Obsession (18 page)

“ ’Tis only…He cannot die. Not yet. Not until he’s confessed to me the whereabouts of my daughter.”

Maria shoved Edwina aside and fled through the open door.

17

M
OMENTARILY, SHE PAUSED.
A
S IF SHE
had stumbled through a portal into a past that she had long since buried deep within that insanity, unleashed memories came rushing upon her.

’Twas all familiar to her now.

She knew the way to Salterdon’s bedroom. The recollections hammered at her skull, the many steps she had taken down the long gallery those years ago, driven by some emotion to heal him. Unafraid of his madness, driven day after day to look upon his face, finding naught but pleasure in his garbled words and fierce temperament.

The world had deemed him a beast.

Yet…yet,
then
she had had the capacity for compassion.

Then
she had looked beyond the monstrous facade of the man; witnessed his vulnerability, his pain, his anguish; recognized there beat within his bosom a heart that was misunderstood.

Stop! Cease this hateful and unwelcome reminiscence!

She did not love him.

She did not care that he suffered. ’Twas God’s punishment for the hell he had put her through.

She would coerce from him the truth about their daughter. Nothing more!

Traversing the hall, she noted the pictures on the walls: long deceased ancestors, grim men and pompous women with powdered hair and lavish jewels, whose stern gazes were as lifeless in life as they were in their crypts.

She passed a great oak clock, enormous in height, whose case was carved and black with time and rubbing. At the very moment of her passing, it knelled.

The deep sound reverberated through the empty hall and seemed to strike with its brass hammer upon her heart. A chilled and vault-like air suddenly pervaded the corridor. The burning girandoles on the walls cast an odd, gyrating light as if they were disturbed by some fleeing, unseen entity.

At last Maria came to his bedroom.

She halted there a moment, her hand upon the knob as the memories burned more brightly, blinding in their brilliance.

She squared her shoulders and entered the room.

The invalid’s companions looked at her with pale faces, and their eyes widened as if some spectre had appeared.

Yet no one spoke.

Clayton stood at his brother’s bedside, his wife near, while Iris bent over His Grace and cooled his sweating face with a damp cloth.

Cautiously, Maria moved through the shadows, to Trey’s bedside.

She was unprepared.

Maria had not imagined that she would tremble in such a way when she saw him.

Yes, she had shaken with anger, and shivered with fear and pain and disgust while in his presence. But this…
emotion
felt traitorous and befuddling.

Panic seized her.

A fist of fiery steel grasped her vitals: a hateful warring of sentiment full of struggle. Love and hate gnashed at one another within her breast and her thoughts clamored for reasoning.

Escape! Now!

He
is the cause of your misery!

He
is the reason your life became an unending nightmare.

She had looked upon death’s grim countenance only once in her life—the instant before the soul of her beloved Paul had slipped from its earthly chamber and reached for Heaven.

Clayton and Miracle stepped aside, allowing Maria to move closer.

She looked into Iris’s eyes, noted the sparkling tears there before she backed away, clutching the damp cloth to her enormous bosom.

Nay, he had not yet succumbed. His chest rose with shallow breaths, each a sound like iron grating upon iron.

Help him,
came the whisper from the shadowed corner of the vast chamber, startling her.

Paul! He was with her yet. Not a spirit contrived by her lunacy. Yet how shocking and frightening it seemed in that moment.

Maria, you must help him. Only you can save him.

Her faculties roused and she turned sharply to point at the pitifully weak flames within the hearth.

“Stoke the fire,” she ordered. Then to Iris, “Collect several of your most dense bedcovers and place them over His Grace. And the lot of you, out. Get out.”

“Do you think I’ll leave my brother with you unattended?” Clayton asked. “Good God, woman, you’ve attempted to murder him—”

“Would I murder the man without learning the whereabouts of my daughter?”

She narrowed her eyes as she looked from pale face to face. “Unless
you
know the truth about my daughter. Do you? The devil is in you if you do not answer me truthfully.”

