Fool Me Twice (10 page)

He meant to kill only himself.

She forced herself to face him. He still stared fixedly into space, but his hand was playing over the pistol, stroking it. What an awful, meditative rhythm his fingers struck up. “You mustn’t do this,” she whispered.

He did not seem to hear her.

She could not bring herself to approach him. All she could do was speak. “Please, Your Grace. Whatever it is that troubles you”—such a lie; she knew exactly his cause for grief, and it was
her
fault, she realized,
her
fault for having abandoned the newspaper where he would find it, where his eyes would fall on that headline, that last dash of salt into an already mortal wound—“it isn’t worth your life.”

She might have been talking to a stone for the
notice he took of her. But the quality of his gaze seemed to change. To focus on something invisible to her eyes, somewhere in the air in front of him. His face tightened, seemed to harden. For a moment she wondered if he would speak—if he would rave now to the ether, and complete his lunatic resemblance.

But he said nothing. And she began to wish he
would
speak, for the silence was dreadful, deep and unnatural and dire, like the hush after a sudden fatal accident. The very house seemed to hold its breath.

She saw deep shadows beneath his eyes, almost like bruises. He looked like a man in the grip of a fever, burning up from within.

“Your Grace,” she said again.

This standoff could continue forever. Either she would surrender to cowardice and go, or take hold of her courage and . . . approach.

She did not know which she would do until her feet were carrying her forward.

Shaking, she knelt down before him. She put her face in front of his, but he did not focus on her. He was in a trance of some kind. Only his fingers kept moving, stroking the pistol.

Every instinct in her, every shred of self-interest, fixated on the gun’s presence so close to her—and on his hand, which might so easily trip the trigger.

“Your Grace,” she said. “He is not worth your life.” The words triggered a flood of anger, scalding, directed outward, across the city. Bertram was worth nothing, not even a spare look from a street urchin. A cabinet appointment? Salisbury would have been wiser to appoint a slug. “He is beneath your contempt.”

Did his fingers briefly pause? She could not say.

Her anger grew. It made her reckless. “If you don’t like it, get up then! You think this gun is your answer?
You
have let him do this. You have
given
Bertram your office.”

No reply.

Very well. If he meant to ignore her, then she would speak to her heart’s content. “You don’t even answer letters,” she said. “How odd, how bizarre, how
childish
is that? Why, how could Salisbury
not
replace you? You might as well have put his hand into Bertram’s. And now that Bertram has your office, will he make half the use of it that you did? Will he bother to support the laborers, or to think of children in the slums? Will he fight for their schooling? Ha! He won’t care if they never learn their letters. It will make them better peons if they can’t read to save their lives. He cares nothing for the poor—nobody does.
You
were the only one who did.”

She fell into a breathless pause, appalled by herself—by how sharply, how boldly, how
fluently
the speech had spilled from her.

But then, strangest thought, it came to her that his hair was the color of beaten gold.

And that made her angry all over again. He did not deserve to look like a fallen angel, or a warrior, either. “
You’ve
done this. You’ve given him the post he’ll use to enrich himself and his friends at the Bank of London. Because he never would have had the office had it not been for
you
deciding to retire from the field!”

His lashes fell. He stared now at the gun he stroked, as though her speech,
which was the truth,
affected him not at all.

She gritted her teeth, boggled, furious. How could this be the same man who had written and delivered so
many powerful, breathtaking speeches? Who had waged battle with his colleagues for the sake of the unfortunate—and whose continuous, earnest struggles were so amply documented in the files in the study downstairs?

Suddenly she was no longer afraid in the least. Let him fondle his gun. What would he do with it? The same as he did with himself: nothing.

She clambered to her feet. “I thought you lacked bullets,” she said. “But I suppose it would only take one. At this rate, nobody will notice—you’ve driven them all away.
England
will not notice.”

He flinched.

