That Silent Night Read Online Free PDF

Davis?”
    â€œMost certainly not, madam.” He turned on his heel and opened the door for my husband.
    Colin returned only a few minutes later, pulling on his heavy overcoat. “Leighton’s wife is nowhere to be found. He asks for my assistance and wonders if you would be so good as to go to their house and wait for her, in case she returns before he does.”
    â€œOf course,” I said. “What happened?”
    â€œHe does not know.”
    I stood at the library window, pulling my shawl close around my shoulders, and watched him and Mr. Leighton, along with several footmen, scatter across Park Lane and disappear from sight. She could not have got far on foot, but she might have hired a hansom cab, and, hence, could be anywhere. Searching would be a necessary yet most likely fruitless endeavor, unless Mr. Leighton had some idea where his wife might have gone. Davis brought my coat and hat, and I set off for the Leightons’ house, where the butler ushered me in and told me I was expected. His face, etched with lines of worry, revealed deep concern for his master’s wife.
    â€œYou will be comfortable in the drawing room, Lady Emily,” he said. “May I send up some tea or coffee for you? Brandy, perhaps, to ward off the cold?”
    â€œNo, thank you,” I said. “Would it be possible for me to go to the sitting room where Mrs. Leighton and I took tea this afternoon? She told me it is her favorite spot.”
    â€œOf course,” he said, and led me there. Once alone, I studied every detail of the space. It was not a large room, but occupied a space in the front of the house that included the tower. After determining there to be very little that conveyed anything deeply personal about Mrs. Leighton in the rest of the chamber, I focused on a small gilded desk from the Empire period that had been set at an angle against a corner. Searching through its drawers, I found writing paper with Mrs. Leighton’s new initials monogrammed on the top, several pens in need of mending, a tattered address book, a slim volume of Emily Dickinson’s maudlin American poetry, and a stack of old correspondence dating back to before Mrs. Leighton’s wedding.
    Ordinarily, I would not dream of impinging on a person’s privacy by reading their letters, but in this case, I justified the action by the hope that I might find something suggestive of the location to which Mrs. Leighton had fled. I could see from the envelopes that they all had been addressed to Miss Penelope Hartford at what must be her aunt’s house in Essex and bore postmarks dating from the previous winter. The girlish penmanship matched the tone of the writer, a young lady who signed herself Minnie and expressed her condolences over the arguments Penelope and her aunt were having over wedding plans. Minnie took Penelope’s side, agreeing Westminster Abbey to be far more romantic than St. Margaret’s, no matter what fashion decreed. The issue of Westminster being more appropriate for royal nuptials struck Minnie as elitist and unfair, and she passionately declared her support for Penelope’s every desire for what, she wrote, would be the greatest day of my dearest friend’s life. I rather liked Minnie’s spirit, although I hoped she would find many days of her life at least as great as that of her wedding. A single ceremony ought not to be the culmination of one’s desires.
    After returning the letters to their envelopes and then to the drawer in which I had found them, I circled the room again, this time noticing a photograph in an elaborate pewter frame. Its placement almost behind a lamp on a side table had caused me to overlook it on my first perusal of the room. In it, two girls, the older standing next to the chair on which the younger sat, looked very serious, turned out in what must have been their best dresses. Their buttoned boots, polished to gleaming, showed signs of wear, and