Mortal Arts (A Lady Darby Mystery)

by Huber, AnnaLee

  “What of the children?” the marchioness demanded, gesturing to Alana, who stiffened. “Your own nephew? Are they not in the nursery on the same floor?”

  I squeezed my sister’s hand and scowled at Lady Hollingsworth. While perhaps a legitimate concern, she needn’t have voiced it in such a way. Alarming my already overtaxed sister did not help matters.

  “The children are as far away from William as we are, with many doors locked between them.”

  Lord Damien narrowed his eyes. “Then you do admit you fear for their safety. If you’ve taken such precautions, you cannot be as certain of your brother’s inability to do harm as you protest.”

  Gage shifted in his stance, drawing my attention. There was a tightening in the muscles of his face, a sharpening of his eyes that I knew signaled intense interest.

  “I . . . I do not believe William would hurt anyone,” Michael stammered. “At least, not on purpose. But if he were confused . . . I simply thought it best to ensure our guests’ comfort and his.”

  “And is he often confused?” Gage asked.

  I wanted to glare at him for assisting Will’s detractors, but I knew it was a reasonable question.

  “No . . .” He sounded uncertain. Raking a hand through his hair, he leaned forward over his knees and sighed. “Sometimes. Though less and less often.” He glanced sideways at Laura. “He’s never hurt my sister or Keswick.”

  “But that doesn’t mean he won’t,” Gage pointed out doggedly.

  I did glare at him this time.

  Michael stared down at his hands, considering Gage’s words. “No,” he asserted, shaking his head. “No. I don’t believe it. Will would not hurt anyone.”

  Gage looked as if he would like to argue, but held his tongue.

  Lady Hollingsworth was not so circumspect. “And what of this missing girl?”

  I sat up straighter, glancing at Michael in confusion. I noticed that Miss Remmington and Laura, seated on either side of him, had done much the same.

  He frowned. “What do you mean? Will has nothing to do with her.”

  “How can you be so sure?” she demanded.

  His eyes narrowed in warning.

  “Wait.” Philip held up his hands to interrupt, evincing the same perplexity I was feeling. None of the others seemed similarly lost. “What missing girl?”

  “A man stopped by a few days ago to tell us a girl went missing from the neighboring village of Cramond,” our host replied impatiently, still glaring at Lady Hollingsworth.

  A tingle of unease crept down my spine.

  “He wanted to know if we had seen her or noticed anything suspicious.” Michael leaned forward. “And we haven’t,” he bit out.

  Lady Hollingsworth lifted her chin, staring down her nose at him. “Yes, but how can you be so certain your brother was not involved?”

  “Because he never leaves the house without an escort.” He sneered. His sister glanced at him in concern, and he took a deep breath to calm himself before adding, “And, far as I know, he isn’t acquainted with anyone from Cramond.”

  I inhaled my own calming breath. Given those facts, it did seem rather unlikely that Will had anything to do with her disappearance. And even if Will did know the girl, and had been given the opportunity to meet with her alone, it seemed rather precipitous to accuse him of a crime just because of his recent enforced stay in an asylum. He had never been dangerous before, and it seemed unworthy to suppose he would be now. But, nevertheless, I couldn’t seem to shake the disquieting feeling that had crept over me.

  I glanced at Gage, curious how he had taken this news. His emotionless mask was back in place, his pensive gaze contemplating the floor at his feet. For once he didn’t seem to be eager to question Michael on the matter. I could only assume he didn’t know what to think of it either.

  Lady Hollingsworth huffed. “Well, regardless, I do not want my daughter within ten miles of your brother.”

  Caroline shifted anxiously. “Mother . . .”

  “And I am furious that you would risk her safety in such a manner,” she continued, heedless of her daughter. “You have misrepresented yourself since the moment you presented yourself to her, and I will not stand for it.”

  Michael’s temper exploded again. “I never misrepresented myself. You were the one who assumed I would petition the Court of Chancery for my brother’s title.” He stabbed his finger at the marchioness. “I never mentioned doing any such thing, and I always flatly refused whenever I was questioned about it.”

