Lady in Red (31 page)

As the room came into sharp focus, Mary’s entire body simmered with anticipation. Her eyes widened with the bright colors of the silk wall hangings, contrasting with her father’s austere dress. The silence that surrounded her erupted with the voices of all around her and the return of the orchestra’s sweeping waltz.

Suddenly, her father was greeting Edward with a staid smile upon his handsome face. Edward appeared just as any grateful guest should, bowing his head only slightly to a fellow duke. And then Edward was gesturing toward her.

The racing of her blood did not diminish as she slowly stepped before the Duke of Duncliffe. With deliberate ease, she lowered her fan and sank into a curtsy.

Her father’s smile remained fixed for a moment, but then it began to die a slow and painful death. The muscles seemed to collapse as his features paralyzed with disbelief. He stared down at her face, his eyes blank, then flaring to life with the most shocking emotion . . .
love
. Wild, rabid love.

“Esme!” he exclaimed before he reached down and grasped her fan hand with his own. Those fingers clasped hers with fervor, massaging against the glove as if to assure himself she would not disappear.

She could not seem to move as her father’s eyes darted over her face, devouring its planes and contours. Then a most alarming thing happened. His reason vanished as did his love. Pure terror shone from his orbs. “Forgive me,” he choked out.

Anthony Darrel, Duke of Duncliffe, fell to his own knees before her.

The guests’ chatter faded into an abrupt silence. As dominos fall, gaze after gaze turned toward them until even the orchestra’s playing stopped abruptly, punctured only by the errant bow of a violin.

“You must forgive me,” her father begged.

It would be so easy to torment him. To play the ghost, but that was not the lie she wished for herself and her mother. All she longed for was truth. “Why should I forgive you . . . Papa?”

His face creased into a map of confusion and then dawning lit his eyes. “N-not Esme.” He swallowed quickly but did not rise from his knees. “Of course not, my darling pearl.”

Tears sprung up in his blue eyes and suddenly her father appeared twenty years older than his true age. His shoulders sagged and the skin of his face slackened. “I miss your mother so much.”

This is what he had to say? After years of misery? After he’d sent her away to a madhouse? He missed her mother? She wanted to retort with savage sarcasm that if he missed her so much, perhaps it had not been wise to shove her to her death. Those words she managed to keep back. She had other words to say, after all.

The terror that had briefly seized the older duke slipped away as he murmured, “I was informed of your death.”

“A lie.” Her lips moved numbly, the whole situation dreamlike, surreal.

Unbelievably, a warm smile lifted her father’s lips. “Thank god.”

He yanked her forward, pulling her against his smooth cravat and waistcoat as he pressed a kiss to the top of her head the way one might do to a small child. “You are returned to me.”

Mary pushed away from him, his very proximity enough to send her insides reeling with nausea. “Why did you do it?” Her throat burned with the demand. “How
could
you?”

“Sending you away . . .” His voice broke before he sucked in a breath. “It was the only thing to do. I did it for your protection.”

“Protection?” she echoed. Mary felt no tenderness and she could not help but wonder if this was some performance, like all the other performances he gave to society to hide his true nature. “You sent me to a madhouse.”

He nodded but seemed to slowly disappear into memories, his eyes dazed. “I feared you would be mad. I feared you would be like . . . your mother.”

Exclamations and gasps filtered around her from those watching, but Mary paid them no mind as she focused on rending every truth from his hateful heart.

Both his hands swallowed her single one up, sending a pulsing ache through her bruised wrists. He leaned toward her. “Say you forgive me. Say . . . say we can begin again. When I heard you died, my heart broke for I never was able to say good-bye.” His large hands, cool and dry, rubbed against hers like old, rumpled paper. “Do you know what that is like? To never say good-bye?”

It took all her strength not to tear her hands from his or to give in to the small girl within who so desperately longed for a father’s love. “I do.”

Relief eased his sagging shoulders. “You understand, then?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Oh, I do understand, for I never said good-bye to my
mother
.”

He blanched but showed no remorse. “Neither did I.”

Fury stung her heart and seized her body at his callous reply. “Because you pushed her down the stairs!”

