Once capable.
Past tense.
Before the headaches. Before the disease had begun its insidious work.
The answer came then, chilling him: the tenuous link between will and action, mind and body, was breaking down already. He was healthy and strong, she’d claimed, but that was only outwardly. His degenerating mind was already sap-ping his will.
He turned away, lest she read his despair in his countenance. He would master it. He needed but a moment. It had caught him unawares, that was all.
“Rawnsley.”
He felt her hand upon his sleeve.
He wanted to shake it off, but he couldn’t, any more than he could shake off his awareness of her. The taste of her lingered in his mouth, and her drugging scent wafted about him. He recalled the soft look in her beautiful eyes and the smile…warm promises. And he was cold, chilled to his soul.
And too selfish, too weak, he thought with bitter resignation, to let her go.
He brought his hand up and covered hers. “I do not want to go back into that curst library and listen to their solemn speeches and read their bloody documents,” he said levelly. “I signed the settlements. You’ll get your hospital. That is enough. I want to be wed. Now.”
She squeezed his arm. “I’m ready,” she said. “I’ve been ready for hours.”
He looked down at her. She smiled up at him.
Warm promises.
He drew her arm through his and led her back to the house. It wanted all his will not to run. The sun was setting, evening closing in with its blessed darkness. Soon, this night, they’d be wed. Soon, they would go up to his room, to the bed. And then…God help them both.
He took her through the door and hurried her down the hall. He saw the library door standing open, the light streaming into the gloomy corridor.
He turned to speak to her—then he caught it, faint but unmistakable, at the periphery of his vision.
Tiny zigzags of light.
He blinked, but they would not wash away. They hovered, sparkling evilly, at the edges of his vision.
He shut his eyes, but he saw them still, winking their deadly warning.
He opened his eyes and they were there, inescapable, inexorable.
No, not yet. Not so soon. He tried to brush them away, though he knew it was futile.
They only signaled back, glittering, remorseless: soon, very soon.
Four
“This is your doing,” Mr. Kneebones raged at Hoskins. “I told you my patient’s fragile health could not withstand any strain. I told you he must be insulated from all sources of nervous agitation. No newspapers. No visitors. You saw what the news about his family did to him: three attacks in one week. Yet you let strangers descend upon him at a time when he was most vulnerable. And now—”
“A man becomes a peer of the realm, he ought to know about it,” Hoskins said. “And attacks or no attacks, it was a relief to him to learn the old gentleman couldn’t trouble him anymore. And as to letting in strangers, I reckon I can tell the difference between a friend and an enemy. Even if I couldn’t, I’d like to see you shut the door in Lady Pembury’s face—and her the grandmother of the only friend my master ever had. Maybe it wasn’t my place to tell her what was wrong with him, but I judged it best to warn her beforehand that he wasn’t as strong as he looked, and his nerves weren’t what they used to be.”
“Which means they should not have been subjected to any source of agitation,” Kneebones snapped.
“With all due respect, sir, you never clapped eyes on him until a few weeks ago,” Hoskins said. “You may be qualified to judge his medical condition, but you don’t know his character or his wishes. I’ve had more than nine months to learn, and I promise you, the last thing he wishes is to be treated like a vaporish female.” He glanced at Gwendolyn. “Meaning no offense, my lady.”
“None taken,” she said. “I’ve never succumbed to vapors in my life.”
The middle-aged veteran smiled.
Kneebones glared at her.
He’d been glowering at her ever since she’d summoned him into the drawing room, after he’d visited his patient. They had not spoken together ten minutes before hostilities broke out. Hoskins, waiting outside in the hall, had hurried in and leapt to her defense, unware she didn’t need defending.
Still, that had not been unproductive. The manservant’s skirmish with the doctor had clarified several matters, and heaven knew Gwendolyn needed as much enlightenment as she could get.
Rawnsley seemed determined to keep her completely in the dark about his illness.
She had noticed something was wrong within minutes of their returning to the house, after the episode in the garden. During the following hours, while Gwendolyn was marshalling everyone into order, she had watched the earl change. By the time of the ceremony, his voice had settled into a monotone…while his movements became painfully slow and careful, as though he were made of glass and might shatter at any moment.
The fingers slipping the wedding ring onto hers had been deathly cold, the nails chalk white.
Only after it was done, though, and they had signed their names as husband and wife, had Rawnsley told her he had a headache and was going to bed.
She’d sent her relatives away, as he’d asked, saying the earl needed absolute quiet.
He had spent his wedding night in bed with his laudanum bottle. He had locked his bedroom door, refusing to let even Hoskins in.
This morning, Gwendolyn had taken up the earl’s breakfast herself. When she tapped at the door and called softly to him, he told her to stop the infernal row and leave him alone.
Since the servants hadn’t seemed unduly alarmed by his behavior, she’d waited patiently until late afternoon before sending for Kneebones.
After the doctor left the room, the patient’s door had been locked again—and Kneebones refused to discuss his condition with her.
