The Deadliest Sin

by Caroline Richards

“I love you,” he said suddenly, into the softness of her hair, almost with a kind of violence.

  The words struck both fear and exhilaration in her heart. “You are not being realistic, Strathmore,” she murmured. “There is so much we don’t know about each other. What you don’t know about me.” She sensed a change in him, an uneasy wariness, as though the gauntlet had been thrown down in a fight to the death. He was on alert, leaving Julia to wonder when the battle would resume. “You don’t have to protect me.”

  The feminine brightness of the salon did not suit her mood. Like a knife to her heart, the thought of Rowena could send her buckling to her knees, the memory of the fire at the inn following close behind, threatening to blot out the impact of Strathmore’s declaration.

  “I’ve said it before. I love you. Nothing you can tell me will make a difference.”

  “You don’t know,” she repeated stubbornly but not a moment before his mouth stopped her words, covering hers with a punishing kiss of willful possession. His fingers hurt as he pulled her tightly into his body, his hands at the base of her spine.

  “I know what I want. And it’s you,” he murmured, his mouth lifting from hers for a brief moment. “Why don’t you tell me what I don’t know, Julia. Tell me what happened so long ago.” His eyes darkened.

  “I can’t.” Her palms braced against his chest, her soul twisting in agony. He grasped her chin, bent his head, and met her trembling lips with his. She wanted to vanquish the grief but still could not give in to him.

  “Talk to me,” he murmured against her lips. He crushed her against him, her cheek pressed to his chest. She sensed his frustration. “Tell me what’s hurt you so deeply, beyond even losing Rowena.” She flinched at the name, lifting her face to his. Her expression told him more than she could ever say. “You’ve surmised much already,” she said quietly. “But here is the truth, as best I know it, if you need to hear it from my lips.” The irony was lost on neither of them.

  He held her still in the circle of his arms. “The fire,” she began. “It is a nightmare and not a nightmare.”

  “Finally,” he bluntly said. “Go on.”

  “I must have been seven years old because I can remember details of the nursery—our rocking horse, the one Rowena was mad to play with, the brightly-colored top, and the dolls,” she recounted with a grim solemnity. “I remember waking up, choking, my throat closing against the thick smoke in our rooms and then trying to rise from my bed to reach her…in time.”

  “And you did, you did reach her in time,” Strathmore soothed. He seemed to know what she was feeling and for as many times in the last few days she was overwhelmed by emotions she could not control, outrun, or hide from.

  She whispered. “I did. At least I think I did awaken her and bring her out of the fire. I can’t remember exactly, and I always felt as though I’d left something precious behind.” Her voice was taut with consternation until she took a steadying breath. “Then all I remember is coming to live with Meredith. That she looked after us.”

  “You would do anything for Meredith, wouldn’t you?”

  She nodded numbly. “Something terrible happened between Meredith and Faron. I have always sensed it, although Meredith never wanted to burden us with the truth. She believed it would only endanger us further.”

  “You feel indebted to your aunt. I understand now why you would take on as formidable a foe as Faron.”

  “I would do anything to protect Meredith,” Julia said fiercely. “She protected us. She refused to let me remain in my self-imposed silence. Imagine—taking in two children in such tragic circumstances, after the fire.” She paused and took a breath. “I owe Meredith everything.”

  Strathmore was holding back, and she sensed he wanted to ask who had been responsible for the blaze had threatened two young lives. What she didn’t discern was the carefully banked rage he so assiduously hid from her, unwilling to mar their growing but fragile intimacy.

  “I don’t know who was responsible,” she said, her cheek against his hard chest. But they both knew that she did.

  “You have nothing to feel guilty about,” he said carefully, his voice even. “The culpability rests with someone else entirely. We know who was responsible.” The casualness of the statement belied his mounting fury, the uncontrolled emotion frightening to a man who, since childhood, had never really cared about much other than the next mountain to climb or riverbed to explore.

  Julia took a shuddering breath. “What kind of man is Montagu Faron, to set fire to a nursery?” It was out, the ugly truth hanging in the air between them. It was a question with no ready answer.

