Seduced by a Stranger

by Eve Silver

Ah. Oddly, he felt no surprise, almost as though a part of him had anticipated the words.

  What to say? Gabriel’s gaze flicked to Dr. Vincent as he searched for the appropriate response, the one that would not mark him as mad.

  “How?” he asked, injecting as much volume into the inquiry as he thought practical, hoping it would serve to indicate shock and grief.

  “Father fell from his best hunter. Broke his neck.

  Mother pined for three weeks, and then succumbed to a broken heart.”

  Gabriel froze as, to his shock, genuine emotion surged. Rage. Regret. He had been cheated. His opportunity to show them, to make them see who he truly was, to make them acknowledge what they had done. To make them love him . . . gone. It was gone. They were dead.

  He would never have the opportunity to face them.

  The sun broke through the clouds at that moment, bathing him in light. He flinched, ducked his head, acutely aware of his brother standing by his side, watching him. And Dr. Vincent, as well. He must play this with care. Everything depended on it now.

  Whatever Dr. Vincent saw in his face, it must have satisfied, for he patted Gabriel’s arm, and murmured, “My condolences.”

  For a second, Gabriel could not think of the correct rejoinder, so he merely nodded in acknowledgment. It was enough. The tension in Dr. Vincent’s expression eased.

  But the tension in Gabriel’s gut only twisted tighter. With his parents dead, his brother was his legal guardian. Geoffrey, who masqueraded as Gabriel, as him, was now his legal guardian. Without Geoffrey’s agreement, Gabriel could never leave Hanham House. Never. Not by walking free. No. All his planning and plotting . . . it must be today. His chance. His one chance. He knew with complete certainty he would never have another.

  After today, his brother would not return.

  He had come to deliver this news in person only to glean some sort of vile satisfaction in watching as he tossed the last shovelful of dirt to bury Gabriel alive.

  Gabriel kept his breaths slow and even, though his heart raced and his thoughts whirled. He was not ready. He had not expected that today would be the day.

  “Will you walk with me, brother?” Gabriel asked, turning to Geoffrey, offering no glimpse of his true thoughts in either tone or manner. “Will you tell me of their last days. Happy things, if you please.”

  Geoffrey shot a glance at Dr. Vincent. He could not easily decline such a pretty request. “Of course,” he replied. With a few more murmured words of condolence, Dr. Vincent took his leave.

  Gabriel thought of his bedroom and the loose board beneath his bed and the knife he had hidden there in preparation for this day. All for naught. He could not go there and retrieve it with none the wiser.

  Geoffrey would leave and his opportunity would be lost.

  He would need to find another way.

  “How sad that you never got to say goodbye,” Geoffrey said, his look sly and dark.

  “Yes,” Gabriel agreed, and searched for a question, any question that might do to fill the silence and hold Geoffrey here a little longer.

  “How is Madeline?” he asked, though he could not have cared less for the answer.

  Geoffrey laughed. “Devastated.”

  His answer was so short and succinct that for a moment, Gabriel wondered if he recognized the ploy. And then he realized he had asked the wrong question. He must ask about Geoffrey; there was no topic his brother enjoyed more than a dialogue about himself. And so he posed question after question, about Geoffrey’s friends and his time in London and the gambling hells he frequented, using the opportunity to divert and delay, while at the same time prying out the last bits of knowledge he could.

  They walked side by side, separated by a span of two or three feet, separated by an immeasurable volume of knowledge and trickery.

  Along the way, Gabriel found a stick, long and thick, the end rather dull. He lifted it and offered it to Geoffrey, who regarded him quizzically for a moment and then took it. And they walked on.

  Moments later, he found a second stick, far more suited to his needs. This one, he kept for himself. They walked, Geoffrey talking, Gabriel listening, memorizing every word, their sticks touching the ground with each step.

  “Just like when we were children.” Geoffrey laughed.

  “Yes. Just like when we were children.” Except today, I will not be the one left stabbed and bleeding. Today will have a different end.

  “We were so happy then, so imaginative in our . . . games.”

  Geoffrey stopped and turned to him, his brow furrowed. “Can it be that you do not remember? That you recall nothing of that day . . .”

