She approached the stone steps, searching for Sebastian. He had definitely been here, and done a great deal of work exposing the grotto. She remembered how he’d had to hack away at the vines and plants and even drag a fallen tree out of the way before. Today there was no evidence of any of that. Of course, there was also no evidence of his presence at the moment. Perhaps he’d only wanted her to see it, and that had been behind his comment in the letter. She felt a little deflated at that possibility. She wanted to see the grotto again, but that wasn’t why she was here today.
On that thought, the man she’d actually wanted to see stepped out of the trees on the opposite side of the clearing, a large bundle in one arm and a lantern in his other hand. For a moment they stared at each other.
“I didn’t know if you would come,” he said at last.
She nibbled her lower lip. “Didn’t you want me to?”
“Very much,” he said with a searing look. “But after the way we parted . . .” He shrugged. “It seemed long odds you would.”
Abigail walked toward the grotto. “You cleared the steps. No one could miss it now.”
He limped forward. “You were right. It shouldn’t remain lost.”
She looked around the clearing again; it was much more than a morning’s work, she realized. It must have taken a full day or more, and given the weather lately . . . “You came out in the rain to expose it.”
He didn’t deny it. “I needed something to occupy my mind.”
She hesitated. “Thank you for the book.”
“Thank you for accepting it.”
That made Abigail laugh a little. “I could hardly give it back!”
A ghost of a smile crossed his face. “If you had truly wanted to, you would have found a way.”
Her own lips twitched with a smile. “Perhaps I brought it with me today to do that.”
She’d meant to tease him, to make him laugh and ask in pretend alarm if she had in fact come only to return his gift. But instead he took it as an invitation to examine her from head to toe, with such bold, unabashed interest, it left her flushed and breathless.
“I don’t think so,” he said in a low voice, looking her in the face again.
Flustered, she blurted out the first thing to cross her mind. “Perhaps I brought the other gift.”
This time he did smile, a slow, dangerous look that made her knees weaken. “Now why would you do that?” He moved a step closer and leaned down until she thought he meant to kiss her on the cheek. “Unless you meant to read it to me?” he whispered in her ear.
She forgot to breathe. “No . . .”
He lifted his head and gave her another simmering look. “Perhaps you’ll change your mind.” He shifted his burden and held out the lantern. “I did bring a light this time.”
Abigail stared at it blankly. The thought of reading that story to him—! It was shocking and alarming and she was horrified to realize she wanted to try it. She imagined how he would watch her as she read Constance’s most recent adventure, in the shadowy quiet confines of the grotto. She imagined what he would do, when he saw how arousing she found it . . .
She gave herself a shake to banish that wicked image. “How sensible to bring a lantern! Now we’ll be able to find our way out.”
“Yes,” he said, “if that’s what you desire.” He gestured to the steps. “Will you light the way?”
Last time, she hadn’t planned to go into the grotto. She could pretend that everything between them had been unexpected and spontaneous. This time, if she went with him, she couldn’t pretend innocence. This time, if she went, it would mean she was willing to take what he offered, whatever that was.
Although . . .
He had once said they would never be amiable. He had once agreed that he must avoid walking in the woods if he didn’t want to meet her. He had once refused to show her where the grotto was . . . and yet here they were today. If he could change his mind about all that, perhaps he could change his mind about more. He’d said he was no noble hero, but he was still a gentleman, one who claimed he was trying to be honorable toward her.
Besides, she wanted to see the grotto with more light than a candle.
She took the lantern and led the way down the narrow stone steps. As before, the cold air wrapped around her, but she barely felt it this time. With the extra light, he didn’t follow as closely behind her, but she still heard every rustle of his coat, every scrape of his boot as he limped along, much more noticeably than ever.
“Have you left your cane behind?” she asked, finally realizing he didn’t have it.
“Yes. It’s a nuisance when I have to carry something.”
“Shall I fetch it?” she offered.
“By all means. I left it in the glass chamber.”
A shiver rushed over her skin. She told herself it was because of the cold, and not because of what had happened between them in the glass chamber, but the cold didn’t explain the way her heart skipped a beat and the way her lungs seemed too tight to take a full breath. “So you’ve already been there.”
“Can’t you tell?” he asked.
She frowned, and opened her mouth to ask what he meant, but instead she gasped. There was light ahead. She held her lantern a little higher, peering around the gently turning corridor, and then stopped in the doorway of the glass chamber, struck dumb.
Four other lanterns sat around the chamber, shutters wide open. Their light filled the chamber with a bright glow that made the glass on the walls and ceiling sparkle like jewels. “It’s amazing,” she whispered.
He took the lantern from her, reaching up to hang it on a rusty iron hook that protruded from the ceiling above her head. “You didn’t get a chance to see it properly the last time.” He lowered his arm slowly, tugging loose the ribbon on her bonnet as he did so. His raised hand caught the crown of her bonnet and lifted it away. “That is why you came, isn’t it?” He dropped the bonnet behind him.
