The Dark Affair (2 page)

T
he Irishwoman’s response was not at a
ll what he’d expected. In fact, he began to wonder if he’d fallen down Carroll’s rabbit hole. Surely his life was upside down?

Instead of backing down from his hard line, she stayed still and said simply, “Your father, and therefore the committee in charge of this institution, feel you must be kept under watch for your own protection. All because you can’t control your anger any longer . . . or your opium intake.”

He jerked back, his hands sliding away from the wall. “I beg your pardon?”

“You will be considered mad and at the hands of the doctors until I tell your father I am willing to take you into my keeping.” She waggled her brows slightly. “Ironic, is it not? A wee slip of a girl in charge of the mighty Viscount Powers?”

Again, the room looped, and he closed his eyes, desperately trying to keep his footing. He reached out and grabbed her wrist. “I don’t believe you.”

She tensed but didn’t scream. She didn’t make a sound. Only locked gazes with him, daring him. Daring him to make the right choice and not the mad one. Even so, now that his fingers had encompassed her wrist, he couldn’t help but savor the feel of her delicate bones and smooth skin under his roughened hands. It was as though he’d latched on to an anchor that would keep him from drifting wildly on raging seas.

“I know when I see a man stewin’ in his own pain. Why don’t you tell me about it?”

He snorted. “I don’t want anyone’s help. And I am not talking to you about such things.”

“Sure, and could you not make an exception given the unusual circumstances?” she asked. “You don’t want to stay here until they truss you up like a Christmas goose.”

Good sodding Christ. How in the hell had he ended up here? In this room. With this cool-as-steel Irish lass passing off imprisonment as a joke? He, Viscount Powers, in a madhouse. Oh . . . Yes. His father had tossed him here. But for what reason? Because he’d gone on a few benders in the course of a few weeks? What man didn’t? Granted, the last had been particularly bad. He could scarcely recall many days, just bruised and bloodied knuckles and the scent of opium smoke. That hardly seemed—

“Are you listening, James? If you are, I’d be grateful if you let go my arm.”

Instead of letting go, he slowly inched her forward and slid his fingers about hers until he was holding her hand just like a suitor strolling through the park. She wanted to be intimate, did she? “Your name, then?”

A muscle twitched in her cheek at his newly enforced but gentle touch. “Margaret.”

He smiled grimly. “Maggie.”

“Margaret,” she corrected.

He dropped her hand and took a pointed step back from her, his own gaze hot as he weaved slightly. “Maggie, you call me James one more time, and I will stuff my bedclothes down your lily-hued throat.”

She staggered a little at his sudden movement but then righted herself by smoothing her hands down the front of her skirts. “What a colorful and interesting proposition.”

“Interesting?” he echoed, disbelief rattling through him, mixing with the liquid-hot feel of his muscles and bones. Why the hell wouldn’t she go away, as all the others had done? Either she had a death wish or she was incredibly dense. He was guessing the former.

She nodded, her eyes traveling over to the mattress, which was clearly bare of linen. “Do you like being medicated, my lord?”

He shook his head slightly, fighting off the fog that had been rolling in and out of his life these last days. “Medicated?”

“Sure, and they’ve been giving you morphine,” she said softly. “Were you not aware?”

He tore his gaze from her and let his attention dart around the room, searching for something, anything to hold him as panic began its evil dance inside him. Morphine? No wonder he felt lost. Lost. So lost and furious. Futile desperation crawled into his gut. How could he make them stop giving him the stuff? Just so he could have a little clarity. A little time. A little time to prove he was not completely out of control. “No. I didn’t. I knew—”

She sidestepped a little, looking toward the door. “Something wasn’t quite right?”

He gave a curt nod, his teeth grinding as he clamped his jaw tight.

She turned her serene face back to him and then said solemnly, “Will you talk about Sophia if you refuse to talk aught about yourself?”

The fight, which had been so ready to burst in him, fizzled down to the burning plight of ashes doused in London’s debilitating rain. All he wanted to do was drag his tired body to the bed, collapse upon it, and curl into a conciliating ball. “She’s dead.” The words reverberated through the room, bouncing in the cold air around him, like cruel, north Essex mockingbirds that would not cease their chatter.

