The Ruin of a Rake

by Cat Sebastian

  “If you’ll listen to me for half a minute, please,” Turner said, not bothering to conceal his irritation at having to run his quarry down. “My employer has been entertaining the idea that despite your personal failings it might do Simon some good to see you, considering how close you were during his time on the Continent. I was simply making sure that you weren’t engaged in round-the-clock orgies. I believe Lord Radnor will be satisfied. I’ll be in London for three days, and I brought Simon with me so he could visit Astley’s again. I thought you might want to come with us.”

  Courtenay thought he might weep with relief. “Yes,” he managed. “Yes.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Why didn’t you tell me you had been invited to the Preston ball?” Eleanor asked, looking up from the letter she was reading at the breakfast table.

  Courtenay was in an agreeable mood, having spent the past two days taking Simon about London. It had felt like old times, but more than that it was the promise of a future that wasn’t totally devoid of joy. “There’s no point, thank God. Radnor saw reason, and now I can go back to behaving normally,” he said.

  “But I’m going,” Eleanor argued. “It would be lovely to see you at one of these dos for once.”

  “I have to go,” Standish said, appearing in the open door of the breakfast room. “I don’t see why I ought to be the only one suffering.”

  At some point while Courtenay had been distracted by Simon’s presence, Standish and Eleanor had reached a slight detente. Standish now leaned against the doorframe, his hands jammed in his pockets and a smile on his lips. His words were addressed to Courtenay but his eyes were on Eleanor.

  Eleanor, who was blushing. Very interesting.

  “Julian did go to all that trouble to get you invited.” Eleanor said, blissfully oblivious to the fact that Courtenay and Julian hadn’t spoken in days. “It seems a waste if you don’t go.”

  Standish made a strangled noise and Courtenay shot him a reassuring look. Courtenay would hold his tongue. If Eleanor knew that Standish had told Courtenay about Julian’s novel, she’d be upset with her husband for violating her confidence, and it might undo some of the progress they had made in reconciling. Courtenay, however, was unspeakably grateful to Standish for telling him the truth before Courtenay had fallen even more dangerously in love with Julian.

  Besides, it would be damned hard to explain why Standish had felt it necessary to tell Courtenay Julian’s secret without revealing their affair. Courtenay wasn’t entirely sure if Eleanor knew that her brother’s tastes ran to men, let alone whether he had been intimate with Courtenay. And as disappointed as Courtenay was with Julian, and with himself for having been stupid enough to fall for a man who held him in such low regard, he wasn’t exposing the man’s secrets.

  “Perhaps I’ll go,” he said, wanting to be agreeable.

  “Eleanor said it will be very crowded.” Standish spoke with an offhand air, but Courtenay understood him to be reassuring Courtenay that he wouldn’t need to see Julian if he didn’t want to.

  Well, he damned well didn’t want to, so that was good. He also didn’t want to look like he was shrinking away from all decent society. It was rather a coup for him to have gained this invitation to the Preston ball, and declining to attend would feel like a defeat, as if he were admitting he had no right to be among civilized people.

  Courtenay pulled his watch from his pocket. “I need to leave if I’m to see Simon off.” He pushed his chair back and rose from the table. “I told him I’d go to the hotel and admire the carriage horses.”

  As he left the breakfast room, he saw Standish sit in the chair he had vacated. Courtenay dearly hoped Standish and Eleanor managed to make this work and was almost annoyed that they had spent years resentfully apart when they could have been together. They could have had what Courtenay never would.

  Medlock had made him start to second-guess his belief that he didn’t deserve happiness, didn’t deserve lasting companionship after his part in robbing his sister of her future. For how many years had he implicitly allowed his own opinion of himself to be tarnished by his mother’s contempt? She had never given a damn about him, and he ought to return the compliment.

  And now, walking along the sun-dappled springtime streets of Mayfair, on his way to see his sister’s beloved child, he couldn’t help but think that Isabella wouldn’t have wanted him to deny himself happiness. Of course she wouldn’t—people wanted their loved ones to be happy. The only person who wouldn’t want Courtenay to be happy was his mother, and—

  And he didn’t care what his mother thought of him.

