Bride of a Distant Isle (39 page)

E
dward himself brought my breakfast. I should have laughed if, months earlier, someone had told me that Edward would be playing housekeeper to me, bringing my bedding and delivering my food, but he was. The tea was tepid, and the eggs not quite done. Who had cooked breakfast? Certainly not Chef.

After a time, I watched Edward ride off, returning about three hours later. He brought me a late-afternoon meal, and this time, he sat down with me. His face was troubled.

“What troubles you?” I asked, not wanting to right it, of course, but thinking it might offer a clue as to what his plans were.

“I did not send you there to be poorly treated,” he said. “To the madhouse. I was assured it was a good place, that the staff were kind and that you would be well cared for. Not like the horrors I've heard of in other, public asylums. Screams, medications, restraints, and such.”

“Well, there were those,” I said. “Sometimes they are needed. It would be a fine establishment within which to reside
if I were insane
. Which I am not.”

“I wanted you treated well, Annabel. But, you must understand, I can't leave the family fortune at odds. Especially now that things have gone wrong with your Maltese friend and he's likely tainted Lord Somerford's opinion of me, too.”

I tilted my head.

“I . . . I think you to be as baseborn as I always suspected you were,” he said. “As we've always known. But you're clearly also unwell, and somehow strangely able to cajole or deceive people into cooperating with you. Staff. Nurses. Foreign sailors. Who knows what or who shall be next?” He ran his hand through his hair, releasing a slight scent of pomade and stale cigar smoke.

“Maybe you, Edward. You shall be next. Perhaps this madness runs in your veins, too. We're cousins, you know.”

The blood drained from his face, and by his frightened expression I knew it was something he had considered. Then he reached his right hand into his trouser pocket and took out a roll of ginger chews.

“Have you had symptoms?”

He did not answer me, which was, in itself, an answer. Terror, then anger, flickered across his face, then he stilled it.

Ever and always acutely aware of good breeding, he offered one of the chews to me. I politely declined. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My eyes were rimmed with dark circles, my face pale. I looked unwell, perhaps physically and mentally. But who would not be given my circumstances and situation?

“The truth is, Annabel,” Edward continued, “you've proven to be a loose cannon. I cannot risk Albert's future in any way.” He stood and the floorboard creaked. He reached out to brace himself on the wall and painted, peeling plaster loosened and fell to the floor.

“Albert's future is not at risk,” I said.

He looked at me wryly.
Oh, I understand. You mean to take what is mine and give it to Albert.

I recalled the conversation I'd overheard him having with Morgan and Dell'Acqua.
The ends justify the means.
Then, and now, too.

“And now, apparently, there is the new complication of your casting aspersions on my mother's reputation.” He stood next to the window. He picked the old spyglass up, rubbed a bit of rust from the lens rim, and looked out. He scanned the horizon for a moment and then set it down on the window ledge once more.

“You don't know what she lived through, who she really was, what she suffered. I simply cannot have you denigrating her name to anyone who will listen. I understand you are desperate—some would say delusional—and have a manic desire to right your own mother's name. But it can't be done, and I simply cannot allow it to happen at the expense of my own mother's reputation. ‘If thy hand offend thee, cut it off.' ”

It seemed the only portions of the Bible Edward had managed to memorize were hurled like stones at those who blocked his way.

He was planning to cut me off, then, for the sin of speaking honestly and pursuing what was rightly mine. “So you're willing to rewrite the truth, then,” I said.

“What truth? Stamps? Post markings? Caps? Priests? It's all hearsay, Annabel. Nothing a judge would take seriously, and yet you have somehow managed to undermine people's sense of reason.” He barked out a laugh. “Perhaps it's true that insanity is in the miasma. It's certainly true it can be passed from mother to child.”

“And in your case?” I taunted, tired of this game.

He grew close to me. “I'm warning you. I shall not brook discussion of my mother in that manner.”

Suddenly, I knew.

“Then how about your wife?” I asked. “She saw the reaction I had to the green fairy—the sugar cubes she had dipped in absinthe—and how it unsettled and upset me. And the idea came to her—yes, right then.
All have seen Annabel appear unstable. Unsettled. How can I ensure this continues?
”

Suddenly Edward's face was convulsed by shock and understanding, which affirmed my suspicions. He recoiled from me and shook his head. “No. That did not happen.”

I nodded. “Yes it did. When Captain Dell'Acqua escorted Clementine and me at the Exhibition, he made a great jest of the ‘crazy Greek honey' and how it had been used for centuries as a truth serum unless it provoked madness. Clementine knew I was disoriented over the discovery of the necklace, and when she heard that, Edward, her idea began to jell. Then she brought you into it. And you bought Greek honey and made sure I took it, publicly, when my ‘madness' would be in full view of the others.”

“I did no such thing!” He was telling the truth. I could see it in the shocked pink of his cheeks and the alarm registering in his eyes. “Clementine, why, I won't believe she would or could do such a thing. And I would never harm you.”

“But you'll send me to the madhouse, where I shall die of an epidemic or a broken heart.”

“Both are risks whether one is in the madhouse or not,” he said. “At least there you'll not be a danger to others or yourself.”

“You do not want to see the truth of your mother nor of your wife. I can understand that it would be a bitter gall to swallow. But it is the truth, Edward.”

“The truth is you're mad—clever, but mad. And you're illegitimate, and not fit in any way to inherit. Perhaps you're actually French, too?” He laughed sharply. “You'd be disqualified in three of three categories, Annabel. Because we do not know who your father was. All so-called evidence is either
circumstantial or missing
, and the parties are either deceased or disqualified. I have had enough of this discussion.”