“All the more reason to recollect her, I should think.”

He frowned, sorting through her collection of words slowly, carefully, wondering. “Should you?”

That face of hers, like all the virgins in all the cathedrals in every godforsaken place in Europe, stared back at him, so calm, so unaffected by his wildness, so full of . . . perfection.

Perfection, he found, was usually a meticulously created guise to hide something horrible beneath. What horrors did she hold beneath her porcelain facade? Perhaps he should endeavor to interrogate
her.

He smiled dryly. “And do you like to recollect your dead, Maggie?”

Her shoulders tensed under the pressed wool molded to her bodice. “I do.”

Shaking his head, he lifted a finger and wagged it at her. “You’re lying.”

It was tempting to let his shoulders collapse and break under the weariness of humanity. Everyone lied. Everyone betrayed. Even the dead. The ones lost to him. But in the end, hadn’t he been the greatest betrayer of them all?

He pinned her with his gaze, challenging her to continue, wishing to a god he didn’t believe in that she would just give up and go. For he would not ever allow her to see his true face. No one was allowed to see that now.

Relentless woman that she was, she had the persistence to point out, “Don’t you see? If we talk about the dead, then they’re never really gone, my lord.”

His lips twisted into a bemused grin, full of bitter humors. For a moment, he’d thought he’d found an interesting woman, a woman who just might understand and not spew platitudes, but as was so often the case these long days, he’d been mistaken. “That is such utter shit.”

“And Jane?” she countered, her voice sharp and pointed, unyielding in the face of his brutal determination to keep his secrets to his breast.

Christ, the woman had no mercy within her at all.

Jane.

The name echoed through him, and he stood absolutely still for a moment, unable to draw breath, as Jane boomed down his veins and rammed into his heart.

A well of memories spiraled up within him, and a rush of pain crammed his throat. The pulsating emotions throttled upward, barreling through his chest with such sudden and uncontrollable force he couldn’t stop it. “Get out!” he roared.

She paled and stepped back, those damn skirts, which had so captivated him, spiraling around her legs.

Good. He wanted her terrified. She wished to push him? Well, he would push back. He drew himself up to his full height, his hands flexing and unflexing with his sudden rage. “Get out!”

She stretched out her palms, attempting to placate him. “My lord, please. Calm—”

There would be no placation. Not now. The room reeled around him and images began to dance, wicked dervish dances inside his head. And the pain of it. His body was on fire with the memories. And then it happened. What little control he had snapped as wild emotion ruled every last bit of him.

He lurched forward, moving fast, his body so full of fury he was sure his skin couldn’t contain it. How dare she? How dare she throw his dead in his face? How dare she make him remember? “Get out!”

She stumbled backward, her own infuriatingly calm eyes flaring. “My lord. Calm yourself—”

“Calm?” he mocked, stunned he could even form words, he so brimmed with hate. “I have been calm for years. I think it’s time I was done with that. Now, get out or I swear to God, I will not be accountable for my actions.”

She darted backward, her boots tapping against the stone floor. “But—”

He flung his hands to his face. A little girl, perfect, elfin, blond, and so full of trust, spun before his gaze. He let out a guttural moan, wishing he could claw the sudden images of his little girl from his eyes. Of his wife, just as pale and elfin, turned blue and dead.

He turned to the bed and grabbed on to the iron frame. His fingers bit into it, and he savored the pain. He needed that pain to force down
this
pain. To force down the memories. He lifted the bed and slammed it against the floor. The metal cut into his palms, and he felt the trickle of blood as his skin broke. And it was just what he needed. God, it felt good.

The sound of her fist jolting against the door penetrated his brain. She was leaving. She was going. His escape was going and he didn’t care. He wanted her to go and leave him forever. Never to come back, not if she was going to force him to remember. God, he didn’t care if he was left here. Not now. Not lost in the white-hot cruelty of memory that she had spurred.