“Well—partly.” She didn’t know what to say. His eyes were burning dark, almost scorching her skin. It flustered her and entranced her and made her vividly remember what had happened the last time they were here.
“Only partly?” He tucked a loose wisp of hair behind her ear. “Why else?”
“To thank you for the book,” she whispered.
He gave her his dark, faint smile again. “You already said that. Come.” His fingers trailed down her arm to clasp her hand. “It’s even more spectacular from the center of the room.” He led her to the center of the chamber, where Abigail was finally able to wrench her eyes away from him and take in the view.
The domed ceiling wasn’t high—she thought Sebastian would be able to touch it if he raised his arm—but somehow the room felt spacious. This time she could see more than a small patch of wall at once, and as she slowly turned on the spot, she noticed something.
“There’s a pattern,” she whispered. Somehow, hushed voices seemed appropriate in such a setting.
“More than just a pattern.” Sebastian tossed down his bundle, which turned out to be two large cushions, onto a rug that had been spread on the floor. He held out a hand to her. “Lie down.” She gaped at him. He wiggled his fingers. “Trust me. This is the best way to see it.”
She gave him her hand, and let him lead her to one of the cushions. He helped her sit and then lowered himself onto the other cushion with only a slight grimace. “Lie back, and look up,” he told her.
Abigail’s mouth fell open again in wonder as she obeyed, tucking her skirts around her feet. He was right—it wasn’t a pattern. It was a portrait, a swirling glass mosaic of sea creatures, swimming and leaping and writhing around the walls. The little mirrored bits of glass she had noticed on her first visit were the eyes of fish, octopods, whales, and sea monsters. “There’s a mermaid!” She pointed in excitement at one side of the ceiling.
A blue-skinned maiden with a long green tail and yellow hair had one arm extended as if in entreaty.
“And her beloved,” said Sebastian. “Look . . .” Abigail followed his finger across the dark ceiling to another long-tailed creature, his hand reaching toward the mermaid’s. More little flecks of silvered glass winked like stars between them.
“Amazing,” she breathed again. For several minutes she just gazed upward, trying to take in every detail. The expressionless figures were rather crude in depiction, for all that their creation must have taken hours and hours of painstaking work, but something about their posture struck Abigail as sad. “I wonder why they’re so far apart,” she murmured. “It seems they should be together.”
“Mythological creatures rarely found happy endings.”
“In stories where a man fell in love with a goddess,” she agreed, “or a god with a human girl. But these are two of a kind. Why couldn’t they be together?”
“Sometimes it’s not as simple as that.”
“No?” She turned her head to look at him. He was lying on his back, but with his head on the side to face her. “What do you think it means?”
He raised his eyes to the merman again, above her. “This house and grotto were built for a king’s mistress. I suppose it was a nod to the fact that she couldn’t merely swim around to his part of the ocean. Too much divided them for their union to be anything other than fleeting.”
Abigail looked at the merman, too. Somehow his face seemed blank and expressionless, as if he knew they would never meet. He was reaching toward her, true, but his hand was flat, and could have been in demand for fealty more than in affection. But the mermaid . . . Her figure had an element of yearning. It was a silly thing to think about a creature who was made only of cut glass. But the hand that wasn’t reaching for the merman was clutched to her heart, and her extended hand was palm up, beseeching.
“Do you think the King saw this?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“But what do you think?” she persisted. “Can you picture a King of England, lying where we are now?”
He was quiet for a moment. “If he loved her, I expect he did. But I daresay love was uncommon between kings and their mistresses.”
“I think she really loved him,” said Abigail softly. “Why else would she have had this built?”
“From what I understand, mistresses aren’t always the most practical creatures,” he said wryly. “It may have amused her, nothing more.”
“No!” she protested. “Surely not!”
“It’s far enough from Hart House, who’s to say she ever saw it herself?”
“She must have seen it—how could anyone know this was here and not come to see it?”
He gave a quiet chuckle. “Not everyone is like you, my dear.”
She closed her eyes and smiled. “Silly and romantic? You have found me out.”
“Not silly,” he said, still sounding amused. “Romantic, I already knew.”
She laughed, and for a moment they were both quiet. “Did you know it was this beautiful when you hinted I should come back?”
“Before yesterday, I hadn’t been here since you marched away from me the first time.” He hesitated. “I deserved that.”
She happened to agree, so said nothing.
“It has been a very long time since a lady looked at me with anything less than disdain or fear,” he went on in the same low voice. “Even though I knew you were different, I was still certain you would learn the same distaste for my company. In truth, you would be wise to do so.”
“Now why—?” she began indignantly, but he held up one hand. He had turned his face back to the ceiling, and she could only see his profile.
“You admit you’ve heard the rumors about me in town. While Boris is nothing but an ordinary boar hound, the rest isn’t as fanciful. My father did run mad, and everyone expects me to go mad as well.”
