She bit her lip at the sight.
Just a day before, this man had been whole and strong, a vital, nearly overwhelming presence. It seemed somehow a sin against nature that he should be laid so low.
That she had laid him so low.
She closed her eyes, desperately praying that he might be well. That those strange, cold gray eyes might bore into her again while he argued with her and tried to order her about.
Abruptly she straightened from the bed and crossed to the fireplace. She knelt there and poked at the embers, adding coal to build the fire back up, and then she stood. By the clock on the mantel it was the middle of the night, but she was restless. Beside the clock was a candle and she lit it from the fire, then stood and glanced around the room.
Dyemore still slept.
The bedroom had two doors on opposite walls. One was the dressing room she’d bathed in. The other she’d not investigated yet.
She went to it now and tried the handle.
Locked.
Dyemore had told her on her first night at the abbey not to enter any locked rooms.
Iris bit her lip. The safe thing to do was to return to her chair. Forget about locked doors and whatever might lie beyond.
She darted another glance at the bed and the stranger lying there—her husband, who screamed in his sleep. She hardly knew anything about him or his motives.
She turned swiftly and crossed to the bedside table. A big ring of keys lay there—the ones that Dyemore had made Nicoletta give her after the wedding—and she picked them up.
She’d been so busy nursing Dyemore for the last day and a half that she hadn’t had time to use them.
Until now.
But she was the mistress of the abbey, wasn’t she? This was her house.
She tried key after key on the lock, wincing as the ring jangled loudly. The key to this door might not even be on the ring. Perhaps Dyemore had hidden it among his own possessions.
The lock clicked open.
Iris stared at it a moment before twisting the handle and pushing.
The door opened to reveal a sitting room, still and silent, as if waiting for someone to wake it.
Iris blinked and stepped into the room, nearly stumbling over a trunk sitting just inside the doorway. She frowned and held her candle high as she walked around the trunk.
Ivory-painted pilasters highlighted walls of the lightest pink imaginable, with a dainty carved bas-relief floral spray between each two pilasters. Gilt and moss-green chairs were grouped here and there. A small round table with gold inlay stood against one wall, and a painted fire screen was before the cold hearth. The windows were the same as in the bedroom—tall and narrow with pointed tops—but they seemed somehow to fit this room better.
Iris inhaled. This was a beautiful room—warm and welcoming—and it was entirely unlike anything else she’d seen in Dyemore Abbey.
It was also obviously feminine.
Iris knit her brows. That meant that the room Dyemore slept in was the duchess’s bedroom, not the duke’s.
How strange. Why would he not sleep in his proper bedroom?
She turned to go back into the duchess’s bedroom again and saw the trunk.
Iris knelt and put down the candlestick before lifting the lid. Inside were piles of clothing.
She drew one out and saw that it was a dress in a style several decades old. The gown was quite ornate, with embroidery worked over the entire skirt, and a matching stomacher. This was no everyday gown. A woman would save it for very special occasions.
Iris gently laid the gown aside. Underneath it was a lovely primrose-yellow bodice and skirt. She held it up against herself. The skirt was inches too short for her, but the bodice might fit.
Excited now, she dug through the rest of the trunk. It was filled with a woman’s clothing, all of it for a lady shorter than Iris but with a fuller bust. At the bottom she found a chemise and stockings and nearly wept at the thought of clean clothes.
Except these must be Dyemore’s mother’s clothes. She bit her lip. Why else would the trunk be in the duchess’s sitting room? His mother was dead—she knew that much—but when or how the woman had died she’d never heard. He might be very angry at her for donning his mother’s clothing.
Iris shook her head. It was the dead of night and she wasn’t wearing her stays in any case. In the morning she’d decide whether or not to use the dress.
She closed the trunk and, taking the yellow skirt and bodice along with the stockings and chemise, retraced her steps. She placed the clothes on a chair before locking the sitting room again.
Then she looked across the room to the dressing room.
The duke’s room had to be on the other side.
With that thought she picked up the candle again and crossed to the dressing room. Inside, the copper bath had been removed. She held her candle higher and saw that another door was on the other side of the dressing room.
She went to it and tried the handle and was unsurprised to find it locked as well.
Outside she could hear faintly the wind whistling around a corner, but mostly it was quiet.
As if everything in this great house had died long ago.
She pushed aside the thought and concentrated on the lock.
On the third try she found the correct key.
The lock gave with a screech, as if reluctant to yield to her curiosity.
She pushed open the door and held up her candle.
The room was almost twice as large as the bedroom she shared with Dyemore. A massive bed on a raised dais stood in the center, and ebony pillars carved into twisted shapes held up drapes in a blood red so dark she at first mistook them for black.
She stepped in and glanced around. This had to be the ducal bedroom, but everything was layered in dust—as if it’d been locked up after the previous duke’s death.
Why hadn’t Dyemore opened it?
The fireplace across the room was enormous, shielded in black marble. A large painting hung above it. Iris raised her candle to get a better look. Saint Sebastian stood tied to a tree, nude and dying horrifically. He was impaled by numerous arrows, the blood painting his white, writhing body.
