Obsession (12 page)

“What happened? That sound—”

I followed the direction of her gaze to the shadows just beyond the lamplight. Nothing, of course. What had I expected to find there? Paul? Christ, I was becoming as mad as she.

“Maria, please.”

She sat up partially, her brow furrowing and her lower lip quivering. “What do you mean, Bertha is gone?”

“Listen to me.”

“Where am I?”

Again, I glanced toward the shadows, staring as the play of lightning reflected in a shimmering glow off the wall. I thought of the voice again and a shiver ran up my back.

“I won’t remain calm!” Maria cried, returning my focus back to her. She glared at the wall as her face blotched with angry color.

“Stop this,” I declared with all the authority I could muster despite my rising sense of frustration. “Do you hear me? Stop it.”

“Paul? Don’t leave me—”

Taking her slender shoulders in my hands, I gently shook her. “Goddamnit, you’re going to listen to me.”

“Bertha!” she wept. “Bertha, please—”

“She’s gone, dammit. I’m afraid you’re stuck with me—”

Her hands beat at my face.

“No! Don’t touch me!”

She shoved me aside and rolled from the bed. Her arms flailed out in front of her, as if she were stumbling in the dark.

“You’re going to stop this,” I shouted, my frustration mounting, as was my fear that she was lost to me. Lost! I knew not how to reach her, and for a moment I felt as mad as Maria. “You’re going to listen to me—”

“Help me! Someone help me!”

She backed into a corner and slid down the wall, her legs drawn up to her breasts, her hands buried in her hair. Her eyes closed. And she began rocking, humming
Maria’s Song.

A
S
I
POURED HALF A BOTTLE OF
E
DWINA’S ROSE-SCENTED
toilet water into the steaming bath, she looked on, horrified.

“You bought me that in Paris,” she cried.

“I’ll buy you another.”

“With what? A candlestick?”

I glared at her. “I’m in no mood to tolerate bitchiness at this moment. I suggest you make yourself useful. Help me undress her.”

“You’re not serious. She’s…dangerous.”

“So am I.”

Her eyes widened and she swallowed. “You’re going to owe me for this, Salterdon.”

“Get in line, Edwina. I owe just about everyone else in this country, in one way or another.”

Maria lay curled up in the bed, staring at the window. I motioned Edwina to the opposite side of the bed in case Maria attempted to run again.

She didn’t, thank God, just lay as limply as a rag doll as I peeled the singed, soot-stained nightdress from her. Gently, I lifted her; she didn’t struggle.

I eased her into the water, cradling her shoulders against my arm. Steam settled on my face in drops that leaked off my brow and spattered on her breasts. Her pale skin flushed with heat. Her eyes widened.

I looked quickly at Edwina and mouthed silently, “Calm her.”

“Me?” she mouthed back.

“Do it,” I mouthed again.

With a sigh of resignation, she eased closer to the tub. “Be at peace, Maria. Everything is going to be fine.”

Maria turned her head toward the voice and stared hard, as if through the dark.

“We’re not going to hurt you.”

“Bertha?” she whispered. “Bertha, is that you?”

I glared at Edwina and nodded.

“Yes, dear.” Edwina wrung her hand and rolled her eyes. “It’s…Bertha.”

Maria relaxed a little and I reached for the soap, skimmed it along her shoulders and down her submerged arms. Soot from my hands formed dark swirls on her skin and in the water.

“Where is Sarah?” she asked.

Edwina looked at me; I shrugged.

“Sarah? What do you want with Sarah?” Edwina asked.

“I want her. I want Sarah.”

“She’s…not here.”

“I want her.” Maria struggled, and I was forced to steady her. Her trepidation was returning; her body began to tremble. “Sarah!” she cried.

“Do something,” I said through my teeth.

“Tell me where she is,” Edwina said, trying to keep her panic under control.

“Give her to me!”

Before I could react, Maria rose partially out of the water, her beautiful face contorted in a rage that set me back on my heels. She looked directly into my eyes, her own like twin fires burning, as hot as the flames that had razed the mine and village hours before.

Suddenly her hands were in my hair, fingers twisting and nails burying into my scalp, dragging me into the tub with her, sprawling, facedown in the water, where I inhaled instinctively, sucking in rose-scented liquid that exploded in my brain.

