“Wait!” she cried. “Where are you going? The rooms upstairs aren't safe. You don't know what other damages could have been done.”
“I'll take my chances,” he said. “There's bound to be a bed in this house that's less dangerous than yours.”
Camden lay abed in the chamber that had been first assigned to him. He stared at the ceiling and half-wished it would collapse on him and knock him senseless.
Not that he had a full implement of sense left. I wasn't thinking, she'd said. She most certainly wasn't alone in it. He probably hadn't had a properly lucid day since the first letter from her solicitors arrived the previous September, requesting an annulment.
He'd long referred to his marriage as “that tolerable state of being.” Tolerable because as long as the legalities were ironclad and ineluctable, she was still wedded to him, with a chance that one day, in a faraway, golden-misted future, they might yet rise above their youthful Sturm and Drang and achieve some sort of passable happiness. Not that he willingly admitted any such wishful thinking to himself, but fourteen-hour working days translated into nights too weary for self-censorship.
When she moved to officially dissolve their marriage, with flocks of letters from her lawyers darkening the sky like so many swarms of Egyptian locusts, the stasis on which he depended descended into chaotic disequilibrium. He found himself a stunned observer, unable to do anything other than toss the letters into the fireplace with increasing grimness and alarm.
Annulment was one thing. Divorce, however, quite another. When she'd actually gone ahead and petitioned for divorce, he'd been jolted with wrath, a massacre-the-peasants-and-salt-the-earth blood rage. This marriage was their devil's pact, begun in lies and sealed in spite. How dare she try to break free of this chain of acrimony that bound them? Neither of them deserved any better.
How injudicious he'd been to not understand the eruption of years of pent-up frustration. And how blind, when he'd calmed down during the Atlantic crossing, to think that he'd arrived at a reasonable, mature solution in his demand for an heir as a condition for releasing her from their marriage.
All he'd achieved was the unleashing of the beastly attraction that had taken him years to tame. But whereas once the beast had devoured her, this time it consumed him.
He didn't know whether it was courage or madness that made him ask her outright to not throw away everything they'd ever had. He only knew the black pain of her rejection, a sense of loss through which he could barely breathe.
Somehow he couldn't believe that this was it, that their story would end with such wretchedness, as if Hansel and Gretel had become the witch's dinner after all, or Sleeping Beauty's prince a pile of gnawed bones in the Enchanted Forest. But her voice, though barely audible, had been firm and clear. She might cling and writhe beneath him—and lose her head momentarily—but she kept her larger goal firmly in sight. And that goal was to sever all ties with him.
Perhaps she was right. Perhaps he was still stuck in 1883. Perhaps this was indeed how their story would end, she as another man's radiant bride, and he but a dusty footnote in the annals of her history.
She was in the dining room, staring at an already cold cup of tea, when he appeared at her side, in riding gear, his hair windblown.
“I imagine we should know, in a few weeks, whether there will be consequences from our action last night,” he said without preamble.
“I imagine so.” She looked back to her tea, all too aware of his presence, of the scent of morning mist still clinging to him, and already panicking over what news the end of her cycle might bring. Either way. “If there aren't any consequences, would you let me go to Freddie?”
“And if there are, would you still insist on marrying him?”
“If there are”—she pushed the words out past the lump in her throat—“I would hold up my end of the bargain, and I should like you to honor your part of it.”
In response, he chortled softly, a sound without warmth or emotions. He took her chin in hand and slowly tilted her face so that she was forced to look at him. “I hope Lord Frederick does not live to regret his choice,” he said. “Your love is a terrible thing.”
Chapter Twenty-four
5 June 1893
No, no, it won't do. Get me the green one instead,” said Langford. He unbuttoned the claret-colored waistcoat—the third he'd rejected—and handed it back to his valet.