Lord Lightning (21 page)

She sensed how much the question meant to him and answered him carefully. “I don’t know. I spent much time considering it and looking at your chart, but all I can come up with is that there is something unusual there, though I cannot tell what it is.”

“Then my suspicion must be true. She must not be my mother.”

She was forced to correct him. “A horoscope cannot answer such a question beyond doubt. I wish it could, for it would be such a relief to you to know the truth. But given how important the question is, I don’t understand why you haven’t simply confronted Mrs. Atwater and demanded to know the truth. It must be torment not to know.”

“Not as much torment as what I should feel if my suspicion proved false. It is bad enough to be Black Neville’s son and James’s brother. To know for a certainty that I am my mother’s son—I don’t know if I could bear it.”

Again his face bore that naked look that was so at odds with his pose of cool unconcern. Eliza turned away and busied herself for a moment with wringing out her damp skirt, fighting the urge to respond to the pain she felt emanating from him with an answering emotion of her own. Whatever it was he wanted from her, it wasn’t that. It was her self-control that made him feel safe revealing himself to her. To let her own feelings peep out
might damage the fragile bond that had begun to form between them. Better to maintain the façade of wry amusement he expected of her.

She paused, trying to find a way to respond to his admission that would not imperil her own fragile control, then finally spoke. “I can understand why you might not wish to know for certain that Lady Hartwood really is your mother. She shocked me this morning with the intensity of her disgust for you and the degree to which she seems to have confused you with your brother.”

“How so?”

“She accused you of being a murderer, of going out dancing the very night you caused a woman’s death, when she, of all people, must know it was James who caused that poor girl to die. I cannot understand how a mother could say such a terrible thing about her own son, knowing it wasn’t true.”

She had not even finished speaking when a startling transformation came over Edward’s face. His warm brown eyes, which had glowed with kindness a moment before, hardened. His mouth tightened. She cursed her thoughtlessness in turning the conversation, which had been going so smoothly, onto such a painful topic. But it was too late. His eyes shuttered, Edward demanded, “What exactly did she say?”

“She warned me away from you, saying you were dangerous and that you had driven a poor deluded creature to her death.”

“And did you fly to my defense and quote the
authority of the Dog Star and the Pleiades to her?”

“No. There was no need to.”

“Thank God for that,” Edward said with bitter relief. “For had you done so, you would only have added to the contempt she feels for me.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, frightened by the look of anguish that had taken over his face.

“She was not referring to the woman James ruined,” Edward said, his voice as dull as lead. “I am guilty of what she accused me of.”

“Of driving a woman to her death?”

“Of driving a woman to her death and going dancing when the news of her death was brought to me.”

“Oh no, Edward!” She gasped. He could not mean what he’d just said. But if he did—the kinder emotions she had been struggling against feeling the moment before were nothing compared to the crushing fear that gripped her now.

“Your faith in me was misplaced.” He spoke in the same deadened voice. “She told you nothing but the truth.”

She felt almost physically sick. It could not be true. She could not have felt such attraction to him if it were.

As if responding to her unvoiced thoughts, his tormented face grew harsh. “Don’t waste your breath taxing me again with deceiving you,” he commanded. “I told you many times I was an evil man. It was you who wouldn’t believe me.”

The sun came out from behind a cloud. In the stiff breeze from the sea the curling tendrils of his
golden hair flared out around his head, glowing like the flames of hell.

Could it be so? Could she have been so self-deluded?

Fear wanted to answer yes, the fear that had controlled her throughout her life until this tormented man had shared some of his strength with her. Weakness chimed in, too, murmuring she’d fallen prey to a delusion just as Lady Hartwood had gloated that she had. But even as fear and weakness contended for her heart, wild courage rose up to meet them—the courage that had been growing within her with each passing hour she had spent in Edward’s presence—and protested it
wasn’t
true. Lady Hartwood could not be so right and she so wrong.

