The Mad Earl's Bride (8 page)

A
FTER DINNE
R THAT
evening, Gwendolyn sat at a table in the library, making a list of medical texts to be sent from home. Dorian sat by the fire, perusing a volume of poetry.

She knew it had not been easy for him to talk about his past, but she was sure it had done him good. He kept too much bottled up inside him, Gwendolyn thought as her gaze strayed back to him. When people did that, matters tended to get exaggerated out of proportion, and his ignorance of medical science only made it worse.

The visual chimera he’d described, for instance, were physiological phenomena common to a number of neurological ailments, not ghastly aberrations, as he thought. Furthermore, Dorian had not quite comprehended his mother’s case or the difficulties of managing lunatics. Nor had he realized that the doctors often had no way of knowing for certain until after death that the brain was physically damaged. Still, she was not sure Mr. Borson had handled the case altogether wisely.

Dorian looked up and caught her staring at him.

“You’re wearing your medical frown,” he said. “Am I foaming at the mouth, by any chance, without realizing?”

“I was thinking about your mother,” she said. “Her hair, for instance. I’m not sure cutting it was the only option.”

His face stiffened, but only for a moment. “I’m not sure what else they could have done,” he said slowly. “She was tearing it out in bloody clumps, according to my father and uncle. She did not realize it was her own hair, I think. She must have believed it was the talons. The imaginary claws of the imaginary Furies.”

Gwendolyn left her chair and went to him and stroked his hair back from his face.

He smiled up at her. “I give you leave to cut my hair, Gwen. I should have done it weeks ago—or at least for my wedding.”

“But that is the point,” she said. “I don’t want to cut your hair.”

“I don’t wear it this way because of some mad whim you must indulge,” he said. “I had practical reasons, which are no longer relevant.”

“I thought you did it to spite your grandfather,” she said. “If he had been my grandfather, I am sure I would have done something to vex him.” She considered briefly. “Trousers. I should have worn trousers.”

He laughed. “Ah, no, I was not so bold as that. When I went to London, I was concerned that someone might recognize me and tell him where I was. Then he would punish my landlady and my employers for giving aid and comfort—such as it was—to the enemy.”

He’d told her about his time in London, slaving night and day. Working on the docks explained his muscles, which had puzzled her very much. One rarely saw that sort of upper body development among the nobility, though it was common enough among laborers and pugilists.

“Looking like an eccentric—and possibly dangerous—recluse keeps the curious at bay,” he went on. “It discourages them from prying into one’s personal affairs. Such concerns obviously applied here in Dartmoor, at least while my grandfather was alive.”

“Well, I’m glad you were impractical and didn’t cut your hair for the wedding,” she said. “It suits your exotic features. You don’t look very English. Not in the ordinary way, at any rate.” She paused, struck by an idea.

She stood back to consider him . . . and grinned.

He grasped her hand and drew her toward him, and tumbled her onto his lap.

“You had better not be laughing at me, Doctor Gwendolyn,” he said sternly. “We madmen don’t take kindly to that.”

“I was thinking of Cousin Jessica and her husband,” Gwendolyn said. “Dain is not ordinary-looking either. She and I seem to have similar taste in men.”

“Indeed. She likes monsters and you like lunatics.”

“I like you,” she said, snuggling against him.

“How can you help liking me?” he said. “I spent hours yesterday talking of little but medical symptoms and insane asylums. And you listened as though it were poetry and all but swooned at my feet. It is too bad I haven’t any medical treatises about. I’m sure I need read but a paragraph or two, and you will become ravenous with lust and begin tearing off my clothes.”

All he had to do was stand there—sit there—to make her ravenous with lust, she thought. She drew back. “Would you like that?”

“Your tearing off my clothes? Of course I’d like it.” He bent his head and whispered in her ear, “I am mentally unbalanced, recollect.”

She glanced toward the door. “What if Hoskins comes in?”

Dorian slid her hand into the opening of his shirt. “We’ll tell him it’s a medical treatment,” he said.

She turned back to him. Behind the laughter glinting in his eyes, desire smoldered, fierce and hot.

One day, too soon, the fierceness and heat would turn dangerous—deadly, perhaps.

