Addicted

by Charlotte Featherstone

  “I can still feel her,” Lindsay found himself muttering. “I smell her. I can hear the sound of her heart beating in my ears. I can still feel her nails scraping along my shoulders and the sound of my name on her lips.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “She has betrayed me.”

  Wallingford steepled his fingers and tapped them across his lip. “I am sorry, Raeburn.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re the most cynical man I know. You’re not surprised she has betrayed me, you expect betrayal from women. You think of them as nothing but deceitful manipulators who are only after a title and a fortune.”

  “I am sorry that Anais has meddled with your heart. The feeling cannot be at all pleasant, I’m sure.”

  Lindsay closed his eyes, shoving the pain away, but Anais’s image flashed before him, followed by the image of his child. “I wanted more than this!” he cried, shoving himself up from the chair and pacing before the hearth. “I wanted more than memories of her. I wanted a life—and she has taken it from me.”

  Wallingford followed him with his dark, fathomless eyes, not commenting, only watching—absorbing.

  “It hurts to breathe. It hurts to live. I hate her, yet I do not think I can exist without her.”

  “There is a very fine line between love and hate, my friend, and that gray area is usually desire.”

  Lindsay closed his eyes, fearing the visions while at the same time welcoming them. Visions of Anais in his bed. Anais beneath him. His daughter lying content against his chest, sleeping in innocent wonder. Love, desire, anger, hate.

  “Are you surprised by her betrayal? Did you think Anais not capable of deceit?” Wallingford asked.

  “Not of this magnitude. Not something this cruel.”

  Wallingford nodded and reached for his tumbler. “Women, like men, are capable of unspeakable cruelty—never forget it. It is the human condition to hurt and destroy. It is our compulsion—our fate, to devastate those we love most.”

  Lindsay looked up at the painted ceiling of Wallingford’s study and saw the image of plump women with long, unbound curls cavorting in clouds as if they were angels. He closed his eyes, blocking the images. “I never thought her capable of destroying me.”

  “Who is it you love with such passion and fervor?” Wallingford asked. “Anais the paragon or Anais the woman she is now? Who is it your body cries out for, Anais the woman who stands upon a pedestal in her mantle of idyllic womanhood or the woman who has sinned?”

  Lindsay’s eyes snapped open and he saw that Wallingford was pressing forward, watching him with unreadable eyes. “In the seconds before you climax with her and you look down into her face and you see yourself in her eyes, and you feel your hearts become one, who is it you lose yourself in, Raeburn? Anais, the childhood friend who could do no wrong or Anais, the girl you made a woman?”

  The ticking of the clock sliced the taut silence, tick, tick, tick.

  “Both.”

  Wallingford smiled almost cruelly. “You cannot have both. One of them must die. One of them is surely dying now. She can only be one person to you. She cannot be your angel and your mistress. She cannot save you and fuck you.”

  “No.”

  “Yes,” Wallingford hissed. “She can no longer be the Anais we knew as boys—the girl who was never tempted to be anything but good. She has been tempted—tempted by you, and she is no longer pure and untainted. You have given her the taste of pleasure and sin. You have made her mortal and now you wish to punish her for what you yourself have done to her.”

  “No,” he cried.

  “She is no longer your angel, Raeburn. She is your Eve.”

  “You don’t understand—”

  “I understand more than you think. You want the demure little angel, you want her to save you from your demons and your opium habit. You need her kindness and understanding. Yet you want the little minx she’s become. You’ve become addicted to her cries of pleasure. You want the fucking. But angels don’t do that, do they?”

  “Stop referring to it in such a coarse way!” he roared. “She does not fuck me like your dalliances fuck you.” The atmosphere became taut and both men stared at each other, chests heaving. “I make love to her,” he growled.

  “Beautiful, passionate love,” Wallingford drawled as he waved his hand in a mocking manner. “Your souls intermingle and you become one, and yet despite this connection, this morphing of two into one, you cannot offer her your forgiveness even when you have demanded that she forgive you.”

