“I was wrong to ask it,” I admitted. “I did not think it through properly.”
He waved his hand and I stroked the hair back from his temple. “What is it then, if not Lucy and your father?”
He fixed me with a bleak stare. “I told you some days ago that there are dangers in my work that you cannot possibly comprehend. Well, there are moral dilemmas as well, thickets of conflicting demands that keep any decent man awake at night, walking the floor as the thorns twist in his side. There are no
right answers, only degrees of pain to be inflicted upon others. And you must decide whom to hurt and how deeply.”
I regarded him with mystification. “What has happened?”
He said nothing at first, then rose and went to retrieve his waistcoat from the floor. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a length of material. I recognised it at once. It was the familiar bandanna-patterned handkerchief that Robin had used for his neckcloth.
I took it into my hands. It was damp still and smelled of lake water. “I do not understand. Why should Robin’s neckcloth cause you so much trouble?”
“Because of how I found it.” He poured another deep draught of whisky, draining the glass. “It wasn’t tied loosely. It was knotted about his throat. Deliberately.”
I dropped the fabric to the floor as if it was venomous. It lay, dark and slimy against the polished wooden boards. I could not bring myself to retrieve it. “An accident,” I said, trying desperately to believe it.
To his credit, Brisbane did not chide me. He merely slipped back into bed and kept silent until I could reason it out for myself.
“Of course it was not an accident,” I said dully. “Miss Thorne told me that it was the Reverend’s idea that he take Robin out that night. He knotted the cloth about the boy’s throat. It is unthinkable, unspeakable,” I whispered. I said nothing for a long moment, then, “How did you come to find him?” It was a cruel question, but Brisbane did not flinch from it.
“They had just found the Reverend. I knew the waters were a little higher because of the rain. It seemed likely that the boy’s body might be nearby, but caught in some of the lake plants. I found a patch of water hyacinth nearby and there he was, his face just a foot below the surface. The Reverend did not choose his place well.”
“But why?” I whispered. “To murder his own child, deliberately and with such cool planning. What possible reason?”
Brisbane sighed. “Robin must have known that his father was culpable in Freddie’s death, in spite of his rather convincing show to the contrary. Robin represented a threat to his father, and he was dealt with accordingly.”
“But for a father to kill his own child,” I said. “It is impossible.”
“You really think so?” he asked, tipping his head. The light caught the crescent scar upon his cheekbone, and I felt the lash of embarrassment. It was not so very far a journey from striking one’s child with a bullwhip to snuffing out his life altogether, I reflected. Brisbane sensed my chagrin.
“You have been handicapped by the burden of a loving father,” he said with a gentle smile. “It has limited your imagination.”
“Remind me to thank him,” I returned. “But what is your moral dilemma in this case?”
“How much do I tell Cassandra Pennyfeather?”
“You tell her nothing!” I cried, sitting up. “You must not. It will be difficult enough for her to bear the loss of her only son, but if she knew that it was at the hands of her own husband, she would go stark staring mad.”
He shrugged and rubbed a hand absently along my arm. “Perhaps. But it will mean concealing the truth.”
I ignored the caress and pressed my point. “You began such concealment the minute you took the cloth from the boy’s neck,” I argued. “You have no moral dilemma. You already knew what you were going to do.”
“That does not mean I will not question it until my dying day,” he told me.
I pressed a kiss to his brow. “You are doing the right thing,”
I assured him. “You are saving a grieving woman from a burden so terrible I think the weight of it would crush her. And Primrose as well,” I added. “Think of the damage it could inflict upon that girl to know her father committed such a ghastly act.”
He gave me a look that told me he could be persuaded.
“Come,” I said, pulling at his hands. “Your bath is probably stone cold by now and we must ring again for food. You will see I am right in the end.”
But of course, I was not right at all.
Just before dawn the next morning something awoke me, some small animal sound of pain. I swam up from sleep, thinking dully that perhaps Feuilly had hurt himself when I realised the sound was coming from inside my room.
I bolted up, peering into the gloom, and could just make out a form hunched into the corner. I threw back the covers and ran to him.
“Brisbane, what is it?”
