A Flaw in the Blood (11 page)

“I must.”

Fitzgerald rapped on the hansom's roof. “Paul's Wharf. And quickly.”

“A boat, Patrick? At this hour of the night?”

“We shan't go far. Just down the Thames, past Sheerness.”

“Sheerness!”

He glanced at her, his expression curiously closed. “I'm taking you to the Isle of Sheppey. It's a lonely place, but safe with it. You did
promise
to trust me.”

“But we shan't reach it until midnight! Who will receive us at such an hour?”

“My wife,” he said.

CHAPTER TWENTY

A
FTER BERTIE LEFT HER, ALICE
spent an hour in the nursery reading to her little sisters. Louise, who was thirteen and considered artistic, looked drawn and frightened; she held her sketch book in her lap, staring at the blank pages. Helena, two years older, could not stop crying. But Beatrice was unquenchable—at four, the utter absolutes of loss escaped her. She was unlikely to miss Papa for long; there had been periods in her brief life when their paths crossed only once in three months. The Consort's duties had been that consuming.

Now Alice was undressing before bed. She had spent a dreary evening perusing one of Mama's volumes of sacred sermons, her usual duty on Sunday, and sought her bedchamber early, from a deep desire to end the hideous day. Violet, her maid, was respectfully silent as she removed the pins from Alice's hair—a girl who chattered thoughtlessly at most times, on every subject appropriate or scandalous. The maid's eyes were red from sympathetic weeping.

Alice studied her own reflection in the mirror. Black clothes brought out the sallowness of her skin. They deepened the charcoal shadows beneath her eyes; deep lines ran from her nose to the corners of her mouth, as though she had endured starvation or terror. Bertie had probably ascribed her dreadful looks to the sleepless nights she'd devoted to Papa's final illness. She hoped Mama would do the same. She did not want anyone to suspect she harboured a guilty secret. She was unequal to the forms of torture that might be applied to win the truth.

“Violet,” she said slowly. “May I trust you with a particular service? One that is
quite private
—that you must not breathe to
anyone
?”

The maid's warm brown eyes widened avidly. “Of course, Your Highness! I shan't breathe a word—cross my heart and hope to be struck dead if I'm a liar!”

“See that this letter is collected with tomorrow's post.” She slipped a common white envelope into Violet's hand. “I do not wish it to be known as
mine
. If anyone chances to observe you—destroy it.”

They made landfall south of Eastchurch, on the Isle of Sheppey, at twenty minutes past eleven o'clock by Gibbon's watch.

It was a tedious journey down the Thames, in a trim little steamer Fitzgerald kept moored at Paul's Wharf: past the looming ships of Her Majesty's fleet anchored off Greenwich, past Gravesend and through the mouth of the Thames Estuary, Fitzgerald shoveling coal into the raging gullet of the boiler while Gibbon steered and Georgiana shivered and dozed.

“Why a steamer, Patrick?” she murmured.

“Because the trains'll be watched.”

“You regard von Stühlen as clairvoyant, then?”

“I regard him, love, as deadly.”

From the estuary they might have turned north, toward Sheerness, the great naval port that sat at the northwestern end of Sheppey; but Gibbon knew his master's mind, and pulled the
Dauntless
's wheel hard to starboard, sending the little boat into the Swale, a brackish channel that ran between the island and the northern coast of Kent. A slight chop, and sand banks numerous—Sheppey being famous for its wrecks—so that Fitzgerald sent Gibbon aft and took the wheel himself. He had known the Swale well in happier times.

Five miles along the winding coast they turned to port. They entered a creek that cut through the marshes, moving so slowly now they might as well have cut the engine entirely. Georgiana woke and took up a position on the starboard side, alert to snagging weeds and the narrowing of the creek bed.

“Black as Satan's bottom,” Gibbon snorted, “and miasmic as only the sheep marshes can be. You'll have to walk a bit, miss, and the ground's boggy underfoot. But there will be a fire at the end of it, and hot soup if we're blessed.”

“I must look dreadful,” she said wearily. “To think that I should be presented to Mrs. Fitzgerald in such a case! And how will I explain—?”

Gibbon glanced at her, then at the governor's back. Unlikely that Fitzgerald could hear them over the throb of the engine, and his attention was claimed entirely by the black water in front of him. “It's not likely she'll be awake at this hour,” he answered, “so don't give it no mind. The companion as lives with her is French—with no cause to look askance at any lady's dress or manner, if you take my meaning.”