  “We will find out one day,” he said starkly. “We have the daguerreotype should you choose to develop it. Who knows where it might lead,” he said enigmatically.

  The lie slipped from her lips before she could hold it back. I already did develop it. But the plate was degraded after twenty years of storage,” she continued, the falsehood taking on a life of its own. “I tried, when last at Montfort, after you had already left,” she said, the embellishments coming frighteningly easy to her. Dear God, she loved Strathmore so much she was willing to lie to him.

  “Another dead end,” he murmured softly into her hair. “But let’s not think of it right now.”

  Julia waited for a rush of relief but it didn’t come. Instead, she chose the next words carefully, the wound still too raw to contemplate openly. “What does it all really matter when I did fail Rowena, finally and ultimately?”

  “You were not responsible for Rowena’s death,” Strathmore said, ignoring her words, wishing to sweep the burden of the past and present from her shoulders, and to mute his own growing rage. She felt the heat of his skin next to hers as his hands moved to the buttons at the neck of her dress, slowly slipping the first one free.

  “I wish it were that simple,” she protested, welcoming the touch of his palms against her neck, a balm for the ache inside her which he knew all too well. The image of the daguerreotype floated stubbornly in her mind’s eye, a warning she knew she must heed, but could not find the courage to confront. At least not yet, when all she wanted was for Strathmore to hold her forever.

  “You are making it complicated, Julia. Let it go. At least for the present.” He kissed her lightly on her lips. He looked into her eyes searchingly and she wondered whether he believed her.

  “That’s all I know and that’s all I remember,” she said, as he slipped the dress from her shoulders. “I am being completely honest.” She reached up and kissed him, her arms clinging around his neck, desperately wishing everything she could not reconcile would drop away. They stood together, their bodies melding.

  “You don’t have to speak of it any longer.” His kisses soothed away remaining pinpricks of anxiety. “I believe you, that there is nothing more you are holding back.” His mouth dipped to hers again, while her chemise strap slipped over her shoulder.

  “Thank you.” The two words were simple and heartfelt as she tried to hold off her doubts and fears, her happiness spilling over to drown an ugly reality. For now, with Strathmore, she was strong and whole.

  He lifted her hands to his lips, kissing each fingertip one at a time. “You are thanking me for having your camera apparatus sent from Montfort?”

  “Indeed, many, many thanks. I shall give you a demonstration of the daguerreotype process if you like.”

  “Later,” he said with an arrogance that she was beginning to find appealing. “But for now, I’d prefer to hear more of your thanks.”

  She heard an undercurrent of lightness in her own voice, surprising herself and Strathmore at the same time. “You know precisely what it takes to please me.”

  The double entendre did not go unnoticed. “Why Miss Woolcott,” he grinned, “are you complimenting me on my amorous prowess?”

  “I meant the camera apparatus, of course,” she said primly, the curve of her smile belying her words, while deep inside, she thanked the gods that he was not asking her m
ore questions about the daguerreotype. Perhaps like her, he was unwilling to break the fragile mood they had created together, reluctant to open the door to ruin and devastation. “Nothing whatsoever to do with your other many talents, of which you are clearly inordinately proud.”

  They undressed each other then, leisurely, in the doorway of the salon, the rhythm of their movements beginning with a heated ease before quickly escalating into ferocious hunger they seemed unable or unwilling to appease. Kicking the door of the salon shut behind him, Strathmore lay her on the plush Persian rug as, moments later, they gave into the intemperate demands of desire.

  “You are exhausting me,” Strathmore murmured much later, with Julia nestled against his chest, both of them oblivious to the threat of servants hovering outside the door or the scratch of wool against their naked skin.

  “Not too exhausted, I trust.”

  “Greedy minx.”

  “I hear your heartbeat,” she said softly, the powerful rhythm of life strong beneath her ear.

  “And what is it saying to you?” he asked drowsily.

  “I don’t know,” she said dreamily. “Perhaps it is the drums of Africa. Tell me about your explorations there.” She was sated and content, desperate to know every facet of the man she loved.