His face was turned to the wall, and even the touch of my hands upon his shoulders seemed torture to him. He flinched and turned farther away, his fists knotted into his eyes.
“The migraine?” I whispered.
He did not nod, it would have killed him. But he raised his forefinger in assent and I felt my throat go dry. I had seen him once before in the throes of an attack and it had been thoroughly unpleasant. He dosed himself with various substances, licit and otherwise, to dull the pain, but I did not know what he had brought with him.
“What do you have for the pain? Do you want the hookah?”
“No,” he rasped. “Too late for that.”
He lifted his head with a groan and motioned for the basin. He was sick, comprehensively so, and I had hoped it would ease
him a little, but the pain seemed to worsen, and he put out a hand to the skirts of my nightdress, clutching it as if to anchor himself somehow to reality.
“What can I do?” I begged.
“Llewellyn,” he managed finally. “Morphia.”
“You cannot,” I told him flatly. I knew he had once been a slave to the drug, weaned from it solely by his own will and the efforts of his devoted Monk. I could not bear to think of him once more ensnared.
“Do it,” he ordered.
I did not go. I crouched next to him, holding the fouled basin, torn between my opposing duties as his wife. Should I look to the moment, to alleviating his pain, or should I look to the rest of his life, and what might become of him if he failed to put the drug away once he no longer had need of it?
I might have stood there forever had he not raised his head again, and as the morning light fell across his face, I saw what he had been reduced to. He was a proud and handsome man, and yet he huddled in the corner like the lowest of creatures, his eyes dull with pain and his features twisted with suffering. As the light touched his eyes he gave a low groan of misery and tightened his hand upon my skirts.
I would not make him beg. “I will send Jolly,” I promised. “He will go now.”
“No, you,” he commanded.
“I will not leave you,” I told him, but he thrust out a hand, cupping the back of my head and drawing me near to him.
“Do you want everyone to know what I am?” he demanded in a voice that was not his own. He released me and dropped his head into his hands once more. And I knew full well what he meant by the question. He did not want everyone to know his vulnerability, a man tormented by the second sight he refused
to acknowledge, reduced to agony, something less than human when the migraines were upon him, begging for any succour in his hour of need.
“Very well,” I told him quietly. “I will go.”
I dressed as quickly as I could manage and made certain the shutters were closed fast so as to admit nothing of the searing morning light. I covered him with a blanket and told him I would return as quickly as I could. I moved away and he clutched at my hand.
“Forgive—” he began, but I twisted from his grasp before he could finish.
I slipped out of the house and hurried to Dr. Llewellyn’s little house, passing the vacant crossroads and the empty Pine Cottage on my way. Much had happened since our arrival, I reflected, and little of it good.
I prayed, every step as deliberate as the telling of a rosary bead, as I made my way to Dr. Llewellyn’s. I prayed he would be home, and that I could rouse him. I prayed that he would have everything required to make my husband whole again.
I hammered upon the door, calling loudly between knocks, and after a shorter time than I could have dared to hope, Dr. Llewellyn appeared, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
“Lady Julia! Is it Mrs. Cavendish? Is it her time?”
“No, it is my husband. You must be quick. Bring with you everything you have that is for the dulling of pain, morphia if you have it.”
He stared for the briefest of moments before recovering himself. “Of course. I will be but a moment to gather my things.”
I did not enter and he did not invite me to. Instead I paced the garden, thick as it was with weeds and heavy with dew, waiting an eternity it seemed, although it could not have been more than a minute or two. As we hurried back to the Peacocks
I explained about Brisbane’s rather unique condition and Dr. Llewellyn put to me all the relevant questions, only some of which I could answer.
“He does well enough if he can keep the headaches at bay,” I explained. “For that he has a hookah for smoking hashish.”
“As good a means as any other of encouraging relaxation,” Dr. Llewellyn agreed.
“But once in a great while, if he has suppressed the visions for too long, a migraine will erupt, half-blinding him with the pain. He cannot bear light or sound and he becomes sick.”
“Very common with migraine,” he assured me. “What methods of treatment has he employed when the migraine is upon him?”