  Or, rather, he did care but realized he shouldn’t.

  He thought that he could maybe try to see himself through the eyes of the people who thought the best of him—Isabella always had, Simon did now. So did Eleanor and maybe even Standish.

  So had Julian, despite what he had written in that book; that had been before he had really known Courtenay. Courtenay knew that. He had gone over the timing a hundred times. He had remembered, unbidden, every kind word Julian had told him.

  That didn’t mean he could ever trust Julian again, but he could know that Julian had cared about him, as much as Julian was capable of caring about anyone. He told himself that had to count for something.

  That night, settled in the spare room, he took The Brigand Prince out of his valise. He hadn’t read it since learning that Julian had written it. But he hadn’t burnt it either, or tossed it out the window.

  As he turned the familiar pages, he found himself catching traces of Julian—a turn of phrase, a cutting remark. And he realized these words were always from the mouth of the villain Don Lorenzo. The rest of the characters were as good-hearted a lot of simpletons as ever graced the pages of a novel and Julian made them all say the most appallingly sentimental things to one another. Any notion Courtenay had about Julian not understanding the workings of the human heart were proven utterly false. He was a damned expert in the treacliest of sentiment.

  Courtenay remembered Julian’s insistence that Don Lorenzo wasn’t based on Courtenay, that Julian had only borrowed Courtenay’s looks and mannerisms. And now he saw that this was the truth. Julian, not Courtenay, was Don Lorenzo: conniving, ruthless, cold, friendless.

  Courtenay rather wished he hadn’t figured that out.

  He flipped to a passage he remembered well. Agatha and Don Lorenzo were trapped in the crumbling tower of the monastery. Don Lorenzo had very flamboyantly thrown the key out the window.

  “You’ll never get away with this,” Agatha cried, clawing at the velvet folds of Don Lorenzo’s robes. Wind whipped through the open window, bringing with it pelting hail and blinding gusts of frigid air. Agatha’s own humble cloak was in tatters, a poor defense against this gall.

  “My child,” Don Lorenzo drawled, his emerald green eyes glinting with cold malice, “I already have.” He opened his palm to reveal the golden contours of the prince’s locket. He held his hand out through the window, dangling the locket over the abyss.

  “No!”

  “Without this locket you’ll never have proof that you and your appalling infant brother are the rightful heirs of the prince, and his fiefdom will revert to me.” He ran the long white fingers of one hand through the ravens’ wings of his hair. “The ancestral curse will finally be lifted from my bloodline after centuries of despair.”

  “What do you want from me?” Agatha begged, falling to her knees on the cold, hard flagstone of the tower floor. “I would do anything to restore my family’s honor.”

  “Sweet, stupid Agatha. Don’t you wish it were that simple? I know I do.”

  He was interrupted by the sound of a tremendous crashing. The stone floor creaked and trembled and it sounded as if the tower itself was in danger of collapsing into dust. The ancient oaken door burst inward, sending a spray of splinters into the room.

  Agatha turned toward the hole in the wall where the door had once stood. It was empty. She had expected to
see a party of rescuers armed with a great battering room, but instead there was only a gaping void of shadows.

  “No!” Don Lorenzo cried, flinging an arm over his eyes in terror at a sight only he could behold. “Not that!”

  “Nothing is there,” Agatha protested, shaking her head in meek confusion. “It must have been the storm.”

  “Don’t take me!” Don Lorenzo begged to the unseen entity. “It isn’t time!”

  “Who are you speaking to?” The mist in the tower seemed to be coalescing into a shape. Agatha knew it had to be a trick of her tired mind. She had spent weeks chasing this villain over hill and dale. She had travelled nearly the length of the country tracking him down and now her mind must be fevered. But if she stared too long at the mist it seemed to take the form of a hooded figure who loomed over them.

  “I thought I’d have longer,” Don Lorenzo cried, tears streaming down his face. He seemed to be diminishing in size and substance. With what seemed to be every reserve of strength in his body, he leaned out the window and released the locket. Agatha watched in frozen horror as she saw the golden object drop from his long fingers, plummeting into the abyss.