Edwina screamed.

I heaved upward and tore myself away, choking, then retching up water that scorched my throat.

Edwina screamed again.

Through a burning blur I looked around to find Maria climbing out of the tub, her attention fixed on Edwina, who backed toward the door.

“Give her to me, you bitch,” Maria growled.

“I don’t have her!” Edwina cried. “Trey! Do something. She’s going to—”

Maria leapt as gracefully as a cat onto Edwina, sending her flying backward to land in a jarring thump on the floor. Maria took handfuls of her hair and began to slam her head against the carpet.

Scrambling to my feet, I leapt over the tub and grabbed Maria around the waist, hauling her back, causing Edwina to howl in pain as Maria, with the tenaciousness of a snapping turtle, continued to grip Edwina’s hair and shake her side to side like a dog with a bone.

“Let her go!” I shouted and tried to peel Maria’s fingers from Edwina’s hair.

With a snarl, she sank her little teeth into my shoulder. I felt them tear into my muscle like pointed knives.

I drove my elbow into her ribs; heard the rush of air leave her lungs as she released me. She stumbled back, no longer interested in me or Edwina as she turned round and round, her arms outstretched as she wailed, “Sarah!”

W
HO THE DEVIL WAS
S
ARAH?

As the rain pounded against the roof, I saw Maria’s face over and over again as she screamed the name. There’d been no fear there, only despair so intense my heart ached to recall it.

Sarah.

I searched my mind, recalling the miners’ wives—no Sarah there that I could remember. Perhaps one of the lasses I had not met? Someone who, with Bertha, had made a sort of breakthrough with Maria? Whoever it was, she had made an impact of utmost power.

As the sun rose behind the low dark clouds of threatening rain, I took off down the muddy path once again, my progress slowed by mire and the brutal cold that had settled over the landscape in thick patches of ice-kissed mist. I didn’t feel the cold—only the gnawing hope that I would locate Sarah, and she would help me.

The village sprawled like some lifeless cadaver in the hollow, the roofless stone houses like bones jutting out of the earth. Scattered among the fallen debris, men sat like stone relics of another time, picks lying on the ground, forgotten, shovels tossed away, useless.

The wraith-like figures of the dead miners’ wives moved silently among the scorched houses, dragging out their pitiful furnishings and piling them high onto the backs of wagons. As I passed, a few turned their hollow-eyed looks toward me, their expressions lifting in momentary hope before realization slammed the door of reality again in their faces.

The stones of the Whitefields’ house stood in stark contrast to the black hills beyond it. Carefully, I entered, paused at the burned threshold, and stared in on the charred remnants of the ladder-back chair and cot, the blackened metal cooking pots inside the hearth.

The world smelled of smoldering, wet ashes.

Bertha exited the bedroom, her arms full of bundled bedding that had, miraculously, escaped the inferno that had gutted the main room. Upon seeing me, she stopped. She had aged a decade in the last twenty-four hours. Grief had etched deep grooves in her face.

“Bertha,” I said, my voice tight. “I’m sorry.”

She gave me a quick nod and clamped the bundles to her chest. “Aye. So am I.”

“Can I help you with that?”

“No.” She shook her head.

“What will you do now?”

“I’ll be movin’ on.”

“Where will you go?”

“Down the road. I’ve got me brother in Bradford. His wife passed on last year. He could use me help, I think, what with his passel of children.”

She plunked the bundle on the floor and returned to the bedroom. I moved to the bedding and picked it up, waited until she returned with another arm full of what appeared to be Thomas’s clothes.

“Who is Sarah?” I asked.

She stared at me a long moment as if she were lost in deep thought.

“Sarah,” I repeated. “Where can I find her?”

Bertha swallowed and glanced around the room. She looked, for an instant, as if she would shatter.

“Maria is calling for her.”

“Ah.” She took an uneven breath. “How is the lass?”

“Violent.”

“ ’Tis a shame.” She blinked and looked at me again. “Like I said, she needs a woman’s touch.”

“Perhaps this Sarah person can help. Maria seems bonded to her, somehow.”

