Married by Morning (26 page)

Feeling stunned, as if she had just fallen from a great height, Catherine had left her grandmother’s study. She knew a momentary, mad urge to bolt for the front door. But without a place to go to, without money, an unprotected girl would last only a matter of hours in London. The trapped sobs in her chest had dissolved into shivers.

She went upstairs to her room. But then the dream changed, the memories transforming into dark vagaries of imagination … becoming a nightmare. The stairs seemed to multiply, and the climb became difficult and she went upward into deeper and deeper shadows. Alone and shivering with cold, she reached her room, illuminated only by the glaze of moonlight.

There was a man sitting at the window. He was straddling the frame, actually, one long leg placed firmly on the floor, the other swinging negligently outside. She knew him from the shape of his head, from the powerful lines of his silhouette. And from the dark, a velvety voice that lifted the hairs on the back of her neck.

“There you are. Come here, Marks.”

Catherine was suffused with relief and yearning. “My lord, what are you doing here?” she cried, running to him.

“Waiting for you.” His arms went around her. “I’ll take you far away from here—would you like that?”

“Oh, yes, yes … but how?”

“We’ll go right out this window. I have a ladder.”

“But is it safe? Are you certain—”

He put his hand gently to her mouth, silencing her. “Trust me.” His hand pressed harder. “I won’t let you fall.”

She tried to tell him that she would go anywhere with him, do anything he said, but he was covering her mouth too tightly for her to speak. His grip became hurtful, clamping on her jaw. She couldn’t breathe.

Catherine’s eyes opened. The nightmare fell away, revealing a far worse reality. She struggled beneath a crushing weight, and tried to cry out against the callused hand that covered her mouth.

“Your aunt wants to see you,” came a voice in the darkness. “I ’as to do this, miss. I ’as no choice.”

In the space of just a few minutes, it was done.

William gagged her with a tight cloth that bit into her mouth, a large knot pressing hard against her tongue. After binding her hands and feet, he went to light a lamp. Even without the aid of her spectacles, Catherine perceived that he wore the dark blue coat of a Rutledge Hotel employee.

If only she could get a few words out, plead or bargain with him, but the knotted lump of cloth made coherent sound impossible. Her saliva spiked unpleasantly at the intensely acrid flavor of the gag. There was something on it, she realized, and at that same moment she felt her consciousness breaking into pieces, scattered like an unfinished puzzle. Her heart turned sluggish, pumping poisoned blood through her collapsing limbs, and there was a ballooning, thumping sensation in her head as if her brain had suddenly become too large for her skull.

William came to her with a hotel laundry bag. He began to pull it over her, starting at her feet. He didn’t look at her face, only kept his gaze on his task. She watched passively, seeing that he took care to keep the hem of her nightgown primly down at her ankles. Some distant part of her brain wondered at the small kindness of preserving her modesty.

The bedclothes rustled near her feet, and Dodger streaked out with a furious chatter. With quicksilver speed he attacked William’s arm and hand, inflicting a series of deep, gouging bites. Catherine had never seen the little animal behave in such a manner. William grunted in surprise and flung out his arm with a low curse. The ferret went flying, slamming hard against the wall and falling limply to the floor.

Catherine moaned behind the gag, her eyes burning with acid tears.

Breathing heavily, William examined his bleeding hand, found a cloth at the washstand to wrap around it, and returned to Catherine. The laundry bag was pulled higher and higher until it went over her head.

She understood that Althea didn’t really want to see her. Althea wanted to destroy her. Perhaps William didn’t know. Or perhaps he thought it was kinder to lie. It didn’t matter. She felt nothing, no fear, no anguish, although tears leaked steadily from the outward corners of her eyes. What a terrible fate to leave the world feeling nothing at all. She was nothing more than a tangle of limbs in a sack, a headless doll, all memories receding, all sensation falling away.

A few thoughts needled through the blanket of nothingness, pinpricks of light in the dark.

Leo would never know that she had loved him.

She thought of his eyes, all those colors of blue. Her mind was filled with a constellation of high summer, stars in a lion’s shape.
The brightest star marks his heart
.

He would grieve. If only she could spare him that.

Oh, what they could have had. A life together, such a simple thing. To watch that handsome face weather with age. She had to admit now that she had never been happier than in the moments with him.

Her heart beat faintly beneath her ribs. It was heavy, aching with contained feeling, a hard knot within the numbness.

I didn’t want to need you, Leo, I fought so hard to stay standing at the edge of my own life … when I should have had the courage to walk into yours
.

“You’re not one of those parasitical dunderheads,” Temple had told him emphatically, which Leo gathered had been a compliment. And later, “My influence on you cannot be eradicated, can it?” And of course Leo had assured him that it could not, that he remembered and valued everything he had learned from Temple. He hadn’t dared to mention the far greater influence of the elderly professor in Provence.

