Ravishing the Heiress (9 page)

“You don’t need to do such wifely things. We have an agreement in place.”

“I am not doing anything wifely,” she said, finding that it required great effort to keep her voice low and even. “If I stay here, after my husband demolished his room and left, I dare say I will not enjoy the pity and idle curiosity from the inn’s owners and staff.”

He looked at her a minute, his otherwise beautiful blue eyes entirely bloodshot. “Suit yourself, then. I leave in half an hour.”

T
he place twenty miles north was beautiful. They were halfway up a steep, densely wooded slope that overlooked a mirror-bright lake. The colors of the hills changed constantly, grey and misty in morning, a brilliant blue-green at noon, almost violet at sunset.

But an
establishment
it was not. Millie had expected a country estate of some description. Or, failing that, a hunting lodge. What she found was a cottage little larger than a cabin and only two steps removed from primitiveness.

The nearest village was six miles away. They had no carriages, no maids, and no cook. The earl expected them to survive on bread, butter, potted meat, and fruits that were delivered every three days. Or rather, he expected
her
to live on those. He himself needed only whisky, which came in crates.

Nightly he retired with several bottles. Nightly he brutalized something in his room: plates on the wall, the washstand, the solid oak desk. She cowered in her bed during his bursts of violence. Even though he’d never said a harsh word to her—or even so much as looked at her—every crash shattered her.

Sometimes she left her bed, put on her heaviest coat, and went outside, as far away as she dared in the pitch dark, to look at the stars. To remind herself that she was but a speck of dust mote in this vast universe—and her heartache just as insignificant. Then he would destroy something else, fracturing the silence of the night, and her entire universe would again shrink to a singular point of despair.

He slept during the day. She walked for hours in the
hills, not returning until she was exhausted. She missed her mother, her kind, wise, and unwaveringly loving mother. She missed the peace and tranquility of her old house, where no one drank himself into a stupor day after day. She even missed the relentless piano practices—she had nothing to do, no goals to achieve, no standard of excellence to which she could aspire.

She rarely saw him. One day, after the washbasin in his room had departed for the rubbish bin in fragments, she came upon him bathing in the stream behind the cottage, stripped to the waist. He’d lost a shocking amount of weight, his entire torso but skin over skeleton.

Another time, he hissed as she lit the oil lamp in the parlor. He was sprawled on the long sofa, his arm thrown over his face. She extinguished the lamp with an apology and left to her room. On the way she passed his: The wardrobe had been overturned, the chair was now firewood, and, over everything else, razor-sharp shards of God knew how many whisky bottles.

She couldn’t breathe. His misery rose all about her, a dark tide full of undertows of rage. She hated him then: Nothing and no one had ever made her feel so
wrong
, as if her entire existence served only to tear apart soul mates and turn perfectly promising young men into destructive shadows of their former selves.

All the same, her heart broke for him, into a thousand pieces.

T
he isolation of the cabin, no doubt excellent for keeping private pains private, was unhelpful in every other respect. Lord Fitzhugh had no duties to perform,
no obligations that required him to adhere to a proper schedule, and no friends or family before whom he needed to keep up an appearance of sobriety and normalcy.

There was nothing left to smash in his room—having axed his bedstead to kindling the previous week, he now slept on a pallet on the floor. Millie feared he’d start on the parlor. Instead, he plunged into a deep lethargy. The whisky, at first only a nocturnal friend, was now his constant companion.

Millie was inexperienced in such darker aspects of life. But she had no doubt that he was sliding faster and faster down a dangerous path. He needed help, badly—and soon. Yet when she sat down to compose an appeal, she had no idea to whom she ought to address the letter.

Could Mrs. Townsend persuade her brother to stop drinking? Could Colonel Clements? Certainly no one in the Graves family could be of any assistance. And even if Millie were to swallow what remained of her pride and beg Miss Pelham for help, would Miss Pelham’s family allow her to become involved again in the earl’s affairs?

Via Mrs. Graves’s pragmatic advice, Millie had been equipped to deal with a remote husband, disdainful servants, and a Society wary of yet another heiress breaching its defenses. No one, however, had ever thought to teach her what to do when her husband was determined to shove his youth and vitality down the throat of a whisky bottle and throw it all away.

She abandoned her letter and grabbed her hat. The swollen clouds that blanketed the sky promised rain, but she didn’t care. She had to get out of the cabin. And if she returned a drowned rat, developed pneumonia, and expired before the end of the month, well, so much the better for—

She stopped dead.

Her husband, who had not been outside in days, sat on the front steps of the cabin, staring into the barrel of a rifle.

“What—what are you doing?” she heard herself ask, her voice high and reedy.

“Nothing,” he said, without turning around, even as his hand caressed the barrel.

Slowly, not daring to make a sound, she shrank back into the cabin. And there, for the first time in her life, she clutched her heart. Her throat closed; her head spun.

He was contemplating suicide.

F
itz had lost track of time and he minded not at all. The past was infinitely preferable to the present, or the future. And even better when the boundary of reality and fantasy blurred.

He was no longer anywhere near the Lake District, but at the Pelham home, engaged in an animated conversation with Isabelle, while her mother embroidered at the far end of the room.

She was so interesting, Isabelle, and so interested. Her eyes shone like stars, but her beauty was the winsomeness of morning, bright and glorious, full of heat and verve. And when he looked upon her his heart was weightless with joy, rising to the sky like a balloon.

“I need to speak to you, Lord Fitzhugh,” she said.

Lord Fitzhugh? Lord Fitzhugh was his third cousin twice removed.

