chapter Four
The click of a key echoed loudly in the room, followed by the metallic churning of tumblers giving way and the muffled clang of bars swinging open just outside his door. Gabriel came to his feet as his eyes fixed on the rectangle of paneled wood, the last barrier that separated his “parlor” from the rest of Vickering Place.
His heart kicked in his chest in what could only be anticipation. He’d spent half the night alternately praying for Penelope to come to her senses and not show this morning and the other half willing her to keep her vow. Now he would find out which contrary wish had been granted.
She sailed through the opening door and Gabriel’s shoulders relaxed as he released a breath. She’d come. Foolish chit. And yet Penelope smiled so widely that even he couldn’t help but feel optimistic in the glow of it.
“Good morning, Gabriel.” She stopped a scant two feet in front of him, the hem of her dark cloak swirling slightly around her legs. The crisp scent of a winter morning reached his nose, carried in on her fur-collared manteau. He breathed in automatically, as if his senses craved the sharp contrast from the stuffy staleness of his rooms.
She peered around his shoulder to the table where he’d been sitting. “Oh, good. I see you’ve breakfasted.”
He blinked at her, and the stirrings of a smile tickled his mouth. “Ah, yes.” Then a thought arrested the grin before it could form. “Why? Are you planning some horrid treatment for which I’ll need fortification?”
The corners of her eyes turned down, and her nose scrunched up in a sympathetic wince. “I’m afraid so.”
“In that case, I wish I hadn’t eaten that second helping of sausages,” he grumbled as said extra serving turned over in his stomach.
“Never fear, my lord,” she murmured softly. “’Twill be over in a trice.”
Gabriel’s breath caught. Did Penelope know those were the very same words she said to settle him before their first dance so long ago?
Or was her phrasing simply meant to mollify, as she would a child before requiring him to down a particularly revolting remedy?
Either way, he had to trust that she would treat him with as much concern and sensitivity down this path as she had that wedding dance.
“If it is any consolation, what I have in mind does come with certain benefits,” she promised.
A wholly inappropriate thrill charged through him. He tamped it down. She hadn’t meant anything close to what his body heard. Still, he couldn’t resist asking, “Such as?”
“Freedom.” Pen flashed him a grin that turned a bit wry at the edges as she tipped her head back and to her left to indicate an unhappy-looking Carter. “Or at least the illusion thereof. Mr. Allen insists I bring him along.” Pen made a moue of distaste. “I explained that it would not be necessary, but he refused to allow us out of doors otherwise.”
The attendant stood in the corner, bundled up in a greatcoat and scarf and sporting a fierce scowl—clearly not relishing his role as outdoor watchdog any more than Penelope did.
“Go on.” She flicked her fingers toward Gabriel in a backward wave. “Don warm boots and a coat. It’s chilly today.”
Enthusiasm buzzed through him at the very idea of a day spent outside. And yet it was February. He glanced toward the window. The day loomed gray, and forbidding clouds blotted out the sky, threatening to wring sheets of rain down upon them.
He looked back at Penelope. Her cheeks appeared chafed and the tip of her nose had a pink tint to it. While it rarely got overly cold in this part of the country, the wind and moist air could quite chill one to the bone. “Perhaps we should wait for a sunnier day. I wouldn’t risk your health.”
Penelope waved a dismissive hand. “Pish. You knew me only as a London society wife, but I was raised on a country estate. My only playmate was my cousin Liliana, and she abhorred being cooped up indoors where my mother might hound her into some feminine pursuit. If I didn’t wish to be lonely, I had to keep up with her.”
Gabriel frowned, unconvinced.
“Did I mention her favorite places to play were muddy swamps and bogs?” Pen wrinkled her nose. “Believe me, I am far from fragile.”
Hard to imagine her, who he’d once heard a group of ladies grousing always looked as if she’d stepped off of a fashion plate, traipsing around after her cousin through the marshes, her clothes covered in mire.
Still . . . “I’ve seen many an able-bodied soldier fall prey to the elements,” he argued. “One doesn’t have to be fragile to catch one’s death.”
“No, I suppose one doesn’t. However, I must insist.” She cocked a challenging brow. “Unless you are not feeling up to it, of course.”
Gabriel hastened to fetch his winter garments.
Minutes later, he stepped past a frowning Allen into the outside air for the first time in weeks. Penelope stayed close to his side, while Carter followed behind after grumbling something indiscernible to the director.
