The clock struck one in the morning, and Elizabeth was the last one still awake. Her gaze swept over the many dozing figures in the spacious nursery, each spent from the evening's activities. Even Priscilla's frisky spaniel was all played out, having been for the last hour curled into a ball of silken fur on Malcolm's bed. Dog and boy lay nestled against one another in peaceful slumber, their snores humorously harmonious.
Elizabeth took some minutes staring down at her youngest. Even in sleep, Malcolm always wore a kind, peaceful expression, and this night was no exception. So dear he was! So like Jane! So attentive to the needs of others before even thinking of himself, this eight-year-old boy who had gone well beyond the call of a young master to make their guests feel welcome and included, affording an equal amount of love without a thought as to which was more or less deserving of it, treating each of them as more than a visitor, rather as a member of their family; for he genuinely felt one could not have enough. Elizabeth brushed her fingers through his dark blonde hair, stirring him but slightly.
She then took up a blanket and draped it over her friend who had settled herself into the large cushy chair generally filled by the nanny. If practice was indeed a prerequisite to achieving excellence, then Pricilla Blackwell was on the direct path to becoming as good a mother as she would be a mistress. As her confidence continued to grow and flourish, so had the intuitions all too commonly bred out of gentlemen's daughters, those which fell under the more fashionable jurisdiction of a handsomely paid servant, if not several. Elizabeth had allowed for herself this luxury at the behest of an insistent husband with the condition that he was not to interfere with how she chose to govern it. This amicable agreement led to their most disagreeable months as a married couple, for her maternal reflexes, once Ben was born, turned out to be as intense as the loneliness engendered by a wife's neglect, resulting in a mutual state of conjugal unrest of which neither knew how to openly acknowledge, let alone rectify. The couple had retreated almost into separate lives, with one half driven to her infant at all hours and the other to insomnia, draughts, and ultimately a separate bedroom, that callous convention the couple had sworn never to abide. After a miserable few weeks of his laudanum-induced stupors and her midnight walks from Ben's cradle to a cold bed, Elizabeth finally, painfully realized the importance of finding and maintaining a balance between marriage and motherhood, and was quick to establish a new standard that would allow for plenty of time spent in her passionately appreciative husband's arms. Such lessons were for the Blackwells too to learn, and in the same manner the Darcys had, by trial and error. As Elizabeth tucked the blanket around Kingston's young mistress and mother-to-be it was decided then and there, that never again would even the slightest interference, short of a life and death circumstance, be an option to consider, no matter how enticing the concept or self-fulfilling the challenge.
On that head, her thoughts traveled back to when the evening was still young and the storm in its earliest stages. No sooner had the children settled on a game for all of them to play, than Mrs. White appeared with a look befitting her name. Elizabeth followed her anxious nanny out into the hall, and from thence was made aware of a distressing development concerning the arrival of Lord Matlock and, what was soon thereafter determined, his impossibly tempting trio of satin-clad reinforcements. Though furious at the depths to which Richard had sunk to achieve his purpose, she refrained from taking action in that moment, quite certain that her husband would say his piece before she would contribute hers. Time spent with the children, however, had served to quell that anger, leaving her now in a state of acceptance over a decision that was, after all, entirely Thornhaugh's to make. She only hoped that William, ever harsh and sometimes cruel when in pain, was keeping his in check lest his friend departs to die as convinced as ever that he had no one in this barbarous world but himself.
Not that the conviction would be unjustified, thought Elizabeth as she watched Priscilla sleep. There was no hiding Mrs. White's report from the lady, who deserved to know the sort of company her husband would be keeping for the next several hours, even if it was against his will. She took the news rather well, fully trusting Elizabeth's explanation, and pitying the man whom she confessed had earlier thrown her into an inexplicable rage with his demeaning form of address.
"I can hardly remember feeling so angry before in my life," said she. "Lady Frederick, indeed! How did he know, Lizzy, that so trivial a slight would have such an effect? And why would he wish to enflame me? What pleasure could be derived from it?"
"He takes less pleasure in your anger than his own misanthropy. You would have won the moment, my dear, had you responded with either sweetness or indifference."
"Won? I had no idea that I was playing."
"Oh, that hardly matters to him. His games are often one-sided, and almost always rigged in his favor."
"What a strange man! I am glad to have been kept away from him, Lizzy, and even gladder that he is going away. Your family has endured enough without his presence to darken such a happy home. But I do hope the poor devil dies in peace, and with God's mercy."
