Pain stabbed through my ankle as I hitched up my heavy silk skirts and ran through the docklands, but I didn’t let the pain in. I didn’t let the panic in or the questions or anything—my brain only registered the need to run and so I did. I was good at running. I was fast. I was strong. I was born to move. Pinning me down, capturing me, was like trying to make the Thames flow backwards, it was like trying to hold the wind in your hands.
This was what I’d been born to do and I was going to be safe.
The docklands were not very busy—we were much farther upstream than the thriving docks on the East End—but there were people in sight, within an easy running distance. A boatyard, it looked like, and on the road, even farther down, carriages. I was going to be safe I was going to be safe I was going to be safe—
Something hit me from behind, hit me hard, and all the breath left my body as I went pitching forward into the muddy ground. I couldn’t breathe and there was something on top of me and I couldn’t move either…
“I wanted this to be easy for you,” Gareth said. “I so wanted it to be easy.”
And this time when the cloth came, I couldn’t fight it. I squirmed and tried to roll and tried to hold my breath, but it was impossible. And when I finally relented and inhaled, I could feel the substance leaching the fight from my limbs, the will from my mind. My eyelids started to close of their own accord and everything began to spin away, distant and distorted, like the world through a magnifying glass at the wrong angle.
And then nothing.
Heaviness clung to me. A thick drowsiness. A sopping wet blanket of disorientation and dizziness.
I was in a sitting room. A very nice sitting room, although the furniture was covered in sheets and the portraits were taken down from the walls.
I was not at the docklands. I was in a house.
I couldn’t lift my head, but I knew without looking that it was now early afternoon. And I knew that I was on a chair, my hands bound behind my back and I knew that I wasn’t alone.
“Why?” I mumbled, struggling to make my mouth move. My lips felt numb, my tongue felt fat. But that one question crystallized in my mind, galvanizing me. Why?
Gareth knelt in front of me. Had I ever noticed before how cherubic he looked? I hadn’t—my senses had been stolen by the master of Markham Hall the first night I’d arrived. But Gareth was handsome. Blond hair and blue eyes and a face that was so smooth and beautiful, it looked like a statue in the British Museum. He looked like an angel.
An angel that had me tied to a chair.
“I am really sorry about this, Ivy,” he said. His voice was rather apologetic. “This was never my original plan—but I had to improvise after Violet’s death.”
I managed to raise my head a few inches and then it bobbed back down.
“Do you know where we are?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“We’re in Mr. Markham’s Hampton house. It’s quite a ways from London proper. It’s where he and Violet shared their wedding night, you know.” Gareth tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “I was here for that too. I had to go in the valet’s room in the attic and wonder if every creak, if every thump, was them making love. I’d been fucking her for two months by that point.”
“You loved her,” I managed. Somehow, I knew to keep engaging him, to keep feeding his tangential thoughts, even though the other parts of my mind that were firing into alertness begged me to find a way to end this madness. But how? My legs were free. That was quite an advantage. But I wouldn’t be able to turn a doorknob with my hands behind my back.
“I did love her,” Gareth mused. “I did. She didn’t love me. But she could have. After she had our child, perhaps.”
“Mr. Markham would have raised it as his own,” I said. My mouth was feeling closer to normal again, my words coming out in my usual voice. “She wouldn’t have risked falling in love then.”
“I wouldn’t have let him have the child. There was a time when I thought I might, when the thought of him raising my son was satisfying—fitting even, but I loved her too much. I loved her too much to let her be his. Even if she didn’t want to be mine.”
I didn’t understand. Maybe it was the lingering effects of the agent he’d used to put me to sleep or maybe it was that none of this made any goddamn sense. Something about Gareth and Violet and the baby, but why was I here? Why was I involved?
And why was there a creeping fear that I would be made to suffer for someone else’s sins?
“Do you know how I first met Mr. Markham?” Gareth asked, standing up. “Do you know when I first met him?”
“When you applied to be his valet?” It was a reasonable assumption, but it seemed to annoy Gareth.
“No. I had a life before working for Mr. Markham, you know.” He started pacing. “I was born at the same level as him. I was born to a wealthy man and raised in a fine house. And I was but a boy when he married my sister. My half-sister,” he corrected. “The first time I really saw him was at their wedding, at the York Minster, but before that, I felt like I knew him. My parents adored him. Arabella wouldn’t stop talking about him. It was like he was part of the family before he ever actually married into it.”
Arabella.
Arabella.
