Loretta Chse

by The Mad Earl's Bride

  There was nothing anyone could have done for her, they claimed. Just as medical science had no way of detecting such defects early on, it had no way of curing them.

  And so Borson and his associates absolved themselves of all blame—as though they had not made her last months a living hell.

  And the Camoys saw to it that no blame or shame would be attached to the family, either.

  She had “sunk into a fatal decline”—that was the story they gave out, because no Camoys, even one by marriage, could possibly be mad. No hint of insanity had ever appeared in the family in all the centuries since Henri de Camois had come over from Normandy with the Conqueror.

  Even among themselves, they never openly referred to her insanity, as though giving the truth the cut direct could make it go away, like an unsuitable acquaintance.

  That was just as well, as far as Dorian was concerned. If he had to listen to the heartless hypocrites pontificating about his mother’s madness, he was bound to commit some outrage—and be destroyed, as she had been.

  After the funeral, he returned to Oxford and buried his feelings, as usual, in study. It was the one thing he could do, the one thing his grandfather could not crush or twist to suit his tyrannical purposes.

  Consequently, at the end of the term, Dorian not only earned his degree but did what no Camoys had ever done before: he won a first, In Literis Humanioribus.

  The traditional celebration followed at Rawnsley Hall. It was the usual hypocrisy. Dorian had never truly been one of the Camoys and he knew his academic triumph stuck in the collective family craw. Still, they must give the appearance of family unity, and for Dorian, pretending was easier this time, with freedom so near. In a few weeks, he would be upon the Continent—and he would not return to England until his grandfather was sealed in the tomb with his saintly ancestors.

  In the meantime, Dorian could play his role, as he’d done for years, and bear their pretense and hypocrisy.

  Pretending, always pretending, his mother had said.

  Her mind had broken down under the strain, she’d believed.

  Too many secrets … too weak to keep them in.

  He didn’t know that hers were not the only secrets she’d let out.

  He did not find out until twenty-four hours after the so-called celebration. And then Dorian could only stand and listen helplessly for an endless, numbing hour to the chilling speech that shattered and scattered his plans like so much dust and left him with nothing but his pride to sustain him.

  DORIAN WAS TURNED out of Rawnsley Hall with six pounds and some odd pence in his pocket. This was because Lord Rawnsley had expected him to hang his head and make penitent speeches and beg for forgiveness—and Dorian had decided that the earl could wait until Judgment Day.

  His grandfather had called him a whoremonger, a slave to the basest of appetites, who shamelessly and recklessly pursued a path that could only lead to madness and a hideous death from the foul diseases contracted from the filth with which he consorted.

  Though Dorian knew this was true, he found he must be sunk beyond shame as well because he could not find a shred of remorse in his heart, only rage. He would not, could not submit to his grandfather, ever again. He would starve and die in a filthy gutter, rather than go crawling back.

  He left fully aware that he’d have to survive entirely on his own. The earl would make trouble for anyone who aided his errant grandson.

  And so Dorian went to London. There he assumed a new identity and made himself one of the insignificant masses. He found lodgings—a dank room among the teeming tenements of the East End—and employment as a dockworker by day and a legal copyist at night. There was no future in either occupation, but then, he had no future, with all respectable doors shut to him. Still, even when the dock work dwindled from time to time, the lawyers kept him busy. There was little danger of their running out of documents. And when the drudgery threatened to crush his spirit, a few coins could buy him the temporary surcease of a relatively clean whore and a bottle.

  The months stretched into years while his grandfather waited for the prodigal to crawl back on his hands and knees and the prodigal waited for his grandfather to die.

  But the influenza epidemic that bore off Dorian’s father, his Uncle Hugo, two aunts, and several cousins in 1826 left their lord and master untouched.

  Then, in the summer of 1827, Dorian suddenly fell ill—and sank into a decline.

  Chapter 1

  Dartmoor, Devon

  Early May, 1828

  DORIAN STOOD IN the library of Radmore Manor, looking put the window. In the distance, the moors stretched out in all their bleak beauty. They beckoned to him as strongly now as they’d called to his sickly fancy months before in London, when he’d fallen so dangerously ill, too weak even to hold his pen.

