Fool Me Twice

by Meredith Duran

  “Did it now?” Vickers sat up, looking interested. “Scandalous past, eh?”

  “Oh, my. Well, if you must know, I exploded the range.”

  Vickers’s eyes bugged. “What? Did anyone die?”

  Cook gave him a comfortable smile. “Not so very many. But I must say, it did give me a turn, when I saw the range here is the very same kind.”

  Vickers sagged back, looking regretful that he’d asked.

  Olivia decided to confess something else. “He’s already sacked me. Twice, in fact.”

  Jones began to choke again. Vickers loosed a whistling breath. “Well, that’s bollocks,” he said, then turned red at Cook’s hiss. “Begging your pardon, ma’am. But you must admit, it’s very bold of our Mrs. Johnson to stay on, after.”

  “It—isn’t—bold,” Jones wheezed. Cook pounded his back, lending his next words a very forceful rhythm: “It—is—criminal! Mrs. Johnson, you must”—he coughed again, violently—“pack your things at once!”

  “How now!” Cook recoiled from him. “I wouldn’t go so far as that, Mr. Jones. Seems to me that she’s been doing a world of good, don’t you say? A bookcase in his sitting room, no less. That’s a very fine thing.”

  “It will be,” Olivia said, brightening. “Once there are books on it.”

  Jones pulled himself into a straight-spined huff. “Mrs. Bailey, I am shocked by you! If His Grace has spoken, then it is our duty—”

  “Bunkum,” Cook said. “Lately I’ll tell you what our duties have been: to duck a bottle or a shoe, or cringe away and hide downstairs, and ignore the awful noises he makes. Don’t pretend at bravery you haven’t got, for I’ve not seen you venturing upstairs to check on him. It was Mrs. Johnson who did that today, so I heard.”

  Jones looked at her. Olivia shrugged. “He was making a dreadful ruckus, and I feared . . .”

  All at once, Jones crumpled in his seat. “I have failed him.”

  “Oh, no! Here now,” Cook chided, and began to pound his back again. “Nobody meant to say that. My point was only that Mrs. Johnson might be the fresh blood we need. Now, now, you dear man, don’t cry now, there’s a good ’un . . .”

  Jones batted away Cook’s proffered handkerchief, then fumbled for his own and scrubbed his eyes. This done, he took tight hold of the bridge of his nose, drawing rough, loud, unsteady breaths that caused the rest of them to exchange looks of concern.

  After a very uncomfortable minute, he finally dropped his hand. “Very well,” he said. “For the sake of His Grace, my dear master, I will do a very difficult thing: I will ignore his wishes on the subject of Mrs. Johnson. Ma’am, you may remain here for the time being.”

  “Thank you.” Naturally, Olivia would not have confessed the news of her firing had Jones not seemed to be one of those lovely sorts who could be talked into, or out of, anything. But it was good to know that the next time Marwick sacked her, she’d not need to conceal it.

  She retired to bed feeling very satisfied. It was only as the fire began to die down, and she cast a look about for the newspaper she’d vowed to use for kindling, that she realized she had lost it somewhere.

  In the last moment of wakefulness, she had a vision of it, abandoned on a bookcase outside Marwick’s bedroom.

  * * *

  “How curious.” Baffled, Olivia halted in the doorway to the duke’s sitting room. Overnight, one of the bookcases had disappeared. The other lay toppled on its side. She tilted her head for a different view, but it brought no clarity. “Could he have moved the other one himself?”

  “No chance,” said Bradley, who was hanging back by several feet—which made him at least five feet braver than Fenton, who stood all the way out in the hall. “It’s a heavy beast. Took both of us to budge it.”

  “Well, we must ask him—”

  “Ma’am.” Bradley fixed her with a plaintive, hangdog look. “Don’t make us go in there.”

  “Do you take note of the state of the bookcase?” Fenton called from the corridor. “The shelves are broken, ma’am.”

