After all the pleasant time they had spent together, she had not expected him to betray her by investigating her without her consent. She should have known better. She should have remembered that he was a man who always got what he wanted. And if she wouldn’t tell him what he wished to know, he’d find it out some other way.
Though she hadn’t acknowledged it, she’d seen it in his eyes that night in the library.
She lifted her chin, clinging to defiance. “Yvonne told you?”
“She gave me the name of this place, yes, but that is all she would reveal.”
“Why are we here?” Her words flew upon the air, stolen from her lips before they’d even left her mouth.
“You know why, don’t you?”
She did. It was to see something she had no desire to see. The world was so much clearer now that she’d significantly reduced her laudanum intake. The doctor’s orders had been plain. Little by little, she’d weaned herself off . . . And the reality was, without the blunting effect of her drug, she’d begun to feel her circumstance with a glaring intensity.
As comfortable as she had been with Edward, she couldn’t escape the fact that she was ruined and her father wished her dead. At any moment, someone might come to try to force her back to that place. “I want you to take me from here,” she said through clenched teeth.
Edward didn’t look at her. Instead, he looked out to the sea of cold stone monuments. “Not yet.”
“Why?” But she knew why. And he had to know, too. It would be so much easier if they could simply talk things over. If she could feel relief by telling him about her past. But the trust in her soul had long since scattered like the lifeless brown leaves caught in the grass.
And Edward was testing that trust by forcing her to come here. The contradiction in him was impossible. Over the last days, he’d made her feel as if she might be leaving the past behind, but clearly his motivation for keeping her—for learning about her past—was why they were here.
It unnerved her to not understand what he truly wanted from their alliance.
“Come.” He held out his hand, the perfect gentleman.
She shook her head, unwilling to take his offered arm. Unwilling to have that close intimacy again when she was so frustrated at him. At the moment, she couldn’t accept the care of a man determined to thrust her into the pains of her past against her wishes.
It was horrifyingly laughable, really.
Falteringly, Edward lowered his hand back to his side.
When she looked into his beautiful black eyes, she knew it wasn’t she he truly desired. How could it have been? She’d been wrong to think he’d ever taken interest in her secret self, locked up in such a hidden and far-off place, longing to be saved and loved.
Indeed, the more she reflected, the more laughable it became. She would have laughed, too, if she’d had the strength. For a time, she had thought she was truly beautiful in his eyes. But as they began the slow walk down the path through the cemetery of bone and rotting flesh, she knew with utter certainty that what she had seen in his gaze was hope that she could save him.
What a fool she’d been.
Her heart should have been immune to it, but as her fingers ached to slip into his strong grip once again, she found her heart cracking ever so slightly. A crack to add to a thousand others. Another one to ensure she kept her distance from the world.
Her soft, new kid slippers glided with ease over the rocky soil. She glanced at Edward from the corner of her eye. Anticipation gleamed in his black stare. And hope. More hope. It was surprising in some twisted way to give him that. “Do you know what you are doing?” she demanded.
“I know exactly what I am doing,” he said evenly.
But he couldn’t. He only thought he did. A man of such natural arrogance, no doubt, was always certain his feet were upon the right path. She, on the other hand, had learned how easy it was for the path to slip away and to find one’s self stolen away to unknown places and unknown routes filled with danger.
He stopped in front of a large crypt of Connemara marble, swirling green and white stone married to granite angels. It rested under a tall oak, the knobby branches reaching out to shelter it from summer sun. In winter, its long, outstretched limbs hung ominously bare over the crypt.
Mary stood quietly. She couldn’t bring herself to move forward and trace her gloved fingertips over the smooth marble or the words carved into it.
Esme Genevieve Darrel
Duchess of Duncliffe
Beloved wife and mother
A diamond seized from this world too soon.
1830–1862
With her mother lays the pearl of the world
Mary Elizabeth Darrel
1847–1862
She’d never been to the grave. Now, standing only feet from her mother’s remains, she once again wished tears would come or some rending pain would finally pull her apart. But nothing happened. There was no overpowering, soul-searing moment, only the sound of the wind whistling through the trees.
Edward stared at the crypt for several moments. Then his piercing gaze turned toward her. “I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you?” She had known he wouldn’t find what he was looking for. There was so much more.
He let his attention wander from her to the crypt. “No.”
“Read the names,” she said tightly.
He scanned the words. There was a single beat of silence before he said, “Mary.”
“Lady Mary Elizabeth. Yes.” Her eyes locked on the crypt until they burned.
Only the slightest exhale revealed his shock. “You’re the Duke of Duncliffe’s daughter.”
“I am,” she confirmed flatly.
“I . . . went to your funeral.”
“Did you? How kind.”
He turned to her, his shoulders squared and his gaze snapping with a hundred unspoken questions. “I don’t—I don’t know what to say.”
A mocking smile forced her mouth wide. Even though she knew it was a grimace, the way her lips pulled against her teeth, she couldn’t help herself. How she wished they could go back to his town house and sit and read. But Edward seemed consumed by the need to know what had nearly destroyed her. As if that might help her. “Imagine my position, then . . . if you don’t know where to begin.”
