by Mia Marlowe
She loved him back.
She had to return to him. Even though the black sea still beckoned, she didn’t crave the forgetfulness it offered. She focused all her energy on opening her eyes. A clock chimed the quarter hour and then the half before she succeeded. She found herself in a darkened room.
Her chamber at Camden House.
She tossed a glance full of intent at the cold fireplace and the logs stacked in it suddenly burst into flames.
Good. She had her gift. She’d hated that part of her at first but now it proved she was still herself. Cassandra loosed a single thought and the rest of the candles in the room leaped to life, turning the entire space into a dance of light. Next, she concentrated on feeling her hands, her arms, the muscles in her belly and back. She tried to sit up. She was inordinately proud of herself when she managed to lift her head from the pillows and prop up on her elbows.
She attempted his name. Garret.
It came out a whisper, but at least her tongue was her own again.
Without conscious thought, she sat up straight and clapped her hands in pleasure over the simple accomplishment.
Her hands. She held them up before her eyes. They weren’t hers any longer. The knuckles were as wrinkled as an elephant’s knees. A distended blue vein snaked across the back of her left hand.
What else about her was altered?
By bending every ounce of her will, she forced her legs to dangle over the side of the bed. The effort was so great, she could only sit there and tremble while she recovered her breath. Then she struggled to stand. Every joint screamed in pain as she moved across the room toward her vanity, shuffling her stockinged feet on the smooth hardwood. She had to watch her toes peeping from beneath the hem of her night rail to keep them moving. Otherwise they’d stop completely and she’d catch herself standing in one spot, trembling like an aspen in a breeze. Finally, she reached the low table with the mirror and looked up.
It was a good thing there was a chair behind her because she would have gone down whether there was anything there to catch her or not.
The face that greeted her in the mirror was framed by wild locks of iron-gray hair. Lines crosshatched around the temples and dug deep grooves at the corners of the mouth. The lips were papery, dry as a summer with no rain. The cheeks were sunken and the skin along the jawline sagged like a derelict bridge. It was a face in total ruin.
A face ravaged by time.
The only things Cassandra recognized were the amber eyes. Her young soul peered back at her from inside the old woman.
“Paschal,” she whispered. The time thief had done this to her. He’d stolen years—decades—of her life and had left her in this dry husk of a body.
How could Garret claim this changed nothing? It changed everything. Cassandra couldn’t marry him. Couldn’t give him children. Couldn’t… Oh, God, she couldn’t love him like this, couldn’t join her tired, weak body to his strong one.
Paschal had stolen more than time. He’d stolen everything she had lived for. She was desiccated. A desert. Then against all expectation, tears came. She laid her head on the vanity table and wept. Silently. She didn’t want to bring anyone to her side. She couldn’t bear to be seen. She didn’t know how long she mourned her lost life, but no matter how terrible a situation is, a body had only so many tears. When she was all cried out, she rose painfully and wobbled back to her bed. With any luck at all, she’d sink back into that black sea and never resurface.
But the way to that shadowy realm seemed barred to her. Even natural sleep fled. With a thought, she pinched off all the candles and banked the fire, but she still couldn’t escape into oblivion. She could pretend to be gone. She could close her eyes and never reopen them. When Garret and Lady Easton returned, they didn’t have to know she was conscious.
How long, she wondered, would it take for her to die if she refused food?
But before she could formulate any more morbid plans, the door to her room creaked open and a man entered.
Garret. Her lips formed his name, but she didn’t voice it.
He didn’t speak. He walked softly to the bed, removed his banyan, and slid in under the sheets with her. She hardly dared breathe as he gathered her bony body next to his, cradling her head on his shoulder and hugging her close. He pressed a kiss on the crown of her head as if her hair was still soft instead of wiry.
“I love you, Cassie,” he whispered.
She bit her lip to keep from answering him in kind.
“Come back to me.” Then his chest began to shake and she realized he wept.
She wanted to reach up and give him comfort. To kiss away the tears.
But she had no comfort to give. If she kissed him with those papery lips, he’d leap from the bed and run away in horror. In all the ways that mattered, she was dead to him.
“Oh, Cassie.” His voice was husky with grief. “Why couldn’t it have been me?”
That tore her heart so, she had to speak. “If it had been you, I’d have never recovered. But you will. I want you to.”
“Oh, love. You’re back.” He kissed her and contrary to her expectations her old mouth didn’t seem to bother him one bit. It was a very good thing she’d put out all the candles earlier. Darkness was her friend. She could pretend for the length of this kiss that she was still herself.
When he finally released her mouth, she ducked her head down on his shoulder again, hoping that way she’d seem almost normal to him. She still felt young inside. Only her outside was old.
When the sun rose, bringing light with it, she’d still be trapped in this body.
“I may be back, but not for long,” she whispered.
“You have as long as you need. Remember, the duke has the Infinitum in his vault. I’ll make him let us use it.”
“But the Infinitum only extends life at the bearer’s current age and I must have aged sixty years.”