Elizabeth had nodded in accord, for that hope was apparently all that remained.
As the evening wore on, she was especially pleased with the children's good behavior, though poor Ben, her hopeless little romantic, was captivated by Priscilla's beauty as to often be caught staring when he was meant to take his turn at one of their parlor games. This struck in Janie the urge to tease him, thus compelling Elizabeth to raise a cautioning eyebrow to prevent her elvish daughter from acting in a manner that she might have in her own youth. And so, spirited but steady Janie, her eyes twinkling with mischief, held her tongue and settled for giggling behind her hand while flashing at her brother a knowing expression, causing him to color slightly before he lifted his chin to reclaim, just as his father would have, that bit of stolen pride. Though the two elder (and clashingly dissimilar) siblings managed to refrain for once from quarrelling, it seemed they were to always be at odds.
The youngest, meanwhile, continued to demonstrate his natural sweetness by consistently offering Priscilla first choice at the next game or activity, even if it were one of which he was not particularly fond. Janie would then whisper suggestions into the undecided lady's ear, in no subtle manner coaxing her into choosing a game that she herself wished to play. Her hints were taken in excellent humor, with Priscilla pretending to think it over thoroughly before agreeing that, indeed, the game of forfeits was much preferred to charades. And Malcolm smiled as he always did when that harmony was reached, neither thinking nor caring a whit about the clever methods applied therein, so long as everyone about him was content.
And then there was George, who participated freely in their fun but whom Elizabeth perceived, since his meeting with Thornhaugh for the giving of the children's good luck charms, to be somewhat out of sorts. The boy had been slow in returning to the nursery, and upon doing so was loath to raise his head until the sound of Janie's laughter pulled him from a seemingly melancholic reverie into her sphere of merriment. Never more than this moment had Elizabeth seen so many shades of Lydia in the girl as she took George by the hand and led him into the center of their circle for a game of pass the slipper, and after blindfolding him whispered something into his ear which had made him laugh, brightening his mood in that moment and many others; and so it went for as long as Janie was at his side with a joke to upend his every inclination to frown.
"Have you heard this one, Blackwell?" Thornhaugh mashed out his nub of a cigar before drawing another tiresome joke from his repertoire. "One man says to another, 'it is said that Dame Fortune knocks on everyone's door!' The other replies, 'No, it was her daughter, Miss Fortune, who visited me.'"
Fred raised from the floor to meet the laughing eyes, devilish smirk, and puckish wink that, in his mind, fully characterized the man who had taken him for a goodly sum over the course of several wearying hours. It was far more owing to Thornhaugh's skill than luck, not at cards so much as his uncanny aptitude for chipping away, layer by layer, the internal armor that men too often take for granted.
Within such time the whole party had witnessed the slow draining of Sir Frederick in terms of money and morale as Thornhaugh's technique of diminishing the latter so as to gain the former was proving more than effective, with such factors as advanced illness or age having in no way dulled or hindered his abilities which, as he smugly stated, were really more of an art. It was a secret to no one in the room and even stated in the terms, that games of the mind, in concurrence with the more tangible game in practice, were expected and encouraged; and Fred therefore could hardly blame ignorance for his current debt. Only himself. Perhaps that was the reason he was now resting sluggishly upon the carpet, and why his generally proud and self-assured countenance had taken a dramatically altered turn to one of shame and depletion, if not defeat.
Darcy, for his part, had fallen into state of ambivalence during this period of repose in which he reflected at length on the potential outcome of the contest. It seemed Thornhaugh's victory was a lock. Though Darcy's sum total of personal experience was modest at best—at least compared to that of la Croix and her girls—he felt he knew as well as they did how highly their Thorny excelled at cerebral swordplay. Even his duel with Sir Alvin had been treated less as a physical challenge than mental sport. In that swiftly arranged fight to the death Cotter's material weakness, upon its exposure, had sealed his doom. Never could Darcy forget the surge of anxiety that ran through his breast when Thornhaugh stabbed his trusty dagger into the dirt no more than a yard's distance from an even madder rival to mark his point. Thornhaugh had limped his way to the field still battered and swollen from a boxing match fought a mere ten hours or so earlier, his ribs bruised so badly that he could scarcely stand, let alone ride or walk, without excruciating pain. But ride and walk he did, right up to the fit and furious war hero as if he no more feared him than he would a paper tiger, buoyed and emboldened by the fresh memory of a malicious, devastating arson. Similarly heated words were exchanged as the two enemies stood eye to eye, mettle against mettle, rage against rage, a lost mind versus a lost soul. It was some time later when Darcy realized how crucial the proximity had been to Thornhaugh's sound and methodical aim to study the physically disfigured and mentally fractured man up close, through his mottled skin to his very core. Caroline had already laid the groundwork, provided all the heavy lifting with her lies, her misuse of Cotter's trust and devotion, her mishandling of his love.