She shuddered and turned aside.
Her hip bumped against a small table, knocking it over along with the things that had been standing on it. A marble bowl thumped to the carpet, rolling in a circle, spilling its contents, and a book of some sort slid to the floor.
Iris bent to look at the bowl and what it had held. She could smell the scent even before the candlelight picked up the thin curls of wood: cedar. The subtle, balmy fragrance filled her nostrils. She must’ve inadvertently stepped on some of the chips as she bent down. Carefully she swept as much as she could back into the little bowl with her hand and set it on the table again.
Then she knelt to reach for the book.
It was quite large, but thin, as if it might contain maps or botanical prints. She opened it curiously, only to find that it wasn’t a printed book at all.
It was a sketchbook.
On the inside cover were the words Leonard, Duke of Dyemore. Across from the inscription, on the first page, was a drawing of a little boy, perhaps seven or eight, standing, one hip cocked. It was a beautiful sketch, innocent and ethereal.
She turned the page and found another little boy, this one sitting, his legs skewed to the side. On the opposite page was a girl, her hair brushing her shoulders.
Iris flipped through the book. There were dozens of delicate drawings in black pencil and red crayon, page after page, all of them exquisite, all of them drawn by a master hand.
All of nude children.
They stood or sat or lounged, their soft limbs not yet formed into the muscle of adulthood. Several were facing away from the viewer, and from that angle it was impossible to tell if the model had been a boy or a girl. The bodies were done in intimate detail, but the heads were hardly sketched in—or, in some cases, missing entirely—as if the artist wasn’
t interested in his models’ faces.
As Iris turned the pages with fingers that had begun to tremble she noted that the children seemed to be just on the cusp of puberty. The girls with barely budding breasts, the boys with hands and feet that had begun to grow ahead of the rest of their bodies. The children trembled on the cusp of metamorphosis. It made the drawings horrid somehow. As if the artist had caught this special, almost mystical moment in these children’s lives and dissected it on the page.
As if they’d been caterpillars in the chrysalis, about to turn to butterflies, and he’d crushed the chrysalis to pulp between his fingers.
A teardrop splashed on the page, warping the elbow of a girl. Iris gasped and hastily wiped at her cheeks.
The last model was different from the others, although he, too, was nude. The drawing was of a small boy, no older than five or six. He sat with one leg drawn up, his elbow resting on his knee and his head in his hand. Unlike all the other children’s, his face had been sketched in meticulous detail.
He was beautiful.
She stared at the little boy. It was hard to tell—a child was so different from an adult—but there was something in the lips, the set of the eyes …
She swallowed. She must be imagining the resemblance to her husband.
She must.
Except she knew she wasn’t. This was Dyemore—her husband—and his face was beautiful and innocent and entirely unblemished.
There was no trace of a scar.
Iris slammed the book shut and thrust it onto the table.
Standing, she turned back toward the door to the dressing room. A man was staring at her from the shadows.
She bit back a scream—and then realized that it was only a painting.
A life-size painting.
She inhaled and walked closer, peering at the figure. It was obviously the last duke, judging by the cut of his purple suit. He had a red velvet robe lined in ermine flung over one shoulder and wore a full-bottomed wig powdered gray. In the portrait he appeared to be about forty years of age. He gazed out at the viewer with a sly smile on his red lips, one beringed hand resting on a gold snuffbox sitting on a table next to him.
Iris remembered what Dyemore had said: this man had led the Lords of Chaos. Such corruption should leave a trace on his countenance, surely? Some mark of his evil? She’d heard whispers about him—of depravity so terrible it could not be named.
This man had been notorious.
But the duke in the painting was unblemished, his face unlined. If anything, he was rather handsome.
Suddenly the room was too quiet. It seemed oppressive, filled to suffocating with desires and emotions too black to have simply died along with the man who had engendered them. They lurked here like malevolent spirits, waiting to infect the living, drag them closer with skeletal hands, and breathe despair and hatred into their faces.
No wonder Raphael had locked this room up.
Iris rushed from the dreadful bedroom. Her hand shook as she locked the door, and then she nearly ran back to the room she shared with Raphael.
He still slept. She crept to the bed and looked at him. In her candle’s light his scar stood out like a livid worm on his face, almost as if he bore the mark of evil his father did not. Dear Lord. Was that possible? Was his scar somehow caused by his father’s sins?
When had it happened?
And who had scarred him?
Iris swallowed and tried to rein in her imagination. She touched one finger to his scar and traced the length. The skin was tight and abnormally smooth beneath her fingertip.
And it was slippery with sweat.
He was still terribly ill—perhaps deathly ill.
Whatever he had done, something inside her knew that Dyemore didn’t deserve to die. Not when his father had lived a long life without consequence. Not when his father’s face had been unmarred.
She inhaled shakily, feeling the hot splash of tears against her cheeks, and bent over him.
Gently she kissed his scar.