Another titter of gasps and cries surrounded them, but Mary didn’t care if their audience devoured their conversation whole. She hoped they would finally see her father for the cold creature he was . . . but perhaps her father still longed to keep his facade firmly in place?

The Duke of Duncliffe blinked and his breathing slowed slightly. “I didn’t push her, Mary. Don’t you recall?”

She stole her hand from his unbearable touch. “You did.”

“No,” he countered passionately. This time, a genuine horror lit his once regal face. “I t-tried to catch her. I begged her not to drink so much wine. I begged!” His strong, rough voice pitched up into the shocking whine of one who could not be comforted. “But she would not listen. She would not act the proper wife.”

A flash of memories thundered through Mary. Her mother, a crystal goblet in her hand. A laudanum tincture in another. Her mother had almost always carried a glass of champagne or rich red wine. The images fell upon her swiftly, innocent pictures suddenly meshing into something sinister. “No,” she protested. “That is not true.”

Her father’s face creased with grief. “It is. I tried to save her. I did everything in my power to correct her unfortunate shortcomings. I swore I’d save our daughter before she, too, became mad.”

“By sending me to hell?” Mary said so calmly she didn’t believe she had actually spoken.

“Perhaps it was a mistake,” he began. “Perhaps—”

“A mistake?” she repeated. “My life was a living nightmare and all because of your own failings as a man.”

“I am not a failure,” he snapped, the old anger beginning to rise. “And you will forgive me, as a dutiful daughter must.”

She leaned forward and hissed, “You are a failure and I will never forgive you. My mother will never forgive you. No one will
ever
forgive you!”

That rationality which always clung to his exterior evaporated into rage. His fist clenched and hauled back as if he would strike her, but before he could swing, his eyes flared suddenly. The left side of his face drooped and his mouth opened and closed several times in wordless speech while his blue eyes blazed with panic. Abruptly, his entire body jolted; then he tumbled forward.

“No!” she screamed as his body pummeled into hers and then slid to the floor. “No!” she screamed again, not believing he would deny her revenge even now.

Drool slid from the corner of her father’s mouth and he lay without moving. His wide eyes stared, pleading for help.

Anger throttled through her, singeing Mary’s body. She leaned over him, letting her face linger only inches above his before she cursed him. “You will never be forgiven.
Never!
”

“Mary!” Edward demanded.

Hands grabbed at her upper arms, but she shoved them away as she continued screaming, a relentless chorus of her own hate. “I will never forgive you!”

But her father didn’t move or recoil. He remained locked in his pained position, his eyes blinking and his mouth working furiously. No sound came from that mouth and she suddenly wished that he could say something, anything to make her years of pain all vanish. As a sob tore from her throat, she collapsed upon his chest. Her fingers wound into his black evening jacket and an inhuman cry wrenched from what seemed to be the very center of all that she had ever been or could ever be.

The wailing would not stop as she pressed her face into the stiff folds of his cravat. She sobbed for her mother, for the man she had always wished her father had been, for her own broken life devoid of love. Nothing penetrated the great wave of sorrow. Nothing ever would. Of that she was sure.

Even as hands finally grabbed her upper body and hauled her off her father’s still-breathing form, she shook and heaved with tears and anguish she could no longer keep caged.

Edward swung her up into his arms, cradling her against his chest. She should have felt safe in that embrace, but she knew it was a temporary comfort. Something that would vanish. Just like everything else she had ever loved, he, too, would go. Had he not said it?

There was one more thing to sob for. And she did. She let the pain come over her, swallow her, and spit her out. Perhaps if she gave herself over to it, if she did not fight the pain any longer, she would no longer be under its spell.

“I
shan’t be able to carry you, you know,” Yvonne pointed out to Powers as they slid along the back streets of St. Giles.

Powers let out a snort. “I’ve fallen in worse places.”

Yvonne peered at the slimy pools on the gritty cobblestone. Her lip pulled back in disgust at the image of Powers lying facedown in one of them. “Hard to believe.”

Powers gave a tight gallows smile. “Come, my dear madam. One needn’t be so condescending, given your own familiarity with these alleys.”