But she would deal with that day when it came, Gwendolyn told herself. In the meantime, she was happy to burn in his strong arms.

She lifted his hand to her breast. “Touch me,” she whispered. “Make me mad, too, Dorian.”

H
E HAD AN
attack the next day.

They had just finished breakfast when she saw him blink impatiently and brush at the air near his face.

He caught himself doing it and laughed. “I know it does no good,” he said. “A reflex, I suppose.”

Gwendolyn left her chair and went to him. “If you go to bed now and I give you a dose of laudanum, you’ll scarcely notice when the headache starts.”

He rose, and went upstairs with her, his expression preoccupied. She helped him undress, and noticed that his vision was not so impaired that he couldn’t find her breasts. He fondled them while she wrestled with his neckcloth.

“You are remarkably good-humored,” she said when she’d finally got him under the bedclothes. “If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect my lord only wished to lure me into his bedchamber.”

“I wish it were a trick,” he said, blinking up at her. “But there the damned things are, winking and blinking at me. And you were right, Gwen. They are not like ghosts, after all. You described it better. ‘Like colliding with a lamppost,’ you said. ‘First you see stars, then the pain hits.’ I should like to know what it was that persuaded my brain I’d suffered a blow to the head.”

She knew, all too well.

I
told you he must be insulated from all sources of nervous agitation,
Kneebones had said.

He was a real doctor, with decades of experience. He understood the malady, had studied Dorian’s mother for months.

You saw what the news about his family did to him: three attacks in one week.

She recalled yesterday’s conversation, and her conscience stabbed.

“I can see what it was,” she said tightly. “Yesterday, I obliged you to relive the most painful experiences of your life. And I was not content with the general picture, was I? I pressed you for details, even about the post-mortem report on your mother. I should have realized this was too much strain for you to bear all at once. I cannot believe I did not think of that. I do wonder where I misplaced my wits.”

She started to move away, to fetch the laudanum bottle, but he grabbed her hand. “I wonder where you’ve put them now,” he said. “You’ve got it all backwards, Gwen. Our talk yesterday did me nothing but good. You eased my mind on a hundred different counts.”

He tugged her hand. “Sit.”

“I need to get your laudanum,” she said.

“I don’t want it,” he said. “Not unless I become unmanageable. That’s the only reason I took it before. I wasn’t sure I could trust myself. But I can trust you. I’m not your first lunatic. You’ll know when I need to be stupefied.”

“I also know the pain is dreadful,” she said. “I cannot let you lie there and endure it. I must do something, Dorian.”

He shut his eyes then, and his face set.

“It’s started, hasn’t it?” It was a struggle to keep her voice low and even.

“I don’t want to be stupefied,” he said levelly. “I want my mind clear. If I must be incapacitated physically, I should like to use the opportunity to think, while I still can.”

Gwendolyn firmly stifled her screaming conscience. Her guilt would not help him.

She had come with low expectations, she reminded herself. She had hoped to learn while ameliorating, insofar as possible, his suffering. She had never had any illusions about curing what medical science scarcely understood, let alone knew how to treat.

She had not expected to fall in love with him, almost instantly. Still, that changed only her emotions, and she would simply have to live with them. She would not, however, let them rule, and be tempted to pray for a miracle, when what she ought to be doing was listening to him and ascertaining what he needed and how best to provide it.

“You want to think,” she said, frowning.

“Yes. About my mother and what you said about her. About my grandfather. The experts. The asylum.” He pressed a thumb to his temple. “I do not believe I’ve burst a blood vessel, but I distinctly see my life passing before me.” Smiling crookedly, he added, “And it is beginning to make sense.”

She felt a surge of alarm, which she ruthlessly suppressed. “Very well,” she said calmly. “No soporifics. We shall try a stimulant instead.”

G
WENDOLYN GAVE HI
M
coffee. Very strong coffee and a good deal of it.

Two hours and countless cups later, Dorian was fully recovered and his wife was staring at him as though he’d just risen from the dead. She stood by the fire, her hands folded in front of her, her expression a comical mixture of worry and bewilderment while she watched him yank on his clothes.

