The Punishment of Ivy Leavold (Markham Hall Book 3) (12 page)

Something hit me from behind, hit me hard, and all the breath left my body as I went pitching forward into the muddy ground. I couldn’t breathe and there was something on top of me and I couldn’t move either…

“I wanted this to be easy for you,” Gareth said. “I so wanted it to be easy.”

And this time when the cloth came, I couldn’t fight it. I squirmed and tried to roll and tried to hold my breath, but it was impossible. And when I finally relented and inhaled, I could feel the substance leaching the fight from my limbs, the will from my mind. My eyelids started to close of their own accord and everything began to spin away, distant and distorted, like the world through a magnifying glass at the wrong angle.

And then nothing.

Heaviness clung to me. A thick drowsiness. A sopping wet blanket of disorientation and dizziness.

I was in a sitting room. A very nice sitting room, although the furniture was covered in sheets and the portraits were taken down from the walls.

I was not at the docklands. I was in a house.

I couldn’t lift my head, but I knew without looking that it was now early afternoon. And I knew that I was on a chair, my hands bound behind my back and I knew that I wasn’t alone.

“Why?” I mumbled, struggling to make my mouth move. My lips felt numb, my tongue felt fat. But that one question crystallized in my mind, galvanizing me.
Why?

Gareth knelt in front of me. Had I ever noticed before how cherubic he looked? I hadn’t—my senses had been stolen by the master of Markham Hall the first night I’d arrived. But Gareth was handsome. Blond hair and blue eyes and a face that was so smooth and beautiful, it looked like a statue in the British Museum. He looked like an angel.

An angel that had me tied to a chair.

“I am really sorry about this, Ivy,” he said. His voice was rather apologetic. “This was never my original plan—but I had to improvise after Violet’s death.”

I managed to raise my head a few inches and then it bobbed back down.

“Do you know where we are?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“We’re in Mr. Markham’s Hampton house. It’s quite a ways from London proper. It’s where he and Violet shared their wedding night, you know.” Gareth tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “I was here for that too. I had to go in the valet’s room in the attic and wonder if every creak, if every thump, was them making love. I’d been fucking her for two months by that point.”

“You loved her,” I managed. Somehow, I knew to keep engaging him, to keep feeding his tangential thoughts, even though the other parts of my mind that were firing into alertness begged me to find a way to end this madness. But how? My legs were free. That was quite an advantage. But I wouldn’t be able to turn a doorknob with my hands behind my back.

“I did love her,” Gareth mused. “I did. She didn’t love me. But she could have. After she had our child, perhaps.”

“Mr. Markham would have raised it as his own,” I said. My mouth was feeling closer to normal again, my words coming out in my usual voice. “She wouldn’t have risked falling in love then.”

“I wouldn’t have let him have the child. There was a time when I thought I might, when the thought of him raising my son was satisfying—fitting even, but I loved her too much. I loved her too much to let her be his. Even if she didn’t want to be mine.”

I didn’t understand. Maybe it was the lingering effects of the agent he’d used to put me to sleep or maybe it was that none of this made any goddamn sense. Something about Gareth and Violet and the baby, but why was
I
here? Why was
I
involved?

And why was there a creeping fear that I would be made to suffer for someone else’s sins?

“Do you know how I first met Mr. Markham?” Gareth asked, standing up. “Do you know
when
I first met him?”

“When you applied to be his valet?” It was a reasonable assumption, but it seemed to annoy Gareth.

“No. I had a life before working for Mr. Markham, you know.” He started pacing. “I was born at the same level as him. I was born to a wealthy man and raised in a fine house. And I was but a boy when he married my sister. My
half
-sister,” he corrected. “The first time I really saw him was at their wedding, at the York Minster, but before that, I felt like I knew him. My parents adored him. Arabella wouldn’t stop talking about him. It was like he was part of the family before he ever actually married into it.”

Arabella.

Arabella.

The name almost didn’t make sense. It didn’t compute. Why was Gareth talking about Arabella and Mr. Markham, why was he talking about a childhood growing up with the Whitefields…

“You were the Whitfield bastard,” I breathed, realization clicking into place. “You were Josiah’s son.”

“See, you call me a bastard, but he never made me feel illegitimate,” Gareth said. “I was educated and introduced to the finer members of society and groomed to inherit the estate. He never had a son with his wife, and he always planned to write me into the will…”

“But he didn’t.” Part of me sensed it was dangerous to be so blunt with him—he was clearly mad—but the other part of me was desperate to piece together the reasons I was tied to a chair in an empty suburban mansion. I recalled all of Aunt Esther’s tale. “He died before he could.”

“Because Arabella died. Because Markham killed her.”

“She was sick—”

“She was
alive
until she married him. She didn’t worsen until after their wedding, until he dragged her all over Europe, and then she died, and left my father unable to cope.”

“And then
he
died,” I said softly.

“He died and his wife died, and the estate was sold off to the nearest heir, because I wasn’t legally able to inherit. And then I was practically sold off as well. No one wanted me, no one would claim me. My birth mother was dead. Some distant relation of hers, a
farmer
, took me in and I was forced to finish my childhood among ignorance and poverty.”

He stopped in front of me. “So do you see now? Do you see all he’s taken from me? Not just Violet, but my sister, my parents, my home. All of it obliterated in the face of Julian Markham.”

“So why would you want to work for him? If you hated him so much?”

