Three Times a Bride

by Catherine Anderson

  “You are remarkably good-humored,” she said when she’d finally got him under the bedclothes. “If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect my lord only wished to lure me into his bedchamber.”

  “I wish it were a trick,” he said, blinking up at her. “But there the damned things are, winking and blinking at me. And you were right, Gwen. They are not like ghosts, after all. You described it better. ‘Like colliding with a lamppost,’ you said. ‘First you see stars, then the pain hits.’ I should like to know what it was that persuaded my brain I’d suffered a blow to the head.”

  She knew, all too well.

  I told you he must be insulated from all sources of nervous agitation, Kneebones had said.

  He was a real doctor, with decades of experience. He understood the malady, had studied Dorian’s mother for months.

  You saw what the news about his family did to him: three attacks in one week.

  She recalled yesterday’s conversation, and her conscience stabbed.

  “I can see what it was,” she said tightly. “Yesterday, I obliged you to relive the most painful experiences of your life. And I was not content with the general picture, was I? I pressed you for details, even about the post-mortem report on your mother. I should have realized this was too much strain for you to bear all at once. I cannot believe I did not think of that. I do wonder where I misplaced my wits.”

  She started to move away, to fetch the laudanum bottle, but he grabbed her hand. “I wonder where you’ve put them now,” he said. “You’ve got it all backwards, Gwen. Our talk yesterday did me nothing but good. You eased my mind on a hundred different counts.”

  He tugged her hand. “Sit.”

  “I need to get your laudanum,” she said.

  “I don’t want it,” he said. “Not unless I become unmanageable. That’s the only reason I took it before. I wasn’t sure I could trust myself. But I can trust you. I’m not your first lunatic. You’ll know when I need to be stupefied.”

  “I also know the pain is dreadful,” she said. “I cannot let you lie there and endure it. I must do something, Dorian.”

  He shut his eyes then, and his face set.

  “It’s started, hasn’t it?” It was a struggle to keep her voice low and even.

  “I don’t want to be stupefied,” he said levelly. “I want my mind clear. If I must be incapacitated physically, I should like to use the opportunity to think, while I still can.”

  Gwendolyn firmly stifled her screaming conscience. Her guilt would not help him.

  She had come with low expectations, she reminded herself. She had hoped to learn while ameliorating, insofar as possible, his suffering. She had never had any illusions about curing what medical science scarcely understood, let alone knew how to treat.

  She had not expected to fall in love with him, almost instantly. Still, that changed only her emotions, and she would simply have to live with them. She would not, however, let them rule, and be tempted to pray for a miracle, when what she ought to be doing was listening to him and ascertaining what he needed and how best to provide it.

  “You want to think,” she said, frowning.

  “Yes. About my mother and what you said about her. About my grandfather. The experts. The asylum.” He pressed a thumb to his temple. “I do not believe I’ve burst a blood vessel, but I distinctly see my life passing before me.” Smiling crookedly, he added, “And it is beginning to make sense.”

  She felt a surge of alarm, which she ruthlessly suppressed. “Very well,” she said calmly. “No soporifics. We shall try a stimulant instead.”

  Gwendolyn gave him coffee. Very strong coffee and a good deal of it.

  Two hours and countless cups later, Dorian was fully recovered and his wife was staring at him as though he’d just risen from the dead. She stood by the fire, her hands folded in front of her, her expression a comical mixture of worry and bewilderment while she watched him yank on his clothes.

  “I begin to suspect you believed I had burst a blood vessel,” he said as he fastened his trouser buttons. “Or was about to.”

  The comical expression vanished, succeeded by the familiar steady green regard. “I do not know what to think,” she said. “Frankly, I am confounded. Two hours, from start to finish. This makes no medical sense at all.”

  “I told you I distinctly felt the pressure ease after the fourth cup,” he said. “As though my head were being released from a vise. Perhaps the coffee washed the pressure through my system and”—he grinned—“into the chamber-pot.”