As they reached the bottom stair, Gabriel paused and simply breathed it all in. Damned if he didn’t have to force himself not to throw out his arms, turn his face up to the dreary sky and turn in circles as he would have in his nursery days.
He caught Penelope’s knowing smile out of the corner of his eye just before she pulled the hood of her cloak over her head.
She turned to him, looking very much like Red Riding Hood would have were the girl dressed in black rather than crimson. “Mr. Allen tells me there is a path through the gardens that leads into the wood. Shall we venture there?”
She might look like Red Riding Hood, but she sounded very like the Big Bad Wolf . . . a little too innocent to be safe. He had a feeling this was where whatever horrid treatment she had in mind began. Still, he nodded. “Lead on.”
Penelope set a brisk pace. They walked in silence for some time, the only sound being their boots crushing leaves and dead grass beneath them, echoed by Carter’s heavier footfalls from behind.
Blood hummed in Gabriel’s veins. It could simply be dread over what she might have planned for him today. Or it could be that Penelope was by his side. But either way, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this invigorated.
Or this much his old self.
With every breath of fresh air that pumped through his lungs, that feeling grew.
“Did you know that emotion can be directly tied to motion?” Penelope asked after a time. Her voice had a breathy quality to it from the exertion. “If you observe someone who is lost in their melancholy, for example, you notice that often their shoulders are slumped and their movements are sluggish. Their breathing is shallow and slow. Have you ever noticed that?”
He glanced sideways at her. “Not particularly, no. While I’ve experienced some melancholy since the wars, my madness is more of the raving sort, wouldn’t you say?” he returned dryly.
His big bad she-wolf gave him a decidedly sheepish look. Still, she persisted. “Define ‘some melancholy’ for me. Do you mean occasional sadness? Or do you ever experience periods of extended despair?”
He heaved a sigh. “So, you brought me outside to interrogate me.”
“Yes.”
He stuffed his gloved hands into the pockets of his coat. “Takes some of the joy out of the morning, I’d say.”
“I am sorry.”
He let her apology linger in the air for a few steps. “Wouldn’t it have been simpler to talk in my rooms? Warmer, at least.” He glanced back at the sullen attendant, shuffling along some paces back. “Carter would have thanked you for it.”
“I imagine he would,” she agreed. “However, I care naught for Carter.”
Implying she did care for him? Suddenly Gabriel no longer felt quite so surly about the whole thing.
“As to bringing you out here, my reasons are many. First, the emotion-to-motion connection I mentioned earlier seems to work both ways. On one hand, the melancholic’s despair depresses their body systems, hence the sluggishness and shallow breathing. However, if that person were to consciously choose to stand straighter, take deep breaths or engage in some vigorous activity, oftentimes their mood is improved just by those simple physical motions. I’m not certain why it works, but that has been my observation.”
“Hmmm,” he said, just to let her know he didn’t disagree. He did feel quite the thing after only a quarter hour’s walk.
“Second, the soldiers I know are men of action and they are most comfortable on the move. I thought you might feel more yourself out here.”
As he had from the moment they met, Gabriel marveled at Penelope’s gentle intuitiveness. “You were right,” he confirmed, breathing the crisp air through his nose.
“Most soldiers I’ve treated spent the majority of their time out in the elements. Days and nights, for months—sometimes years—at a stretch. Assuming your military experience was anything like theirs, it is only natural that you would be most at home outside.”
It seemed Penelope’s natural instincts were now borne out by her experiences helping other soldiers. He was still getting his mind around that.
His eyes scanned the rugged winter landscape that comprised Vickering Place’s grounds, but in his mind’s eye he saw the colorful autumn foliage of his home as it had been when he’d last been there. “My servants complained that they couldn’t catch me indoors,” he admitted. “Sometimes I had legitimate reasons to remain out. Surveying the fields, visiting tenants. But other times, I just couldn’t bring myself to stay inside.” Those days had been when he’d felt his best. Even before his current madness, being outside and active had done more to keep his wartime nightmares away than anything else had.
Yet, since these more frightening bouts of mania had taken hold, he’d imprisoned himself indoors . . . hidden himself away long before his family decided to finish the job and send him to Vickering Place. Had he compounded his illness by his choice? It made sense. His attitude and perspective had deteriorated every day—which, at the very least, hadn’t made him feel any better. He’d been a fool not to have realized it.
But Penelope had, and because of her insight, he felt more alive in the past hours than he had during months of hellish treatments on the advice of more educated, esteemed doctors. If she had been in his life at the time the mania started, would he have gone this far afield?