Her eyes pooling with tears, Bertha chewed her lower lip, then trudged back through the ashes into the bedroom. Exiting again, she held a baby doll in one hand. She stared at it with such pain I feared she would erupt in a torrent of tears.

She tossed it to me. “Take it. It’s all I’ve got left of me darlin’ daughter, but Maria needs it more than me. Only serves to remind me of what I’ve lost.”

I stared down on the cracked face of the doll with big painted blue eyes and fading cupid lips. The fringe of hair spraying from its head looked like dry matted straw.

Confused, I looked again at Bertha.

“Me daughter called ’er Matilda. Thomas bought it for her once when he went to London.” Her smile quivered. “Me precious girl slept with it ever’ night till she died.”

A doll. I stared down into its cherubic face, my confusion growing. “The doll—”

“ ’Tis Sarah.” She swallowed. “Maria called her Sarah.”

12

R
EALITY—INDEED, LIFE—CAME RUSHING UPON
her like a sea of fire—blinding in its brilliance and horrifying in its cacophony. It seemed to boil up from her very essence—what remained of her, at least, that had not moved into the realm of the netherworld. For as long as she could remember—which wasn’t long, because nothing existed before she had, at Paul’s insistence, allowed herself to slide like one drowning into the blackness—there had been silence and numbness. No fear. No happiness. No pain. Or sorrow. Only…numbness.

Maria wondered if she, in some miraculous twist of irony, had been hurled back into her dear mother’s womb, where existence swarmed as red and hot as blood. She heard the loud beating of a heart—her
own
heart, she realized—felt each surge of her own blood rush into her chest, expanding—
beat
—withdrawing—
beat beat
—sending tingles down her arms and fingers that felt as if they were being pricked by a thousand fiery needles.

No, no! She didn’t like it, this…awakening. ’Twas the black that sustained her, saved her from complete insanity. Beyond the blackness was evil and pain. And fear. Oh, God, the fear…

It had begun with a roar that had rushed through her darkness with Herculean force, and she had watched her black cocoon of comfort fracture around her like glass, allowing fragments of light and noise to stream in upon her.

She had screamed for Paul, and he had come, swiftly as always, yet…in the briefest of seconds he had been pulled away, sucked into a spiraling vortex of light. His face, his glorious face, always awash in such calm blissfulness, had appeared disturbed.

Then Bertha’s voice, usually soothing and oh, so kind (she had been convinced that Bertha was an angel, though Paul had adamantly denied it), had risen in a horrifying wail—certainly no sound belonging to angels. Far from it. Angels didn’t experience pain or horror. That’s what heaven was for: to provide a haven from human misery.

With every fiber of her strength, Maria had fought to hide, to sink back into the void and pull the darkness in over her.

Yet it was crumbling. Little by little. Fractures appearing in the black walls surrounding her, allowing in the light and sound.

Hateful consciousness crashed over her now, awakened by an awareness that stole through her. Soon the screams would begin—the horrible wails of maniacs. Then they would return to poke and prod her with their feet, to laugh at her and sneer and cause her pain.

And with those monsters would come the memories. It was those that hurt her more, even more than the pain and humiliation inflicted on her by the monsters.

Cracking open one eye the tiniest bit, she peered through her lashes. She wasn’t alone. Every instinct roused inside her. She always knew, no matter how hidden she was in her mind, when she wasn’t alone. They were playing with her again, waiting to scare her. Waiting to remind her that she would rot in this horrible cell forever, because…

Because she had committed the vilest sort of crime. Worse even than murder, according to Ruskin.

She had dared to seduce a blue blood—skewed his priorities, not to mention his familial loyalties. His marriage to her would have meant the extermination of a blood line that had undoubtedly begun with Adam and Eve.

She mustn’t think about it!

To allow those memories to intrude would invite the insanity—the black hate that hovered around her like death itself, waiting to invade if she let down her guard for an instant.

Once, before Paul had introduced her to the darkness, she had been consumed by hate. She had howled out her fury like the lunatics in the surrounding cells. She had obsessed herself with plotting murder—she, the daughter of a vicar, had sunk as low as Lucifer himself. Revenge had coiled and twisted through her mind like some poisonous vine.

She focused on her surroundings, confusion mounting. She heard the beating rain on the casements, the wuther of wind among trees.