  “It does have diuretic qualities,” she said.

  “Obviously.”

  “But you should not respond in this way.” Her brow furrowed. “Perhaps I misinterpreted your account of the autopsy report, though I do not see how. Your mother’s was hardly an unusual case.”

  “I should like to know what’s troubling you,” he said. “Have I been babbling incoherently without realizing it? Am I manifesting signs of mania? Is the extraordinary sense of well-being a danger signal? Because if I am at death’s door, Gwendolyn, I should appreciate being informed.”

  She let out a shaky breath. “I don’t know. I had thought the dilating blood vessels and increased blood supply—possibly augmented by leakage—triggered the aura and pain. But for the pain to stop, the vessels must contract again and diminish blood flow—and your cells and tissue are supposed to be too weak and damaged to do it so quickly and thoroughly.”

  He recalled what she’d told him yesterday about brain function. “I see,” he said. “You fear that something has cut off blood supply too abruptly, perhaps in a dangerous and abnormal fashion—and this is a temporary and illusory surcease.”

  “I cannot say.” Her voice was the slightest bit unsteady.

  Perhaps he’d fall down dead in the next minute, Dorian thought. That did not seem possible. He had never felt more alive. Nonetheless, he wasn’t going to take any chances.

  He went to her and gathered her in his arms and kissed her, long and thoroughly, until she melted against him. He went on kissing her, then caressing her, and soon, carrying her to the bed.

  That wasn’t what he’d intended. He’d only wanted to make sure she understood how he felt about her.

  But there was no stopping, once they’d begun. In a little while, the garments he’d so recently donned lay strewn about the floor, along with hers, and he was lost, drowning inside her, in the hot sea of desire.

  And later, when they lay together, limbs tangled, he found his heart was still beating and his brain was still working, and so he told her what she’d done for him.

  Yesterday, he’d told her of his debauched past, expecting shock and disgust. Instead, she’d impatiently dismissed his whoring and drinking as normal male behavior.

  He’d told her about his mother, the pitiable and monstrous creature she’d become, and Gwendolyn had not turned a hair. “It’s like consumption,” she’d said, after reducing the horrors to a logical series of physiological events. “There is no saying that her infidelities and secrets made it worse or triggered the breakdown. Her marriage was unsatisfactory. For all we know, the romantic intrigues may have reduced the emotional strain and delayed the inevitable, instead of hastening it.”

  If Dorian had stayed with his mother, he might have added to her agitation, Gwendolyn had theorized, because Aminta had a stronger emotional bond with him than with his father.

  Moreover, the conditions at the mad house must be put into perspective, Gwendolyn had told him. The moral faculties were often destroyed in such cases. Patients might appear calm and rational without having any more awareness or control over their thoughts and behavior than if they had been marionettes, with the damaged brain cells pulling the strings. And aware or not, patients often forgot what they were angry or sad about, just as they forgot basic hygiene, and even who they were or who they’d imagined they were minutes before.

  Then he’d realized that his mother might not have endured continuous humiliation and pain, becau
se she’d been living for the most part in a world of her own, where little could reach her.

  “You have truly eased my mind,” Dorian told his wife now. “Even my grandfather does not seem so monstrous. Pitiable, actually, in his ignorance, his fear of what he didn’t understand, and his dependence on ‘experts.’ But you are not like him or his precious experts. You have a knack for making the incomprehensible make sense. You’ve reduced it to manageable proportions. Even this last attack seemed like little more than a damned nuisance.”

  She lifted herself onto one elbow and studied his face. “Perhaps, because you became less agitated, your brain did not have to work so hard,” she said. “You said you needed to think, and it appears your reflections were positive. It’s possible that stimulating such thought, rather than stupefying it, was the more beneficial approach.”

  “Lovemaking instills in me any number of positive feelings,” he said. “Perhaps we must regard that as a beneficial treatment as well.”

  She arched one eyebrow. “I recall nothing in the medical literature recommending coitus as a course of treatment.”

