Hysteria is a condition very common in women of the upper classes; the symptoms include nervousness, an inclination to fainting, shortness of breath, insomnia, irascibility, and a tendency to cause trouble. Quacks will prescribe sensory deprivation and all manner of doodads. The best cure, in fact, is heavy consumption of rich foods and several hundred hours in bed, after which the delicate flowers of teatime will come back in as vigorous a state of health as ever.
— WOMEN’S SUPERIOR HOME HEALTH MANUAL, 1897 EDITION
THERE WERE NO MORE ANGELS FOR ELIZABETH, not even in the cloudy waters of deepest sleep. In her few conscious moments, she whimpered and prayed and begged. She had tried to pretend to herself that it was all a delusion, and believe that Snowden really only did care that she got her rest. But then she saw the cruel calm with which he put her down again and again, and she remembered that he had killed with awful calculation before. This fact she knew with some frightened, primal certainty. Perhaps her father had given a fight, and she knew that Will had faced his death with the same dogged bravery as he had everything else in his short life. She would be easy for Snowden — he would make it seem that she had died giving birth, and then the heir to everything the Hollands had would be his to control. For why would anyone doubt that it was not his child, once she was turning slowly to dust below the ground and could no longer speak?
It was well past midnight when her eyes flew wide open, and she found consciousness upon her like a frost. There was no way for her to know what day it was. Her heart, which had suffered such abuse already, was now churning like some heroic machine. The memory of a few very hard facts came first, and then sensation followed, all the way to her fingertips and toes. She was thirsty and hungry and would not have minded an encouraging smile from just about anyone, but she needed nothing so badly as she needed to be out of that bed and out of that house.
Everything was blurry, indistinct, bruised. She blinked hard, trying to make out the contours of the room, trying to think what was best for her to do. But she knew she wouldn’t get many chances like this one, that it must have been some oversight that she was allowed to wake now, and that her husband was not given to many of those. In her dreams, Teddy had come to save her, but in real life he had made it to the door and his profound sense of decorum had blinded him to her situation. All she could think was: the stairs, the door, the street. Then she brushed aside the heaping covers and stumbled forward on trembling feet.
She had always stepped lightly. It was one of the pretty things that used to be written about her in the society pages. She moved with such grace on the dance floor, one wouldn’t even know she was there, except that of course one could never take their eyes off her. That was how Elizabeth Holland had been, and she found those qualities served her well now as she moved like a ghost into the hall.
There was a touch of moonlight coming through the fanlight above the front entry. Everything else was a spreading darkness. Perhaps, she thought as she came onto the second-floor landing, her training to become a very marriageable debutante would one day make her a great cat burglar, too. But this was a whimsical direction, and her situation was very grave, and she wondered what that clear, cloying stuff that Snowden soaked his handkerchief in before smothering her mouth and nostrils was, and whether it didn’t make her a little daffy besides causing her to fall asleep.
This distracting notion allowed her pulse to slow just slightly as she came, almost, to the top of the stairs. Then she heard the creak of a board not far below her, and all of her instincts lurched. She knew it was Snowden, though she could hardly see anything. A trace of moonlight caught in the bottle of clear liquid he was carrying. So it was only his being a little late in coming to put her down again that had allowed her this opportunity. The vileness of his intention swept over her. The man whose home she’d promised to make for the rest of her life, before God and everybody, was engaged in nothing less than the extermination of her family. She had never experienced rage of the kind she felt now. It coursed through her like electricity.
In her mind’s eye she saw Will just before he was gone, his face so full of fear and confusion, his whole body traumatized with pain. As Snowden was nearing the top of the steps, his movements slowed, perhaps because he had only recently woken up. She could make him out now, his eyes cast down but his purpose plain in his limbs. He hadn’t noticed her — but then she hadn’t so much as dared inhale since hearing him on the stair. His breath was full and even, like that of a man who slept soundly in a soft bed. He still had not seen her as she took hold of the banister. That she was there, upright and watchful, didn’t fully occur to him — his eyes growing popeyed at the sight — until after she put her arms forward and pushed hard against his chest.
There could never be a contest of strength between these two. He was solid, and she was practically a wraith, unbalanced by her immense belly. Was it her rage that gave her such force, or some mother-wolf instinct, or had God’s hand worked through her in that moment of peril? Later, when her body was no longer so storm-tossed by terror and emotion, she would come to see that it was Will who had been there, in her, like the winged angel she’d dreamed about, protecting her one final time.
The impact of that push was sudden and great. Snowden’s slippers skidded against the step, and then his arms wheeled. The whites of his eyes grew huge, and he looked at the small, blond thing he had so easily kept subdued for many days now. But it was too late for him; the earth pulled him down hard, and not in any kind way. He hit the bottom of the stairs with a thud and a bone-snapping crack. After that Elizabeth took several quite audible breaths and still felt no kind of calm. She placed her hand on her belly, to try and stop the trembling there. The rest of her was a lost cause.
Then she tiptoed forward, to see what she had done.