Escapade (9781301744510) (39 page)

She led him into one of the house's smaller
parlors much favored by her late husband for its dark furnishings
and gloom-ridden atmosphere. She seldom bothered with the chamber,
so consequently the air in the room was stale. Even the lamp she
lit did little to dispel the darkness.

Zeke became a little more subdued. Whether it
was owing to the funereal aspect of the room, or to Mrs. Van H.'s
customary chilly demeanor, he couldn't have said. He had been
carried to her doorstep by a fever pitch of emotion. But now
face-to-face with the elegant, self-possessed woman, what Tessa had
told him seemed incredible.

He waved aside her offer of a drink. Refusing
to be seated, he paced in front of the hearth, no longer so certain
where to begin.

"What is so urgent, John?" She favored him
with a brittle smile. "Surely it cannot be that you have come to
your senses over that little circus girl, that you have been
reconsidering what I offered you?"

"No!" The mere reminder of her offer sent a
shudder of revulsion through him, especially as he considered the
possibility that what Tessa had told him was true.

"I only came here because I need some
questions answered, questions about some information I
received."

She looked wary, but at the same time almost
resigned. "I see. You must have been talking to your friend Mr.
Duffy."

"Duffy? What the hell has he got to do with
this?"

"Why, I thought-. Then I am afraid I don't
understand."

"I've come to you about something my sister
told me."

Zeke could find no way to approach the matter
subtly. In his usual blunt manner, he laid out for Mrs. Van
Hallsburg everything that Tessa had said. She listened in silence,
with no more reaction than a flicker of an eyelash. She made no
effort to confirm or deny any of it.

"Well, is it true?" Zeke demanded. "Did my
mother ever come to see you?"

"Your mother? Oh, you mean that dowdy little
Italian woman."

"I mean Sadie Marceone."

When she still showed no inclination to
reply, he barked, "Answer me, damn it."

"There is no need for you to be coarse, John.
I have every intention of answering you." She shrugged. "Yes, your
Mrs. Marceone called upon me. But don't expect me to remember all
the details. It was a long time ago, just after she adopted
you."

Her lip curled. "Those ridiculous people from
the orphanage sent her to me, and after my father had paid them a
goodly sum to keep quiet about your ancestry. I warned him it
wouldn't work. As far as I know, there is only one effective way of
silencing people."

Zeke stared at her, chilled not so much by
her words as her manner. She was confessing it was all true, just
like that, as calmly as though these facts of his life held no more
meaning than reading off the social register.

"Then you are admitting you've always known
about me—who I was?"

"My family managed to follow your progress,
even when you ran away from the orphanage."

Did they? Zeke thought with a surge of
bitterness. They had known when he had slept in the gutters, pawed
through garbage in search of something to eat, fled for his life
from the blades of some street gang. She had known.

"And my father too? Did he know what became
of me?”

"I suppose he did, if you believe the dead
can look down upon you." She sounded almost bored by the entire
discussion. "What is all this sudden fuss about your birth, John?
You never expressed much interest in your parentage before, at
least not to me."

"I never realized you knew so damn much. Now
I want the truth."

"Do you?" She had an odd glint in her eyes,
her smile mocking. "As tough as you think you are I wonder if you
can take it."

"Try me," he snarled. "You might as well come
out with all of it. You've as good as told me that Stephen Markham
was my father. That makes you my aunt."

To his astonishment, she laughed. He couldn't
recall ever hearing her do so before. The sound left him feeling
cold.

"Not your aunt, John," she said with one of
those smiles he was coming to dread. "Your mother."

She had to be lying, or else she was crazy.
She didn't know what she was saying. He hadn't heard her right.
Zeke sought every form of denial, but there was no escaping the
truth reflected to him in the depths of those taunting eyes.

"My. . ." He couldn't bring himself to say
the word, not in connection with her. "What the hell are you
talking about? You mean that you and your own brother—"

He stopped, moistening his lips, feeling as
though he would be sick.