  In August, Hoskins, a solicitor’s clerk, had found him barely conscious, slumped over an ink-splotched document.

  I’ll fetch a doctor.

  No. No doctors, for God’s sake. Dartmoor. Take me to Dartmoor. There’s money … saved … under the floor-board.

  Hoskins might have absconded with the little hoard, and heaven knew he needed money, living on a clerk’s pittance. Instead, he’d not only done as Dorian asked but stayed on to look after him. He’d remained even after Dorian recovered—or seemed to.

  That apparent recovery had not deluded Dorian. He’d suspected, early on, that the illness, like his mother’s years earlier, had simply been the beginning of the end.

  In January, when the headaches began, his suspicions were confirmed. As the weeks passed, the attacks grew increasingly vicious, as hers had done.

  The night before last, he’d wanted to bash his head against the wall.

  … pain … tearing at my skull … couldn’t see straight … couldn’t think.

  He understood now, fully, what his mother had meant. Even so, he would have borne the pain, would not have sent for Kneebones yesterday morning, if not for the shimmering wraith he’d seen. Then Dorian had realized something must be done—before the faint visual illusions blossomed into full-blown phantasms, as they had for his mother, and drove him to violence, as they had done her.

  “I know what it is,” Dorian had told the doctor when he came yesterday. “I know it’s the same brain disease and incurable. But I had rather finish my time here, if it can be managed. I had rather not … end … precisely as my mother did, if it can possibly be helped.”

  Naturally, Kneebones must satisfy himself and arrive at his own conclusions. But there was only one possible conclusion, as Dorian well knew. His mother had died within eight months of the onset of the “visual chimera”—the “ghosts” she’d begun seeing while awake, not simply in dreams, as she’d said.

  Six months was the most Kneebones could promise. He said the degeneration was progressing more rapidly in Dorian’s case, thanks to “a punishingly insalubrious mode of living.”

  Still, Kneebones had assured him that the violent fits could be moderated with laudanum, in large doses.

  “Your father was too sparing of the laudanum, fearing overdose,” the doctor explained. “Then, when your grandfather came, he raged about my turning that unhappy woman into an opium addict. And then the fancy experts came, calling it ‘poison’ and saying it caused the hallucinations—when it was the only means of subduing them and quieting her.”

  Dorian smiled now, recalling that conversation. Opiate addiction was the least of his anxieties, and an overdose, in time, might offer a welcome release.

  In time, but not yet.

  Outwardly, he was healthy and strong, and in Dartmoor, he’d been free of the self-loathing that had haunted him since his last year at Eton, when temptation, in the shape of a woman, had first beckoned, and he’d found he was no match for it. Here, as his mother had said, there was no temptation. When he felt the old itch and grew restless, he rode through the moors, riding long and hard, until he was exhausted.

  Here he’d found a refuge. He meant
to enjoy it for as long as he could.

  Hearing footsteps in the hall, Dorian turned away from the window and thrust his hair back from his face. It was unfashionably long, but fashion had ceased signifying to Dorian years ago, and it certainly wouldn’t matter when he lay in his coffin.

  The coffin didn’t trouble him much, either, and hadn’t for some time. He’d had months to get used to the idea of dying. Now, thanks to the promise of laudanum, his remaining anxiety was eased. The drug would stupefy him, sparing him full awareness of the wretched thing he would become, while those who looked after him needn’t fear for their lives.

  He would die in something like peace with something like dignity. That was better than the lot of scores of wretches in the cesspits of London, he told himself. It was better than what his mother had endured, certainly.

  The library door opened, and Hoskins entered, bearing a letter. He set it face down on the library table so that the seal was plainly evident.

  It was the Earl of Rawnsley’s seal.

  “Damn,” Dorian said. He tore the letter open, scanned it, then handed it to Hoskins.

  “Now you see why I chose to be a nobody,” Dorian said.

