Dawn in My Heart (16 page)

His mind focused on that fact and he concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other.

When he arrived at the gathering, he could have wept for disappointment. It was nothing but a street meeting. Some fool was standing on a block proclaiming the Savior and describing the horrors of hell for those who refused the invitation. The flames from a few torches surrounding the man gave substance to his graphic illustrations. Tertius watched the flickering shadows against the brick walls and on the faces of the poor fools, their faces upturned, taking in the vivid descriptions.

Tertius turned away.

No one could save him now. He remembered those years
of catechism as a young lad. How little those lessons served him now. What was it? Fragments of a verse came to him, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…”

What a joke. Hadn't he wanted? Look where it had got him.

Suddenly he was forced to turn into another dark alley and fall to his knees to retch.

These days he couldn't hold down his liquor as in his youth, or much else, for that matter. Everything disagreed with him. His guts were in a continual turmoil; he'd end his days facedown in a gutter. What an ignominious way to go, he thought, wiping his mouth at last on his neck cloth, unable to do anything about the vile, acid taste in his mouth.

He staggered to his feet and made his way back out to the street. When he finally arrived at his home, Nigel, after scolding him for being out alone, helped him into bed, although Sky tried to shake him off.

“A pity my dear wife doesn't know what a losing bargain she got for a husband. Never mind, soon she'll be a dowager countess, her worries past….” He doubled over in pain as Nigel finished pulling off his boots.

His father was right. He was no Edmund. The word he'd been running from since his fateful wedding night stared him in the face now.

Failure.

The word rang in his mind like a gong. He was nothing but a fraud and failure.

You're not half the man Edmund was and never will be.
How could he ever have thought to fill his brother's shoes? What audacity.

He couldn't even manage a respectable marriage. He couldn't hold his head up in English society. In his thirty-
five years he'd only managed a mediocre success in an insignificant society a thousand miles across the sea. What a colossal conceit to think his puny success would hold any account here in his homeland.

February 1815

T
ertius woke up in Laurette's bed with a blinding headache, and he knew the fever was upon him full force once again. For six months he'd played a danse macabre with it as it attacked in small skirmishes, just enough to let him know it still held sway.

But now he knew he was in for a siege.

He groaned as he rolled over in the soft feather bed.

He touched Laurette's bare shoulder. There was no response.

He shook her harder, but he knew from experience she was a deep sleeper.

“Laurette!” He winced in pain as he spoke her name sharply.

She moaned but didn't waken.

Shaking her more roughly and continuing to call her name, he finally succeeded in semi-awakening her.

“Wha—what is it?” she asked, struggling to form the words.

“I need for you to bring Nigel—my valet—to me,” he managed to say.

Consciousness penetrated. As she took in his appearance, understanding gradually sank in. She shoved her tangled hair from her face and frowned at him.

“What is it? Are you unwell?”

“You could say that,” he replied. Until now, he had managed to hide his intervals of indisposition from her.

She slipped her hand from the covers and felt his forehead. Immediately she withdrew it and sat away from him. “You're burning up.”

She rose from the bed and put on a wrapper. “You've got to get out of here. How long have you been ill?”

As she spoke, she twisted her hair into a knot and searched her wardrobe for a gown.

“Call my man. He'll know what to do,” Tertius said quietly. If he'd felt a little less ill, he'd have found the situation amusing. “It's not the plague, my dear, so I wouldn't concern myself unduly.”

She stopped in midstride, her frown deepening. “How do you know? Have you had this before?”

He nodded wearily, closing his eyes against the pain behind them.

“Why on earth did you come here last night if you knew you were going to be sick? I can't afford to fall ill. I have a performance tonight.”

“Send for Nigel,” he repeated, at the end of his strength.

“Yes…yes! I will!” She finally began to understand what he'd been telling her. He sank back against the pillows as she left the room in her dressing gown to send a serving boy with the message.

By the time Nigel arrived, Tertius's body was racked with chills.

He could hear Nigel talking with Laurette, but he hardly cared what they said or what was being done to him.

“I don't understand it. He was fine last evening. How long will it last?” Laurette's tone became more strident.

Nigel's tone, soft, came through the fog. “We never know how long it last. He come through every time, but his body grow feeble.” As he spoke, he lifted Sky to a sitting position and pulled the nightshirt off him.

Tertius struggled to assist his valet as he dressed him. How he hated this helplessness, but he felt so weak.

“What about me? What am I supposed to do now? How long is he going to be ill?” Tertius could hear the note of panic in her tone as he walked across the room leaning heavily on Nigel.

