Gwen laughed and sniffed and wiped tears from her blue eyes. “It seems this place is impossible to escape.”
Lawrence frowned, not catching her meaning. He looked out of the window. The trees were mostly bare.
“Was there a storm?”
“Yes,” she said with a hitch in her voice. “Yes . . . there was a very bad storm.”
But Lawrence was asleep again.
DR. LLOYD ARRIVED within the half hour. He arrived to find Sir John standing at the foot of the sick bed and Gwen hovering solicitously by Lawrence’s side. The doctor had become used to the strained silence between Sir John and the young woman from London, and privately he was happy for her that she hadn’t married into the Talbot family. Not as long as Sir John was the master of the house. Cold, stiff-backed old bastard, Lloyd thought. Never got over his wife’s suicide, as if his own heart had stopped beating when Solana’s had, and Sir John had not been the warmest of men before that. Now with one son dead and the other polishing the hinges on death’s door . . . well, he thought, Miss Conliffe must have the patience of a saint to have put up with Sir John all this time.
These thoughts ran through his head but he wisely kept them off his face.
He pulled a chair close and carefully unwound the blood-encrusted bandages. Lawrence Talbot’s shoulder, chest and back looked like a map of a train yard. Lines of black sutures crossed and crisscrossed the bruised flesh. The doctor grunted and sat back for a moment, staring at the wounds. The wounds were remarkably well knitted, the lips of each laceration showing tight seals with almost no swelling. He bent to sniff the dressing and found nothing amiss. The wounds had been infected for a while but there was no telltale smell of suppuration. He held the back of his hand over the gashes—no heat, either.
“How is the pain?” he asked.
“It’s . . . ,” Lawrence began and trailed off. His face wore a quizzical expression. “It barely hurts at all. More of a dull ache. You’re too good a doctor for a small town like this.”
Dr. Lloyd grunted again. “Make a fist.” Lawrence slowly curled his fingers into a fist. Lloyd’s eyebrows rose. He held out a finger. “Squeeze my finger.”
“I feel weak as a baby,” Lawrence protested, but he grasped the doctor’s finger and squeezed. His efforts brought a wince, but it was on the doctor’s face.
Sir John shifted closer, watching with great interest. Lawrence noticed him and looked up.
“Father, what did the Gypsies say?”
A small smile curled the edges of the old man’s lips. “That the Devil has come to Blackmoor.”
The doctor withdrew his hand from Lawrence and quietly redressed the wounds. He met no one’s eyes as he did so. As soon as he was finished, he shoved his instruments into his bag and rose.
“What’s wrong,” Gwen asked. “Is there infection or—?”
Dr. Lloyd shook his head and finally met Lawrence’s eyes. “This is . . . remarkable. A week ago I would have said that you’d never use that arm again.”
“And now?” asked Gwen.
The doctor looked steadily at her. “He was missing his entire tendon and most of the muscle. It seems . . . um . . . to have healed.”
“ ‘Healed?’ ” echoed Sir John.
“It’s truly remarkable.” He turned back to Lawrence, but almost at once his eyes shifted away. “Remarkable.” He straightened his shoulders. “I’ll be back to check on you at the end of the week.”
Lawrence said, “Doctor . . . thank you. You’re a miracle worker.”
“Not I,” said Dr. Lloyd, and he still did not meet Lawrence’s gaze as he turned and left. Singh ushered him out.
ONCE THE DOCTOR was gone, Gwen plumped Lawrence’s pillows and Sir John came and stood by the foot of the bed.
“Miss Conliffe,” he said softly, “thank you for staying with us during this difficult time. Perhaps if there was any sense of filial obedience in this house we wouldn’t have inconvenienced you so.”
Gwen stiffened and Lawrence looked from her to his father, sensing tension and rightly guessing that this was another round in an argument that had played out over the last few weeks, and her words confirmed his guess.
“Lawrence was just trying to find out what killed Ben,” she said with frost, “as you well know. What he did was heroic, and he did it out of love.”