“Hate is not the right word, Miss Leavold. Not at all. I never had a plan, I never had an elaborate revenge plot that I’d dreamed up like in the novels, but every major event in my life was tied to him, as if he were a port my fate had to return to over and over. I’d found work as a footman in my youth, and when I heard that Julian Markham was looking for a valet…it seemed like destiny. I didn’t know why or what for, but I knew I had to. He didn’t recognize me, of course. I doubt he ever paid much mind to his little bastard brother-in-law, and in case he had, I changed my name.”

“So what…you were biding your time?”

“It’s not like that,” he said, almost impatiently, as if I were being deliberately obtuse. “I wasn’t biding at all. I was working. I just felt like it was right somehow, that I should be close to him. I even thought that one day I would tell him my real name and he’d help me reclaim my place in the world. I never planned on doing anything injurious until…”

Until you fell in love with the same woman.
I could see it now, the valet—overeducated and overbred, one small tragedy away from being at the same level in society as Violet and Julian—and then of course, Mr. Markham himself, wealthy and magnetic. Both handsome. Both attractive. Knowing Violet as I did, I wasn’t surprised that she’d been unable to choose. Why not dally with the valet—who after all was born and raised a gentleman—while waiting to be made wife to one of the wealthiest men in the north?

And in true Violet fashion, she hadn’t really loved either of them. It had been another game for her.

A game that had killed her in the end.

“I loved her. And I wanted her to bear my child.” Gareth was truly agitated now, the pain of Violet’s death clearly much more recent and raw than the death of his sister and parents. “And I knew, finally, what I had to do. It all became clear that night he caught us together. He had killed Arabella, and by extension, my parents. He was going to keep Violet and my child away from me…and then what he did to Violet after he found us, the things I heard coming from that room.” He shuddered. “He deserved to die. He deserved it at least three times over, if not four.”

“What did you do?” I whispered.

He met my eyes. “I knew I had to kill him, but I didn’t have the stomach to do it directly. I went out to the stables and cut the cinch of Raven’s saddle.”

I stared back at him, understanding but not fully absorbing what he was saying. I had chosen to trust Mr. Markham. I had believed that he hadn’t cut that saddle, that he wasn’t ultimately responsible for Violet’s death, but after that, I had let the matter lie, shoving the hand that held the knife to the back of my mind. An unsolved mystery.

But here it was: solved, confessed, laid bare.

Gareth had done it.

“You killed Violet.”

“No!” He was beginning to shout now, all pretense at calm abandoned. “
He
did! He killed her with what he did to her in that room. If he hadn’t tormented her, she would have stayed inside where she belonged and
he
would have been the one dead in a field.
Fuck!
” He kicked viciously at a nearby end table, and it fell over with a crash.

I jumped in the chair, adrenaline singing through me, every nerve and muscle alive, every synapse firing. We were nearing the end of the talking time, I saw, moving closer to the reason he had brought me here. I wanted to fight and resist, to somehow bolt for the door, but I knew better. I needed to stall as long as possible, even as I realized there wasn’t much point in it. Mr. Markham was detained by the police, and my aunt would have no reason to worry about me in the care of Mr. Markham’s servant. The thought depressed me, scared me. No one knew where I was. No one knew that I was about to die.

But I had to try.

“I know you didn’t mean to kill her,” I soothed, hoping he couldn’t hear the shaking in my voice. “No one blames you. It was an honest mistake.”

“It was,” he mumbled to himself. “But don’t you see?” His voice grew plaintive, loud, discordant. “He’s taken
everything
now—including the child I never got to meet. I am going to take something of his.”

He stepped so close that his feet touched my feet, and my instinct was to hiss at him, like a cat, but I resisted. Instead I looked up at him. “This isn’t necessary, Gareth,” I said. “Please. I’m sure if you just explain it to Mr. Markham—”

“Explain what? That he deserves to suffer for what he’s done to me? And what do you think he’ll say in response? ‘Yes, you’re right, please take my fiancée?’”

That had not been what I had meant, but I didn’t know exactly what I
had
meant, only that I was trying to appeal to whatever sense of sanity still lived in this man. This man who had seemed so steady, so damn sunny and friendly before. “There’s got to be a way around this,” I said. “What will killing me solve?”

Gareth shook his head. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.” He went over to the fireplace and started building a fire. “There’s nothing that can fix what’s happened to me. It’s too late for that. But I can make sure that Julian Markham suffers like I suffered. And that will be a small comfort in itself, I think. All I really want is one glimpse of his face when he learns the truth. When he knows that you’re dead.”

“He’ll kill you.”

Gareth shrugged, still attending to his work. “He can try. I’m very good at hiding, Miss Leavold. I hid in plain sight for three years.”

Whatever he was planning with this fire, I didn’t like it. I tried to move the chair, gratified when I found I could force it across the low carpet with a minimum of noise. If I could make it to the door…

What then I didn’t know. But damned if I’d sit here waiting to find out what happened if I didn’t.

“I tried to save you, remember, the night he took you for his own? I tried to save you from being loved by him. I didn’t want to hurt you. I
like
you. But I have no choice. You are the sacrifice with the most value. I delayed as long as I could, but then I realized that someone else in the house knew. I didn’t have long before Julian learned who and what I was…”

The fire was catching now, licking at the sticks and logs in the fireplace, dangerously close to the pile of wood halfway in the fireplace and halfway on the hearth. I kept trying to move the chair as quietly as I could, having made it almost three feet since he’d turned away.

Three things happened at once then. The first was that Gareth stood up and turned around. The second was that I decided to run for it, no matter how hopeless it was. I stood in the chair and tried to run for the door as he chased me.

The third thing was that Mrs. Brightmore appeared in the doorway.

I blinked at her a minute, as I’m sure Gareth did too, her presence so incredibly incongruous with the setting and the circumstances that it was almost impossible to reconcile the two.