Gwendolyn regarded the physician composedly, ignoring his threatening expression. Medical men had been glowering and glaring and fuming at her for years. “I should like to know what dosage of laudanum you have prescribed,” she said. “I cannot get into my husband’s room to determine for myself, and I am most uneasy. It is all too easy for a patient in extreme pain to lose track of how much he’s taken and when he last took it. Laudanum intoxication rarely improves either calculating abilities or memory.”
“I’ll thank you not to tell me my business, madam,” Kneebones said stiffly. “I have discussed the benefits and risks with my patient—for all the good that does him now, after what he’s been subjected to. One shock after another—capped by a hurry-up wedding to a female he doesn’t know from Adam. It was as good as killing him outright. You might as well have taken a hammer to his skull.”
“I have discerned no symptoms of shock,” Gwendolyn said. “What I have observed—”
“Ah, yes, during your lengthy acquaintance with His Lordship,” Kneebones said with a cold glance at Hoskins. “My lady has known him all of what—thirty-six hours, if that?”
Gwendolyn suppressed a sigh. She would get nowhere with him. He was like virtually every other physician—with the blessed exception of Mr. Eversham—she’d ever encountered. How they resented being questioned! And how they loved to be mysterious and all-knowing. Very well. She could play that game, too.
“I noticed that the hallucinations were of very brief duration,” she said.
Kneebones started. He recovered in an instant, his expression wary.
She could have told him she’d been trained to observe, but she said nothing of her background or of the conclusions she’d drawn after noticing the way Rawnsley had angrily blinked, and brushed at the air near his face, as though trying to clear cobwebs. If Kneebones chose to keep her in the dark, he must expect the same treatment.
She gave him the faintest of smiles. “Did His Lordship not tell you, sir? I am a witch. But I must not waste your valuable time. You have other sickbeds to attend, I know—and I must
set my cauldron aboil…and look about for a fresh batch of eye of newt.”
Kneebones’s mouth set in a grim line, and without another word, he stalked out.
Gwendolyn met Hoskins’s quiet gaze.
“I don’t know the dosage,” he said. “All I know is what the bottle looks like—and there’s more than one.”
Dorian awoke from a restless, nightmare-plagued sleep to nightmarish pain.
His head pounded relentlessly. His insides churned, raw with bile.
Slowly, carefully, he inched up to a sitting position and reached for the bottle on the nightstand. He put it to his lips.
Empty.
Already? he wondered dully. Had he finished it off in a single night? Or had several nights passed in the oppressive haze of pain and opiates?
It didn’t matter.
He had seen the silvery wraiths again. Today, they’d slowly closed in from the peripheries and shimmered everywhere he looked. He had watched the wedding preparations through sparkling ripples undulating in the air like waves in a ghostly sea.
Then, finally, the silver shards had vanished from his vision and sliced into his skull like white-hot blades.
Now he understood why his mother had claimed the “ghosts” had vicious talons, and why she’d screamed and torn at her hair. She had been trying to rip the wicked claws away.
Even he had trouble reminding himself there were neither ghosts nor claws, that it was all a sick fancy.
He wondered how much longer he would be able to distinguish between sick fancy and reality, how long before he began confusing those about him with ghosts and demons—and attacked them in mindless rage.
But he would not, he told himself. Kneebones had promised that the laudanum would quiet him, quelling the delusions along with the pain.
Dorian edged closer to the nightstand and opened the door. He reached in and found the porcelain cylinder.
He took it onto his lap and pried off the lid.
The narrow bottle, nestled in a woolen cloth, lay within.
The elixir of peace…perhaps eternal.
He took it out and with trembling hands set the cylinder upon the nightstand.
Then he hesitated, but it was not the prospect of eternity that gave him pause. No, he was too shallow and base for that. It was the witch he thought of, and her soft mouth and slimly curved body. And that image was enough to set his mind to fabricating noble reasons for avoiding laudanum’s risks: if he died before the marriage was consummated, it might be annulled, and she would not get her hospital…and it was his duty, besides, to get an heir.
But her hospital and the end of the Camoys would not matter to him when he was dead, Dorian reminded himself. Nor would she. He would be gone, and good riddance, and God forbid he should leave a child behind. With his luck, his offspring would inherit the same defective brain and live—briefly—and die in the same mortifying way.
He unstopped the bottle.
“I should be careful, if I were you,” came a quiet, familiar voice out of the darkness. “You are married to a witch. What if I’ve turned it into a love potion?”
The room was black as Hades. He couldn’t see her—couldn’t focus past the throbbing anyhow—but he could smell her. The oddly exotic scent stole through the thundering sea of pain like ghostly fingers and lifted him up to consciousness.
“It might even be a potion to turn you into a cat,” she said.
He could not hear her approach past the relentless hammering in his head, but he could smell it, the faint scent growing richer, more potent. Jasmine?
Slim, warm fingers closed over his icy ones.
He tried to speak. He moved his lips, but no sound came out. Pain slammed his skull. His stomach lurched. The bottle slipped from his hands.
“Sick,” he gasped. “Christ, I—”
He broke off as something else, cold and round and smooth, pressed into his hands. A basin.