"No." Her voice held a faint trace of
amusement. "Stephen always took his pleasures elsewhere."

Zeke heaved a deep breath of relief. That
made it better, but not much.

She continued, "Your father was one of the
Irish grooms in our stables."

His incredulity must have shown, for she went
on quickly, "Everyone commits some indiscretion, and this was mine.
That one hot July afternoon, I needed to know what it would be like
to lie beneath a man glistening with sweat, calluses on his hands,
passions as wild and primitive as the studs my father bought to
breed his mares."

For a brief moment, a shudder tore through
her, her features transformed by a look of ecstasy she quickly
repressed. "The experience was every bit as loathsome as I
imagined. Yet I made a fool of myself over that man. There's no
saying where it would have ended before I came to my senses.
Fortunately, one day Sean broke his neck, jumping one of the
horses."

"How obliging of him." Zeke tried to summon
some feeling of sorrow for the father he had never known, tried but
couldn't. He couldn't help believing that the young groom was
better off even descending into hell rather than within Mrs. Van
Hallsburg's poisonous grasp.

Undaunted by his sarcastic remark, she said,
"Yes, Sean was always a most accommodating man. I might even have
mourned his passing but for the legacy he left me."

Her gaze swept toward Zeke, her eyes icy
splinters of accusation. "You were already growing inside me,
feeding upon my life's blood like some parasite. I would have
aborted you, but I was too far gone before I realized. I was rather
naive about some facts of life in those days."

Zeke couldn't credit it. Cynthia Van
Hallsburg might have been many things in her youth—spoiled,
selfish, fatally attractive—but never naïve.

"So then what?" Zeke prompted when she fell
silent, uncertain if he could stand to listen to any more of this,
but unable to turn away from her either, until he had heard every
last wretched detail.

She sighed. "I had to pretend to leave for an
extended visit to a friend's summer house, while actually I went to
live in this miserable boarding house with only my maid Emma to
attend me. You came into the world after midnight one April
morning, not stillborn as I had hoped, but lusty and
screaming."

Mrs. Van Hallsburg pressed her hands briefly
to her brow as though after all these years, she was yet trying to
shut out the sound of those cries. "It was your constant screaming
that did it, drove me to abandon you on that refuse heap. If I had
been thinking more clearly, I would have suffocated you, but the
ordeal of childbirth had disordered my wits."

Zeke's mouth went dry, but he was too stunned
to say or do anything other than regard her with loathing. She was
so calm. That was the true horror of it—so calm as she explained
why she hadn't managed to murder him at birth.

"You needn't look at me that way," she said.
"As though I were some sort of villainess. When I heard later you
had been found, and taken to the orphanage, when I was far away
from your cries, I didn't mind at all that you had lived."

"Thank you," Zeke said bitterly.

"No one would have known a thing about you,
except that my maid betrayed me. She told my father, who insisted
that something more had to be done. Such a stupid man. He paid the
orphanage a large sum of money for your care, and to keep silent
about who your benefactor was. And what good did that do? You never
saw a penny of that money and it only put my reputation at risk.
Luckily everyone believed you were just another one of Stephen's
indiscretions."

Zeke wished he could have continued believing
that himself.

"And that's what you told Sadie when she came
to see you?" he asked.

"I started to, but it was so strange. Somehow
I found myself confiding the truth to her. I knew she would never
betray me. She was too terrified I might want you back. But I never
found you the least interesting until you were fully grown."

The nature of her interest showed all too
clearly in her eyes, that unholy light there again. Zeke took an
involuntary step back, his gut wrenching. Now he understood full
well why Sadie had never told him any of this, the painful
knowledge she had tried to shield him from, why she had been so
terrified when Mrs. Van Hallsburg had come back into his life.

As Mrs. Van Hallsburg approached him, he
tensed, afraid of what he might do if she tried to touch him. He
glanced down at that once-lovely face that suddenly seemed to be
showing the lines of age, not a graceful aging, but one of
decadence, a twisted soul too long kept hidden behind that timeless
mask.

