I turned my face to his. Eyes like cold, hard stone fixed me.
"Behold the lunatic and monster," he said quietly, his lips twisting just short of a smile. Turning then, he walked out the door.
I summoned Trevor from his apartments. Both of us helped Adrienne to her quarters. Her weeping filled the long corridors and echoed deep into Walthamstow's closed-off chambers, and I knew, wherever Nicholas had gone, he could hear her.
Adrienne's apartment was overly warm. Light from smoldering wood-ash radiated from the hearth, from the chandelier overhead, and from a dozen lanterns set about the room. Trevor tossed aside the faded mulberry curtains that draped from the tester of her bed, and we settled the distraught woman onto her banked pillows.
"Adrienne, you must try to calm yourself." Trevor squeezed her hand in concern. "I'm certain Nick meant no harm."
"Meant no harm! Why do you continue to excuse him?"
"it's his memory, darling, he simply forgot—"
"Forgot that he shamed me? Ruined me? Has forever made me a spinster?"
She lapsed into a crying fit again. "I wish I need never have to put eyes on him again! He has hurt me abominably and I shall never forgive him!" As Adrienne continued to weep into her hands, Trevor turned to the mahogany table beside her bed. He poured water from a ewer into a glass, then into the glass poured a tiny phial of powder. He gave it a quick stir with his linger, then lifted the glass up to her mouth. She gulped it down quickly, then relaxed on her pillows.
Standing away from the bed, Trevor looked at me, his dark-brown eyebrows drawn severely over his nose. "What has brought this about, Ariel?"
I picked the lace off the floor where Adrienne had thrown it. "A gift, sir, from your brother. A wedding gift."
He took it in his hands and studied it with pressed lips before crumpling it in his fists. "Damnation, it's his first flare-up in a while. I had hoped . . ." Looking directly at me, he asked, "Will you stay with her a while? I've a patient waiting."
I could hardly refuse.
When he had gone I took my place beside Adrienne's bed on a Chippendale stool with cabriole legs. In a moment her weeping had dissipated to little more than an occasional shuddering breath. I began to relax, and thought her asleep until she startled me by saying:
"No doubt this is all my mother's fault/' Her head rolled. She blinked sleepily at me, her blue eyes pale and slightly puffy. "My mother was a witch, you see, as stern as a pope and as unbending as a dictator. My father often said, Watch my sons; as men they will harbor gross hatred for all the female gender.' It has happened, as I see it. Nicholas hated my mother, his wife, and now me. He would like nothing better than to destroy us all, I think."
I realized it was the powders talking: I knew their impairments as well as their benefits. But I listened nevertheless, enthralled.
She covered her forehead with her arm. I thought in that moment that she was a very pretty woman, her lashes pale brown and her skin unblemished like a white cameo.
She sighed. "My mother died in this very bed just days after my brother's marriage to Jane. They were still on their honeymoon in London. When she grew ill we sent Jim to fetch him home, but of course Nicholas arrived too late. He came moments after she took her final breath." She indicated a certain place on the floor near the foot of the bed. "He stared upon her still face and called her 'bitch.' Poor, poor Nickie. How I pitied him in that moment. Even more than I pitied my mother. He had given up everything, you see. Everything he had loved in his life to please her—my mother. Why must we struggle throughout our lives to please our parents? Oh, Nickie, if you had only waited. You should have known that marrying Jane would never have been enough to win the dragon-lady's approval."
I sat upon my stool, the bottom of my shoes resting lightly on its claw-and-ball feet, and the heart in my breast drew up into a hard, brittle knot. I turned my gaze from Adrienne's waxen face and stared at the window, my eyes full and burning with tears. Understanding drummed in my head and I too hated Lady Millicent Wyndham for what she had done to Nicholas . . . and to me.
Adrienne's voice came more softly then, and slowly. I brushed away my tears before facing her again.
"My beautiful, beautiful Nickie, so fair and gentle. He was the only one of my brothers who pampered me, George and Eugene and Trevor thought me no more than a nuisance and scolded me if I ventured too close to their treasured belongings. Not my Nickie. He would have cut the heart from his breast and given it to me if I had asked for it. Then. But when Father died—oh how she clung, wrecking his youth and using her sickness to get from him what she wanted."
