Mind you don’t break your own neck climbing down the stairs in this beastly darkness. For a terrifying moment Milli stumbled and felt her heart drop into her belly with a crash. Dash my wig! It was some moments before she pried the bones of her fingers from the railing and, still gasping, continued her descent. Dash my wig indeed—I’m like to dash my skull on the stairs!
Emma would likely have dismissed the sticky tang of panic Milli had sensed in her room as utter nonsense—a figment of Milli’s unfounded fear of all things dark. Well, she would keep that bit of foolishness to herself then.
She reached the landing with a sigh of relief. She padded along bare floorboards and oriental carpets towards the library, murmuring her sister’s name again. Yet that room too was empty.
A trickle of icy trepidation crept its way up along her neck. Something in this house was awfully amiss. It was then she heard more muffled creaking, but this time it had come from the boards in the entryway. Her hair bristled, alert. The sharp snick of the door bolt followed and then a whine of hinges. Milli was loath to call out again for fear the noises were not, as she’d supposed, her sister’s doing. Emma would have answered Milli when she’d called out. So who then was the nightwalker, and where was her sister?
She snatched up a gilt candlestick from the side table, its heft offering some small comfort, before she finally quit the library. Armed with her bludgeon, she made her way silently to the entryway and there found the front door ajar and the night creeping in. Alarmed, she rushed forward to shut it, but upon closing her hand on the latch she caught sight of her sister outside and already at some distance from the house. Emma was barefoot and garbed in naught but a shift, gliding soundlessly along the street like a White Lady. Her movements barely disturbed the fog and her silhouette was fast becoming consumed by the gloom.
“Emma!” Frantic, Milli abandoned her weapon and sprinted over the considerable stretch of road that separated them. She called out again, louder, but her sister appeared deaf to her own name. Nor did she react, except to freeze, when Milli seized her night-rail. “Answer me, Emma!” She then gave her sister’s wrist a hard tug for good measure.
But Emma appeared rooted. Suddenly she turned to Milli, her eyelashes fluttering sleepily. “Delighted you’ve come at last.”
“You are?” Milli faltered, confused. A frisson of dread coiled inside her to see her sister thus—eyes wide but insensate. “What in God’s name are you doing out here?”
“Heavens! I quite forgot the time.” Emma turned a faraway gaze into the fog, her fingers reaching out to something only she could see. “This way.”
“Gads, are you ill?” Or was her sister lost in some febrile dream. She certainly didn’t seem lucid. Milli gave another insistent tug, her eyes bouncing furtively up and down the street for fear a carriage might materialize out of the mist. Or Erebus himself. “Do get out of the street before you get us both killed.”
“Don’t mind the bird,” said Emma, grinning blankly. But she allowed herself to be lead home by the hand like a child.
“Yes, you are an odd bird. Next time you decide to ramble about in your slumber, I would as soon you do it indoors like a normal person.” To her knowledge, respectable people did not just go sleepwalking off into the night, in their unmentionables no less. Milli could only imagine the spectacle they presented—two scantily-clad madwomen capering about in the fog at midnight—and she hoped fervently that no one was about spying from their windows. Fortunately, there was no watchman about to bear testimony to Emma’s queer behavior. When at last they reached the stairhead, Milli hurriedly shoved her sister through the door and shut it with a great sigh. “I can’t think what our uncle would say if the neighbors saw us.”
“A devilish temperament.”
“Uncle? Yes, I suppose he does have at times.” Wait a moment, why was she bothering to talk sense to the senseless? “I wish you will stop maundering, Emma. You sound ridiculous.”
“Curse you, thief!”
Milli made a sound of impatience as she bent to retrieve the candlestick she’d dropped earlier when she’d rushed outside. The gilding had chipped away from the wood in several places where it had hit the floor. “Faugh!” She marched off to the library, her sister in tow. “Look at what you made me do.”
Emma gave a sleepy nod, her eyes unfocused as she watched Milli return the misused gimcrack to the side table in the library. “Take care, Miss Rose.”
“Too late now.” It was obvious she would get little sense out of Emma tonight. Mayhap her sister would be herself again in the morning. “Either you are drunk as a wheelbarrow, Emma,”—pulling her sister up the stairs—“or you are still asleep, and I am not sure which I ought to be disturbed by more.” She had never known her sister for a somnambulist.
In Emma’s chamber, Milli drew back the counterpane and guided her sister into bed. “For once, I am the adult and you are the child.” She tucked the covers under her sister’s chin and then straightened to leave. But she found she could not bear to return to her own room where, no doubt, the clammy darkness now awaited her. She paused, knitting her fingers in her hair as she glared into the shadows beyond Emma’s door. “Perhaps…perhaps I ought to sleep here, Em.” She glanced back at Emma and then, resolved, moved to shut the door. “Just in case you take it into your head to leave the house again.” She lifted the covers and climbed in beside her sister. “For your own sake, you understand.” It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that she was still afraid of the dark.
“You walk among monsters,” said Emma.
The words touched Milli like a chilling claw. “Stop it, Emma, you’re frightening me.”
Unexpectedly, Emma sat up with a start. “What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Are you not too old to sneak into bed with me, Milli? I thought you had outgrown that silly habit.”
After some bemusement, Milli said, “I just saved your life, you goose.”
“Nonsense, you’re scared again.” Emma turned onto her side and gave her pillow a good fluffing. “There is nothing to fear from the dark, you know.”
“How very ungrateful you are. We could have been dashed to pieces by a coach, or murdered by that mad butcher or wicked monk or whatever.”
“What an imagination you have.”
“You ought to thank me, not scold me.”
“If you are determined to talk nonsense,” —Emma yawned, shifting to make space for her sister— “then go to your own bed at once.”
“I liked you better when you were maundering.” With a mutter, Milli rolled over and gave her back to Emma. “See if I save your life again.”
“Lord Winterly saved my life,” Emma sighed, her words slumberous.
“Well, where was he tonight?” Milli turned to shoot a glare over her shoulder. “Hmm?”
But Emma had already succumbed to sleep again, her breathing soft and even.
“I’m sure I don’t know of any gentlemen, at least no respectable ones, that stalk about late at night in such dreadful weather when there are murderers about.” The last was cut off by a yawn. “Perfectly strange behavior for a viscount, I say.” Then, with a long sigh of her own, Milli sank deeper into her own pillow and was soon lost to fitful dreams.