  And he did. He told her about the horrors of slave selling that he witnessed in Zanzibar. About the push to Lake Tanganyika, a journey wherein he studied and made notes on the ethnography of the indigenous peoples while observing the behavior of birds. About the Mountains of the Moon, the mysterious snow-capped giants shrouded by perpetual mist and brooding under eternal storm clouds. About the Nile.

  And for the fragile present, as the sun slowly disappeared from the windows of the salon in London leaving the two lovers in the cooling shadows, it was enough.

  Lowther threw the letter across the room, uncharacteristically losing control, only moments later picking up the missive to familiarize himself with the instructions. He ironed out the crumpled paper with the flat of his hands and went over the words slowly.

  It was impossible to discern Faron’s mood, or the stability of his mind, which was more important. However, it was clear that his master was far from pleased to have to cross the Channel and make an appearance at Eccles House. A command performance, if Montagu Faron wanted to continue playing his game.

  Lowther preferred not to see the devil released from his den. There was probably good reason Faron was disinclined to join society, show his face, given the ungovernable moods that would overtake him with the unexpectedness of sheet lightning. Unpredictability was not to Faron’s taste. Lowther painstakingly read the words again, as if some hidden meaning would be revealed beneath the stark, harsh sentences. Disquiet filled his mind at the perfunctory statements definitively stating a searing displeasure at the recent outcomes of what Lowther referred to as the Woolcott dilemma, or more accurately, the Strathmore debacle.

  It brought to mind Beaumarchais. Rage pulsed in time with Lowther’s fluent curses, the tempo escalating at the thought of the Frenchman’s utter capriciousness which had only provoked Strathmore further. The fire at the inn was beyond disrespectful, an outrageous gesture fanning the flames of the past that were better left buried in ashes. A furious, impotent anger swelled inside Lowther’s chest at the thought of the vain, cavalier Beaumarchais attempting to avenge himself against a perceived slight. Lowther replayed the encounter in his carriage, the moment when Strathmore broke Beaumarchais’s gold-handled cane in half as though it were a twig.

  The extent of Lowther’s anger was evident when he broke into Beaumarchais’s rooms above Bond Street, a scant thirty minutes later. Ignoring the pained expression of the butler who had reluctantly escorted him up the stairs, he knocked on the door with his own pearl-handed walking stick. “A moment of your time, Beaumarchais, now.”

  The butler, pressed against the doorjamb, drew back as the two men stared across each other from a table where Beaumarchais was about to indulge in a glass of champagne and mille-feuille larded with custard and cream. With the practical sense of his bourgeois ancestors and in acknowledgement of the provenance of his regular pay packets, Beaumarchais politely said, “Well, of course, Lowther. I am most pleased to make time for you.”

  Lowther remained scowling and silent while the butler pried himself away from the wall and gratefully shut the door behind him, leaving the two men alone.

  “Don’t look so grisly,” chided Beaumarchais, rising from his chair, his green watered-silk vest immaculate. “I can see that you are somewhat distressed.” He offered Lowther a chair with elaborate courtesy.

  “How could you have been so monumentally stupid?” Lowther asked, ignoring the invitation to sit, his scowl deepening, fingering the walking stick to leaven his temper. “Simply because your much vaunted pride is pricked, you decide to have someone set fire to the room where Strathmore and that Woolcott chit are staying.”

  “I simply had no choice, Lowther. You know that.” He returned to his chair at the table where his champagne and platter of pastries remained unfinished. Fussing with the damask napkin on his lap, he reached for his champagne flute just as Lowther’s walking stick interrupted the gesture with a decisive feint right in front of his nose.

  “One always has a choice if one chooses to exercise restraint—an attribute that seemingly eludes you. Of all the reprisals you might have chosen, why the fire?”

  Beaumarchais sat back in his chair, his full attention on the walking stick, understanding that he’d misjudged Lowther’s, and very possibly Faron’s, reaction to his impulsive course of action. He considered the extent of Lowther’s bad humor with the beginnings of trepidation.

