Page 27 of The Truth About Dukes
His room had been filled with books, maps, and strange gadgets, becoming a sort of lending library for the other residents, not that anybody had let Soames know about that.
“You thought of escape?”
He came a few steps closer. “For about the first five years. I filled my head with fantasies. Perhaps Papa did not know that John Coachman had left me at the madhouse instead of at school. Papa would come fetch me when he realized the error. Papa had died and Mama was searching for me. I wrote letter after letter, which Soames dutifully sealed and addressed for me. He put them in the boot boy’s sack, and when my back was turned, took them out and tossed the lot of them into the fire—after he’d read them.”
Rothhaven regarded the rambling old pile at the end of the weedy drive. “I gave up on Nathaniel last, and that took more years.”
“How did you not go mad?”
He closed the distance between them, gazing down at her as if she were the subject to be painted.
“I did, for a time. I was completely…the ice baths, the lashings, the lack of decent food, the confinement, seeing the other residents part with what reason they’d had when they arrived. I was contemplating an escape of a very permanent variety when along came a new maid. A serious, watchful girl who kept her eyes open and her mouth shut. Soames was allotting me just enough food to keep me perpetually ravenous. This maid, so quiet and so bold, managed to sneak a wedge of cheese to me between the clean linens she brought for my bed.”
Constance indulged in another brush of her fingers through his hair. “At first I thought you were slender by nature, then I realized Soames was starving you.”
“He was manipulating my diet to see if any particular food brought on seizures and, as it happens, his theory had merit. Too many sweets, too much alcohol, tobacco, strong tea, or coffee aggravate my condition, as does a lack of regular, adequate rest.”
“He did not need to starve you to test that theory. An occasional bite of cheese, a few slices of ham, fresh apples…” She’d brought Rothhaven whatever she could pilfer from the larders, and had done the same for the other epileptic resident subjected to Soames’s vile science. She’d sneaked books to Miss Sophie—nobody had a family name at that wretched place—andaccidentallyallowed the cat into Miss Helen’s room as often as possible.
“You saved my life, Constance Wentworth. Saved my life and also my sanity, the one being occasionally exclusive of the other.”
Rothhaven stood directly before her, and Constance was reminded that this was not the gaunt young man who’d watched her with such rage in his eyes when she’d come to sweep his hearth. The first three days she’d undertaken that chore, he hadn’t spoken a word to her. The fourth day, he’dthankedher.
Nobody thanked a char girl for hauling ashes, and Constance hadn’t expected thanks. Even as Miss Constance Wentworth of Highlane Street, York, nobody had thanked her for anything.
“I viewed it as a game,” Constance said. “Whatever misery Soames inflicted—forcing a patient to bide alone in her room, depriving her of diversions, keeping decent food away—I plotted to thwart him. I wasn’t always successful.”
“For which you were caned by the housekeeper.”
“Never very hard. She did what she could too. Compared to Jack Wentworth…”
Constance fell silent, her attention arrested by Rothhaven’s gaze. The furious, brilliant, half-mad youth yet lurked somewhere inside him, but that younger man had learned to manage his confinement. Not to make peace with it, but to tolerate a cease-fire.
“I didn’t want to leave,” Constance said. “I did not want to go with Quinn when he showed up that morning. I still have no idea how he found me. I worried for you so when I left, worried for all of you.” She hadn’t had the luxury of worrying only for them, though. “You received my letter?”
“You addressed it to the housekeeper, and she kindly let me have it. I was not in a position to reply.”
Constance let that admission pass unremarked, for now. “And after I left, then what?”
“We managed. You taught us much. When Soames kept us apart, when he pitted us against one another with his false friendship and fleeting approval, we all suffered. When I shoved a book under Miss Sophie’s door, when I saved some of my bread to pass along to Alexander at prayers, when I slipped Miss Helen a deck of cards so she could play solitaire, we all benefited. I bought the place, you know.”
Rothhaven was tall and strong now, also confident in a way a man who’d been spared that hell could never be. Even Quinn didn’t have quite this much…what? Awareness of self? Self-possession? Gravitas? Whatever it was, Constance wanted to paint it.
“You bought that awful, nasty…youboughtit?”
“When Nathaniel found me, taking ownership of my prison was one of the objectives that motivated me to leave, to learn to live in the world again, albeit a world nearly as circumscribed as a hospital. In that larger world, the letters I sent reached their destinations. I had coin and influence, even without leaving the Hall. My very signature had power.”
He relished that power now, and Constance was glad he had it. “What did you do with the hospital?”
“Eventually, I closed it. With the exception of Miss Sophie, we weren’t mad, and she was certainly not violent.”
“She was violently convinced Napoleon had married her during the Peace of Amiens.”
“And that he was coming for her any day. Where is the harm in such a fantasy? She’s living with a niece now, writing letters almost daily to the deposed emperor. He writes back sometimes, courtesy of the local curate’s epistolary talents. For Miss Sophie, the Corsican has not yet gone to his heavenly reward.”
“That is…marvelous.” Brilliant, in fact. “And Mr. Alexander?” A shy, slight fellow also given to the falling sickness.
“In Leeds, teaching maths at a boys’ school run by Quakers.”