She drifted peaceably, her lower lip quivering only slightly as she murmured, "Too young to hear this burden of nobility, this wretched title—lord, lord—hardly a man and knowing so little of life. Too many responsibilities and her dragging him down. Then Jane came. Wretched woman, Handpicked by Mother. Just like Mother, making demands of Nickie, of me, moving into this house, calling herself Lady Malham and taking more than he could afford to give her. I hated her. Cruel, vicious woman like my mother. I told him ..."
Her head rolled back and forth. Slipping from my chair, I soothed her warm, smooth brow with my hand and said, "Hush now, milady. He didn't mean it. He wouldn't hurt you intentionally"
"I told him ... I hate her ... I wish she were dead . . ."
My hand paused.
"Dead," she repeated, her word a whisper through her dry lips. "God forgive me ... I wish she were ..."
I pulled the counterpane up over her knees but no farther. Folding the length of white lace, I tucked it beneath her pillow, then quit the room.
I did not stop to think where I was going. I only went, mayhaps out of instinct, less out of common sense. I traveled mindlessly through the cold, dark corridors of Walthamstow, letting my thoughts muse over what had transpired these last awful minutes.
How Adrienne had disliked Nick's wife. Perhaps dislike was even too light a term. She had hated Jane because she was so like her mother, had hated her for making Nick so unhappy, had hated her for usurping her place in this house.
Passing through the kitchen, I spoke briefly to Matilda and Polly. Then, exiting the house, I followed the path I had walked earlier, continuing beyond the pond, past the magnificent orchard of cherry and pear trees. In my mind I recalled sitting at the foot of the hill near town in hopes of catching a brief glimpse of the young earl himself. It all seemed a lifetime ago, Nick's sauntering into my uncle's tavern and biding his time over warm pints and Havana cigars, while I could but crouch like a timid mouse in the shadows and watch him. I had known then that we would touch, for he was lonely and I was alone. And like the nightingale who waits patiently for its turn to sing, I waited until my season, anticipated my nights filled with laurel-sweet winds and song and Nicholas—always Nicholas.
The baying of the hounds brought my mind back to the present. I tucked my hands into my cloak and marched, head up, beyond the dog runs.
Jim looked round, his arms full of rakes and ropes and hoes, as I walked into the garden shed. His hair was grizzled and his paunch hinted of too many pints of ale, but his face was as friendly and pleasant to look upon as it had been on the morning of my arrival to Walthamstow.
"Good evenin' to y'," he greeted me.
"Good evening," I returned, smiling. "I am looking for the stables."
His brown eyes widened in surprise. "Will y' be needin' an animal?" he asked.
"I won't."
He watched me with curiosity, then caution. After a moment he proceeded. "I'm supposin' y'll be here t' see the new stables?"
I hesitated, suddenly aware of how odd my request would appear. I decided then that if Jim was indeed Nick's Damon, he would be willing to help me. I shook my head. "The old stables, or what is left of them."
He fixed me with eyes as sharp and searching as a hawk's. "There's nowt there, luv, but rubbish. It burned, y' know."
"I'm aware of that." I pulled my cloak closer about my shoulde
rs.
He slowly began to unload his tools, then without another word he left the shed and walked off down the over-grown path running at an angle to the kennels. I followed at a distance. What drove me to stand among the scorched pilings and stone I could not guess. But some instinct told me it had all started here: the madness and mayhem that was crippling my lord's mind.
It was an eerie place in the half-light of approaching dusk. Hidden from Walthamstow by horse-chestnut and gooseberry trees, the rubble was as bleak to look upon as death itself.
Looking up from beneath the hood of my cloak, I watched Jim as he ambled about the cinders, flaking the crisp ash from a timber with his toe. He hunched his shoulders against the cold north wind and stared at a particular spot. I sensed, in that awful moment that it was the place Jane had died. And I could not help but stare myself.
Finally Jim turned. Running one rough, red hand over his mouth, he asked, "Have y' seen wot y' come t' see, Miss Rushdon?"
I hesitated, then pushed on. "Were you here that eve, Jim?"
"Aye, I were."
I waited.
"Like hell it were," came his quiet, thoughtful voice. I found myself straining to hear it over the sudden gust of wind. "All the poor animals trapped there. The flames must have singed the very bottom of God's feet, they reached that high t' heaven. All them fine horses gone. It were a tragic loss, I tell y'."
