At the sound of his entrance, she turned to face him. It took time for his vision to adjust, for him to see enough to confirm his first, impossible impression.
The woman was Diana.
Chapter Twenty
Gervase stared at her. “For God’s sake, Diana! What are you doing here? Did you wheedle the direction out of my lawyer and come to check that I was doing what I said I would?”
Her face was pale over a soft brown dress whose simplicity emphasized her graceful figure and rich coloring. “I’m here because this is my home, Gervase. I lived here for eight years, and I still own it.”
He tried to make sense of her words. “Then . . . you know Mary Hamilton? Have you been the one taking care of her?”
“No.” She moistened dry lips with her tongue, then spoke, her voice almost too low to be heard. “I was christened Mary Elizabeth Diana Lindsay Hamilton. I am your wife, the girl you married against your will.”
The silence stretched, then snapped. “Impossible.” Gervase felt the numbness of shock even as his voice denied her words. “You are intelligent, normal. You look nothing like her.”
“Do you really remember what the girl you married looked like? Think back, then say she couldn’t be me.” Diana’s voice was level, but she was braced against the window frame for support, her fingers white-knuckled on the sill.
As they stood separated by the width of the cheerful room, he tried to connect his memories with the woman before him, the woman he knew so intimately. He had thought the girl in the inn had dark brown hair and brown eyes, but Diana’s chestnut hair and lapis eyes were dark in dim light.
Surely he would have remembered Diana’s exquisite features, her heart-shaped face? But the face of the girl he had married had been veiled in dark hair, distorted with fear and weeping. She didn’t have Diana’s lush feminine body, but she’d been scarcely more than a child, her body just beginning to develop.
A slow chill of horror began deep inside him even as he spoke the key denial. “Her mind was afflicted. She could barely speak. Her face was slack, her eyes strange. You could never have looked like that.”
“No?” Diana’s voice was bitter. “It isn’t difficult when one has been drugged into unconsciousness. You were wrong about me but correct about my father. He was quite, quite mad. When he traveled, he took me along for fear I would lie with half the parish in his absence. When we stayed at an inn, he would force me to take laudanum, waiting until I swallowed it. Then he would lock the door from the outside to be sure I couldn’t leave.”
She waited for the beginnings of belief on his face before continuing. “Mind you, I can understand why you decided there was something wrong with me. I had difficulty waking up, and when I did, at first I thought you were one of the horrible nightmares that come with laudanum. I couldn’t understand or believe what was happening.”
Diana halted, unable to continue as she recalled the night in full, agonizing detail. Waking up to the terror of a stranger’s invasion; her father’s indecent delight at the thought of ridding himself of his loathsome daughter; the strange, unreal ceremony. Then her husband’s fury, his implacable strength as he ripped and defiled her body in unimaginable ways.
She shuddered, then spoke with rapid sarcasm, trying to bury the memories. “Of course, if one is going to be raped, there is something to be said for being drenched in laudanum first.”
The memories were horrible, but they came from the past and were less important than the present and future. Deliberately she slowed her breathing, which had quickened in remembered panic. “When our paths crossed in London, I was terrified that you recognized me, the way you stared, then came over and took me out of that group. But you never showed any sign of knowing who I was. I suppose that was because you were so sure you had married a simpleton.”
He asked flatly, “Did you recognize me?”
“Oh, yes, my lord husband,” she said softly. “I recognized you the moment I saw you.” The furious face of the man who had so reluctantly married her had been burned indelibly on her brain—the wide cheekbones, the clear light eyes, the chiseled lips twisted into a thin line. She would have known him anywhere, even if half a century had passed.
There had been times in the past when she thought Gervase remote, but they were nothing compared to the bleak withdrawal in his face now. Speaking more to himself than to her, he said, “So you devised the perfect revenge. You trained yourself in harlotry and sought me out, knowing that no man could resist you.”
He was staring as if he had never seen her before, as if she were some unspeakable creature from the depths of the earth. “How long did it take you to discover the finest, cruelest method of injuring me? Did you know in advance, or did you only realize it when you came to know me better?”
“Neither!” Diana was startled and suddenly frightened. “I didn’t seek you out for revenge. When I came to London, I had no thought—nodesire—to meet you. But then I did. Since you wanted me, it seemed like a God-given opportunity to become acquainted, to learn what kind of a man I was married to. And when I did . . .” Her voice faltered. It was difficult to continue in the face of his revulsion. “And when I did . . . I came to love you.”
“You lying, traitorous bitch.” The viciousness in his voice was scalding. “You can actually stand there and play the innocent, even after so many lies.”
He paced a few steps closer, his lean body explosive with fury. “And I thought your father mad for saying you had a vile nature. Tell me, Diana, how many men have you lain with, or are there too many to count? How many times have you and your friends laughed and mocked me for my incredible stupidity? Were you working with the Count de Veseul all along? Or did he approach you and you decided that compromising my work as well as my soul would be a delightful and profitable bonus?”
“None of that is true!” she cried. “No one, not even Madeline or Edith, knows that we are married. I have never given my body to Veseul or to any other man. Only to you, my husband. And the first time, I didn’tgiveit to you—you took it, against my will.” Even in her fear at how disastrously wrong this confrontation was going, she could not restrain the bitterness of her last sentence.
“Do you honestly think I will believe a word you say when you have been deceiving me since the moment I met you?” he asked incredulously. “Only my blind, mind-warping lust kept me from seeing through you. You always seemed too perfect to be true, but I wanted to believe in you.” Pain roughened his voice. “My God, how I wanted to believe.”
“Of course I deceived you at first,” she said with exasperation. “Don’t you remember saying that if I ever came near you or any of your properties, or used your name, that you would revoke the settlement and leave me penniless?”
“I should have known that money was at the bottom of it,” he said scathingly, “even though you did such a fine job of pretending to be less grasping than most of your kind.”
“That’s exactly why I wouldn’t let you settle a regular income on me,” Diana said, hoping that he would see this as a proof of integrity. “It seemed wrong to be taking your money twice over when you didn’t know who I was.”
“So instead of asking more for yourself, you had your friend Madeline do it, preserving your facade of saintly unconcern.”