Hard to judge from Georgiana's expression whether she was comforted or not. Gibbon was uneasy. He disliked the Isle of Sheppey and everyone on it. He would have shielded Miss if he could—urged Mr. Fitz to seek an inn at Queenborough, or turn toward Margate and avoid the island altogether. But worse trials than Shurland Hall lay before them in the coming days, and Lady Maude would hardly betray them. Shurland was the one place on the Channel coast they could be certain of refuge.

Except for young Theo,
Gibbon thought grimly. He wondered if Mr. Fitz had considered that sprig of fashion when he made his plans. Then the boat squelched on the marshy bottom and the chug of the engine died. Fitzgerald drew a shuddering sigh—whether from relief or dread of the coming encounter, Gibbon could not say. In either case, it was time to abandon the
Dauntless
.

More ruts had settled in the gravel drive in the past six months, Fitzgerald noted, and the dilapidation of the Hall—which could be charming in high summer, raffish and open-handed—was rudely apparent in mid-December. Broken, sightless windows in the unused wing where Anne Boleyn once slept; and the encircling walls in such poor repair that Gibbon stumbled over a chunk of granite. It was Maude who leased Shurland, not Fitzgerald; but he determined now that he must find a way to shift funds to her agent—undertake to order repairs, though she would fight his meddling if she learned of it.

It was then he remembered that the usual world was cut off as completely as this island. He could not consult his London bankers or send letters of instruction to anyone. Only Shurland stood between himself and all the hounds of Hell.

The great house rose from its pastures like a time-scarred monolith, unsoftened by trees; the profound island darkness could not diminish the severity of its haphazard outline. Fluid shapes blundered across the drive—sheep, always sheep. The animals milled through the darkened courtyard like mourners before a tomb.

And yet Fitzgerald had loved Shurland once.

“Hallo the house,” he called out, as though he still commanded there, and trotted up the broken pavers of the stairs. “Madame duFief! Coultrip!”

He lifted the heavy iron knocker and let it fall. The thud echoed through a vastness beyond.

“Twelfth-century,” Gibbon whispered to Georgiana, “and not much been done to it in the past seven hundert years. I wonder if even Mrs. Fitz has given up, and gone back to England?”

But a light, faint and wavering, was growing in one of the leaded front windows. As they watched, it steadied and was set down, as the massive front door swung open.

*    *    *

“Brandy, sir? Or a glass of wine for the lady?”

Coultrip was a local name on Sheppey, and the family could be found in all the towns that dotted the island—sailors, most of them, dedicated to the Royal Navy. Samuel Coultrip had chosen merchant ships, and lost a leg during a fracas with Barbary pirates off the coast of Malay in 1836. Fitzgerald had hired him as a rough butler and footman twelve years ago, when he still spent several months a year at Shurland; now the old man ran the household.

“Mrs. Coultrip will shift to set a light supper before the company,” he offered. “Bread and cheese and some cold ham—her la'ship having dined at five, and long since retired.”

“Sure, and that'd be welcome,” Fitzgerald said. “My compliments to Mrs. Coultrip, and beg her to prepare a room for Miss Armistead. Gibbon will shift with me—on the cot in my dressing room.”

“Mr. Theo has taken your old apartment,” Coultrip said steadily, “so as to be closer to my lady—but I will have the Yellow Bedchamber prepared for you, sir.”

“Thank you.” Fitzgerald betrayed no emotion—how could he expect his rooms to be kept in readiness, against a chance arrival?—yet the knowledge of his inconsequence stung. He reached for the brandy decanter. “Mr. Theo is here, then?”

“He arrived on Friday, sir.” Coultrip bowed, and limped toward the door; Gibbon made to follow him.

“Wait,” Fitzgerald ordered, and poured out a glass. “Take a dram, Gibbon. Medicinal purposes. The good Lord knows you've earned it.”

“That's good of you, Mr. Fitz,” the valet replied, on his dignity; Fitzgerald's offer had undoubtedly shocked him—“but I should prefer a tankard of ale what Coultrip keeps in the cellar.” He bowed, and followed the old man out of the room.

“Will you defy me, too?” Fitzgerald demanded of Georgiana. He heard the belligerence in his tone:
And me still the master of this house, by God.
He was feeling the strain of the day and night, biting down hard on a consuming fury.

She took the proffered brandy and drank it down in a single draught. “For medicinal purposes. As though you had the slightest idea what those might be!”

An antique settee commanded the middle of the room, its silk rotted like everything else at Shurland. Georgie lingered near the hearth, drinking in the warmth, firelight glinting on her dark hair. Her French twill gown was wretchedly spotted with marsh mud and seawater, and torn from the scuffle on the tenement roof; but Georgie never gave her appearance much thought. She was more interested in the flames at her feet.

“Why is the fire coloured, Patrick?” she asked, always the scientist. “I've never seen such a thing.”

