A Flaw in the Blood

by Стефани Баррон

  It was then he remembered that the usual world was cut off as completely as this island. He could not consult his London bankers or send letters of instruction to anyone. Only Shurland stood between himself and all the hounds of Hell.

  The great house rose from its pastures like a time-scarred monolith, unsoftened by trees; the profound island darkness could not diminish the severity of its haphazard outline. Fluid shapes blundered across the drive—sheep, always sheep. The animals milled through the darkened courtyard like mourners before a tomb.

  And yet Fitzgerald had loved Shurland once.

  “Hallo the house,” he called out, as though he still commanded there, and trotted up the broken pavers of the stairs. “Madame duFief! Coultrip!”

  He lifted the heavy iron knocker and let it fall. The thud echoed through a vastness beyond.

  “Twelfth-century,” Gibbon whispered to Georgiana, “and not much been done to it in the past seven hundert years. I wonder if even Mrs. Fitz has given up, and gone back to England?”

  But a light, faint and wavering, was growing in one of the leaded front windows. As they watched, it steadied and was set down, as the massive front door swung open.

  * * *

  “Brandy, sir? Or a glass of wine for the lady?”

  Coultrip was a local name on Sheppey, and the family could be found in all the towns that dotted the island—sailors, most of them, dedicated to the Royal Navy. Samuel Coultrip had chosen merchant ships, and lost a leg during a fracas with Barbary pirates off the coast of Malay in 1836. Fitzgerald had hired him as a rough butler and footman twelve years ago, when he still spent several months a year at Shurland; now the old man ran the household.

  “Mrs. Coultrip will shift to set a light supper before the company,” he offered. “Bread and cheese and some cold ham—her la'ship having dined at five, and long since retired.”

  “Sure, and that'd be welcome,” Fitzgerald said. “My compliments to Mrs. Coultrip, and beg her to prepare a room for Miss Armistead. Gibbon will shift with me—on the cot in my dressing room.”

  “Mr. Theo has taken your old apartment,” Coultrip said steadily, “so as to be closer to my lady—but I will have the Yellow Bedchamber prepared for you, sir.”

  “Thank you.” Fitzgerald betrayed no emotion—how could he expect his rooms to be kept in readiness, against a chance arrival?—yet the knowledge of his inconsequence stung. He reached for the brandy decanter. “Mr. Theo is here, then?”

  “He arrived on Friday, sir.” Coultrip bowed, and limped toward the door; Gibbon made to follow him.

  “Wait,” Fitzgerald ordered, and poured out a glass. “Take a dram, Gibbon. Medicinal purposes. The good Lord knows you've earned it.”

  “That's good of you, Mr. Fitz,” the valet replied, on his dignity; Fitzgerald's offer had undoubtedly shocked him—“but I should prefer a tankard of ale what Coultrip keeps in the cellar.” He bowed, and followed the old man out of the room.

  “Will you defy me, too?” Fitzgerald demanded of Georgiana. He heard the belligerence in his tone: And me still the master of this house, by God. He was feeling the strain of the day and night, biting down hard on a consuming fury.

  She took the proffered brandy and drank it down in a single draught. “For medicinal purposes. As though you had the slightest idea what those might be!”

  An antique settee commanded the middle of the room, its silk rotted like everything else at Shurland. Georgie lingered near the hearth, drinking in the warmth, firelight glinting on her dark hair. Her French twill gown was wretchedly spotted with marsh mud and seawater, and torn from the scuffle on the tenement roof; but Georgie never gave her appearance much thought. She was more interested in the flames at her feet.

  “Why is the fire coloured, Patrick?” she asked, always the scientist. “I've never seen such a thing.”

  “Driftwood, love. The sea leaves its mark, and the flames remember.”

  “I suspect it's some sort of chemical reaction. And the smoke smells of salt.” She glanced around suddenly. “What is this place? How do you come to . . . to . . .”

  “Fight for any kind of welcome here?” he retorted bitterly. “Well may you ask. I shouldn't have brought you here. You knew I had a wife?”

  Her eyelids flickered. “Well—she is everywhere recognised as a singular poet. I myself have read Bohemian Odes. And I understand she is quite . . . beautiful. Although she does not frequent Society of late.”