I was right, and I knew it. But he was right, too. It was all hearsay and anecdotal.

“Care of Highcliffe, and all the family legacy, was a responsibility left to me. I've let my mother down in marrying Clementine. At all cost, I shall not let my father down once more as well. I cannot risk you, Annabel.” Edward walked back to the window, picked up the spyglass once more, and nodded. “Yes. That is good.”

I did not know what he was looking for in the deepening dusk. But he'd found it. He took me by the arm and opened the door. I wriggled free and he grabbed my arm again, twisting it behind me, and shoving me forward.

“We're leaving now.” We took the servants' stair to the floor below, then went on to the second floor. Perhaps because the family were hidden away and would not see me. Clementine was with Albert, probably in her rooms. I did not know where the Wattses were. I shouted for help once or twice but no one came. Too, I was aware that everything about my shocking reappearance and constant crying out only made me seem more mad.

He set me in the front of the carriage, and then after the young man had hefted my trunk onto the back, Edward climbed in himself. “You're driving?” I asked.

“I know how to drive a carriage, Annabel.”

But why was he driving? The only answer could be that he wanted no one save himself and me to know where we were going.

W
e started down the drive. Edward drove, but unsteadily. The horses must have sensed his insecurities because they kept looking left and right, and the reins were too slack to control them confidently. Even I could see that.

It was now dark.

Instead of turning left, as we would if we were going to town and which would be natural if he were bringing me to another madhouse, he turned right.

“Where are we going?” I asked. I looked off the side of the cart. I could jump, but where would I go if I could even escape a moving carriage without hurting myself?

“You're going home,” he said. “And then I'm going home, too, to set things right.”

He made no sense. Perhaps he was mad after all.

The clouds clotted into a dark and pregnant gray. About a half mile along the road he stopped the carriage and secured it. He helped me down and then kept a firm hand on my arm. We walked around the back of the carriage and he took my trunk; it was too heavy for him to manage with one arm, wobbling this way and that like a drunk in an alleyway, so he let go of me.

“Follow me or things will go much worse for you,” Edward said, and I did, all the time looking for a possible escape. My cloak stiffened as shards of ice, which the sky had begun to spit, burrowed their way into its fabric, like worms.

I knew just where I was, and it did not bode well for me. In the far distance was the stone cottage where Emmeline and Oliver's family lived, halfway between our estate and Pennington Park. Just ahead was the Edge of the World. To the left were the trails leading down to the Keyhole, where smaller boats and skiffs could slip in, take on contraband, and slip out into the dark waters, unseen, like sprats. Why had Edward brought me here now? If he was going to push me off, over into the abyss, why bring my trunk?

We stood there for a moment. Nothing happened, and he did not move, but the water crashed into the hillside just below us, making it nearly impossible to hear what Edward was saying. I drew a little nearer so I could hear, though his close presence repelled me. He smelt of the sour odor a body exudes when it's anxious.

“There is no insane asylum here, Edward,” I spoke loudly. “Why are we here?”

He scanned the water. “I have a better plan, Annabel. You'll be put away, but it will be somewhere much more pleasant. Somewhere you'll be treasured as well as kept. And kept well. I've ensured that. He knows he's to answer to me.”

I looked just over the edge of the slope, where the trails began to ribbon up the hillside. A boat skimmed the water, coming ever closer to us.

I thought I recognized, even at this distance, the skiff and the beard of the man piloting it by lamplight. I could not be sure because the man on board was dressed for the wet and cold, but it seemed he held himself in a certain way that I recognized.

“Nigel Morgan!”

Edward grinned. “I could not take a chance that you would find some overly sympathetic nurse at the next lunatic asylum. This is the best for everyone. Morgan will treat you well. He loves you.”

“I do not love him! He frightens me.”

The wind picked up and blew my hair round me. Edward shifted my trunk to his other shoulder. It had not been well tied and locked; the top burst open, and the lid gaped like the mouth of a ghost's jaw, freed in the afterlife from its rag support.

“Even if I am forced to marry, I will continue looking for documentation of my parents' marriage from Morgan's home in London.”

“He plans to keep you in Ireland. Way beyond the pale. It's an arrangement we came upon. There will be no escape from Ireland, Annabel. His estate is back in the bogs where few Englishmen venture, and the Irish are all in his family's employ.”

My rib cage hurt. “If we have children, they will become heir to the Ashton legacy.”

He grinned and licked his lips, his tongue darting as he did so, and he looked as if he were about to enjoy a particularly favored pudding. “No, Annabel. Do you remember I told you I'd learned some men have ‘wives' in every port? I've come across documents showing that Morgan has ‘married' women in Sicily and perhaps the West Indies. Surely you understand that women and trade have gone together like wind and sail since the beginning of time? I've shown the documents to him. If ever a claim is made on behalf of a child of yours, or any child he begets, I will be able to prove he is a bigamist and your child illegitimate.”

Had “Mrs. Wemberly” been a false wife? Or simply someone he'd used and then set aside? In either case, he was not to be trusted. The ice turned to snow, which drifted down upon me like bleached wood ash. Edward lifted his lamp toward the Keyhole, where the skiff waited. A signal of some sort.

“Morgan will want my money if I prove myself legitimate.”

“There will be little left after Highcliffe is sold and my debts paid. He is uninterested in your money, but you, my dear, will be partial payment for those debts. I'll build it back up over time, and he's better off than I. He simply wants a beautiful woman for pride of place. He wants you. I shall give you to him—he will treat you well, he's assured me—and I will keep his many secrets.”