“Rest and quiet and some less wholesome things as well.” I catalogued for him the various drugs and herbal preparations Brisbane had used, from the poppy elixirs of his Gypsy aunt to the vile glasses of absinthe that drove him half out of his head. I told him of Brisbane’s encounters with opiates, most of which I had pieced together from various bits of information I had gleaned over the years. I had never seen him use the stronger opiates, and the thought of it unnerved me.
“I will do everything I can for him,” Dr. Llewellyn promised, and we lapsed into silence then as we had reached the garden gate of the Peacocks.
Brisbane was precisely as I had left him save for the state of the basin, which told me he had been sick again.
I stood back as Dr. Llewellyn knelt and murmured gentle questions to him. I could not hear the conversation that ensued, but after a moment, Dr. Llewellyn rose and opened his bag, extracting packets of various drugs and a syringe kit.
“Should he not be in bed?” I asked quietly. Dr. Llewellyn shook his head.
“He is in too much pain to move at present. If you would light the lamp and shield it with your body to protect his eyes, I will prepare the injection.”
I did as he bade me, and he set to work. He took a little water to dissolve the drugs, then heated the lot in a spoon over the flame of the lamp, turning it carefully so as not to scorch it before drawing the concoction into the syringe.
“What are you giving him?”
“A mixture of my own development,” he told me. “It is based in morphia, but with a few other substances as well. Morphia alone can induce nausea and he is already unwell in that regard from the migraine. I am mixing the opiate with something to settle his stomach. He will feel better when he wakes, but he will sleep very deeply until then. It is called coma, the sleep of death,” he warned me. “But he will come back.”
With that he turned to kneel again at Brisbane’s side. Brisbane wore no nightshirt, only his trousers from the night before and the blanket I had wrapped around him. Dr. Llewellyn pulled the blanket aside, baring the thick muscle of Brisbane’s arm. But the doctor did not plunge the needle into his arm straightaway. Instead he used a stout piece of fabric to make a sort of ligature, tightening it around Brisbane’s arm until the veins showed in relief against his skin. The doctor traced one with a fingertip, then slid the needle into it, depressing the plunger slowly.
Brisbane gave another low moan, but almost instantly seemed to relax a little, and when Dr. Llewellyn rose and attempted to lift Brisbane, he offered no resistance. I put down the lamp and hurried to help him, and between the pair of us, we managed to get Brisbane into bed. By the time we had accomplished this and covered him warmly, Brisbane was entirely unconscious. The lines of pain began to smooth from his face, and he had ceased to moan.
“Thank you,” I murmured, hot tears pricking my eyelids.
I blinked them away as Dr. Llewellyn reached to pat my hand. “I will do all that I can for him. And you must not worry about the difficulty he has had in the past with opiates. I have worked with such patients before, and it is possible to stay free of the grasp of them, provided they are used only for palliative care. Once he wakens, I will offer him less extreme methods to manage the pain if it is necessary. But I will hope it is not.”
I nodded, and listened as he gave me the rest of the instructions for care that Brisbane should require. First among them was that Brisbane must not be left alone, and that I was to send for Dr. Llewellyn the moment he awakened or there was any change in his demeanour or pallor. I nodded, and had just turned to thank him again, when suddenly Brisbane rose up, his eyes open and blazing with pain and determination.
“My God!” Dr. Llewellyn exclaimed, scrabbling in his bag. “I will prepare another syringe.”
“It is too much,” I argued, but he shook his head.
“He is a large man and he can have more, he requires more,” he told me, but I noticed his hands were trembling a little, and I moved to help him.
But Brisbane caught my wrist, the fingers clamping painfully over the slender bones of my arm. “Brisbane, you are hurting me,” I told him softly.
He could not hear me. The pain—or the morphia—had taken hold of him, and he was not conscious of what he did or said in that moment. He turned to me, but his eyes did not meet mine, and I knew he did not see me.
“A letter. There must be a letter,” he said. His hand tightened further upon my wrist and I gave a cry of pain. The sound of it recalled him and he saw me then, truly saw me, but the thought that drove him would permit no other to enter his mind, and
he did not loose his grip. “The letter. Find the letter,” he said, forcing each syllable between teeth gritted tightly against the agony.