The next time Raphael escaped his nightmares, the bedroom was dark, but his duchess still sat beside him, candlelight softly lighting her face as she read her book.
The curve of her cheek, limned by the light, made him ache.
The fire in the hearth crackled, creating the only sound in the room besides her soft breaths and the turning of her pages.
She’d pulled her golden hair into a simple knot at the back of her head and found a rough-looking shawl to wrap about her shoulders. Perhaps she’d borrowed the garment from Nicoletta? She might’ve been an ordinary woman—a cobbler’s daughter, a seamstress, or the wife of a baker—were it not for the way she held herself. So very upright, her spine straight, her shoulders level, her chin tilted just slightly so she could look at the book in her hands.
Even if she were in rags she’d be discovered as a lady at once—by her gait, her gaze, her speech, and the manner in which she sat.
His lips quirked at the thought.
She must have sensed something, for she looked up and met his gaze.
She smiled like the sun breaking through cloud cover. “You’re awake.”
He nodded.
She stood and poured him a glass of water, then sat on the edge of the bed to help him sit up to drink it.
He wrapped his hand around her wrist, feeling the delicate bones beneath her skin. The scent of oranges lifted to his face.
He swallowed the water gratefully.
She made to rise, but he stilled her.
“How …” He coughed and tried again. “How long?”
She knit her brows, looking at him warily. “What?”
He blinked, trying to focus his eyes, glancing about the room. Where were his men? Nicoletta? “How long have I been abed?”
“Yesterday and today,” she replied calmly. “This is the evening of the second day. You were feverish, your wound infected. The fever only broke this morning. Do you remember arguing with me before you collapsed?”
He let his eyelids close. His head ached and his limbs felt heavy. He grimaced in frustration. “You were wearing my shirt.”
He remembered her nipple, small and pointed and pink.
“Yes.” She pulled her hand from his and rose.
She took the one burning candle and lit several others around the bed, making the area brighter. As she did, the shawl slipped off her shoulders.
He squinted. She was wearing a yellow dress. “Where did you get that?”
Her eyes darted away from him. “I … erm … I found it in the next room.”
He froze. “Which room?”
His voice had been quiet, but her gaze flew to him, clearly alarmed. “The sitting room. But I … I also went into the duke’s room.”
His lip curled as he looked away from her. He didn’t want her to see the rage rising behind his eyes.
He kept his tone calm. “I told you not to go into any locked room.”
“Yes, you did.” Her voice was steady, though a bit high pitched. “But I’m your wife now. Don’t you think I should be allowed to access rooms in your house?”
He turned to look at her then because she deserved it—and because he’d gained control of his expression. “No, I do not.”
Her lips trembled, but she lifted her chin. “Would you prefer it if I’d continued to wear your shirt and banyan?”
Actually he’d quite liked her wearing his clothes, both because her breasts had been unbound and because it made something in him very, very content. The yellow dress, however, quite suited her. She seemed to glow in the candlelight, like a beacon of purity.
“Naturally not,” he replied. “You may wear my mother’s clothes if that is what you truly desire. But I don’t want you to enter my … father’s room again.”
He felt wild at the very thought. That room was steeped in evil.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I ordered you not to.” The words slid like ice from his lips.
She fr
owned, looking stubborn. “Whyever don’t you sleep there instead of the duchess’s room?”
He gazed at her and the scent of cedarwood seemed to drift through the room.
His stomach roiled.
That must be why he answered her with the truth. “Because walking in that room makes me want to vomit.”
He closed his eyes and listened to her swallow.
“Oh.”
Damn it. He hadn’t wanted to argue with her. Nor reveal the worst parts of himself.
He sighed. “Thank you.”
He felt her straighten the coverlet over his chest. “For what?”
“For nursing me.” He opened his eyes with effort. “For not running away.”
She frowned at him and then abruptly turned to pour more water in the cup. “I wouldn’t leave a sick man, Your Grace.”
Ah. He’d insulted her.
She held the cup to his lips again and he watched her as he drank. She looked tired. Weary and wary … of him?
Most probably.
As she should be.
She set the cup down by her book.
“What are you reading?”
“Polybius’s Histories.” She glanced at the book and then up at him, her brows knitting. “Don’t you remember me reading to you?”
“Yes, but I couldn’t understand you. The fever, I think.” Polybius was rather an obscure chronologer of Roman history. He glanced at her curiously. “In Latin? Or Italian?”
“Neither.” She cleared her throat almost as if she were embarrassed. “My Latin isn’t particularly good—though I have read a Latin edition of Polybius before—and I don’t know Italian. I found you had an English translation in your library.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “I was unaware of an English translation in the library, but I came across a record of my father’s steward having bought the Earl of Wight’s library when the earl was forced to sell on his father’s death.” He caught her puzzled frown. “Gambling debts.”
“Oh.” She glanced down at the volume in her hand, smoothing her fingers over the worn cover. “I see. Then the Earl of Wight’s loss is my gain, I suppose.”