“ ‘Love’?” repeated Sir John, shaking his head. “No, my dear, I think there was some stronger motivation. It is seldom love that compels a hunter to enter the forest.”
Lawrence said nothing. There were many things about that night he couldn’t remember, but the burning hatred and towering rage—those things he remembered with perfect clarity. But he did not want to side with his father against Gwen.
“Call it what you will,” insisted Gwen, “but Lawrence was not being a willful child. He’s a man.” Her voice faltered for a moment. “A fine man . . . and he’s suffered terribly.”
“To no good purpose,” Sir John countered.
“No? We know that Ben’s murder wasn’t the random act of some madman passing through the region. Wasn’t that one of your theories? Well, this was no lunatic who attacked the Gypsy camp.”
“No,” he said, “but we don’t know what it is, do we?”
“No . . . but now we know that whatever it is—it’s still out there.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Dr. Lloyd had left a sleeping draught for him and despite his protests Singh had all but forced it down his throat. Lawrence vanished down a black hole. He wasn’t sure if it was for hours or days. The act of waking, of confronting the reality of what had happened, of being poked and prodded by Dr. Lloyd, interrogated by his father, watched like a hawk by Singh and comforted by Gwen—all of this was too much for Lawrence, and he drifted back into an exhausted sleep. But it was sleep, not coma.
When he woke it was in the depths of night. Gwen was no longer in her chair. Lawrence had some vague memory of Sir John insisting that she take a night in the bed that had been provided for her across the hall, a bed she had barely used since the attack. Although he would have liked to speak with her here in the quiet privacy of the night, he was equally pleased to be alone.
His shoulder throbbed strangely. Not quite pain, but not a comfortable feeling. It was a strange sensation, as if things were moving beneath his skin. Lawrence had read about surgeons placing maggots on infected wounds because the little vermin ate only necrotic tissue and would not eat healthy flesh. Whereas he could understand the scientific logic of that, it nevertheless profoundly disgusted him and he hoped to God that there were no wriggling grubs beneath his bandages.
He swung his legs out of bed and placed them on the carpet, and for a moment he distracted himself by flexing his toes in the thick nap. But the strange sensation continued. He experimented with his grip by opening and closing the hand of his injured arm. Earlier that hand had been stiff and un responsive, but now the fingers moved and the muscles worked correctly as he clenched and unclenched his fist. The action comforted him, but it made his shoulder throb and itch.
“So far so good,” he said aloud, aware that his voice was a rusty croak from disuse. He’d nearly burned his throat raw recounting the whole story of the attack earlier in the day, and had said very little since. Singh had brought him endless cups of tea and honey, and Gwen had spoon-fed him soothing broth.
Standing was a challenge and Lawrence took hold of the bedpost and used his good arm to pull himself slowly to his feet. The room did a drunken jig for several nauseating seconds, but it settled down more quickly than he thought. Even so, he stood still for a full minute before he tried a step.
His muscles felt weak, but not as weak as he expected from nearly a month in bed. He tottered slowly across the floor to the window and looked out at the night. The sky was a velvet black with a gibbous moon washing the landscape with pale silver.
There was a tall dressing mirror nearby and he walked carefully to it and examined his drawn face and peered into
his own dark eyes.
“Who are you, you old beggar?” he said, barely recognizing the face. His shoulder throbbed again and Lawrence drew a breath as he made a very hard decision. He knew that at some point he was going to have to confront the truth about how badly damaged he was. No matter what nonsense the doctor had said about his tendons regrowing, Lawrence knew that he was likely to be at least a partial cripple. He was already wondering how the limitation of his mangled arm would impact his performance on stage. Shakespeare was a demonstrative playwright and, though subtlety of voice was important, gestures and physical performance were crucial.
“There’s always Richard the Third,” he told his skeptical reflection.
