by Ingrid Hahn
Patience didn’t have time for this nonsense. “I hope you wake up with fins and rotting fish eyes in your hair.”
He made a face of disgust and drew back. “What?”
Well, it wasn’t exactly as Lady Reyne had phrased it, but Patience’s mind spun with too great a force to do anything but catch what words it could grab ahold of and hope for the best when she flung them from her tongue.
She returned for the supper dance. A gentleman by the name of Mr. Gray Mason had claimed her. Once he’d taken her to dine, he’d said, “I don’t know whether to let you have one whole table spread for yourself or express my disapproval of you by allowing you naught but one small bite from a single dish.”
And then he’d laughed uproariously at his supposed wit.
Taken by surprise, Patience nearly drowned, shocked and silent, under a wave of excruciating humiliation. Having so recently stood up to Silverlund amplified the mortification of being rendered mute by this worm.
And later, after she’d departed the ball, a myriad of biting replies, each stunning and more dazzling than the last, buzzed around her mind. Of course.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Giles wandered the days in a stupor of exhaustion but couldn’t relax into oblivion at night. Food was flavorless, wine bitter, sleep elusive.
And when he did manage a few hours of unconsciousness, he dreamed, heavily and relentlessly. They began in swirls of color. Oil falling one drop at a time into the fine silt of crushed pigment. Drop. Drop. Drop. Each left a tiny dimple in the mountain of grains. He’d reach for a pencil, but it wouldn’t be there. It would roll across the planks of the floor, rattling in that hollow way of wood upon wood, and he would chase it, going down and down through layers of the earth, through the glowing heat of unbearable fires, and tunneling through continents of ice that could have swallowed England whole. Sometimes, he’d catch it, grasping for the handle, then it would burst open in his hand—it having been all along an elongated egg containing a million scurrying black centipedes. The insects would burrow under his skin, crawl in his ears and mouth, swim through his eyes…
He’d wake gasping for breath, the bedclothes in a knotted tangle and soaked through, lungs not able to suck in air quickly enough. Once, it’d taken the icy tundra of the dark northern lands to make him feel cold. Now he woke freezing and shaking. Keeping the fire roaring all night long was no help. He was colder than he’d ever been in the high latitudes, and not because there he’d been wrapped in silver fox fur. No. There he’d been whole.
And his bloody arm would throb with pain. If he tried to extend his fingers, white-hot shards of glass would shoot up all the way to his shoulder.
Oddly, on top of everything else, he found himself unexpectedly mourning his loss of the ability to write. He could no longer look at his own handwriting. He’d spent years perfecting each stroke of each letter—the juxtaposition of airy swirls, weighty swirls, delicate lines, and heavy lines. Each word crafted beautifully, a miracle of what could be achieved with such humble things as quill tips and thick black ink.
“It’s nothing more than a broken bone, my lord,” stuffy medical man after stuffy medical man would say, scolding him as if he were a naughty child proffering lies. “A trifling discomfort at worst. It shouldn’t hurt like that.”
Giles would grind out a reply from between clenched teeth. “It. Does.”
“It’s in your head.” They would invariably nod sagely, not having so much as glanced at the arm or examined him in any other way.
“Are you calling me mad?”
“Never, my lord. But—”
“Then you think I’m making this up.”
They’d bluster at his direct accusation. If they’d had feathers, they’d have to smooth them back down again. “We might see what a good bloodletting might do…”
At the first mention of bloodletting—and it always came to that, didn’t it?—Giles threw them out. Sometimes before they had time to discreetly set a little bottle of an opium tincture on a side table. Sometimes after. He had seven now. Soon he’d be opening his own apothecary shop.
A visit from his friend one dark night, when the rain pattered upon the windows and wind howled in the chimneys, wasn’t an improvement.
Giles had a rug around his shoulders and didn’t rise when Holbrook entered. That the man was a duke was incidental. What mattered was that he was a friend, which kept Giles firmly seated. Besides, Giles couldn’t risk revealing his left arm. The man knew, of course. But Giles didn’t want his deformity viewed.
