Wicked Becomes You (33 page)

With every exit, that thud was sounding more and more significant. The sound of finality.

Which it was
not
.

Of course he could fix this problem. There was no need to panic. He turned back to the mumchance assembly. “I only need to know what the problem is,” he said.

Belinda and Caro exchanged veiled looks.

He did not like that. “Say it to my face,” he said, and his voice had a grim note in it that made him wonder whether his instincts had recognized something that his brain had not yet. In an
hour
, perhaps, he would not feel so calm at all.

“I believe that she told you,” Belinda’s husband said helpfully. “Doesn’t think you love her.”

Belinda shot her husband a glare.

Ah. But the man was right. At present, Alex’s truths held no value or meaning to her. He would not know how to speak them persuasively until he cracked this riddle. It would take more than an hour to do that.
Why do you doubt me, Gwen?
What was the true cause?

Little Madeleine spoke. “Why did the bride run away, Mama?”

“Because she got scared,” Caroline said, smoothing down her daughter’s hair. “Uncle Alex is going to fix it by proving to her that she doesn’t need to be scared anymore.”

“Does Uncle Alex love her?”

“Of course he does,” Gerry snapped.

Hearing this truth from Gerry’s mouth brought a wave of foreboding over Alex. Christ, if
Gerry
could believe this but not
Gwen—

“Well,” Gerard continued gruffly. He took a seat at the desk, graceless as a sack of turnips. “I’ll say no more, then. But it’s a damned shame. Family could have used three million pounds.”

“Oh,
Gerard
,” Caroline sighed. Alex opened his mouth to deliver the truly cutting reply that his brother’s asinine remark deserved—and a nudge of intuition stopped his tongue.

“Could we, then?” he asked mildly.

Gerard’s eyes, meeting his, widened infinitesimally—then dropped. “Who couldn’t?” he muttered.

Alex did not look away. A possibility, theretofore unthinkable, spun through him. He did not like unthinkable possibilities. He liked none of this.
You love me as much as you love Heverley End
. Is that what she thought she was to him? A problematic millstone around his neck? Some unwanted weight?

A glimmer of inspiration struck him. “I’ll fix this,” he said slowly.

At the Beechams’, he discovered that Gwen had fled to Heaton Dale, and Elma had taken to bed. She called him up to her sitting room, where she subsided across a chaise longue, tipping her head to the cold compress held by a solicitous maid. “Do not chase after her,” she advised. “You will waste the trip. She would not permit even me to accompany her. I have never seen her in such a state!”

He did not argue. “If she asks after me—”

Elma took charge of the compress and sat up. “She won’t, Mr. Ramsey. I tell you, she has lost her wits. I reasoned with her all the way to the station. I might as well have been speaking to a lump of clay!”

He mustered a smile. “If she asks,” he said, “tell her I have gone to Heverley End.”

The compress thumped to the floor. “But why?” Elma frowned. “That’s the opposite direction! Surely you can’t mean to listen to me? You
must
go after her!”

He laughed. “And so I will,” he said. But first he had to find Gwen what he had promised her: the proof she required.

Heverley End was a Jacobean cottage of Portland stone, weathered and pocked by the centuries of salt that had scoured its golden face. It sat atop a serpentine cliff veined with copper, and its mullioned windows overlooked the surf’s retreat. In Alex’s memory it was fearsome, a place better fit to abandonment and hauntings. In his more recent imaginings on the journey here, men with bowler hats had menaced the perimeter.

The truth was far less remarkable. The house was pretty in the setting sun. Quaint, even. And if Barrington had yet visited his new possession, he’d made no changes to the staff. The gatekeeper recognized Alex from boyhood, and the front door opened on another familiar face: the housekeeper, Mrs. Regis, still as spare and tall as a Maypole. He remembered her as a stiff and bloodless presence, always hovering a few paces from the doctors and nursemaids. Now, to his surprise, she insisted on crying briefly into her apron before leading him on a tour of the old terrain.