“I begin to suspect you believed I
had
burst a blood vessel,” he said as he fastened his trouser buttons. “Or was about to.”

The comical expression vanished, succeeded by the familiar steady green regard. “I do not know what to think,” she said. “Frankly, I am confounded. Two hours, from start to finish. This makes no medical sense at all.”

“I told you I distinctly felt the pressure ease after the fourth cup,” he said. “As though my head were being released from a vise. Perhaps the coffee washed the pressure through my system and”—he grinned—“into the chamberpot.”

“It does have diuretic qualities,” she said.

“Obviously.”

“But you should not respond in this way.” Her brow furrowed. “Perhaps I misinterpreted your account of the autopsy report, though I do not see how. Your mother’s was hardly an unusual case.”

“I should like to know what’s troubling you,” he said. “Have I been babbling incoherently without realizing it? Am I manifesting signs of mania? Is the extraordinary sense of well-being a danger signal? Because if I am at death’s door, Gwendolyn, I should appreciate being informed.”

She let out a shaky breath. “I don’t know. I had thought the dilating blood vessels and increased blood supply—possibly augmented by leakage—triggered the aura and pain. But for the pain to stop, the vessels must contract again and diminish blood flow—and your cells and tissue are supposed to be too weak and damaged to do it so quickly and thoroughly.”

He recalled what she’d told him yesterday about brain function. “I see,” he said. “You fear that something has cut off blood supply too abruptly, perhaps in a dangerous and abnormal fashion—and this is a temporary and illusory surcease.”

“I cannot say.” Her voice was the slightest bit unsteady.

Perhaps he’d fall down dead in the next minute, Dorian thought. That did not seem possible. He had never felt more alive. Nonetheless, he wasn’t going to take any chances.

He went to her and gathered her in his arms and kissed her, long and thoroughly, until she melted against him. He went on kissing her, then caressing her, and soon, carrying her to the bed.

That wasn’t what he’d intended. He’d only wanted to make sure she understood how he felt about her.

But there was no stopping, once they’d begun. In a little while, the garments he’d so recently donned lay strewn about the floor, along with hers, and he was lost, drowning inside her, in the hot sea of desire.

And later, when they lay together, limbs tangled, he found his heart was still beating and his brain was still working, and so he told her what she’d done for him.

Yesterday, he’d told her of his debauched past, expecting shock and disgust. Instead, she’d impatiently dismissed his whoring and drinking as normal male behavior.

He’d told her about his mother, the pitiable and monstrous creature she’d become, and Gwendolyn had not turned a hair. “It’s like consumption,” she’d said, after reducing the horrors to a logical series of physiological events. “There is no saying that her infidelities and secrets made it worse or triggered the breakdown. Her marriage was unsatisfactory. For all we know, the romantic intrigues may have reduced the emotional strain and delayed the inevitable, instead of hastening it.”

If Dorian had stayed with his mother, he might have added to her agitation, Gwendolyn had theorized, because Aminta had a stronger emotional bond with him than with his father.

Moreover, the conditions at the madhouse must be put into perspective, Gwendolyn had told him. The moral faculties were often destroyed in such cases. Patients might appear calm and rational without having any more awareness or control over their thoughts and behavior than if they had been marionettes, with the damaged brain cells pulling the strings. And aware or not, patients often forgot what they were angry or sad about, just as they forgot basic hygiene, and even who they were or who they’d imagined they were minutes before.

Then he’d realized that his mother might not have endured continuous humiliation and pain, because she’d been living for the most part in a world of her own, where little could reach her.

“You have truly eased my mind,” Dorian told his wife now. “Even my grandfather does not seem so monstrous. Pitiable, actually, in his ignorance, his fear of what he didn’t understand, and his dependence on ‘experts.’ But you are not like him or his precious experts. You have a knack for making the incomprehensible make sense. You’ve reduced it to manageable proportions. Even this last attack seemed like little more than a damned nuisance.”

She lifted herself onto one elbow and studied his face. “Perhaps, because you became less agitated, your brain did not have to work so hard,” she said. “You said you needed to think, and it appears your reflections were positive. It’s possible that stimulating such thought, rather than stupefying it, was the more beneficial approach.”