He cut his eyes to her. Penelope had said she’d helped other ex-soldiers. She had no reason to be untruthful about that. She wouldn’t be here if she didn’t think she could do the same for him.
Perhaps he should open up to her, just a bit, and see where it led.
He glanced back over his shoulder to see how closely Carter followed. The attendant had fallen back several yards and was sullenly kicking his feet at the occasional rock that littered the path. Good. He might have to show weakness to Penelope, but he’d be damned if he’d do so in the hearing of the other man.
Satisfied that their conversation would be private, he said, “For the first several months, I had to force myself to sleep in my rooms. I felt so”—Gabriel searched for the word—“confined. I’d spent so many nights out under the stars that lying beneath a ceiling, surrounded by walls, seemed more like a tomb than a bedchamber.”
“Hmmm,” was all she said. She fell quiet, leaving him with an odd urge to fill the silence.
He reached a hand behind his neck to massage away a sudden tension instead. Just confessing this one innocuous thought made his muscles tighten just as badly as being cooped up indoors at night once had.
“But a marquess can’t just pitch a tent on the heath without setting the gossips to wagging,” he said lightly, hoping to end the exchange. “So . . .” He tossed in a shrug to make it seem as if the whole matter were of no consequence.
“So you suffered night after night at the expense of your own comfort.”
He huffed. He should have known she wouldn’t let the matter drop. “My comfort should be of no consequence to you.”
“But it is,” she insisted. Then she added carefully, “To a point.”
He glanced askew at her.
“Gabriel, you must know that in order for me to help you, we are going to have to discuss some very uncomfortable things.”
He’d known she was going to say that. He turned his face away, focusing on the stripped trees they passed, every craggy bend and every knotty blemish on the wood bared to the eye by winter’s harshness. Is that how he would look to Penelope if he let her in? Scarred and ugly inside?
“But we needn’t start there. We can ease into our conversation with more pleasant things,” she suggested.
A single fat drop of rain chose that moment to splatter against his cheekbone. “That leaves out the weather as a topic, then,” he drawled, wiping the moisture from his cheek. “Speaking of, it is looking ominous.” He glanced up at the colorless sky. All right, so perhaps that was stretching the truth a bit. No more drops were forthcoming. But the clouds were clearly fat with it. That should be enough to win him a reprieve from her questioning. “We should return.”
Penelope glanced up as well before shooting him a look better suited on a governess—one who was well accustomed to her charges trying to get out of their lessons.
“I’ll hardly melt,” she intoned, “and neither will you.”
“Carter might,” he grumbled.
She let that pass without comment and continued trekking ahead.
Damn. He could turn on his heel and walk back himself. Carter, he knew, would follow gladly. But he also knew Penelope would just pester him there. The only way to avoid her questions would be to demand that Allen bar her from Vickering Place.
But without her help, he’d end up in a local tavern, put on display by the commission for lunacy in a public trial that would be gossiped about for years to come. His chest clenched at the mere thought.
“To hell with pleasantness, then,” he growled, his voice sounding uncharitable even to his own ears. But he cared not. She would have to take what she could get. “Ask me what you need to know to cure me.”
She stopped and turned toward him. He stopped as well, standing very still as Penelope eyed him. “You understand that there is a real chance that no matter what we do, you won’t wholly recover.”
He kept his gaze locked with hers. “There’s a larger chance of that should we do nothing.”
She nodded. “All right,” she said, and resumed walking down the footpath, leaving him to follow.
He did, though he had to pick his way carefully. The path she’d chosen had likely been well kept when Vickering Place had been a country manor, but now it was overgrown in places and bare in others, with the occasional knotted root protruding through the earth.
When he caught up to her, she said, “These episodes you’ve been having, have they always been like the one I witnessed?”
She’d certainly taken him at his word and dove right in, hadn’t she?
He cleared his throat. “As I have no memory of what exactly you witnessed, I couldn’t say,” he answered, his voice tight. Perhaps this had not been such a good idea. “But given what witnesses have said of my behavior whilst I am blacked out, my guess would be no.” Christ, he sounded like a formal arse. Rather like his butler at home. But it felt somehow safer to remove his own personality from the conversation. “I am told each one is worse than the one before.”
She seemed to think about that for a moment. “Did you experience anything similar before you gained your commission and went off to war?”
He gave her a curt shake of the head.