Jane. Beautiful Jane. Her blond braid dancing down her back and her childish fingers pressing against his cheeks as he kissed her good night. Her beautiful, laughing smile as he told her stories or as they galloped through the fields playing hide-and-seek amid the rushes.

Jane.

His heart split, and grief spilled from him in wave after unrelenting, punishing wave.

Big hands, nothing like Maggie’s pretty pale hands, seized him and wrenched his arms behind his back. He didn’t care. He didn’t care so long as he could forget . . . and never had to remember his life again.

M
argaret pressed a hand to her middle and swallowed back the disconcerting sense of sadness that encompassed her usually icy heart. It would do the viscount no good for her to become overly involved in his pain. No. Only a calm assessment of his situation would aid him. Still . . . Margaret paused and glanced down the hall, listening for the sound of approaching doctors or staff before she peered in through the peephole in the big iron door.

Three male keepers were subduing Powers. Their bodies big, but nowhere near the size of the viscount’s, surrounded his form, shuffling and struggling with meaty hands to keep him under control. But she felt fairly certain the only reason Powers was being held at all was because he allowed it and was under the sway of morphine. Even in this state, there was something cool and fierce about the man. As if when he chose, he could erupt into a force so deadly that all would be laid to waste in his wake.

Perversely, that force was the very reason why she hadn’t been afraid of him. Because under all the surly challenge had been the notes of a man who had been completely in control of every aspect of himself for an exceptionally long time.

Perhaps too long.

Though it should have been, fear wasn’t what she’d felt in his presence. It had been something else entirely. Something else that lingered in her, captivating her, even as she studied his face, lean and furious as they manhandled him.

She’d meant what she’d told him—he was a good man. She’d never forget his letter to her father. So many years ago now. He’d spoken so eloquently of his grief for the Irish people, of his desire to help them. And unlike most of the English, this man had sent aid with no conditions attached.

She owed him a debt of gratitude that wouldn’t be easily ended.

Once this beautiful, agonized man had had all the control and ability to aid others. Now he had control of nothing. How the world turned . . .

His loss was the key to this current wildness. Perhaps he had simply controlled himself too long, had slipped loose his leash to expose the lord who had so long been hidden.

It was her duty to help him put the leash back on and reenter the world. This undertaking was unlike any she’d ever met. She’d worked with many men since the Crimea. All those beautiful youths destroyed by carnage. She’d never thought when she left the green shores of Ireland to be a nurse in that far-off war that she’d find her calling in helping soldiers rebuild their lives. But she had. In fact, her qualifications as a nurse and witness to war had altered her entire approach to the treatment of men trapped by the poppy’s lure.

She understood that not only was there a physical hunger, but there was a trauma that drove them back again and again to find forgetfulness.

It was these skills that had made her respected and sought after by the
ton
in the treatment of their damaged sons.

She was grateful that she’d taken that often painful path because now she could help the man who had helped her people. It was as if fate had taken her by the hand all those years ago so that she might be able to walk through his cell door and help him heal.

It wouldn’t be easy.

When she’d first seen him, that cold visage had seemed so manageable. So close to already being back into the world, she’d been sure she could lead him quickly and easily.

From the mention of his wife and daughter, he’d rapidly descended. And her heart had done something it had never done for any other man in her care. It had wept for him and his thrashing anger at his losses. But weeping solved nothing, and weakness would neither serve herself nor Powers. She drew in a slow breath and forced herself to watch and remind herself that Powers was no ordinary man. Forgetting that hardly seemed possible, given his remarkable presence.

The keepers wrestled Powers onto the bed, slamming his bulk down with a grunting thud. His silver-blond hair, gleamed halolike around his stunning, pain-stricken face. His big chest heaved like a bull ready to charge, and sounds of inhuman grief were erupting from him.

At last they forced him entirely down, strapping leather over his legs and over his chest. They even strapped a leather band over his forehead to keep him from whipping his head about and damaging his skull.

This was the best treatment available in London, and it sickened her.