  He slid his fingers into her wayward hair and drew her down to him. “Maybe you haven’t read enough books.”

  Six

  Three weeks later, Dorian stood in the doorway of his wife’s sitting room, watching her frown over a pamphlet.

  Her books had arrived a fortnight ago, and he and Hoskins had helped her convert the sitting room into a study. The medical tomes stood in neat rows in a bookcase.

  Her desk was not so neat. Pamphlets, notebooks, and sheets of foolscap lay in haphazard heaps.

  Dorian leaned against the door frame and folded his arms and studied his preoccupied wife.

  He knew what she was looking for. Not a cure, because there wasn’t any, but clues to his “positive response to treatment.” Though she would never admit it, Dorian knew she had hopes of prolonging his sanity, if not his life.

  He had every reason to cooperate. He would be glad of an extra month, even an extra day. Yet her dogged search made his heart ache for her. She was not “practical and selfish,” as she’d claimed. She cared, deeply, about her patients. She had even cared about Mr. Bowes, whose dementia made Dorian’s mother’s fits seem like mere sulks.

  But at present it was not simply a matter of caring. Dorian feared Gwendolyn’s dedication was crossing the line, from a quest for intellectual enlightenment to obsession. Last night she’d muttered in her sleep about “idiopathic inconstancy” and “lesions” and “prodromal symptoms.”

  He was strongly tempted to send the books back and order her to cease and desist before she developed a brain fever. Yet he couldn’t deprive her of what he knew was the learning opportunity of a lifetime, or show a lack of respect for her maturity, intellect, and competence.

  Fortunately, he’d been able to devise something like a solution because his mind was still functioning adequately, despite two more attacks. The last, a week ago, had continued for twenty-four hours, until he’d made her dose him with ipecac, to make him vomit. After that, he’d slept like the dead for another half a day.

  Yet he’d recovered with the same sense of well-being and clarity of mind he’d experienced the two previous times. He was sure it was because she’d exorcised the demons of fear, shame, and ignorance, thus reducing emotional pressure on his damaged brain. He knew the reprieve was temporary, and he wasn’t going to waste it. He had no future, but she did, and he’d spent the last week looking into hers.

  “Is this a bad time to interrupt?” he asked.

  Her head went up and her preoccupied gloom vanished, and the sun came out in the endless smile that could still make his heart turn over in his breast.

  “There is never a bad time for you,” she said. “You are the most welcome interruption in the world.”

  Dorian came away from the door frame, crossed to her desk, and perched on the edge. His gaze settled upon the pamphlet she’d put down when he approached: “An Account of Acute Idiopathic Mania as Manifested…”

  “It is one of Mr. Eversham’s studies,” she said. “But your behavior does not fit his model.”

  He took it up and scanned the pages. “I wonder how you make anything of this gibberish.” He set down the pamphlet and took up a narrow volume. “This is still worse. I should go howling mad trying to read the first sentence—and it’s only three-quarters of a page long.”

  “They are doctors, not writers,” said Gwendolyn. “You ought to see their penmanship. It is a wonder the printers are not all in Bedlam by now.”

  “Yours is nothing to boast of,” he said with a meaningful glance at the untidy pile of foolscap covered with her even more untidy scrawl.

  She wrinkled her nose. “Yes, my handwriting is horrid. Not at all like yours. I’m sure you were the finest copyist those London solicitors ever had.”

  “I should be happy to copy your notes legibly,” he said. “In fact, I…” He trailed off, his mind snagging on a recollection. Something she’d said weeks ago. Something “misinterpreted.”

  Catching her worried look, he shrugged. “I’m all right. My mind wandered, that’s all. I had interrupted for a specific reason, and the medical jargon and your ghastly handwriting distracted me.” He ruffled her hair. “I came to ask if you’d like to visit Athcourt with me.”

  “Athcourt?” she said blankly.

  “I wrote to Dain a few days ago,” he explained. “I need advice on some business matters. He’s now a member of the family, his place is but a few miles southeast of here, and he’s an excellent manager, from all one has heard.”