“Architecture is how we reconcile to the difficulties of life,” Joseph had once told Leo at his
atelier
. The old professor had been repotting some herbs at a long wooden table, while Leo tried to help. “
Non
, don’t touch these,
mon fils
, you pack the roots too tightly, they need more air than you allow them.” He took a pot away from Leo and resumed the lecture. “To be an architect, you have to accept the environment around you, no matter what its conditions. Then, in full awareness, you take your ideals and form them into structure.”

“Can I do it without ideals?” Leo had asked, only half joking. “I’ve learned I can’t live up to them.”

Professor Joseph had smiled at him. “Neither can you reach the stars. But you still need their light. You need them to navigate,
n’est-ce pas
?”

Take your ideals and form them into structure. Only in that way could a good house, a good building, be designed.

Or a good life.

And Leo had finally found the cornerstone, the essential piece to build the rest on.

A very stubborn cornerstone.

His lips curved as he considered what to do with Catherine that day, how to woo her, or annoy her, since she seemed to enjoy both equally. Perhaps he would start a small argument and kiss her into capitulation. Perhaps he would propose to her again, if he could catch her in a moment of weakness.

Heading to the Rutledge apartments, Leo entered after a careless knock, and found Poppy rushing to the entrance foyer.

“Have you—” she started, then broke off as she saw him. “Leo. I wondered when you’d get back. I didn’t know where you were, or I would have sent for you—”

“What is it, sis?” he asked gently, understanding at once that something was very wrong.

Poppy looked wretched, her eyes large in her white face. “Catherine didn’t come up for breakfast this morning. I assumed that she wanted to sleep late. Sometimes her nightmares—”

“Yes, I know.” Leo gripped her cold hands, staring at her alertly. “Out with it, Poppy.”

“An hour ago I send a housemaid to Catherine’s room, to see if she needed something. She wasn’t there, and these were on the table by the bed.” Reaching out with a trembling hand, she gave him the new silver spectacles. “And … there was blood on the bed.”

It took Leo a moment to contain the rush of panic. He felt it as instant stinging from head to toe, and a heart-thundering blast of energy. A dizzying urge to kill.

“The hotel is being searched,” he heard Poppy say over the roar in his ears, “and Harry and Mr. Valentine are talking to the floor stewards.”

“Latimer has her,” Leo said thickly. “He sent someone for her. I’ll rip the filthy whoreson’s guts out and hang him with them—”

“Leo,” she whispered, her hand fluttering to his mouth. What she saw in his face frightened her. “Please.”

Relief partially smoothed Poppy’s brow as her husband entered the apartment. “Harry, is there any sign?”

Harry’s face was grim and hard. “One of the night stewards said that last night he saw a man dressed as an employee—he assumed he was newly hired—carrying a laundry sack down the back stairs. He noticed it because the housemaids usually take care of laundry, and never at that time of night.” He put a restraining hand on Leo’s shoulder, and Leo shook him off. “Ramsay, keep your head. I know what you assume, and you’re probably right. But you can’t go dashing off like a madman. We need to—”

“Try and stop me,” Leo said in a guttural tone. There was no controlling what had been unleashed in him. He was gone before Harry could draw another breath.

“Christ,” Harry muttered, dragging his hands through his black hair. He gave Poppy a distracted glance. “Find Valentine,” he said. “He’s still talking with the floor managers. Tell him to go to Special Constable Hembrey—or whoever he can find at Bow Street, and let them know what’s happening. Hembrey can start by sending a man to Lord Latimer’s house. Tell Valentine to say there’s a murder in progress.”

“Leo won’t kill Lord Latimer,” Poppy said, her face blanched.

“If he doesn’t,” Harry replied with cold certainty, “I will.”

Catherine awakened in a strange euphoria, light-headed and listless, and very glad to awaken from her nightmares. Except that when she opened her eyes, she was still in a nightmare, in a room hazed with sickening-sweet smoke, the windows shrouded with heavy curtains.

She took a long time to collect herself, straining to see without spectacles. Her jaw was sore, her mouth unbearably dry. She was desperate for a sip of cold water, a breath of clean air. Her wrists were fastened behind her back. She half reclined, half sat on a settee, dressed in her nightgown. Awkwardly she used her shoulder to try to push back some of the loose tangles of her hair that had fallen over her face.

Catherine knew this room, blurry as it was. And she knew the old woman sitting near her, stick thin and dressed in black. The woman’s hands moved with the delicacy of an insect’s pincers as she lifted a thin leather hose attached to a hookah vase. Putting the hose to her lips, she sucked in a breath, held it, and expelled a puff of white smoke.

“Grandmother?” Catherine asked, her voice rough, her tongue thick in her mouth.

The woman moved closer, until her face came into Catherine’s limited view. A powdered white face, vermillon lips. Hard, familiar eyes rimmed with kohl. “She’s dead. It’s my house now. My business.”

Althea
, Catherine realized in dull horror. A cadaverous version of Althea, the once attractive features shrunken and calcified. The face powder covered the top stratum of skin but hadn’t settled into the web of wrinkles, giving her complexion the appearance of crackled glaze on porcelain. She was far more fearsome than even Grandmother had been. And she looked more than a little mad, her eyes bulging and blue-glazed like those of a baby bird.