  “Well, you should have known it would be expected. What self-respecting mother wouldn’t wish for her daughter to have a title? And your failure to mention the mental illness that runs in your family was inexcusable.” She rose stiffly from the settee. “This engagement is at an end. We will be leaving first thing in the morning.”

  “But Mother!” Caroline gasped, tears already streaming down her cheeks.

  “Hush! I’ll hear no word from you. To bed.”

  Michael rose to try to stop them, but Keswick put a hand out to prevent him. “Not now,” he said with a shake of his head.

  Michael watched in misery as Lady Hollingsworth ushered her children out the door. Caroline glanced over her shoulder one last time before her mother forcibly pulled her from the room.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Michael dropped back into his chair and stared forlornly at the door. Seeing him like this, I wanted to do nothing more than run after Lady Hollingsworth and shake some sense into her. Couldn’t she see what a good man Michael Dalmay was? What tough decisions he’d been forced to make? Couldn’t she see how much he cared for her daughter?

  But for all the displeasure I felt at the marchioness, I knew she was right to question Michael’s behavior. He hadn’t been completely honest. And, regardless of his reasons for doing so, and whether his intentions had been good, she wouldn’t have been looking after her daughter if she did not at least call him to task for it. Her ending of their engagement had been a bit precipitous, but perhaps she could be made to see reason in the morning.

  The others seemed to be of the same mind-set.

  “Take heart, old boy,” Keswick told his brother-in-law, clapping him on the shoulder as he slumped forward. “I predict cooler heads will prevail tomorrow.”

  Michael nodded absently, his elbows braced on his knees.

  “Keswick’s right,” Philip said. “We may yet be able to resolve this matter to everyone’s satisfaction or at least give you some more time to prove your brother is stable. But not tonight.”

  Michael lifted his head. “I’m sorry, Cromarty. I didn’t think. I should have realized you’d be alarmed to hear your children were sharing the same floor with my brother.”

  I glanced at my sister, whose complexion was paler than normal. I couldn’t tell whether that was due to her recent illness or worry over her children. Either way, it was impossible not to think of the manner in which she had reacted to the news of the murders two months past, locking herself in Gairloch’s nursery with her three children.

  “But, I promise you, they are safe,” he vowed to Alana, clearly realizing she was the one he needed to convince of his sincerity. “I would never allow them to come to harm. But if you would like to have them moved, to the room next to yours or somewhere here on the ground floor, I will do whatever you feel is necessary.”

  Alana looked up at her husband, who was waiting for her to decide what should be done. She smoothed her hands over the creamy satin of her skirts. “I know you would never place our children in danger.” Her gaze flitted toward Laura and Keswick. “And if little Nicolas is safe in the nursery, I’m sure our children are as well.”

  “You’re certain?” Michael pressed, anxiety stretching his voice. “I do not want you to worry.”

  She took a deep breath and exhaled before offering him a reassuring smile. “I�
�m certain.”

  Michael nodded.

  “We’re going up to say good night to Nicolas,” Laura said. “Would you like to join us?”

  Alana perked up. “Yes. Yes, I would.”

  “Go on,” Philip told her when she turned to him. His eyes warmed with affection. “I’ll be up shortly.”

  “Come along, Elise,” Keswick told his sister as they passed by her chair.

  Miss Remmington, who had been listening to us quietly, with a far more earnest expression on her face than I had yet to witness, glanced up at her brother. “Oh, I’m wide awake,” she replied, doing a marvelous job of masking whatever concern she felt. “I believe I’ll stay up a bit longer.”

  “Then you can read in your room.”

  Miss Remmington blinked up at him through her eyelashes and her lips formed into a pretty pout—an expression that was certain to have any number of men eating out of her hand. Unfortunately for her, it had no effect on her brother.

  “Now, Elise!”

  “You’re so stodgy.” She flounced out of the room after her brother.

