“I’ll go with her,” offered Bianca as Max kept his arm around the sleeping Greta. “If you think that would help her.”
For a moment he stared at her, before blinking with a start. He was nearly asleep on his feet, she realized. “Yes. Yes, I think it would. Thank you.”
Greta woke with a panicked cry, but Max calmed her at once. He spoke to her for several minutes in a low, hushed voice. Bianca heard her own name, and saw Greta’s terrified eyes dart her way.
Even though she didn’t understand and still smarted under the sting of Max’s secrecy, she felt her heart move at the way he treated his aunt. Whatever the state of Greta’s mind, she had been treated abominably. It was clear she hadn’t had a bath in weeks; her clothes were rags, and she was half-starved. She kept plucking Frances’s shawl over her shoulders as if she hadn’t been warm in forever.
She sat quietly waiting until Greta looked at her again. Max smiled encouragingly. “Meine Frau,” he told his aunt. “Bianca.”
Slowly, Greta nodded once. “Schön,” she whispered.
“Sehr schön,” murmured Max with a ghost of a smile at Bianca. He helped Greta to her feet, and put his arm around her as he guided her from the room. For the first time Bianca noticed her feet were bare, scratched and scabbed. She told Aunt Frances to send for some salve, and wondered uneasily what Max meant by mad.
Max must have convinced Greta she was safe. The woman went into Cathy’s old bedroom with Bianca, only jumping uneasily when the door closed. Ellen came in with a bucket of warm water and Greta started to shake again, whimpering.
“Set it down and go,” said Bianca swiftly. “Go!” Looking startled, Ellen put down the bucket by the hearth and fled. Bianca heard her voice in the corridor, and the weary rumble of Max’s reply, followed by Frances’s tart admonition to Ellen to fetch more water for Mr. St. James’s bath.
Greta cowered from the hip tub, so Bianca abandoned the idea of bathing her. She settled for wiping away as much dirt as she could with a damp cloth, speaking softly and soothingly the whole time. She began to brush Greta’s hair, but the mass was so tangled and filthy, the brush made no progress. They would have to wash it and probably cut it, but that was for another day. Finally she coaxed Greta into a clean nightdress, and then into bed. The woman looked so childlike, clutching the blankets to her chin, her eyes roving the room.
When she was asleep, Bianca slipped out of the room. To her surprise, Frances was waiting. “How is she?” asked her aunt.
“Asleep. Aunt Frances, there are bruises all over her body. Her feet look as though they were whipped. Her hair is so matted, we’ll have to cut it—”
“Yes,” Frances said quietly. “Madhouses are terrible places, my dear.”
Bianca hesitated. “Is she mad? She looks a fright, but she understood what I told her to do, and she cooperated . . .”
“I do not know,” was Frances’s answer. “But now you must go to your husband. Assure yourself he has not fallen asleep and drowned in his bath. I will stay with her.”
Bianca nodded gratefully and went to her old bedroom.
Max had indeed fallen asleep in the bath. Of course, he was much too large for the bathing tub, so his head lolled on his shoulder while his knees stuck up out of the water. For a moment Bianca stared at his face in the flickering firelight.
Why hadn’t he told her about Greta? Or rather, why hadn’t he told her this about Greta?
Madness, of course, was terrible. A lunatic in the family was something most people would keep hidden. If Papa had known there was madness in Max’s family, he would never have invited him to dinner, let alone entertained a marriage proposal.
But Max was not mad. No, not at all; he was the most logical, sensible, driven person she knew . . . and that meant he had known full well how people would have reacted, if he’d told. How Papa had reacted tonight. If Bianca hadn’t realized who Greta was and gone to her aid, Papa would have thrown her out of the house and barred the door.
And she was no better. If Max had told her of Greta in the early, antagonistic days of their marriage, Bianca knew she would not have taken it well. Not out of fear of Greta, but fury at him.
You kept her a secret so you could save her, she thought as she gazed at her exhausted husband. He clearly cared for his aunt. Greta had taken him in when his mother died, she had sent him to university, and she had tried to get him started in a respectable profession. Lawrence said Max had hired Mr. Leake to look for her months ago.