“What is it?”

“You cannot go on like this.”

“Why not?” He was bewildered. This was exactly how he’d
like to go on, a carefree young man, with the girl he loved by his side.

“If you won’t think of yourself, then please think of your family. Your sisters will be devastated.”

He opened his eyes. Strange, had he been holding a conversation with his eyes closed all the while? And when had the room become so dark, so full of shadow and gloom?

He was lying down. And she, above him, was as close as the reach of his hand. He lifted his arm and touched her face. She shivered. Her skin was softer than the memory of spring. He’d missed her so. It was her. It was always, always her.

Very gently, so as not to startle her, he pulled her down and kissed her. God, she tasted so sweet, like spring water at the source. He slid his fingers into her hair and kissed her again.

It was as he undid the top button of her dress that she began to struggle.

“Shh. Shh. It’s all right,” he murmured. “I will take care of you.”

“You are delusional, Lord Fitzhugh! I am not Miss Pelham. I am your wife. Kindly unhand me.”

Shock spiked through him. He scrambled into an upright position—Christ, his
head
. “What the—why are you talking to me in the dark?”

“Last time I lit a lamp your eyes hurt.”

“Well, light one now.”

The light came, stinging his eyes, but he needed the prickling, burning sensation. His wife had fled to a far corner of the room. How in hell had he mistaken her for Isabelle?
They could not be more different, in height, in build, in voice—in every aspect.

“Perhaps it is time to rethink being so inebriated that you mistake your wife for your beloved,” she said coldly.

He lay down again. The light of the lamp flickered in circles of diminishing brightness upon the ceiling. “It helps me forget.”

“What good is that when you must remember everything anew the next day?”

Of course it was no good. The drink was a weakness—his father would never have countenanced such a show of unmanliness. But then again, his father, at nineteen, had everything to live for. The rest of Fitz’s life stretched endless and barren before him. Only pain was a certainty: His classmates from Eton would receive their commissions as officers; Isabel would marry another man and bear his children.

What did he have to look forward to? Roof repairs at Henley Park? An intimate knowledge of the preservation of sardines? Lady Fitzhugh, with her primly disapproving face, sitting across the table from him at ten thousand breakfasts?

“Continual sobriety is unappetizing,” he said.

Sometimes he was amazed he could even withstand an hour of it.

“You don’t always remember to close your door. I have seen you clutch your head in agony; I have heard you retch. Is it not enough that your heart aches? Must you ruin your health while you are at it?”

“I will stop when I am inclined to do so.”

His hand, by habit, reached for the fresh bottle of whisky
by his side, only to encounter nothing at all. Strange, even if he’d poured its contents down his throat, the bottle should still be here.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to stop sooner,” said his wife. “I disposed of the whisky.”

Damned interfering woman. He’d been somewhat thankful that she hadn’t tried to cheer him up or censor his drinking—guess that was too good to last. No matter, she’d emptied one bottle; he still had half a crate left.

Using the arm of the sofa for support, he struggled to his feet. Walking had become hazardous. He’d stumbled and bruised his shoulder the other day—the perils of being a sot. A sot, a lush, a man who drowned his troubles in his cup—or tried damn hard, at least.

He usually had ten or fifteen bottles stocked in the cupboard next to his room. The cupboard was empty. He swore. Now he had to take himself all the way outside.

He lurched and staggered to the shed behind the cabin. He wouldn’t have kept the whisky so far away, but one night, as he smashed things in his room, he’d damaged several unopened bottles. The next day he’d moved the whisky for its own protection.

The crates were neatly stacked in the shed, the bottles dully glistening. His heart trilled with relief. He grabbed one bottle by the neck and yanked it toward his parched lips. Something was wrong—it was too light. The bottle was empty. He threw it aside and pulled up another bottle. Again, empty.

Empty. Empty. Empty.

I disposed of the whisky.

She’d been thorough.

He kicked the stack of crates and almost lost his
balance completely, banging heavily into the wall of the shed.

“Are you all right?” said her bloodless voice somewhere behind him.

Was he all right? Could she not see with her own eyes that he’d never be all right again?

He tottered out of the shed. “I’m going to the village.”

He was going to have his drink if it killed him.

“It’s going to be completely dark in half an hour. And you have no idea where the village is.”

He hated her reasonableness, her do-good ways, and her stupid assumption that she was
helping
him.

“I can’t stop you from leaving tomorrow. And I most certainly can’t stop you from falling on the next delivery of liquor. But for tonight I strongly advise that you stay put.”

He swore. Turning—his heart thumping unpleasantly—he went back into the shed and pulled out an empty bottle, hoping that there might be a drop or two at the bottom. But the only thing left was the sweet, alcoholic fume.

Her voice came again, flat, inexorable. “I know the sky has fallen for you, my lord. But life goes on and so must you.”

He threw the bottle against the back of the shed. It didn’t break, but only thudded against the wall and fell with a plop onto a mound of burlap sacks. He stormed out to face her.

“What the hell do you know about the sky falling? This is the life for which you’ve been preparing for years.”

She raised her eyes to him. It was stunning, the intensity of her gaze set against her practically nondescript face.

“Do you think you are the only one who has lost someone you love because of this marriage?”

She did not bother to explain her cryptic statement, but pivoted on her heels and returned to the cabin.

I
t seemed all right at first, no worse than the bad heads he’d become accustomed to when he woke up. But as the evening ground on, his headache turned ugly, doubling, then doubling again in viciousness. His hands trembled. Perspiration soaked his nightshirt. Waves after waves of nausea twisted his innards.