It was enough to drop her back onto her knees, to look into his face more closely. The flat line of his mouth gave her more hope. It was an expression.

“I lied,” she confessed. “People would notice.
I
would notice, of course.”

No reply.

Frustration bolted through her. But she remained crouched before him for one simple, stupid reason: she could not forget all those pages he had written, the gorgeous meditations on improvement, on virtue—and the profoundly messy speeches, as though he’d made drafts upon drafts, demanding ever more of himself, for the sake of people, strangers, he would never meet, who might benefit from his labor.

She looked at him now, exhausted and beautiful and locked so deeply inside himself, and some weirdly bittersweet emotion choked her. Was there no way back for him? Did he not realize he’d made the
choice
to be alone?

On a desperate stroke of daring, she reached out to touch his face—tipping up his chin, as he had once done to her far less gently. “Look at me,” she said.

To her shock and triumph, his lashes rose. It gave her a jolt; as they stared at each other, her every breath felt shallower, harder to draw.

His skin felt warm, rough from his whiskers. He felt
human.
It was so easy to think of him as a monster—or as a mannequin, too angular, too perfect, to be fashioned from pedestrian flesh.

But he was only a man. Only and entirely a man. She felt the slight, irregular tremble that moved through him, and sensed the rigidity with which he held himself still. He was making a great effort to restrain himself—but from what?

“You are so much more than this,” she whispered. “Why do you insist on hiding away?”

He did not answer. But he didn’t look away, either. He had worlds in his eyes; they were magnetic. He was a force of gravity, and his presence, even in this blackest moment, could not be confined to the small, dark space he had made here for himself. The force of him felt like an invisible wave, overwhelming her, crushing the air from her lungs: such was the power of his gaze. He was larger than this room, larger than this house. Why had he tried to make himself so small?

“You deserve better than this,” she said. “Give me the gun.”

One corner of his mouth lifted. It was a dead smile; a chilling, lifeless expression. “You have no notion of who I am,” he said. “Girl.”

I know more than you realize,
she thought. What she knew of him—his ruthlessness toward his brother; the injustice he’d done to Lord Michael and Elizabeth—had helped her justify how she meant to deceive him. But the files she had read . . .

She pulled back. Who was
she
to help him? Her motives were black, through and through.

“You were a good man, once,” she said as she stood. “You could be so again. It is up to you.”

“A good man?” His voice was cutting. “ ‘A savior to the poor,’ do you mean? ‘A ministering angel’?”

He spat out these common praises as though they were vilest slander. “Yes,” she said. His brother had loved him very dearly once. And his public works showed that he’d been worthy of that love. His wife’s betrayal had deranged him, but beforehand . . . “You did great things—”

His smile silenced her. It cut through his features as sharply as a knife. “Despite all you have seen, you still believe that? You think the newspapers had it right. You are a fool, Mrs. Johnson.”

She took a hitching breath. He would not intimidate her now. She crossed her arms and stared down at him. “Were you not the author of the education reform bill? Did you not take a stand for the workers who suffered in the fire at the Hallimore factory? Did you—do you not fund your brother’s hospital?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Such a résumé. Very impressive. And what you have witnessed in this house—how does that fit into this noble picture? Tell me, ma’am—by what possible contortions have you made this evidence fit with my reputation?”

She opened her mouth, but her brain could not fit it with a reply. How curious, how perverse, that he should be asking her to defend him—against himself!

She might have lied anyway. She might have made an excuse for his behavior. But even what she knew privately could not excuse all of it. “I don’t know,” she said flatly.

“But you do. What you have seen in this house is the truth: the man I always was. Now you know it.” He shrugged. “And so do I.”

This philosophical drivel suddenly annoyed her. That he would terrify her with a pistol and then spout all this nonsense . . .

She stepped back a pace. “I see you feel very sorry for yourself,” she said sharply. “Forgive me, but what a
pathetic
reason to kill yourself. Even the playwright of a farce would come up with a better motive.”

