Addicted

by Charlotte Featherstone

  “I’m tired, Ann.” She was feeling weak and fatigued, but most of all she did not want to talk about Lindsay and what had happened between them the night of the masquerade ball. She had told no one, not her father, and most certainly not her mother. She had to divulge a few of the details to Aunt Millie. Aunt Millie’s companion, Jane, knew a bit more than her aunt, but Anais had convoluted the truth to suit her needs. The only person who knew the full truth was Garrett, and he had been remarkably supportive, not to mention silent.

  “I’m very disappointed in Lord Raeburn,” Ann said, stroking Anais’s hand with her fingertips. “I thought for certain he would propose to you. How wrong I was.”

  “It’s all right, dearest,” Anais said, trying to smile for her sister’s benefit. “It wasn’t meant to be.”

  “But you loved him, Anais.”

  “In truth, it would not have been a sound alliance.”

  Her sister shot her a dubious look. “And an alliance with Lord Broughton would be more sound, then?”

  “Ann,” she warned. “I am not talking about such things with you.”

  “I’m fifteen now,” she wailed, “and Squire Wilton’s son kissed me beneath the Maypole. I’m a woman, Anais. I know about such things as love and marriage.”

  “Really? Then you are much more educated than I, for I understand none of it. Now, off to church you go. I think I hear Mama calling your name.”

  “What of Lord Broughton, Anais, are you going to marry him?”

  “Garrett is a friend, Ann. A very dear friend.”

  “Just like Lindsay was your very dear friend?”

  Anais looked toward the window, to the black night beyond and the white snow that fell in a straight, heavy line. “Lindsay was a dear friend. But that was before.”

  “I’m sorry that Lindsay ran off instead of proposing to you. I would have liked to have him for a brother-in-law. He is much more sporting than Lord Broughton.”

  “Lord Broughton is a very kind man. He is very loving, very forgiving.”

  “And what has Lord Broughton to forgive you for?” Ann asked, immediately pouncing on the little slip.

  “For not marrying him despite—” Anais looked away and brushed a small tear that escaped unchecked from her eye. She did not finish her thought. Could not finish it, despite the very great need she had to confide in someone. She felt so alone, so empty inside. But then, she had made her own choices and the consequences were hers alone to live with.

  “I hope someday you shall be able to tell me the truth of what happened between you and Lord Broughton in Paris, Anais. Perhaps you have convinced Mama and Papa that this mysterious illness of yours is nothing but a trifling fever, but you have not fooled me. I would hate to think you could not share confidences with your own sister.”

  “Confidences can be such burdens, Ann. I contracted my illness while traveling abroad. Lord Broughton returned me home to convalesce, there is nothing else to say.”

  Ann’s blue eyes swept along the covers that shielded Anais’s form. Anais could not help but draw her knees up farther, hiding deeper beneath the blanket. “I suppose time will tell us, won’t it?” Ann said with a sad wistfulness. “Good night, Anais.”

  “Good night, Ann.”

  Her sister smiled and let herself out. Sighing heavily, Anais looked about her room, feeling tired and drained. Her body was tired, her mind and the worries that constantly plagued her further drained her of what little strength she still possessed. She wondered if she would ever be free of the worries she harbored. Perhaps it was her penance to live every day in fear that her secret would be found out and exposed to the world.

  The clopping of horse hooves on the cobble lane outside broke through her thoughts and she slipped out of bed, watching as her sister and mother were handed into the carriage by a footman dressed in his blue-and-silver livery. Where was her papa? she wondered. Perhaps he was already in the carriage. But it was not like him to not wait for the ladies of the house to enter the carriage first.

  The carriage door slammed shut and within seconds, the four white horses were in motion, carrying her family the short ride into the village and the Christmas Eve church service.

  Reaching for the book that sat atop her bedside table, Anais reached for it only to have it slip from her fingers and land with a loud crack against the floor. She startled in surprise. It was a loud, ringing sound for so slim a volume, and the resonance echoed throughout her room. The echo, she noticed, was followed by a peculiar thudding on the stairs below.