Meticulously, she observed the way Powers began to still. How his body shut down. The sounds stopped abruptly, as did his raging, and then one of the keepers pulled out a syringe and a long piece of rubber. He wound the tourniquet around Powers’s arm, tapped the syringe, and then injected the morphine.

She ground her teeth. That had to cease. The man would never recover under the influence of opiates. If anything, it was the opium that was driving him into madness. But the doctors were convinced that Powers had become a violent lunatic who had periods of sanity, and the doctors were insistent that such patients needed to be medicated. She wasn’t so sure.

Self-awareness and intelligence still blazed in Viscount Powers’s icy eyes. And it would be up to her to pull that forward and drive the madness back. If she chose to take him on . . . which she would.

It was a task she could perform. She had to. She very badly needed the funds for her causes in Ireland. And she longed to help him. She lifted her hand and placed it on the cold door, as if she were pressing her palm to Powers’s shoulder. Wishing she could give him some sort of peace, even when a wall of iron existed between them.

She balled her hand into a fist and whipped away from the door. Comfort was all well and good. But control was what he needed and control was what she’d give him. Margaret lifted her chin and swept to the hallway that led down to the consulting rooms.

In quick, measured steps, she walked past bolted door after bolted door, locking the mad away. If only Powers’s pain hadn’t manifested through such violence on the streets, he’d never have been sent to such an aggressive sanatorium.

She ignored the rattles of chains and the maniacal laughter and moans of those still in the world but not of the world. She’d become inured to the sounds, the foul smells of bodies out of control, and the dim, flickering lighting. At least everything was clean. A far cry from how things had been when she’d first started nursing.

Fifteen years of being surrounded by some sort of ailment or madness had distilled a certain vein of implacable serenity in her person. She’d always relied upon and clung to it in moments like meeting a patient. But wasn’t that it? Why she was so shaken? She had never met a man like Powers.

Never.

And somehow, she’d felt herself quickly drawn into his world and the desire to pull him back into hers.

When she stood before the mahogany door leading into one of the receiving rooms, she smoothed her hands over her hair, assuring herself that she was perfectly ordered and not still visibly shaken from her response to the viscount. She turned the latch sharply and stepped through the open door.

The Earl of Carlyle stood before the crackling fire.

Like his son, he was a remarkably handsome man. Except worry and age had etched his countenance considerably. He twisted toward her the moment she stepped into the intimate and fairly cheerful room, a room meant to ease the consciences of the families committing sons, daughters, or wives. His black superfine wool coat hung lankly about his big frame. A clear sign he’d lost weight. His cheeks were two hollows, brushed with a barely groomed silver beard, and his eyes, though blue, unlike his son’s, were dark with fear. “My son? You’ve seen him?”

She closed the door behind her, buying a moment. She studied the lace draping the small table by the fire. It was never simple or pleasant, assisting the family in understanding the destruction of a loved one. She lifted her gaze to his hopeful one. “I have, my lord.”

“And you will help him?” Doubt lifted the old man’s voice to a high pitch. His hands shook slightly at his sides, whether with strain or ill health, she was uncertain. “No one else will.”

No one else will
.

And that, of course, was why he had sought her out. It saddened her that it often took so long for powerful men to seek the help of a woman, no matter how qualified, but there it was.

Folding her hands calmly before her, she gave a succinct nod. “Indeed, I shall, my lord.”

Most inappropriately, the earl darted across the room and seized her hands in his. Swiftly, he brought them to his lips and kissed them the same way a penitent might kiss the dusty preservations of a saintly relic. His whiskers brushed roughly over her skin as he murmured, “Thank you, my dear. Thank you.”

Margaret stared at the bowed silver head of the older man, thinking of her own father for a moment. A lord with no real power and no money. A failure to his people. He’d been so broken and desperate at the end.

The room began to close in, pressing tightly, sucking the air out of her lungs. Unlike the earl, her father’s desperation had not been for one man, but the millions he had seen placed in mass graves on lush green hillsides or shipped off like meat in overpacked and filthy ships.

