by Lara Blunte
He swallowed. Catherine put her hand out, wanting to spare him, but he shook his head at her. He would get to the end now. “The worst thing was that she had struggled. She had been at her vanity table and when the killer went in she must have realized that she was going to die. She tried to get away and he stabbed her on the shoulders, then she must have turned round and tried to protect herself because he stabbed her arms. And finally he drove the knife through her heart."
He fell silent and she didn't know what she could say to such a horrible tale. "I'm so sorry," she whispered.
His voice was tired, as if he had been speaking for a long time. She knew, though, that it was because he had held that story inside him for too long, not wanting to share it, knowing that it would never be as full of anguish to anyone listening as it was to him. "You want to know why I have been running around the world, why I don't talk about any of it, so I shall tell you: there isn't a new heir. My Aunt Bianca only had one son, Edmund, and he is the bastard who murdered my family."
She stared back at him for almost twenty seconds, her eyes wide. "Edmund Lawson? He died before it happened! "
"He planned it all, don't you see? He planned it years in advance. He lived and breathed for this plan of his."
"That's impossible!"
"He supposedly died in India. I went there and I spoke to the army people who saw his body. It was half burnt, they said, because the people in the village where he died were afraid of catching his fever. They couldn't swear beyond all doubt that it was he."
"This isn't proof that he's alive!"
"And then there was a man so kind as to visit the lunatic, Coogan ─ a tall, fair man whispering in his ear."
She kept shaking her head: "It was Coogan who killed your family! You've conjured up a ghost, the only person who might have a reason to kill them so that you could find some meaning in it!"
"It was Edmund at the madhouse with Coogan," Adrian said doggedly. "It was Edmund who entered Halford that night, probably not alone because he is a coward. He would need help to do his butchering. And then he found my room empty. That must have almost made him lose his nerve, but he has a lot of nerve. He took poor Coogan and opened his veins in a ditch."
"It can't be true," she said weakly.
"It is true."
"Then why haven't you found him before now?"
"Because I did go mad. At least for a while."
Catherine was shivering, but he kept on going: "After the funerals I couldn't speak to anyone I had known before. I couldn't bear them telling me that my parents and my brother were with God. What kind of God would have allowed such a thing? Why?
"People told me, 'you are the Earl now!' As if that should make me happy somehow, that it should be the compensation for losing everyone I loved. My father was the Earl! He had another good twenty years of life in him, at least. Then my brother would have been the Earl, and instead he had had his throat cut at twenty-three! "
He looked at her, "I know there is little anyone could have said, but if I hadn't understood before how mad everyone was, I did understand it then. They expected me to find consolation in useless titles, in empty houses full of rooms, when I had to put my family under the earth!"
"Oh, Adrian," Catherine whispered softly, her eyes full of tears.
He continued, "And then the nightmares started. So often I dreamt that they were alive somewhere, but out of my reach ─ they were still alive but dying of some plague, and I needed to get to them to save them but I couldn't ─ for some reason I couldn't. And I knew they were waiting for me. When I woke up it would break my heart every time that they weren't anywhere, that even though whatever I had to do was impossible, it had still given me hope to be with them again..."
Catherine kept shivering at the thought of what he had to endure and at her own lack of imagination, thinking that a man could relate such things just because she was curious, thinking how lonely he must have been, how lost. He had been twenty-two years old, and all the love in his life had been replaced with grief.
The bottle sat forgotten between his hands as he went on. "I didn't even think about Edmund for a long time, maybe three years. I left England soon after it happened and moved and moved until I ended up in Sicily. I have some land there and I just lived in a cottage and worked on it. It's hard, dry earth, it breaks your back, but it puts you to sleep at night. I didn't think anything, I just had nightmares, got up at dawn and went to work.
"Then someone tried to kill me. And then someone else. And that couldn't be a coincidence. That's when it dawned on me that it hadn't been Coogan who killed my family. It was someone still trying to finish the job.” He was nodding now. "There was only one person in the whole world who stood to gain if all of us died, and he stood to gain a fortune that most men would kill for. That person was dead, but how convenient that he had been buried in India. So I had to go there, and from there I started to follow his trail. It takes a while to follow a man over half the world, when he hides even in the jungle.
“I sent out the message that I knew what he had done, that he could never come back to claim the title and the properties because he would be arrested and hung. From then on, all he wanted was the money."
"How much actual money can there be?"
He gave one of his crooked smiles. "The men in my family were not just landowners like your father or the Daltons. They were a different breed. They speculated in America and invested and then invested again. There are over two hundred thousand pounds in money, scattered in different places." Catherine widened her eyes while Adrian nodded. "Yes, it's a lot. It drives normal people mad to think about it, what do you think it would do to Edmund, who was already deranged?"
"But how can he expect you to just hand all this money to him?"
"He's been biding his time. Waiting for me to make a mistake. And I made one."
Catherine's eyes were sad. "So that's what I am, your mistake."
