“Yes, my lord.”
“Then—don’t you have to do what I say? Yes,” he answered himself with finality, nodding.
“You want me to go?”
“Immediately. Do not return. Thank you.”
“Fine.”
But she stayed where she was, watching him push off from the door and move gingerly to his desk, where a cut-glass brandy decanter rested on a silver plate. He unstoppered it and picked it up, then just stood there and looked at it. A ridiculous amount of time passed.
“It’s in your pocket,” she snapped. Of all the emotions she could have felt at this moment, aggravation because he wouldn’t let her take care of him was surely the maddest.
***
It went on for days. “Who’s changing his bandage?” she demanded of Preest after Sebastian sent her away for the half-dozenth time. “He is,” the valet told her. “Banned me from the room, won’t have me anywhere about.”
All he did was drink, the servants informed her. Trays of food went untouched, visitors unseen, correspondence unopened. When Dr. Hesselius came again, Sebastian sent him away, too. He wouldn’t even talk to Holyoake. Late at night she could hear him playing the piano, nothing but baleful chords and dissonant melodies that jangled her nerves and made sleep impossible. Occasionally she saw him from a distance, and each time he looked worse than before. He hadn’t shaved; his fierce black beard made him look criminal, like a degenerate pirate. Once she tried to speak to him, but it was exactly as before: first he stared at her, virtually devoured her with his eyes, and then, with precise, drunken courtesy, he told her to please leave him alone.
Even her irritation, mild as it was, finally drifted away. When she thought about the night Sully and the others had tormented her, she found that there were large chunks of the evening she could barely remember. Because she didn’t want to remember them—yes, of course—but the whole experience was not nearly as painful to recall as it ought to have been. It was as if her mind had wrapped the memory in a layer of gauze to cushion her from the worst of it.
What she could not forget was that Sebastian had saved her. He’d saved her. Not out of selfless kindness, she didn’t think—she hadn’t completely lost her mind—but she couldn’t believe he’d done it out of pure possessiveness, either. Something in between, then.
She felt restless and on edge as time went by; something was pending, unfinished, hanging in the balance. She ought to be glad he wouldn’t see her—how absurd to think about him or care at all what happened to him. But she was at loose ends without him. He’d been the center of her life for too long. It was as if, without him, there wasn’t anything else compelling enough to hold her interest.
On the fifth day, he fell. She learned of it from Holyoake when she returned from her weekly visit to the constable. “’E were comin’ down the stairs when ’e slipped. Must’ve missed four in a row at least, and fetched up at the bottom all in a heap. Susan heard him and run for me, and between us we got him up to ’is room.”
“My God. Is he hurt?”
“How the blazes would I know?” He ducked his head. “Beg pardon, but I’m that vexed, and I don’t know what else t’ do for ’im. ’E won’t have the surgeon, o’ course,” he went on, fuming. “Preest fluttered round ’im for a time, cleaning ’im up and whatnot, but he sent ’im away, and now he says he wants you t’ come and no one else.”
“What?”
“Aye.” He nodded heavily, as amazed as she. “Says ’e wants you ’t come as quick as you can.”
She looked at the floor. “He’s drunk, isn’t he?”
“No, ’e ain’t.”
“No?”
“No. I thought sure he would be, but he weren’t.”
“Then—why did he fall?”
William shook his head and shrugged. “So. Will you go to ’im, then?”
She glanced at him sharply. What must he be thinking? Impossible to tell; there was no one more discreet than Mr. Holyoake, and at the moment his kind face was expressionless. “Yes, I’ll go,” she said levelly. “Since he’s sent for me.”
“Mph. Preest says he’s neglected ’is wound.”
“Has it festered?”
“Preest says not, but it needs tending to. I’ve told Jerny to take up hot water.”
“Good.”
“Do you want me to come wi’ you?”
She almost smiled. “Do you think I’ll need protection?”
“No, no,” he said too quickly, abashed. “Help; I were thinkin’ o’ help.”
No, he wasn’t. “Thank you, William. I think,” she said, with much more confidence than she felt, “I’ll be able to manage on my own.”