“William told me he’d seen you,” Althea said. “And I said, ‘We must fetch her for a long overdue visit, mustn’t we?’ It took a bit of planning on his part, but he executed it nicely.” She glanced into a shadowed corner. “You’re a good boy, William.”

He replied in an unintelligible murmur. Or at least it was unintelligible to Catherine, through the irregular pulse that thumped in her ears. It seemed the inner systems of her body had been rearranged, a new order of channels and nerves that she couldn’t quite integrate.

“May I have some water?” she asked hoarsely.

“William, give our guest some water.”

He complied clumsily, going to fill a glass, standing over Catherine. Holding the cup to her lips, he watched as she sipped carefully. The water was instantly absorbed into the parched tissue of her lips, inner cheeks, throat. It carried a dusty, brackish taint, or perhaps that was just the taste of her mouth.

William retreated, and Catherine waited while her aunt puffed thoughtfully on the hookah.

“Mother never forgave you,” Althea said, “for running away as you did. Lord Latimer hounded us for years, demanding the return of his money … or you. But you don’t care about what trouble you caused. You never gave a thought to what you owed.”

Catherine fought to keep her head steady, when it kept lolling to the side. “I didn’t owe you my body.”

“You thought you were too good for that. You wanted to avoid
my
downfall. You wanted a choice.” Althea paused, as if waiting for confirmation. When none was forthcoming, she continued with soft vehemence. “But why should you have one when I didn’t? My own mother came to my bedroom one night. She said she’d brought a nice gentleman to help tuck me in. But first he was going to show me some new games. After that night, there was no innocent part of me left. I was twelve.”

Another long inhalation through the hookah, another dizzying puff of smoke. There was no way for Catherine to avoid breathing in more. The room seemed to sway gently, as Catherine had imagined the deck of a ship would rock at sea. She floated on the waves, buoyant, listening to Althea’s seething. And she felt a stirring of sympathy, but like the rest of her emotions, it remained deep under the surface, drowning.

“I thought of running away,” Althea said. “I asked my brother—your father—to help me. He lived with us then, coming and going as he pleased. Using the whores for free any time he wanted, and they didn’t dare complain to Mother. ‘I need just a little money,’ I told him. ‘I’ll go far away to the country.’ But he went to Mother and told her what I’d asked. I wasn’t let out of the house for months afterward.”

From what little Catherine remembered of her father, a brusque and pitiless individual, this story was easy to believe. But she found herself asking distantly, “Why didn’t he help you?”

“My brother liked the situation as it was—he had the best of everything without lifting a finger. Mother gave him whatever he wanted. And the selfish pig didn’t mind sacrificing me to keep himself comfortable. He was a man, you see.” She paused. “So I became a whore. And for years I prayed for rescue. But God doesn’t hear the prayers of women. He cares only for those He made in His own image.”

Befuddled and squinting, Catherine labored to keep her thoughts in order. “Aunt,” she said carefully, “why did you bring me here? If that was done to you … why must it be done to me?”

“Why should you escape when I couldn’t? I want you to become me. Just as I became Mother.”

Yes … this was one of Catherine’s fears, the worst one. That if she were put in the wrong situation, the wickedness in her own nature would take over all the rest.

Except … it wouldn’t.

Catherine’s foggy brain seized on the idea and turned it over, examining it. The past was not the future. “I’m not like you,” she said slowly. “Won’t ever be. I grieve for what was done to you, Aunt. But I didn’t make the same choice.”

“I have a choice for you now.”

Despite Catherine’s opiated detachment, Althea’s caressing tone made her flesh creep.

“You will either make good on that long-ago arrangement with Lord Latimer,” Althea continued, “or you will service customers in the brothel, as I did. Which shall it be?”

Catherine refused to choose. “Doesn’t matter what you do,” she said, drugged but intractable. “Nothing will change who I am.”

“And who are you?” Althea’s voice dripped with contempt. “A decent woman? Too good for the likes of this place?”

Catherine’s head became too heavy for her to hold up any longer. She lowered herself to the settee, resting her head on the arm. “A woman who is loved.”

It was the worst, most hurtful answer she could have given Althea. And it was the truth.

Unable to open her eyes, Catherine was aware of a bustling movement nearby, of Althea’s tentaclelike grip on her face, of the leather hose from the hookah shoved between her lips. Her nose was pinched shut, and she breathed in helplessly. A flood of cool, pungent smoke entered her lungs. She coughed, and was forced to draw it in again, and then she wilted into a placid and near-insensible heap.

“Take her upstairs, William,” Althea said. “To her old bedroom. Later we’ll move her to the brothel.”

“Yes, ma’am.” William gathered Catherine up carefully. “Ma’am … may I undo her wrists?”

Althea shrugged. “She certainly won’t go anywhere under her own power.”

William carried Catherine upstairs, settled her on the small, musty bed of her old room, and untied her hands. He arranged her arms with her hands touching at her middle, in the position of a body in a casket. “Sorry, miss,” he murmured, looking into her half-open, unseeing eyes. “She’s all I ’ave. I ’as to do what she says.”