She glared at Clayton. “Reply, damn you. What have
you
to say?”

He set his gray gaze steady and fixed upon hers. “We don’t know any more than you, Maria. We only just learned about the child—as did Trey. ’Tis my grandmother who holds the secret. My brother is innocent in all this.”

“You’re a bloody liar.”

Maria turned away. “Of course you would not give me the truth now—else I would leave this room and let him pass. May the lot of your souls go to hell. Now get out. I shan’t lay a healing palm upon him until you do.”

Clayton’s wife gently grasped her husband’s arm. “Come away, Clay. Let them alone.”

“You’re as daft as she is, if you think—”

“Husband, your brother tarries at death’s door. She has little choice but to help him now.”

Clayton moved up behind Maria. “And then what, lass? Will you sweat the truth from his dying lips, then smother him with yonder pillow?”

He laid a hand upon her shoulder, and she flinched. She would have drawn away, but his grip held her as if by some magical force.

“I knew you when you were innocent and kind, and believed only the good in your fellow man. You saw beyond my brother’s calloused shell to the human capable of loving you. You, above all others, exuded Christian benevolence even upon the most lost of souls.”

“And where did it get me?” she said. “Interred in wickeddom.”

Silence.

At last, he moved away.

Maria listened as the room emptied. Moments later Iris returned with the bedcovers, which she placed upon Salterdon. Herbert followed, stoking the fire until the flames licked like dragon tongues along the stone hearth, until Salterdon’s countenance shone with sweat and the room radiated with light red as the womb of Hell.

Maria sat upon a stool at the foot of the duke’s bed after the servants left, her hands gripped fiercely together in her lap as the heat made her body wet and her lungs burn.

Then she heard him groan.

She moved to his side.

As she watched, a glow spread across his waxen, hueless face. Sweat saturated his hair and beaded upon his cheeks’ contours.

How weak and pitiful he looked!

She spun away and covered her face with her hands. Glad she should be, at his suffering! Yet…

What hateful, niggling feelings squirmed in her heart. What unwelcome memories roused with dreaded clarity.

His smiling face…his gentle touch…his tender kiss.

Help him,
came that familiar whisper, closer now, so near that the words felt like a breeze upon her cheek.

Frantic, Maria turned. The room remained empty.

“Show yourself!” she cried.

Silence.

“Why, suddenly, do you hide from me, Paul?”

Silence.

She moved to the window and tossed aside the heavy drapes. The heat caused the ice to melt upon the panes, and beyond, the night lay black and frigid and still.

“Where are you? Show yourself! Prove to me that you exist and have never been a figment of my lunacy!”

Have faith.

“Faith? Brother, I have long since lost faith.”

Nay, you’ve not lost faith, Maria. ’Tis faith alone that has kept you alive.

Maria closed her eyes and rested her forehead against the pane. “You kept me alive, Paul. No other. Yet now you taunt me. You withhold your beautiful, beloved face from me.

“Why will you not help me now? If it’s true what they say, that the man dying on yon bed is innocent of abandoning me to that dreaded asylum, why have you not said so? If you do indeed exist, why will you not reveal the truth about my daughter?”

She turned back to the vacant, sweltering room. “I’ll tell you why: because you don’t exist. Not since you died in my arms those many years ago. You’re nothing more than the lingering hallucinations of a maniac.”

Silence again.

Her gaze darted around the room, a sense of panic rising within her.

“Paul? Paul! Are you there? I…I didn’t mean it. Don’t leave me. I simply want the truth. I want to understand.”

Maria waited, the quiet pressing down on her.

At last, she turned and moved toward the bed, each step hesitant, her body feeling cumbersome and wooden. Her heart felt as chilled and void as the night beyond the window.

Wretched faith! Faith had caused her suffering, filling her endless days and nights spent pacing her filthy stone cell, praying to a God who had abandoned her.

Why? Why? Why?
she had uttered in the darkness.

She,
who had practiced only goodness and tolerance all of her young life.