But had he meant to conceal her existence forever?
Bianca sighed. There was no use pondering these questions on her own. She took up one of the towels left to warm by the fire and draped it gently over his shoulders.
“What?” He startled awake before subsiding. “Greta. Is she—?”
“Asleep in bed, with Aunt Frances standing watch.”
He scrubbed his hands over his face. “Thank you.”
He got out of the tub and dressed. Much as she had done with Greta, Bianca put him to bed, too. Max went as docilely as a child. “When did you last sleep?” she asked, sitting on the bed beside him and brushing the damp hair from his forehead.
“A long time ago,” he said on a sigh. He groped for her hand and brought it to his cheek. “I’m sorry, love.”
“For what?” She kept her voice calm and soft. “For haring off without explaining why? For letting me think you and Greta were simply estranged? Or for something else I’ve not discovered yet?”
He looked at her in despair. “I’ve much to beg forgiveness for.”
She sighed. “Let’s start with this. How long have you been searching for her?”
He hesitated. “Three years.”
That was much longer than Bianca had expected. “My,” she said. “Why so long?”
“Her husband hid her away,” he said, his voice sinking into a drowsy rumble. “He put her in a prison and refused to tell me where. He taunted me and extorted me until I had no more money to give, and still he would not tell me where she was.”
She stroked his hair. “Will you tell me more later?”
“Yes,” he sighed, pressing her hand, still in his. “Everything.”
“What did she say?” asked Bianca on impulse. “When you told her I would help her. Schön?”
His sleepy smile held a hint of his usual wickedness. “Beautiful,” he said softly. “And I replied that you are very beautiful.”
And with that, he fell asleep, and Bianca lay next to him for a long time, unwilling to pry apart their hands.
Max woke with a jerk, bolting upright. He could swear he heard screams, just like the ones at Mowbry Manor. He was half out of bed before Bianca caught his arm.
“Stay,” she mumbled. “Greta is well.”
Heart thundering, he paused, every muscle tensed. “How do you know?”
His wife rolled over and yawned. She was fully dressed, asleep on top of the coverlet. “Aunt Frances and I traded turns sitting with her all night. When she woke this morning, Frances read to her. She seemed to enjoy it.”
“Oh.” Slowly he collapsed back into bed, still trembling from the moment of fearful fury.
“When last I went in, Aunt Frances had persuaded her to let Ellen wash her hair. Can you guess how?” She smiled. “No, you never will. Frances had Ellen wash her hair in the basin, to prove it was safe. Ellen and Jennie were fussing with the combs when I left.”
“How very kind of Mrs. Bentley.”
“Max.” Bianca turned over to face him. “What happened to her?”
He hesitated. Originally, his plan had been to conceal Greta and her condition forever. He’d taken the Duchess of Carlyle’s money and hired Leake, unwilling to abandon his aunt to the clutches of her viper husband, but also desperate to keep his family stain from anyone’s knowledge. As long as Croach had Greta, he had leverage over Max, able to turn up and make a spectacle of Greta in one of her fits.
Now . . .
“She was not mad years ago,” he said slowly. �
�She was charming and beautiful and lighthearted. She looks so much like my mother, her older sister. When I was a child she would run in the fields with me. She taught me to play cricket, in fact. I thought she was wonderful,” he finished wistfully.
“Nothing seemed wrong until Thomas Bradford, her first husband, died suddenly. They had been happy together, and Greta felt his death very keenly.” Max sighed. “I ought to have given her more support, but I was a young fool, irked at being turned off from Bradford’s law office and yearning to keep pace with my mates from Balliol—Wimbourne and Dalway and that lot. It was impossible, of course, and I ran myself into such trouble . . .” He closed his eyes for a moment. “I didn’t know she began drinking gin, in the mornings and at nights. I neglected her, and she—still beautiful, still young, possessed of Bradford’s money and my grandfather’s farm, but desperately lonely—married Silas Croach.”