  “You know that we separated years ago—that we live apart?”

  “Yes.”

  It seemed to Fitzgerald, as he looked at the young woman standing by the changeling fire, that his next few words must forever alter the feeling between them. Georgiana stood for a world entirely free of the suppressed violence of Sheppey, the sordidness of his marriage; she stood for order, and reason, and London, and the semblance of sanity he had found there. Now he had chosen to drag her through the barrier he'd set between present and past. Why had he done it? What reckless need had forced this meeting? He was about to speak—to find the words to explain Lady Maude Hastings Fitzgerald—when the drawing room door screamed on its hinges and Georgiana's countenance changed. Fitzgerald did not need to be told who stood there; she transformed the air of a room simply by entering it.

  “Maude,” he said, as he turned to face her. “May I introduce Miss Georgiana Armistead to your acquaintance?”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  IT was true—Maude had once been beautiful.

  Fitzgerald could remember how she'd looked at twenty: her rich auburn hair dressed with flowers, her gowns too daring for an unmarried lady of good birth. Maude was tall and elegantly spare, her face a composition of oblique bones and green eyes. She was famous for riding punishing hunters; for stealing her brother's cigars; for the poems she wrote and circulated among her two or three hundred friends—and for meeting young men alone in Hyde Park. One of them had been the dangerous Patrick Fitzgerald.

  She stood now in the wide doorway, staring at him as though he were a ghost. Thirty-eight years old, most of her hair and teeth gone, an open sore where her mouth had been.

  “Patrick? Is that Patrick? I thought I heard your brogue.” Her voice was as insubstantial as dust. She moved toward him slowly, one hand extended. “A dream, I thought. Patrick. A memory of the dead.”

  “Hello, Maude.” He took her hand.

  “What are you doing here?”

  She ignored Georgiana—perhaps she had not really seen her. It was hard to know what reality Maude distinguished from the chimera in her brain. At times she could finger the truth with punishing acuity; at others, she recalled nothing of what was said. Fitzgerald could not assume she was safe—he could tell her nothing of the true business that brought him here.

  “Sure, and I was passing in a boat,” he managed. “I couldn't help but call.”

  The hideous mouth opened in a smile; for an instant he was afraid she would throw her arms wide and kiss him. But some memory of their past inhibited her; she remained, swaying slightly, a few feet away.

  “Armistead,” she murmured. “I knew an Armistead once—Berkshire family. The assembly rooms at Bath. Robert. A fusty old-womanish sort of fellow.” She turned away, an expression of worry crossing her ravaged features. “Don't let her drown, Patrick. The wind is up and the tide advancing. It will drown us all one night, in our beds. Our sea-bed. Full fathom five thy father lies . . .” She drifted toward the door, already forgetting him, her dressing gown trailing behind her.

  Coultrip was standing there.

  “So charmed to make your acquaintance,” Maude murmured to the butler, and floated by him unseeing.

  Fitzgerald watched the sway of her skirt as it mounted the stairs, the bones of her fingers rising along the baluster; he closed his eyes abruptly.

  “I did not know her la'ship was abroad,” Coultrip told him steadily. “I thought her retired some hours ago. Mrs. Coultrip has prepared your room, Miss Armistead. Supper is served in a qua
rter of an hour. May I show you upstairs?”

  Fitzgerald had dragged a comb through his unruly hair and straightened his cravat by the time he rejoined Georgiana in the dining room. She had exchanged the twilled silk for a fresh gown packed in her satchel. Her hair was tidily bandaged and her face washed. “I shall never take hot water for granted again,” she declared, as he pulled out her chair; “and that wine is a luxury past dreaming.”

  There was, as promised, the bread and cheese and cold ham; but Mrs. Coultrip had added a tureen of cottage soup—a comforting concoction of turnips and braised mutton—and Coultrip a bottle of Burgundy from the cellars. It was half-past midnight. A profound weariness nipped at the edges of Fitzgerald's mind, and anxiety shouted its dim chorus; he ignored both. He braced himself for Georgiana's questions.

