and I wondered who he’d been talking to in this brick-lined tunnel.
‘I am a dark, tortured soul who walks the grounds by moonlight to ease my… err… dark torturedness.’ Jay shuffled back further into the little porchway until his back was against the locked metal gate of the icehouse proper, which gave me room to get further in. He was dry and warm and I began to shiver.
‘Cobblers,’ I said, trying to stop my jaw wobbling.
‘Probably. Are you all right?’
It was an unexpected question and, in my soaked, frozen and worried-about-Hugo state it reduced me to tears. ‘No! I want to go home, but I haven’t really got one, and I thought…’ I stopped. Again, this wasn’t Jay’s business. ‘And I’m tired and there’s a cat in my bed,’ I finished, sniffing heftily.