“When did he put her in an asylum?”
Max felt his face harden. “Not immediately. He was canny—he outfoxed me, for certain. I thought him a rum chap, devoted husband and all that. He appeared to fuss over her, and would declare he was taking her to Bath or to Cheltenham for the waters. Every few months they were off to a different spa. Doctor after doctor was brought in to consult, and Croach told me their reports of her condition were relentlessly grave.”
“Did you never see her yourself?” Bianca asked softly.
“Yes,” he murmured, remembering. “Croach said visitors upset her, so I was not to come often. When I did, she would be raving about the blue hedgehogs living under the furniture, or sunk in a stupor so low, she couldn’t respond to any conversation. I believed Croach.” Max paused again, swallowing bile at how bloody stupid he’d been. “I agreed when he said she must be put into a hospital for her own benefit.”
“What do you suspect him of doing instead?” asked his wife—his beautiful, intelligent, clear-eyed wife. Max smiled sadly. If he’d had her then, she would have seen through Croach’s lies, and smacked some sense into Max himself.
“I think he encouraged her to drink beyond reason. I think he drugged her— No,” he corrected himself. “I know he drugged her. With my own eyes I saw him dose her, and I thanked him for it. I thought it was medicine to treat her, but now I suspect it was to make her worse.”
Bianca’s lips parted.
“Greta was not an heiress, but neither was she poor,” he explained. “Bradford left her a respectable widow’s portion, almost four thousand pounds. And then my grandfather died, and she inherited the income from the farm in Lincolnshire. Grandfather was wily enough to leave the land to me, but a life estate in the income to her. And Croach knew it.”
“So he spent all her money?” asked Bianca in outrage.
“No, I believe now that he hid that away. But he told me he had spent it—all those spa visits, you know—and that he needed more to pay for the doctors and the hospitals.” Max shrugged. “So I took myself to the gaming tables and I got it for him.”
He’d told her that. She knew he’d been a gambler and a rake. He’d simply never said why.
“You said you were brilliant at it . . .” Of course she remembered that, from Vauxhall.
Max grinned slightly at that memory. “I was. My best year I cleared nine thousand pounds.”
Bianca’s eyes rounded, as he had expected. That was a very handsome sum of money.
“You’re thinking I only gambled so I could give it all to Croach,” he said. “Don’t. I spent as carelessly as any young man, loosed upon town with no one to say me nay. I lived well when the cards fell in my favor, and then I lived rough when they did not. It was all sport to me. But I did dutifully give Croach money, every quarter.” Max’s voice grew bitter again. “He lectured me of cures, of medicines, of doctors! She was trying to harm herself, he said, and attacking the servants. If I didn’t help him care for her, he would have no choice but to have her confined in Bethlem Hospital with the lunatics.”
Her face softened. “What made you think he drugged her?”
“She began speaking German to me, instead of English, when I visited,” he said slowly. “It was . . . odd. Her parents spoke nothing else but Greta spoke English. I know only enough German to get by. But Croach couldn’t understand any, and she asked me to take her away. I began to suspect him of being, if not the cause of her malady, at least no help, and that’s when he abruptly put her away in a private madhouse.”
He remembered that as if it had happened an hour ago. He’d gone to visit Greta, armed with more information than usual as his suspicions grew. He’d asked a couple of friendly apothecaries, who had told him what to look for. He’d asked his aunt, in German so Croach couldn’t know, if her medicines made her feel worse. She said they made her soul split in half; Max promised he would come back for her the next day. And by the next morning Croach had bundled her off to God knew where.
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” Bianca’s betrayed tone pierced his heart.
Max turned onto his back, staring at the ceiling. “I told no one. Nor did I ever intend to. Who would want a man with lunacy in his blood? Your father would have shown me the door and locked it behind me. You didn’t want me at all. What would a mad relation, locked up in an asylum, have done to your feelings?”
She was quiet for a long time. Max felt drained of all emotion. This was why he had planned never to tell anyone. He had hoped to find a hospital—a good one—and make Greta as comfortable as possible. He had planned to visit her as often as he could. But he had accepted that her condition, even her existence, must be kept secret.