“You’ll just have to use the Infinitum for as long as it takes me to catch up with you. Can’t you see that age doesn’t matter?”
“It must.”
“It doesn’t change how I feel about you.” He stroked her hair. “If this had never happened, you’d grow old someday and I’d still love you.”
“Yes, but then you’d be old, too.”
“I feel old,” he said. “Watching you in that unnatural sleep aged me on the inside, love. Does that count?”
She touched his cheek. It was wet. “It counts, but I can’t do this to you, lo—” She stopped herself, resisting the urge to call him “love” in return. It would only make what she must do all the harder. “I want you to go.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do. Please, Garret. It’s killing me to be with you like this. I can’t bear it.” She rolled away from him, making sure not a bit of her tired, old body touched his young, hard one. “If you ever loved me—”
“I love you now.”
“Stop saying that.” She clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a sob. Then she steeled herself to plow forward. “Leave me. For pity’s sake, Garret, let me have a little peace. Go away and don’t come back. I mean it.”
He touched her shoulder, but she jerked away from him. He was Lord Stanstead now. He deserved a life with a woman who could give him an heir, with someone who could fill his days with love.
Cassie wept silent tears because it couldn’t be her.
Finally, she felt the bed give and heard the whisper of his banyan as it slid over his skin. Every muscle in her body tensed. She willed herself not to call him back as he trudged to the door and didn’t exhale until she heard the latch click behind him.
Then she loosed the grief she’d been suppressing. She cried without restraint. Cassie wept for all the days she wouldn’t have with Garret. She wept for the children they might have made together. Her life was over before it had hardly begun. She could hardly draw breath between heaving sobs.
Then she heard the door latch again and someone slipped into her room. S
he swiped her eyes and tried to stifle her hitching whimpers. Her grief was not something she wanted to share with anyone, not even the man she wept for. But, as hopeless as everything was, part of her still wished selfishly that he had come back.
“Garret?” she said, her voice quavering a little.
“It’s me,” he answered. “I couldn’t stay away. I’ve just been standing outside your door, listening to you weep. You’re breaking my heart, Cassie. Please don’t make me go. There is no place on earth for me without you. You are my home, my heart. I can’t bear to leave you.”
She couldn’t speak. She could only sit up and reach for him. He climbed back into the bed with her and held her close.
He was silent for several heartbeats. “I know I’m not the deepest of thinkers, but I’ve come to realize we are far more than flesh. Shining beings. The most important part of us is invisible to the eye. That’s who we really are. There is something inside me that has to have the something inside you. Call it my soul, if you will, but I only know it is lost without you.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, but couldn’t keep the tears from escaping. “Oh, Garret. I wanted so much for us.”
“I know, but we still have as much as every other couple in the world has. We have now. And that’s all anyone’s promised. Just let me hold you.” He clasped her to him and she laid her head on his chest, listening to his heart pound. “Can you feel how much I love you?”
She nodded, her heart too full to speak.
“Let me feel your love. The night is dark and dawn is a long way off. Hold me, Cassie.”
She wrapped her arms around him and squeezed.
Now.
They did have now. It wasn’t as much as she’d hoped, but she’d take it.
As his breathing settled into a steady rhythm that told her he’d slipped into an exhausted sleep, she realized she really had received more than most.
Love without conditions. Love that was constant in an inconstant world.
It was a rare and beautiful thing. She’d be a fool not to latch onto it with both hands and never let go. At least until morning light revealed the impossibility of their situation.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host.
—John Clare, from “I am”
As dawn lightened the room, Garret slipped away from her. He knew, without being told, that Cassie would prefer it that way. He left her a note, telling her he hoped she’d come down to breakfast. Everyone would be delighted to see her up and about.
There was no need for her to rush since the members of the household rarely gathered until ten, at the earliest. She’d have time to collect herself, to call for an abigail and do something with her hair. For some unfathomable reason, women always felt better about things if their hair was arranged to suit them.
Since Garret didn’t care if he even had hair at the moment, he had little to occupy his time as he waited for the rest of the household to join him in the breakfast room. The one bright spot in his morning was that Mr. Bernard didn’t so much as blink an eye when Garret asked him to bring the bottle of fifty-year-old Scotch His Grace had been saving for a special occasion. The steward returned with the spirits and a single glass.
After one shot, Garret decided he was done living in fear of his dreams. He’d master them once and for all, no matter what it took. He was Lord-bloody-Stanstead now. If he could be responsible for an estate, he could take charge of his own life.
It was high time he moved out from under the duke’s shadow. Now that he was an earl, Garret would set up his own house in London. Cassie could furnish it to suit herself and if she didn’t feel up to larking about London to shop, he’d have providers of the finest goods call on her so she could make their home together just as she wanted. He’d do everything in his power to make her comfortable and happy.
The only trouble was his power was woefully limited. No amount of money, no title, no clever Sending, could add a single breath to Cassie’s life. Chances were good that she’d refuse to marry him now.
But there was a way he could join her.