  Lindsay narrowed his gaze. “Her transgression far outweighs mine.”

  Wallingford smiled smugly. “How very human you are. Instead of forgiving and moving on with the one person who shall haunt you for the rest of your days, you stand here before me, cataloging and weighing her trespasses and reasoning that because hers are more weighty, you are justified in your indignation and your self-righteous behavior. You should be at home loving her, forgiving her, losing yourself in her mercy and sweeping her up in yours.”

  “How can you say that when you do not know what she has done? I never expected this out of you.”

  “So that is the way of it!” Wallingford vaulted up from his chair. “You’ve come here so that I can mollify you and share in your belittling of Anais? Well, you’ve knocked on the wrong bloody door, Raeburn, because I will not join you in disparaging Anais. I will not! Not when I know what sort of woman she is—she is better than either of us deserves. Damn you, I know what she means to you. I know how you’ve suffered. You want her and you’re going to let a mistake ruin what you told me only months ago you would die for. Ask yourself if it is worth it. Is your pride worth all the pain you will make your heart suffer through? Christ,” Wallingford growled, “if I had a woman who was willing to overlook everything I’d done in my life, every wrong deed I had done to her or others, I would be choking back my pride so damn fast I wouldn’t even taste it.”

  Lindsay glared at Wallingford, galled by the fact his friend—the one person on earth he believed would understand his feelings—kept chastising him for his anger, which, he believed, was natural and just.

  “If I had someone like Anais in my life,” Wallingford continued, blithely ignoring Lindsay’s glares, “I would ride back to Bewdley with my tail between my legs and I would do whatever I had to do in order to get her back.”

  “You’re a goddamned liar! You’ve never been anything but a selfish prick!” Lindsay thundered. “What woman would you deign to lower yourself in front of? What woman could you imagine doing anything more to than fucking?”

  Wallingford’s right eye twitched and Lindsay wondered if his friend would plant his large fist into his face. He was mad enough for it, Lindsay realized, but so, too, was he. He was mad, angry—all but consumed with rage, but the bluster went out of him when Wallingford spoke.

  “I’ve never bothered to get to know the women I’ve been with. Perhaps if I had, I would have found one I could have loved—one I could have allowed myself to be open with. But out of the scores of women I’ve pleasured, I’ve only ever been the notorious, unfeeling and callous libertine—that is my shame. Your shame is finding that woman who would love you no matter what and letting her slip through your fingers because she is not the woman your mind made her out to be. You have found something most men only dream of. Things that I have dreamed of and coveted for myself. The angel is dead. It is time to embrace the sinner, for if you do not, I shall expect to see you in hell with me. And let me inform you, it’s a burning, lonely place that once it has its hold on you, will never let you go. Think twice before you allow pride to rule your heart.”

  “What do you know about love and souls?” Lindsay growled as he stalked to the study door.

  “I know that a soul is something I don’t have, and love,” Wallingford said softly before he downed the contents of his brandy, “love is like ghosts, something that everyone talks of but few have seen. You are one of the few who have seen it and sometimes
I hate you for it. If I were you, I’d think twice about throwing something like that away, but of course, I’m a selfish prick and do as I damn well please.”

  “You do indeed.”

  Wallingford’s only response was to raise his crystal glass in a mock salute. “To hell,” he muttered, “make certain you bring your pride. It is the only thing that makes the monotony bearable.”

  Slamming the door shut, Lindsay stepped out into the dark night and pulled the collar of his greatcoat around his ears. With one last glare at Wallingford’s front door, he snarled and turned to walk down the gaslit street, wandering along as if he was in a dream.

  Goddamned selfish bastard! Wallingford choking back his pride for a woman? Damned liar, Lindsay scoffed. Wallingford wouldn’t choke back anything if it were in aid of a woman. The man was a misogynist. To Wallingford, women were good for one thing and one thing only.

  Damn Wallingford for saying those things to him. For forcing him to confront what he feared—that he wanted Anais to be the two women he loved. He wanted his angel and he wanted his sinner. And both were now out of his reach.