  “How long has she suffered from syphilis?” she asked calmly.

  “Nearly ten years.”

  “She takes mercury against it?”

  “Twelve cures in the past decade. I suppose the torture has prolonged her life.” He drank deeply of the wine.

  “And her mind?”

  “As you see. She passes in and out of dreams. Or nightmares.”

  “And you escaped it. The disease.” Her tone was clinically neutral.

  “Sure, and I did,” he agreed. “We're a lucky race, the Irish. As I'm forever being told.” That was the real question she was asking: If you escaped, who gave her syphilis? Behind the unspoken words lay the broken ground of his marriage.

  He rose restlessly and turned before the fire, the wine glass glinting in his hand. “Would you have me tell you all of it?”

  “Not unless you want to, Patrick.”

  “But I do.” He shifted a log with his boot. “I've kept the faith of lies and smoke, Georgie, so long—so long. Do you know what her high-born friends say, in their infinite wisdom? She should never have married a dirty Irishman; that was her mistake. I've allowed the world to believe it.”

  “Why—if that is untrue?”

  “Because I've become a gentleman, for all that, and it's a gentleman's duty to lie.” He emptied his glass, reached again for the decanter. “She was an earl's daughter, you know. Beautiful as sin. And so clever—all the power of life at her fingertips. When I met her, I thought Lady Maude was a girl the gods loved. And now look how they've broken her mind on their rocks.”

  “You still care for her,” Georgiana said distantly; was it the knowledge of Maude's fate that pained her, or the unavoidable fact that Maude was Fitzgerald's wife? She had set down her fork. “How did you meet?”

  “The Earl—her sainted father—hired me to defend his son when the buck killed his man in a duel. I kept the Viscount from hanging—that being my specialty—but young Hastings was forced to repair to the Continent, and there led such a life. . . . No matter. His sister watched the trial from the gallery. She fell in love, so she said, with my high courage; but faith, I think it was probably my voice.”

  Georgie smiled faintly. “Or your words. She writes poetry, Patrick.”

  “None of it comforting. She seduced me with poetry, you know.” He finished his wine and reached for Coultrip's brandy. “Her verse could rip the skin off a man. As though her life was hollow, already consumed—an orange whose flesh she'd devoured, leaving only the pith. I think of her that way—her long, supple fingers clutching bruised fruit. The look of disappointment. That's what she felt in her life with me. I disappointed.”

  “Surely not!”

  He snorted derisively. “She eloped with me, Georgie, because her father would never abandon his priceless girl to Irish trash. And God forgive me, I met her that dawn in a hired carriage with my whole heart in my hands. Did I think the tie between us would spur my career? Did I dream of a place in her perfect, peerless world? Maybe I did. Maybe I was already corrupted. But God, I loved her passionate mouth and her need for beauty and her lust for life in all its forms, lowborn and high, wretched and noble, ugly and gorgeous. I loved her greediness in drink and her flamboyance in dress. I even loved her petulant rages. I never understood they were signs of madness.”

  “Even before the disease?”

  He shrugged. “Did the rot claim her? Or did she claim it? There are people—artists and poets—who believe syphilis is a gift that opens the soul to genius. My lady Maude believed it. She told me once that love was the only cure for living; and she pursued it in every slum, every house in Mayfair, in the back hallways of Pall Mall clubs, even in the open air—under the ramparts of bridges where the prostitutes dwell. Publicity gave the act spice, d'ye see? I don't know whether she took pleasure from her anonymous couplings or clawed art from debauchery—by that time I was dead tired of collecting my wife from every hellhole in London, each night. I gave her up, Georgie, to the glittering death palace she'd made of her life. And it was years before I saw her again—and then she was already sick past caring.”

  Georgiana was toying with her food, her face pallid in the candlelight. “How did she come to this place?”

  “Her father leased it, when he understood she was dying; and since he went to his grave, her brother's agents have managed the business. The family likes her marooned in the middle of the ocean—but convenient to Kent, should they wish to call.” His mouth twisted. “I spent long months here, years since, when we hoped the mercury might cure her. The pain of it—the destruction—was horrific. She turned back to me, Georgie—she was in dire need of a friend. But when I see the enormity done to her, I bless the demon that destroyed her mind. Better that she not know—most of the time—what she has become.”