  The wind in the tower stopped for an instant and a silence fell over the monastery, so eerily still Agatha could hear her own heart beating. It was over. The locket was gone and her hopes were dashed. Don Lorenzo sagged with relief against the window casement, and for the first time Agatha could see what the man would be without the prophecy compelling him to black deeds and awful feats. His visage smoothed, relaxing into something devoid of rancor, empty of all traces of the villainy that had spurred him on for perhaps his entire life. As Agatha watched, a sigh escaped his mouth, a white puff in the darkness, and his eyes fell shut.

  Suddenly the wind picked up again, furious and violent, and before Agatha could realize what was happening she saw Don Lorenzo fall out the window as if pushed by an invisible hand.

  “No!” she cried, even though vanquishing this man had been the object of her life.

  Courtenay closed the book. Julian hadn’t even made Don Lorenzo fall into the abyss by his own greed or treachery. Courtenay didn’t know what the curse signified, if anything. He closed the book and put it on the nightstand, but it was a long time before he fell asleep.

  Julian’s head was throbbing. It felt like there were shards of glass where his brain ought to have been. When he moved, he set off a chain reaction of pain throughout his body.

  But it was the night of the Preston ball and it would take more than a simple cold to keep him away. Because that’s what this was: a cold. Nothing more. Never mind that when he crawled out of bed after his nap he felt that he could just as easily curl up on the floor and sleep until the next day. Never mind that when his valet tied his cravat, the smooth linen felt like coarse rope against his flesh.

  “If you’ll pardon me, sir,” Briggs said after watching Julian wince through having his hair combed. “Will you let me take the liberty of calling for the doctor? Or perhaps Lady Standish? She always knows what to do in these, ah, situations,” he said diplomatically.

  “No,” Julian croaked. “It’s a summer cold.” It wasn’t summer and it was becoming increasingly clear that this wasn’t a cold but Julian didn’t care. He would not sit this ball out. He had worked blasted hard to get to the point where his invitation to such an event was a matter of course. “I daresay I’ll feel better once I’m distracted.” His voice sounded like it was coming from far away.

  Later, he couldn’t say how precisely he had gotten to the ball. Briggs must have poured him into his carriage and told the coachman where to bring him, because the next thing he knew he had drifted through the receiving line and gone down the stairs into the ballroom.

  He lasted about two minutes in the ballroom. It was stifling hot and infernally loud. Were balls always like this? Impossible. He would have remembered. It was like something dreamt up by one of those medieval Dutch fellows who were forever painting their deranged imaginings of a hell populated by jolly demons torturing the damned. Courtenay would have found that vastly amusing, but he was not thinking of Courtenay, because that made his head hurt even worse, to say nothing of his heart. He made his way through the crowd and out into the garden.

  Why did the soles of his feet ache so much? That was bloody new. Perhaps he’d tell Eleanor, so she could write the symptom in that little book in which she detailed his illnesses. He hated that book. The cool night air, at least, was blessed relief. Julian wanted to crawl onto a garden bench and fall asleep. The sound of the breeze rustling through the immaculately maintained shrubbery was somehow as loud as a monsoon.

  Leaning on the balustrade that overlooked the garden, he let his eyes fall shut. He peeled off his gloves so he could feel the cool of the stone with his hot, painful hands. He didn’t need to open his eyes to know what the Prestons’ garden looked like. The first year he had attended this ball, he had been wide-eyed with astonishment that such a large garden existed behind a private home in a crowded metropolis. Even most wealthy people contented themselves with a modest patch of greenery, but the exceedingly wealthy—and the Prestons were very rich indeed—had obelisks and follies, bridges crossing picturesque streams, cleverly situated temples and grottos. Houses like this must require armies of gardeners—always out of sight, even though a garden like this must need hours of work daily to coax flowers to bloom coincidental with the ball. He wanted to tally the likely cost of such an enterprise but his mind wouldn’t cooperate.

