Page 40 of The Duke
The infuriating Lady Anstruther.
He’d thought her only a devious social climber, but it was much, much worse than that. She was, in fact, an idealist. A crusader. One of the consecrated few who’d pulled themselves out of the middle classes and wanted to reach into the gutter and pull everyone else up as well.
Curse her bleeding heart.
She couldn’t possibly be so blind, could she? How was it feasible to not realize the risk she was taking, letting criminals and whores into her home? How could she maintain such a misguided faith in humanity? She must have never known cruelty. Or betrayal. She must be a stranger to brutality; the only violence inflicted upon her the errant stick of a hairpin by her lady’s maid.
It occurred to him that she didn’t know better. That she’d not seen the horror that was the primal man. The beast that lived inside, the rot beneath the blood and offal and clay.
He knew.Oh, he knew. He’d seen men rip each other apart for an extra piece of moldy bread. He’d watched the strong prey on the weak in the most sinful of ways. Once man was stripped of all society, civility, and dignity, even the most noble of them became animals. Savages. Beasts.
Monsters.
He knewbecause he’d been one of them.
Layer by layer, lash by painful lash, he’d been carved away from himself, from his humanity, until nothing but that primitive savage remained. Once he’d been rescued, the struggle to regain his sense of civility became his only imperative. When nightmares played on the backs of his eyelids every time he closed them. When he had episodes like this one, where his body betrayed his dignity, and the beast threatened to overtake the man, demanding he execute or escape. When paranoia stalked his every interaction, and suspicion became his only companion, he grasped onto the one principle he knew to be true.
Every man was an animal.
The only thing that separated them from the beasts was regulation, convention, and order. England was the grandest empire in the world because of the strident social expectations that harnessed the savage creature. That cultivated intellect and logic and tradition, eschewing the base and the prosaic.
This was necessary for the survival of mankind. Of this he was certain.
He’d experienced the alternative, had lost a part of himself to it, a part of his body, a part of his soul. It haunted his every moment, no matter how hard he tried to keep the creature at bay.
Some lived their lives closer to the beast than others, and it was better that they remain where they belonged. Where they could prey upon each other. Breeding and cannibalizing until one of their betters came along and established dominance, order, and thereby distracted the monster. Or at least redirected it.
He wished he could make the misguided Lady Anstruther see this. That he could make them all realize. That they could know what he knew without experiencing it firsthand, as it were.
Some of them might understand. He knew Ravencroft was well acquainted with the ferocity of war. He’d been called the Demon Highlander because he’d been known to unleash his beast upon the battlefield. He’d become an unholy thing. But he was not a demon, that’s what they didn’t comprehend.
He was only a man.
And man was evil enough. He didn’t need the help of the devil.
Case in point, these fits of wrath and unreasonable terror that made Cole want to do unspeakable things. These moments when what he feared the very most was himself. These days he felt nothing but spite and irritation. The slightest noise would set his nerves to singing, and incite his urge to strike. It was a daily battle not to act on every impulse. Not to eat, drink, or smoke too much, to fight or fuck too often.
He was barely keeping himself together. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt peace or pity.
No, that wasn’t true. Hecouldremember. It had been precisely three years ago.
With Ginny.
He knew that was why he pursued her so ardently. Why, despite his convictions, he made himself a hypocrite only for her sake. Because as bitter and cynical as he became, she remained his only hope for exception. She’d been a true diamond in the rough, as they say.
An innocent whore.
What was she now?Wherehad she gone? He almost feared finding her sometimes, of giving her a chance to prove him right about the whole world. To dash what little hope he possessed. What if he found her, and she betrayed or abandoned him?
Like everyone else had.
Before he’d met her, he hadn’t known he could be broken in so many ways. Now, after all he’d survived, he was pretty certain a woman he’d only known one night could finish him.
For good.
The clip of soft, light footsteps alerted him to the hurried approach of a woman before she burst into the garden much as he had. Only she took the time to turn and latch the doors softly behind her.
She passed the wall by where he sat, and hastily navigated the path to the fountain. Her dress, the exact bewildering color of the sunset, brushed at a multitude of flowers, snagging on some of them, but she didn’t seem to care.