His body shuddered violently. Then all he could do was hold on to the basin, his head bowed, and give himself up to spasm after spasm after spasm, uncontrollable.
Retching. Endlessly. Helplessly.
All the while, he felt her warm hands upon him, holding him. He heard her soft murmurs above him.
“Yes, that’s right. It can’t be helped. It’s a sick headache, I know. Beastly thing, isn’t it? Hours and hours. Then it won’t go quietly, will it? Instead, it must rip out of you and take your insides with it. I don’t doubt it seems that way, but you shall feel better in a moment. There. You’re done.”
It was not a moment, but an eternity, and Dorian didn’t know whether he was done or dead. His body had stopped the spasmodic heaving, but he couldn’t lift his head.
She caught him before he could sink into the revolting mess in the basin. She raised his head and put a cup to his lips. He smelled mint—and something else. He didn’t know what it was.
“Rinse your mouth,” she commanded quietly.
Too weak to fight, he obeyed. The tangy draught cleansed the foul taste from his mouth.
When he was done, she gently guided him back onto the pillows.
He lay there, exhausted, aware of movement. The basin disappeared, and its stench with it.
In a little while, a cool, wet cloth touched his face. Gentle, quick, efficient—cleansing and cooling him. He knew he should protest—he wasn’t a babe. He couldn’t summon the strength.
Then she was gone again, an everlasting time, and the pain rolled in during her absence. Though it was not so ferocious as before, it was there still, pounding at him.
This time, when the scent returned, light came with it, a single candle. He watched her shadowy form approach. He winced at the light. She moved away toward the fireplace and set the candle on the mantel.
She returned to the bed. “You are still in discomfort, it seems,” she said very softly. “I don’t know whether that’s the original headache or the aftereffects of laudanum.”
He remembered, then, the bottle she’d stolen from him. “Laudanum,” he choked out. “Give me the bottle, witch.”
“Maybe later,” she said. “At present, I have to work a spell. Do you think you can climb into the cauldron unaided, or shall I summon Hoskins to help?”
The witch’s “cauldron” was alleged to be a steaming bath, and the spell appeared to involve her holding an ice bag on his head while she boiled the rest of him.
That, at least, was the sense Dorian made of her explanation.
He had no trouble deciding that the last thing on earth he wanted to do was climb out of his bed and stagger down to the ground-floor bath chamber.
He changed his mind when he learned his servants were prepared to carry him. He couldn’t bear to be carried by anyone, anywhere.
“Your extremities are icy cold,” she said as she handed him a dressing gown. She looked away while he angrily struggled into it. “Above the neck, you are much too hot. Your system is unbalanced, you see. We must correct it.”
Dorian didn’t care if he was unbalanced. On the other hand, he could not bear her seeing him lying helpless and trembling like an infant.
And so he dragged himself from the bed and stumbled across the room and through the door. Rejecting her helping hand, he made his way out of the room and down the stairs.
He found the small, tiled room filled with lavender-scented steam. Candles flickered in the narrow wall niches.
The scented mist, the warmth, the gentle light enveloped him and drew him in. Entranced, he walked to the edge of the sunken bath. Towels had been laid on the bottom and draped over the sides.
His impotent rage dissipated in the sweet warmth and quiet.
He flung off his dressing gown and climbed in, groaning as he slid into the steaming water and the heat stole into his aching muscles.
A moment later, a small pillow slid behind his neck. His eyes flew open.
Mesmerized by the delicious warmth, the inviting water, he had forgotten about the witch…and he was stark, scream
ing naked.
“All you need to do is soak,” she said. “Lean back on the cushion. I’ll do the rest.”
He couldn’t remember what the rest was and winced when the soft, icy bag settled onto his head.
“I’ll hold it in place,” she said. “You needn’t worry about it slipping off.”
The ice bag was the least of his concerns.
He looked down into the water. The sunken tub was not the deepest one in the world. He could see his masculine possessions all too distinctly.
Though it was too late for modesty, he drew a bit of towel over the place and set his hand over it to keep it from floating up.
He heard a faint sound, suspiciously like a giggle. He refused to look up.
“It’s nothing I haven’t seen before,” the witch said. “Admittedly, the others were live babies or adult corpses, but the equipment is essentially the same in all males.”
Something stirred in his sluggish mind. He laid his head back and closed his eyes, trying to collect the elusive bits and pieces. The hospital…definite ideas and…principles. Her relatives’ puzzling obedience. Her lack of fear. The basin in his hands the instant he needed it…the quiet efficiency.
He began to understand, but not altogether. Many women had nursing experience, and yet…
He returned to the last piece of news. He could understand about the babies. Plenty of women saw infants naked—but adult male…corpses?
“How many deathbeds have you attended, Miss Adams?” He kept his eyes closed. It was easier to think without trying to see at the same time. His eyes still hurt. Though the pain was easing, it was still there.
“I am not Miss Adams any longer,” she said. “We are wed now. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”
“Ah, yes. It slipped my mind for a moment. Because of the…dead bodies. I am vastly interested in your corpses, Lady Rawnsley.”
Three Times a Bride Page 17