“I don’t know,” Bianca said at last. “Heaven knows Aunt Frances is terrible enough, and we let her walk about freely. Madness is different, of course . . . Are you certain she is mad?”
Max paused. “I fear so. She had flashes of sensibility, but you saw her—”
“She’s been starved and whipped, dressed in rags and locked in a madhouse. I shudder to think what any of us would be like after enduring that.” She went up on her elbows and looked at him. “Perhaps kinder treatment will improve her.”
“She shall have kinder treatment for the rest of her days, even if her mind is irretrievably broken,” Max vowed. “I’ll tear Croach apart if he tries to take her again.”
“As he’s the one who allowed her to be treated this way,” said Bianca, “I’ll gladly help.”
His heart swelled. When he’d realized Leake must have brought Greta to Perusia, Max had braced himself to be reviled and rejected, thrown out and even divorced. Instead of scenes of horror and revulsion, though, he burst into the house to find Greta sitting on the settee, a fine shawl around her shoulders and Bianca’s hand in hers. Even after his secrecy, even when he’d gone off and been too afraid to send her a note, even after he’d decided, with a sinking heart, that he must try to save Greta even if it cost him his wife.
His wife had been more insightful and compassionate than he deserved. Before he could think, before caution could rear its head and silence him, he pulled her to him and kissed her. “I love you,” he breathed. “I love you.”
She slid her arms around his neck. “You frightened me half to death.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“You had better never do it again,” she added with a tug at his hair.
“Never,” he promised. “I am the poorest excuse for a husband in all Britain.”
“As long as Silas Croach walks the earth, you can’t be the worst husband anywhere.”
He kissed her. “You are the very best of wives to endure my many faults and failings, and I shall spend the rest of my days atoning for being such an idiot to have doubted you.”
She took his face in her hands and kissed him back, softly, deeply, completely. “You had better make love to me so I forget how you didn’t trust me, after asking me to trust you so often . . .”
“Always.” Max yanked off his nightshirt and moved over her. Primed to iron, he plowed up her s
kirts and pushed inside her. Her fingernails dug into his back, and he shuddered at the sight of her beneath him, her eyes shining like silver and her hair dark bronze around her.
“Yes,” she moaned. “Yes—Max—”
It was the hardest, fastest bout of lovemaking he’d ever had. Neither needed soft tender touches; Bianca clutched his arse and urged him to harder, deeper strokes. She writhed beneath him, tossing her head from side to side and whispering incoherent words of encouragement, passion, even something like love.
Love.
He fought back his own release until he felt her come. Her climax was a glorious sight to his eyes, and this morning it seemed tinged in shades of rose and gold, like everything about her.
The biggest gamble of his life had paid off beyond his wildest dreams. Not only had he proved himself capable of running a business, he had found Greta and rescued her from the hell Croach had cast her into. He was no longer a penniless rake, living from wager to wager; he was a gentleman of property and purpose. And he had Bianca—fiercely intelligent, passionate and loyal, a match for him in every way.
He had everything a man could ever ask for.
Even if she never loved him back.
Chapter Thirty-One
To the surprise of everyone at Perusia, Frances took Greta protectively under her wing in the next few days. She sent a stream of requests to Cook for various dishes she thought would be beneficial. She refused to allow Greta any spirits or wine, only strong tea—but in great quantities. She plied her with eggs and beef broth with fresh vegetables and fresh fish, but no pudding. When Bianca wondered where her great-aunt had gone one morning, she found both women in the kitchen, toasting bread on forks at the hearth.
“And when it’s nicely browned, we’ll put some of this lovely cheese on top,” Bianca heard her confide, sounding unusually warm and inviting. Greta, looking much better in a proper dress with her hair combed and braided, smiled slightly, swaying on her feet as she held out her fork.
Max looked askance when she relayed the scene. “Should they give Greta a toasting fork? She has a history of attacking—”
About a Rogue EPB Page 26