  Hoskins had learned Dorian’s true identity only yesterday, at the same time he’d been informed of Dorian’s medical condition—and offered the opportunity to depart, if he wished. But Hoskins had fought and been wounded at Waterloo. After the horrors he’d experienced there, looking after a mere lunatic was child’s play.

  Moreover, to Dorian’s vast relief, Hoskins’s manner remained matter-of-fact, with occasional ventures into a gallows humor that lifted Dorian’s spirits.

  “Is it the irascibility of age?” Hoskins asked mildly as he handed the letter back. “Or was the old gentleman always like this?”

  “He’s impossible,” Dorian said. “Born that way, I suppose. And quite convincing. For most of my youth, I actually believed I was always the one at fault. There is no dealing with him, Hoskins. All one can do is try to ignore him. That won’t be easy.” He frowned at the letter.

  His remaining aunt, Hugo’s widow, had visited Dartmoor a short while ago and spotted Dorian on one of his gallops through the moors. She’d written the earl a highly exaggerated description of Dorian’s riding garb—or lack thereof—and passed on a lot of local gossip, mostly ignorant speculation about the reclusive eccentric living at Radmore Manor.

  The earl’s letter ordered Dorian to appear—his hair properly shorn and his person decently attired—at a family council on the twelfth of May, and explain himself.

  If they wanted him, they’d have to come and get him, Dorian silently vowed, and they would never take him away alive.

  “Did you wish to dictate a reply, sir?” Hoskins asked. “Or shall we chuck it into the fire?”

  “I’ll write my own reply. Otherwise you’ll be targeted as an accomplice, and made to feel the weight of his righteous wrath.” Dorian smiled faintly. “Then we’ll chuck it into the fire.”

  ON THE TWELFTH of May 1828, the Earl of Rawnsley and most of his immediate family were gathered in Rawnsley Hall’s drawing room at the moment that a section of the ancestral roof above them chose to collapse. In a matter of seconds, several tons of timber, stone, and miscellaneous decorative debris buried them and made Dorian Camoys—one of the very few family members not in attendance—the new Earl of Rawnsley.

  In a small sitting room in a house in Wiltshire, Gwendolyn Adams read the weeks-old newspaper account several times before she was satisfied she had not overlooked any details.

  Then she turned her attention to the other three documents on her writing desk. One was a letter written by the present earl’s recently deceased aunt. According to it, her nephew had turned into a savage. His hair hung down to his knees, and he galloped half-naked through the moors on a murderous white horse named after a bloodthirsty pagan god.

  The second document was a draft of a letter from the earl to his “savage” grandson. It gave Gwendolyn a very good idea why the heir had failed to attend the funeral.

  The third document was the present Lord Rawnsley’s reply to his grandfather’s obnoxious letter, and it made Gwendolyn smile for the first time since the duc d’Abonville had arrived and made his outrageous proposal.

  Abonville’s mother had been a de Camois, the French tree from which the English Camoys branch had sprouted centuries earlier—and thus Rawnsley’s very distant cousin. Abonville was also the fiancé of Gwendolyn’s grandmother, Genevieve, the dowager Viscountess Pembury.

  The pair had attended the Camoys’s funeral, after which a harassed solicitor had sought the duc’s assistance as nearest male kin: papers needed signing, and any number of legal matters must be attended to, and the present Lord Rawnsley had refused to assume his responsibilities.

  Accordingly, the duc and Genevieve had journeyed to Dartmoor. There, they discovered that the new earl had fallen victim to a terminal brain disease.

  Gwendolyn’s smile faded. Bertie Trent, her first cousin, had taken the news very hard. At present, he was hiding in the stables, sobbing over an old letter, creased and faded past legibility, from his boyhood friend Cat Camoys.

  She moved the papers aside and took up the miniature Bertie had given her.

  The tiny likeness allegedly represented Bertie’s friend. It had been painted years earlier by a singularly inept artist, and it did not tell her much.

  Still, twenty-one-year-old Gwendolyn was too levelheaded a girl to base the most momentous decision of her life upon a picture two inches in diameter.