  Damn her, she had kept his child from him! Had given his own flesh and blood away as if it were nothing more than an outdated dress a lady would pass on to a maid. Didn’t she realize that Mina was a part of him? The creation out of their love and shared passion? The product of that night in the stable where he had given everything of himself to her?

  Stalking along the cobbles, he felt a snort of indignation creep into his throat. She had denied him the one thing he wanted more than her love—her child—their child. And he could never forgive her that. Even now, his body burning for her, he could not erase the anger he felt when he thought of what she had done.

  Rounding the corner he saw that he was no longer in Mayfair. Ahead was Soho—the dividing line between the pleasant, well-ordered West End and the seedy, dark East End. It wasn’t always safe to be traveling in a coach in the East End let alone on foot, but he had become something of a regular in the dregs of the eastern parishes. He could handle himself and whatever trouble came his way.

  Feeling the familiar hunger awaken in his belly, Lindsay continued ahead, waiting to find the little alley, rife with rats and rubbish and overflowing cesspools. And through this little alley he would find himself in St. Giles Parish where vice of any kind was available for purchase—bodies—dead or alive. Women, or even more abhorrent, young girls. Ale and gin. Fenced items and even murder could all be purchased from the many rookery rats lurking about the dark streets. But what he wanted, what he came to St. Giles to purchase, was not sex or drink, but opium.

  Skirting to the left, he found the dank, narrow alleyway off Petticoat Lane. Ignoring the whistles from the whores who gathered in the corner of the crumbling brick buildings, warming themselves by a fire that had been lit in an iron pot, Lindsay stalked on.

  “Oh, gov’ner, I’ve got just what ye need.”

  “A case of the pox, or the clap, I should imagine,” he grumbled. Christ, he was in a mood. Normally when he traveled this path, he tossed the whores pound notes and continued on his way, but tonight he was not feeling charitable.

  “C’mon, gov, give ’ol Bess a try. Let me see what ye got hidin’ in those fancy trousers of yers. I bet ye’ve got lots for Bess to play with. I’m good on me knees, lovey. I bet your fancy lady back ’ome don’t take your lovely cock in ’er mouth.”

  Fishing through his waistcoat, he pulled out a fiver and tossed it to the women. “Purchase a room and some food,” he snapped, then continued past the whores until he could see the ramshackle houses of St. Giles. Lord, had he ever really noticed the despair before?

  Of course he had, in some part of his mind it had registered in his brain that these people lived in reprehensible conditions. Had he not spoken of the filth and squalor and the multitudes of homeless children to parliament? Had he not petitioned Russell’s Whig government to set about change and clean up the East End so that these people might have some dignity and basic human rights?

  But he had never really seen the extent of the waste, the pain, the unending hardship that loomed before him. Until today. Every other time he had journeyed here, his mind had been clouded with opium, or the lure of procuring the opium.

  Christ, opium had blinded him to so many things.

  Standing before the door of his preferred smoking den, Lindsay looked through the windows that were covered with smoke grime. Taking the door latch in hand, he let himself in. No such thing as a butler or porter in this establishment. Not here in Tran’s seedy Oriental opium den.

  “Meester, sir,” Tran murmured as he bowed over and over again. “You come back. You spot is here.”

  “Good,” Lindsay replied. As he followed Tran to the back of the den, Lindsay picked his way through the crude hard pallets where the poor and down on their luck lay on their sides, smoking their pipes. Soldiers and sailors, whores and criminals were strewn about, some conscious, some just beginning to feel the effects of the drug.

  In the back of Tran’s establishment, through a low-beamed arch, the silk cushions that were plump and embroidered with dragons and cherry blossoms awaited. This was where the elite came to smoke their opium—far away from Mayfair. Far away from discovery. These were not dilettantes out for a lark, but habitués, like himself. Disciples, he admitted, blind followers to the powers of the sinister beauty of opium.

  “You sit,” Tran said. “I will get servant.”