Steeling himself, he unbelted his robe and let it fall to the floor, and then with great care and caution he began to remove the bandages. The doctor had used what seemed like miles of gauze, and Lawrence unwound many turns of it, letting the cloth fall to the floor. But a perverse part of his mind noted that the lengths of gauze piled at his feet looked more like ghostly entrails. He cursed his own imagination for conjuring that image. The itching sensation was nearly maddening and he wanted to tear off the rest of the bandages and scratch like a madman, but that would be foolish. Dr. Lloyd had said that between what the Gypsies had done for him and his own work, there were hundreds of sutures holding his flesh together. God. Hundreds.
He removed several layers and now he was down to it. One large section of thick padding lay between him and the reality of what he would have to live with for the rest of his life. What horrors would he encounter? And, more importantly, would he be able to face the truth? He thought he would, but now at the moment of commission his certainty was faltering.
“Come on, you coward,” he scolded himself.
He lifted the padding away, and the sight indeed turned a knife in his bowels. His skin was a mad patchwork of crusted scabs that ran from shoulder blade to nipple and from sternum to armpit. The blood was crusted and hard and it itched worse than ever.
“Son of a bitch,” he swore as he poked experimentally at one of the scabs. The pressure didn’t hurt as much as he thought it would and when he pulled his finger back some of the scab stuck to his fingertip and pulled clear of the wound.
Only there wasn’t a wound beneath. He bit his lip, hoping that maybe the wounds were less widespread than they looked. Maybe a lot of the scabbing was just smeared blood that had dried on his skin.
He scratched lightly at the edge of one of the scabs. It resisted for a moment and then flaked away. Lawrence frowned. His shoulder itched terribly and he used his nails to crack more and more of the scabbing, scratching as much to satisfy the itch as to reveal the extent of his injuries. The scabs fell away, and stuck into them were bits of catgut and medical sutures. He kept at it, the action quickly becoming obsessive as more and more of his wound was revealed.
Only it wasn’t his wound.
As the scabs fell away all that he could find were thin white lines to show where the long and terrible slashes had healed. There were no open wounds. No lines of stitches, no patchwork of ruined flesh. All he found was a network of pale scars that barely marked the places where teeth and claws and tried to tear the life out of him.
“God . . .” he breathed, shocked at what he saw, though he suspected, deep in his heart, that God had little to do with this.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Later that day—and against the insistent warnings of Gwen Conliffe—Lawrence Talbot went downstairs. He called it “rejoining the world.”
“But your shoulder!” she stressed.
“It hardly hurts,” he soothed; that was a lie. His shoulder did not hurt at all, but he had not shared this with anyone. He had not yet sorted out what he thought about the miracle, if “miracle” was a word that could be applied to this. “But . . . if you’d let me lean on you I’m sure I’ll manage not to trip down the stairs.”
He said it with a smile, the kind of harmless flirtation a convalescent can get away with, but Gwen blushed all the same. Even so, she offered her arm and Lawrence made it down to the sitting room, and he was glad he had her there. The arm may have healed but he was still far from steady on his feet.
When they paused on the landing, Lawrence took a few seconds to catch his breath. “When did father have those extra five hundred steps installed?”
“I told you this was too soon.”
“Don’t scold me, Gwen,” he said, not yet letting go of her arm. “I couldn’t take being confined in that room another minute. I’ve been restless all morning. . . .”
She gave his arm a small squeeze and was about to say something when Sir John stepped into the hall. He saw their interlaced arms and said, “Well, well.”
Gwen blushed a deeper shade of red and disentangled her arm from Lawrence. “He needed help on the stairs,” she said defensively.
“I daresay.”
Lawrence did not like the cold accusation in his father’s tone, but he understood it. Gwen had been engaged to Ben. Any show of affection that he might show to Gwen might be construed as bad form, and too soon. To rescue the moment he said, “Well, you kept me from doing a series of pratfalls that would have done nothing for my reputation . . . but I think I can manage from here.” He turned to the Ming urn set between the staircases and spotted the silver walking stick the old Frenchman had given him. The wolf’s head seemed to snarl at him and as he reached for it he felt a wave of revulsion, but he snatched it up regardless and leaned on it. “This will do fine.”