A friend Holbrook might have been, but he remained very much his annoyingly somber self. And he was whole, which roused that old twisted monster of envy that Giles hadn’t met with in years and didn’t care to be forced to greet once again.
“How the mighty have fallen.” Giles settled back in his chair and glowered, daring Holbrook to needle him further. If anyone were ever in need of a fight, it was Giles.
Holbrook, damn the man, remained nonplussed. “As you say.”
A bulky creature with tattered ears and a reverberant purr jumped into Giles’s lap.
The duke gave it a blank look—blank, in all likelihood, because the man had no place to process what he was seeing. “What’s that?”
“What does it look like?”
“It looks”—Holbrook spoke in a disbelieving drawl—“like a cat.”
And so it was. The big old ratter who’d finally had his own way in the question of whether or not he’d be allowed in the house. In the end, Giles hadn’t been given a choice. It was as if the cat decided not only to retire, but where to retire to, and with whom. Giles had had no say in the matter. “I know what you’re going to say, so you needn’t bother.”
“Do you now?” Holbrook motioned toward the wine, and Giles answered with an exasperated swat of his right hand, indicating that of course the stupid sot should help himself. “And what is that?”
“‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself, you stupid whelp.’ There. I’ve saved you the trouble. Now leave.” Giles scowled. “Whelp” had always been the duke’s word for him. He’d never meant to use it himself. Yet it had flown from his tongue as casually as any other word in his vocabulary.
“You’re wrong.”
“Am I now?”
There was a pause. Holbrook cast his gaze through the shadows, slowly, as if searching for something. Well, he’d find naught here. “Seems odd to live in these bare walls.”
The pictures, he meant. Rather, the lack of them. Giles had ordered them all removed. Every last one.
Giles responded to his friend with an offhanded wave of his right hand, as if the topic bored him, then returned to stroking the cat with his right hand. The creature’s purr was the loudest thing in the room. “It’s how it must be.”
Which was true. He wouldn’t live in a world filled with pictures. Blank walls were bad enough. If he weren’t careful, he’d begin imagining what could fill them.
Holbrook picked up a stray book and read the title, lifting his brows. “Geometry? I don’t recall you caring overly much for mathematics when we were at school.”
School. Making good on a promise to his mother, Giles had given Oxford a good-faith effort. And he had lived up to the letter of his promise to her, trying his best to focus on his studies.
It hadn’t been for him. He’d left after a year. Gone to study in Venice instead, abandoning everything in favor of what he loved most. Light. The play of paint on canvas. Women. He lost himself in the jewel upon the sea…and Titian most especially.
“I didn’t.”
“Found a new passion, have you?”
“I haven’t the first intention of opening the cover ever again.” Not because he was uninterested. Oh, it was awfully dry, no mistake, but it could have been a bit of an interesting diversion.
Picking the book up had been an error of judgment. Geometry was a way of describing the world that brought Giles square—no pun intended—back into the middle of exactly where
he did not want to be. Thinking about rendering three-dimensional form onto a one-dimensional surface. Thinking of light playing off a sphere and how the shadow would fall depending on how strong the light was and how close the source.
“Did I ever tell you that once when I was twelve, my drawing master made me spend six solid weeks drawing spheres with nothing but one pencil? I thought I would die of happiness when he allowed me use of trois crayons.”
It’d been a miserable six weeks. Now Giles would give anything to have them back. If he were resigned to nothing but pencil, paper, and spheres for the whole rest of his life… But he couldn’t. And that was why he could not open that cruel book ever again. It hadn’t been a diversion. It had thrown him back where he didn’t want to be.
Holbrook seemed to understand, nodding faintly in that way people do when they have no intention of allowing either party in a conversation to feel the true gravity of the subject. “You didn’t come to the Reyne ball.”
“What the devil would induce me to do such a thing?”
