Obsession (3 page)

Clayton pushed his way through the gaping onlookers crowding the doorway, disheveled from his frantic ride on horseback to Menson. He took my arm and hauled me to my feet, his expression one of shock and repulsion as we watched the attendants struggle to restrain her.

As swiftly as she had roused to strike me, she collapsed into the arms of a hulk of a man who dropped her in a pile of straw as if she were nothing more than a lot of rags.

I turned on Ruskin, who had retreated, his face slack with dread.

Clayton stepped between us and threw his shoulder into me, his every muscle straining to restrain me, knowing that should I get my hands on Ruskin, I would most likely kill him for what he had allowed to transpire here.

“You’ll do Maria no good if you get yourself imprisoned for murder,” Clayton said as matter-of-factly as possible.

I flashed him a hot look. “I’m a duke. Those wigged bastards wouldn’t dare imprison me.”

“Your Grace, you’re the scourge of aristocracy. The King himself would sink you into the deepest, darkest hole of perdition if he wasn’t so fond of our grandmother.”

“I fully intend to kill her, too.”

“Promises, promises.” Clayton’s lips curved, and I felt myself relax.

Clayton removed a kerchief from his vest pocket and shoved it into my hand, then touched one finger to his cheek, reminding me of the scratches that only then began to pulsate with sharp pain.

I pressed the linen to my face, and the cloth was quickly tainted with blood. As I stared down at it, the absolute reality of this place and its people, of the cowering, once-beautiful lunatic huddled in the corner, bore down on me, a behemoth weight that made me feel as breakable as thin glass.

Clayton ushered me from the cell.

I collapsed against the corridor wall, head down, remotely watching drops of blood from my cheek spot my shoes like dark teardrops.

“What do you propose to do now?” Clayton leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms over his chest. “Need I remind you that you left a church full of guests and an abandoned fiancée at the altar?”

“The wedding is off, of course.”

He looked back at Maria’s cell. “That goes without saying. I was referring to…this.
Her.
Brother, I sense you’re much too late to do her any good. She’s quite gone, I’m afraid.”

“I’ll take her home, where she belongs.”

“Huddersfield?”

“Thorn Rose.”

Clay’s gray eyes regarded me solemnly. “She’ll need a staff of nurses and servants. I’ll see to it immediately.”

“Unnecessary.” I straightened and stared at the wall. “She’s my burden to bear. If it weren’t for me—”

“Trey.” Clay moved closer, his voice softening. “This isn’t your doing.”

I looked at my brother. “Aye, it is. I loved her. That was enough.”

3

Thorn Rose Manor

I
SAT IN A CHAIR IN THE SECOND-FLOOR
gallery, in a pool of sunlight fractured through mullioned glass, the heat making the back of my neck damp with warmth. My cheek throbbed from the scratches Maria had inflicted the day before, ragged trenches that would undoubtedly scar.

Portraits of Salterdon ancestors lined the walls, all of whom stared down at me with such righteousness, my face burned.

I might have been twelve again, ordered to my grandmother’s apartment to be disciplined for some infraction unworthy of a future duke. The wait had been a punishment in itself—giving me and, less frequently, Clayton, ample time to ponder the consequences she would lay upon our backsides.

Occasionally, if Grandfather were in the house, he would attempt to dissuade her from inflicting her sort of justice.

“Boys will be boys,” he would guffaw, and she would crow, “And dukes will be dukes.”

I had spent my entire life trying to prove her wrong.

As I stared at the locked door of Maria’s room, the large ornate silver key resting on my thigh, I listened for any sound to alert me that she had arisen from the drugged state in which she had traveled from Menson to Thorn Rose. It had been a hellish journey, with Maria bound and occasionally rousing from her opiate stupor to howl in horror from the rich squabs of my coach while I rode up with Maynord, who drove the conveyance as if all the hounds of Hades were in pursuit.

Herbert, my man, butler, cook, and swigger of my finest port stood near, having delivered hot water and the scented soap that I had recently purchased in Paris for my affianced—lovely, taloned, and fanged Edwina, who even now must be planning my demise over this turn of events.

