Page 68 of The Mad Baron's Bride
The house was dark,but far away, she heard the high, shrill cry of a babe. A cold rug pressed against her feet. Cold swirled around her bare legs beneath her shift.
“You’re a sight to frighten the devil.”
Toplady stood at the end of a long, narrow hallway, a hulking outline in the dark. Not Bertram, her husband. Bertram lay stabbed on the floor of his library, his eyes dull and open with shock. Eustace stood in the hall, his dark hair greasy with sweat, his teeth a gleam in the shadows.
She was dreaming. A nightmare. She must wake.
She looked down at herself and saw what she knew she would see. The ones fading to rust were from the maid, where they had cut her to free the babe struggling to emerge. The midwife knew what to do, but yet, so much blood.
There were fresher ones, though, bright red, sticking to her bodice. Her hands were sticky, too. She examined them, the red smudges on the blade and handle of the knife. Why was thecarvingknife in her hand?
Wake up, Leda!
“I didn’t kill him.” She stood as she was before the magistrate’s table, bloody shift, bare feet, the knife. The room crowded with spectators gawking, whispering her guilt.
“Not in her right mind.” The judge was so large, so fierce as he glared at her. Troublesome woman. “Lock her in the asylum and see if they might cure her madness.”
Eustace at her side as she was loaded, hands in manacles, into the prisoner’s cart, the way revolutionaries had been carried to the guillotine in France. Such a good nephew. Such a caring man, placing her valise with her one gown and shoes and hairbrush and the Bible that had belonged to her grandmother. Who had packed the bag? Betsey was gone. Mrs. Blake was gone.
The babe was gone.
“Where is it?” Eustace leaned close, hissing in her ear like the geese in the yard. “The child.”
She’d killed it. They told her so. They couldn’t find the body, but they said she had borne her babe and slain it, and then she had killed her husband, before or after. Childbed madness. It happened to some women, pitiable creatures. She couldn’t be let around good people, of course. Not sane, god-fearing folk.
“The babe is dead.” She was lying.Wake up, she urged herself as Eustace leaned in, his onion breath stirring her hair, lank and unwashed down her back.
“It had better be,” he said. “And when I am ready, I will come for you. I will take you for my own and redeem you, you miserable creature. Once they’ve broken some of that pride.” He grinned again, showing the rot in his teeth, the plump satisfaction of a man who lived only for the surfeit of his bodily desires. “And then you will have arealmaster.”
He rubbed the bulge in his breeches, his black eyes sharp and satisfied as they gazed on her. There was the knife again in her chained hands. She raised it, pointed it toward his throat. She struck.
Someone screamed, and wept.Wake up!
It was the mermaids calling. Their sharp, weeping cries drew her to the rim of sleep, surfacing.
She lay in the mistress’s suite in Holme Hall, looking out at the Wash. There were no chains, no blood, no knife. No Eustace. She wanted to cry with relief.
Moonlight outlined the waves, gently heaving. A sharp edge dug into her side, and Leda shifted on the mattress, then sat up. The mermaids had murdered her sleep, like Macbeth. Sleep, the balm of hurt minds. Or the source of nightmares. Leda rose, reaching for her dressing robe and slippers. Her cap had fallen off her head, as usual, and she let it lie on the pillow, like a weary thought.
Anne-Marie had slept in this room, tossed on this bed, kicked these covers with her restless longings. She had perhaps paced these floors and looked out on other moonlit nights, thinking of her lover.
Perhaps Jack had come to her in this bed, seeking her warmth. And his wife had turned him away.
How could she have left her children? Leda wished she could understand the woman’s mind. She must have been truly desperate.
The memory clawed its way out, a monster from the dark, and Leda wasn’t seeing the scene out her window, the sandy beach studded with worn, smooth stones and seaweed. Her fingers froze around the hilt of a kitchen knife, the great blade used for carving joints, for rending bone and sinew from flesh. Her bare feet pressed the cold floor of the house, Toplady’s house, which had never felt like hers, not even the rooms allotted to her. Her hands were damp and crusted. And her heart beat so quickly, quivering in her chest, as if she’d drunk poison. Far away, in a distant part of the house, a baby shrieked, jolted into cold air from the womb that had safely held him all this time.
No.No.She would not go back to that nightmare. She would not let that woman into this house, Jack’s house. Not with the girls here. Leda blinked, trying to clear her thoughts.
Her arm ached. She must have stabbed him. She must have stabbed him many times, from the gashes in his waistcoat, from the blood splashed on the carpet around him, part of a table, the cushion of an overturned chair. How easily the great knife must have sunk through the fabric to the soft, pale flesh beneath. How cool his skin had always felt, even when he shuddered above her in her bed. Cold sweat fell from his brow as he worked her, striving to sow his seed. She had always washed herself after, and no matter how cold the water in her basin, it had felt warmer on her skin than her husband’s flesh. He was a creature entirely lacking in human warmth.
But that didn’t mean she should have killed him. She was mad, as they said. So mad she could not submit to her imprisonment, which she deserved, but had spilled herself out of the window like Rapunzel following her hair, had fled like a wraith across the fields and meadows to the ship that could carry her away.
To here. To a place surrounded, embraced by the sea, knit up with legends, laden with ghosts.
A song came from afar, a singing, but not the mermaids. The blurred, wordless moaning she’d heard from the girls’ room when she watched them, and swore she had heard since. It was tuneless, haunting.
There was no light beneath Jack’s door, but farther down, at the end of the hall, silver light spilled from the nursery door, partly open. The singing came from there. A shadow moved across the slit of light, a weaving pattern. As she neared Leda heard the creak of the floor, the quiet pad of feet. She pushed the door open as silently as she could.
