Three Weddings And A Kiss

by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, Catherine Anderson, Loretta Chase

  He smiled. “Your sins are not so grave, Mother. Bertie Trent’s grandmother goes through lovers as she goes through bonnets, they say.”

  Her brooding gaze upon the bleak wastes beyond, she did not seem to hear him. “I dreamt my sins took the shape of phantasms,” she said in an odd, low voice. “They pursued me, like the Furies in Greek myths. It was frightful—and so unjust. I can’t help my nature. You understand.”

  Dorian understood all too well. He loathed the weakness in himself, but no matter what he did, he could not master it. He could not resist the scent of a woman; he could scarcely resist the mere thought of one. Time and again the need drove him—and Lord, the distances he traveled, the subterfuges he resorted to…for what always, afterward, left him sick with disgust.

  It was not nearly so bad with her, he was aware, but then she was constantly under scrutiny, which he wasn’t, and she was a female, smaller in her sensual appetites as she was in size. Still, even her little escapades had taken their toll on her health.

  He ought to heed the warning, Dorian knew. She’d only recently recovered. That made it more than six months since Mr. Budge, the Camoys family physician, had diagnosed a “decline.” She’d spent half that time between a chaise longue and it her bed.

  Dorian could not afford so long a period of debility. He would fall behind in his studies…and the trip abroad would be delayed…and his bondage to his grandfather would stretch on…

  He shook off the grim prospect. “It’s Dartmoor,” he said lightly. “Every foot of ground seems to have a spook attached to it. Small wonder you dream of ghosts and demons. I should be amazed if you didn’t.”

  She laughed and turned back to him, her melancholy mood lifting as swiftly as it had descended.

  From then until the end of Dorian’s two-day visit, his mother seemed to be her lively self again. She related, along with more Dartmoor legends, all the London gossip gleaned from her friends’ letters, and told slightly improper anecdotes that made Father blush, yet laugh all the same. Away from Rawnsley Hall, Edward Camoys was more human and less his father’s puppet, and though he still treated his wife like a wayward child, that had suited them both for years.

  All seemed well when Dorian departed.

  He had no idea that his father had secrets, too, and as the months passed, Edward Camoys would find them increasingly difficult to conceal.

  Aminta Camoys’s letter writing, like Dorian’s, was erratic at best. That was why he suspected nothing, though he didn’t hear from her after early September.

  It wasn’t until shortly before Christmas, when Uncle Hugo, the earl’s eldest and heir, turned up at Oxford unexpectedly—and, as it turned out, against the earl’s orders—that Dorian learned the truth.

  Then, deaf to his uncle’s warnings, Dorian boarded a mail coach headed north.

  He discovered his mother where Hugo had said she was.

  It was a private, exclusive, and very expensive lunatic asylum.

  Dorian found her in a small, rank room, strapped to a chair. She wore a stained cotton gown and thick, rough stockings on her delicate feet. Her long black hair had been sheared to a dark skullcap. She didn’t know who he was at first. When, finally, she recognized him, she wept.

  Dorian did not weep, only cursed inwardly while he unfastened the cruel straps. That sent the attendant running out of the room, but Dorian was too distraught to care. He carried his mother to the narrow bed and laid her down and sat beside her and chafed her icy hands and listened, his gut churning, while she told him what they’d done to her.

  She’d fallen ill again, she said, and in her weakness, she’d let her secrets out. The earl knew everything now, and so he’d locked her up to punish her because she was a scarlet woman. Her keepers mortified her flesh to make her repent: they starved her and dressed her in stinking rags and made her sleep on filthy linens. They thrust her into ice baths. They shaved her head. They would not let her sleep: they beat on the door and called her a whore and a Jezebel and told her the Devil was coming for her soul.

  Dorian didn’t know what to believe.