Fighting the darkness closing in on her, Eliza shouted into the freshening wind, “Edward, I have been with you too long to suppose that you are that evil. You aren’t a wicked man. I won’t believe it.”

He spun around on his heel to face her. “You must believe it,” he said, his voice desperate. “I caused a woman to die, just like my brother.”

“But surely it was an accident.”

“It was no accident. I tell you, Eliza. The woman died and I wanted her to die. I’m not the man you dream of. I am a cold, cruel man who cannot love, and my touch is deadly. You made me wish it weren’t true. You made me want to be the man you imagined me to be. But I am not.”

He shook the sand from his feet and strode
away from her back toward the path. For a terrifying moment, Eliza wondered if he was going to abandon her here on the beach. But as he neared the cliff, he stopped and waited for her.

“At least I haven’t ruined you,” he said in a tone of detached satisfaction, his voice once again under control. He picked up his shoes and busied himself with putting them on. “Fetch your things,” he said, but the pain Eliza still saw in his eyes warred with the nonchalance he was trying to project. She struggled to hold on to the objectivity that was all that could save both of them now.

“You must tell me what happened,” she insisted.

“I cannot. I have vowed never to defend myself for what I’ve done. You need know only that I am not worthy of your faith in me.”

He smacked his shoe sharply against his hand to dislodge a small pebble, refusing to meet her eye. “This morning I gave in to my own weakness and used my knowledge of how to manipulate women to trick you into staying with me. But you had the right of it when you told me you should go. Thank God you reminded me of what I really am, before my weakness took complete control. You are not safe with me. My mother told the truth. I am dangerous. You must go away quickly before I harm you further. I will leave the money I promised you with my man. You may apply to him for it when it pleases you.”

Eliza stood shivering in the cold wind, her fear contending with another emotion even more difficult to endure, for even as he condemned himself,
she had heard it in his voice: He cared for her. And as her heart opened to the wonder of that knowledge she felt a strange mixture of joy and impending doom. How could she leave him now? She had fought so hard against loving him when she had feared he could not care. How could she leave him now when the agony in his voice told her it was his concern for her that made him condemn himself so harshly? It was not self-delusion to believe that he cared for her—cared so much that he was fighting to overcome the darkness within himself to save her. But that knowledge paralyzed her. What if his self-condemnation was true?

She should flee. She should escape him while he gave her the chance, but she could not. The thought that she meant that much to him gave her the strength to make one last desperate plea.

“You said you needed my friendship, Edward. If that was a trick you played on me, you have tricked yourself, too. For I will behave as a friend must behave. I will go nowhere ‘til you tell me the truth about the crime you accuse yourself of. I must judge for myself if you are what you say you are. You owe me that much. You must tell me what really happened.”

The dark eyes glowed from beneath the pale gold thatch framing his face. “Go ask my mother for the details. She’ll be glad to tell you.”

“Your mother hates you. I wish to hear the story from you and from you alone. And I will wait until you tell it to me.”

“You’ll have a long wait ahead of you, for I’ve sworn not to tell it.”

“Then you must prepare to add oath breaking to the long list of your sins. For I will not leave until I hear the story from your own lips.”

He shrugged. His face had become a mask of torment that for once was not an actor’s mask. “How like a woman,” he said bitterly, “to refuse to leave me ‘til you’ve destroyed my happy memories of our time together and replaced them with one final vision of your face twisted in disgust, after you finally see that, just as I told you, I am an evil man.”

Then without another word he took her hand and led her back toward the path.

H
e abandoned her when they reached the house, fleeing into his room and calling his man to him there. Eliza made her way alone to her attic room and once again reached into her flowered satchel for Lord Lightning’s well-worn chart.

Could it really be true? The certainty that had gripped her by the sea had fled. Could her Edward have really driven a woman to her death and danced when he heard the news? Could he have been that heartless? Had her Sagittarian optimism betrayed her into seeing goodness in him where there was none? The day was taking on the feel of a nightmare. The chart she held in her hand seemed to change as she looked at it, the familiar signs revealing sinister meanings she had never seen there before.