He shook his dark head, disbelief turning his sun-kissed skin pale. “What happened?”
“I died.” It was so easy to push him. She realized it was cruel of her to find it almost enjoyable. But she’d been punished for so long. Even he was pushing her now, though he didn’t realize it. “Yet, somehow, I stand before you.”
“A miraculous incarnation, then, for you appear to have restored your fleshy envelope.”
“I am reborn, you see.” Her fingers curled as the slickness of the keeper’s blood seemed to slither beneath her gloves, drenching her palms. “Out of blood.”
“Make yourself plain, Mary. You didn’t die—”
“I did worse.”
“Worse?” he echoed blankly.
She turned to look at him, her skirts rustling over the dead leaves. It was finally here. She could no longer avoid the truth. Then what? Would he turn from her? She swallowed, gathering her courage.
“I went mad.” She shrugged, desperate not to appear broken. “I still am.”
“I beg your pardon?” It was amusing to see realization dawn on him in stages. At first, complete confusion, twisting his brows and opening his mouth in consternation. But as he stared at her, his face began to ease into understanding, then anger.
“He— Papa claimed I was mad. He kept saying I had to be sent away because I would become like my mother. That I would become a whore.” Her voice tapered until it was a choking pain in her throat. “A defiant whore.”
This time, as she looked at the incredulous man who had brought her to her own grave, a laugh did ripple from her throat. It was high and loud, piercing her ears with its sharpness. She clapped a hand over her
mouth and swallowed the sound. She drew in a slow breath and lifted her gaze to his before she lowered her hand. “And we all know where lunatics go, don’t we?”
“An asylum?” The word dropped from his mouth like a stone. “Is that where you’ve been?”
“It’s not what you imagined, is it?” She took a step toward the crypt, the hem of her cloak skimming along the wintery ground. She lifted her hand and placed it over her mother’s name. The eternal cold of the stone seeped through her glove, penetrating her fingers, chilling her with the harsh finality of death.
She’d known for a very long time that her mother was dead. Esme Darrel had breathed her last at the bottom of her own stairs. Now she was moldering all alone, with not even her daughter’s body to keep her company.
His voice cut strong through her reverie. “Mary, you’re not mad.”
“No?” Sometimes she wondered. Between the opiates and the months upon never-ending months locked away, she’d felt insane. Felt herself slip away until all she’d longed to do was scream. Scream until she had no voice left. Scream until she did indeed go mad with no reason left to comprehend her wretched situation. Her own mother had been murdered. And her own life? It was but a bleak span of nothingness. “How can you be so certain?”
Creaking branches and the mournful wind spun around them as she faced Edward.
He stood helpless before her. The Duke of Fairleigh, the man who’d been at turns so kind and so unyielding in his desire to help her. The sight was miraculous and tragic. She didn’t know what to make of it. “I assume you are unaccustomed to being speechless?”
He drew in a long breath, his gaze askance as if he couldn’t bear to meet her eyes. “I haven’t felt quite this jarred since the day they hanged my father. If you must know.”
Mary’s stomach clenched. She must have been a little girl when it happened, or else she would have known. Such a thing would have been cried to every corner of the empire. “I apologize. I had no idea.”
He swung his gaze back to hers, a twisted amusement sparking in his black orbs. “It is refreshing to meet someone who might possibly understand my own history. Only you, Mary, could understand the horror . . . the need to forget.”
Her thoughts shifted from her mother to his ghosts. Ghosts buried so deep they were but a specter in his eyes. “I do understand,” she said simply. “This world . . . its only constant is in the unreliability of people.”
“I was certain my father could never die, powerful, larger-than-life man that he was. I never dreamed he could be taken at all, let alone in such a manner. And you? I envisioned you trapped with an abusive husband. It never occurred to me that—”
She cocked her head. “I had been locked up with the bumble-brained?”
The muscles in his jaw flexed with anger. “How can you make light of it?”
“I don’t usually, but what would you have me do?” She gestured to the lonely stone crypt. “Throw myself on my mother’s grave and weep? Hardly necessary or helpful.”
He inclined his head. “In that we are the same, then.”
She lowered her arm and lifted her chin, clinging to her defiance now that he knew a part of her secret. “So now you know what you wanted to know.”
“How are you here now?” he asked.
She clenched her teeth, a dose of terror rolling over her.
“Mary?”
She closed her eyes for a moment, seeing the blood, feeling flesh give to iron. “I escaped.”
“My god. How?”
She opened her eyes, determined to make him understand that there was no going back. That she’d done unspeakable things. It was too late to hide those things from Edward now. He already knew too much. “I attacked a keeper. I may have killed him. And I escaped.”
She waited, standing rigid for his judgment, for his eyes to shutter.
Instead, Edward took a step forward and oh so carefully cupped her chin. He tilted her face up toward him. “You saved yourself. You took your own fate into your hands and you chose life. Nothing could be more admirable or powerful than that.”
Tears stung her eyes. “You’re not going to send me away, then?”
“Why would I do that?” he asked, shock tightening his features.
“B-because of what I have done. Where I have been.”
“I want you all the more because of what you have done, where you have been, and your will to survive.”