A look of relief flashed on her face. At least he thought it was relief. It was hard to tell with the hood of her cloak obscuring part of her profile.
“All right, can you remember when the first episode occurred?”
As if he could forget such a thing. It was, up until that time, the second-most terrifying thing that had ever happened to him. “Nine months ago.”
Penelope snapped her head around, coming to a halt on the path. She pushed the hood of her cloak off, he supposed to get a clearer look at him, and her eyes were wide in her face. “But that would be nearly four years after the war ended.”
“Yes.”
“That is . . .” Her face shifted from disbelief to guarded. “Unusual,” she finished.
He raised a brow. “I take it from your tone you do not mean ‘unusual’ in a good way.”
She winced. “It’s only that, if your illness sprang from battle fatigue, I would have expected it to start shortly after you returned home. Perhaps even before.” She crossed her arms and brought a fisted hand up to her mouth, tapping her gloved thumb against her lips in what seemed to be a nervous habit he’d never noticed she had before.
He wished he had a nervous habit to employ, as her obvious dismay was draining his confidence in their success. “Meaning you now suspect that my madness comes from somewhere inside me rather than as a result of my war experiences,” he concluded.
“Well, I have never heard of a case where someone had no symptoms for four years and then develops bouts of mania overnight.”
He considered that depressing thought for a moment. “I do have other problems that started during or just after the war,” he offered.
“Oh, good!”
She said it so enthusiastically, he couldn’t resist a dry snort. “I’m glad my misery brings you such joy.”
Her cheeks turned a becoming rose. “That did seem rather unfeeling of me,” she admitted.
“Coldhearted,” he agreed, but he lifted his lips to let her know he was in jest.
She smiled back. “Tell me about them.”
That was enough to wipe the smile off of his face, but Pen simply nodded encouragingly.
Gabriel tried to remember back to those earlier days, when sudden overwhelming vertigo and unexplained panic were the worst of his problems.
“The first time I became aware that something had changed inside me, I was at a ball on the Peninsula. It wasn’t long after Wellington’s victory at Vitoria. Spirits were high and everyone felt like celebrating.”
He kept his eyes straight ahead, determined to pretend that he was simply telling her a story, as if none of it had happened to him. “Even though the Peninsular War would go on for another ten months, those of us who were there knew that we’d broken Napoleon’s stranglehold in Spain.”
Penelope didn’t say a word, just let him talk, which he appreciated. It made it easier, somehow.
“I, along with most of the officers, attended a ball held at the home of a wealthy landowner. There was nothing unusual—just the typical throngs of people dressed in their best, gaiety, dancing, noise—nothing I hadn’t experienced a hundred times during the Season at home. Nothing that should have bothered me . . .” He couldn’t go on past the tightness closing his throat.
“But it did,” Penelope said quietly when several heartbeats had passed.
“Yes,” he croaked, no longer able to hold the memories at a distance. The crush of people. The air, heavy and close. “I couldn’t breathe.” The feelings came back to him now, though not as intensely as they once had. This was far from the horrid squeezing in his lungs he used to feel, where air could barely scrape in and out.
“You felt trapped,” she said, understanding somehow.
He nodded jerkily. “I pushed on, but when I came to the dance floor—” Images assailed him. Whirling dancers, colors swirling about. He closed his eyes and pressed a hand to his forehead, just above his temple.
“Were you dizzy?” Pen asked. “Light-headed and sick to your stomach?”
He nodded, opening his eyes. “All that.” He took a deep breath, then another. “I had to fight my way out of the room,” he admitted, ashamed of his weakness.
“What happened when you made it outside?” she asked quietly.
His heart had hammered so hard and fast in his chest, he’d feared it would explode like the new fragmenting shells his troops had begun using in battle. “Eventually I returned to feeling normal,” was all that he said. “Shaky, but normal.”
“Did you try to go back inside?”
He shook his head. “No. I went back to the mess for a stiff drink.”
“And did that help?”
He raised an eyebrow. “I drank myself into oblivion,” he recalled, “so yes.”
“Hmmm.” He heard Pen’s breathing beside him as they continued to walk. But whereas before, being outdoors had made him feel free enough to fight off the bad memories, now they were closing in. With each step, he stretched his limbs as far as they could reach, trying to regain that sense of being unconfined. But it wasn’t working.
“Did you experience such things again?” she asked.
