It Takes a Scandal (18 page)

The domed ceiling wasn’t high—she thought Sebastian would be able to touch it if he raised his arm—but somehow the room felt spacious. This time she could see more than a small patch of wall at once, and as she slowly turned on the spot, she noticed something.

“There’s a pattern,” she whispered. Somehow, hushed voices seemed appropriate in such a setting.

“More than just a pattern.” Sebastian tossed down his bundle, which turned out to be two large cushions, onto a rug that had been spread on the floor. He held out a hand to her. “Lie down.” She gaped at him. He wiggled his fingers. “Trust me. This is the best way to see it.”

She gave him her hand, and let him lead her to one of the cushions. He helped her sit and then lowered himself onto the other cushion with only a slight grimace. “Lie back, and look up,” he told her.

Abigail’s mouth fell open again in wonder as she obeyed, tucking her skirts around her feet. He was right—it wasn’t a pattern. It was a portrait, a swirling glass mosaic of sea creatures, swimming and leaping and writhing around the walls. The little mirrored bits of glass she had noticed on her first visit were the eyes of fish, octopods, whales, and sea monsters. “There’s a mermaid!” She pointed in excitement at one side of the ceiling. A blue-skinned maiden with a long green tail and yellow hair had one arm extended as if in entreaty.

“And her beloved,” said Sebastian. “Look . . .” Abigail followed his finger across the dark ceiling to another long-tailed creature, his hand reaching toward the mermaid’s. More little flecks of silvered glass winked like stars between them.

“Amazing,” she breathed again. For several minutes she just gazed upward, trying to take in every detail. The expressionless figures were rather crude in depiction, for all that their creation must have taken hours and hours of painstaking work, but something about their posture struck Abigail as sad. “I wonder why they’re so far apart,” she murmured. “It seems they should be together.”

“Mythological creatures rarely found happy endings.”

“In stories where a man fell in love with a goddess,” she agreed, “or a god with a human girl. But these are two of a kind. Why couldn’t they be together?”

“Sometimes it’s not as simple as that.”

“No?” She turned her head to look at him. He was lying on his back, but with his head on the side to face her. “What do you think it means?”

He raised his eyes to the merman again, above her. “This house and grotto were built for a king’s mistress. I suppose it was a nod to the fact that she couldn’t merely swim around to his part of the ocean. Too much divided them for their union to be anything other than fleeting.”

Abigail looked at the merman, too. Somehow his face seemed blank and expressionless, as if he knew they would never meet. He was reaching toward her, true, but his hand was flat, and could have been in demand for fealty more than in affection. But the mermaid . . . Her figure had an element of yearning. It was a silly thing to think about a creature who was made only of cut glass. But the hand that wasn’t reaching for the merman was clutched to her heart, and her extended hand was palm up, beseeching.

“Do you think the King saw this?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“But what do you think?” she persisted. “Can you picture a King of England, lying where we are now?”

He was quiet for a moment. “If he loved her, I expect he did. But I daresay love was uncommon between kings and their mistresses.”

“I think she really loved him,” said Abigail softly. “Why else would she have had this built?”

“From what I understand, mistresses aren’t always the most practical creatures,” he said wryly. “It may have amused her, nothing more.”

“No!” she protested. “Surely not!”

“It’s far enough from Hart House, who’s to say she ever saw it herself?”

“She must have seen it—how could anyone know this was here and not come to see it?”

He gave a quiet chuckle. “Not everyone is like you, my dear.”

She closed her eyes and smiled. “Silly and romantic? You have found me out.”

“Not silly,” he said, still sounding amused. “Romantic, I already knew.”

She laughed, and for a moment they were both quiet. “Did you know it was this beautiful when you hinted I should come back?”

“Before yesterday, I hadn’t been here since you marched away from me the first time.” He hesitated. “I deserved that.”

She happened to agree, so said nothing.

“It has been a very long time since a lady looked at me with anything less than disdain or fear,” he went on in the same low voice. “Even though I knew you were different, I was still certain you would learn the same distaste for my company. In truth, you would be wise to do so.”

“Now why—?” she began indignantly, but he held up one hand. He had turned his face back to the ceiling, and she could only see his profile.

“You admit you’ve heard the rumors about me in town. While Boris is nothing but an ordinary boar hound, the rest isn’t as fanciful. My father did run mad, and everyone expects me to go mad as well.”

“But you’re not!” she interrupted.

His jaw tightened. “If you’d come to Richmond seven years ago, you might well have thought differently. When I returned from the army, I discovered my father had sold nearly all our land, for hardly anything at all. A few shillings an acre, and one of the largest estates in London was nearly gone. I . . . did not take it well.” A black and bitter smile twisted his mouth. “I raged a good bit, to tell the truth. I called on the men who’d bought the land—
my
land—and demanded they reverse the sales. Some of them laughed at me, some of them took offense. More than one visit degenerated into both parties hurling curses at each other, and ended with me slamming the door behind me. Word spread that I was just as mad as my father, and dangerous to boot. Within a few weeks everyone regarded me with the same alarm as my father.”

“But surely your anger was understandable.”

“I thought so,” he said in a flat tone. “Others . . . did not. I threatened some of them.”

That also seemed understandable to her, but it would only have fueled suspicions about him. Abigail tried to imagine her own father losing his grip on reason, frittering away his fortune. Her brother would put a quick stop to it, one way or another, she thought—but of course Sebastian hadn’t been there to stop his father. The trouble had happened while he was away. And from the grim set of his face, he didn’t like talking about it.