  “I recall many happy days,” Gabriel replied. “Which day do you speak of?”

  “Only happy days?” Geoffrey asked, clearly perplexed. “What an odd thing. They have truly cured you here”— he turned and kept walking—“or truly driven you mad,” he finished under his breath.

  Gabriel pretended not to hear, only measured his steps to his brother’s, waiting. Waiting.

  At length, they reached a lovely garden far into the estate, surrounded on all sides by a tall hedge of dogwood. It was an isolated place, one Gabriel had steered them to with care, allowing his brother to think he chose their way, then subtly guiding him.

  “What is the date today?” Gabriel asked, falling back behind his brother, dragging the stick he carried hard against a large boulder that had a series of small bushes with tiny white flowers circling its base.

  “The fifteenth of March,” Geoffrey replied, tossing his own stick aside and kicking impatiently at a clod of dirt. He was bored. Ready to leave.

  A moment more. Just a moment. Gabriel dragged the tip of the stick back again along the boulder, and again, faster.

  “Must you do that?” Geoffrey snapped.

  “Only March?” Gabriel asked, ignoring his brother’s show of temper. He made a disbelieving laugh, stunned in truth. “I had thought it May already.” Then he paused and wondered at the irony. “The fifteenth, you say? The ides of March,” he murmured.

  “What did you say?” Geoffrey turned to him, and his eyes widened, his hands raised in defense as Gabriel moved.

  Gabriel closed his hands about his brother’s throat. With his thumbs, he pressed hard on either side of his windpipe. Geoffrey’s fingers clawed his wrists, and he tugged and pulled, but to no avail. For Geoffrey lived the soft life of a dissolute heir, while Gabriel spent his endless hours of solitude pulling his weight up with his fingers curled around the lip of his door frame or doing push-ups, shadow boxing or running in place, anything to stave off desperation and madness.

  Thumbs digging in hard, Gabriel waited, and after a time—seconds? Minutes?—Geoffrey’s eyes rolled back in his head until the whites showed and his lids flickered, and then he slumped, his breath lost, his body dropping like a stone.

  Not dead. That was never Gabriel’s plan. He had no intention of killing him. Death was too easy. To go sweetly into that eternal slumber was not what he wished for his brother. No. He would not be his brother’s murderer, would not add that dark deed to any others he had gathered. He only wanted turnabout. Fair play.

  As he stared at his brother’s slumped form, he offered silent thanks to Dr. Vincent and the many books he had shared. Texts on anatomy and medicine and philosophy. They had all played a role in the formulation of his plan.

  Geoffrey’s lids fluttered, and Gabriel knelt at his side. There was little time.

  Deftly, he stripped his brother bare, no mean feat given that every so often he moaned and thrashed and fought against Gabriel’s grasp. Each time Geoffrey began to rouse, Gabriel pressed on the arteries in his throat once more until he mumbled and became disoriented, his lids fluttering down. And if he did not precisely fall unconscious each time, he became pliant enough for Gabriel to do what he must.

  Gabriel shucked his own clothing and made quick work of redressing himself and then his brother in their exchanged wardrobe.

  He was
breathing heavily, his heart pounding, his palms slick with sweat. He had dreamed this moment so many times, planned it in all its minutiae. But now that it was here, nothing was going precisely according to his plan; he had to improvise and alter his course every step of the way.

  “What? What?” Geoffrey moaned, and Gabriel pressed at his throat once more, hoping against hope that it was not one time too many, that his brother would not die of this.

  He so desperately wanted him to live.

  Closing his hand around a small rock, he threaded the fingers of his other hand through his brother’s hair, yanked his head up, and used the stone to rub hard at the back of his neck. Hard enough to open a wound in the place of the scar on the back of his own, a reminder of the wound Dr. Bradley had made there, then kept open with caustics for weeks on end. To let his brain breathe, Dr. Bradley had said.

  Well, if it was true, then Geoffrey’s brain was breathing quite nicely now.

  He positioned the rock beneath his brother’s head and quickly smeared the blood to mask the marks of his fingers. He hoped it would appear that Geoffrey had opened the wound when he fell.

