“What do you mean?”
“You heard him.”
She bit her lip. So, Stephen knew what had been done to him. What difference? Stephen’s opinion did not matter a whit. That was what she wanted to say.
But in truth, she understood that it did make a difference. To fathom that Stephen knew the details of Liam’s degradation, his torture, was a fresh cruelty, salt in an unhealed wound.
“He’s loathsome,” she said. “Nothing he says is worth—”
“No. You don’t follow. He could have . . .” He pushed out a sharp breath. “He could have snapped your neck, Anna. While I stood there, he—” He abruptly ceased to speak. Setting his fist against his mouth, he shook his head once, sharply. His knuckles looked white.
His anguish seemed outsized to the cause. “He was never going to hurt me, Liam. He was only trying to frighten me. I wasn’t in any danger—”
His hand slipped away, revealing a horrible smile. “Ask, then.”
“Ask what?”
“Ask why it took so long for me to come to your aid.”
“I . . .” Remembering his strange, frozen posture, a pit opened in her belly.
No, she did not want to ask about that. “You were wise to hesitate. He was baiting you. He wanted you to make a public scene—”
“Stop.” His terrible smile vanished, leaving his face stark, his eyes hollow. “Don’t take pity on me.”
“Not pity.” She crossed her arms, miserable. She did not know the right thing to say.
“He is right,” Liam said softly. “My brain is mangled.”
“Oh, come now—”
“You’ve seen it before.” His voice strengthened. Grew cool and clinical. “At Hanover Square Rooms, for instance. And the first night you came to my rooms—after I bedded you. You saw the start of my panic.”
“I . . .” Suddenly fearing what her expression might reveal, she turned away toward the street. He had behaved oddly in those instances. But that did not mean his brain was damaged. “You’ve been through a trial, Liam, and it’s no wonder if you need time to heal from—”
His voice came so close by her ear that she jumped. “You did not want a drunkard’s child, Anna. Would you want the child of a madman?”
Panic made as sharp a spur as anger. She whirled on him. “I will not discuss nonsense! Your child—that is the child I will have. Drunk or mad or double headed, it makes no difference. But I won’t hear you recite your cousin’s words as though they had a lick of truth in them. Listen to yourself! He showed his hand today, and all you can talk of now—”
“He showed his hand,” he said softly, “and I had always thought that when he did, mine would be ready to strike. Instead, I watched him maul my wife.”
“I was not mauled.” But that was not the right thing to say, either. He was looking past her again, his expression remote.
“You should go back to Rawsey, I think.”
And now they were back to that? “Don’t give him this victory, Liam. Please.”
He exhaled, glancing back to her. For a moment, as his haunted gaze locked with hers, she thought she would be able to reassure him, after all. “He is nothing,” she said fiercely.
But then his gaze seemed to shutter. His expression smoothed, and his lips turned in a false, charming smile as he offered his arm.
“Come,” he said. “We’ll go find the coach.”
His mask was in place again.
His cousin could be vanquished. But his mask, she did not know how to breach.
For the first time all afternoon, she at last felt truly afraid.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“What a lovely and unusual room, your grace.” This marveling comment came from Liam’s wife, who stood in the middle of Jules’s drawing room, turning full circle to admire the ebony furnishings and sculptures of sandalwood and marble that sat in niches along the walls.
The early evening light, slanting through the carved wooden screens that shielded the tall windows, cast a bluish cluster of stars onto Anna’s bare nape. That line, where her long neck curved into her shoulders, was the greatest wonder in this room of priceless rarities.
He had not touched her in six days.
“Oh, please do call me Emma,” said Miss Martin. Or, no—she was the Duchess of Auburn now. Jules had wed her in some abrupt private ceremony a fortnight past. “In fact, most of these furnishings come from the royal family of Sapnagar. They are great friends of Julian’s, and sent several new pieces only last week . . .”