He laughed. “Kill myself? Mrs. Johnson, there are four bullets in this pistol. None of them are for me.”

She caught her breath and prayed her comprehension did not show on her face.

“Won’t you ask who they’re for?” he said mildly.

“No.” Four bullets would be sufficient for each of the men to whom his wife had written . . . and with whom she had betrayed him. “It’s not my concern.”

“When has that stopped you?” He pushed himself to his feet, rising lithely, up, up, up—he was several inches taller than she, which was a feat. She was not accustomed to having to look so far up at anyone; she could not be blamed, surely, if the act made her take another step backward. “But will you still urge me to go into the world again?” he asked lazily. “Because if I do, it will not be to save orphans.”

Finally, she understood.
This
was why he refused to leave—because he knew that if he left this house, he would kill the men who had made him a cuckold.

A horrible thought gripped her: if he murdered Bertram, her own life would become so much simpler!

She caught her breath, appalled by herself—and by him, too. He looked light on his feet, easy, like a
man accustomed to long, athletic days out of doors; he looked suddenly amused, in control, nothing like the mute, entranced, suffering soul she had encountered a minute ago.

And suddenly she felt outclassed. It was a startling and unpleasant and very novel experience, but somehow he had done it: he had turned the tables on her, not with brute strength but with his wits. For now, if she encouraged him to leave these rooms, she would be a party to his murderous intentions.

And he had made sure she knew it.

“I can’t say I support murder,” she managed. She hoped God took note of this virtue, and marked it as a counterbalance to her longer list of sins.

His head tipped as he studied her. His eyes were the shade of some deep, stormy ocean, and far too intelligent for her comfort. “And if it were not murder, but justice?”

This felt like a test designed by the devil to tempt her. “Murder is the sloppiest form of justice ever devised. It punishes the doer as much as the receiver.”

“Oh, rest assured, Mrs. Johnson—I would not suffer pangs of conscience.”

She stared at him. He looked steadily back, his well-shaped lips turning into a dark, easy smile.

For a twisted moment, that smile seemed beautiful to her, and infinitely seductive. Darkness became him. He was blond and beautiful as an angel, but was not the most famous angel the one who had fallen from grace?

“Have I shocked you?” he asked.
“Do
forgive me, Mrs. Johnson.”

She should pretend that he had shocked her. How much more awful to admit that she envied his
confidence—his refusal to be ashamed—and his indifference to God and the fate of his soul. How free it made him.

The next moment, she came to her senses. He was not free. He was the furthest thing from it. “I’m shocked by your stupidity,” she said through a tight throat. “Murder might not trouble you, but once you were caught and tried and
hanged
for it, you’d be uncomfortable, indeed.”

His smile faded. “No,” he said. “It would not be more uncomfortable than . . .” Something raw and vulnerable flickered across his face. “This.”

She knew that feeling. She
recognized
it. It was the look of a person in purgatory, unable to look with a quiet heart toward the past, and hopeless of seeing a better future.

She stepped away from it. Why should
he
feel so? He had no right. Even
she
could see his way to the future. He was a duke; what stopped him from doing whatever he liked? Only he himself did.

“There are a thousand ways to take revenge without killing someone,” she said bitterly.
Give me a look at your private files and I’ll take care of one man for you. Give me a tenth of your wealth, a twentieth of your power, and I will find my way very easily.
“But none of them, Your Grace, can be undertaken while cowering against a wall.”

He nodded once, contemplative. “I do wonder,” he said, “what it is
you
want, Mrs. Johnson.”

She hesitated. “What do you mean? I want nothing.”

“So it would seem. It seems you would have nothing to gain from bearding the lion in his den. Yet you attempt it, again and again. Ergo, you must have something to gain by it, after all.”

She did not like this line of inquiry. But at least it was
the sort of idle speculation that a man bent on murder did not spare the time to make. “Have I bearded you? You still look rather hairy to me.”