But Will’s paintings and sketches brought the truth home to me as nothing else could. Will was an artist, like me. He captured images on canvas, noting details with one blink of an eye that others would never see had they stared at the same scene for hours. To have such terror imprinted in your head, reappearing over and over in your mind’s eye, was a living nightmare. I knew from experience.
The cadavers Sir Anthony had forced me to watch him dissect had plagued my thoughts and troubled my sleep so badly that I had dropped a stone in weight. Until I learned to accept them, to see the beauty in the bodies and not the gruesomeness of the undertaking, I found no rest. Even so, those first few corpses sometimes still haunted my dreams, particularly Frederick Oliver, the young man whose body had been the subject of my first dissection. How much more disturbed had Will been by the memories he carried home with him from war?
“Who else saw them?” Gage asked.
Deep furrows pleated Michael’s brow. “I don’t know. Father showed them to me when he told me the truth about my brother’s whereabouts. I think he believed they would convince me of the rightness of his actions.”
Gage sat taller. “He kept them?”
“Yes. I admit it seems a bit odd now that I think about it. Wouldn’t he want to destroy all evidence of his son’s malady?” He sighed and shook his head. “I can only suggest my initial assumption was correct. That he believed they proved his blamelessness, and he kept them in his defense, should someone question his decision. As far as I know, they’re still in the attic.”
A shiver ran down my spine at the thought of them.
It was apparent to me now that those paintings and sketches had been the primary source of Will’s trouble. That they had been the evidence Dr. Sloane used to convince Lord Dalmay that his son was insane and that he should be confined to this Larkspur Retreat, without following proper protocol. It wasn’t the aimless wandering or the sometimes frantic pacing. It wasn’t the lapses into silence or the startled reactions to seemingly innocuous noises or the haunted look in his eyes. It was the art he continued to create, the visual depictions of what he was seeing in his mind, those frightening images.
“What your father never understood,” I told Michael, “was that, as disturbing as they were, those drawings were merely memories. Remembrances of a time he wanted to, but could not, forget. They weren’t representations of what he wished to do. They were images of the past.”
“But how can you be sure?” Gage’s skeptical tone of voice made me believe even more strongly in what I was saying.
“Because I am. None of you were there during the days and weeks leading up to his disappearance. I saw him almost every day. And I could have sworn he was improving. I know I was only fifteen, but I was not unobservant.” Especially when it came to Will. I lifted my gaze to a portrait of William and Michael Dalmay’s mother, whose image flickered in the firelight, and thought back on those last few weeks spent with Will. “He seemed . . . lighter somehow. Less restless. And he’d gained at least a stone of much-needed weight.”
I felt the weight of Gage’s gaze as he studied my face, but I ignored him in favor of Michael, whose eyes were lowered toward the floor. I could tell he was wrestling with some emotion. I waited, knowing he would speak when he was ready.
“Do you . . .” He cleared his throat and looked up at me. His gray eyes were bright. “Do you think he could do it again? Fight his way back from . . . whatever is troubling him. If he started to draw again?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted honestly. “Maybe. You said he already sketches?”
“Yes.” Michael seemed to hesitate, and I wondered if the drawings contained more disturbing images.
“There aren’t any art supplies in his rooms, not that I saw,” Gage pointed out, and I realized that he had been to see Will.
For some reason that set me on edge. I didn’t want Gage visiting him without me being present.
“Where does he draw?” he persisted.
I felt indignant. As if Michael would lie.
Michael glanced from me to Gage to Philip. Then he sighed, as if he’d just made some kind of troubling decision, and pushed to his feet. “It might be easiest if I just show you.”
I blinked in surprise, rising to follow.
Gage’s eyes darted to me as he stood. “Is that really wise? After all, you just told us he’s been unwell this evening, that he had a relapse.”