He could not touch Anna. He could, at times, barely stand to look at her, for what she saw in him was so clearly a figment of her imagination. She saw some kind of hero. She overlooked the festering flaws that would infect her, too, if she insisted on lingering.
“It is very kind of them,” the duchess was saying. “But not the greatest kindness they’ve ever done us, I assure you.”
A pause fell. The newlyweds exchanged a long, intimate look, redolent of private memories.
Some men caused their wives to bloom. The new duchess glowed, her cheeks rosy, her formerly ashen hair seeming to glimmer in the lamplight.
Other men did not have such happy effects on their wives. Liam watched Anna step backward, out of range of the Auburns’ entangled gazes, and stare disconsolately at a sculpture of a dancing god. There were shadows beneath her eyes. At night, in her bedroom, she paced more than she slept.
Lying awake in his own room, Liam would listen to her footsteps, slow at first, then faster and louder, as though anger drove her to stalk. Sometimes she knocked at his door, but he never replied. He had no face he wished to show her now. Since their ill-fated meeting with Stephen, the panics had come more often. Perhaps they were fed by his fury with himself. He had let the bastard touch her.
Abandoned, then, she stewed, a trapped animal walking the boundaries of her cage. He listened to her misery in the dark as his own heartbeat escalated, as his breath came short, as a bitter knot choked his throat and brought bile into his mouth.
What a husband he was! Each night he expected to be dead by morning: no man’s heart could gallop and stumble as his did, and continue to labor on afterward.
Yet each morning he woke gritty eyed, having fallen asleep at some point before dawn. Still alive, but not relieved by it.
This purgatory in which he now lived was not more bearable than the tortures of Elland. In Elland, only he had been at stake. Now, his weakness could cost her.
“The entire house is a marvel,” the duchess told Anna. “Shall I show you around?”
Liam did not feel insulted by how readily Anna agreed, or with what visible relief she followed the duchess from the room. He, too, felt it easier to breathe when she was gone.
If only she would go. Leave London. But she refused. She had made her choice, unwisely and stubbornly, from a surfeit of emotion he did not deserve and would not allow himself to contemplate.
The door closed behind the women. Julian took a seat, his fond gaze lingering on the door. Liam, remembering himself, retrieved his brandy and proposed a toast. “In belated congratulations,” he said, with the proper wry cheer that Jules would expect. “And here’s my wedding gift to you: I meant to overlook your failure to invite me to the ceremony.”
Julian grinned and kicked out his long legs, crossing them at the ankles as he raised his own glass. “We had the footmen for witnesses, no one else. In honesty, I feared she might change her mind, should I hesitate.”
That scene with Stephen had snapped something in Liam’s brain. It felt rusty these days, as though he were never quite awake. It balked now at the requirement of manufacturing a charming reply.
“No,” he said finally. “That’s over.” Emma Martin, at Liam’s first meeting of her, had been ghostlike and withdrawn, hidden behind the shocking camouflage of her vivid and violent artwork. But even then, he had sensed the chrysalis-like quality about her: whether or not she’d known it, she had already been straining toward the light.
/>
That light, for her, had always been Jules, who was looking at Liam now, his head tipped in a quizzical attitude.
“She wouldn’t have changed her mind,” Liam said. “She always felt you were her . . . fate.”
Fate.
Anna had thanked fate for their marriage. The notion made him feel wild and dark.
If fate had brought them together, then fate had also directed what followed. No, he would not credit God with that travesty. His soul could not bear it—for he would not worship a god so cruel, nor trust in such a god for future justice.
Julian, frowning, set aside his drink. “All right, what’s wrong? I was gladdened when you said the countess would be joining you, but . . .”
But he’d taken one look at them and sensed that their presence would not redouble the lovestruck haze in the air here.
“My apologies. Do I dim the newlywed glow?” Hearing the bitterness in his own voice, the goddamned churlishness, Liam held up a hand—“Forgive me”—and then used it to press his eyes until he saw stars. “I should not have come tonight.”
