Cry for Passion (36 page)

He was a barrister of the Queen’s Counsel, he silently communicated, but he was not a member of Parliament.

Rising, Jack exited the courthouse.

Chapter 42

Rose lay on her side and stared at the rain-splattered window.

A dull roar of voices interwove with the incessant drum of rain.

Snatches of words pelted the glass: free . . . rose that . . . woman’s plight. Free the rose . . . dies . . . liberty.2

Meaningless words.

Free . . . liberty.

A constable had entered Jonathon’s house. The constable had exited Jonathon’s house.

She had told him she was being held against her will. He had closed the bedroom door and locked it behind him.

This, then, Rose thought, was what Jack had meant when he’d said she would lose all rights by taking him as a lover.

“How much is Jonathon paying you, Nurse Williams,” Rose asked, voice expressionless, “to live in his house and eat his food and spy on his wife?”

“Mr. Clarring is a generous man,” the older woman merely said.

Rose had once thought so.

Abruptly she sat up, metal springs squealing, horsehair bustle biting.

The crochet needle winking in the flickering light of a lamp stilled. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to relieve myself, Nurse Williams.” Dark emotion coiled through the cold void of shock. “Would you care to watch?”

The nurse’s gaze snapped downward; the needle resumed winking.

Rose firmly closed the bathroom door and located a tin box of matches.

Light flared.

Pale skin shone in the darkness.

A woman’s hand . . . a woman’s face.

Rose lit the pink crystal sconce and watched a blue line of fire crawl toward her fingers.

Did you feel my touch, Jack?

Yes.

Heat singed her skin.

The pain did not touch her.

Rose dropped the sputtering match into the toilet.

A distant bong seeped through rain and wood: The fifth bong drowned the fluttering light.

Rose had been a prisoner for forty-nine hours.

A fullness stretched her lower abdomen.

Forcefully she tamped down the dark emotion that swirled underneath the calm void: It was urine that swelled her stomach, not a baby.

The dark emotion refused to be ignored.

She could be pregnant with her lover’s baby, it screamed. While the husband she loved held her a prisoner.

Dr. Burns had given Rose a pill to take should she be late with her monthly courses, but Jonathon—along with her liberty—had taken away her reticule.

Desperately she glanced about the flickering bathroom, seeking an emotional anchor.

Everywhere she looked she saw Jonathon.

Sky blue eyes that cried her tears. Brown hair made black with shadow.

I think it will be some time before I can bring myself to touch her again.

Rose acknowledged what she had not been able to acknowledge twenty-three hours earlier.

Jonathon had known when he called out to her just three steps away from her door that she was using a contraceptive.

But how could he?

Pain ripped through her stomach.

How could a man do to her what he had done?

Her gaze landed on the empty box of Bromo tissues.

Rose automatically opened the oak cabinet underneath the pink marble sink.

Three boxes of tissue were neatly stacked, exactly as she had left them one week earlier.

But she was not the same woman she had then been.

She did not know to what extent she had changed over the course of forty-nine hours: She only knew that a vital part of what made her a woman had been violated.

A muffled rap wormed through pink enameled wood.

Rose did not need to exit the bathroom in order to verify it was not Jonathon who knocked on the bedroom door.

He was not going to confront the past. And Jack was not able to liberate her.

The law did not support it.

Lifting up her skirts, Rose relieved herself.

Over the trickle of urine she heard the clicking closure of the bedroom door. The flush of roaring water obliterated further sound.

Rose mechanically washed her hands.

Soapy bubbles swirled down the dark drain of memory.

Dr. Weinberger had washed his hands with this same bar of soap. But the laudanum another doctor had prescribed for menstrual discomfort resided inside the top drawer.

Rose dried her hands and retrieved the brown bottle. Burying her hand and the bottle in the loose folds of a round lower skirt, she exited the bathroom.

Roasted beef wafted through the damp musk of rain: It had been a servant bearing dinner who had knocked.

