Judith Ivory (36 page)

Christina stood, clinking her cup down on the table beside her. “I said he couldn’t have,” she asserted. “Or if he did, he dyed every hair on his entire body.”

“What a bizarre thing for a wife to know,” Claybourne suggested. He raised a brow and turned a look on her. “Surely, he didn’t completely undress in front of you in broad daylight.”

“Surely, Mr. Claybourne, you can keep your lascivious curiosity to yourself.”

But he was undaunted. He shrugged and picked up a quill. He began playing with it. “It was merely professional interest. To help with the investigation.” He turned to one of the other men standing, staring. “Wethers—” the man’s eyes shifted to him—“you will begin with the undertaker, then? See if you can trace the body directly back to the earl’s arrival that day. Or, if the body we have leads you elsewhere, start at the docks. We need to know what became of the more proper corpse….”

A cold dread began to seep into Christina’s veins. What had she accomplished with all this, with her ten weeks of nearly ceaseless effort? Claybourne was now in charge of the search for Adrien. And never had he had better reason to produce Adrien’s corpse.

Dear God, she thought. Pray there is something—besides her inept help—standing between Adrien and death….

Adrien didn’t know exactly where he was. He knew only that he was locked in a cellar of some old, dilapidated estate; a place where Claybourne could come and go with impunity and where no one else cared to go at all. He hadn’t seen a soul, but Claybourne and Gregory, since the prison.

The cellar was not much of an improvement over that first place he’d been kept. It was dirty. It had a low ceiling, an earth floor. This, and the presence of huge columns, structural support for the house above, every five feet or so, made what would have been a fairly large underground room into a claustrophobic den. And a dark one at that. Except for what daylight came through one high window, the place was lightless.

Adrien was not wild for grubbing around in someone’s dark cellar, but he had dutifully explored. The place held nothing. No cast-off junk, no implements that might lend themselves to a new use; no covered-over windows or doors. There was one small opening on the far dark wall he couldn’t explain. It looked as
though it might have been used for the delivery of something. Coal, perhaps. Though that wasn’t a very good explanation, since the coal furnace was across the room, on the same side as the window. It didn’t matter anyway. Once, he had moved the rocks that were stacked against it; beyond these was a bolted closure, padlocked with a key.

A knock came. Dinner was slid, on a tray, through a small opening at the bottom of the locked cellar door. Sounds from the recesses and dark corners of his room indicated other creatures were more interested in this meal than he. They could have it, Adrien thought. Weak tea. Rather unpleasant looking food. Then, as he bent down, he saw another finger of opium. God, he wondered, what was he going to do with it all?

He had stopped taking it after the first three days. This was something he made himself do. He had continued to pretend, for Claybourne’s sake—and, thus far, there had been no “tests”: His acting was good; it drew on experience. But in reality, he wasn’t about to get entangled with Madam Opium again. Not if he could help it. He needed his wits about him.

He picked up the stick of opium and looked around. He was afraid to hide it in too obvious a place. Claybourne spent too much time down here in this hole with him—and the man paced, wandered, poked. Thus far, Adrien had gotten away with climbing onto the headboard of the cot in the room—the only furnishing—and digging his fingers into the flower bed at the window. That window bed had possibly the happiest little batch of scraggly weeds in Hampshire.

Adrien was almost sure he was in Hampshire. Something about the weeds, the little patch of sky he could see, the air itself; there was spring in the air. He knew the smell of home.

Out of his window, there was little else to see. The
window faced onto a carriage entrance, a drive with an overhang and pillars that blocked out almost any other view.

Adrien began quietly to move his bed under the window again. But he had no sooner gotten it in the right position and climbed onto the headboard, when a carriage, traveling full speed, turned down the drive. It charged into the carriage entrance, spraying gravel in through the window. He quickly got out of the way.

“Gregory!”

It was Claybourne. What was he doing here so soon? Adrien wondered. He never came till after midnight.

“Is he awake?” Claybourne asked.

Adrien didn’t hear the response, but he heard the man get down out of his carriage and stride into the house. His footsteps marched across the floorboards overhead.

“I hope he’s not too stupefied to appreciate this,” Claybourne’s muffled voice said. “We’ve got to have our fun, then be done with it tonight. Tomorrow, I need his corpse.”

Christina arrived home from Whitehall late in the evening. She had had dinner with Evangeline and Charles. But she had not been very good company, she knew.

In the hallway, she took off her bonnet and looked around. There was no sign of Thomas. But the housekeeper came running down the stairs.