“Nonsense,” Julian said sharply. “After all you did for me and Emma—Christ, man, let me return the favor for once. What weighs on you? You got my note, I hope. The Commons appointed a select committee to investigate that railway fraud. Devaliant will be finished soon enough.”
“Yes, so I heard.” Some make-believe railroad company had bilked investors out of their hard-earned money, and Jules had uncovered proof that Stephen had helped to promote the company, perhaps even to found it.
“Over five thousand investors defrauded, Liam. He could go to prison, as soon as next year—”
“Not enough.” He took a breath to dispel the tightness in his chest, to persuade his heart not to pound. “I can’t wait any longer.”
“Oh?” Julian hesitated. “What changed?”
“He’s more ragged than he seems. Coming into the open at last. We had words last week. He all but admitted he knew of Elland.”
“Ah.” Julian studied him a moment. “Well, good.” His smile was hard and unpleasant. “I’m amazed he’s still breathing. What happened?”
He opened his mouth to manufacture some story—then abruptly found himself too exhausted to lie.
Julian saw it. “What happened?” he asked more quietly.
Liam had imagined himself intimately familiar with degradation. He’d even believed himself immune to it—inoculated, by a sustained and concentrated dose, to all the other more mundane versions. But this confession felt like a scouring shame. “We met in public. Hanover Square. He grabbed her. And I did nothing.”
Julian had known him since boyhood. Their friendship ran deep. But even he could not prevent a frown at this news. “Nothing? What do you mean?”
“I mean”—say it—“he took hold of her. He could have snapped her neck. Slipped a knife between her ribs. And I would not have been able to stop him. I simply . . . stood there. Gripped by something.”
“Gripped,” Julian murmured. “I don’t . . .”
“Understand?” The laugh crawled out of him like a worm. “Nor do I. It’s a sickness of the brain. Ever since my return, it comes over me at odd moments—a baseless dread, choking, paralyzing.”
“You never told me.”
A snarl took control of his mouth. “How might I have shared that news? What ho, Jules, I’m losing my bloody mind?”
Instantly he regretted his temper. But Julian seemed not to notice; he steepled his fingertips, frowning. “This . . . grip, as you put it . . . what provokes it?”
He blew out a long breath. “In the early days, I thought I knew. Loud sudden noises, anything that took me off guard. Crowds, sometimes. Dreams of the . . . ” Say it. “Dreams of the hole.”
Julian’s face darkened. No doubt he was recalling their conversation at the club, in which Liam had mentioned exactly how Sadler had died in that hole. “Well,” he said. “Yes. That makes sense.”
Liam’s laugh felt harsh. “Sense? What sense does madness make?”
His friend offered a brief, lean smile. “Classic dilemma of the critic: he never excels at self-judgment. You were always mad, even as a boy—I won’t argue that. But there’s nothing deranged, or even rare, in feeling oneself thrust back into a dark memory.”
This felt like kindness rather than honesty. “Don’t disappoint me,” Liam said. “I have always counted on you for truth.”
Julian grimaced, then sat back. Making a fist atop his thigh, he flexed it hard, seeming to study the glint of his own signet ring before he shrugged and said, “All right. At Cawnpore, I witnessed—horrors. Men executed by cannon fire. It took me a very long time, afterward, not to flinch when it thundered. Not to feel my breath come short, and my heart pound. That did not make me mad, Liam. It made me human.”
Liam understood the generosity of this admission. Jules very rarely spoke of the Uprising, and then, only in vague detail.
But . . . “I wish to God it were only a flinch. These recent episodes are full-bodied incapacitations. And . . . they’re coming more and more often. Every night,” he said quietly.
“With no incitement?”
“None.” He bit his tongue against the frustrated urge to curse, or to smash something. “Lying in bed, I’ll see his goddamned hand on Anna. The next moment, it starts: locked in my own brain, my body beyond my control.”
Julian nodded slowly. And then he abruptly shook his head. “On the contrary, there does seem to be an incitement, then: your cousin.”
“Of course,” Liam bit out. “But—”
“And loud noises, and crowds?”
