Obsession (2 page)

And when I plummeted into that perdition, I would drag my dowager duchess grandmother along with me.

T
HE PORT BEAT AT MY HEAD LIKE A CUDGEL AS
the vicar spoke solemnly, first to the breath-holding onlookers, then to me, then to Edwina, who peered up at me with a knowing smirk. Her fiery red hair was covered in a lace cap and her plunging décolletage revealed the most voluptuous breasts outside of Paris.

With any luck I would get through the ceremony before I passed out completely. God forbid the vultures collected in the cushioned pews would come all this way only to have their entertainment spoiled by the groom passing out before he committed his life to total perdition.

The vicar’s words floated to me, scattering like leaves in a wind—something about if anyone knew of any reason these two should not be wed, speak now….

Oh, there were many, many reasons. The least of which—we didn’t love one another.

But she had money. I needed money.

She needed a compliant lover to satisfy her bent for erotic escapades, and since she had burned through five husbands—the last two dying in the throes of her orgasms—there wasn’t an available man on two continents who would come within a wink of her eyes.

Besides, if there was any woman on England’s beloved soil my grandmother despised, it was Edwina—the duchess’s deceased husband’s paramour.

“I do,” came a voice from the congregation.

The words were followed by a gasp and a sudden silence that rang through the room as resoundly as a church bell. The vicar, his expression frozen in shock, his face pale as flour, stared over my shoulder while the hands gripping the book went slack.

Clayton, standing at my side, let out a soft “Thank God.”

Edwina spat out a curse as she slowly turned.

I shook free of my inebriation and confusion as I swayed around to focus on a drab little creature, round as she was tall, wearing a dingy cap of sorts and a gray, shapeless frock covered by an equally dingy pinafore, standing center aisle, her body shaking as if with ague.

The duchess struggled to her feet, her face gray as her hair, her eyes too big for their sockets—eyes that locked with those of the intruder, who stepped back as if she anticipated an asp strike.

Lifting one shaking hand, the rotund little woman pointed at the dowager duchess and declared in a squeak, “She done it. All of it. May me sorry soul burn in hell for keepin’ shut ’bout it. But I cum soon as I heard ’bout yer weddin’, Yer Grace. I cudn’t keep me mouth closed a minute longer.”

Clayton stepped around me. “What the devil is this about?” he demanded.

I caught his arm, stopping him in his tracks.

Focusing on the terrified woman’s face, I spoke with no hint of the inebriation that had sullied my blood and brains seconds before.

“Let her speak.”

The woman sidestepped past the dowager, who clutched at her cane and opened and closed her mouth, saying nothing.

“ ’Tis the lass, Yer Grace. Maria? I know where she is. Where she’s been since the night she done rode off in yer grandmother’s coach. ’Twasn’t Huddersfield where yer grandmother had her took. ’Twas Menson, Yer Grace.”

Another burst of gasps, twitters of shock mingled with nervous speculation.

“Menson.” I stepped from the dais, the port’s sluggishness replaced by a heat that began in my belly and sluiced through my body. “Surely you’re mistaken. Menson is an asylum for the criminally insane.”

The woman gulped and nodded, wrung her hands and began to cry. “Aye. Y’ll find ’er there, Yer Grace. Or what be left of ’er, God bless ’er tormented young soul.”

2

Menson

Asylum for the Criminally Insane

T
HE MAN’S BREATH SMELLED OF ROTTING
teeth and kippers. His right ear, or what I could see of it beneath his fringe of long, greasy gray hair, had been mauled to a nub. Human teeth marks scarred the remaining flap of skin.

I twisted my fists in the man’s filthy shirt, and for the third time slammed him hard against the stone wall.

“Answer me, you idiot. Where is she? Maria Ashton. Where have you buried her? If you don’t answer me, I’ll snap your sorry neck so fast you’ll be eating kippers in hell by nightfall.”

“What is the meaning of this?”

I looked around.

An obese man of some fifty years stood in the doorway. His head appeared much too small for his immense girth. Large, protuberant eyes, bulging with shrewdness and feverish with ambition, marked him as one who would sell his own mother’s soul if it would enrich his coffers.

