CHAPTER FOURTEEN
By the calendar, he’d only lost four days. But the bright midday light showed differently. It lit Liam’s face in the mirror and offered a glimpse of his elderly future: hollow cheeks. Ashen bruises beneath his eyes. A marionette’s mouth, bracketed by deep lines.
He gazed on himself steadily as he knotted his cravat. The old man in the mirror looked put out. His jaw flexed and hardened, a weakling’s sulk, frustration with a cravat that would not cooperate. His hands were trembling too violently to manipulate it.
Liam made a fist, squeezing hard, harder, hard enough to snap his own tendons, to break his own bones.
There. The trembling stopped.
He knotted the cravat tightly. Choke on it, he thought.
“Where are you going?”
His wife’s startled query came from the doorway. She had forgotten how to knock. She assumed it was her right now to come and go as she pleased. Brazen, entitled, smug little fool. “Out.”
“Out, where? You should be in bed. You’re—”
He pivoted toward her. His expression caused her to take a startled step backward.
“I have an appointment,” he said.
He had tossed her out on waking, four hours ago. She had been sleeping next to him at the time. And beforehand? Watching him, listening to him, undressing him, bathing him, eavesdropping on his dreams, feeding him medicine to keep him weak and careless and exposed. His valet had described these deeds to him in admiring tones, as though they were proof of what a faithful and wondrous boon she was, this wife of his. As though any of it had been her right.
“You nearly just died,” she said sharply. She had used these four hours to bathe and refresh herself. Her sacque dress, a russet silk edged in gold lace, had been chosen by somebody—perhaps her, perhaps a cunning dressmaker—to complement the green of her eyes, and to force the viewer’s awareness, through the clash of russet and red, to the flaming brilliance of her hair. She looked every inch a countess, fashionable and civilized and impossibly, provocatively beautiful.
He wanted to rip that gown. Rub dirt on her face. Knock the pins out of her complex coiffure. Perfection had no place near him. Her voice droned on, fattened by the authority she mistakenly thought she possessed.
“—no ordinary fever! Dr. Smith thinks someone poisoned you, do you know that? What on earth could be so important that you—”
Words like flies flapping about him. He pushed by them and by her, too, into the sitting room, before her hand caught his elbow.
He turned immediately. “Let go,” he said softly.
Her hand detached itself. He took a long breath.
“Very well,” she said. “I’m coming with you.”
“No, you are not.”
“Yes.” She moved past him, putting herself in the doorway, barring his way by clutching the doorframe. “You are not going out alone. You have no idea how ill you were!”
He stared at her for a moment. What an absurdity. She knew he could remove her, lift her bodily away, with the barest effort. She did not know how little he trusted himself to touch her at present. If she were a man, he already would have struck her.
The thought felt strange and sickening. He had never understood or appreciated violence before being forced to practice it. He had mastered it through practice. Now the skill had become a part of him, an instinct: destroy.
“Get out of the way,” he said very quietly.
She tightened her grip on the doorframe. “I’ve spent four days nursing you back to health, and I won’t—”
“You overstepped.” Words could unleash violence, too. They felt like daggers in his mouth, sharp and murderous to speak. “It was not your place to ‘nurse’ me. It was not your place even to feel concern.”
“How can you say that? I’m your—”
“My wife. My contract wife, whose duties begin and end with the money she provides.”
She met his eyes with what she probably told herself was bravery. The noble, stainless heroine, confronting the monster she had married. “You know it was always more than that.”
A dull roar rushed into his ears. “I beg your pardon?”
“We loved each other. And had I known then what I know now—”
Pity. She felt pity for him now. He had no interest in what her pity had wrought. “Step aside.”
“You’re still feverish,” she said urgently. “You—”
He grabbed her hand and forced it to his brow.
“I am cold as a stone,” he said as he dropped her hand. “And I am sick of you, Anna. Sick of your demands, sick of your good intentions, sick most of all of your prurient little interest in my past. I am leaving—”
“Prurient! Liam, I am telling you I loved you. And I . . .” She licked her lips. “And I lost my faith in it only because I thought you had abandoned me. Do you hear me? That love never died. But I thought you had left me. Now that I know the truth—”
The truth? She knew only the barest outlines. Would a black-and-white sketch show her the truth of a three-dimensional world? But she thought she understood. She thought her pity, her Florence Nightingale ministrations, should mean something. He should feel grateful, no doubt, to find her willing to look upon him without repulsion—to remember, even, how she had once felt for the boy he’d been.
“I am leaving,” he said flatly. “When I come back, you will not be here. Or, if you are, then I will find some other place to lodge. Is that clear?”
She looked astonished. “No, I—are you angry with me? Upset that I saw you, is that it? That I know everything now—”
His laughter sliced through her words. “Everything? You know everything, do you? And now you love me again. Yes, of course, knowing everything has won me your heart. You know, for instance, that I was tied down while some bastard burned my initials into me—because if I wanted to be called that name so badly, I could wear it on my skin. You knew that? And it moved you.”
Her lips fumbled around some syllable. Of course she had no reply for him. Unspeakable things had no reply.
But he had survived them. So he could speak them.
“You knew I was whipped bloody,” he said, “and salt spread in my wounds. You know I was starved, and felt grateful when Henneage vomited, for the bread came up as soon as it went down.”
Her mouth fell open.
“Baby bird,” he said. She looked like a baby bird, gaping for a mother’s feeding. “Yes, precisely like that.”
“God above,” she whispered. “I—” She swallowed. “I want to know these things, Liam. However horrible, I want to know—”
“How courageous. You’ll find the strength to listen. Very brave, Anna.”
She stared at him, her eyes huge and fearful. An infant, at last beholding light.
But he had more marvels to share. “You’ll want to know how I wept like a child as they buried me alive.”
No reply for that?
“Two days, I spent buried in the hole. And survived! What a miracle; let us thank God for the miracle. Or do you still want more details? Do you want to know precisely how it feels to have soil clog your throat, to turn to mud when mixed with your snot? That will inflame your fantasies, won’t it? That will increase your reborn love. Your husband weeping in terror—you can think of that while you touch yourself.”
She recoiled from the doorway. How could she not? She was almost, almost, seeing him clearly now.
“Liam.” Her voice sounded broken. “I—I don’t—”
“Oh, but that’s not all.” He heard his own voice, light and casual. He saw her flinch from it. She had no practice at violence. “Later, I begged. I licked a monster’s boots. I sucked the dirt off his heels. And I tell myself it was not unforgivable—I tell myself there is no shame; it was for Wilkins’s life that I did it. I saved his throat from the noose, so the shame, no, it shouldn’t crush me. But here’s the truth, Anna: it was not hard by then to bend my knees. I groveled without much effort at all, if truth be told. Go ahead, picture it—hold it in your mind: on my hands and knees, bleeding, licking a man’s boots like a dog.” He paused, staring at her. His smile made her go paler, it seemed.
“Precisely,” he continued. “Now, perhaps you can offer to bathe my brow and tell me again that you love me. That will make it all better. Remind me that your heart was broken when I disappeared—what a great tragedy, Shakespearean really! And even now, it makes you weep.” For tears were streaming down her face. “Are those tears for you, or for me?”
“For you,” she said brokenly.
“Then spare me the fucking sight of them. I cried my fill in the hole. I am done with these goddamned scenes.”
He pushed past her.
For once, she had the sense not to pursue.