The duke’s vault was located deep beneath his town house. Garret headed to it by way of the stone steps leading from the scullery to the basement. Then he took the cunning spiral staircase, concealed in a false hogshead of beer, to burrow deeper into the earth. All the psychically charged relics the Order had collected over the years were painstakingly cataloged and stored in locked glass-front cases. At one end of the vault, there was a barred cell.
The space was large and surprisingly well lit owing to a skylight that slanted underground, stretching from the duke’s deep garden fountain to the subterranean room. If a prisoner should take it upon himself to slither up the narrow tube, he’d be drowned for his trouble when he broke through the thick glass at the other end.
But if comfort was one’s goal, there was little need for a prisoner to seek release. The cell was opulently furnished with a feather bed, complete with a porcelain chamber pot beneath. A desk and chair occupied one corner. Plenty of books lined the shelves and a bowl of fresh fruit sat in the center of a table set for one.
However, Paschal did not look at all pleased with his living arrangements. He sat petulantly on the floor, chin in his hands, hardly acknowledging Garret’s presence.
“On your feet,” Garret ordered.
“Or what? There is nothing you can do to me,” Paschal said petulantly. “The duke won’t let you hurt me.”
“I’m the one who’ll be hurt,” Garret said, shrugging off his jacket and rolling back his shirtsleeve. Then he thrust his unprotected arm through the bars. “I want you to take as many years from me as you stole from Cassandra.”
“I could drain you till you’re as empty as I left your uncle.” Paschal rose to his feet. “How do you know I’ll stop?”
“I don’t. But frankly, Cassie is the only friend you have in the world. Anyone else would have incinerated you. She could have, you know. Do you really want to wound her by killing me?”
Paschal scuffed the toe of his shoe against the stone floor. “I didn’t want to injure her, but she gave me no choice.”
“You had a choice. And you have one now.” This was the only way Cassie and he could be together. Garret set his jaw. “Are you going to help me or not?”
The boy bared his teeth in a wolf cub’s grin. “Brace yourself, Lord Stanstead,” he said as he removed his scarlet gloves. “This is going to hurt!”
But before the time thief could latch onto Garret’s arm, Lord Westfall and Mr. Bernard came clattering down the spiral staircase. Westfall grabbed Garret and pulled him away from Paschal’s cell. Garret fought like a demon but the steward helped Westfall wrestle him to the ground.
“Let me go, dammit,” Garret growled. “I should have let her burn Almack’s to the ground.”
“Come, old chap. You don’t mean that,” Westfall said as Miss Anthony and Lady Easton climbed down the winding stairs to join them.
“The devil I don’t.”
“Language, my lord,” Westfall said. “There are ladies present.”
“My apologies, my lady, Miss Anthony,” Garret muttered. “Let me up, Westfall.”
“Only if you promise to stay away from those bars,” Westfall said, his knee digging into Garret’s spine.
Get the hell off me, or you’ll wish you had, he Sent furiously. Then when the viscount refused to budge, Garret reluctantly Sent, I promise to stay away from Paschal. Then when Westfall released him, he rose as he ought in the presence of the ladies. “None of this would have happened if I hadn’t brought Cassandra into the Order. I should have left her alone.”
The Duke of Camden followed his sister and Miss Anthony into the vault, pausing in the doorway. “He should have left her alone,” Garret all but snarled at Camden.
“As opposed to having the prime years of her life snatched from her? This is still all your fault,” he said to Camden. “You sent her out to face something incredibly dangerous without knowing the full extent of the risk.”
“Risk is inherent in every life,” Westfall said. “But you’re right. Those of us in the Order do face unique challenges. However, one mustn’t give up hope.”
“Wonderful,” Garret said. “Comfort from an escaped Bedlamite.”
“You wouldn’t speak so to Westfall if you knew what he’s done for you,” Camden said.
The viscount made a point of studying the tips of his boots.
“When I saw Miss Darkin’s condition,” the duke said, “I reasoned that perhaps since the Infinitum extends the life of its possessor, the relic might be useful if we could learn more about how it operates.
“I wondered if Lord Bellefonte might have access to more information about it,” Westfall said.
“Even though being in a crowd is excruciating to him, Westfall went to White’s to find Lord Bellefonte. He was able to isolate Bellefonte’s thoughts from among the myriad clamoring at him and discovered that he had an ancient text describing the uses of the Infinitum. Since the gentleman no longer has the item, the scroll is useless,” Camden explained. “Westfall convinced Bellefonte to sell it to us, along with some other oddities to avoid arousing his suspicion. I have been studying the text since I obtained it.”
“Tell him what you learned,” Vesta urged.
“The Infinitum may possibly be used to reverse the aging process,” Camden said softly.
“How?” Garret asked, fisting his hands so hard, his fingernails left impressions in the heel of his palm.
“It’s complicated, but I believe I understand the mechanism well enough to oversee the procedure,” the duke said. “However, according to the scroll, the reversal process requires a sacrifice.”