Not that she would have been at all humiliated over having been left at the altar. Nor would she have been heartbroken. She didn’t love me any more than I loved her. I needed her money, and she needed a husband…and a father for the babe flourishing in her womb—sire unknown.

Not mine, for certain. She was too far gone when I first had her.

With my desertion, however, she would be forced to deal with her situation on her own. She was no more prepared for motherhood than I was for fatherhood; we were much too self-absorbed. Children were for men like my brother, who found baby babble and drool somehow endearing, who enjoyed romping like wild puppies in the gardens, spending dreary winter nights sharing fairy tales before roaring fires, and reading Bible scriptures.

Together, however, we might have made a go of it. She had the money to supply the child enough nurses to keep it dry, fed, and pacified while Edwina and I went about our business, entertaining ourselves with lovers, Faro, and the occasional foray into London’s dark East Side, where bounders like myself indulged in unmentionable but pleasurable sins.

There was a sound, at long last, from behind the locked door.

I took the key in my suddenly sweating hand and slowly stood, my gaze locked upon the door as if it were a causeway to hell.

How could I possibly fear her?

She, whose hands had once soothed my fevered brow, and stroked my phallus with such incredible gentleness that the very act of orgasmic climax into her warm, yielding body seemed a sacrilege.

Sick bastard.

Even as I stood outside her door, the memories of our lovemaking slugged me with a desire for her that made my lower body rouse with a heat and firmness that made me clench my teeth.

I had ached for Maria Ashton from the first moment I looked into her eyes those years ago. She had become, in a curve of her full, crimson mouth, my sole cause for survival.

My…exquisite obsession.

I slid the key into the lock slowly as I pressed my ear hard to the door, listening for another hint of her revival, turning the key until it clicked, so loud in the tense moment that I flinched.

Placing my fingertips lightly upon the door, I shoved it open.

Sunlight spilled through the open window where Maria crouched on the broad sill. Having shed the soft, thin cotton sleeping gown in which I had dressed her, her naked skin, pale as milk and marred by deep bruises, glowed with an iridescence that made her appear some ethereal spirit prepared to take flight.

She was poised, face turned up into the late afternoon sun, faded blue eyes glistening, the tufts of her once-beautiful hair stirring with the breeze that billowed the curtains on either side of her.

Her head turned, and those wide, as-yet innocent irises regarded me—first with the look of a deer staring into its stalker’s hungry eyes, then confusion, then—

She was gone.

Before my fear-frozen limbs could spring toward the window to stop her, she was gone, arms outstretched like a soaring bird.

A sound rose in my throat as I stumbled to the open window and looked down to where she lay on her back upon the thick, dark green grass with its sprinkling of wild anemones. One arm was crooked over her head, one leg straight, the other bent at the knee, giving her the appearance of a marionette.

Her eyes were open, staring up into mine, her red lips curved as they had always been in my dreams.

“H
ER CONDITION IS DEPLORABLE, OF COURSE
. E
XTREME
malnourishment. While her leap from the window appears to have done little harm, there is evidence of formerly broken bones. You see here, along the femur—how it crooks slightly there. It was broken and poorly set, if set at all. And the fingers here, and here just below the knuckle. The open sores on her feet and legs are no doubt due to the unsanitary conditions in which she was forced to live. Also, Your Grace, she appears to be in a disassociated state.”

“Meaning?”

I glared at the old physician, Jules Goodbody. Herbert had located him in Haworth, just exiting the Black Bull, cheeks flushed by ale. He boasted a baritone bark, abrupt in utterance—little to assure the dying of much more than the inevitability of their demise.

“She’s quite mad,” he explained, then flipped open the face of his watch and regarded the time with a down quirking of his lips. “Yes, yes, quite mad. I should return her to Menson posthaste if you know what’s good for you.”

“I expect you to cure her.”

He closed the watch with a click and tucked all but the ornate silver fob back into his vest pocket. Pondering, he gazed out the window to the distant winding lane and pennines, and the sunken stone wall where legions of rooks lined the lichen-covered stones.

“Curing such injuries isn’t so simple as lancing poison from a boil or splinting a broken bone. We cannot open the skull, prod about it with an instrument, and pluck out the malady.”