  Strange. Who could be running up the stairs in such an undignified manner? Shrugging, she bent at the waist to retrieve the book and straightened in horror. The almost overpowering scent of smoke wafted up between the floorboards and she ran to the door, breathless despite the minute exertion. Throwing open her chamber door, Anais saw that the hallway was engulfed in fire. The staircase, that only minutes before Ann had descended, was swallowed in black smoke and orange flames. Shutting the door as the wind came from below and licked the flames into a soaring giant tower, Anais scrambled to her dressing room, praying she could escape down the stairs before the fire consumed that portion of the staircase. But as she reached for the latch, she realized it was locked and the key missing. Squelching the panic that arose in her breast, Anais fought to clear her head of the dizziness and the burning sensation in her chest. She was trapped.

  The house, nearly two centuries old and built entirely of wood and plaster, would be engulfed by fire in no time. She did not have minutes to waste in panic.

  Anais looked to the window and ran to it, flinging open the sash and ignoring the bitterly cold air that rushed in. Tearing the velvet draperies from the wooden rods, she ignored the heaviness in her chest and went to work tying them together before she reached for her blankets and drew the coverlet from the bed.

  There was no recourse left, the window was her only means of escape.

  5

  The wind howled through the forest and down the mountains, only to whirl around the lumbering conveyance. The chill air somehow found a way through the tight seams of the carriage frame, plummeting the temperature inside so that the interior felt like an icebox. Burying his chin into the folded depths of his greatcoat, Lindsay felt another chill race down his spine.

  “Damn cold,” he grunted, burrowing deeper into the warm Yorkshire wool of his coat. What bloody timing to arrive back in England during a snowstorm.

  As the rhythmic rocking of the carriage continued, Lindsay fought to stay awake, but soon his eyes grew heavy until it was impossible to hold them open. Within minutes he was dreaming. Dreaming of dry, arid heat and the scent of Arabian spices that sifted through the waving branches of cypress trees.

  In his dream he was back in Constantinople, where the saffron-colored sun hung heavy on the azure horizon, illuminating the cobalt and gilt tiles of the Islamic columns of the Kapali Çarsi. The sun burned hot on his cheeks. The scarf he used to protect his head from the heat rippled in the breeze as the salt-scented air rolled in from the Sea of Marmara. That salty, spicy breeze was the only reprieve from the scorching heat of the midday sun and the sea of humanity that swarmed inside the covered bazaar.

  Inside the Kapali Çarsi, viziers and pashas smoked their hookahs while their slaves and attendants bartered for goods for their richly furnished homes. It had been there, in Constantinople’s covered bazaar, that Lindsay and his traveling companion, Lord Wallingford, found themselves meandering through the hundreds of stalls that sold everything from spices and nuts to hashish and beautiful women who were bought by rich men as new acquisitions for their harems.

  Constantinople’s voluptuous exoticness was so different from his genteel England. He was so very far removed from the glittering ton and the fancy town houses in Mayfair. Far away from his responsibilities to his family and the estates in Worcestershire. Yet Constantinople had not been far enough away from the reaches of his past. He still remembered how Anais had fled from him the night
she’d discovered him in the hall with her best friend. No physical distance could make him forget that strangled cry of shock and hurt, nor the distraught look in her eyes.

  Now semiawake, he struggled to find his way back to his dream—to a time where nothing had mattered but the warm, lazy days spent in decadence. To the days when the hookah and a beautiful concubine had been all he needed to wile away the hours and deaden the pain of his failure.

  But damn him, the dream would not return. It remained elusive and he was faced once more with remembering how Anais had seemed to vanish into thin air after she left the Torrington masquerade. He had looked everywhere for her, but she had evaded his pursuit, denying him the chance to explain that he had not set out to seduce her friend or to destroy her faith in him.