The Moon conjunct his Mars, which she had interpreted
as anger against his mother, had other meanings, too. Was it not placed in the House of Death? She had interpreted that to mean that he had a strong sexual nature, for that House was also the place of Sexual Congress. But it also could point to murder. She shivered. Had she simply seen what she wanted to see, seduced by Edward Neville’s sensual beauty?

And his Saturn. She had given it little weight in her earlier readings, taking it to mean he’d had a difficult childhood; but now it seemed to glow from the paper with a stark malevolent glare. It was placed in the House that described both childhood and love affairs. So it could also be read as permanent hard-heartedness. As coldness to lovers. And because it opposed his fiery Leo Sun, missing only by a few degrees the damaging square to his Moon and Mars, she had interpreted it to mean that his mother’s anger had blocked his ability to express a fundamentally loving nature. But there were other more troubling interpretations of the aspect. It might mean, as he had claimed all along, that he really could not love.

But why would she only see this now?

Had she first read his chart after meeting him, she would have blamed her lack of objectivity on her own involvement with him. But he had been a complete stranger when she had first read his horoscope at Violet’s behest. There had been no reason for her to delude herself then when she had seen his need to love.

Or had there been? Overwhelmed by a sense of
foreboding, she heard her inner voice speak the truth she had been hiding from all along. There was a reason why she was looking at
his
chart, not her own. A reason she had been hiding from herself.

She forced herself to extract her own nativity from the satchel. The well-worn parchment was all too familiar. How often had she and her aunt pored over it. How often had her aunt warned her of what now stood out so painfully as she confronted it.

Lord Lightning was not the only one under the sway of unruly Uranus. It conjoined her natal Jupiter, the planet of excess. It stood in the House of Lovers, too, the place where that excess would play itself out in her life. And if that were not bad enough, both Jupiter and Uranus trined her natal Sun—that Sun which was placed in the alarming House of Sexual Relations. How could she view with objectivity a man who excited all that she found most fearful in herself?

“The universe is a mysterious place,” Aunt Celestina used to tell her, “and we are not meant to know all.”

But she must know all, and swiftly. Was she falling in love with a cold-blooded destroyer? Had her aunt been right that Eliza’s impetuous nature would lead her into ruin far worse than that which had befallen her poor mother?

Perhaps she had.

Lord Lightning was everything her Aunt Celestina had feared she might become. Had that been
what made him irresistible? Hedged about as she had been by so much constraint, she had been bewitched by the freedom he had appropriated to himself. But under the sway of that enchantment had she overlooked the obvious? That a man who did not feel himself bound by the trivial rules that governed society might easily go further and ignore the serious ones—and cause a woman’s death.

The suspicion tortured her. And yet, even as she felt the cold settling around her heart, a voice rose within her and cried out she was being unjust. The man for whom she felt such affection was not just Lord Lightning. He was Edward Neville, too, the sad boy trapped behind the burning eyes that begged her not to leave. And it was not just his willingness to transgress the laws of society that drew her to him. There was much more to him than that.

She must find out the whole truth before she abandoned him forever. Too much was at stake to do anything else. If she was wrong and he was guilty of the crime with which he charged himself, she would accept the judgment of the stars and leave him to live out his life heartless and alone. But only when she was certain. ‘Til then, she must find courage and not let her own fears doom the two of them.

She threw herself on the bed, still dressed in the clinging damp clothes she had worn into the sea, but too exhausted to do anything about it. As the evening drew on, knowing she must sleep, she did
what she could to calm herself. Breathing deeply, she imagined herself rocked by the ocean’s surge, bathed in the light of the cold, implacable stars. But when she finally fell into a troubled sleep her dreams were fitful and disturbing. At long last the light of dawn glimmered at the attic room’s small window. She stripped off the salt-stiffened gown and did her best to clean herself off before dressing herself again in one of Violet’s silky garments. Though its touch should have repelled her now, oddly, it didn’t. It lent her courage.