She,
who had never uttered so much as an unkind word, never lifted an ungentle finger against even the most loathsome of insects.

She,
who had practiced patience and understanding at her father’s cruelty and domination.

But after an agony so lingering that death ought to have been a welcome blessing, she had at last closed the eyes of that departed, spiritless faith, and with great calm, had embraced madness.

Salterdon rolled his head from side to side, his fever stoked by the sweltering air.

Help him.

Maria covered her ears with her hands, as if the act would somehow vanquish the voice in her mind.

Touch him.

“Nay, I will not! The man is loathsome to me!”

He’s lost. Lost. All hope and faith is lost to him—

“Then let him die.”

Save him, Maria. Save yourself.

Suddenly Salterdon’s eyes sprang open. He fixed her with pupils that were glassy and afire. His lips parted, and he whispered, “Maria.”

And she seemed to hear a sound like music.

The tune that had haunted her thoughts for month upon month. It had played over and over in her mind, soothing her and lancing her, inviting fond visions that tore her heart in two.

Maria’s Song
.

He had composed it those years ago when he, lost of his faculties, unable to communicate, had reached out to her in the only way he could. Each stroke of the ivory key had become a gentle caress upon her soul.

What fiend played it now?

She fled to the door and threw it open, then stepped into the empty hallway.

No music here. It resided only in her mind—yet another wicked trickery of her memory.

Maria returned to the room and took a chair near Salterdon’s bedside. His eyes closed again, his body writhed beneath the burden of the heat that bore down on him, and within him. His lungs rattled with every breath.

The distant case clock struck midnight. And time passed.

Later it struck one. Then two.

Upon each hour she roused and stoked the fire, feeling its heat singe her flesh and soak her garment with sweat until she yearned to throw open the window and relieve her own suffering.

Yet another hour stole over her, and she dozed.

Suddenly a chill kissed her cheek and arms and she awoke, uneasy. She rose as if lifted by some unseen force—frigid fingers upon the back of her neck, guiding her to Salterdon’s bed.

Silent and still he lay, his eyes wide and staring, his face colorless.

The duke, friend, lover, fiend, was dead!

An eddying darkness seemed to swirl round her, and some emotion roused in her bosom. Fear. Yes! Grief. No, no, not grief. Surely not grief.

Yet she had no strength to deny the traitorous grief. A prayer rushed to her lips.

“Dear Heavenly God, spare him.”

She placed a trembling hand upon his brow—warm yet, warm, and closed her eyes.

“Dear Heavenly God, spare him.”

Beyond the windowpanes the wind moved through the nearby boughs of trees, groaning like a thousand souls. The terrifying yet beautiful sound filled the room, and Maria cried out again and again, entreating the bodiless angels to save the once-cherished master of her heart.

The windowpanes trembled. Flames within the hearth heaved with fresh vigor, their luminescence splashing upon the walls like nymphs dancing.

What frightening energy besieged her! Fire and wind. The song of souls. It swept through her body and down her arm, and as she flung back her head, a vision radiated above her in a blinding white light.

Paul! His brilliant blue eyes smiled at her. His beloved face—so distinct—was as beautiful as God Himself.

Faith, Maria. ’Tis with you yet. Never doubt Me. I live within you, and you in I. I shall show you miracles yet.

The vision faded, drawn down some spiraling white abyss into an indefinite distance, where it died.
He
was gone. The wind was gone. The singing of souls—all gone.

The man beneath her hand moved. His eyelids quivered.

Salterdon lived.

Gratitude swelled in Maria’s heart and she fell to her knees at his bedside, her hands clasped at her breast.

The bedroom door burst open and hurried footsteps approached.

“What the devil is going on in here?” Salterdon’s brother demanded.

Miracle swept around Maria and hurried to Trey’s bedside. “His fever is broken!”

“Thank God,” Clayton declared.

Maria closed her eyes and whispered, “Thank God.”

18

M
ARIA REMAINED AT
S
ALTERDON’S BEDSIDE
throughout the night as he slept.