  She looked back at it, startled. Fenton was right. But those shelves were solid oak, two inches thick. “You can’t mean . . .” How on earth would Marwick have split them? Was he hiding an axe in his room?

  She pondered the scene. Something was nagging at her—a feeling that she was missing something important. “Well, I suppose—” She looked over her shoulder and found that the footmen had fled once again. Sighing, she stepped into the hall. They had taken some cunning escape route, for the staircase, too, was empty.

  It grew very tiring, rounding up cowards. She would deal with them later. Squaring her shoulders, she marched back into the duke’s apartments and rapped smartly on his bedroom door—which yielded beneath her knuckles, creaking open.

  He hadn’t locked it.

  He hadn’t even latched it.

  A chill crawled down her spine. He hadn’t drawn the curtains, either. Through the inch-wide crack, she could see daylight pooling on a patch of carpet.

  But surely this was good news. Taking a deep breath, she stepped through the doorway. “Your Grace . . .”

  The scene imprinted itself in an instant, complete and terrifying:

  He sat against the wall beneath the window, his forehead laid atop his bent knees. The sunlight gilded his hair as gold as a coin; it illuminated the dust motes floating about him. And beside his bare foot lay a newspaper—the same one she had forgotten on the bookcase last night. She could see the headline from here, the fat black print: BERTRAM’S BI—

  The rest of the headline was obscured beneath a pistol.

  She stared at the gun for a long, stupid moment. It was real. She was not imagining it. And it lay all too near to his hand.

  She took a step backward. The duke sat as still as a statue. He did not even appear to be breathing.

  He’s dead. He shot himself. But she saw no blood. And surely a corpse would have toppled over already.

  But if he wasn’t dead . . . then he was alive, and armed.

  She retreated another step, dreading the moment when the groan of the floorboards would betray her. She dared not remove her eyes from him. With one hand cast behind her she made a desperate, groping fumble for the doorknob.

  How was it that he did not move? Perhaps he was dead?

  The doorknob came into her hand.

  His head lifted.

  She froze.

  He stared at her without comprehension. The angle of the light played some trick on his eyes, so they looked lit from behind, impossibly blue. The light glinted off the stubble on his cheeks; it made him blaze. He looked like a creature made of light and fire and the blue, blue electricity that crackled in his eyes.

  She turned to flee—and glimpsed what she had not, before: the missing bookcase. It held tidy rows of books, neatly shelved.

  A choked sound slipped from her—panicked denial, anger at herself, and at him for having put the books away, for having done the one thing that would now prevent her from doing the wisest thing, the only wise thing, given the circumstances: flying through the doorway, turning the key, and locking him inside with that pistol.

  The bookcase forbade it. The bookcase sent a message, unintended yet clear: a man who shelved his books on his housekeeper’s insistence was not a man who meant to kill his staff.

  He meant to kill only himself.

  She forced herself to face him. He still stared fixedly into space, but his hand was playing over the pistol, stroking it. What an awful, meditative rhythm his fingers struck up. “You mustn’t do this,” she whispered.

  He did not seem to hear her.

  She could not bring herself to approach him. All she could do was speak. “Please, Your Grace. Whatever it is that troubles you”—such a lie; she knew exactly his cause for grief, and it was her fault, she realized, her fault for having abandoned the newspaper where he would find it, where his eyes would fall on that headline, that last dash of salt into an already mortal wound—“it isn’t w
orth your life.”

  She might have been talking to a stone for the notice he took of her. But the quality of his gaze seemed to change. To focus on something invisible to her eyes, somewhere in the air in front of him. His face tightened, seemed to harden. For a moment she wondered if he would speak—if he would rave now to the ether, and complete his lunatic resemblance.

  But he said nothing. And she began to wish he would speak, for the silence was dreadful, deep and unnatural and dire, like the hush after a sudden fatal accident. The very house seemed to hold its breath.

  She saw deep shadows beneath his eyes, almost like bruises. He looked like a man in the grip of a fever, burning up from within.

  “Your Grace,” she said again.