“Sorry, mum. We didn’t hear your carriage arrive.”

“No matter.” Christina shrugged out of her coat. She handed over her gloves. “Please tell Cook I won’t require dinner. I’m going straight to bed. Do keep something on for Mr. Lillings though.” She paused. “How is Xavier?”

“Asleep, mum.”

Christina sighed. Her breasts ached with fullness.

“And M. La Fontaine?” Rather than let Adrien’s grandfather go to Hampshire as planned, she had invited him to stay with her at the London house. He was a consoling presence and seemed happy for her company as well.

“He’s fallen asleep in the library.”

“Will you see that he gets upstairs?”

Christina went to her apartments.

She had her bath and crawled into bed. She tried to read. Yet, she couldn’t concentrate. Without wanting to, she kept listening for Thomas, hoping he was so late because he had come across some information worth following—

Yet, he didn’t come and he didn’t come. Eventually she fell into a heavy, restless sleep.

She didn’t hear him when he finally did arrive. Not until he was at her door.

“Christina?”

He had come through her sitting room and peered into her bedchamber. He had carried up a lamp from downstairs. Her own oil lantern still burned dimly on the night stand beside her.

She raised herself up on one elbow and pushed her hair back, away from her face. She squinted at him, trying to awaken, to understand why he was here in her room.

“Did the doctor tell you anything?” she asked. Her voice was foggy with sleep.

“No.” Thomas came fully into the room and leaned his back against the door. It closed. He stared at her for what became a long period of silence.

“What is it?” Christina asked finally.

He didn’t seem to know for a moment. He looked down. Then he said, “I’ve come to tell you I can’t help you anymore.”

“What?” Christina pushed herself up to a sitting position. Again, she had to push the drape of loose
hair from her face. She had come to sleep with it loose. A preference of Adrien’s. “What are you talking about?”

“I can’t help you find him.”

There seemed to be something in the way he said this…. “You know where he is?”

Thomas seemed taken aback. She had somehow divined something she shouldn’t have; she could tell by his reaction. He sighed and bent his head. “I think I might.”

“Where?”

He didn’t say anything.

She sat up all the way. “Did the doctor tell you?”

“No.” He came forward, holding the light out before him.

The arm’s length of light hid him. He moved in the shadow of it. But the light would illuminate her, Christina knew. She pulled the covers up a little. Then, as he came close, she didn’t need to see him. At least not to ascertain one fact about him. The stale sour smell of ale—strong ale—was on him. He’d been drinking.

“Not in words,” he explained further. He set his oil lamp down on the tea table by the bed and sat on the bed’s edge. His shin touched her knee. “Whatever hold Claybourne has on the good doctor, it’s firm.”

Again, Christina waited for further comment. But it didn’t come. She realized something was bothering Thomas. Something that would make him drink, that would not allow him to sleep. Something that would make him come knocking on her door in the middle of the night to talk, in need of a friend. She was fully awake now; beside herself to elicit the information he had. But she resolved to try not to rush him.

He sat, staring. When finally he did speak, it was hardly the sort of conversation she wanted.

“I haven’t seen your hair down like that since we
were children,” he murmured. He looked down. “Except, of course, for that other time.”

She remembered, too. That night on the lawn with Adrien. With Thomas watching from the house. Christina bent her head, as if this memory could wash over them both and be gone.

Something dropped, small and hard, into the covers between her legs. Her hand automatically searched and retrieved the object. A small, heavy metal ball.

“What is it?”

“A musket ball.”

“Where did you get it?”

“From the basket of candles in the Hunt family tomb.”

“What—”

“Townsend put it there.” Thomas let out a breath, an exhaustion. Then began. “After everyone left, Townsend said he would stay for a few more moments. I was to wait. The idiot took a candle and lit it—it took him a long time to find one he liked. Then he knelt. He left me standing there while he knelt and prayed for a man I set up to be killed.”

Thomas’s face made a kind of involuntary, anguished flinch. Just a momentary spasm. He looked down. Christina reached over and touched his hand.

He withdrew his hand instantly. As if she had pinched him. “I couldn’t figure it,” he went on. “The candle had half burned before I got so bored and irritated I started to rummage through the candles myself. And there it was. As soon as I picked it up, the bastard stood up and said, ‘let’s go.’ Didn’t offer another word all the way to London.”

“Are you sure the doctor put it there?” Christina marveled at the small piece of steel in her hand. It was tangible. She clenched it. Something in her gave a little cheer of joy—

“I know he did. It was put there for me to find. And for him to deny if I said anything.”