“Driftwood, love. The sea leaves its mark, and the flames remember.”

“I suspect it's some sort of chemical reaction. And the smoke smells of salt.” She glanced around suddenly. “What is this place? How do you come to . . . to . . .”

“Fight for any kind of welcome here?” he retorted bitterly. “Well may you ask. I shouldn't have brought you here. You knew I had a wife?”

Her eyelids flickered. “Well—she is everywhere recognised as a singular poet. I myself have read
Bohemian Odes.
And I understand she is quite . . . beautiful. Although she does not frequent Society of late.”

“You know that we separated years ago—that we live apart?”

“Yes.”

It seemed to Fitzgerald, as he looked at the young woman standing by the changeling fire, that his next few words must forever alter the feeling between them. Georgiana stood for a world entirely free of the suppressed violence of Sheppey, the sordidness of his marriage; she stood for order, and reason, and London, and the semblance of sanity he had found there. Now he had chosen to drag her through the barrier he'd set between present and past. Why had he done it? What reckless need had forced this meeting? He was about to speak—to find the words to explain Lady Maude Hastings Fitzgerald—when the drawing room door screamed on its hinges and Georgiana's countenance changed. Fitzgerald did not need to be told who stood there; she transformed the air of a room simply by entering it.

“Maude,” he said, as he turned to face her. “May I introduce Miss Georgiana Armistead to your acquaintance?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I
T WAS TRUE—MAUDE HAD
once been beautiful.

Fitzgerald could remember how she'd looked at twenty: her rich auburn hair dressed with flowers, her gowns too daring for an unmarried lady of good birth. Maude was tall and elegantly spare, her face a composition of oblique bones and green eyes. She was famous for riding punishing hunters; for stealing her brother's cigars; for the poems she wrote and circulated among her two or three hundred friends—and for meeting young men alone in Hyde Park. One of them had been the dangerous Patrick Fitzgerald.

She stood now in the wide doorway, staring at him as though he were a ghost. Thirty-eight years old, most of her hair and teeth gone, an open sore where her mouth had been.

“Patrick? Is that Patrick? I thought I heard your brogue.” Her voice was as insubstantial as dust. She moved toward him slowly, one hand extended. “A dream, I thought.
Patrick.
A memory of the dead.”

“Hello, Maude.” He took her hand.

“What are you doing here?”

She ignored Georgiana—perhaps she had not really seen her. It was hard to know what reality Maude distinguished from the chimera in her brain. At times she could finger the truth with punishing acuity; at others, she recalled nothing of what was said. Fitzgerald could not assume she was safe—he could tell her nothing of the true business that brought him here.

“Sure, and I was passing in a boat,” he managed. “I couldn't help but call.”

The hideous mouth opened in a smile; for an instant he was afraid she would throw her arms wide and kiss him. But some memory of their past inhibited her; she remained, swaying slightly, a few feet away.

“Armistead,” she murmured. “I knew an Armistead once—Berkshire family. The assembly rooms at Bath.
Robert
. A fusty old-womanish sort of fellow.” She turned away, an expression of worry crossing her ravaged features. “Don't let her drown, Patrick. The wind is up and the tide advancing. It will drown us all one night, in our beds. Our sea-bed. Full fathom five thy father lies . . .” She drifted toward the door, already forgetting him, her dressing gown trailing behind her.

Coultrip was standing there.

“So charmed to make your acquaintance,” Maude murmured to the butler, and floated by him unseeing.

Fitzgerald watched the sway of her skirt as it mounted the stairs, the bones of her fingers rising along the baluster; he closed his eyes abruptly.

“I did not know her la'ship was abroad,” Coultrip told him steadily. “I thought her retired some hours ago. Mrs. Coultrip has prepared your room, Miss Armistead. Supper is served in a quarter of an hour. May I show you upstairs?”

Fitzgerald had dragged a comb through his unruly hair and straightened his cravat by the time he rejoined Georgiana in the dining room. She had exchanged the twilled silk for a fresh gown packed in her satchel. Her hair was tidily bandaged and her face washed. “I shall never take hot water for granted again,” she declared, as he pulled out her chair; “and that wine is a luxury past dreaming.”

There was, as promised, the bread and cheese and cold ham; but Mrs. Coultrip had added a tureen of cottage soup—a comforting concoction of turnips and braised mutton—and Coultrip a bottle of Burgundy from the cellars. It was half-past midnight. A profound weariness nipped at the edges of Fitzgerald's mind, and anxiety shouted its dim chorus; he ignored both. He braced himself for Georgiana's questions.

“How long has she suffered from syphilis?” she asked calmly.

“Nearly ten years.”

“She takes mercury against it?”