The nurse in the rigidly starched white cap sat at the round table free of memorabilia, before her a plate filled with beef medallions, scalloped potatoes and green peas. Rose sank down in the waiting armchair opposite the nurse to a matching plate full of food.

Twin dishes of tapioca pudding completed the setting.

It was a familiar meal, one Rose had often eaten while Jonathon—buried inside his den—drank himself into a state of unconsciousness.

The nurse bowed her head and said grace: “For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly grateful. Amen.”

Rose was not grateful: She did not bow her head.

Rough, red hands poured aromatic tea into rose-patterned china cups.

Steam veiled the air between them.

Silently Rose waited until the nurse reached for a heavy, silver-plated fork.

Fingers clenching around cool glass, she asked, “Does not cleanliness go with godliness, Nurse Williams?”

Her voice was oddly jarring, as if it came from another woman.

And it did.

That other Rose—silently hurting in her solitary world—would not do what Rose now planned.

The nurse’s hand paused.

Purposefully Rose met the gaze that for one brief second seemed oddly vulnerable, like a child reprimanded when reaching for candy. “Please wash your hands before eating at my table.”

Ugly red splotched the older woman’s face.

Rose thought for one sickening second she would not obey. Reluctantly the nurse rose from the makeshift dining table.

Rushing water drowned out the steady patter of rain.

Laudanum contained alcohol: The flavor would be unmistakable in tea.

Rose dumped tincture of opium over the medallions of beef, clear liquid thinning brown gravy.

Without warning the roar of gushing water died.

No sooner did Rose recork the bottle than the nurse returned.

“Thank you,” she said, pushing the laudanum in between a silk-covered cushion and the silk-upholstered frame of the chair.

The nurse did not reply. Face splotched with angry red bites of embarrassment, she snatched up her knife and fork.

Rose smoothed a white linen napkin over her lap. More slowly, she lifted up the heavy silver utensils and sliced off a sliver of beef.

“This tastes odd,” the nurse said, frowning.

Calmly Rose chewed and swallowed before replying, “Beef bourguignon can be an acquired taste.”

“French.”

The word expressed both contempt and intrigue.

The look on Ardelle Dennison’s face when George Addimore had brought an ivory cock ring to a club meeting had been identical to the expression the nurse now wore.

“Yes,” Rose said.

“There’s nothing better than good English beef,” the nurse righteously claimed, curiously forking up the remaining medallion.

“It is English beef,” Rose calmly explained. “It’s merely braised in burgundy wine and seasoned with garlic and onion. . . .”

Rose described how beef bourguignon was prepared while bite by bite the nurse devoured plain beef that was prepared with nothing more exotic than lardons, salt and pepper.

And tincture of opium.

An ingredient with which the nurse should be well familiar.

“I’m very tired,” Rose said when the older woman’s plate was empty of meat. Tossing her napkin onto her own plate that was barely touched, she stood. “I’m going to lie down.”

Metal springs squealed in protest; deep inside her, dark emotion continued to swirl.

Pain. Anger.

A loss so profound, it threatened to swallow her whole.

The muted roar of voices vied with the drum of water.

Rose wondered who they were, those people who stood in the pummeling rain.

Her mother? Her father?

Her brothers?

Jack?

But she could not think of Jack. All she could think about was Jonathon and the love he had stolen from her.

A gentle snore rippled the air.

Rose left the bed in which she had slept alone for eleven years.

The nurse was slumped down in the green-velvet-covered armchair.

Curiously removed from the consequences of her actions, Rose reached into the apron pocket in which the nurse kept her keys.

Dark motion fluttered outside of her peripheral vision.

Rose’s lashes snapped upward.

Eyes dilated black with opium stared into her eyes.

Their faces were so close, Rose inhaled the other woman’s breath: It smelled of roast beef and the spicy-sweet tang of laudanum.

“You drugged me,” the nurse said thickly.

“Yes,” Rose said.

She had drugged the nurse while weaving around her the illusion she had wanted, to sample the riches which she envied Rose.

Every woman had her weakness.

“Did you kill me?” the nurse asked.

Fear swirled underneath the opium-induced lethargy.