Sir John grunted and indicated the drawing room with a sideways tic of his chin. “If you’re up to it, we have company.”
“I—”
“An inspector down from London.” Sir John stepped closer. “He wants to ask questions, Lawrence.”
“No!” protested Gwen. “Lawrence isn’t nearly up to an interrogation.”
“No he isn’t,” agreed Sir John. “So let’s make sure that’s not what it becomes.”
Lawrence said, “It’ll be fine, Gwen. I’ll do anything to help.”
Sir John studied his face. “Very well then.”
INSPECTOR ABERLINE WAS a cool customer; Lawrence could see that much right off. He had the easygoing mannerisms of a common laborer overlaid with a veneer of education, but Lawrence wasn’t fooled. And despite the blue twinkle of his eyes Lawrence could see the calculating mind of a hunter. Under other circumstances Lawrence would have liked to play cards with this man. You can learn so much about a man from the way he played cards.
The inspector sat comfortably in an armchair. A cup of tea steamed in a china mug on the table beside him. Sir John stood beside the big globe, spinning it slowly though his eyes were fixed on Aberline.
“He was quite seriously injured, Inspector,” said Sir John. “Quite grievously injured, and his memory seems affected. I don’t know what use he can be to you.”
“Certainly there will be a more advantageous time,” agreed Gwen.
“I completely understand,” said Aberline diffidently. “Only . . . if I could have just a few words with him. A completely unofficial interview . . .”
“No, no,” said Sir John, his jaw set and eyes hard. “No.”
“Even the briefest exchange,” insisted Aberline, “could be infinitely helpful to us.”
“No!” said Sir John and Gwen as one.
“Yes,” said Lawrence, and everyone turned to him in surprise.
“Lawrence,” Gwen began, “don’t let—”
“It’s all right. I’d like to understand what happened, too.”
“It’s foolishness,” snapped his father. “You’re clearly unwell. This is an outrageous imposition on your convalescence.”
Lawrence nodded, although his eyes were fixed on Aberline, whose smile did not reach as high as his eyes; however, Lawrence thought he understood this man. Sir John’s rant trailed off as he watched the exchange between the inspector and his son. He sighed.
“Oh, very well, damn it.”
“If you push my son, Inspector . . . if you cause him distress in any way, then official papers or not, I’ll throw you out. Your intrusion is taxing my civility.”
As he said this Singh stepped into Aberline’s line of vision and stood, heavy arms folded, behind Lawrence.
Aberline looked faintly amused, but he inclined his head. “I understand, Sir John. I will not abuse your generosity.” With that he turned to face Lawrence. “Francis Aberline, Scotland Yard. It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Talbot. I’m an enormous fan of your work. It was my very good fortune to see your performance of Othello in Edinburgh some years ago. I agree with the critics who said that you have redefined Iago for the modern stage. Bravo, sir.”
“That was on my first European tour,” said Lawrence, surprised at the praise and the fact that Aberline had seen his work. “I suppose an inspector would appreciate a well-turned villain.”
Aberline smiled. “Indeed I do, sir. And I was delighted to have caught you as Hamlet. Let me just say that I’m sorry to hear of your troubles. I hope they won’t impede your return to the stage.”
“Thank you.” Lawrence was listening to Aberline’s tone as much as his words, and he noted the ever-so-slight stress on the words ‘caught you.’ A slip? A trick? In either case Lawrence felt himself retreat a pace mentally. For his part, Aberline appeared to be trying to read Lawrence’s face. Well, he thought, let him. He knew that police were good at reading lies and half-truths, but Lawrence had nothing to hide and even if he had . . . his whole life was built around deliberate inflection, to conveying only what his interpretation of the script demanded and nothing more. Let the man look.
Aberline must have realized that Lawrence had caught him in his assessment and he covered it with a laugh. “Forgive me for staring. I really can’t impress upon you how much I am moved by your melancholy Dane. Are you certain you are feeling well enough for a few words?”
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