  After searching throughout England he’d traveled across the channel to France. He had learned from Anais’s mother that she had gone abroad with her aunt—a trip, Lady Darnby had told him, that had been planned for some time. But he knew better. She’d gone to France in order to be free of him.

  He had immediately set out for the continent, but hadn’t been able to locate her in Paris. It was then that Wallingford grew frustrated with him and his obsession with finding Anais. After weeks of fruitlessly searching Paris, Lindsay had allowed Wallingford to persuade him into accompanying him to Constantinople where Lindsay had been seduced, not by beautiful women, but by the allure of opium. Opium, that heavenly demon.

  The carriage swayed sharply, pitching to the right. Lindsay found himself fully awakened, and he shook his head free of the memory of his time in Constantinople, as well as the bitter memories of Anais.

  “You were dreaming,” Wallingford said, tossing him a fur for his lap.

  The temperature had dropped again and the carriage, despite its cushioned silk and thick blinds, could not keep out the chill from the violent winds.

  “I was remembering how warm the breeze was when it blew in from the Bosphorus. Perhaps we should not have left the warmth of Constantinople,” Lindsay muttered, lifting up the blind and seeing nothing but the blinding whirl of snow outside the window. “I had almost forgotten how damn cold England gets in December. Although, this amount of snow is quite rare so early in the season.”

  Wallingford nodded as he puffed on his cheroot. “It is bloody cold. But three months ago we were not thinking of winter when we left Turkey. We were thinking of other things—like the beauty of the woods in the fall. The sound of the wind howling through the forest as it blows from atop the Malvern Hills. We had had enough of traveling, had we not? We were anxious to see England again.”

  “Indeed.” But had he not experienced that dream of Anais all those months ago, he might still be in Constantinople, wasting away his days in lavish Eastern decadence. He had been lost for days at a time, the opium his only companion in a world of silk veils and velvet pillows. Where he had only had a taste for opium before, he now had a consuming hunger.

  “Sir,” one of the footmen called, rapping his fist against the back of the carriage. “We need to stop, milord.”

  With a tap of his walking stick against the trap door, Lindsay signaled for the coachman to bring the team to a stop. As the six grays came to a prancing halt, Lindsay threw open the door and covered his face with his arm as snow, wild and angry, gusted inside the carriage.

  Lindsay could not help but notice how red-cheeked and shivering the footman was, despite the beaver hat and numerous layers of thick woolen capes. “The stallion is rearing in the box carriage, milord. Jenkins says that the animal has begun to suffer from the cold.”

  “Not acclimated yet,” Lindsay called over his shoulder to Wallingford. “I’ll ride him the rest of the way. That should warm him up.”

  “Bloody fool,” Wallingford yelled after him after Lindsay disembarked from the carriage. “You’ll get yourself killed riding that animal in this weather.”

  “I spent a fortune on him. I’ll be damned if I allow him to die from the cold. He’s going to stud my stables and he can’t very well perform when he’s frozen, can he?”

  “Damn it, Raeburn,” Wallingford grunted as he tossed his cheroot into a drift of snow. “You know I won’t let you go alone. Not in this weather. Bloody hell, man.”

  Lindsay tossed his friend a smile. “Come, it will be like old times, when we were neck-or-nothing youths galloping at breakneck speeds down the mountainside.”

  “Our bones were not so easily broken in our youth,” Wallingford grumbled as he raised the collar of his greatcoat to protect his face from the biting wind. “Nor were our heads, for that matter.”

  “You sound like Broughton when he used to chastise us for our foolish recklessness.”

  “I’m coming to believe that our dear friend was the more intelligent of the three.”

  “Come,” Lindsay said, not wanting to think of how he had betrayed Broughton, as well as Anais. Instead, he stalked to the box carriage to where his prized Arabian stallion was snorting and stomping.

  “Lead on, Raeburn,” Wallingford said, following in Lindsay’s wake. “And if we are so fortunate to make it home alive, the first to enter the stables may buy the other a warm pint of cider and a hot woman.”