“How am I supposed to pay my bills? Will I still be able to draw on the bank?”

“I don't know, madam. You'll have to speak to his secretary.”

She grabbed Sky's arm as he was being propelled out the door. “You must continue our arrangement. Do you understand me? You can't leave me stranded like this!”

Tertius nodded wearily. “I'll see to it. You have nothing to worry about.”

After that, he knew nothing more but bumping along in the coach and being carried to his own bed by Nigel.

 

Nigel wearily replaced the wet cloth over his master's forehead.

He was at his wits' end. Since they'd arrived in England, his master had been steadily deteriorating. Now Nigel truly doubted Sky's chance of recovery. He'd done everything he knew to do.

He stood and stretched, then walked to the window. The day was another inhospitable one, the clouds low and gray, pressing on a man's soul.

Never in his life had he been so lonely…or so cold. It was cold that seeped down into the bones and didn't let go.

On his native island, there was always the laughter of adults and children, no matter how heavy the toil. There was warmth and light, bright sunshine and crimson flowers.

The only person to even look at him like a human being since he'd come to London, besides his master, had been that maidservant with her sharp blue eyes, but she had long since left, taken away with the new mistress.

Since then, life had been growing steadily grayer and colder.

He knew what he'd do if he were still on the island.

For a while he thought he'd succeeded here in London. Through another black-skinned footman at another great house, Nigel had at last found a woman who knew the arts of white magic.

He'd gone to see the large woman, her gray hair braided tightly against her scalp in narrow rows. She'd smoked her thick brown cigar silently, reading the ashes as they'd grown
longer on its fat end, and confirmed what he already knew in his heart.

“Your master indeed be cursed.” Her brown eyes, their whites yellowed, looked into his, making him feel she could read everything in his soul. “It be a powerful curse. He near death now, ain't he?”

Nigel nodded reluctantly.

“It be a woman. A woman done it to him. She very angry with him. See him dead before she see him with another woman.”

The witch heaved her heavy body up from the cane chair and moved about her small, cluttered room, collecting things here and there.

Nigel went home with a list of instructions and a bagful of ingredients.

He'd followed it all to the letter—the special baths, the water perfumed with fragrant oils as he'd chanted incantations over his master's wasted frame. He'd put the protective amulet around his neck; he'd burned incenses around his bed, all to ward off the evil attack from across the ocean, all away from the eyes of the other servants.

Lord Caulfield had done his part, summoning the best physicians he knew to prick and prod at his only son's body. Nigel had come to dread the sound of the clink of metal tweezers against metal dish as the physician picked up those leeches, their bodies wet and glistening like wedges of raw beef liver, and set them against Sky's skin, their bodies growing fat as they sucked out his master's life blood.

But all to no avail.

Lord Skylar was weaker than he'd ever seen him.

“Nigel?” His master's hoarse whisper came to him.

Nigel was immediately at his bedside. “Yes, my lord, what is it?”

“I'm going to die, am I not?”

“No, no you're not,” he replied automatically, although it was getting harder to sound convincing.

“It's too powerful for me, no matter how much I fight it,” Sky continued as if Nigel hadn't spoken. “What was it Job's wife told him—‘Curse God and die'? That's what I ought to do, oughtn't I?”

Nigel shushed him and adjusted the covers around his thin frame.

Sky moved his fingers against his neck and felt the string around it. He grinned weakly at Nigel. “Don't tell me…it's some shark's tooth or tiger's claw to ward off evil. I hate to disappoint you, my dear fellow, but I'm afraid it's no good.”

He had tired of talking, Nigel could see.

“I'm taking you home, my lord.”

Skylar raised his eyebrows a fraction, not bothering to open his eyes. “Home? I thought I was home.”

“This isn't your home.”

“You mean back to the island?”

“Home is where your wife is.”

Sky turned his face away on the pillow. “I have no wife.”

“You have a young, pretty wife who been badly treated.”

“The young, pretty thing you are referring to is a harlot.”

“Nevertheless, I'm taking you home,” announced Nigel.

 

Gillian laid her knife and fork parallel to each other at the edge of the blueware plate.

The rabbit pie had been a bit bland. Perhaps a touch of curry added to the sauce? She would speak to the cook about it.

She drained her glass and gave a final pat to her lips with her linen napkin, then refolded it and replaced it in its ring.

As soon as she stood, Sophie rose to her feet from her place by the door and waited until Gillian opened the door. She padded behind Gillian as she left the dining room. There were no footmen at Penuel Hall. She no longer noticed the dark stone walls surrounding her. After the first couple of months, she'd decided it was useless to expend her energies on things she was powerless to change.