"Sadie tried to warn me once," he said. "She
said you were evil."

"Evil? Simply because I desire my own son?"
She drifted closer, her scent filling his nostrils, as cloying as
the sickly sweet smell of too many floral offerings clustered round
an open casket.

"The trouble with you, John, is that you have
a lower class mentality. You understand wealth and power, but not
fully enough to know that they bring you freedom from the laws that
govern lesser men. The Pharaohs of Egypt intermarried, mingled
their own blood. Why not us?”

"My education might be lacking, but they
sound like nothing but a bunch of heathens to me."

"I forgot. Dear Mrs. Marceone raised you to
be a good Catholic boy."

"Don't sneer at my upbringing," he said.
"Especially when you never troubled yourself whether I lived or
died."

The closer she came, the more his flesh
crawled, and he knew he had to get out of there, get himself a good
stiff drink. Maybe if he poured enough whiskey down his throat, it
would burn, cleanse him of the taint of her.

As he moved to leave, some of her composure
crumbled. She even looked a little desperate as she got between him
and the door. "Where are you running to, John?"

"Anywhere away from you. You were right about
me and the truth. I guess I can't take it."

"John, please!”

"Get out of my way."

"I understand. I should have broken this to
you more gently. You are in shock, but when you have had time to
grow accustomed to the idea—"

"Not in a million years!"

"But you may never see me again after
tonight. When all the truth is known, I will be forced to leave the
city."

"Not because of me. I'm not about to go
boasting of the connection between us."

"I'm not talking about us, but that other
matter, with your friend Duffy."

When Zeke regarded her blankly, she said with
impatience. "You must be the only person in New York who doesn't
know about the extent of his investigation, how he's dragging me
down."

She hesitated and then rushed on. "I may as
well tell you. I was Charles Decker's partner in his enterprises.
When he made such a disaster of everything, I had to kill him and
fake his suicide. Does that astonish you?"

"After what you've already told me tonight?"
Zeke gave a harsh laugh. "Nothing about you would surprise me. And
so Duffy is onto you? Well, I wish you luck, because you're going
to need it. He's damned persistent."

"I don't need luck. All I need is you." She
clutched at his sleeve. "Come away with me, John. I have money
deposited in Switzerland. We could live quite comfortably
abroad.”"

But he barely heard her breathless flow of
words as he stared at her hand, which no longer appeared so smooth
or elegant, but rather like skeletal fingers grasping at him, death
tugging at his arm. Desperation and madness swirled in her pale
blue eyes.

He grasped her wrist and put her away from
him very deliberately. But when she tried to cast herself into his
arms, his control broke and he shoved her back with more roughness
than he had ever shown any woman. She staggered into one of the
chairs.

"John," she cried. "We belong together. You
are my flesh. It's my blood that flows through your veins."

"If I thought that counted for anything, I
would slit my wrists," he said. Before she could regain her
balance, come at him again, he strode out of the room, slamming the
door behind him.

With a shrill cry, she started to go after
him, only bringing herself up short as she reached the threshold,
fighting for the familiar comfort that was her dignity, the icy
shroud of her composure. What was happening to her? Never had she
begged anything of anyone before.

Leaning against the door, she closed her
eyes, trying to still the unaccustomed pounding of her heart.
Instead she found herself looking back over the ruins of her life,
wondering where it had all started to come apart.

Despite her youthful folly, she had always
enjoyed the position in society to which her birth entitled her.
And thanks to Charles Decker, she had had the wherewithal to
sustain it. When John Ezekiel Morrison had strode back into her
life and she had commenced the task of polishing him, making him a
fit companion for her, everything had been perfect.

Until the day of that disastrous lawn party
when that girl had crashed on John's lawn. Yes. Mrs. Van
Hallsburg's mouth pinched taut. That was the day when she had first
begun to lose control of John, when that girl had swept into his
life. She laced her fingers together as though tightening them
about a slender white throat. She had never understood the concept
of revenge before, considering it a meaningless waste of energy and
emotion.