"It is when the mind and soul are lost," said Thornhaugh in his account to Fred of the event, "that a man loses all will to live, and therefore not a muscle was needed to bring this one down. It had taken me little more effort than a story spun with as much truth as eloquence, with no cause for embellishment, about a vengeful wife and the husband she played for a fool. Soon thereafter came victory, a payout to my gamble, a blast caught in Cotter's own heart before the bitch who had broken it. A rather romantic ending, is it not? I thought so."
This story had been the last of countless others Thornhaugh told throughout the evening, weaved with the usual care and flourish in his deep baritone that was now beginning to wear and crack with overuse. And as a purposeful consequence to something so seemingly innocuous as storytelling, the targeted listener, though in a state of almost total sobriety, now appeared to be suffering a different sort of alteration brought on by decreased faith in his fellow man, his strength, mind, and spirit weakened after bearing so many vivid, disturbing chronicles avowed to be as true as memory itself.
In line with this form of slow torture fell several subtle but sharp references to Fred's domestic situation, specifically that which involved his ailing father, thereupon drawing intense feelings of guilt and anguish to the surface to further impair him. Fred was at first alarmed by Thornhaugh's wealth of information and demanded to know how it was acquired, but then his expression changed almost an instant later as comprehension dawned. Without further inquiry was the source confirmed in Blackwell's mind, for he had similarly used his own servants for the gathering of enough evidence to prove his wife's adultery, which had thus far gone unmentioned.
Moreover, as a fellow master of these grimy tactics regularly conducted on the political stage, Fred could not see his way to blaming or condemning Thornhaugh for doing his research. Having faced and bested a multitude of fierce candidates and colleagues, each as fixed as himself to the causes he wished to put into legislation, Fred actually admired and appreciated the practice of crushing the opposition by means of airing dirty laundry, the next aim being to exploit his agony, treat it as a scab to be peeled back and doused with vinegar, again and again, until the challenger is spent, broken down, virtually defenseless.
It was because Fred knew this, had studied, performed, and mastered these methods for himself, that Darcy as the evening's host and arbiter was not quite convinced the man lying down in apparent defeat was ready to declare such.
Outside their relatively calm and quiet quarters the winds continued to howl, their violent force knocking the occasional bit of debris against the window. Thunder rolled; a flash of lightening ignited Thornhaugh's pale, angular, indeed villainous features, and then he casually spoke of the cruelty practiced in even the more reputable houses for those stricken with madness. "Bedford sent me to one when I was but thirteen, after my eight or ten-week flight from Harrow when I was eventually found on King Street earning money through short cons; Three-Card-Monte was my specialty. Anyway, have you perchance seen the devices used to restrain a particularly willful patient? Though effective, I should hardly call them comfortable. There are those that go over the mouth, you see, and those that…oh, but never mind. I am sure Lord Blackwell shall not make the trouble to require their use."
Blackwell sprang up from the carpet with a burst of renewed vigor, perchance kindled by sheer hatred, and walked over to the chair positioned between the sideboard and the trolley. He sat there mutely, pensively staring into space amid an assemblage of crystal and cut-glass decanters.
La Croix and her girls had only just recently left their Thorny's corner, having imbibed like Matlock to the point of heavy sedation. While the women napped in their sofa and Richard in his chair, Darcy and Thornhaugh sat at opposite ends of the card table, with the latter exuding the deepest self-gratification. "Why whatever is wrong, Blackwell?" he taunted. "Do you need cheering? Perhaps another joke is in order. Two lunatics arrive at Bedlam, both in chains. One lunatic says to the other—"
"No more," said Darcy, thinking back to the two instances in which his fingers were poised to snap big Angus into the room, before managing to talk his choleric neighbor out of slamming a certain acid-tongued invalid against the wall. "No one has laughed once."
Thornhaugh smiled across the table, and at a hushed volume began the following exchange: "You will miss my humor when I am gone."
"Your humor," replied Darcy, "is your least appealing attribute."
"To you stodgy landlords, of course it is. How dearly I miss those dirty dens in the heart of East London, the raucous laughter of misfits, rascals, and rogues, those who are so lost in revelry that all good manners are forgotten."