***
The bedchamber was empty; his lordship must be in his bathroom. She took a moment to gather herself; even ordinary encounters with Sebastian were unsettling, and this one was bound to be beyond that.
His bedroom always surprised her: it wasn’t the exotic lair she’d have expected a man like him—a sensualist, a voluptuary—to inhabit. In fact, it was uncommonly plain. It had once been Anne Morrell’s, when she’d lived here as Lady D’Aubrey, but since then all traces of femininity had been eradicated. There wasn’t even a mirror. The furniture was good but sparse. The bed . . . the bed looked strange from here; her memories of it were acute, but the perspective from a distance was off, almost disorienting. Like one’s first sight from shore of the ship on which one has taken a long sea voyage.
She whirled at a sound from behind her—but it was only Jerny, carrying a brass can full of steaming hot water. “For the master,” he said needlessly, and she gestured for him to precede her into the lavatory.
Sebastian sat on a stool in front of the enormous marble sink, shirtless, holding a towel against his right side with the flat of his arm. The room was dim because the curtains had been drawn across the windows, but even in the feeble light of only one candle she could see that his face was too pale. But Holyoake was right: he wasn’t drunk.
“Bring a lamp, Jerny,” she murmured, after the boy had poured hot water into the stoppered basin. “There’s one in the bedroom; light it and bring it here.”
During the two minutes he was gone, she stood with her arms folded and looked around at everything except the room’s other occupant, whose quiet stare she could feel but wasn’t prepared to acknowledge. If his bedroom was spartan, the master’s bathroom epitomized—at least to Rachel, who was used to different amenities—the ultimate in luxury and extravagance. Besides the marble sink, there was a bathtub the likes of which she’d never even seen in pictures, never even dreamed existed. Gleaming bronze with gold handles and spouts, long and sleek, Greek or Roman, possibly Byzantine for all she knew, it personified decadence; a full-grown man could lie down flat in it—and if Violet Cocker’s gossiping tongue was accurate, Lord D’Aubrey had done exactly that on any number of occasions in the company of full-grown women.
The walls were tiled in gorgeous pink marble. Ivy hung from pots before the two windows flanking the sink, and between them the biggest mirror she’d ever seen soared to the ceiling. Another graced the wall at the foot of the bathtub, and an elegant, man-size cheval glass stood beside the door. Surprisingly, the effect wasn’t garish or even particularly sybaritic; rather, candlelight in the mirrors’ multiple reflections mellowed the hard, shining surfaces of bronze and marble, making the room seem glamorous, unearthly, almost magical.
Jerny brought the lamp then, and the mystical quality dissipated somewhat in the brighter light. Rachel remembered the basket in her hands and set it down beside the sink. “I’ve brought linens for bandages, my lord, and some basilica powder. But I must tell you that I agree with Mr. Holyoake. I think the doctor should—”
He’d dismissed Jerny with a nod, and now he cut her off by reaching for her hand. She didn’t fear him now, but the strong grip of his fingers startled her. She thought he would pull her toward him, take some liberty with her person. Instead he drew her toward the padded stool be
side his, and urged her with a gentle pressure to sit down. She returned his narrow, enveloping gaze as well as she could. In truth, she was glad to see him, glad to look at him. Preest had shaved him; she could smell the bay soap on his skin and the clean scent of his hair, still wet, slicked back from his fine, high forehead.
“I can’t tell what you’re thinking,” he said after a curious pause. “Usually your face is as transparent as glass in a window, but not now.” She stared at their still-clasped hands and didn’t speak. “Possibly I should have kept on drinking. Left you alone even longer. Forever. It’s not as if I know now what to say to you,” he said harshly, releasing her hand all at once. “It’s not as if I’ve—come to any rational conclusion about you, or myself, or anything else under the sun.”
“My lord, did you hurt yourself?” He looked blank. “When you fell. Mr. Preest told—”
“This is nothing,” he interrupted almost angrily. “Less than nothing.” But when he lifted his arm from the towel clamped to his side, she saw bloodstains. “Rachel,” he said before she could move, “are you all right?”