“Didn’t you press him for an explanation?”

“Yes. But, as I said, he was as silent as a damn grave all the way back. He wouldn’t explain a jot.”

Christina leaned backward toward the light, rolling the steel ball between her fingers. It was a musket ball. There was no mistake. Her heart leaped again. Then she looked at Thomas.

Only to see his eyes jerk to her face.

Guilt. It was all over him. But for more reasons than just being caught staring at her nightdress, her bosom. He wore it in the slant of his mouth, in the creases at his eyes. And in the liquid, rheumy look of pain she saw in the brown irises. A deep, self-accusatory culpability.

“They don’t take steel balls out of dead men,” he said. Again, he looked away. “The implication, I’m sure, is that Townsend saw him days after he was already supposed to be dead. Townsend removed the musket balls from him and left him alive.”

“And you know where he is,” Christina added too hopefully. She was finding it difficult to go slowly, to care too much about any suffering Thomas might be going through at this particular moment.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he frowned up at her, a flash of an irritable look. “I might,” he said. “I’m not sure.” He paused. “But I won’t tell you.” With more pain than maliciousness, he added, “I can’t.”

“l don’t understand, Thomas. If you—”

“I don’t want to find him.”

He said it clearly enough. But Christina refused to hear its meaning. “If you’re thinking he’d be angry over your telling Claybourne—”

“You know perfectly well what it is. I couldn’t bear having things return to as they were.”

“But, Thomas—” Again, she reached out.

He shook her hand off. “You, making calf eyes at him.

And him, touching you, absorbing you”—he made a small sound, as if physically in pain—” knowing your naked body whenever the urge comes upon him.”

Christina tried to ignore the overly familiar way this seemed to come out. “He’s my husband, Thomas—”

He groaned-growled at her. “I don’t give a damn.” No longer shunning the touch of her, he took her by the shoulders. “Don’t you see? I don’t care that he’s your husband. I don’t care that he’s my friend. It’s not that I feel remorse at what I did to him.” His face came close to hers, hissing the hot smell of stale ale in her face. “What is killing me,” he breathed, “is the sudden knowledge that I would do it again.” With a soft kind of menace she had never heard from Thomas, he told her, “I covet his wife, Christina. You think he’d allow me to stand around, good friend to both, while I mentally undressed and slept with you every time I looked at you? Why do you suppose he sent me from France to begin with?”

“No—” His hold bit into the flesh of her upper arms. She strained, concave, as she tried to resist the grip of his fingers.

He whispered close to her face. “I thought I could make it all up to you, up to him, all the wrong I had done. When I honestly believed he was dead. But realizing today that Adrien is probably alive…Well, it makes being repentant a damned sight more difficult—”

“Thomas—” Christina tried to push him back. She realized suddenly he had much the same strength, the same build as Adrien. It was a mystery to her as well, she thought, why he didn’t appeal to her and Adrien did. “Listen, Thomas,” she said, “you’ve been drinking, and you’re not thinking very clear—”

Without further notice, his mouth took hers. He leaned his weight upward, onto his knees and pushed her back.

She went into the bedclothes. “Thomas—” She turned her face from his mouth, more angry than frightened by what he was doing. “For God’s sake. You have no right—”

Beyond any discussion of rights, he began pulling at the covers.

“So help me, Thomas Lillings,” Christina warned. She tried to keep her voice down. “People are going to find us like this. Get off me!” She squirmed. She shoved. First in token resistance, then sincerely with all her might.

Her nightgown was coming up. He was trying to wedge himself between her legs. She whispered vehemently at him, resisting, reprehending…. “Thomas—”

But he wouldn’t quit. He was undoing his breeches.

She braced her knees together and caught him on the chin as he came down on her. She flung a pillow in his face.

He growled, panted, “Let me love—love you—Christina—” He was trying to circumvent her legs, get her arms, pin them down….

She smashed the heel of her hand into his eye, digging her other hand into his hair; she pulled, kicked. Covers churned.

He let out a short burst of pain, then a slower groan as her kicks and blows rained down on him. Slowly, he seemed to be getting off the bed. Christina followed to the foot of it, throwing pillows, then finding and throwing the iron bed-warmer.

It almost hit him; he didn’t even try to avoid it. He seemed to be in a daze. “Oh, Christina—I’m so sor—”

“Get out of here!” She had found the vocal chords, the volume at last, to scream at him. “I never want to see you again!”