  “Why did I choose fire?” he asked reflexively. “The truth be told, the choice has a certain symmetry or one might even say elegance, would you not agree?”

  Lowther exhaled sharply. “Symmetry,” he fumed. “You deliberately alluded to an incident that best remains buried. Furthermore, did you give any consideration that Strathmore may have been killed in the blaze?”

  Beaumarchais shrugged. “Don’t be ridiculous, Lowther. The man is indestructible, having survived the basest hardships among the most savage of primitives. As for Woolcott, would it matter?”

  “Would it matter?” Lowther repeated. “You are immeasurably fortunate Faron did not learn of the incident.” His voice was so soft Beaumarchais had to strain to hear it. “As it is, I am reluctant to place in your hands his further instructions and I do so only because it behooves both of us to follow the directives to the letter—this time. Have I made myself understood?” Lowther’s fists came down on the table with unexpected force. “So what I expect from you—if you value your continued good health—is that you listen closely to what I have to say next.”

  Beaumarchais hesitated, trying to weigh how much goodwill he had available to him. It was not simply his physical health that concerned him but the ongoing allowance provided by Faron. He eyed the champagne and pastries meaningfully. As the great man seldom left the confines of his estate, Beaumarchais had become, over the years, a glorified factotum, entrusted to execute many of the great man’s more minor affairs. His relatively low standing in the hierarchy of Faron’s retinue did not rankle as he preferred to keep his involvement at a more superficial level. The incident at the inn, he had decided, was worth the risk. A man could only be expected to endure so much. Ever since that first meeting at Eccles House, Strathmore had done nothing but belittle him with a careless arrogance that he wore like the mantle of a foreign potentate.

  Beaumarchais considered the pearl-handled walking stick lying across the table, just inches from his champagne flute. Satisfaction had a price but he was not about to sacrifice a relatively good and easy life for a moment of impulse. Therefore, he recognized it was not an advantageous time for argument or recriminations. He swallowed his pride to insure his voice did not carry an audible layer of self-regard. “Of course, I understand.”

  Lowther straightened
to his full height, his eyes narrowing. “Thank you, Beaumarchais,” he said sarcastically, “for your admirably good judgment. Too bad it comes too late.”

  Ever practical and eager to put the disagreement behind them, Beaumarchais asked, “What is it then you wish for me to arrange?”

  “This shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish, even for you.” Lowther was all business. “A weekend at Eccles House—within the fortnight.”

  “A reprise?” How unimaginative, Beaumarchais thought, to repeat oneself. It did not smack of Montagu Faron. But then again, it was the ever-arrogant Strathmore who was attempting to snatch the baton from Faron. Hardly wise. He smiled to himself with relish.

  “Yes, a reprise. Was that not what you meant by symmetry?” asked Lowther with an arched brow.

  Beaumarchais thought it best to ignore the obvious taunt. “Same cast of characters I presume?”

  Lowther nodded. “However, this time with a few additional twists. I take it that both Strathmore and Faron would like to conclude their association.”

  “I am surprised Faron has been brought to this juncture by Strathmore.” Beaumarchais took a sip from his champagne.

  As am I. But Lowther did not say the words. Stepping away from the table with a glare, he said, “Must you always indulge yourself? And at such an early hour?”

  Beaumarchais looked over his glass, pursing his lips with satisfaction. “Yes, if you must know.”

  Lowther sighed with exasperation. “I encourage you to attend to what I have to say next. There are several other details that must be seen to.” Faron’s instructions had been precise, a complicated orchestration that was to culminate in a crescendo, not that Beaumarchais needed to know.

  Beaumarchais relinquished his flute with some reluctance. “I am at your disposal. What shall it be, then?”

  “Three challenges.”

  “As opposed to four, or two?”

  “Your sense of humor is in poor taste, given the situation.” Lowther grasped his walking stick from the table and tapped it on the floor with impatience. “By now you should know that Faron does nothing without a reason. So it is simply a matter for us to speculate.” His walking stick punctuated the floor in an increasing staccato. “For Pythagoreans, three was the most noble number. Let us not forget, Sir Francis Bacon’s three tables.”