  This standoff could continue forever. Either she would surrender to cowardice and go, or take hold of her courage and . . . approach.

  She did not know which she would do until her feet were carrying her forward.

  Shaking, she knelt down before him. She put her face in front of his, but he did not focus on her. He was in a trance of some kind. Only his fingers kept moving, stroking the pistol.

  Every instinct in her, every shred of self-interest, fixated on the gun’s presence so close to her—and on his hand, which might so easily trip the trigger.

  “Your Grace,” she said. “He is not worth your life.” The words triggered a flood of anger, scalding, directed outward, across the city. Bertram was worth nothing, not even a spare look from a street urchin. A cabinet appointment? Salisbury would have been wiser to appoint a slug. “He is beneath your contempt.”

  Did his fingers briefly pause? She could not say.

  Her anger grew. It made her reckless. “If you don’t like it, get up then! You think this gun is your answer? You have let him do this. You have given Bertram your office.”

  No reply.

  Very well. If he meant to ignore her, then she would speak to her heart’s content. “You don’t even answer letters,” she said. “How odd, how bizarre, how childish is that? Why, how could Salisbury not replace you? You might as well have put his hand into Bertram’s. And now that Bertram has your office, will he make half the use of it that you did? Will he bother to support the laborers, or to think of children in the slums? Will he fight for their schooling? Ha! He won’t care if they never learn their letters. It will make them better peons if they can’t read to save their lives. He cares nothing for the poor—nobody does. You were the only one who did.”

  She fell into a breathless pause, appalled by herself—by how sharply, how boldly, how fluently the speech had spilled from her.

  But then, strangest thought, it came to her that his hair was the color of beaten gold.

  And that made her angry all over again. He did not deserve to look like a fallen angel, or a warrior, either. “You’ve done this. You’ve given him the post he’ll use to enrich himself and his friends at the Bank of London. Because he never would have had the office had it not been for you deciding to retire from the field!”

  His lashes fell. He stared now at the gun he stroked, as though her speech, which was the truth, affected him not at all.

  She gritted her teeth, boggled, furious. How could this be the same man who had written and delivered so many powerful, breathtaking speeches? Who had waged battle with his colleagues for the sake of the unfortunate—and whose continuous, earnest struggles were so amply documented in the files in the study downstairs?

  Suddenly she was no longer afraid in the least. Let him fondle his gun. What would he do with it? The same as he did with himself: nothing.

  She clambered to her feet. “I thought you lacked bullets,” she said. “But I suppose it would only take one. At this rate, nobody will notice—you’ve driven them all away. England will not notice.”

  He flinched.

  It was enough to drop her back onto her knees, to look into his face more closely. The flat line of his mouth gave her more hope. It was an expression.

  “I lied,” she confessed. “People would notice. I would notice, of course.”

  No reply.

  Frustration bolted through her. But she remained crouched before him for one simple, stupid reason: she could not forget all those pages he had written, the gorgeous meditations on improvement, on virtue—and the profoundly messy speeches, as though he’d made drafts upon drafts, demanding ever more of himself, for the sake of people, strangers, he would never meet, who might benefit from his labor.

  She looked at him now, exhausted and beautiful and locked so deeply inside himself, and some weirdly bittersweet emotion choked her. Was there no way back for him? Did he not realize he’d made the choice to be alone?

  On a desperate stroke of daring, she reached out to touch his face—tipping up his chin, as he had once done to her far less gently. “Look at me,” she said.

  To her shock and triumph, his lashes rose. It gave her a jolt; as they stared at each other, her every breath felt shallower, harder to draw.

  His skin felt warm, rough from his whiskers. He felt human. It was so easy to think of him as a monster—or as a mannequin, too angular, too perfect, to be fashioned from pedestrian flesh.

  But he was only a man. Only and entirely a man. She felt the slight, irregular tremble that moved through him, and sensed the rigidity with which he held himself still. He was making a great effort to restrain himself—but from what?

  “You are so much more than this,” she whispered. “Why do you insist on hiding away?”