“But you’re not!” she interrupted.
His jaw tightened. “If you’d come to Richmond seven years ago, you might well have thought differently. When I returned from the army, I discovered my father had sold nearly all our land, for hardly anything at all. A few shillings an acre, and one of the largest estates in London was nearly gone. I . . . did not take it well.” A black and bitter smile twisted his mouth. “I raged a good bit, to tell the truth. I called on the men who’d bought the land—my land—and demanded they reverse the sales. Some of them laughed at me, some of them took offense. More than one visit degenerated into both parties hurling curses at each other, and ended with me slamming the door behind me. Word spread that I was just as mad as my father, and dangerous to boot. Within a few weeks everyone regarded me with the same alarm as my father.”
“But surely your anger was understandable.”
“I thought so,” he said in a flat tone. “Others . . . did not. I threatened some of them.”
That also seemed understandable to her, but it would only have fueled suspicions about him. Abigail tried to imagine her own father losing his grip on reason, frittering away his fortune. Her brother would put a quick stop to it, one way or another, she thought—but of course Sebastian hadn’t been there to stop his father. The trouble had happened while he was away. And from the grim set of his face, he didn’t like talking about it.
“What was he like?” she asked instead. “Before.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Before?” He thought a moment, then a faint smile curved his mouth. “Very clever. Whenever there was a problem, he would set about righting it, often in the most ingenious manner. He was a scholarly man. He would visit Mrs. Driscoll’s bookshop every week with an order for a new scientific tome or pamphlet. She admired him. When I was a boy, there were always experiments going on around the house. He made his own candles, in search of ones that burned longer and brighter. He was fascinated by fire and light, and once constructed a series of glass tubes which he intended to use to heat the drawing room more evenly, so one wouldn’t have to sit in front of the fire to be warm.”
“Did it work?”
“No,” he said, his smile growing. “The tubes shattered. He had connected them to a large kettle of water over the fire, to fill the tubes with steam. His plan was for the steam to circulate through the tubes and bring heat to every corner of the room, but instead they exploded, one after the other. I’ll never forget the astonished expression on his face . . .” The smile faded. “Later, when he lost his mind, he almost burned the house down, trying something similar.”
Without thinking she groped for his hand. He started, but then his fingers closed gently around hers.
“What happened to him?” she finally asked. She knew what gossip said: that Mr. Vane would fly into violent rages and attack people as if he meant to kill them, and had to be restrained. And that finally Sebastian had taken him into the woods and killed him, burying him in some secluded spot no one had located. Or perhaps drowned him in the river. Or even perhaps taken him to London and committed him to an asylum, where he might still linger for all anyone knew.
None of that made sense to Abigail, though. If he’d committed his father to an asylum, it would be easy to prove the man wasn’t dead. And she just didn’t believe he was a killer.
“There’s no way to know. I’ve always wondered if he concocted something that poisoned him unintentionally, or if he suffered some injury he never bothered telling anyone about that damaged his brain. He was always a bit eccentric. When he went mad, it happened rather subtly. He could seem quite lucid, from what I hear, only to erupt in a fit of delusion and fury that alarmed and shocked everyone around him. The lucidity fooled everyone for a while. His attorney swore he seemed in full possession of his wits even as he was selling off his land for pennies an acre.” He rolled his head to look at her. “Or do you mean that night?”
“Never mind,” she said hastily,
but he squeezed her hand.
“No, I’ll tell you. It won’t change anything. My father was confined to his room—for his own safety. I woke after midnight to find his door unlocked and him escaped. I searched the woods, we dragged the pond, and Mr. Jones combed the meadow, but no trace of him was ever found.”
“None? How is that possible?”
Slowly he shook his head. “These woods are thick, and they go on for miles. I daresay the grotto isn’t the only place one could fall into a hole in the ground and disappear forever. And then there’s the river, which could sweep a man miles away in an hour’s time.”
Abigail frowned. “Why do people say you killed him, then?”
“Because there’s no proof I didn’t. Because it’s what they would have done, perhaps. But most likely . . . because it’s my fault he got loose.”
Her eyes grew wide and she forgot to breathe. His dark gaze held hers as he went on. “I was the one who locked his door every night, but that night it was unlocked. I forgot to do it. I . . . I still needed laudanum to sleep then, from time to time, and because of it I didn’t hear him slip out. And it cost him his life.”
“That is not the same as killing someone,” she said in a very low voice.
His mouth quirked bitterly again. “But the result is the same, isn’t it? The madman vanished. No one needed to live in fear anymore.” He shrugged. “I only hope his end came without much suffering.”
She was too stunned to move, but her horror must have shown on her face. “Is that terribly callous and cold to admit?” He rolled onto his side, facing her, and propped one hand under his head. “Have I ruined your good opinion of me yet? Because you might as well know: I’m not sorry he’s dead.”
It Takes a Scandal Page 14