Liam paused, the question startling him. “No, in fact. I’ve had no trouble there, recently.”
“Then perhaps your cousin has done you a favor. For if he’s now the sole cause, then there’s a simple solution to it.”
Liam allowed himself a brief, dark smile to match Julian’s. “To him, yes. But . . .” Throat tightening, he spoke his greatest fear: “For my brain, perhaps not. For I cannot guarantee that once he’s gone—”
“Listen.” Julian sat forward, eyes narrowed. “I have heard of such things. Sometimes, in survivors of violence . . .” He hesitated. “Emma cares for you. She would not mind me telling you this. In the early days after her return, she often had no memory of putting brush to canvas. She painted as though in a wild trance. And afterward, she awoke rageful, in tears. But those episodes did eventually pass.”
Liam mulled this. He did not know if Emma wore physical scars. But her paintings were scars; he’d recognized that from the first, and her courage in showing them had called to him. “They went away completely? Even now that she’s painting again?”
“Yes. And she says that even the act of remembering—remembering the worst—feels different now. Tranquil, and within her control.” Julian tipped his head. “Have you confided in the countess about these moods?”
“She says I only need time to heal.”
Julian’s expression eased. “Yes. Good. I think she’s right.”
Liam picked up his drink, took a measured sip. His hand was shaking slightly.
There’s a simple solution to that.
Jules was wrong. Ending Stephen would not cure the problem of his brain.
The thought shocked him. It felt odd and electric, like an illicit confession. Liam turned it over in his mind, marveling at how it made his muscles tense, his body brace as though for a violent collision.
Here, he abruptly realized, was the truth he’d not wanted to face—and which he had avoided by refraining from putting an end to the business of Stephen. Ending his cousin would not cure him of all his troubles. He would never again be the man he’d been before Elland. There was no way to undo the changes that Elland had wrought in him.
Yet this insight, as it faded, left a weird lightness in its wake. His hand steadied, and he felt his throat ease. His heartbeat began to slow.
So what if there was no magic cure? It did not mean he
was beyond hope.
Neither Anna nor Julian thought him beyond hope. They did not even think him mad. They both believed that healing was possible. Emma was proof of its possibility.
But healing could not occupy him so long as his cousin remained a danger. Stephen had shown his hand in Hanover Square, which meant that he felt desperate or bold enough to do any number of rash and unwise things. Before anything else, Stephen must be handled.
A breath slipped from him. And then came a smile, faint but real. Easy, even. The course was so simple, after all. “It’s time to end this.”
Julian followed his meaning perfectly. With a swift hard smile of his own, he said, “Only tell me what you need.”
• • •
“And this is my studio,” said the Duchess of Auburn. “Forgive the mess. I had all my paintings fetched over, but I haven’t yet uncrated most of them.”
As Anna followed her hostess into the spacious white-walled room, a canvas caught her eye. Poised on an easel in the corner, reached by weaving through a maze of unopened crates and boxes, it showed a mundane country scene: a rolling field bounded by a low stone wall, from which a basket of flowers had just been knocked. Both the basket and its contents—a shower of bright flowers—had been caught midfall, as a long, slim hand reached into the frame, unsuccessfully, to catch them.
The subject might have seemed ominous. But the sunny setting, the bright clear sky, and the lush vivid realism of the flowers—their scarlet and saffron petals still gleaming with dew—combined to create a mood of whimsy, even optimism. Things got knocked over. There was beauty in that, too.
“New work,” Emma said, joining her side. She made a warm and gracious hostess. When touring Anna through the fine appointments of this house—cunning hallways of inlaid and mirrored paneling, a glass-walled hothouse, paintings by old masters and Mogul portraitists—she had marveled alongside Anna at the fineries, clearly taking no credit for her husband’s exquisite taste.
But now, her cheerful serenity fractured. She twisted her hands at her waist as she said, “It’s very different from my old style, of course.”
The Sins of Lord Lockwood Page 26