"A pejorative phrase to you, 'good manners.' You are the only person I know who looks down upon that which keeps a nation civilized."
"I endorse only the behaviors that are true and honest, be they angelic, amoral, or categorically evil. It is not good manners that deserve contempt but the hypocrites who hide behind them, the liars and artists, the showmen, the charlatans, the pontificators…the politicians. But the masses, Darcy—those whom the likes of Blackwell and Bedford call rabble—loved my humor as I did theirs. Unfettered, of course. I recall my sides hurting on some mornings from laughing all night."
"I am not stodgy!" suddenly cried Richard from the chair in which he had been out cold for more than an hour.
Thornhaugh smilingly observed the man's comically futile attempts to shake off the effects of drowsiness and drink. "Beg your pardon, Matlock?"
With mild affront he restated, "I am not, as you claim, a stodgy landlord, nor have I ever been."
"You were never meant to be a landlord. Or a Lord of anything, for that matter."
"He is a damn good earl," Darcy was quick to rejoin.
"That is beside the point."
Richard gripped the arms of his chair to keep steady and focus his blurred vision. "Do share your point then. I long to hear it."
"I had thought it quite obvious, but very well. The title you hold is not that for which you were born and bred. Is that plain enough?"
"Ah, well. Yes. I mean, no, it is not. The title, I mean. It is rather a…fated circumstance."
"Fated? More like fatal! Your brother's fatality was in fact the fateful event that settled your fate."
"In whatever droll manner wish to phrase it, oh clever one," Richard mumbled, fingers having moved to his temples to massage his headache.
"No cleverness intended, and certainly not as droll a phrasing as 'fated circumstance,' as if it were steered by the hand of the Almighty Himself. Is that what you believe, Matlock? that Stephen Fitzwilliam was the unlucky but essential casualty of a greater design to upheave you into the noble ranks?"
"Certainly not!" Richard calmed his drunken ire before subjoining heavily, "Though we were never close, I dare say no one—not even his own wife—lamented his death more than I."
"Is that so? Let us unfurl that statement."
"There is nothing to unfurl."
"Now Matlock, indulge me! Please? I am to join your brother shortly after all. Think back to your grief as you sat at poor Stephen's sickbed. Which prospect drew a tear from your eye, ran fear down your spine: his looming death, or your new birth?"
As the question was posed, Darcy cut a passing glance at Fred, who was attending the conversation with a look almost of relief that he, for once that evening, was not the object of pointed derision and ponderous scrutiny.
Richard peered through heavy eyelids. "The earldom," said he, "held no charm for me."
"You dreaded it," Thornhaugh revised.
"Indeed." Richard's confession went on with some reluctance. "As almost any man would a calling for which he was wholly untutored, I dreaded it. More than the battlefront, more than a charging French cavalry, more than a bayonet primed to stick my gut and bleed me out." He leaned toward his inquisitor, making no secret of his meaning beneath the surface of his next statement: "The tending and prolonging of a dynasty is, after all, a tremendous burden to shoulder."
"So it is," said Thornhaugh placidly, "should one elect to take on that burden. You could have abdicated the title, given it up to the youngest."
"Just as you could have. So why didn't you then?"
"For my own reasons, and none of them fear. And your reasons?"
"My own," answered Richard, "and not a one that you could possibly comprehend. You know not the meaning of gallantry, of the giving of oneself for a greater purpose."
"That is untrue. I fully grasped the principle of self-sacrifice before rejecting it, as you understand and reject my own belief that our choices—not our origins—decide our destiny. I made mine; you made yours."
"My choice served to make me a better man, because it was the right and honorable one, not the easiest or safest or most pleasurable or most expedient..."
"Do spare me your false virtue, milord, for I know better."
"What do you know?" Richard challenged.
"That you knew, well before Stephen's death, how unfit he was for the title and all the duties for which you were far better qualified. You, Darcy, Matthew, I dare say your mother and father as well, knew him to be spoiled, stupid, indolent, arrogant, feeble, useless, supremely unsuitable for the calling in which you take such pride. You knew down to your bones, even as you begged your higher power to spare Stephen's life, what a damn fine earl you would make. And by God, you wanted it. You feared it, you wept over it, but you wanted it so very badly. You wept over how badly you wanted him to die."
Richard's eyes flashed with anger. "That is a lie," he whispered furiously.