She made no reply. Once, she’d known every place suitable for a quick piece. A professional necessity. Things had not changed overmuch in the last twenty years except the rookery seemed to be even more crowded than it had been in her day.

The din of fiddle and drunken men, women, and children from only one street over could be heard in the silence of this cutthroat path. It struck her as shocking that such a place should be allowed to continue festering, germinating the worst of London’s crime. Thank the heavens she was free of it. If she had not gotten out, she’d be dead now . . . or so pox-ridden that only the poorest, sickest of men would have paid for her cunny.

But she was not here for those memories. Oh, no. She’d returned to St. Giles for an altogether more agreeable circumstance.

They continued down the narrow alley, the lack of moonlight making the narrow space as black as molasses. Death lurked at every doorway and cross alley they came to. It might come from anyone, including the smallest child, in this part of London.

Still, she would not pass this opportunity. And as they made the next left turn toward the Merman’s Tail, Yvonne fingered the pistol in her pocket. Her own skin crawled with worry for her companion and, as a consequence, for herself. Powers was truly in no condition to be following, but she could not have gone alone, and he deserved this moment just as much as she.

As they stepped out into the busier, gaslit street, Yvonne hesitated, then jerked her attention back to Powers. His skin blended ominously with his blond hair and each step sent him lurching. Anyone who studied him with any particularity would see him as an easy mark.

Without giving it another thought, Yvonne grabbed his arm and slung it over her cloaked shoulder. “A room, you say, me luv?”

She grinned up at him and started tugging him across the shit-and-trash-covered street. They wove through the stench of unwashed whores and their slightly cleaner pimps with cash in one hand and bottle in the other. And of course there were the drunken customers of gin and slit.

As they made their way around the cart of a hot-chestnut seller, Powers’s uneven step appeared to be that of a man deep in gin going after a bangtail who would likely fleece his pockets as well as tickle his cock. In other words, a common enough sight. And though she loathed it, ’twas easier to recall the swagger of a whore and the businesslike attitude of one escorting a client toward a hasty screw than to risk going into the red-light inn as her more educated self with a sick lord on her arm.

They sauntered into the Merman’s Tail, her now blackened slippers kicking lightly at the straw strewn over the filthy wood floor. She squinted through the smoke until she spotted the greasy-haired, one-eyed porter. “A room, pet, if ye please,” she said in the accent of her childhood and former career.

“’Ow long?” he demanded as he turned slowly and opened a small cupboard hanging upon the cracked wall.

“Half hour, luv.” She dug in her pockets to find the coin, but before she could pull it out Powers smacked her hand away.

“Not you, sweetheart,” he slurred. “I pay.”

The porter smirked, revealing cracked yellow teeth covered in the scum that grows from years of inattention. The patch over his absent eye stretched ominously as he waggled his wiry gray brows. “You got yourself a gent.”

“I ’ave that.” She winked at him, knowing full well he’d expect a cut of whatever she rifled out of Powers’s coat.

“Now give us the damned key, my good fellow,” Powers drawled, his lips moving exaggeratedly.

The porter’s soot-caked fingers scrabbled among the iron keys before picking one. “Number six, my dear. Nice room. Just the thing for your fellow.”

She nodded, businesslike. “Ta very much.”

“Hurry up,” Powers demanded in the perfect tones of a petulant lordling.

“Ah, luv, don’t you worry now,” she soothed. “I’ll show you a lovely time.”

“Better,” he said before he let out a wet belch.

Yvonne’s brow shot up, surprised that Powers could assume the role of slumming client with such ease. It gave her the suspicion he’d played the role before and not in jest.

She pulled him toward the stair, tightening her grip about his waist, wishing he wasn’t quite so big. “Will you be able to handle yourself?” she whispered.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” He sneered, though the sweat beading his brow belied his arrogance. “I will wait outside and ensure no one disturbs your ‘
appointment
.’”

They started up the narrow stair. The walls leaned in, crooked. Paint peeled off them, the very image of skin sloughing off a diseased old woman. Each step creaked with their weight, but soon enough they were up to the hall and heading toward a very different room from the one the porter had intended.