With the affection she now felt, she couldn’t help but forgive him for speaking to Yvonne about her. Far from rejecting her, he seemed to be accepting her completely. She wasn’t sure whether anyone else ever had.
There was no regret in his voice.
At last she asked, “What are we going to do?”
“It is not what I shall do. It is what you are going to do, Calypso.”
“And what is that?”
As one might swear a weighty vow, he looked full into her eyes. The anticipation in his own gaze was back, along with something strangely . . . deadly. She shivered even before his voice crawled low and worn like the gravel path, cold as ice along her skin. “You’re going to destroy the man who did this to you.”
Chapter 11
The pistol’s shot cracked through the fog. Its butt kicked against Mary’s kid-gloved hand. In the far distance, through the swirling dawn air and across the dew-covered, crocus-dotted field, a puff of flour wafted into the mist. A grim dose of satisfaction welled up in her. It had taken less than twenty-four hours for Edward to begin to make good on his promise.
And she’d taken it on with a thirst-filled passion that shocked her. She’d only ever thought of hiding, of running, but never of fighting back. And in one moment Edward had changed all that.
Here in the frigid morning, under the first breath of spring, in a pair of deep blue breeches and a linen shirt lent from one of Edward’s smaller male servants, she felt oddly composed and alive. She loved the feel of loose male clothing, the small gray jacket buttoned just to her chin and the black boots that swallowed up her feet and covered her calves.
No wonder men kept their women in feminine clothes. What better way to imprison a woman than in corsets cinched with metal grommets that bent the ribs and gowns so drowning with fabric they left one entirely helpless.
“You’re a fine shot, Mary,” Edward announced proudly.
She turned to him, arm still outstretched, her body humming with exhilaration. “Indeed?”
Alarm burst past Edward’s lips. He jerked to the side. Keeping his eyes trained on the weapon, he lifted his black-gloved hand to her wrist, diverting the pistol. “I do. Just don’t use your skills on me.”
Mary pursed her lips, nodding. “’Twould be a shame to shoot such a fine teacher.”
Those long, strong fingers of his lingered upon her wrist, the leather of the gloves the only barrier between them. “It feels good, does it not?” he inquired. “Life or death in one definitive shot.”
Her heart shifted from its triumphant beat to a slower, stronger, more insistent one. She looked to his hand barely touching her, then up into his hard, dangerous face, and let her eyes drink him in. “Yes,” she replied. “But I don’t understand exactly why we’re doing this. I’m not going to kill anyone.”
His own gaze was unreadable, like twin depths of an opaque lake. He didn’t look away. Rather, he held her gaze until the chill of the morning evaporated under the heat of his stare. “You are doing this because you will never be at the mercy of another person again. You will always be able to defend yourself.”
It wasn’t gratitude she felt. It was something different. Something far more powerful. Something like seeing her eternal soul in his eyes.
She so longed to believe he didn’t care for her. That he was doing this purely for his own personal motives. If she believed that, her heart would be safe. But as his touch lingered upon her arm and his gaze deepened—alive with hot and tender emotions—she couldn’t stop hoping.
Could it be that he truly wante
d her? Her life had been so full of sadness that it was hard to imagine.
And, god help her, her heart longed to open to him. Despite the risks. Despite the fear. Despite it all, she saw he had within him the potential to be her other half. If they could just take the chance. “Edward, I—”
He shook his head gently. “No words, Mary. Not yet.” Still holding her wrist in a gallant clasp, he knelt to the damp grass and plucked up a purple-throated flower, barely unfurled in its newness. He offered it up to her. A hypnotic symbol of her own life, and the trust between them, just beginning to open. “Just understanding.”
Understanding. A thing far more powerful than empty whispered nothings. He didn’t need to say what she knew. That the flower reminded him of her, bursting up from the icy landscape to embrace the sun. It was there on his face, the thoughts of his heart.
She took the bloom from his fingers, rolling the fragile stem carefully between her fingers, careful not to crush the fragile shoot, just as he was being careful not to hurt her.
Gently, he relinquished his grasp upon her arm, stood, and took the pistol from her. Then he withdrew a small silver and black powder horn from his pocket, focusing his attention on it. Methodically, he twisted the corker free. “There is an odd satisfaction in knowing that skill can shatter a man’s skull.”
As she twirled the little flower between her fingertips, she couldn’t deny the truth of it. Though she imagined it was only a truth to a person who had had everything taken away. She studied his precise yet sensual movements as he poured the small black grains into the mouth of the smooth black muzzle. “And if you miss?” she asked.
He slid the tamp from its place beneath the barrel and pressed down a small lead ball and the powder. “With skill, you miss by choice.”
She couldn’t help but wonder how many he had killed, for one who could speak so confidently on the subject clearly had experience. Yet the thought didn’t frighten her. It assured her. Edward didn’t just take life; he restored it.
He stood with perfect stillness as he lifted his arm in a smooth sweep, and without even seeming to aim stroked the trigger. Black powder burst around him as the pistol flashed. She didn’t need to look at the target to know he had hit it. Nor could she have looked—her gaze was locked upon him, upon his surety and knowledge that no one could harm him.
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