"I am your mistake," he said passionately. "What did you want with a man like me, a man with only sorrow in his life? Edmund can't kill me, not before he gets his hands on the money. He knows he can't go back to England, he can't inherit anything now. But he can get at you."
She was breathing quietly, thinking of what he had said.
"For so long, so many years, I was careful not to go near anyone,” Adrian said. “You managed to break through and you gave me joy, you made the nightmares stop and I wanted to be around you as I had not wanted to be around anyone in a long time. When that body was found, even though it was the second time he played this trick I wanted to believe it." He sighed. "I wanted to live, to stop dealing with death.”
"But why did you keep looking?" she asked slowly. "Even if all this is true, why could you not forget about him?”
Adrian shook his head. "Don't you see, Kate, he is just waiting for me to love someone, to be married, to have children so that he can do it once more. He will snatch the people I love, he will use them to get the money, and then he will kill them anyway, for sport. I was alone for a long time, because it's better to have nothing than to ever lose so much again."
Catherine held his hand with both of hers. "Adrian, you don't have to be alone. If this is true, if Edmund has done these things, the law will go after him."
He scoffed. "The law! You don't know Edmund...I have dedicated a great amount of resources, men, money, all my time to finding him for years, and he has always gotten away. No law would be after a man who is supposed to be dead with a fraction of the dedication I have shown.”
"He's not some sort of wizard..."
"He isn't a wizard, he's a thing without a soul!”
"But if you have found him again..."
"Do you know why I found him? Because he wanted me to. He started to call himself Richmond in Constantinople... It's a little joke he likes to play on me. He calls himself after pretenders to the English throne: his name was Bonny Stuart at one point. And now Richmond."
"Why would he want you to kn
ow that he's alive?"
"He wants me to be after him again, because all the time he will be torturing me."
She remembered the night at the theater. "Iago..."
"Yes, Iago. But even more cunning than Iago and more determined. He is much more cunning than me. He can do horrible things, Kate, he likes to do them. I need to kill him."
"You are not a savage!"
"Aren't I?" he asked quietly.
Catherine's head had begun to hurt. She had stopped thinking of him as mad and now he gave her reason to think it once more. It was all too absurd! She felt his pain, she longed to comfort him, but she still couldn't believe that any of it had happened as he thought.
He was entreating her again: "Let me put things right, Kate. The ship will stop in Vigo ─ we'll get married there and I shall find a safe place for you and send for Aunt Helen and Henriette. You will want for nothing. You can still be happy and give this child a happy life."
Catherine felt determination rise in her once again. She loved him more than she would let him know, and she would not let him continue this ghostly chase around the world alone. He had said that she had given him joy, that she had made the nightmares stop, and this was all she wanted to hear. Surely she and the child could lure him further into happiness and away from the delusion that had consumed him for so long.
Her hands were still in his. "If what you have told me is true, then I have more reason than ever to stay with you. If Edmund is the monster you describe, he would not let me live and bear your child. It would be even worse if we were married and the child your true heir. Surely you can see that I am only safe as long as I am near you?"
"Don't say 'if', Kate. Don't tell yourself that I am mad. Edmund killed my family. I know what he is capable of doing. You must believe me,” he begged.
"I do believe you," she lied. "But you can see yourself that I can only be near you, until you have found him."
"I don't know if I can protect you from him," he said.
It was the first time he had sounded uncertain of anything. His eyes pleaded with her. She felt for him, for the horrible story he had finally shared with her, but she was sure that such things as he had related simply didn't happen to people like them. The murders at Halford had been a tragedy, but they had been the work of a madman, that was all.
That night she slept in his bed. It was the first night that they spent together, but they didn't make love. Instead he held her as if even in that cabin there were something from which he needed to shield her.
BOOK IV - Constantinople. One
January, 1857
"I am nothing but a prisoner here!"
The boy, Nabil, looked up from the grammar book he was using to teach the lady Turkish and smiled at her. He was fifteen years old, but already practiced in the art of reassuring adults through flattery or lies. "Not a prisoner, you are the mistress of the house."
Catherine got up and went to the window, "So if I decided to leave now and walk through those gates, the men standing there would let me?"
"No, lady."
"Then I am a prisoner!" she concluded triumphantly.
"It is for your own protection," the boy said, turning serious. "The master has said..."
"If the master is so concerned about my safety I think he ought to spend more time with me. As it is, I have hardly seen him in the last fortnight."
"Fortnight?" the boy asked.
"Fourteen days," she explained mechanically.
Nabil had agreed to teach her Arabic to while away the time, though she was learning it much more quickly from her maid, Leila. She was also picking up some everyday Turkish, since the Ottoman Turkish of literature and bureaucracy would be less useful to her, and in any case many educated people in Constantinople spoke Arabic, Persian or French.
In the most magnificent city of the Ottoman Empire, there were Arabs from a variety of places. Nabil had been born in Mount Lebanon and Leila was a Christian from Syria.
