His at Night (42 page)

When Vere was sixteen, he and Freddie were summoned from Eton to attend their father on the latter’s deathbed.

Being a dying man had not rendered the marquess any less vitriolic than usual. With Freddie in the room, he had instructed Vere to marry soon and reproduce fast, so that there would be no chance for the title and the estate to pass on to Freddie.

Vere had held his tongue because of the presence of a physician and a nurse. But he’d grown angrier and angrier as the evening progressed. Finally, deep in the night, he could stand it no more. His father might be at Death’s door but he needed to be told that he was a despicable man and a wretched excuse for a father.

He made for the marquess’s bedchamber. The nurse had nodded off in the next room but the door to the marquess’s bedchamber was ajar, leaking both light and voices into the passage. He peeked in and recognized the rector by the man’s vestment.

“But—but—but, my lord, that was murder,” stammered the rector.

“I knew bloody well it was murder when I pushed her down the staircase,” said the marquess. “Had it been an accident, I wouldn’t need you here.”

Vere saw black. He gripped a wall sconce for support. Eight years before, his mother had died of what everyone believed to be an unfortunate fall from the grand staircase of the marquess’s London town house. She’d stayed out too late, had a little too much to
drink, the heels of her dancing slippers had caught, and down she had gone.

Her death had devastated Vere and Freddie.

Her blood had had nothing of the Norman purity her husband so prized in himself; her father, despite his superlative wealth, had ranked in the marquess’s eyes as little more than a peddler. But she had been no wilting flower. The only child of an extraordinarily wealthy man, she’d known very well that her dowry paid the marquess’s debts and kept the estate afloat. And she’d protected her children, especially Freddie, from the marquess’s unpredictable and often virulent temper.

The marquess and the marchioness’s mutual loathing had been common knowledge. The spendthrift marquess had already depleted the considerable dowry his wife had brought into the marriage and was in debt again. Vere’s maternal grandfather, Mr. Woodbridge, no fool, provided for his daughter’s needs directly: her gowns, her jewels, her trips abroad so she and her children could get away from her husband.

Yet despite all the domestic tension, no one had ever suspected foul play in her death. Or at least, no one had ever dared to accuse the marquess himself of it. Six months later the marquess married again, a lesser heiress this time, but one who had already come into her inheritance—no pesky father-in-law this time.

While the record was firmly set that the first marchioness’s death had been an accident, pure and simple.

And so Vere had believed, until that heinous moment. He wanted to hide. He wanted to run. He wanted
to kick open the door and stop the proceedings. But he was frozen in place, unable to move a single muscle.

“I assume you have repented, my lord?” asked the rector, his voice squeaking.

“No, I would do it again if I had to—I couldn’t stand her another minute,” said the marquess. He laughed, a wheezing, horrible laugh. “But I suppose we must go through the formalities, mustn’t we? I tell you that I’m sorry and you tell me all is well on God’s green earth.”

“I can’t!” the rector cried. “I cannot condone either your action or your unrepentant ways.”

“You will,” said the marquess, his spite inexorable. “Or the world would finally learn why you are the confirmed bachelor you are. For shame, Reverend Somerville, carrying on with a married man, damning his eternal soul to hell even as you damn your own.”

Vere turned and walked. He could not stand to listen to the marquess have his way one last time, not after he already got away with murder.

The marquess’s funeral was a dreadful occasion, thickly attended, his lofty character and good deeds lauded to the rafters by those who either didn’t know or didn’t care what he truly had been: a fiend.

The night after the funeral, Vere had his nightmare for the very first time. Never mind that he’d never seen the scene of his mother’s death; he would now find her cold and broken at the foot of the staircase again and again and again.

Three months later, Vere broke down and confided in his great-aunt Lady Jane.

Lady Jane listened with sympathy and sensitivity. And then she said, “I’m so sorry. It devastated me when I learned of it from Freddie. And yet it devastates me no less to hear it again from you.”

Her revelation shocked Vere almost as much as the truth behind his mother’s death.

“Freddie
knew? He knew and he didn’t tell me?”

Lady Jane realized her mistake but it was too late. Vere refused to allow her to retract her knowledge. Eventually she gave in.

“Freddie was worried about your reaction. He feared you might kill your father if you knew—not an unjustified concern, based on what I’ve seen so far,” said Lady Jane. “Besides, he believes your father already adequately punished.”

When Freddie was thirteen, so the story went, he had gone to their father’s room one night, after the marquess had confiscated one of his favorite sketches, in the hope of stealing it back. Apparently the marquess, believing the sounds Freddie made to indicate the presence of his first wife’s ghost, had been terrified.