He’d never called her by her given name before. The uncertainty in his face was new as well, and even more disturbing. “I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m well. I’m fine. And—I’m not the one with a stab wound in the side.”
“You’re fine?” he repeated slowly. His voice had gone hoarse.
“Yes. I’m—”
“You’re fine? You’re well?” He was holding a half-full glass of water. “Being baited and ridiculed and brutalized by a gang of villainous, contemptible, barely human derelicts is an everyday occurrence for you, something easily recovered from, easily—shoved behind the wall of your infernal, everlasting self-control—!” He smacked the glass down on top of the marble vanity; only a miracle kept it from shattering. She jumped, but she still wasn’t frightened, only startled—because the anger bottled inside of him wasn’t directed at her.
“Don’t mistake me,” he went on, in a tone that was quieter but no less intense. “I don’t exclude myself from their number. By no means. And I have no reason, no motive to offer to you that could possibly explain my behavior, much less excuse it.”
She almost said, You were drunk, but a second’s thought reminded her that that wasn’t really true. Besides, why would she want to help him name an excuse for what he’d done, even one as deplorable as drunkenness? “The water is cooling,” she said evasively. “Let me clean your wound, my lord.”
“I want you to do something,” he said, and his eyes shone with a self-directed bitterness she’d never seen and didn’t understand.
“What is it?” she asked warily.
“I want you never to call me your ‘lord’ again. Never again, alone or with others. My name is Sebastian. What you and I have been to each other . . . I wouldn’t presume to name it. But I think even you will admit that we are something, and whatever it is has been . . . intimate enough to warrant dispensing with titles and—other verbal formalities. Oh, hell,” he muttered, and dropped his forehead down on the arm he had stretched out along the sink top.
She reached for him, afraid he was fainting. She held his shoulders, and his cold skin went clammy under her hands. “My lord, you’re ill. Please let me send for the doctor.”
He turned his head to look at her, and a pained smile pulled at one corner of his mouth. “I’m not ill. All that talking did me in. And it hasn’t even helped—you’re still my-lording me. Say my name, Rachel. Say it once, for practice.”
“I don’t—What difference does it make? Please, let me—”
“It makes a difference. Say it.”
She took her hands away to say it. “Sebastian.”
“You see?” he asked softly, alertly. “It makes a difference. Do you feel it?”
She felt it, the facile, instantaneous razing of one of the barriers between them. Too facile; she didn’t trust it. No matter. There were a hundred other barriers to keep them apart.
“If you’re comfortable in that position, then don’t move,” she said, trying to sound brisk; “I can clean the wound like this.” He only grunted. “Lift your arm a little.” He winced when she took the towel away; no wonder—it had already begun to adhere to his wound. But there was very little fresh blood, and the black stitches Dr. Hesselius had sewn in the long, uneven gash that ran from the bottom of his rib cage to his hipbone were still intact. “I have no experience at this, my . . . I have no experience at this.”
“Does it sicken you?”
“No.”
“Then do it. Please. I don’t want anyone but you to touch me.”
Immediately she flushed. Her throat hurt; the most foolish desire to weep welled up in her without warning. She wanted to whisper, Why? but she held her tongue. She would not regard what he said, she would not regard the way he was treating her. It was an anomaly. It meant nothing.
The water in the sink was still hot, so she cooled it by turning on the tap for a few seconds. The fact that cold water actually flowed through pipes all the way to the second floor of Lynton Great Hall was a source of much wonder in the household, probably in the village at large. Hot water still had to be carried up from the kitchen by hand, but rumors were rife that his lordship had plans for a boiler that would heat water and pump it through new pipes all the way up to his bathroom. A miracle if it was true, which most people doubted.
She bathed his wound as gently as she could, then dabbed basilica powder on it. She couldn’t look at him, touch his naked skin, or smell his sweat without remembering the night he’d taken her to bed. The same man who meekly submitted to her ministrations, whose demands on her now were tentative, even courteous, was the same patient, methodical, remorseless lover who had made it a crusade to steal every last shred of her pride. She told herself that if she forgot that or ignored it, she would deserve all the consequences.