“There has to be something—some way to help her.”

“Only time, Your Grace. Kindness. Gentleness. Above all, patience.” He punctuated “patience” with a sharp jab of one finger toward the ceiling.

“Ah, patience.” I laughed dryly into the man’s face. “Am I not renowned for my
im
patience,
un
kindness, and
deviltry,
sir?”

“You might try repenting, Your Grace.”

“In hopes that God will be so very pleased over the conquest of yet another sinner, He’ll suddenly shower me in the attributes I am so sorely lacking?”

“I shouldn’t attempt such a wholesale redemption too quickly. ’Twould seem a bit hypocritical, I think.”

I picked up my glass of port and regarded it. “God hasn’t done me any favors.”

“On the contrary. You were born into position and prosperity, to loving parents—”

“Who were taken from me and my brother when we were only ten, depositing us into the care of a manipulating, heartless old crone who would sacrifice the body and soul of the angel in that bed, in order to keep me a prisoner of her control.

“Oh, and let’s not forget that He allowed highwaymen to bash my head so I was little more than one of those dribbling idiots at Menson. What was that for? God’s way of reminding me I should be thankful my skull is hard as a coconut?”

“Had your coconut not been knocked, you wouldn’t have met her, would you?”

“Touché. However, had she not met me, she would no doubt be happily married to that limpish little vicar—John Rees or something—from Huddersfield, who was so madly in love with her. He showed up on my doorstep once with his heart on his sleeve, wishing to whisk Maria away before I could sully her innocence.”

“Occasionally, God’s road to happiness comes with pits and valleys. Such is life, Your Grace. Sublimity is made all the more divine if one must suffer to attain it.”

“The road to heaven being paved with flagellation seems a touch hypocritical of a God who is supposed to epitomize kindness. Doesn’t it?”

“If life was meant to be bliss, Your Grace, there would be no rational reason to look forward to heaven. Would there?”

“You sound like a bloody vicar. I thought physicians were prone to atheism, along with science scholars, philosophers, and mathematicians.”

Goodbody looked down at Maria, and his brow furrowed. “I should hate to think this life is all we have to look forward to, else what a damnable waste of time it all is.”

He sighed. “Take care in the way you handle her. I sense she could be dangerous.”

M
ARIA DANGEROUS?
N
OT POSSIBLE
. N
OT THE
angel who had delivered me from my own hell.

Maria Ashton epitomized kindness. She had been the first true goodness to influence my life since the death of my parents. How confident she had been in God’s charity. To this very moment, her words of God’s benevolence tapped upon my memory.

“I believe Him to be patient and kind and all-forgiving—no matter what the sin, or sins. His hand is always outstretched. All one needs, Your Grace, is faith and courage, and a repentant heart.”

Such damned, naive conviction, and this is how He repaid her faith in Him?

“Your Grace.”

Herbert entered the room carrying a tray of food, which he placed on a table near the bed. Stiffly, he then turned to face me. A thin strand of gray hair spilled over one bloodshot eye. He didn’t bother to push it back.

“Will there be anything else, Your Grace?”

I regarded his rumpled white shirt. “You’ve forgotten your coat again, Herbert.”

He looked down, looked up, and sniffed. “So I have, Your Grace. My apologies.”

“What is that?” I pointed to several dark stains on the shirt front, below his chin.

“The young lady’s dinner, Your Grace.” He flopped a hand in the general direction of the tray. “Stew.”

“Good God. Not the lamb stew you tried to feed me three days ago.”

“Pigeon, Your Grace.”

We looked in unison toward the now closed and locked window, where a trio of pigeons perched on the windowsill peered in at us.

I slowly turned my gaze back on Herbert. “You didn’t—”

“Not personally, Your Grace. ’Twas the stableman Maynord. He was most happy to do it. Said they were—I beg your pardon, Your Grace—‘shattin’ on his bleedin’ harness and buggy.’ ”

“How very…appetizing.”

“Aye.” Herbert blinked sleepily. “Will there be anything else, Sir?”

I shook my head and watched him move toward the door.

“Herbert.”