"Fortnight," he wrote in his small notebook. "In Arabic you would just say 'two weeks'. You would say..."
She shook her head impatiently, "Not now, Nabil. Now I want to know how I may get out of the house!"
"You may not, lady. The master has forbidden it."
She approached the boy and sat next to him. "But the master does not own me, Nabil. He cannot keep me prisoner. He cannot decide what I do and what I do not do. Do you understand?"
Nabil clearly did not understand. The master was the lady's husband, and so naturally he told her what to do. It was the lady who was stubborn. Besides, what woman of her position would walk the streets of Constantinople? Perhaps things were different in England, but here she would do better to obey her husband.
Catherine looked around her sitting room with dislike. It was kept warm and furnished comfortably in the Ottoman style, yet it had been her prison for the past weeks.
She could still remember her excitement when the Gravina had entered the Bosphorus for the first time and Constantinople had appeared as if borne by the waves. Its silhouette, with the pointed minarets and round domes, had been so beautiful that she had gaped at it.
Then she had seen the city through a slit in the curtain of the carriage. She had been fascinated by the movement, the colors, the people, which made the streets there very different from any she had ever seen in her life.
The carriage had passed divans scattered across the way on which men of all the races of the East reclined, covered in furs, and dreamily smoked. The houses and walls were painted yellow, blue and white, and some had indecipherable inscriptions in green above the threshold. Busy boys ran back and forth, carrying small cups of what seemed like very dark coffee.
The air was blue and sweet with the smell of tobacco and coals, and she had greedily observed people: men in uniform who rode towards the sultan's palace, sailors from European countries who tried to make out her face through the curtain, street merchants who shook their wares and shouted over their cakes, their ices, their fruits.
Constantinople seemed to smell a good deal better than London or Paris, and that had delighted her. The women buying things concealed themselves in bright silk and showed dainty feet in yellow shoes. Men sported red hats and embroidered tunics, and it seemed as if every tongue of Babel were being spoken around her.
She had craned her neck to look up as the carriage passed a beautiful mosque, or a palace, but there was no time to enjoy details or even understand everything she was seeing.
However, she had been given no occasion to walk around and know the city any better. They had moved to a succession of places the same day she arrived, until she had fallen into an exhausted sleep and awoken in that very room the next morning. She had been told that they were in a house in the old walled peninsula of Stamboul. Adrian apparently believed that he was being followed and was doing his best to escape whoever might be after them.
Once they were settled, there were seven or eight men who came to the house every day, several of whom Adrian had known for years. Foremost among these was an Arab from Jerusalem called Omar. Adrian seemed to trust this man, who was about his age, unconditionally. He was dignified and serious, though his countenance could suddenly open in a burst of laughter at something Adrian or Abed, his younger brother, might say.
Catherine at first bristled under his direct gaze, as she read disapproval in it. She told Adrian she could not countenance that in a servant.
"He's no servant," Adrian told her.
"No?" she asked haughtily. "What is he, then, a friend?"
"Yes, he is my friend, and so is Abed. I can't even imagine trying to pay them for anything, they would be wounded to the heart and utterly insulted," Adrian said. He smiled. "And besides, he is less judgmental than you think, even for a man whose culture doesn't exactly approve of women who do as they like. It might not be our position he is frowning at."
"Then what might it be?"
"It might be just you," Adrian told her, and laughed for a while at her fu
rious expression.
But even for Catherine, who formed quick antipathies, it was hard to hate Omar. He had a wise, steadfast look about him. She found herself rather wanting to win him over, though it was so much easier to talk to Abed, who did not manage to hide a certain love sickness whenever he dealt with her, something which both Adrian and Omar noticed with an exchange of wry looks.
Catherine could tell that time was passing because of the five calls to prayer a day coming from a nearby mosque: each time the call would ring through the garden and into the house, and it was beautiful. She especially loved the first one, at dawn, when the world hardly stirred.
She would often leave the window open even in the cold when she knew the muezzin would start calling, just that she could hear his voice better. At times she sat and listened to it, at other times it was in the background, yet she never tired of it.
After a while captivity began to bore and annoy her equally, but Adrian would not pay any heed to her complaints and told her in no uncertain terms that if she tried to leave she would be stopped. He would not spend the day with her either, as he had done at Halford. He was often out, probably trying to discover Edmund's whereabouts, or at least so he thought.
Every night, however, he would sleep with her, a loaded pistol and a sharp knife nearby. She told herself that he would never have to use them. Nothing would ever happen. He would pull her to him and hold her all night, or follow the curve of her body with his, or hold her hand. These were the sweetest moments for her; she thought it was worth being his prisoner in a foreign country, just so that she could feel him molding to her in sleep. She knew that if she moved even an inch he would bring her close to him again.
I love you, she thought as she watched his sleeping face. He always looked so much younger when he slept; perhaps he looked like the boy he had been before anything had ever happened. She felt that she could silently confess her feelings to that boy.