  In the first place, she knew she was no great beauty herself, with her pointy nose and chin and impossible red hair. She doubted that her green eyes, to which several suitors had composed lavish—and very silly—odes, compensated for everything.

  In the second place, physical attractiveness was irrelevant. Rawnsley had not been asked to fall in love with her, nor she with him. Abonville had simply asked her to marry the earl and bear him a son to save the Camoys line from extinction.

  She’d been asked to do this because she came of a phenomenally fertile family, famous for producing males. Both characteristics were critical, for the Earl of Rawnsley hadn’t much time to sire an heir. His physician had given him six months to live.

  Unfortunately, there were no documents offering any insights into the brain disease itself. The little Genevieve and Abonville knew they’d learned mainly from the earl’s manservant, Hoskins. His Lordship had volunteered no details, and pressing him for information would have been unkind, Genevieve had said.

  Gwendolyn frowned.

  Her mother entered the room at that moment and softly closed the door behind her. “Are you truly thinking it over?” she asked as she took the seat next to Gwendolyn’s desk. “Or are you only making a show of hesitation for Papa’s benefit?”

  Though she had taken time to reflect, Gwendolyn did not feel hesitant. She knew the task she’d been asked to undertake would not be pleasant. But that did not daunt her in the least.

  Unpleasantness was only to be expected. Illness, whether of the mind or the body, was disagreeable; otherwise so much labor wouldn’t be dedicated to making it go away. But illness was also exceedingly interesting, and lunatics, Gwendolyn felt, were the most interesting patients of all.

  Lord Rawnsley’s case, combining both a mysterious neurological disease and aberrant behavior, could not have excited her more.

  If the Almighty had sent her a letter, signed, witnessed, and notarized, she could not have felt more certain that He, in His infinite wisdom—about which she had entertained doubts on more than one occasion—had made her expressly for this purpose.

  “I was making absolutely certain there wasn’t anything to think about,” Gwendolyn told her mother. “There isn’t.”

  Mama gazed at her for a long moment. “Yes, I heard the celestial summons—as clearly as you did, I don’t doubt. Papa is another matter, however.”

  Gwendolyn was well aware of this. Mama un
derstood her. Papa did not. None of the males of the family did. That included Abonville. Gwendolyn was sure the marriage idea was one her grandmother had planted in his head while convincing him it was his own. Fortunately, Genevieve had an enviable talent for making men believe just about anything she wanted them to.

  “We’d better let Genevieve talk him round,” Gwendolyn said. “Otherwise he will create delays by raising a lot of needless obstacles, and we have no time to lose. There’s no telling how long Rawnsley will retain his reason, and he must be of sound mind for the legalities.”

  That wasn’t Gwendolyn’s only anxiety. At this very moment, the Earl or Rawnsley might be taking one of his reckless rides and risking a fatal tumble into a mire.

  Then she would never have a chance to do something truly worthwhile with her life.

  Before she could voice this concern, her mother spoke.

  “Genevieve has already begun working on your father,” she said. “She knew what your answer would be, as I did. I shall go downstairs and signal her to administer the coup de grâce.” She rose.

  “Thank you, Mama,” Gwendolyn said.

  “Never mind that,” Mama said sharply. “It is not what I would have wished for you, even if you will be Countess of Rawnsley. If that young man had not been Bertie’s friend, and if he had not looked after your idiot cousin all through Eton—and doubtless saved his worthless neck a hundred times—” Her eyes filled and her voice was unsteady as she went on, “Oh, Gwendolyn, I should never let you go. But we cannot leave the poor boy to die alone.” She squeezed Gwendolyn’s shoulder. “He needs you, and that is all that ought to matter, I know.”

  DORIAN CAMOYS STOOD, trapped, in his own library.

  Less than a fortnight had passed since the duc d’Abonville had turned up at the door.

  Now the Frenchman was back—with a special license and a female he insisted Dorian marry forthwith.

  Dorian could have dealt with the Frenchman and his ludicrous command easily enough. Unfortunately, along with Lady Pembury and the girl Dorian had not yet met and knew better than to consider meeting, Abonville had also brought his future grandson, Bertie Trent.