  He did not answer. But he didn’t look away, either. He had worlds in his eyes; they were magnetic. He was a force of gravity, and his presence, even in this blackest moment, could not be confined to the small, dark space he had made here for himself. The force of him felt like an invisible wave, overwhelming her, crushing the air from her lungs: such was the power of his gaze. He was larger than this room, larger than this house. Why had he tried to make himself so small?

  “You deserve better than this,” she said. “Give me the gun.”

  One corner of his mouth lifted. It was a dead smile; a chilling, lifeless expression. “You have no notion of who I am,” he said. “Girl.”

  I know more than you realize, she thought. What she knew of him—his ruthlessness toward his brother; the injustice he’d done to Lord Michael and Elizabeth—had helped her justify how she meant to deceive him. But the files she had read . . .

  She pulled back. Who was she to help him? Her motives were black, through and through.

  “You were a good man, once,” she said as she stood. “You could be so again. It is up to you.”

  “A good man?” His voice was cutting. “ ‘A savior to the poor,’ do you mean? ‘A ministering angel’?”

  He spat out these common praises as though they were vilest slander. “Yes,” she said. His brother had loved him very dearly once. And his public works showed that he’d been worthy of that love. His wife’s betrayal had deranged him, but beforehand . . . “You did great things—”

  His smile silenced her. It cut through his features as sharply as a knife. “Despite all you have seen, you still believe that? You think the newspapers had it right. You are a fool, Mrs. Johnson.”

  She took a hitching breath. He would not intimidate her now. She crossed her arms and stared down at him. “Were you not the author of the education reform bill? Did you not take a stand for the workers who suffered in the fire at the Hallimore factory? Did you—do you not fund your brother’s hospital?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “Such a résumé. Very impressive. And what you have witnessed in this house—how does that fit into this noble picture? Tell me, ma’am—by what possible contortions have you made this evidence fit with my reputation?”

  She opened her mouth, but her brain could not fit it with a reply. How curious, how perverse, that he should be asking her to defend him—against himself!

  She might have lied anyway. She might have made an excuse for his behavior. But even what she knew privately could not
excuse all of it. “I don’t know,” she said flatly.

  “But you do. What you have seen in this house is the truth: the man I always was. Now you know it.” He shrugged. “And so do I.”

  This philosophical drivel suddenly annoyed her. That he would terrify her with a pistol and then spout all this nonsense . . .

  She stepped back a pace. “I see you feel very sorry for yourself,” she said sharply. “Forgive me, but what a pathetic reason to kill yourself. Even the playwright of a farce would come up with a better motive.”

  He laughed. “Kill myself? Mrs. Johnson, there are four bullets in this pistol. None of them are for me.”

  She caught her breath and prayed her comprehension did not show on her face.

  “Won’t you ask who they’re for?” he said mildly.

  “No.” Four bullets would be sufficient for each of the men to whom his wife had written . . . and with whom she had betrayed him. “It’s not my concern.”

  “When has that stopped you?” He pushed himself to his feet, rising lithely, up, up, up—he was several inches taller than she, which was a feat. She was not accustomed to having to look so far up at anyone; she could not be blamed, surely, if the act made her take another step backward. “But will you still urge me to go into the world again?” he asked lazily. “Because if I do, it will not be to save orphans.”

  Finally, she understood. This was why he refused to leave—because he knew that if he left this house, he would kill the men who had made him a cuckold.

  A horrible thought gripped her: if he murdered Bertram, her own life would become so much simpler!

  She caught her breath, appalled by herself—and by him, too. He looked light on his feet, easy, like a man accustomed to long, athletic days out of doors; he looked suddenly amused, in control, nothing like the mute, entranced, suffering soul she had encountered a minute ago.

  And suddenly she felt outclassed. It was a startling and unpleasant and very novel experience, but somehow he had done it: he had turned the tables on her, not with brute strength but with his wits. For now, if she encouraged him to leave these rooms, she would be a party to his murderous intentions.