  Lindsay gained the stallion’s saddle and took up the reins, turning the Arabian in the other direction. Through the snow, he ran the animal as safely as he could while ignoring the biting wind. On instinct, Lindsay guided the horse down a path he had followed countless times in his lifetime.

  As the familiar sites came into view, Lindsay slowed the stallion as it pranced along the icy path that overlooked the town of Bewdley nestled snugly in the vale below them. Ice pallets floated aimlessly atop the black waters of the Severn River, reminding Lindsay of the paintings he had once seen of the remnants of an iceberg after it had crumbled into the sea.

  Tossing its sleek black head, the Arabian’s billowing breaths misted gray and evaporated amongst the snowflakes that were circling about them. Tightening the reins, Lindsay settled the rearing animal before casting his gaze to the roof of St. Ann’s Church that dominated the view of the town.

  Below the ridge lay the sleepy village he had called home since birth. But tonight, the quiet little village of Bewdley was coming alive. Its residents were strolling down the cobbled streets, candles in hand as they made their pilgrimage to church. To the west of the town center, huddled in the valley where a small tributary broke away from the Severn and formed a creek, lay the first of four prominent estates that anchored Bewdley’s aristocratic society. Wallingford’s family estate bordered the forest. Broughton’s was to the east and only minutes down the ridge. His own home, Eden Park, rested on the other side of the bridge. And directly below him lay Anais’s home, which he had not seen in nearly a year.

  Scouring the Jacobean-style mansion from high above the valley, Lindsay blinked back the snowflakes that landed on his eyelashes. The earthy, acrid smell of wood burning in the cold air drifted up to meet him and he inhaled the scent, so familiar to him, yet so long since he’d been home to smell its aroma.

  It was Christmas Eve and the coal was replaced in the hearths of the faithful with a Yule log that would burn throughout the holiday. Lindsay watched the smoke billow out of the three large chimneys that loomed above the peaked roof. The calming scent took him back to the time when he was young and carefree. A time when he once sat beside the hearth and ate plum pudding and custard with Anais after the Christmas Eve service.

  His gaze immediately focused on the last window on the right side of the house. A gentle glow from a lone candle flickered lazily. He could almost imagine Anais sitting on her window bench staring out at the sky with her chin propped in her hand. She adored winter. They had sat side by side so many times watching the snow falling gently to the ground. No, that wasn’t entirely the truth. She had watched the snow, he had watched her; and he had fallen more in love with her than he had ever thought possible.

  He slid his gaze from her window and allowed it to roam ov
er the land where the verdant green fields were now covered in a thick white blanket that shimmered like crystals in the silver moonlight; where the hawthorn and holly hedgerows that marked each farm were weighted with snow. Only the occasional red bunch of holly berries could be seen peeking out beneath its white winter blanket.

  Again the wind began its low moan through the branches of the forest behind them, and Lindsay brought the collar of his greatcoat around his chin, staving off the cold and the chilling wail of the wind. It was a melancholy sound that somehow resonated deep within him.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Wallingford asked, reigning in his mount to stand beside his. “The wilds of nature are unparalleled here, are they not? Nowhere can you appreciate her more than in the Wyre Forest. I shall have to paint this view when I get home,” he said, scanning the grounds below them. “I’ve never seen the vale looking so desolate and untamed, yet so hauntingly beautiful.”

  “Spoken like a true artist,” Lindsay drawled, unable to keep his eye on the hedgerows. Unfortunately, he kept stealing glances at the lone candle in the window, wishing Anais would appear; hoping the dreams he had of her were not the omen his soul believed them to be.

  “When shall you call upon her?” Wallingford asked quietly after noting the direction of Lindsay’s gaze.

  “I don’t know.”

  “When we left Constantinople you were hell-bent on finding her. For the three months it’s taken us to arrive in England you’ve been having nightmares about her. You’ve feared the worst. Now you lack the conviction to see for yourself if your vision was real or merely a deception of the sultan’s hookah?”