Part 11 (1/2)

That apparent recovery had not deluded Dorian. He'd suspected, early on, that the illness, like his mother's years earlier, had simply been the beginning of the end.

In January, when the headaches began, his suspicions were confirmed. As the weeks pa.s.sed, the attacks grew increasingly vicious, as hers had done.

The night before last, he'd wanted to bash his head against the wall.

...pain...tearing at my skull...couldn't see straight...couldn't think.

He understood now, fully, what his mother had meant. Even so, he would have borne the pain, would not have sent for Kneebones yesterday morning, if not for the s.h.i.+mmering wraith he'd seen. Then Dorian had realized something must be done-before the faint visual illusions blossomed into full-blown phantasms, as they had for his mother, and drove him to violence, as they had done her.

”I know what it is,” Dorian had told the doctor when he came yesterday. ”I know it's the same brain disease and incurable. But I had rather finish my time here, if it can be managed. I had rather not...end...precisely as my mother did, if it can possibly be helped.”

Naturally, Kneebones must satisfy himself and arrive at his own conclusions. But mere was only one possible conclusion, as Dorian well knew. His mother had died within eight months of the onset of the ”visual chimera”-the ”ghosts” she'd begun seeing while awake, not simply in dreams, as she'd said.

Six months was the most Kneebones could promise. He said the degeneration was progressing more rapidly in Dorian's case, thanks to ”a punis.h.i.+ngly insalubrious mode of living.”

Still, Kneebones had a.s.sured him that the violent fits could be moderated with laudanum, in large doses.

”Your father was too sparing of the laudanum, fearing overdose,” the doctor explained. ”Then, when your grandfather came, he raged about my turning that unhappy woman into an opium addict. And then the fancy experts came, calling it 'poison' and saying it caused the hallucinations-when it was the only means of subduing them and quieting her.”

Dorian smiled now, recalling that conversation. Opiate addiction was the least of his anxieties, and an overdose, in time, might offer a welcome release.

In time, but not yet.

Outwardly, he was healthy and strong, and in Dartmoor, he'd been free of the self-loathing that had haunted him since his last year at Eton, when temptation, in the shape of a woman, had first beckoned, and he'd found he was no match for it. Here, as his mother had said, there was no temptation. When he felt the old itch and grew restless, he rode through the moors, riding long and hard, until he was exhausted.

Here he'd found a refuge. He meant to enjoy it for as long as he could.

Hearing footsteps in the hall, Dorian turned away from the window and thrust his hair back from his face. It was unfas.h.i.+onably long, but fas.h.i.+on had ceased signifying to Dorian years ago, and it certainly wouldn't matter when he lay in his coffin.

The coffin didn't trouble him much, either, and hadn't for some time. He'd had months to get used to the idea of dying. Now, thanks to the promise of laudanum, his remaining anxiety was eased. The drug would stupefy him, sparing him full awareness of the wretched thing he would become, while those who looked after him needn't fear for their lives.

He would die in something like peace with something like dignity. That was better than the lot of scores of wretches in the cesspits of London, he told himself. It was better than what his mother had endured, certainly.

The library door opened, and Hoskins entered, bearing a letter. He set it face down on the library table so that the seal was plainly evident.

It was the Earl of Rawnsley's seal.

”d.a.m.n,” Dorian said. He tore the letter open, scanned it, then handed it to Hoskins.

”Now you see why I chose to be a n.o.body,” Dorian said.

Hoskins had learned Dorian's true ident.i.ty only yesterday, at the same time he'd been informed of Dorian's medical condition-and offered the opportunity to depart, if he wished. But Hoskins had fought and been wounded at Waterloo. After the horrors he'd experienced there, looking after a mere lunatic was child's play.

Moreover, to Dorian's vast relief, Hoskins's manner remained matter-of-fact, with occasional ventures into a gallows humor that lifted Dorian's spirits.

”Is it the irascibility of age?” Hoskins asked mildly as he handed the letter back. ”Or was the old gentleman always like this?”

”He's impossible,” Dorian said. ”Born that way, I suppose. And quite convincing. For most of my youth, I actually believed I was always the one at fault. There is no dealing with him, Hoskins. All one can do is try to ignore him. That won't be easy.” He frowned at the letter.

His remaining aunt, Hugo's widow, had visited Dartmoor a short while ago and spotted Dorian on one of his gallops through the moors. She'd written the earl a highly exaggerated description of Dorian's riding garb-or lack thereof-and pa.s.sed on a lot of local gossip, mostly ignorant speculation about the reclusive eccentric living at Radmore Manor.