"Jim," I said, "I know about Lady Jane."
"Ah!" Scowling, he shook his head and again looked toward the massive beam that lay partially burned through on the ground. "So the gossip-tongues 'ave been at y' already. Don't surprise me none. They'll be fillin' yer head with tales of hobgoblins and demons within a fortnight. A shame it is that they've got nowt else to' do besides ruin a man's fine reputation."
"Do you believe them?" I asked him outright.
"I only know what I found when I came here: flames risin' from perdition and blisterin' the sky, and my friend—his lordship—standin' just there and starin' like a dazed man into the flames."
"Do you know him well, Jim?"
"Aye, I know 'im. Not long, mind you, no more'n three year, but we've been close, like this." He held up his big clasped hands for me to see.
"You saved his life?"
He looked surprised. " 'e told y' that, did 'e?"
"In a manner."
Jim nodded. "Fished 'im out of that watery death, I did, thinkin' 'e were already a corpse, frozen through. V lay with 'is shoulders and 'ead out o' the water and the rest of 'irn surrounded by ice. I took 'im back to my 'ouse and there 'e lay for a fortnight, shivering' and talkin' out o' his mind with fever. When 'e finally came to, 'e couldn't remember who 'e was, where 'e'd been or where 'e was goin' when 'is horse fell through the ice. 'e went on that way for a month; it were then we became friends."
I sat down upon a stone and drew my legs up under my cloak. Pacing back and forth before me, Jim continued.
"Mind you, I knew 'e were no peasant like me. 'e'd been wearin' fine clothes when I fished 'im out of that ice. And 'is way of speakin' were of the titled folk. In a way I 'oped he wouldn't ever remember, 'e became like a son to me, I won't lie by tellin' j otherwise. Then one mornin' it come to 'im who 'e were, though he still 'ad no recollection what 'e'd been doin' travelin' to York, 'e insisted that I return to Walthamstow with 'im and, as you can see, I did. I were a poor man and proud, but I ain't afraid t' work, 'e saw me set up 'ere and gave me a job and more wages than I'd ever see raisin' sheep."
"Did he love Jane?" I asked.
He stopped his pacing and looked at me, his face strange in the pale light. We stared at one another without speaking. Finally he spoke. "There were only one woman 'e loved and she haunts 1m t' this day. Faceless she is to 1m now, though the loss of her gnaws at Is insides . . ."
I came to my feet, my heart thumping with impatience. With hardly a breath's space between us, I turned my face to his and beseeched him in a voice grown hoarse and unsteady with anticipation, "Tell me who he loved, Jim, tell me now."
"Why does it matter, lass? She's dead, y' see. Dead and buried and cold in the ground, buried in some pauper's grave north of 'ere. 'e blames 'imself P her death, too, poor lad. 'ad I known, 'ad I only known those days 'e lay fighting 'is fever on my bed and callin' out 'er name—•"
I grabbed his arms and shook him. "Tell me what name he called, my friend, I must know."
"Maggie," he responded. "The lady of milord's heart was Maggie."
Dropping my hands, I stumbled backward. The wind whipped the hood from my cape as I leaned my face into the falling icy mist and wept, "Maggie." Turning, I fled back to Walthamstow.
Chapter 6
I stood shivering in my room, that blessed sanctuary with its locked doors that kept the world at bay. Outside the winter storm raged, hurling sleet against my window, howling like a banshee around the pointed dormers and eaves of the ancient house. I was at a loss. What should I do? My preconceived notions about Nicholas Wyndham had been driven to dust. He had loved Maggie, had wept her name in despair as he lay struggling for his own life. And yet, she was lost to him, in mind if not in heart.
How could that be? I asked myself.
I left my room with candle in hand, hesitating in the hallway. To my right the corridor stretched into an abyss of darkness. To my left . . . the door of Wyndham's studio was open, beckoning me, tempting me, and I told myself even as I approached the threshold (hat I had no right to intrude; I had been ordered to lake no liberties in his studio. Yet, with every minute I found my need to learn this family's secrets growing more urgent.