“Twelve cures in the past decade. I suppose the torture has prolonged her life.” He drank deeply of the wine.

“And her mind?”

“As you see. She passes in and out of dreams. Or nightmares.”

“And you escaped it. The disease.” Her tone was clinically neutral.

“Sure, and I did,” he agreed. “We're a lucky race, the Irish. As I'm forever being told.” That was the real question she was asking:
If you escaped, who gave her syphilis?
Behind the unspoken words lay the broken ground of his marriage.

He rose restlessly and turned before the fire, the wine glass glinting in his hand. “Would you have me tell you all of it?”

“Not unless you want to, Patrick.”

“But I do.” He shifted a log with his boot. “I've kept the faith of lies and smoke, Georgie, so long—so long. Do you know what her high-born friends say, in their infinite wisdom?
She should never have married a dirty Irishman; that was her mistake.
I've allowed the world to believe it.”

“Why—if that is untrue?”

“Because I've become a gentleman, for all that, and it's a gentleman's duty to lie.” He emptied his glass, reached again for the decanter. “She was an earl's daughter, you know. Beautiful as sin. And so clever—all the power of life at her fingertips. When I met her, I thought Lady Maude was a girl the gods loved. And now look how they've broken her mind on their rocks.”

“You still care for her,” Georgiana said distantly; was it the knowledge of Maude's fate that pained her, or the unavoidable fact that Maude was Fitzgerald's wife? She had set down her fork. “How did you meet?”

“The Earl—her sainted father—hired me to defend his son when the buck killed his man in a duel. I kept the Viscount from hanging—that being my specialty—but young Hastings was forced to repair to the Continent, and there led such a life. . . . No matter. His sister watched the trial from the gallery. She fell in love, so she said, with my high courage; but faith, I think it was probably my voice.”

Georgie smiled faintly. “Or your words. She writes poetry, Patrick.”

“None of it comforting. She seduced me with poetry, you know.” He finished his wine and reached for Coultrip's brandy. “Her verse could rip the skin off a man. As though her life was hollow, already consumed—an orange whose flesh she'd devoured, leaving only the pith. I think of her that way—her long, supple fingers clutching bruised fruit. The look of disappointment. That's what she felt in her life with me. I
disappointed.
”

“Surely not!”

He snorted derisively. “She eloped with me, Georgie, because her father would never abandon his priceless girl to Irish trash. And God forgive me, I met her that dawn in a hired carriage with my whole heart in my hands. Did I think the tie between us would spur my career? Did I dream of a place in her perfect, peerless world? Maybe I did. Maybe I was already corrupted. But God, I loved her passionate mouth and her need for beauty and her lust for life in all its forms, lowborn and high, wretched and noble, ugly and gorgeous. I loved her greediness in drink and her flamboyance in dress. I even loved her petulant rages. I never understood they were signs of madness.”

“Even before the disease?”

He shrugged. “Did the rot claim her? Or did she claim it? There are people—artists and poets—who believe syphilis is a gift that opens the soul to genius. My lady Maude believed it. She told me once that love was the only cure for living; and she pursued it in every slum, every house in Mayfair, in the back hallways of Pall Mall clubs, even in the open air—under the ramparts of bridges where the prostitutes dwell. Publicity gave the act spice, d'ye see? I don't know whether she took pleasure from her anonymous couplings or clawed art from debauchery—by that time I was dead tired of collecting my wife from every hellhole in London, each night. I gave her up, Georgie, to the glittering death palace she'd made of her life. And it was years before I saw her again—and then she was already sick past caring.”

Georgiana was toying with her food, her face pallid in the candlelight. “How did she come to this place?”

“Her father leased it, when he understood she was dying; and since he went to his grave, her brother's agents have managed the business. The family likes her marooned in the middle of the ocean—but convenient to Kent, should they wish to call.” His mouth twisted. “I spent long months here, years since, when we hoped the mercury might cure her. The pain of it—the destruction—was horrific. She turned back to me, Georgie—she was in dire need of a friend. But when I see the enormity done to her, I bless the demon that destroyed her mind. Better that she not know—most of the time—what she has become.”

Georgiana rose. “You haven't eaten a thing.”

“No. I've no taste for food at Shurland Hall.”

“Then we ought to leave this place.”

He assessed her face. “Can you bear it here?” he demanded. “Did I do wrong to bring you?”

“I understand why you did. Von Stühlen will never find us. I'm just—” She leaned toward him, kissed his weathered cheek as chastely as though she were his daughter—“so
sorry,
Patrick. For her. For you. For the waste of two lives.”

He watched the woman he loved mount the stairs of his wife's house. And then he turned back to the bottle.