Chapter 33
Vincent stirred awake with a mouthful of the red tangle of his wife’s silky hair.
She had fallen asleep, burrowed in his chest, and somewhere in the dead of night, he’d half-woken enough to draw her nightgown back over her cold body, not wanting her to wake chilly and shy of her own skin come morning.
Her long auburn lashes rested peacefully against her creamy cheeks, her bosom rising and falling with every easy breath. Her hair was a sleek waterfall of fire down her shoulder, a rich contrast against her pale skin.
Strawberry ices and cocoa for breakfast. The promise pulled a daft, drowsy laugh out of him.
He would hold to it too—have Cook ruin both their constitutions for a week and call it a morning well-spent.
But the rest of the day was already tugging at his sleeve.
Keaton at eleven, and the Welsh tutor at long last—Keaton had managed to snag the very same tutor who’d taught Richard Rochester.
Vincent meant to settle the terms with his own hand and say nothing until the evening.
Then he’d lay the whole of James’s future in Emma’s lap, something he wished somebody might have done for his own brother, Benjy.
And after the tutor, after supper, the other matter.
The mask. The decade of pain behind it. Vincent had sworn he would tell Emma today.
No more playing coward with my promises.
He wasn’t yet sure how she might take it, and that was a concern of course, but now, with Weaver’s help, Custor was halfway to rotting anyway.
Sliding his dead arm out from under her, careful of her sleep—she’d earned it twice over—he rose and padded off to the bathing chamber.
He took his time about the whole business, washing the night off, shaving, and turning over how he’d explain the Phantom to Emma once the day was over.
By the time he’d shrugged into his shirtsleeves and let himself back in, a chill had settled into the room, and Emma had not stirred so much as an inch.
Just as he’d left her. Half-turned to the window, plait fanning over her pillow.
“Slugabed,” he chided gently, crossing to her. “With the ices and the extra sleep, my staff will think I’m spoiling you.”
He sat and reached to thumb that one shorn curl off her cheek, but the skin under his finger was frozen.
Frozen and sweating.
“Emma?” He turned her by the shoulder, and her head lolled with it. Her face was drained to the color of old wax, and her lips were faintly blue at the seam. “Emma… Emma, wake up.”
Nothing. Not a flutter behind those lids.
This isn’t sleep… This isn’t slee—
Hauling her into his arms, she came limp as wet linen, her head tipping into the crook of his elbow, and he patted at her cheek hard enough to sting while the other hand chased a pulse down the side of her throat, “Emma, wake up sweetheart!” and he found it at last; thin, scrambling, far too fast under skin far too cold.
“No. No, no, you don’t—” he choked out, shaking her by the arms, “Weston!”
Lunging across her for the bellpull, he wrenched it once and again and a third savage time, near tearing the wire from the wall, then back to her, gathering her up, rubbing the warmth into her cheeks.
Nearly sobbing, “Emma, look at me, sweetheart, open your eyes and look at me, please—”
The door slammed open and Weston shot through already dressed for the morning, and behind him Mrs. Roan in her wrapper with a guttering candle—and then the both of them saw Emma, and went white.
“Duncan Fraser!” Vincent bellowed, not looking up, his hand shivering against her cheek. “Send a man for Duncan now! Fastest horse in the stable, take Colossus if you must—she won’t wake, she is cold and she won’t wake—”
“At once, Your Grace.” The butler was already gone, and Vincent heard him hit the stairs at a run, barking for the stable boy down the whole well of the house.
“Mrs. Roan, hot bricks, blankets, anything—and fetch me Lilian,” Vincent stammered, while bowing his head down over Emma’s, his lips at her damp temple. “What did you eat, sweetheart, what did you take, what did I let you take…”
The housekeeper fled.
There was only the drowsing fire’s tick and the awful shallow rasp of her breath, and Vincent held his wife to his chest and bargained with a God he had stopped speaking to ten years ago.
“V-Vincent?” Her frail voice at once relieved him and impaled his soul.
“You’re awake,” he murmured into her hair, holding her fiercely. “Try to stay awake, pet. I haven’t told you yet—I have so much to say…”
Nearly an hour Vincent had spent wearing a track in the study rug, and the grandfather clock chimed ten somewhere down the hall.
Duncan, the family physician, had shooed him out near dawn, claiming a duke breathing down his neck did the duchess no favors and the physician fewer, so down he’d come to pace back and forth, useless as a gelded bull.