The door gave with a slight creak as I entered, lifting my flame to better illuminate the shadowed interior. Swallowing back my fear, I stepped inside and closed (he heavy door behind me.
The room, so bright and friendly that morning, took on a different appearance now that daylight had again turned to dusk. Standing in my halo of light, I studied each hulking canvas as if it would suddenly grow eyes and fangs and leap at me from its shadow. Imp! I chastised myself. There is nothing here but paint and linen stretched over simple ash-wood frames. I lifted my chin stubbornly and ventured farther into the room.
Harboring hopes of finding my portrait, I headed straight for the covered easel in the center of the room. Yet as I lifted my hand to sweep away the cover, I hesitated. And with my hesitation, the wind slashed at the windows so they rattled an ominous warning.
The candle flame flickered and died. Within the cavernous four walls of the room, I stood in blackness. And there I waited, listening to the frantic pounding of my heart in my ears. In that moment I wished for Nicholas. Frightful, harsh, belligerent Lord Nicholas Wyndham, Earl of all Malham. Fiend. Murderer and lunatic. Yes, I wished him with me; rather I suffer beneath any cruelty he might subject me to than succumb to my idiotic fear of darkness.
Think! I told myself. Were there werewolves hunkered in the shadows when I first trespassed in this room? None. Were there ghouls? None, Vampires? No! No! I took a deep breath and focused my eyes on the deepest shadow, focused until the strain on my eyes brought a pain to my head,
If only the wind would cease its roar, its unrelenting rampage over the moor! It bludgeoned the walls and whipped the limbs of the chestnut tree so hard against the window so I was certain the panes would shatter at my feet. I threw open the curtains and was surprised to find a moon set among the scuttling clouds. She appeared only momentarily, but long enough to brighten Walthamstow's grounds in ice-blue light.
The light spilled through the window and into the room. As I turned, I swept my desperate gaze over each corner to assure myself that no demon lurked there. I low wrong I was. Within the elaborate moldings over the door perched a gargoyle, his snout pulled back in laughter, his slitted eyes staring at me and mocking my (ear. In reflex I stepped back.
The chestnut tree thrashed its bare branches from side to side, casting long, twisted shadows across the floor. Focusing my eyes once again on the solitary canvas in the middle o
f the room, I forced my legs to move and approached it. Quickly! Before the moon's light is cast away—before I am found out—before I die of fright.
I flung the covering away and stared. Full black hair spilled around the girl's shoulders, to the middle of her back. Who was she, this faceless, dark haired waif, surrounded by baskets of heather and yards of pearl-gray fabric? It was not I. I had sat upon no moor with heather. Perhaps this was the portrait of another,
I ran to a far canvas and exposed it.
The moonlight waned, and again I was blanketed in darkness. I dropped the sheet as if it were a hot coal, curled my fingers into my palm, and pressed my hand against my palpitating heart. What had I seen there? "Portraits of madness!" came the crone's words to my mind. Horror, yes. Terror, undoubtedly. But madness? What else would I call it? What sort of mind would set forth to paint portraits of such unspeakable evil? Of skeletal hands reaching from flames while scathing eyes stared out from faces shorn of flesh?
How I suffered in that moment! Upon arriving at Walthamstow I had prayed that Nicholas Wyndham's madness ran true and deep. That his madness would blind him to reality so I might be allowed to act upon my crime and run, never to return. Alas, it was not to be. For with each hour that I spent within Walthamstow's walls I became more and more concerned for his state of mind. How could I feel otherwise, knowing now how he felt about Maggie? That he had loved her; that he loved her yet. Had his feelings perhaps driven him to this brink of irrationality?
I wondered, there in the dark with the wind and sleet pelting the house, with the smell of turpentine making my head reel. With the gargoyle looking on, I crouched upon my heels and wondered what I should do. All instinct warned me to leave, to take what I had come for and disappear into the night like a thief. So, gathering my courage about me like a mantle, I stood and turned for the door.
That was when I heard the laughter. At first I thought it a wailing of the wind. But no. No simple wind ever sounded so. It occupied every black corner of the room. It froze me in my place. It filled my breast with heart-stopping fear and my mind with imaginings too awful to declare. Unable to bear the sound a moment longer, I ran from the room, dropping my candle on my way and never bothering to retrieve it.
A Heart Possessed Page 7