“What was he like?” she asked instead. “Before.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Before?” He thought a moment, then a faint smile curved his mouth. “Very clever. Whenever there was a problem, he would set about righting it, often in the most ingenious manner. He was a scholarly man. He would visit Mrs. Driscoll’s bookshop every week with an order for a new scientific tome or pamphlet. She admired him. When I was a boy, there were always experiments going on around the house. He made his own candles, in search of ones that burned longer and brighter. He was fascinated by fire and light, and once constructed a series of glass tubes which he intended to use to heat the drawing room more evenly, so one wouldn’t have to sit in front of the fire to be warm.”

“Did it work?”

“No,” he said, his smile growing. “The tubes shattered. He had connected them to a large kettle of water over the fire, to fill the tubes with steam. His plan was for the steam to circulate through the tubes and bring heat to every corner of the room, but instead they exploded, one after the other. I’ll never forget the astonished expression on his face . . .” The smile faded. “Later, when he lost his mind, he almost burned the house down, trying something similar.”

Without thinking she groped for his hand. He started, but then his fingers closed gently around hers.

“What happened to him?” she finally asked. She knew what gossip said: that Mr. Vane would fly into violent rages and attack people as if he meant to kill them, and had to be restrained. And that finally Sebastian had taken him into the woods and killed him, burying him in some secluded spot no one had located. Or perhaps drowned him in the river. Or even perhaps taken him to London and committed him to an asylum, where he might still linger for all anyone knew.

None of that made sense to Abigail, though. If he’d committed his father to an asylum, it would be easy to prove the man wasn’t dead. And she just didn’t believe he was a killer.

“There’s no way to know. I’ve always wondered if he concocted something that poisoned him unintentionally, or if he suffered some injury he never bothered telling anyone about that damaged his brain. He was always a bit eccentric. When he went mad, it happened rather subtly. He could seem quite lucid, from what I hear, only to erupt in a fit of delusion and fury that alarmed and shocked everyone around him. The lucidity fooled everyone for a while. His attorney swore he seemed in full possession of his wits even as he was selling off his land for pennies an acre.” He rolled his head to look at her. “Or do you mean that night?”

“Never mind,” she said hastily, but he squeezed her hand.

“No, I’ll tell you. It won’t change anything. My father was confined to his room—for his own safety. I woke after midnight to find his door unlocked and him escaped. I searched the woods, we dragged the pond, and Mr. Jones combed the meadow, but no trace of him was ever found.”

“None? How is that possible?”

Slowly he shook his head. “These woods are thick, and they go on for miles. I daresay the grotto isn’t the only place one could fall into a hole in the ground and disappear forever. And then there’s the river, which could sweep a man miles away in an hour’s time.”

Abigail frowned. “Why do people say you killed him, then?”

“Because there’s no proof I didn’t. Because it’s what they would have done, perhaps. But most likely . . . because it’s my fault he got loose.”

Her eyes grew wide and she forgot to breathe. His dark gaze held hers as he went on. “I was the one who locked his door every night, but that night it was unlocked. I forgot to do it. I . . . I still needed laudanum to sleep then, from time to time, and because of it I didn’t hear him slip out. And it cost him his life.”

“That is not the same as killing someone,” she said in a very low voice.

His mouth quirked bitterly again. “But the result is the same, isn’t it? The madman vanished. No one needed to live in fear anymore.” He shrugged. “I only hope his end came without much suffering.”

She was too stunned to move, but her horror must have shown on her face. “Is that terribly callous and cold to admit?” He rolled onto his side, facing her, and propped one hand under his head. “Have I ruined your good opinion of me yet? Because you might as well know: I’m not sorry he’s dead.”

“Are you certain he’s dead?” she asked falteringly.

“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “His mind was so far gone by then, he couldn’t have survived long. For a few days I thought he might wander home, but of course he didn’t. No, I’m absolutely certain he’s dead.” He paused, watching her closely. “And even more . . . I’m glad.”

Abigail was too shocked to speak.

“He begged me to kill him,” he said, his voice grown so quiet she barely breathed in order to hear him. “He knew he was losing his wits; he fought against it but the madness would swallow him whole for days at a time. One night he turned to me, tears running down his face, and begged me to put an end to it. “You’ve got a sword,” he cried. “Put it through me.” There was a long pause as he clenched his jaw and stared into the shadows beyond the lanterns, and Abigail bit her lip until it almost bled, imagining the anguish that request must have caused. “I couldn’t do it. There was nothing anyone could do to save him, he wanted to die, and shamefully, secretly, I knew it was the only way out of his hell. But I couldn’t do it.”

“Of course not,” she cried softly.

Sebastian shook his head. “Sometimes I think I should have. Sometimes I think I failed him as a son, for not doing what he asked. Instead I hid every sharp instrument in the house and set myself to watching him day and night. Not that it made any difference. Everyone who knew how deranged he had become only heard that he disappeared one night, and decided I must have put an end to him.” Again that bitter smile. “It fit with the mad, enraged image they had of me, I suppose.”

“They’re wrong,” she said in a low, passionate voice. “Wrong, both now and then.”

His fingers tightened around hers. He tipped his head to face her. “You’re a rare woman, Abigail Weston. You deserve so much better than a wreck of a man.”

“You’re not a wreck.”

“I don’t feel like one when I’m with you.” He leaned closer, looming over her.

Abigail could see the mermaid over his shoulder, reaching for her love and doomed never to have him. For decades—centuries—she’d been alone in the dark, unseen and unrequited, helpless to change her fate. Poor mermaid. “I already told you, you don’t get to decide what I deserve.”

His mouth curved. “I remember.” His lips brushed against hers before he lifted his head again. For a moment he studied her, his hair hanging loose and casting his face in dark shadow. Abigail waited, breathless and yearning but unsure of what to do. She’d made a mistake last time, too curious to know the truth of Lady Constance’s stories. This time she tried to shut the notorious stories out of her mind; they were fiction, bits of fancy. Sebastian was real and alive and she wanted him to be her true experience of love and passion.