Keaton was owed a line, at least. The man would be expecting him at eleven with the tutor in tow, and Vincent sat and dragged open the drawer where he kept his plain cards to write off a quick excuse.
His fingers closed on a strange letter instead. Cheap paper, that cramped, spidered material he recognized anywhere.
It was from Aldo. And dated yesterday.
His blood went cold before he’d even thumbed the seal loose.
Weston took the morning post. Weston always took it. And the old goat had said nothing.
Why? He has never sat on so much as a tailor’s bill in twenty years—
The door opened before he could chew on it, and Duncan came through drying his hands, Weston in tow.
“She is resting, Yer Grace, and the color’s coming back intae her cheeks,” Duncan said, before Vincent could get the question out.
“But I’ll nae soften it for ye. The duchess was poisoned.
Yesterday afternoon is my guess, and a wee dose, the Lord be thanked, for a heavier hand and ye’d be ordering black cloth this morning. ”
Poisoned? Icy dread flushed through Vincent as he gripped the chair arm and pushed himself half to his feet.
“B-but she ate nothing the whole day,” he stammered, trying to make sense of what he was hearing. “Last night, yes, but not the afternoon—”
“That is just the trouble, Your Grace,” Weston spoke up, with a drag in his voice Vincent had never once heard out of him, not even the evening he found the former Duke hanging from a rope in his own study.
“The duchess took tea in the afternoon. Half a cup… Lilian Guthrie carried it up to her herself.”
Vincent slammed his hands on the desk, “Then drag that damned girl in here and let her speak for it!”
The butler’s moustache drew into a grey line, “That is… that is the second trouble. Lilian is not in the house, sir. We have turned the place inside out. Her box is gone, and her bed has been made up.”
Vincent froze.
His own house. Someone had walked his own halls and put poison in Emma’s hands, and he had slept through every minute of it. His eyes dropped to the indicting letter crushed in his fist.
Custor. Who else but Custor…
The dog had caught wind he was being hunted; Weaver’s tongue ran both ways down the same dirty gutter. So the bastard had hit him where he had left himself wide open. His wife.
Cold, unadulterated fury clawed at Vincent’s insides.
“Out, Duncan,” he breathed shakily. “Take the duchess quietly to my private clinic and bring as many of my loyalist staff as you need. No one gets in or out. The second she wakes, you have someone fetch me. You’ll be paid handsomely. Weston, stay.”
Duncan knew better than to dawdle. Poking up his spectacles, he nodded soberly and went.
Vincent’s eyes went to the hidden letter mashed in his fist, and a colder thought crept in behind the first.
“You. You hired her!” Vincent accused, rounding on the old butler. “Lilian Guthrie. You brought her under this roof. And this”—he shook the crushed letter at him—“this came yesterday, and you sat on it. Custor’s whereabouts in your hand a full day, and not a word to me!”
“Your Grace—”
“I will ask you this once. Did you know.”
“Your Grace, no—” the butler drew himself up, “on my life, no, and if you would let me explain—”
“Then why bury it from me!” Vincent roared, jabbing the crushed letter at the man’s chest. “Twenty years in my family’s service, and still you have gone behind my back, and for what—”
“Because I have not seen you happy in ten of them!” Weston burst out.
The accusation died on Vincent’s tongue, and the room went dead quiet.
“Not once, Your Grace, not since Lord Benjamin passed, and then the old Duke, God rest his soul. Never, until that girl upstairs entered your life.” The old man’s fists balled and shook at his sides.
“I saw the foreign hand on that letter and I knew straightaway where it would send you. Back into the abyss.
“Back behind that cursed mask, when for the first morning in years I saw in you a reason to come down for breakfast that wasn’t blood thirst. So I sat on it, God forgive a meddling old fool, but I only wanted you to have one more ordinary day of it before you went chasing your dead back into the dirt. ”
The words landed. They landed hard, somewhere under the breastbone where the old man always knew to aim.
But it changed nothing. The dark had come to his door regardless. It had come up his own stairs and poured itself with poison, and he wasn’t able to protect Emma.
“Except it found me anyway,” Vincent muttered, dead still. The letter tore clean down the middle, until only the lines with Custor’s address remained, and stuffing it into his coat pocket, he ordered, “Have Colossus saddled.”
Weston didn’t move. His gaze had gone past Vincent to the drawer standing open, to the ivory mask folded in the bottom of it that Vincent was already moving to retrieve.