They fell into another silence that dragged longer and longer until it seemed no more would be said. Without warning, Holbrook spoke bluntly. “You’ve lost everything.”
“Thank you so much for pointing that out, Your Grace.” Giles grunted. That was an understatement. Everything he understood about himself and the world had been torn away. Crushed or slaughtered. “And shouldn’t I be taking it like a man?”
“That’s your father talking.”
Holbrook wasn’t wrong. Silverlund had paid a brief call to sneer at him: “What are you doing? Pick yourself up. You’re a disgrace to your sex and all good Englishmen everywhere.”
Giles had remained silent. It would take far more to compel him to care about what the duke thought he should do. Not that he could have risen above his feelings if he tried. The life was being crushed from him as surely as if he lay under a bed of stones. “I could weep and wail into the night and still be more a man than you’ll ever be.”
In a vain attempt to occupy the hours, he’d been flipping through old translations of Homer he’d suffered though as a schoolboy. He’d forgotten everything of the original language but a word or two—basically all but how to form the shapes and sounds of the Greek alphabet. Those warriors of legend felt and felt deeply. They were closer to his heart than Silverlund would ever be.
Holbrook seated himself beside the fire in the chair opposite Giles and slowly sipped his wine in the long silence. One leg rested carelessly upon the other, as if they were in a hunting lodge, resting after a long day in the woods—Giles sketching in favor of carrying a gun, Holbrook enjoying the quiet peace—instead of in Giles’s Mayfair house. The only sounds were the flames in the fireplace and the rain outside.
With his good hand, Giles raked unkempt hair from his eyes. When he finally spoke, his voice emerged rough. “Maybe I’m more like him than I’d like to believe.”
Holbrook met his eye. “Are you?”
There was along long pause. “I don’t know.”
“He came to the ball, you know. The Reyne ball, I mean.”
“Did he? Seems unlike him.”
“Made quite a scene with quite a…remarkable woman, shall we say.”
The inside of Giles’s chest tightened, and his face prickled oddly. He didn’t really want to hear about it.
After Holbrook had the grace to absent himself, Giles poured another glass of wine to help him forget the absurd conversation. What he needed was another hot bath. He’d had one every day since…since it’d happened. Two strapping young footmen attended, scrubbing his skin red with sandalwood soap to wash away the old smells. Linseed oil. Walnut oil. Paints. Chalk. Freshly ironed canvas about to be stretched over a frame. It was all too much.
Smells were bad enough. Friends were the worst of all, damn them. After Holbrook left, he told the servants under no uncertain terms, that there were to be no more visitors, and to have a bath ready for him in an hour.
Which, when a lad arrived not three-quarters of an hour later to inform him a caller waited to be seen, would have been curious had it not been so bloody aggravating. “Excuse me, my lord. A visitor has arrived for you.”
Giles, head throbbing, squinted through the haze of semiconsciousness to the young man. His mood was as black as the soot and grime staining Satan’s soul, and all he wanted to do was snarl at the lad to leave him be.
With what he could rummage from his threadbare self-control, Giles inhaled deeply. If he began torturing the servants for his own suffering, he’d be no better than the duke. Giles had to hold on to one scrap of himself. Something that would help him remember that he was not, and would never be, his father. Because all the rest of it was gone. No woman would ever lie with a ruined man, and that’s what he was. He’d never paint again, either.
And thinking about Miss Emery was entirely out of the question. It was like running a thousand sharp blades over newly flogged flesh.
The morning he’d saddled a horse and gone for her, he’d thought he’d wanted her more than all the light and beauty in the world. That had been before. When he possessed everything about himself that mattered. The only thing that mattered. The way he could paint.
“My lord?”
Giles frowned. The visitor was probably Holbrook returning under the mistaken belief that Giles shouldn’t be alone and that he, Holbrook, had any chance whatsoever of helping.
“I’m not seeing anyone. Good night.”
“She won’t leave.”