  Philip shook his head. “Thank goodness I never had any sisters.”

  “Thank goodness mine was well behaved,” Michael muttered in commiseration.

  Philip shifted off the arm of the settee to sit beside me. “Are ye well?” he asked, lifting his eyebrows in query.

  “Yes.”

  His eyes remained locked with mine for a moment longer, as if assuring I spoke the truth, and then he nodded in satisfaction. “So, Dalmay. Now that the others are gone, give us the truth. How is he really?” He frowned. “And what about this missing girl? Are ye acquainted?” I could hear his brogue slipping now that most of the house had retired and the fatigue of the day was setting in. Philip could speak as well as any English-bred gentleman when he chose to, but the truth of his Highland roots was never far away, especially when he let his guard down.

  Michael passed a hand over his face. “I was honest before. Will has his good days and his bad. And, at this stage, they are more often good.” He sighed and settled back in his chair. “As for the girl, her name is Mary Wallace. I’m acquainted with her father—a respectable, generally good-natured fellow. He owns a small estate south of Cramond. I met his daughter once . . . Oh, for heaven’s sake,” he snapped, turning to glare at his friend still lounging against the fireplace mantel. “Sit down, Gage. I will not keep craning my neck to include you in the conversation.”

  Amusement twinkled in Gage’s eyes as he crossed the room toward the settee Keswick and his wife had vacated.

  “I don’t know why you feel you have to be so damned . . .” Michael’s gaze darted to mine “. . . dashed mysterious all the time. Apologies,” he told me.

  I waved it away. He wasn’t the first gentleman to curse in my presence, and I was certain he wouldn’t be the last.

  His scowling visage returned to Gage. “What was all that about?”

  Gage shrugged. “I wanted a vantage point where I could see everyone’s faces.”

  Michael huffed. “This isn’t one of your investigations.”

  Michael might not think so, but I wasn’t so sure. My eyes narrowed on Gage, remembering the way he had interrogated Michael about his certainty of William’s harmlessness.

  A slight tensing of Gage’s shoulders let me know he was aware of my interest. “Well, old habits die hard,” he replied vaguely.

  Michael’s expression said clearly that he thought that was cock-and-bull.

  “Ye said tonight William had a small relapse?” Philip prompted, trying to steer the conversation back to more important matters.

  He nodded. “For weeks he’s been making steady progress. Conversing with others. Taking interest in what’s going on around him. Behaving more and more like the brother I remember. But this evening, just after you arrived . . .” He sighed. “He . . . went away again.”

  Philip’s brow furrowed in confusion. “What do ye mean he ‘went away’ again?”

  “I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s as if one minute he’s there with me, and the next he’s not. His mind, it . . .” Michael lifted his hand in defeat “. . . goes somewhere else.”

  “Was that why the servant at the top of the stairs called you away when we arrived?” I asked.

  “That was Mac. He’s an old family retainer, and one of Will’s caretakers.”

  I nodded, remembering Mac from a decade earlier when he’d acted as Will’s manservant at Swinton Lodge. Mac’s hair had thinned and grayed considerably in the years since I’d last seen him, but now that I knew it was him, I could see his resemblance in the stoop-shouldered servant who had stood at the top of the stairs.

  Michael’s face dragged with worry. “I knew when he appeared that something was wrong.”

  Gage tilted his head to the side in thought. “What does he do when his mind . . . goes away? Anything?”

  “Well . . .” Michael looked at me “. . . he draws.”

  “He draws?” Gage repeated in puzzlement.

  “Yes.”

  I don’t know why I was shocked to hear this, but I was. “He’s returning to what he feels most comfortable with.” Philip and Gage turned to stare at me and I endeavored to explain. “It’s what I do. When I feel troubled.” I shrugged one shoulder. “It’s what he did before.”

  Michael’s gaze turned apprehensive. “I thought you said you had never seen any of his paintings.”

  I licked my lips. “No. You asked if William had ever shown me any.” He narrowed his eyes at my splitting hairs. “And he didn’t. But . . . I did see some of them.”