“Forgive my repeated impositions, Your Grace, but please stay with her,” he said, near pleading now. “Just until the color is back in her. Dr. Fraser says she will mend. Let her wake and find you there, and ride out after, if you must ride at all—”
“She won’t be safe waking or sleeping until Custor is rotting in a hole!” Vincent roared. “I will kill that bastard tonight! He attacked someone I love, and no one—no one— is going to take her from me again!”
His words rang in his ears, and while he realized what he had just said, he decided to shove that to the back of his mind and deal with Custor. He dragged his daggers out and went for his cloak.
“I need you to look over Emma personally,” he ordered Weston. “Find Lilian. Kill anyone he might send to her again.”
The old man’s shoulders sagged by inches, the fight bleeding out of him.
“I… I shall have Colossus brought round to the mews,” Weston said at last, and turned for the door. “But after Her Grace has healed, I hand in my resignation.”
Emma blinked groggily and winced at the bright light around her. Little by little, she opened her eyes to see dull-colored walls, and was that the… the Rod of Asclepius on the wall?
Squinting, she traced over the serpent-entwined staff and wondered where she was. This certainly was not Vincent’s room or his house.
Slightly fearful, she tried to sit up, but dizziness made her slump backward, her head hitting the soft pillow.
“My lady,” Weston said. “Please do not overly exert yourself.”
“Y-yes,” her voice was rough and scratchy. “Where… am I?”
“His Grace’s private physician’s clinic,” the butler answered as he gently lifted her to put a cup of cool water to her lips. “Please drink, slowly.”
As she did, the ache in her throat and stomach began to ease. She drank as much as she could to calm the sting inside, and he gently rested her back. “How are you feeling?”
“Not well.” Her eyelids felt as heavy as lead, but she forced them open. “What happened?”
“You were poisoned about twenty-six hours ago, Your Grace.” Weston explained. “Do you, perchance, remember what you had to drink yesterday afternoon?”
Emma’s eyes closed for a moment as she cast through the fog in her mind. “The afternoon? I… I couldn’t sleep when we got back from London, so I went to get a book from the library…” she faltered. “On my way, I saw Lilian in the blue drawing room. She was looking for her missing hairpin.”
A soft breath left her. “She offered to get me some tea to help me sleep. I—I remember after drinking it that I felt… drowsy and… weak. I must have vomited a little, but I had no trouble sleeping after.”
A strange voice came from the doorway. “And that’s the why of ye still breathing, Yer Grace.”
She looked up to see a kindly looking man with gray at his temples and sharp blue eyes behind spectacles. “The vomiting carried off the worst o’ the toxin. Mandrake root, I’d jalouse, or a sleeping draught made frae henbane, wild lettuce, and opium poppy.”
“This is Doctor Duncan Fraser,” Weston explained helpfully. “He is His Grace’s family physician, and he treated you.”
“Thank you,” Emma croaked.
“Nae thanks needed,” the doctor said. “But I’ll confess, whoever tried tae poison ye made a shoddy job of it, slippin’ it intae too much milk.”
Emma’s eyes widened, and her lips trembled, “You mean… s-she tried to kill me?”
“We are not sure yet, Your Grace,” Weston answered. “It appears her primary target may have been the duke, but she may have taken the opportunity to harm anyone near to him, too. We… believe her employer is Gibbs Custor, the primary suspect in the con of His Grace’s father.”
“The man who robbed Vincent’s father?” she whispered, while feeling a sinking sensation in her stomach, “but wait—why would he…”
“There is much you don’t know about your husband. Not the Duke of Highminster, no, your real husband,” Weston said soberly. “Though the night you treated him at the ball had assured you of that already, I am sure.”
Emma gave him a look, “What are you not telling me…”
“I do not think it is in my—” Weston mumbled, dragging a hand over his haggard face.
“Oh, to hell with it! I suspect you are aware of the stories surrounding the Phantom of the Great Wen. It is a moniker belonging to the duke—he is the Phantom, and I fear His Grace is about to commit an act that will see him hang.”
Emma’s mind gave a dastardly lurch and she sat up fully at once, fighting through the dizziness. “W-what are you saying—”
“He is going to murder Gibbs Custor,” Weston finished.
Swinging her legs from the bed, Emma said, “Take me to him—now.”
“Your Grace, please, you are still ill, let the physician—”
“Take me to him, Weston!” Emma demanded.