“Sit up if you can,” she said. He did, and she began to wind a strip of clean cloth around his middle. She had to touch him with her body, no help for it, her chin, her breasts, brushing against his bare skin as she passed the bandage from hand to hand behind his back. He made it easier by not looking at her, but the quiet between them only underscored the tension. She broke it to say, “Mrs. Oldham gave me the bandages and the powder. She had them in her room. She knows a little about nursing and herbs and such things.” Something she wished she had known before she’d volunteered to be his nurse. Or did she?
“Who,” he asked tightly, “is Mrs. Oldham?”
“She was the cook before Monsieur Judelet came. Now she’s a sort of assistant.”
“A sort of assistant. The poor woman. Judelet’s an unholy terror; she must be a saint to stay on.” Rachel didn’t answer. “You must think it callous of me not to know the names of my own servants.”
“No, of course not.”
“Don’t lie. I’ve never heard of anyone called Mrs. Oldham; I doubt if I’d recognize her if I rode my horse over her. It’s not the way a good country squire ought to conduct himself. It’s appalling, in fact.” She kept her head down, frowning at the knot she was trying to tie over his stomach. He ducked his head—making a joke of trying to see her face. “Come, agree with me. I’m sure it’s what you think. Don’t von? Lord D’Aubrey’s an arrogant, conscienceless libertine with too much money and time on his hands. You won’t admit it? Well, I can’t blame you. Who knows what the consequences might be?” He sighed—then flinched at the pain sighing had caused him.
“I’m finished,” she said. “I think you should lie down.”
“Only if you’ll lie with me.”
Maybe he was drunk. A slight smile played about his lips, but she couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. As if he hadn’t spoken, she stood up and began to rinse out the bloody linens in the lavatory.
“Leave that,” he said. “Come, Rachel, help me to bed.” He held out his left arm, and she had no choice but to come to him and let him drape it over her shoulders. He had a half-
healed wound in his side, and when he’d fallen on the stairs he hadn’t hurt himself. There was no reason why he couldn’t walk the twenty-some feet from his bathroom to his bedchamber unassisted. But she didn’t point that out. Taking up the lamp, she moved with him in a slow, intimate procession, letting him lean on her, and when they reached the bed she turned back the covers for him and tried to pretend that the cool silkiness of the cream-colored sheet brought back no memories.
She wasn’t surprised when he held onto her hand as she started to leave. “Don’t go.” Remarkably, it sounded like a request, not command. “Stay and talk to me for a little while.”
“You should sleep now.”
“I should, but I don’t want you to go. I don’t want to be alone.” He looked down at their hands, hers in both of his. “It’s not fair to say that to you. But I’m asking this favor of you anyway.”
“All right,” she said faintly. “I’ll stay for a little while.”
“Thank you.” He brought her hand to his mouth and held it there for a long moment. Again his gentleness confounded her. “Will you lie down with me, Rachel?”
“What?”
“Just that. I won’t touch you. I have something to tell you.” She began to shake her head. “Please. I have to lie down, and I don’t want to be in this bed and you in that chair.” He smiled. “I’m very weak, you know. Voice can’t carry. Might faint if I have to shout at you.”
She looked away. “When will it end? When will it—be enough?”
“What do you mean?” He touched her cheek, making her look at him. “Don’t be sad. It’s changing, I swear it. Nothing will be the same. You can’t believe that and you can’t trust me, so I have to take advantage of your helplessness one more time. To show you.”
She whispered, “I don’t understand you.”
“I know. Lie down with me.”
So she did. Self-deception wasn’t one of her failings, so she didn’t tell herself that she was obeying him again because she had no choice, that her compliance was one more “condition of employment.” In truth, he wasn’t the only one who couldn’t bear solitude right now. She needed the comfort of another human being, and although it was the height of irony, the only person to whom she could turn was the very one who had put her in need of comfort.
Patricia Gaffney - [Wyckerley 02] Page 16
