Devotion (26 page)

His eyes glazed somewhat, he grinned at Salterdon and swallowed. "I'm truly sorry for wot '
appened
to you," he said in a monotone. "But life goes on,
don't
it? We make do with wot we're given. Make the best of it.
Ya
should've given the scurrilous lot yer money and horse then they wouldn't have been forced to whack
ya
upside the head. It
were
a damn fool thing to do, sir."

With that, Thaddeus quit the room, leaving Salterdon to stare into the flickering flames, the memory of that night hammering inside his head like the blow that had left him senseless . . . and the image of Maria Ashton spread out beneath Thaddeus Edwards making him inexplicably ill.

"Bastard," he said to himself.
"Perverted bastard."

With the help of numerous servants, Salterdon was moved to the library. His grandfather, the former Duke of Salterdon, had taken great pride in Thorn Rose's library. The towering walls were lined with leather- bound books pertaining to philosophy, medicine, poetry, plays, with an occasional fictional novel wedged in between works of the eighth century poets
Notker
,
Balbulus
, and
Mutanabi
. By the time Trey turned fifteen, he had read most of them.

Half an hour later, Miss Ashton arrived looking somewhat pale (as she had the last days), her big eyes ringed by dark shadows.

"Good morning, Your Grace," she greeted as she moved graceful as a butterfly to the desk, righting the lacy cap, which continued to slide askew over her forehead. As always, she wore her typical black dress (neatly starched and pressed, thanks to Gertrude) and a pair of kid slippers that were wearing through at the toe.

A rather tattered looking petticoat flashed briefly beneath the hem of her skirt.

"I trust you rested well last evening? I understand from Thaddeus that you were up particularly early this morning, and that he found you in a rather perilous position." She looked at him directly at last and regarded his appearance with her typical disapproval and disappointment. He wondered what bothered her most: his crumpled clothes or unshaven face. He wondered if the circles around her blue eyes were caused by anything other than her unhappiness over being cloistered at Thorn Rose with a lunatic.

"Do you think it wise, sir, to try something
so
foolish as attempting to leave your bed yourself? You might have found yourself on the floor, or worse, you might have been injured."

He said nothing, only thinking that black did not suit her at all, any more than the tacky, ill-dated swatch of lace hiding her hair-—any more than Thaddeus Edwards suited her, with his mucky boots and barbarian manners.

Red was her color. Scarlet would blaze against her pale
skin,
exaggerate the fiery blue of her wide eyes. Only . . . those eyes were not so fiery now. They continually looked on the verge of tears.

Her mouth smiled; her eyes did not. "Did you rest comfortably last evening? Yes? No? Will you please make an attempt to answer me, Your Grace? A simple nod or shake of your head will suffice."

He narrowed his eyes, noting how the cinched bodice of her dress made her waist seem all the smaller. She had the kind of body that would suit a corset, her breasts flowing over the
niched
décolletage
like white pillows.

She swallowed. Her shoulders stiffened and the recognizable frustration returned to her face. Standing behind the desk as she was, with her hand resting on a stack of books, she looked like some prim, spinsterish nanny and tutor.
Then again, maybe not.
More like a child playing at the part.

"I spent the better part of the evening considering your inability to communicate. Then the idea came to me—books." Pasting on a smile, she declared, "You shall read aloud!"

The proclamation jarred him from the ridiculous trance.
The hell you say,
he thought, then swung his chair toward the door and proceeded to push.

In a flash, she was there before him, barricading his way. "Why must you fight me constantly?" she demanded in a voice quivering in agitation.

"Out!" he snapped and attempted to go around her, plowing into her shin in the process.

"Damnation!" she cried, and hopped up and down before grabbing the arms of the chair and planting her feet solidly in an attempt to hold him. Her face level with his, her eyes and cheeks flaming, she declared through her teeth, "I realize you don't want me here, Your Grace, any more than I want to be here. However, I promised your grandmother that I would do what I could to help you until she locates an adequate replacement. While I . . . may not care for you particularly, I
do
feel a certain attachment to the duchess. She loves you very much, and I fear this terrible thing that has happened to you is breaking her fragile heart."

An emotion crossed her face, anger and pain together. Still, it was not the intensity of the feelings that held him rapt, but the sudden flood of sorrow in her weary eyes.

" 'Tis nothing more horrible than the helplessness one feels when one is forced to watch a loved one disintegrate little by little before one's eyes, to watch someone who was once so vital with life become a shell of himself, to wither and die." Her voice dropped an octave, became soft and dreamy and husky. Her lids grew heavy, and that recognizable pout returned to her lips—that child's pout that seemed to grab his vision in so fierce a hold that like one rapt he couldn't look away.

"One moment you pray to God to end their suffering, Your Grace—to end their misery and your own. The next you pray for mercy, that if He will only spare their pitiful life you will happily spend the entirety of your own life seeing to their every need."

Several seconds of intense repressed emotion passed; silence crackled the air as flagrantly as the jumping flames in the hearth. She looked for an instant as if she might crumble, yet, he could not look away. It seemed to him in that moment that her eyes, those wide, drowning pools of blue were the most captivating, ravishingly beautiful eyes he had ever encountered.