  There was nothing Gabriel could do to mimic the marks on his forearms, the ones they had made when they bled him, the terrible scars that grew one on the next. Geoffrey had two very faint ones on his right arm, the remnants of being bled when a fever had taken him as a child. Gabriel prayed they would suffice should anyone care to search for them, for in no way did they match the extent and number of his own. But he had no way to change that, and so he wasted no further thought on it.

  Time was ticking away. He could hear the clock in his mind.

  Faster. He must work faster.

  Geoffrey moaned and turned his head, becoming more lucid by the second.

  Scrabbling on his hands and knees, Gabriel snatched the stick he’d found earlier. The end had been pointed to start with, all the more so now that he’d dragged it across the stone.

  It was the matter of his scar, the damned scar his brother had marked him with. He would not be believed if that scar was missing on his brother.

  Pushing to his feet, he took an instant to feel for the top of Geoffrey’s hipbone. It offered him a point of reference and he slid off it four finger’s-widths up. Then he slapped his palm across his brother’s mouth, both holding him down and muffling the scream he knew would come.

  He brought the point of the stick down with a quick, brutal thrust, piercing cloth and skin.

  Geoffrey arched and twitched, rousing completely now from his stuporous state, reacting to the pain and shock of his wound.

  The wood stuck up toward the sky, vibrating.

  “Welcome to hell,” Gabriel whispered. He grabbed Geoffrey’s hands and pressed them to the stick, close to the wound, enough to cover them in blood. “Do not pull it out. You will die.”

  With that warning, he bounded to his feet and ran full tilt for the house, screaming for help.

  “My brother,” he cried at the top of his lungs, gasping for breath between words. “Help. I need help.”

  They came rushing from the house. Nurse Little, Nurse Bates, Nurse Holby, and a half dozen others, and there, Dr. Vincent and Dr. Spade.

  “In that direction.” Gabriel waved toward the garden where he had left Geoffrey bleeding on the grass. He bent forward, resting his hand on his thigh, gasping and heaving, forcing the words out between breaths. “Our parents’ deaths... too much for him... tried to...kill ...himself.”

  “Dear God,” Dr. Vincent gasped. “I was afraid of such a thing.”

  And then they were running toward the distant garden.

  Gabriel silently gave thanks for Dr. Vincent’s obsession with healthful exercise as a means of recovery, and his own efforts in that regard, as well. Used to a variety of physical exercises that were part of his prescribed regime, he was not nearly so breathless as he appeared.

  He followed them at a slower pace, playing his part, the distraught brother hovering and waving his hands helplessly.

  Geoffrey was on his side when they came upon him, both hands grasped tight about the stick, his whole body trembling.

  “Now then, Geoffrey. Now then, what have you done to yourself?” Dr. Vincent asked, falling to his knees on the ground.

  Gabriel had a momentary shock to see the doctor’s face then, white and drawn with dismay. Dr. Vincent actually cared about him, he realized then. It came at him like a blow, taking his breath. A good thing, because at exactly that moment, Geoffrey rolled and cried, “I am Gabriel. He is Geoffrey. Do you not see it?”

  All eyes turned to him then, and whatever they saw in his face must have convinced them of the lie. He thought perhaps there was shock and horror there, a momentary tearing away of his carefully cultivated mask. Enough to convince them that he was his brother and his brother was he.

  “He does not know his own name,” Nurse Little said sadly as Dr. Vincent caught Geoffrey’s hands and hauled them away from the stick that yet protruded from his belly.

  “What have you done? What have you done, Geoffrey?” Dr. Vincent said softly, shaking his head.

  Geoffrey let out a strangled cry. “I am Gabriel. Gabriel.” His voice grew shrill. He rolled on the grass, flecks of spittle flying from his lips as he cried the name again and again. Then his gaze locked on Gabriel and he snarled, “You have done this to me, you sodding bastard. You!”

  “Hold him!” Dr. Vincent cried, and others came forward, reaching, confining. “He’ll injure himself. Mind your hands lest he bite.”

  Gabriel stepped back as a nurse came with a canvas stretcher. Snarling and thrashing, then crying out in pain, Geoffrey fought them. But they held him. Strong hands.