Had Rose overmedicated the nurse?

“I don’t know,” Rose said.

The woman closed her eyes. Rose unlocked the door.

A thick rose-patterned runner muffled her steps.

Childish giggles and shushes chased up and down the flickering hallway.

It was an aberration . . . the distortion of protesting voices and pelting rain . . . but for one moment Rose imagined the children she would have borne if Jonathon had not contracted the mumps.

He would have been a loving father. She would have been a faithful wife.

An oak balustrade gleamed in the grayish-green gloom.

Rose grasped cool wood.

The third and tenth steps creaked.

There was no one to hear her descent.

Laughter drifted up from the kitchen, the servants enjoying their evening meal.

Later she would be hurt that not one of the men and women she had hired had bothered to help her.

Not now.

Not when she was about to confront the man she should have confronted twelve years earlier.

Silently she pushed open the door to Jonathon’s den.

An overhead brass reflector light softly hissed; water rhythmically pelted glass and brick.

Rose closed the door and leaned against hard oak.

It was quiet and peaceful here at the back of the house.

The small, walled-in garden that adjoined the masculine room was obliterated by sheets of rain. The ghost of a woman peered through a French door at Rose.

Or perhaps the pale ghost peered at the wing-backed leather chair in which her husband sat—also reflected in the glass door—trying to see the man she had married.

Jonathon leaned over a glass-topped cherry desk, sensitive face somber. Light and shadow alternately silvered and darkened his baby-fine hair.

It took her a long second to recognize the crimson and gold shards of porcelain that lay scattered in front of him like a puzzle: It was the Oriental vase she had dropped when the men he’d hired had seized her.

“The pieces won’t fit,” Jonathon said without looking up, as if he had all along been expecting her.

Black beads and heavy silver winked: Her reticule leaned against the ashtray that had been a wedding gift. An opened newspaper adjoined crimson and gold shards; a dull, metal gun barrel dissected her name. A gold ring circled a pale face that bore her likeness. The band matched the white skin that marked her ringfinger.

Calmly, Rose asked, “Are you going to kill me, Jonathon?”

Jonathon raised his head.

The pain inside his sky blue eyes stabbed through her womb.

This was the man who had made her laugh with happiness, but now he laughed no more.

“The pain must end, mustn’t it?” he asked, just as calmly.

“Yes,” Rose said.

Chapter 43

The clang of the Division bell echoed throughout the eleven hundred and some odd rooms that comprised the Houses of Parliament.

Jack had eight minutes to enter the House of Lords before the content doors locked.

Three MPs dawdled outside the chamber.

“Where’s the Lord Chancellor?” Jack asked shortly, folded umbrella raining water.

“What the devil, Lodoun,” the first man said, graying head jerking around in surprise. “Made a wrong turn, old fellow: The Commons is due north.”

Jack knew exactly where he was.

“Is he in the Content Lobby?”

The equivalent of the Ayes Lobby in the House of Commons.

“Yes, but—”

Wool coat flapping, Jack strode in between red-leather-upholstered benches. The House of Lords was as pompous as the House of Commons was austere. Overhead, the blackening skylights and stained glass windows were stark against hissing, popping chandeliers. The oak door to the left of a gold, canopied throne pushed inward at the slap of his hand.

The voices of milling, guffawing men slammed into him.

“Sir, you cannot enter here,” charged a key-brandishing clerk.

MPs were falling into a long row between Division desks.

Jack fought against a sudden surge of claustrophobia.

“My Lord Chancellor,” he called out.

A sixty-four-year-old man—a former criminal barrister and now Chief Justice for the Court of Appeals, the most powerful court in England—turned.

Recognition flared inside his eyes. “How dare you, sir, enter the Content Lobby.”

Jack shrugged aside restraining hands, purposefully striding forward. “Answer me one question, my lord.”

One by one the guffaws and the gossip died.

The Lord Chancellor snapped: “This is neither the place nor the time—”

Jack ignored the gazes of lords—those born to the title and those honored by the title—that needled his skin.