As he followed her, he grew conscious of a stupid disappointment. He would have taken pleasure from fighting his way into the house. It would have seemed fitting, for he’d certainly fought his way out of it, once upon a time.

“We have kept it up,” Mrs. Regis assured him as she guided him down the creaking corridors. No electricity here yet; gaslight lent the scene the bluish tinge of history, things already receding, soon forgotten to the world. Emptiness pervaded the rooms: walls denuded of their paintings, rugs rolled away, furniture put to sleep beneath dust sheets. But Mrs. Regis spoke the truth: the oak floorboards squeaked beneath a layer of fresh wax.

On the second floor, outside his old bedroom, she stepped aside to permit him entrance and he thought that
here
, surely, was the moment when things would finally become difficult. He stepped in on a breath that wanted to falter in physical memory of his time here. They had removed the bookshelves and armoire. Stripped the bed of its mattress. But the view of the sea, of the whitewashed cliff and the pale blue waters stretching endlessly out beyond, was the same.

He walked to the window. The vista felt more intimate and familiar to him than his own reflection. His reflection was a fluke, a product of chance. In that endless vista he had looked to find his courage and his future as the sour smoke of burning nitre-paper had roiled endlessly up behind him. He had worked to discover himself.

For your own good, Alex.

He pressed his fingertips to the pane. He forced a long breath.

It came easily. Of course it did. Sometimes life was kind, and illness faded more gracefully even than the dead.

He blinked, and the view was not so portentous, after all. It was merely . . . pretty. Yes, he thought, if Gwen thought the Seine at sunrise lovely, she would find this view no less pleasing. This view: how curious that it had once meant so much to him, so much anger and desperation and possibility as well. It was only a small slice of the world, a pleasant slice, framed and made coherent by wood and glass and plaster, rude, dumb material that had no pull on him, no claim, no weight.

This house laid no weight on him. He pressed his hand now against the window frame. Of course it didn’t. It was only a damned building.

He breathed again, even more deeply. How could she think she weighed on him? Even standing in this house, thinking of her, he felt light. As a boy, if he could have looked out this window and seen
her
instead of the sea, he still would have proved no less ambitious for himself.

Well . . . perhaps not. He felt himself smile—here, in this house, without effort. Boys were dim-witted about women. Even as a man, he’d been dim-witted for too long.

A groaning floorboard announced Mrs. Regis’s approach. He turned, and the smile still lingering on his lips appeared to startle her. Her hands flew together at her waist, burrowing into her apron strings like two bony birds in search of cover.

He supposed his sudden appearance, his silent survey, might have looked a bit queer to her, particularly in light of the sale to Barrington. “And how is it with your new master?” he asked, seeking to put her at ease. “Have you met the gentleman yet?”

Her brow knitted. Myopically, she peered at him. “Sir? We’ve not seen the master for some months, now. But . . . that is to say—” She spoke more hastily, perhaps fearing that this remark would be taken as criticism. “He is in regular communication with Mr. Landry—that would be the steward, now, sir. A very good master, Lord Weston is; the rent rollback saved many a family in the village this spring.”

Alex stared at her. “Lord Weston,” he said slowly.

She blinked at him, a startled sparrow. “Aye, sir. Your . . . brother?”

“This spring?” He sounded like a parrot. No matter. Here it was: his intuition finding its aim.

Her sunken face took on a delicate pink hue. “Ah—perhaps more properly summer, sir. We count May as spring in these parts, you know.”

So. The smile was back on his lips now. A month ago, long after news of the sale had circulated, Gerry had been rolling back rents on the property.

He laughed, and she flinched. Poor Mrs. Regis. No doubt the village would soon be whispering that the boy asthmatic, who had bedeviled the family with his reckless antics, now had grown into a full-fledged madman. “He never sold this place.”