She? Wouldn’t be his mother, then, for the servants would have addressed her as Her Grace. He didn’t want to consider alternatives.
Giles’s voice turned hoarse. “She’ll have to.”
“My lord?” This time the question came from a feminine voice in the doorway, the sweet notes a knife to his conscious. “I pray you, my lord. Do not send me away.”
A lifetime of training to stand in a female’s presence forced him to his feet without thinking. The rug fell from his shoulders, and instantly the folly of his movement rang through his body like the clashing of a bell. Without it, he was exposed. Giles turned quickly, guarding her from the view of his mangled arm.
“You should not be here.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Instead of leaving, Miss Emery stepped into the room. It was like seeing her for the first time. Her dark-golden hair caught what little light that fought the darkness of the cavernous room. This time, however, her face was pale. No smile lit her from within.
Part of him wanted to beg her never to leave him again. That was the ugly part of him. The selfishness that could not be quelled. The rational part of him knew that he’d been the one to steal the smile from her face. If he had any hope of replacing it, he might have considered giving in. However, he did not.
“I can’t receive you. Please leave.”
The momentary flash of hurt upon her face made Giles want to tear out his heart. Chin high, shoulders square, she stepped farther into the room. “I don’t need you to receive me, my lord. This isn’t a social call.”
If he weren’t a fool, he’d have ordered her to be gone immediately, whether it hurt her to the depths of her soul or not.
Maybe it was that he’d been drinking steadily all day and all night. Maybe his fall from the horse had broken something in his head as well. Or maybe it was simply her. Her presence was the closest thing to calming and healing that he could imagine and, fair or not, his selfish disposition overruled his compassion.
His head wanted him to be grateful that she’d refused his offer—such that it was—of marriage, so she wouldn’t be stuck with him now. His heart…well, his heart…wasn’t.
“You can stay one quarter of an hour. That’s all.” He signaled the footman to be off, and the boy shut the door behind him.
Miss Emery rushed toward him. “My lord—”
“Stop!” Giles winced. The effort of shouting brought a sharp ache to his ribs, which the doctor had assured him were mer
ely badly bruised.
None of what he’d experienced physically was as painful as having to witness her turn her face momentarily in shadow.
A cold sweat broke out over his brow. He retreated deeper into the darkness of the room. At the side table, he fussed over the wine, moving slowly.
He wanted to beg her not to leave as much as he wanted to frighten her away. “It was temporary, our arrangement. That’s all.”
“You think I’d walk away from you now—”
“I don’t need you here to pity me. You have no obligation to me. Not now. Not ever.”
“Hang obligation, you stubborn ox. I’m here because I want to be, and if you keep pushing me, it’s going to make me push back harder on you.”
Her words locked the vise grip of regret around his heart. All the things he wanted. All the things he could not have.
They stood together in tense silence.
“Oh.” Miss Emery bent to where the cat stood at her feet. The creature had stood on his hind legs and pawed at her skirts for her attention. “Good evening there, big fellow. What’s his name?”
She stroked the cat’s ears.
“Doesn’t have one. I keep hoping he’ll decide he’s had enough and go back to wherever he came from.”
“Oh. That seems a little sad. Better call him something while he’s here.”
“I’ll take that under advisement.”
Miss Emery softened and glanced to his left arm, eyes filled with sadness. “He did this to you?”
“I took a bad fall from a horse. I wish I’d broken my damn neck instead.” The last time she’d seen him, he’d been a whole man. Monumentally stupid and cocksure, but virile and strong. A man at the very height of his powers. Now he was nothing. With nothing of himself left. No fire in his heart or passion in his veins. And nothing to give her. “May I offer you some wine?”
“Yes, please.”
He poured, more aware than ever of the decanter being so blasted awkward in his right hand. He went slowly. Perhaps the glass might never fill. Then he’d never have to turn. Never have to witness her face when the realization dawned about what he was. That his once-good arm was now naught but twisted rubbish hanging from his body.