  Though she sobbed uncontrollably, her speech was coherent. Yet Uncle Hugo had said she’d gone after Father with a knife and tried to burn down the Dartmoor manor house. She heard voices, he said, and saw things that weren’t there, and screamed of ghosts and cruel talons ripping into her skull. Edward Camoys had told nobody about her condition and tried to look after her himself, with the help of the local doctor, Mr. Kneebones. But the earl had visited them in Dartmoor a month ago and, horrified at what he found, summoned physicians from London. Deciding she needed “expert care,” they’d recommended Mr. Borson’s private madhouse.

  “Don’t look at me so,” she cried now. “I was ill, that was all, and the pain was dreadful, tearing at my skull so that I couldn’t see straight. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t watch my tongue. Too many secrets, Dorian, and I was too weak to keep them in. Oh, please, darling, take me away from this wicked place.”

  Dorian didn’t care what the truth was. He knew only that he couldn’t leave her here. He looked about for something to wrap her in, to keep her warm, so that he could carry her away, but there were only the rank bedclothes.

  He was tearing them from the bed when the attendant returned, with reinforcements—and Dorian’s grandfather.

  The instant the earl entered, Aminta turned into a she-demon. Uttering obscenities and threats in a guttural voice Dorian couldn’t believe came out of her, she lunged at Lord Rawnsley. When Dorian tried to pull her away, she clawed his face. The attendants grabbed her and swiftly shackled her to the bed, where she alternated between bloodchilling curses and heartwrenching sobs.

  When Dorian objected to the painful restraints, the attendants—on the earl’s orders—removed him from the room, then from the building altogether. Shut out, Dorian paced by his grandfather’s carriage while his mind replayed the scene over and over.

  He could not stop shuddering because he could not shake off the sickening comprehension of what his mother must feel. In the unpredictable moments of clarity—like the one he’d encountered first—she could look about her and recognize what she’d become and where she was. He could imagine her rage and grief at being treated like a mindless animal. He could imagine, all too vividly, her terror as well—when she felt her control slip and the darkness begin swamping her reason. He had no doubt she knew what was happening to her: she’d said as much, that she was weak and couldn’t keep things in.

  She knew her once-formidable mind was betraying her, and that was worst of all.

  And that was why, when his grandfather came out, Dorian gathered his shattered composure and swallowed his pride—and begged.

  “Please let me take her elsewhere,” he said. “I’ll help look after her. I needn’t return to Oxford. I can finish later. I know Father and I can manage with the help of a servant or two. I beg you, Grandfather, let—”

  “You know nothing about it,” Lord Rawnsley coldly cut in. “You know nothing of her tricks and subterfuges, her madwoman’s cunning. She played your father for a fool and did the same with you this day. And now Borson says there is no telling what damage you’ve done—taking her part against those who know better, and making promises you cannot keep. She will be agitated for days, weeks, perhaps.” He pulled on his gloves. “But it was ever this way. You were always her creature, in character as well as looks. Now you mean to throw away your future—to care for one who never cared for anybody but herself.”

  “She’s my mother,” Dorian said tightly.

  “And my daughter-in-law,” was the grim retort. “I know my duty to my family. She will be looked after—properly—and you will return to Oxford and do your duty.”

  Two weeks later, in the midst of a violent fit, Aminta Camoys collapsed and died.

  She died in the madhouse Dorian had been unable to rescue her from, while he was at Oxford, burying his rage and grief in his studies because he had no choice. He had no money an
d no power to rescue her, and his grandfather would punish anyone who dared to help him.

  He told nobody what had happened, not even Bertie Trent, the only friend Dorian had.

  And so no one but the Camoys family—and then it was only the immediate family—was aware that Aminta Camoys had died, a raving lunatic, in Mr. Borson’s expensive hellhole of a madhouse.

  Even then, she wasn’t left in peace. His grandfather let the curst doctors hack into her poor, dead brain to satisfy their grisly curiosity. The brain tissue was weak, and they’d found evidence of blood seepage. A vessel had burst during the last fit—one of many that might have burst at any time, so fragile they were. Her earlier decline, the doctors decided, must have been the first outward sign of an inner deterioration that had begun long before. The headaches were further symptoms, caused by the slow leakage.