  Georgiana rose. “You haven't eaten a thing.”

  “No. I've no taste for food at Shurland Hall.”

  “Then we ought to leave this place.”

  He assessed her face. “Can you bear it here?” he demanded. “Did I do wrong to bring you?”

  “I understand why you did. Von Stühlen will never find us. I'm just—” She leaned toward him, kissed his weathered cheek as chastely as though she were his daughter—“so sorry, Patrick. For her. For you. For the waste of two lives.”

  He watched the woman he loved mount the stairs of his wife's house. And then he turned back to the bottle.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Fitzgerald crawled into his cold bed after three o'clock in the morning, while the wind off the sea battered Shurland Hall. He awoke with a violent shudder of fear, as an enormous cosh whistled through the fog of his alcoholic dream and tumbled him from a pitched slate roof. When he collected his wits and his aching limbs from the floor, his pocket watch read eighteen minutes past seven o'clock. His mouth was foul with the memory of brandy. He stumbled to the wash stand. He rarely slept so late; it was his habit to greet his clerks each morning with a fire already burning in chambers. It was Sep who never appeared before noon, Sep who worked late into the night and of a Sunday—

  The shock of water against his skin silenced his stuttering thoughts. There'd been no time, last night, to stop in Great Ormond Street and consult with Sep's doctor. His need to tear Georgie from the metropolis—from the threat of hands that had stifled the breath out of a young girl's lungs—had proved too consuming. He'd chosen to protect her as he'd failed to protect his oldest friend. Guilt and weariness flooded his mind. The summons to Windsor two days before had been followed relentlessly by fear and death. Why? What had he—what had Georgie done? If Sep should die—

  He forced down the thought and stripped off his nightshirt.

  Coultrip had taken away his filthy clothes and laid out some old things he'd left behind in a storage chest—country clothes a barrister never needed in London: tweeds and riding breeches. He put them on, and wondered if Maude still kept a horse.

  The stable was empty, but he read the obvious signs in the fresh hay and water. Theo. Of course. He'd have taken the Chatham & Dover line from Oxford and then the ferry to Sheerness—but Maude kept his mount in readiness still. Or someone did. Coultrip, probably.

  He set
off in the grey light along the rough track to the shore, less than a mile north over the undulating sheep pasture. The rain was done, but tufted clouds hung low and dark over the sea, flattening the landscape. The island was a horizontal world—strange and liberating after the vertical confines of London. The sharp air smelled of salt, of wet and matted wool, of the sourness of the marshes behind him. Fitzgerald was a hunted man, with the most powerful monarch in the world against him; but he was walking down to the sea in the early light and might have been returned for an instant to Ireland. Some part of his black mood lifted.

  As he crested the line of dunes that bordered the shingle, a dull, rhythmic thudding came to his ears—the sound of pursuit. He wheeled, heart thudding and eyes straining up the coast toward Sheerness, in search of the men who had inexplicably tracked him and Georgie down. And there was the horse: a chestnut he did not recognise, although he had probably paid for it. On its back, slung low over the galloping animal's neck, was Theo.

  The boy was not looking for watchers in the dunes, but at the endless stretch of empty shingle, the oblique line of advancing waves, the light of morning as he raced toward the east. Fitzgerald almost let him pass. He almost turned like a coward and shuffled back along his trail, to the despairing Hall and the tea that would be waiting there. But he had so little to lose. He ran pell-mell down the dunes, on an intersecting course with the chestnut, calling out his son's name.

  * * *

  “What are you doing here?”

  The boy was scowling, his dark brows so like Maude's, all his fierce joy vanished in an instant.

  It was the greeting Fitzgerald expected.

  “I was passing by. So I gave a look in.”

  “Passing by Shurland?” Theo snorted, sounding rather like his horse. “Nobody does. You weren't expected.”

  “I never am,” he said mildly. “How are you, lad? How's Balliol?”

  “How long do you intend to stay?” The chestnut tossed its head, backing and prancing, and for an instant Fitzgerald saw the horse as Theo—fighting for control.