The earl's letter ordered Dorian to appear-his hair properly shorn and his person decently attired-at a family council on the twelfth of May, and explain himself.

If they wanted him, they'd have to come and get him, Dorian silently vowed, and they would never take him away alive.

”Did you wish to dictate a reply, sir?” Hoskins asked. ”Or shall we chuck it into the fire?”

”I'll write my own reply. Otherwise you'll be targeted as an accomplice, and made to feel the weight of his righteous wrath.” Dorian smiled faintly. ”Then we'll chuck it into the fire.”

On the twelfth of May 1828, the Earl of Rawnsley and most of his immediate family were gathered in Rawnsley Hall's drawing room at the moment that a section of the ancestral roof above them chose to collapse. In a matter of seconds, several tons of timber, stone, and miscellaneous decorative debris buried them and made Dorian Camoys-one of the very few family members not in attendance-the new Earl of Rawnsley.

In a small sitting room in a house in Wilts.h.i.+re, Gwendolyn Adams read the weeks-old newspaper account several times before she was satisfied she had not overlooked any details.

Then she turned her attention to the other three doc.u.ments on her writing desk. One was a letter written by the present earl's recently deceased aunt. According to it, her nephew had turned into a savage. His hair hung down to his knees, and he galloped half-naked through the moors on a murderous white horse named after a bloodthirsty pagan G.o.d.

The second doc.u.ment was a draft of a letter from the earl to his ”savage” grandson. It gave Gwendolyn a very good idea why the heir had failed to attend the funeral.

The third doc.u.ment was the present Lord Rawnsley's reply to his grandfather's obnoxious letter, and it made Gwendolyn smile for the first time since the duc d'Abonville had arrived and made his outrageous proposal.

Abonville's mother had been a de Camois, the French tree from which the English Camoys branch had sprouted centuries earlier-and thus Rawnsley's very distant cousin. Abonville was also the fiance of Gwendolyn's grandmother, Genevieve, the dowager Viscountess Pembury.

The pair had attended the Camoys's funeral, after which a hara.s.sed solicitor had sought the duc's a.s.sistance as nearest male kin: papers needed signing, and any number of legal matters must be attended to, and the present Lord Rawnsley had refused to a.s.sume his responsibilities.

Accordingly, the duc and Genevieve had journeyed to Dartmoor. There, they discovered that the new earl had fallen victim to a terminal brain disease.

Gwendolyn's smile faded. Bertie Trent, her first cousin, had taken the news very hard. At present, he was hiding in the stables, sobbing over an old letter, creased and faded past legibility, from his boyhood friend Cat Camoys.

She moved the papers aside and took up the miniature Bertie had given her.

The tiny likeness allegedly represented Bertie's friend. It had been painted years earlier by a singularly inept artist, and it did not tell her much.

Still, twenty-one-year-old Gwendolyn was too levelheaded a girl to base the most momentous decision of her life upon a picture two inches in diameter.

In the first place, she knew she was no great beauty herself, with her pointy nose and chin and impossible red hair. She doubted that her green eyes, to which several suitors had composed lavish-and very silly-odes, compensated for everything.

In the second place, physical attractiveness was irrelevant. Rawnsley had not been asked to fall in love with her, nor she with him. Abonville had simply asked her to marry the earl and bear him a son to save the Camoys line from extinction.

She'd been asked to do this because she came of a phenomenally fertile family, famous for producing males. Both characteristics were critical, for the Earl of Rawnsley hadn't much time to sire an heir. His physician had given him six months to live.

Unfortunately, there were no doc.u.ments offering any insights into the brain disease itself. The little Genevieve and Abonville knew they'd learned mainly from the earl's manservant, Hoskins. His Lords.h.i.+p had volunteered no details, and pressing him for information would have been unkind, Genevieve had said.

Gwendolyn frowned.

Her mother entered the room at that moment and softly closed the door behind her. ”Are you truly thinking it over?” she asked as she took the seat next to Gwendolyn's desk. ”Or are you only making a show of hesitation for Papa's benefit?”

Though she had taken time to reflect, Gwendolyn did not feel hesitant. She knew the task she'd been asked to undertake would not be pleasant. But that did not daunt her in the least.

Unpleasantness was only to be expected. Illness, whether of the mind or the body, was disagreeable; otherwise so much labor wouldn't be dedicated to making it go away. But illness was also exceedingly interesting, and lunatics, Gwendolyn felt, were the most interesting patients of all.

Lord Rawnsley's case, combining both a mysterious neurological disease and aberrant behavior, could not have excited her more.