"Then you realize," she finally whispered and drew away, "that you cannot help someone who will not help themselves."

With effort, she turned the chair back to the room and pushed it toward the fire. For an instant he wondered if she intended to thrust him into the flames—have done with him at last. Instead, she moved to the desk and grabbed a book, returned to him, and plunked it unceremoniously into his lap.

"For the next hour you will read aloud from the book. Not only will the exercise stimulate the mind's ability to think, it will also help the tongue to communicate more easily, just as playing the pianoforte will limber the fingers of your hands. The work belongs to Oliver Goldsmith. It's entitled,
The Vicar of Wakefield.
Begin with page one, please."

Dropping into a companion chair, she stared down into the flames, her silence filling the room as she waited. After several minutes, she lifted her head, a sullen movement, and without looking at him, said, "There is no disgrace in trying and failing. The disgrace is in the failing to try."

He glared at her profile a few hurdling moments, infuriated by her ennui. So that was that. She had given up; decided her life as a vicar's daughter was far more agreeable than her independent existence seeing after a mental and physical moron. He considered flinging
The Vicar of Wakefield
into the flames. Then he considered flinging it at her.

Instead, he flipped open the book, fumbled with the pages, then stared down at the printed page while the tiny words appeared to swim and smudge, forcing him to concentrate, which made his head ache. The realization occurred to him that he had not so much as looked at a book since the goddamn highwaymen had left him lying in the middle of a road with his brains leaking out into the mud.

Squeezing closed his eyes, he muttered, "Can't."

"Yes you can. Concentrate.
One word at a time."

Teeth clenched, he focused again. The word, as a whole, looked as foreign as hieroglyphics. "Can't," he blurted again, slammed closed the book, and flung it into the fire.

Maria leapt from the chair, snatched the poker, and fished out the smoldering book. Her hands slapped at the sparks; her lips blew away the ashes. Without so much as a muttered recrimination, she then dropped the book back into his lap, reseated herself, and said, "Begin."

"What are you
Dumb!
as
well as
Deaf?"
he barked, the only words to explode through his lips being "dumb" and "deaf." He flung the book again, just missing her head by inches. I
don't remember
how!

Again, she retrieved the book, turned it over and over in her hands before, more cautiously, returning it to his lap. Bending to her knees beside his chair, she opened the cover and
lay
her fingertip beneath the first word. "When you were very young," she said, "your tutors taught you how to read by sounding out the letters. Do you recall the alphabet, Your Grace?"

Her silvery hair reflected the firelight like a mirror. Her smell washed over him. He felt suddenly, inexplicably, riveted by her nearness.

"Your Grace?" she repeated, and turned her big eyes up to his.

He shook his head.

"Nay, from now on you'll speak," she told him, but when he stubbornly refused to respond, she sat back on her heels, and with her fingers laced together in a show of patience, released a weary sigh. "You could rile a bloody saint, I wager. I'm not certain I've ever dealt with someone so unreasonably determined not to yield, whose disposition is to resist constantly, whose unwillingness to brook opposition is tantamount to the Rock of Gibraltar. I'm beginning to understand now why the others left. It is beyond our capabilities to work miracles. What must I do to get through to you, sir?"

A sad smile crossed her face,
then
she stood, put the book on the desk, and moved to the distant window where dreary light turned her form into a silhouette.

He glanced at the desk, at the book, then back at her.

"'Tis a dismal day,"
came
her sad voice. "Yet, there was a time when I was stimulated by the wind and rain. My being was uplifted by the sharp cold. There is something about the iciness of winter that hones the senses to every nuance of the human anatomy, makes one aware of their fingers and toes and nose, clears the vagueness from the sluggish mind so all perceived is vibrant, as it was when we were children. Do you recall
,
Your Grace, how, when we were children, each new season was the prelude to new experiences? Spring brought birds and flowers, summer the long warm days of sunshine and fragrant heather. Autumn was a time for harvest and colors, of gold and red falling leaves in which we frolicked and daydreamed of winter snow. Winter was roaring fires and snuggling deeply beneath goose-down comforters and listening to the howl of wind and sleet scratching at our windowpanes. It was a time to share secrets with our best friend, and to dream of the coming spring. I
wonder,
Your Grace, when exactly did the seasons become so monotonous and something to be dreaded? When did the summers become too intolerably hot and long, and the winters too cold? Why
did the autumn
leaves become a drudgery to be raked and burned? Why did the springs become far too dismally wet and chilly? I wonder," she whispered. "I wonder when exactly
did our every aspiration, dream, and hope become
simply another anticipated disappointment."

At last, she turned, the pale light streaming through the window at her back silvering one side of her face. Had she been crying? He could not tell, could not see her eyes clearly, shadowed as they were. Then she sniffed and swept the back of one hand across her nose. Her voice sounded tight and husky when she spoke again.

"You're the most exasperating person I've ever known."

"Sorry," he replied after a time, realizing he had been staring at her and suddenly feeling self-conscious about it. He was not sorry at all, of course—not in
that
way.