  Implacable minds.

  And he was weak with loss of blood and pain. They held him as they had held Gabriel that long-ago day.

  He felt neither pity nor remorse.

  “Take him inside,” Dr. Vincent ordered. “Steady, Geoffrey. Steady now.”

  They hurried into the house, Goeffrey’s enraged howls following him like a tail. Gabriel came close behind, wringing his hands as he recalled his mother used to do in times of distress. A perfect touch, he thought.

  As they passed indoors, he drew close to the stretcher and said, “Do not die, brother. There is so much that awaits you here. You must live to experience it fully. You must.”

  Dr. Vincent clapped him on the shoulder and muttered reassuring words. “He is not bleeding so very much. We must hope he did not puncture any viscera. My preliminary examination suggests he stabbed muscle and skin, but not colon. A good thing, that.”

  Then one of the nurses patted Gabriel on the forearm, and he let her, though inside, he recoiled at the touch. She murmured words of encouragement and hope, and led him to a small parlor at the front of the house, one he knew was reserved for visitors who were considering damning their relatives to this place. She promised to return once they knew something of Geoffrey’s condition.

  He did not want to wait. He wanted to fling open the doors and run as fast and as far as he could. But he only thanked her, his mask firmly in place, revealing none of the nervous energy that coursed through his veins. Only an hour more, perhaps two. He must only wait for the news that Geoffrey would live. And then he would be away. He would be free. It would not do for him to flee through the doors now, with his brother injured. They would think it odd. He was certain of that.

  Instead, he paced, and after a time, peered through the open door to determine who was about. There was no one in the passage and so he hurried from the room and took the stairs and corridors on a path familiar and known. He went to his bedroom and collected Sebastian’s letters. He had saved them all these years. They had been his link to sanity for a very long while, and he would not leave them here. Could not leave them here.

  Then he returned to the room at the front of the house. Pulling aside the curtains, he looked out at the gathering clouds, charcoal edged and heavy. Sunlight had marked the day he came here; c
louds marked the day he would leave. Beautiful, heavy gray clouds.

  Less than an hour later, Dr. Vincent came to him, his hair standing on end, lines bracketing either side of his mouth. “I am terribly sorry to say your brother has relapsed in a most horrific way. The news of your parents’ deaths has driven him beyond his ability to bear. The circulation to his brain is clearly disrupted. He will need extensive treatment.” He drew a deep breath and squared his shoulders as though in preparation for the task ahead.

  “But he is alive,” Gabriel said.

  “Yes. Yes. The wound was not so serious as it appeared. Not very deep. I suspect it was the presence of previous scar tissue there that slowed his thrust. I have every confidence that he will recover. Physically, that is.”

  “I cannot tell you how pleased I am to hear it,” Gabriel said. “May I see him?”

  “Of course. Of course. I will take you there now. But . . .” Dr. Vincent’s voice trailed away.

  “Go on,” Gabriel urged.

  “But I think perhaps it might be best if you not visit him for a time. Until his state is more balanced. You understand?”

  “I do.” I had not intended to visit him, ever. “Only let me see him for a moment now.”

  They made their way to a small room with a narrow wooden table. Geoffrey lay upon it, a white bandage stretched around his torso. He was mumbling to himself, his eyes hazy and unfocused. Gabriel had no doubt they had fed him opium. For the pain, or perhaps to make him docile.

  He glanced at Dr. Vincent and then stepped closer, leaning down so his lips were directly beside his brother’s ear. “Have no fear, Geoffrey. I vow on my life that I will do everything for you, exactly as you would do, and have always done, for me.”

  Then he covered his face as though overcome by emotion and backed from the room to the sound of Geoffrey’s screams.

  He arrived at Cairncroft Abbey, a stranger in his own home. He knew things from Geoffrey’s endless talk. The cook was Mrs. Corkle, a new arrival. The housekeeper was Mrs. Bell, who had been at Cairncroft all those years ago. Geoffrey had clearly found it amusing that she despised both him and Madeline, and favored Sebastian, who visited on any occasion he was on English soil. Gabriel was glad of the housekeeper’s sentiment. It would make his own distance and reserve less noticeable.