He wanted to demand that she stop asking so many questions. Every bloody word out of his mouth could only damn him as pathetic and weak in her eyes. He glanced over at her, expecting to see the same pity he’d seen so often on the faces of his family, but instead she looked at him with steady encouragement. As if she expected his answers.
Perhaps she did. Maybe the other men she’d treated had had similar experiences. Maybe she looked at him that way because she knew she really could help him.
That flicker of hope inside his chest sparked higher once more. If there was a chance she was right, he’d answer her damned questions as long as he could.
“No. Everything was fine until I attended another ball,” he forced himself to say. “There weren’t many opportunities for such entertainments, so it wasn’t until Paris in 1814, when Wellington was installed as ambassador to France.”
“I see. Would you say it was better or worse?”
“I wasn’t as taken by surprise by it, so in that sense, it was better. But really, it was the same. I avoided ballrooms after that,” he said, “even when I was all but ordered to accompany Wellington to various events.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his greatcoat to hide his clenched fists. “In fact, I didn’t step foot inside a ballroom again until your wedding ball.”
Penelope turned her face to him. Twin lines formed between her brows as her mind worked. Her eyes cast up and off to the side as if she were searching her memory. “I knew you were uncomfortable,” she said, “but I had no idea it was as bad as all this.”
It hadn’t been. Not that night. But he couldn’t tell her that it had been her who had somehow kept the panic away. It would reveal too much.
“But,” she went on, her voice laced with confusion, “you attended several balls after our wedding, both in Town and in the country. Did the dread just fade with time?” she asked, her delicate features rearranging themselves into lines of puzzlement as she studied him.
No. It had been hell. He’d hated every single one of them. But he’d forced himself to attend, knowing that would be the best place for him to find a wife of his own.
And after a while he’d given up that pretense and admitted to himself that he’d gone only so that he could be with her.
But he could never say anything like that, either. Could never tell her that truth. A hot, raw vulnerability scraped through him. “I can’t do this anymore, Pen,” he rasped.
“You can.” Her voice was forceful and sympathetic at the same time. Her expression shifted to match. “Whenever a topic becomes too difficult, we can just move to another and come back when it isn’t so painful.”
He shook his head, causing her to rush on. “Let us leave the war behind for a while and talk about your life before you bought your commission,” she suggested. “Perhaps we can find some clues as to why this mania is afflicting you by looking into what you were like before the wars.”
But he didn’t want to talk anymore. He sped his steps, pulling ahead of her by several feet.
She followed, of course. He should have known she wouldn’t let him escape her.
As she came alongside him, she said, “You never answered me earlier, when I asked you to define your bouts of melancholy. Would you say they were severe? Did they last for more than a day or two?”
He let out a harsh breath. “No. No, I have moments of darkness, but I wouldn’t say they are extreme. Or prolonged.”
“But did you have them before you went to war?”
Gabriel thought about her question, wondering where she was leading. He was fast learning that Penelope’s softly spoken queries tended to lead somewhere. “Yes. Some. Not as often as after, though.”
The crunch of their boots filled the silence between them for several steps. Gabriel glanced up at the sky as they walked without speaking. The clouds had darkened—not quite ominously, but rain was certainly not far off. He might win his reprieve after all.
He turned his head to Penelope, about to suggest they turn around and head back toward Vickering Place, when she asked, “What about the opposite?”
He blinked, lost for a moment in the conversation as his mind had been on the impending storm. “What do you mean?”
“Well, rather than feeling low, have you ever experienced rushes of exhilaration instead? States of excitement where you were so filled with energy that you thought you could do anything? Perhaps even gone without sleep because of it?”
He huffed. “Why? Is that common with battle fatigue?”
“No.”
“Then why have you brought it up?” he asked, hearing the slight bafflement in his voice.
“No reason,” she demurred.
But he didn’t believe her. What had she said before she started this line of questioning? That she was looking for clues to explain his mania in his life before the wars. “Are extreme high feelings an indication of madness?” he asked, curious.
Pen didn’t look at him. “They can be,” she said vaguely.
“Well, no worries on that count. I have never been anything like that. If fact, the only person I’ve known who could be described as such was”—a sick feeling flooded him, leaving a sour taste on the back of his tongue—“Michael.”
He stopped walking.
She did not.
“Penelope.”
She stuttered to a halt at his command, but she didn’t turn back to face him for a long moment. When she did, her normally peach complexion had washed white, making the redness on the tip of her nose stand out like a cherry.
His sick feeling worsened.
“Are you saying my cousin was mad?”