There wasn’t an iota of doubt in my mind that my grandmother had enriched him a great amount.

Behind him crowded several behemothsized assistants prepared to initiate an attack, should the order be given. Judging by the authoritarian’s expression, however, there would be no such order. Realization glazed his eyes. He knew exactly who I was and why I was there.

“Who the devil are you?” I demanded.

“Ruskin. Rupert Ruskin.” He cleared his throat. “Might you release Mr. Swift? He really has no authority to help you, Your Grace. Killing him will accomplish little, and besides, he’s stupid as a rock, as I’m certain you’ve already gathered.”

I released my grip and the man shuffled out the door.

Ruskin forced a thin smile. “You’ve come for the girl, I assume.”

“Obviously.”

Ruskin gave a sharp nod, dismissed his guards with a flip of his hand, and stepped from the room, pausing to allow me to join him in the dark corridor.

As we moved down the dank stone tunnel, Ruskin rummaged through a ring of keys that jangled and clanked in his hands, his only show of nervousness.

No doubt Ruskin had already contemplated the ramifications of this despicable circumstance—suffer under the lash of my grandmother’s tantrums if he divulged the truth of Maria’s confinement at Menson, or die a quick and painful death at my hands as I choked the truth out of him.

I was capable of killing him with my bare hands. I wanted to do it in that moment. He recognized it in my eyes and clenched fists, my burning face and locked jaw. Had anyone attempted to thwart me I would have lost what little thread of self-control I had and become as criminally insane as the lunatics howling from their cages.

Yet I contained my hunger for murder by naively, perhaps obstinately, telling myself that this was all falsity—perhaps another of my grandmother’s schemes to manipulate my life and keep me from marrying a woman who would bring further scandal to the Salterdon reputation.

I wanted to believe that with such desperation that my entire body shook. Surely whatever creature resided behind one of these locked doors could not be the angel who had saved my life and soul from hell’s fiery abyss.

Coming to an iron door, Ruskin slid the key into the lock, gritted his teeth as he struggled to turn it, grunted as it gave with a rusty scratch of metal upon metal, then shouldered the door open with a heave of his immense weight.

Stench washed over me in a stomach-turning wave.

The howls of the insane battered my ears, nonsensical babbles of madness. Insanity peered out at me from slits in the doors.

With each step deeper into the gloom, the hatred for my grandmother mounted. Fury expanded in my chest so that each putrid breath of air became a combustible sear of heat. I shook, not just with fury, but also with fear. It turned my every raw nerve into excruciating pain.

I was not a particularly religious man; I had given up God when forced to watch my father being devoured by sharks after the ship in which we were sailing caught fire—setting dozens of passengers adrift at sea, clinging to fragments of the ship; entire families dying from the heat, starvation, drowning; the devils who silently slinked up from the depths to feed….

But in that moment, walking through the halls of this certain hell, I prayed, actually prayed with every fiber of my less-than-spiritual soul, that this was simply another of my drunken dreams.

Oh, there had been plenty of them over the last years—at first, romantic visions of finding Maria, of our rushing into one another’s arms and covering each other in frantic, impassioned kisses. Then the letter had come—declaring that our a
ffaire de coeur
had been a mistake and she had married another. Then my romantic fantasies had turned to hideous nightmares of such hate that I oft dreamed of killing her.

But this was no dream.

No dream could assault my senses to such a degree!

Dare I pray, then, that this path on which I was being led would reveal some macabre mistake—that the weeping little nurse had been wrong; that the sweating, smelly man with a dough face and compassionless eyes shambling at my side was wrong, as well?

It staggered me that my grandmother would bow to such extreme cruelty and criminality. Disbelief hammered at my brain as the maddened howls reverberated along the damp stone walls. Bile crawled up my throat, acid and bitter.

As we rounded into a dim-as-twilight corridor, we happened upon a pitiful creature being dragged by attendants to his cell as he wept and babbled incoherently. I stopped, incapable of moving, watching as through a spinning tunnel as Ruskin moved ahead, halting at a narrow door.