  His hands flexed on the arms of his chair, and I knew he was seeing the same images I was. The memories Will had brought back from Spain and Portugal and France.

  “What paintings?” Gage demanded.

  Michael shifted uncomfortably, making the legs of his chair creak beneath him. “I don’t quite know how to describe them.”

  “I think they’re scenes from the war,” I replied when he hesitated to elaborate. I hoped that would be explanation enough, and we wouldn’t have to describe the war-ravaged countrysides on his canvases and in his sketches. The abject suffering. The horrors perpetuated by both friend and foe alike.

  I was both relieved and alarmed to see understanding in Gage’s pain-shadowed eyes. The starkness of his features seemed too pronounced for a man with only abstract knowledge of what I spoke.

  “Then they were disturbing?” he murmured.

  I opened my mouth, to deny it, to try to explain it, I don’t know, but I couldn’t make such convoluted excuses. Not when the truth was so straightforward. “Yes.”

  They had been disturbing. Particularly to my sheltered, untested fifteen-year-old self. I had known nothing of war, or the pain and devastation it caused. The only casualty of my acquaintance had been a younger son from a neighboring estate, a gentleman I barely knew. The newspapers did not report the worst for our sensitive ears, and as I was barely ten when the battle of Waterloo was fought, I paid little attention.

  But Will’s paintings and sketches brought the truth home to me as nothing else could. Will was an artist, like me. He captured images on canvas, noting details with one blink of an eye that others would never see had they stared at the same scene for hours. To have such terror imprinted in your head, reappearing over and over in your mind’s eye, was a living nightmare. I knew from experience.

  The cadavers Sir Anthony had forced me to watch him dissect had plagued my thoughts and troubled my sleep so badly that I had dropped a stone in weight. Until I learned to accept them, to see the beauty in the bodies and not the gruesomeness of the undertaking, I found no rest. Even so, those first few corpses sometimes still haunted my dreams, particularly Frederick Oliver, the young man whose body had been the subject of my first dissection. How much more disturbed had Will b
een by the memories he carried home with him from war?

  “Who else saw them?” Gage asked.

  Deep furrows pleated Michael’s brow. “I don’t know. Father showed them to me when he told me the truth about my brother’s whereabouts. I think he believed they would convince me of the rightness of his actions.”

  Gage sat taller. “He kept them?”

  “Yes. I admit it seems a bit odd now that I think about it. Wouldn’t he want to destroy all evidence of his son’s malady?” He sighed and shook his head. “I can only suggest my initial assumption was correct. That he believed they proved his blamelessness, and he kept them in his defense, should someone question his decision. As far as I know, they’re still in the attic.”

  A shiver ran down my spine at the thought of them.

  It was apparent to me now that those paintings and sketches had been the primary source of Will’s trouble. That they had been the evidence Dr. Sloane used to convince Lord Dalmay that his son was insane and that he should be confined to this Larkspur Retreat, without following proper protocol. It wasn’t the aimless wandering or the sometimes frantic pacing. It wasn’t the lapses into silence or the startled reactions to seemingly innocuous noises or the haunted look in his eyes. It was the art he continued to create, the visual depictions of what he was seeing in his mind, those frightening images.

  “What your father never understood,” I told Michael, “was that, as disturbing as they were, those drawings were merely memories. Remembrances of a time he wanted to, but could not, forget. They weren’t representations of what he wished to do. They were images of the past.”

  “But how can you be sure?” Gage’s skeptical tone of voice made me believe even more strongly in what I was saying.

  “Because I am. None of you were there during the days and weeks leading up to his disappearance. I saw him almost every day. And I could have sworn he was improving. I know I was only fifteen, but I was not unobservant.” Especially when it came to Will. I lifted my gaze to a portrait of William and Michael Dalmay’s mother, whose image flickered in the firelight, and thought back on those last few weeks spent with Will. “He seemed . . . lighter somehow. Less restless. And he’d gained at least a stone of much-needed weight.”