  “No, no,” he murmured, holding Tran by his coarse jacket. “I will do it myself.”

  Tran nodded. “I get pipe.”

  Lindsay lowered himself to the cushion and removed his greatcoat and jacket. One needed to be comfortable when one was indulging in the pipe. As he waited for Tran to bring him his pipe and the weigh scale along with the decorative box that held the opium, Lindsay looked out upon the floor and allowed his gaze to linger over the others who had come to indulge themselves in the heavenly demon that was opium.

  He felt slightly ill when he took in their situations. Some were nothing but walking skeletons, and others, just new to smoking opium, struggled to create an effective vapor to inhale.

  In the corner beside him, some young men, obviously well-to-do and of the burgeoning middling class, laughed and giggled as they shared a pipe around a circle of friends. That had been what it was like in Cambridge. Except Broughton had always vomited from the taste and Wallingford had more often than not passed out after one or two inhalations, leaving him free to smoke as much as he liked.

  There were always whores in an opium den, and Tran’s was no different. Tran was a man of discriminating taste. Only the finest Oriental beauties with their black shining hair and exotic eyes were employed by him. On occasion, Tran was able to procure local London girls with their famed peach-colored skin and ample bosoms.

  “Here is pipe,” Tran said, holding out the bamboo stick. Bending down, Tran placed a brazier at Lindsay’s feet and lit it with a sulphur match. “You want girl this time?”

  Lindsay looked about and saw a petite Asian girl eyeing him intently. She was lovely and exotic with long, straight, black hair that would wrap nicely around his hands and his body, and perhaps, in the days before he knew Anais carnally, he might have motioned her over to him. There they would have shared the pipe and shed their clothes in front of everyone. Sex was out in the open in a den, so that one could fuck and smoke at the same time. It had never bothered him before, but it disturbed him now. He couldn’t imagine anyone seeing Anais beneath him as he made love to her. He couldn’t imagine smoking opium while Anais watched him.

  Suddenly he felt dirty and shameful, like a leper begging in the streets. He never wanted Anais to find him here. Never wanted her to see him smoking opium.

  Not before tonight had he felt any shame in smoking. So what was different now? What made the very thought of lying down on this cushion and smoking the pipe so unpalatable?

  “That girl?” Tran asked as he broke int
o a smile and pointed at the woman on the other side of the den. “Pretty girl. She please you.”

  “Not tonight, Tran.”

  Tran bowed and left him to prepare his pipe. Most men of Lindsay’s class preferred to have a servant sit with them and prepare the opium while they lounged about. He, on the other hand, preferred to do it himself. He enjoyed the slow seduction, the allure of preparing it, waiting for it, hearing it calling to him.

  Crouching on his feet, he opened the tin that housed the opium and pinched some of the aromatic black strands that resembled tea leaves. Weighing it, he was satisfied he was using just the right amount to produce the desired effects. Placing the opium in the warming pan, he poured some water in the reservoir of the pipe and waved it over the heated brazier.

  This was where the opium became a mistress. This was when she was to be coaxed and coddled so that she would produce a satisfying round of intercourse.

  As he waited, Lindsay continued to look around and noticed that the once-giggling and boisterous young men were now sleeping deeply on their sides. One of Tran’s servants was blowing out the flame of the brazier while the Asian beauty he had seen earlier was busy rifling through the sleeping men’s pockets. Lindsay wondered how many times his own pockets had been picked while he lay in an opium-induced dream.

  Below him, a sailor made a gurgling sound and flopped onto his back. Lindsay waited to see the rise and fall of his chest, but it remained utterly still. Another soul lost to the opium den, he thought with his characteristic detachment.

  He had seen many die from smoking too much. He had seen many—men and women—sell everything, even themselves, for just another chance at the pipe. And as if to prove himself right, a young man barely into his twenties crouched beside him.

  “Some company, guv’ner?” he asked. “I can do anything you want, if you’ll only share what yer havin’.”

  Lindsay looked at the man and saw that his body was wasted and thin. The boy was dying and opium was his disease.