WAYLAND’S, LONDON - JUNE 6, 1816
WILLIAM
The higher a man rose,the farther he fell. But what happened when he nearly touched heaven and had to come back down?
Probably something like this, this crushing, aching revulsion that overwhelmed me, slipping through my veins like ice. It wasn’t sorrow. Nor was it a tender melancholy for the possibility of tomorrow, a tomorrow that tempted me in a way I hadn’t known before. Though that pitiful dream lay smashed at my feet.
It was disgust. Pure and simple disgust.
Her name escaped me, even as I stared at her wide, aghast eyes.
I had been distracted the only time we spoke, a lifetime ago. More important things occupied my head that day. Matters of life and death were more essential than the name of the slip of a girl in breeches who scolded me in an abhorrent accent.
Shewashiswife?
That much I remembered with absolute certainty. This captivating creature before me, the one whose hand had foundher kiss-swollen mouth with shock. Her fingers caught there on her lower lip.
She was that bastard’s wife.
Her unfairly beautiful eyes were filled with disgust and loathing. Mine almost certainly reflected something similar.
Without a word, she turned. She ripped both the doors open and disappeared into the discord inside. Silken butterflies and embroidered flower petals chased her, trailing in her wake.
Her delicate golden mask remained clutched tightly in my grasp.
Eight yearsearlier -Yorkshire
“Mr. Hart! Mr. Hart!” Every bleeding time I sat down she started squawking.
“What is it, Mrs. Talbot?” She rushed through the doorway, all flushed, ruddy cheeks and cotton skirts.
Breathing heavily, one hand pressed to her ample bosom, the other supporting her against the doorframe, she panted, “She’s missin’, sir! Miss Adriane, she’s missin’,”
The first time, I had managed to temper my reaction.
The second had been a struggle.
But when she fell into a chill after the third time and couldn’t rise from bed for a week, my patience had abandoned me.
“Damn it all! Not again. I pay you to watch her when I’m not able to!”
“I can’t make her do nothin’,” the woman protested. “There aren’t enough pounds in the whole country to pay me to sit there when she’s bein’ all unnerving like.”
“That’s exactly what I pay you—generously, I might add—to do. If you cannot, I will find someone who can. Have youchecked the kitchens?” A frustrated hand tugged through my unruly curls.
“Humph.”
Oh, bleeding hell. I did not have time for a sulk. I tossed my spectacles onto the desk, onto the law book I had been attempting to read. Pinching the bridge of my nose, I steeled myself for the coming megrim.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Talbot. I did not mean to imply that you were replaceable. You’re far too important for us to live without you. You know how I worry about Miss Adriane. Have you had the opportunity to check the kitchens? I would not wish her to burn herself.”
“She was layin’ on the table that way she does when she’s bein’ vexin’. Talkin’ ’bout the darkness and the worms and the stars again. Actin’ like a child even though she’s a woman grown. An’ I told her she wasn’t to talk like that no more, but she wouldn’t have it. So I said, I don’t have to listen to this no more, an’ I went to the drawing room. Just for a minute so’s she’d stop. But I came back and she weren’t there no more. And the door was wide open, so I came to find you.”
The speech was delivered in one breath and poorly enunciated, so it took a moment to glean the most important bit of her story.
“Which door was wide open?”
“The front one. Why would I be tellin’ you about it if it weren’t the front door?”