Ruskin’s fat hands fumbled with keys—I was certain their jingling would become a scar on my memory, as would every crevice of the stone walls and floors, every hateful nuance of Ruskin’s colorless face as it turned slowly toward me, as he shoved open the door and waited.

“Your Grace,” he said with a simple lift of one eyebrow.

I moved. Slowly. One foot carefully placed before the other, like one balancing upon a high beam, the cold of my shock giving way to an internal heat that made sweat run down my back and sides.

Dark loomed inside the cell. The stench burned my eyes and nostrils, forcing me to remove a kerchief from my suit coat and cover my nose.

Slowly, my gaze moved along the straw-littered floor until—

Dear Merciful God.

Rocked back by the sight, I closed my eyes.

Ruskin’s voice came to me, sounding garbled, and an assistant moved around me with a lamp that cast dingy light upon the creature cowering in one corner of the cell.

No. No. This was not Maria!
My
Maria. With gentle blue eyes and an angel’s face. Whose soft, pale hair had brushed my cheeks with scented sweetness.

“She’s naked.”

’Twas all I could mutter in that moment.

“Of course she is,” Ruskin replied. “She might have hanged herself otherwise. It happens frequently.”

The kerchief floated from my hand, dropping softly as a feather at my feet. I stared down at it momentarily, thinking how odd it looked—such absurd foppishness juxtaposed against the fouled straw.

I blinked sweat from my burning eyes, then yanked at the buttons on my coat—tore them away in my fumbling haste to remove the garment as I staggered toward her—whoever she was—not Maria—surely
not
Maria. But whoever she was, she deserved to be shielded from the men who stood looking at her as if she were a slab of butchered meat.

“No.” Ruskin’s hand clamped upon my shoulder, halting me. “She may appear docile, Your Grace, but I assure you, she isn’t.”

“Get your hand off me,” I said through clenched teeth.
“Now.”

Closer, he said, barely above a whisper, “Your Grace, Miss Ashton is insane.”

I turned on Ruskin and drove him back against the wall, my hands twisting his collar, knuckles buried into the flabby flesh of his throat.

“That’s not Maria. Now tell me what you’ve done with her.
My
Maria. Maria Ashton of Huddersfield.” My voice broke. “That…animal is not Maria.”

He said nothing, just blinked with rummy eyes, bulging as a toad’s.

Then I heard it—the dreaded sound.

Humming.

Recognition sluiced through my heart and mind.

Humming.

Maria’s Song.

The love melody I had once composed for her lifted sweetly as birdsong along her cage walls.

As Ruskin tremblingly peeled my fingers from his coat, I stumbled back, my gaze drawn again to the frail woman crouched in the dim corner. Her blank gaze stared off into nothingness as she rocked, her knees drawn up to her breasts, her shorn hair a tangled filthy mass around her gaunt face.

I covered my eyes with my hands, then my ears, attempting to block out the soft sound of the song—certain that I was teetering on the brink of insanity myself.

No, this reality was not the insanity.

The insanity must surely lurk in my grandmother’s mind. Who in their right mind, with a grain of goodness in their heart, would dispose of another human being in such a way all for the sake of lineage? Just so the long line of blue blood running through the Hawthorne veins wouldn’t be tainted by a commoner, so the Salterdon title would not become a laughingstock to be tittered about, so the doors of aristocracy would not be slammed in their faces?

The dowager duchess would pay for this. Sorely.

Unbreathing, I removed my coat and forced myself to approach, her name tripping upon my lips.

“Ma—ria?”

Her eyes shifted. Her lids narrowed.

There was no recognition in the blank orbs that had once embraced me with their compassion and love.

She sprang with no warning, feral as a wild cat, the impact of her body driving me backward and down into the morass on the floor.

Her ragged nails tore at my cheeks; her hands pummeled me. Her legs kicked, knee driving into my ribs with such force the air expelled from my lungs and I suddenly felt as if I were a child again, driven deep into sea water by fragments of an exploding ship—bludgeoned and drowning.

The assistants fell upon her, lifting her off me as she thrashed like an animal in a trap, horrible, inhuman sounds boiling from the mouth that had once lavished me with kindness.

At last, dragging in a fragment of breath, I managed only, “Don’t hurt her.”

“For the love of God.”