  Even with his eyes squeezed shut, Julian could smell the plants—flowering shrubs and trees, blooms that belonged in Madras, not Mayfair. When he heard a burst of conversation, for a moment his aching brains thought he was hearing the Hindustani voices of his grandfather’s servants, the laughing chatter of Eleanor and Ned as they slipped through the moonlit gardens, Julian watching from an opened window of the upstairs room where he balanced the account books, Julian listening from his sickbed while grandfather’s valet made him drink that infernal tincture.

  It was time for the tincture.

  “Nora,” he heard Standish say, and Eleanor laughed. They had always been laughing, thick as thieves from the moment they met. He thought he could hear them now, and even in his disoriented state he knew it was not a good sign to be hearing things. He lifted his head but there were Eleanor and Standish in the garden below him. Eleanor was wearing a gown he dimly recalled having bought her, far away in London—dark blue silk shot through with silver thread, and even from this distance he could see the adoring look on Standish’s face as he regarded her.

  “Thank God,” Julian said aloud. Maybe he hadn’t made a mess of their lives as badly as he had his own. Maybe Eleanor would have what she wanted, all the things she hadn’t ever spoken aloud to Julian. Julian hadn’t deserved those confidences, because he wouldn’t have understood anyway, at least not before knowing Courtenay. Now he thought he could begin to grasp what Eleanor’s sorrow had been like. “Thank God,” he repeated, when he saw Standish pull Eleanor behind a shrub and kiss her. Then he shut his eyes again and rested his forehead against the blessedly cool stone of the balustrade.

  He didn’t know how long he stayed like that, but after a while he felt a hand between his shoulder blades and smelled tobacco.

  “Is that you, Medlock?” It was Courtenay’s voice, low and rumbly and out of place among the exotic blooms.

  “Why are you in Madras?” Julian asked without lifting his head. He felt a hand, wonderfully cool on his brow.

  “You’re feverish. You ought to be in bed. Or in a vinegar bath. Why are you alone out here?” He sounded angry and worried.

  Julian turned his head so his cheek rested against the too-warm wool of his sleeve. The burning tip of Courtenay’s cigarillo seemed as distant as a star in the sky.

  “Come here.” Courtenay wrapped an arm around Julian and hauled him upright.

  Julian tried to explain that his legs weren’t working properly, but his mouth wasn’t work
ing properly either. He collapsed against Courtenay’s hard chest.

  “Christ, Julian.”

  “That’s what you were supposed to call me,” Julian said, his words garbled, “if I hadn’t ruined everything. I ruin everything that isn’t money.” It had been better when he thought he was still in Madras, the future laid out before him in all its dazzling potential. Now he was in London and there was no future, nothing to plan for.

  “I think you have the influenza.” Courtenay’s voice was stern. “Damn. Is there a doctor here? No, impossible that the Prestons would have invited a lowly professional man.”

  “He’s the Chancellor of the Exchequer. But he also has a model village. You ought to talk to him.” Julian couldn’t remember why he thought Courtenay might want to know about model villages, but it had something to do with the Poor Laws and the bad roofs at Carrington.

  “You’re delirious.”

  Julian thought he very well might be. The world seemed to be spinning about his ears. Music wafted out on the breeze, and as he rested against Courtenay’s chest, he felt like they were dancing together. “We’re waltzing,” he murmured. He had never danced with anyone he loved, and he supposed that wasn’t what was happening now anyway. They weren’t dancing so much as standing still while music played and Julian tried not to faint. Besides, Julian didn’t want to think about love. Whatever it was, it would have been pleasant if he weren’t growing increasingly certain that he might drop dead at any moment.

  “I miss you,” Julian said, as Courtenay scooped him up in a pair of strong arms and the world went dark.

  Chapter Twenty

  Where the devil was Eleanor? Courtenay braced Julian against his chest and called out her name. She would know what to do, while Courtenay could only offer brute strength, and even that was barely sufficient to get Julian out into a hackney. He dismissed the idea of having one of the Prestons’ footmen fetch Eleanor—it would take too long, and create a scene that he knew Julian would abhor. Besides, Julian’s illness was getting increasingly worse. He needed a doctor. He told the hackney driver to bring them to Eleanor’s house. It was only a few streets away, much closer than Julian’s lodgings.