  There was nothing anyone could have done for her, they claimed. Just as medical science had no way of detecting such defects early on, it had no way of curing them.

  And so Borson and his associates absolved themselves of all blame—as though they had not made her last months a living hell.

  And the Camoys saw to it that no blame or shame would be attached to the family, either.

  She had “sunk into a fatal decline”—that was the story they gave out, because no Camoys, even one by marriage, could possibly be mad. No hint of insanity had ever appeared in the family in all the centuries since Henri de Camois had come over from Normandy with the Conqueror.

  Even among themselves, they never openly referred to her insanity, as though giving the truth the cut direct could make it go away, like an unsuitable acquaintance.

  That was just as well, as far as Dorian was concerned. If he had to listen to the heartless hypocrites pontificating about his mother’s madness, he was bound to commit some outrage—and be destroyed, as she had been.

  After the funeral, he returned to Oxford and buried his feelings, as usual, in study. It was the one thing he could do, the one thing his grandfather could not crush or twist to suit his tyrannical purposes.

  Consequently, at the end of the term, Dorian not only earned his degree but did what no Camoys had ever done before: he won a first, In Literis Humanioribus.

  The traditional celebration followed at Rawnsley Hall. It was the usual hypocrisy. Dorian had never truly been one of the Camoys and he knew his academic triumph stuck in the collective family craw. Still, they must give the appearance of family unity, and for Dorian, pretending was easier this time, with freedom so near. In a few weeks, he would be upon the Continent—and he would not return to England until his grandfather was sealed in the tomb with his saintly ancestors.

  In the meantime, Dorian could play his role, as he’d done for years, and bear their pretense and hypocrisy.

  Pretending, always pretending, his mother had said.

  Her mind had broken down under the strain, she’d believed.

  Too many secrets…too weak to keep them in.

  He didn’t know that hers were not the only secrets she’d let out.

  He did not find out until twenty-four hours after the so-called celebration. And then Dorian could only stand and listen helplessly for an endless, numbing hour to the chilling speech that shattered and scattered his plans like so much dust and left him with nothing but his pride to sustain him.

  Dorian was turned out of Rawnsley Hall with six pounds and some odd pence in his pocket. This was because Lord Rawnsley had expected him to hang his head and make penitent speeches and beg for forgiveness—and Dorian had decided that the earl could wait until Judgment Day.

  His grandfather had called him a whoremonger, a slave to the basest of appetites, who shamelessly and recklessly pursued a path that could only lead to madness and a hideous death from the foul diseases contracted from the filth with which he consorted.

  Though Dorian knew this was true, he found he must be sunk beyond shame as well because he could not find a shred of remorse in his heart, only rage. He would not, could not submit to his grandfather, ever again. He would starve and die in a filthy gutter, rather than go crawling back.

  He left fully aware that he’d have to survive entirely on his own. The earl would make trouble for anyone who aided his errant grandson.

  And so Dorian went to London. There he assumed a new identity and made himself one of the insignificant masses. He found lodgings—a dank room among the teeming tenements of the East End—and employment as a dockworker by day and a legal copyist at night. There was no future in either occupation, but then, he had no future, with all respectable doors shut to him. Still, even when the dock work dwindled from time to time, the lawyers kept him busy. There was little danger of their running out of documents. And when the drudgery threatened to crush his spirit, a few coins could buy him the temporary surcease of a relatively clean whore and a bottle.

  The months stretched into years while his grandfather waited for the prodigal to crawl back on his hands and knees and the prodigal waited for his grandfather to die.

  But the influenza epidemic that bore off Dorian’s father, his Uncle Hugo, two aunts, and several cousins in 1826 left their lord and master untouched.

  Then, in the summer of 1827, Dorian suddenly fell ill—and sank into a decline.