God’s country.
Her
country. So beautiful it stirred the heart . . . But the beauty had served only as a painful contrast to the corpses, which had appeared barely human as they’d been stuffed in the earth together. For one brief moment, the smell of lye stung her nostrils, and she pulled her hands from the earl’s lest she recalled with any greater detail the dark years of her youth. “’Twill be no simple task. He is not well, yet we will see it done.”

He nodded, conciliatory but determined. “But he is not mad. Just immersed in drink and opium?”

She hesitated, wishing to be honest. “I do not believe he is mad, but he is a man ruled by pain, and we shall have to alleviate it.”

The earl’s expression dimmed, and then he forced a bright, brittle smile to his face. “Be certain he will succeed, Lady Margaret. He is of strong stock.”

Breeding.
In her experience, it meant little, even though the English were so very fond of its supposed importance.

She cleared her throat. “First we must diminish and eventually end his consumption of the devil’s brew.”

The earl’s bushy brows drew together. “Devil’s brew?” he echoed.

“Poppy. Poppy juice. Horse. White dust. Flea powder. China flower.” So many names for one deadly substance. She licked her lips before saying simply, “Opiates.”

“I see.” The earl looked askance, his fingers worrying the chain at his waistcoat. “What a knowledge you do have.”

She shrugged, then said kindly, “It is necessary for me to have knowledge of it. And your son has a dependency. As many have. Even so, it will be no easy task to divest him of it and then see how easily he will be able to cope with his internal pain without the narcotic. Pain is a powerful thing.”

“Yes.” The earl winced. “The doctors, they’ve all concluded that he will do himself . . . a mischief.”

“Which is why I am here,” she assured. “To establish he is not a danger to himself.”

The earl’s shoulders sagged and he turned away. “God, I never should have brought him here. He must hate me now. But I needed him to understand how dire his condition is. He doesn’t seem to see it.”

She took a small step forward, wishing for him to understand that he was not at all in the wrong. “My lord, you did the right thing by your son. If you hadn’t intervened, he’d be dead. I saw the reports. His consumption of opiates is high enough that he might accidentally take it to such excess that it would kill him. There is also the fact that he wanders about the worst areas of town while inebriated.”

He lifted a hand and pressed it to his eyes. “If only I’d known of you sooner. I could have taken him to the country. Kept him there . . .”

“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” She smiled slightly. “And in a few months, after much work and when he is ready, all this unseemly questioning of his health will be of no matter.”

The earl whipped around, his face tense. “You must understand how important this all is. He’s my only son. My heir. If he cannot care for himself, the line will die . . .”

Was that the only reason the old man cared? The need to pass on a heap of rocks and a title as old as England itself? Perhaps that’s what he told himself, but she’d seen genuine emotion as well. The ways and coldness of the English were a mystery to her. They always would be. “All will be well, my lord. I don’t believe your son wishes to die or that he is truly ready to give up on himself. You must leave it to me.”

The earl shifted uncomfortably, then pulled a silver cigar case from his pocket. Hands shaking, he slipped a slim stick free and tapped it against the back of the case. “There is something else I should like to ask of you.”

“I am at your service.” She was proud of her work helping people, even if they were sometimes simply young lords who had lost their way. It had taken her years and the assistance of many war-torn and troubled lordlings to rise to a place in which she could command a fee that was enough to support herself and her ultimate mission, to send significant money home to St. Catherine’s Home for Orphans in Galway.

Resolution seemed to shape the earl’s face and square his shoulders. “I—I want you to marry my son.”

She gaped, disbelieving the words that had just passed such a powerful man’s lips. “My lord?”

“I want you to remain with him always,” he said slowly, firmly. “To protect him.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Why not?” he demanded. “You’re a lady of aristocratic birth. He needs a wife and an heir, and surely a husband of such means would give you more freedom to work at your causes.”

She sought some articulate reason, but the proposal was so intensely shocking she had no idea how to formulate an argument. “I—I—”

“I have thought everything through. No usual young lady can handle or manage my son.” The earl paused, a shadow crossing over his face. “History has proved this. But from all reports, and from my own impression of your character, you can. James didn’t cow you, unlike all the men I sent in to evaluate him.”