"I understand your denial and do not hold it against you. And when I am dead, you may continue your denial as it suits your notions of conscience, integrity, virtue, or whatever else you believe shall earn you a place in…history? Heaven? The illusory Hall of Excellence? I know not which, only that I am barred from all three."
"That was your choice," Darcy disputed.
Thornhaugh nodded in agreement, "Like his ascent to eminence," then returned to Richard. "And though you did covet the role, it was chosen wisely, I dare say bravely. Fear makes some men stronger, fiercer, nourishes them, challenges them; that is what makes you—you, Richard Fitzwilliam—exceptional. It is courage that makes an excellent soldier, officer, master, an excellent man. It is not, nor has it ever been, the sacrificing of oneself. The self must never, ever be sacrificed. It is a good thing you never did, for it is all we have."
Richard was still too cross to acknowledge this point as he hotly replied, "I cannot accept—no! I did not want my brother to die. How dare you presume—"
"How dare you call it a presumption! I am deserving of far more credit than that. I read people, Matlock. I know them."
"As a good gambler must, I grant you, and perhaps your assessments are most often correct. But not in—"
"Not in this case? How many times have I heard that one?"
"You do not live in my head! And your attitude with regards to succession and sacrifice is perverse. You minimize the gentry, the peerage, the Crown, the English Empire as it suits your own personal doctrine of self-interest. Succession is a hereditary blessing ordained by God and the Realm! We do not choose! We are chosen!"
"Hear, hear!" cried Blackwell.
"Chosen," scoffed Thornhaugh, making the sign of the cross against his chest, "that little word—like 'Amen'—so full of divine meaning."
"Yes it is," replied Richard in earnest to his sarcasm.
With a roll of his eyes Thornhaugh looked over at Darcy, who had captured every word, quietly but keenly. "What say you, Darcy? Do you agree with your cousin and your neighbor?"
Darcy met his waiting, confident expression. "I do."
Thornhaugh paled at the response, black eyes burning into his, as if the answer had been a betrayal. He took a long, rasping breath, and with a sad smile, said, "Well, there it is. I am resigned. On that final word from my colleagues of distinction and rank I acknowledge, with not an ounce of hope remaining, that I shall die knowing that I am not to be joined in rebellion…," His voice rose with passion ",…that the vast majority of allegiance shall ever belong to the structure that seeks, by one dictate or another, by one principle or another, to imprison all of our citizenry, from the bottom rung to the top. I accept it now; I do. As the institution prevails, the individual falls!"
Midway through his speech, Richard fled his chair to distance himself from the man whose company was becoming less and less tolerable. He moved with the grace of a pig in a parlor towards a more comfortable chaise, into which he reclined with his back turned to the nuisance he no longer wished to dignify.
Conversely, Fred was more vocal in his vehement denouncement of Thornhaugh as having no understanding at all of the institution, of government in general, or of leadership. To this he added more insults, declaring him an ignominious rogue who would gladly see the country fall into total disorder just for his own amusement.
At the end of Fred's tirade came Darcy's turn to speak out. Feeling woefully misunderstood, he made to address Thornhaugh in a manner that gave more respect to his radical but not entirely dismissible opinion. No sooner had he opened his mouth, however, than his weary detractor intercepted him with, "I do not require a more thorough explanation of your position. Spare me, I beg you! My time is far too precious." Across the room he shouted in frustration, "Blackwell! The hour is late. Shall I deal us another hand? Shall we move along from cards altogether? Or do you find yourself ready to admit total defeat?" He held up the debt tally. "If so, I should like remittance in full before you piss off back to your father's bedside lest he chews through his gag and bites off his tongue."
Fred smirked at his odd new state of unrest. "Feeling a bit peaked, Thorny?"
"On the contrary, Blackwell, I feel healthier and happier than ever. In fact, should you cede this round to me, I shall relinquish my privilege over to you."
Fred brightened at the notion of the offered advantage of choosing the next game. Upon its acceptance came a crack of thunder that shook the room with its force and volume, jolting Richard upright and the women awake. "Bloody hell!" cried la Croix with a clutch to her chest, her girls skittish as mice as they ran to the window.
"Easy, my dear ladies," said Thornhaugh in a calming manner. "What have I always told you? There is nothing more beautiful than a storm."
"What the devil is this?"
Everyone turned towards the gruff, angry voice belonging to the sunken-eyed man stationed just inside the room with a hand-wringing Miss Baxter at his side.
"Sir," said the governess to her charge, "Lord Russell is here as you requested."