  “Athcourt is reputed to be one of the most prosperous, well-run properties in the kingdom,” Gwendolyn said, nodding. “I’m sure his business judgment is sound.”

  “At any rate, he’s made me feel welcome.” Dorian withdrew a letter from his pocket and gave it to her.

  As she perused it, her mouth began to twitch. “The man is incorrigibly wicked. And what is this?” She read aloud, “‘If that nitwit Trent is still loitering about, you might as well bring him, too, since mayhem can only result if he’s left to his own devices. Still, you know what will be expected of you in that case.’” She looked up. “It would appear you are better acquainted than I had guessed.”

  Dorian laughed. “Dain was still at Eton when Bertie first came,” he explained. “About once a fortnight, Bertie would fall down the stairs or trip over something or otherwise contrive to stumble into His Lordship’s path. Fortunately, I was on the spot the first time and hustled Bertie away before Dain could dispose of him by more violent means. After that, whenever your cousin strayed into the Satanic presence, His Lordship would summon me. ‘Camoys,’ he would say, as cool as you please. ‘It’s back. Make it go away.’ And so I would make Bertie disappear.”

  “I can see Dain doing it. And you, too.” She patted his arm. “It is your protective streak.”

  “It was my instinct for self-preservation,” Dorian indignantly informed her. “I was scarcely twelve, and Dain, even at sixteen, was as big as a house. He had but to set one huge hand on my head to squash me like a bug.” He grinned. “Still, I admired him tremendously. I should have given anything to get away with what he did.”

  She laughed, a delicious sound. “So should I,” she said. “It was not hard to understand why Jessica was captivated with him. Or why she was so vexed about it.”

  “I thought you’d enjoy visiting with her while Dain and I talk business,” he said.

  “I should, very much.” She gave the letter back. “I am glad you thought of Dain as a business advisor. A better choice than Abonville. The duc is a foreigner and of another generation.”

  “I knew you had reservations about him.”

  “He’s a wonderful man, but he can be too paternal.”

  Dorian hesitated. He did not want to upset her; on the other hand, they could not spend the remaining time avoiding all mention of what lay ahead. “I trust you won’t mind, then, if I end by mak
ing Dain my guardian instead,” he said quietly.

  There was only the briefest pause before she spoke. “If I encountered difficulties, and you were unable to assist me, there’s no one I’d rather have on my side,” she said. She met his gaze, her own clear and steady.

  He could guess what the composure and steadiness cost her, and it distressed him. Nevertheless, they couldn’t pretend they would have forever when they didn’t.

  He bent and lightly kissed her. “That’s how I feel,” he said. He drew back and grinned. “If we must choose an ally, it makes sense to pick the biggest one we can find.”

  A few days later, they went to Athcourt, intending to stay for two days. They wound up staying for a week.

  Dain turned out to be knowledgeable—and obstinately opinionated—about a vast array of topics, and the two men were soon quarreling happily, like old friends or brothers. They raced each other over Athcourt’s vast park and into the surrounding moorland. They fenced and practiced pistol shooting. One day, Dain undertook to teach Dorian some of the finer points of pugilism, and they knocked each other about in a corner of the stable yard, while their wives cheered them on.

  Dain’s bastard son lived at Athcourt as well. He was a wicked piece of mischief, eight years old, whom Dain proudly referred to as the Demon Seed.

  Little Dominick was wary of Dorian at first, but within two days, he was inviting the Earl of Rawnsley to visit his tree house. This, Dorian learned, was a signal honor. Until now, only the boy’s adored papa had been privy to the refuge’s location and initiated into its mysteries.

  And so, Dorian came away from Athcourt with scraped knees and elbows, Dain’s assurances that Gwendolyn’s affairs would be properly looked after…and a mad yearning for a child.

  Dorian told himself it was ridiculous to long for a child he would never see born and ruthlessly focused his energies on realizing Gwendolyn’s hospital dream.