  1

  Dartmoor, Devon

  Early May, 1828

  Dorian stood in the library of Radmore Manor, looking out the window. In the distance, the moors stretched out in all their bleak beauty. They beckoned to him as strongly now as they’d called to his sickly fancy months before in London, when he’d fallen so dangerously ill, too weak even to hold his pen.

  In August, Hoskins, a solicitor’s clerk, had found him barely conscious, slumped over an ink-splotched document.

  I’ll fetch a doctor.

  No. No doctors, for God’s sake. Dartmoor. Take me to Dartmoor. There’s money…saved…under the floorboard.

  Hoskins might have absconded with the little hoard, and heaven knew he needed money, living on a clerk’s pittance. Instead, he’d not only done as Dorian asked but stayed on to look after him. He’d remained even after Dorian recovered—or seemed to.

  That apparent recovery had not deluded Dorian. He’d suspected, early on, that the illness, like his mother’s years earlier, had simply been the beginning of the end.

  In January, when the headaches began, his suspicions were confirmed. As the weeks passed, the attacks grew increasingly vicious, as hers had done.

  The night before last, he’d wanted to bash his head against the wall.

  …pain…tearing at my skull…couldn’t see straight…couldn’t think.

  He understood now, fully, what his mother had meant. Even so, he would have borne the pain, would not have sent for Kneebones yesterday morning, if not for the shimmering wraith he’d seen. Then Dorian had realized something must be done—before the faint visual illusions blossomed into full-blown phantasms, as they had for his mother, and drove him to violence, as they had done her.

  “I know what it is,” Dorian had told the doctor when he came yesterday. “I know it’s the same brain disease and incurable. But I had rather finish my time here, if it can be managed. I had rather not…end…precisely as my mother did, if it can possibly be helped.”

  Naturally, Kneebones must satisfy himself and arrive at his own conclusions. But mere was only one possible conclusion, as Dorian well knew. His mother had died within eight months of the onset of the “visual chimera”—the “ghosts” she’d begun seeing while awake, not simply in dreams, as she’d said.

  Six months was the most Kneebones could promise. He said the degeneration was progressing more rapidly in Dorian’s case, thanks to “a punishingly insalubrious mode of living.”

  Still, Kneebones had assured him that the violent fits could be moderated with laudanum, in large doses.

  “Your father was too sparing of the laudanum, fearing overdose,” the doctor explained. “Then, when your grandfather came, he raged about my t
urning that unhappy woman into an opium addict. And then the fancy experts came, calling it ‘poison’ and saying it caused the hallucinations—when it was the only means of subduing them and quieting her.”

  Dorian smiled now, recalling that conversation. Opiate addiction was the least of his anxieties, and an overdose, in time, might offer a welcome release.

  In time, but not yet.

  Outwardly, he was healthy and strong, and in Dartmoor, he’d been free of the self-loathing that had haunted him since his last year at Eton, when temptation, in the shape of a woman, had first beckoned, and he’d found he was no match for it. Here, as his mother had said, there was no temptation. When he felt the old itch and grew restless, he rode through the moors, riding long and hard, until he was exhausted.

  Here he’d found a refuge. He meant to enjoy it for as long as he could.

  Hearing footsteps in the hall, Dorian turned away from the window and thrust his hair back from his face. It was unfashionably long, but fashion had ceased signifying to Dorian years ago, and it certainly wouldn’t matter when he lay in his coffin.

  The coffin didn’t trouble him much, either, and hadn’t for some time. He’d had months to get used to the idea of dying. Now, thanks to the promise of laudanum, his remaining anxiety was eased. The drug would stupefy him, sparing him full awareness of the wretched thing he would become, while those who looked after him needn’t fear for their lives.

  He would die in something like peace with something like dignity. That was better than the lot of scores of wretches in the cesspits of London, he told himself. It was better than what his mother had endured, certainly.

  The library door opened, and Hoskins entered, bearing a letter. He set it face down on the library table so that the seal was plainly evident.

  It was the Earl of Rawnsley’s seal.

  “Damn,” Dorian said. He tore the letter open, scanned it, then handed it to Hoskins.