She entered a small room where a fire had been lit for her. It was the only room with any semblance of coziness to it and she'd taken it as her sitting room. Somewhere at some point in the history of the Jacobean hall, some lady of the house must have taken pains to decorate it and make it habitable.

Gillian sat down to her needlework frame set up by the stone grate. A coal fire glowed. It warmed her feet through the screen.

Sophie found a place to curl up beside her. In a few moments one of her cats got up from his place on a Louis XV armchair and arched his body in a stretch. After a few wide yawns, he jumped from the chair and walked over to Gillian. She scratched his neck.

“Had a good nap, my boy?” At the sound of her voice the other cat opened his eyes from his place across the room and then reclosed them.

After working on her tapestry for a half an hour, Gillian rose and wandered to the armchair. She turned up the lamp and took the book she had started a few nights ago. She read for an hour then rang for a cup of tea. When it arrived, she sat at the card table in one corner of the room. She shuffled the pack of cards and laid out a game of patience. She would play until precisely nine o'clock and then she would retire for the evening.

She was debating the merits of placing her ten of hearts onto the jack of spades or the jack of clubs when she heard a carriage in the drive.

Immediately, she turned toward the windows, experiencing a momentary alarm. When she'd first come to the wilds of Yorkshire she'd gone to bed each night with a chair pushed against her door and a stout walking stick by her bed, terrified lest there be a new Luddite uprising in the region. It had only been a few years since textile workers had arisen all over the north, rioting, smashing factory looms with sledgehammers and causing fear of a French-like revolution in the country. But as the months went by and nothing untoward had occurred, Gillian had gradually been able to relax her guard at night.

But she never had evening visitors. Those few neighbors of the gentry who had called at first had been discouraged by her manner, and thus, in a short time, her daytime visitors had ceased as well.

She waited, not even daring to get up and peer through the heavy curtains that had been closed to keep out the cold.

The old servant's footsteps echoed in the hall and then the front door opened and a man's voice spoke.

Gillian dropped her cards and half rose, her hand to her throat. What must she do? More footsteps and finally the manservant's voice. Although it sounded excited, it didn't sound unduly alarmed, so the visitors must be familiar to him.

Should she open the door a crack or should she wait?

Deciding on the latter course, Gillian sat at the armchair, too restless to take up her book or resume her game.

She heard footsteps going up the main staircase in the great entry hall. What on earth?

A few minutes later the stoop-shouldered servant entered with a bow. “M'lady, I beg to inform you, t'maister nobbut brought in.”

She stared at him blankly. “The master?” Had Lord Caulfield come all the way up here to see her? “Brought here? What are you saying?”

He cleared his throat. “Yes, m'lady. Lord Skylar. He be sommut ill. I've had him brought to the maister's room, tho' it ain't been made up. I've sent the missus to see to it, if that be all right with you, m'lady.”

She had risen at his first words. “Lord Skylar here?” What was this crazy old man saying? “Ill? What are you saying? Speak clearly.”

“Ech! m'lady,” he replied impatiently. “Lord Skylar nobbut brought in a carriage by…by…” The old man's eyes grew round as he continued. “A blackamoor—a man as broad as a tree, and he done carried his lordship all the way up the stairs.”

At the description of Lord Skylar's West Indian valet, reality began to sink in. Lord Skylar had come to Penuel Hall,
and he appeared to be too ill to walk himself. Why had he come here, of all places?

Trying to collect herself, she took a step back and collapsed into her chair.

“M'lady, will you nut come see his lordship for yerself?”

“No,” she said, hearing the cold, hard tone of her voice. “Lord Skylar's condition is no concern of mine. See to his needs.”

The man stared at her a few seconds. Gillian deliberately took up her book once more and opened it to her place, removing the ribbon marker and setting it on the table beside her. Without looking at the manservant, she said, “You may go. I'll ring if I should need anything.”

“Y…yes, m…m'lady,” he stuttered, and backed out of the room.

She didn't look up until she heard the heavy oak door shut behind him.

Then she let the book drop into her lap and stared before her.

Lord Skylar under the same roof as she! What did he mean by coming here?

What was she to do?

She didn't think she'd ever have to see him again.

It had taken her a couple of weeks merely to feel clean again. There had been that horrendous journey north. The only thing that had made it bearable was the presence of her three beloved animals.

And now, after six months, her husband—the word caused a frisson of revulsion through her—decided to pay her a visit when he was too ill to walk. What did he want? For her to nurse him?