Mrs. Regis drew herself up, affronted by the idea. “Certainly not! This property has been in your family for near to three hundred years, sir.”

“True enough,” Alex said. That hypocritical, two-faced bastard. “And so it shall remain.”

Of all the things to be loathed in a London season—the hypocrisies and charades, the cruelties small and large, the shallow praise and shallower judgments—none was worse than this: the season had robbed Gwen of springs in the countryside. She had forgotten how beautiful Heaton Dale was in June, even with the pagodas, which made such a ridiculous mismatch with the surrounding cornfields.

She sat in a wicker chair on the back terrace, overlooking this land, the light shawl across her shoulders donned for a chill that the morning sun had long since burned away.
So take it off
, she thought. But she did not move.

She had moved very little in the last two days. It was as if making her way out of London had exhausted all her strength and now she could do nothing but sit very still, and look, and try not to think.

She looked, then, and tried to nourish herself on beauty. Heaton Dale sat on a slight rise—a hillock, really—to which her parents had added. Layer upon layer of sediment had been pressed into the earth, lifting the house farther toward the sky than nature had intended. From this lofty vantage point, the countryside rolled out in all directions, the grass walks that bordered the cornfields drawing a geometrical grid to guide the eye. The hedges bristled with shepherd’s roses and blossoms of white hawthorne, and closer by, interspersing the remaining pagodas (she’d had two chopped up and carted away this morning, and the rest would fall to the axe tomorrow), limes and honeysuckle dotted the lawn. Nightingales and larks flitted from limb to limb, serenading the sky, the season, the sun.

Such a lovely view. Too lovely to be viewed and admired by nobody but her. Behind her, from inside, came a great racket amongst the staff. There were eighteen bedrooms to be aired—
eighteen
;
she could not imagine what her parents had been thinking—and half as many drawing rooms. Also: two dining rooms, a billiards room, a smoking room, a morning room, two conservatories, a music room, quarters to house over sixty servants, and, of course, the nurseries. Very large nurseries, with great, glorious windows that let in light both in the morning and afternoon. Her parents had nursed grand plans for their children, of which marriage had only been the beginning.

Well, they had sent her away, and then they had died.

And then Richard had died.

Anger flickered, and with it stirred a horrifying urge to cry, still not quite vanquished. She took a sharp breath against it. She did not care what her parents’ plans had been. If, somewhere above, they were upset with her for failing to honor their dreams, they must look to themselves for the reason. They had died. Everyone who loved her had died, but
she
had survived and done her best. She was done with being left and abandoned.

I love you
, he said, and
I will prove it
, as if, by doing so, it would become his right to demand another chance from her. Oh, he was worse than Pennington and Trent by far. At least
they
had only wanted her money. He wanted far more than that. He was the last man any sane woman would trust; leaving was his art form. Yet he wanted to take her trust in his hands, to lure her into loving him, with her only reassurance his single, slim promise not to break faith and abandon her. And what did this promise come down to? Merely two words, two syllables, scripted by somebody else, and spoken countless times by a million cads or more:
I do
. How many men had said those two words while already plotting their peccadilloes and betrayals? Her parents had loved her truly, by blood as well as by heart, and Richard had, too; but that had not stopped
them
from leaving. How dare he think a simple promise more powerful than what had bound her family to her? How dare he ask her to imagine that he could deliver to her what her own family had failed to do? Nobody could promise to stay.

“Mistress,” came a voice from behind her. One of her new footmen. It had taken under two days to assemble a staff; money did have its advantages. “Lady Anne rather wishes to see you. Are you at home?”

She turned in her seat. How curious that of all the people she might have imagined would call on her here—although Elma was fuming at her, and the Ramsey twins were maintaining their distance, per her wishes—the first should be Lady Anne. Gwen could not imagine what might have prompted it. Heaton Dale was two hours outside the city by rail, no small effort for a girl whose social schedule was—so Anne assured her in regular notes—remarkably full.