Vere was beside himself. How dense could Freddie be, to think that their father suffered any twinge of regret, let alone fear? The man who’d threatened to expose the rector’s homosexuality had been no penitent and deserved no one’s forgiveness.

Two years Freddie had known it, two years during which Vere could have made his father’s life a living hell. That, to him, would have been Justice, or at least some measure of it. To have been denied it…to have been denied it by Freddie of all people…

Perhaps Lady Jane saw true potential in Vere. Perhaps she only wished that he would stop with his rants on Truth and Justice. In any case she returned his confidence with one of her own: She was an agent of the Crown whose life’s work had been to unearth truth and restore justice. It was too late for Vere’s mother. But might he find some solace in helping others?

He said yes immediately. Lady Jane advised that in order to turn himself into someone no one took seriously—an enormous asset to a covert agent—he should adopt a pose. She suggested the guise of a hedonist. Vere balked. He’d never been one to overindulge his senses. More important, despite his loneliness, he did not want to be near crowds any more than he must. And who’d ever heard of a secluded hedonist?

“I’d rather be an idiot,” he said.

Little did he realize that as a hedonist, at least he’d have been able to express his own opinions on a range of issues. The role of the idiot permitted no such relief. And the more skillfully he played the fool, the more he isolated himself.

Lady Jane recommended that he not make a decision right away. Exactly two days later, however, he was thrown from his horse. He immediately resolved
to exploit the very serious accident, and to take advantage of Needham’s presence as Lady Jane’s houseguest. Once the physician stamped the cachet of his considerable medical expertise on Vere’s condition, nobody would be able to say he
didn’t
suffer a severe, life-changing concussion.

The physical requirements for his sudden transition to idiocy established, he had a choice to make: What to tell Freddie?

Had Lady Jane’s slip of the tongue never happened, he might have made a very different decision. He and Freddie had always been close. While Freddie couldn’t lie, in this instance he didn’t have to: Vere’s own act was going to spread the news. Should Freddie be asked, he could simply give Needham’s diagnosis verbatim. And Freddie’s loyalty to Vere was so well-known that even if he continued to speak of his brother’s assorted cleverness, his listeners would only conclude that he had trouble accepting the new reality.

But as Freddie had seen fit to rob Vere of any chance of avenging their mother, Vere returned the favor and kept his new secret to himself.

When Vere had wholeheartedly disliked his wife, in a way it had been because she, with her thespian skills and her facile lies, reminded him too much of himself.

But those had been mere surface similarities. Underneath, he was a man who had been fractured at sixteen and never been made whole again, while she,
as imperfect as she was, possessed a resilience that left him breathless.

Her hand remained in his, her fingers slack with slumber. He’d meant only to stay with her until she fell asleep, but he was still here at the break of dawn, guarding against her nightmares.

He wanted always to be a bulwark against her nightmares.

The thought didn’t surprise him as much as he imagined it would, now that he’d stopped denying that he loved her. But he wasn’t worthy of her—at least, not as he was, now with all the deceit and cowardice that still blighted his character.

He knew what he had to do. But did he have the courage and humility for it? Was his desire to walk beside her and protect her stronger than his instinct to shy away from the repercussions of truth and continue the fraud that was his life?

He felt as if he stood at the very top of a high cliff. Take a step back and all was safe and familiar. But going forward required a singular leap of faith—and he was a man of little faith, particularly when it came to himself.

But he wanted her to look at him again as if he were full of possibilities. As if
they
were full of possibilities.

And for that he would do the right thing, whatever his shortcomings.

A
death in the family, especially a death under such strained circumstances, required much to be done in its wake.

Edmund Douglas’s body had to be claimed and buried, his solicitors consulted with regard to his will and his estate. Had things been different, Elissande would have taken care of matters. But with her battered face—the bruises had turned a cringe-inducing mélange of purple, green, and darkish yellow—Mrs. Douglas had insisted that Elissande remain home to recuperate. She would go in Elissande’s stead.

It was time she took a greater interest in matters of her own life, said Mrs. Douglas. Vere, who had anyway needed to go to London, volunteered to accompany her. They also brought along Mrs. Green, who would see to it that Mrs. Douglas was comfortably put up and meticulously looked after.

And now Mrs. Douglas dozed in their rail compartment,
her weight against Vere’s arm as insubstantial as that of a blanket.

Memories surfaced of her daughter sleeping next to him on the train. He remembered his resentful bewilderment that he could have been drawn to someone of such questionable character. His intellectual self had yet to recognize what a deeper, more primal part of him already sensed at first sight: her integrity.

Not integrity in the sense of unimpeachable practice of morality, but a personal wholeness. Her trials under Douglas had not left her unmarked, but neither had they lessened her.

Whereas he had been both scarred
and
diminished.