“Fight for any kind of welcome here?” he retorted bitterly. “Well may you ask. I shouldn't have brought you here. You knew I had a wife?”
Her eyelids flickered. “Well—she is everywhere recognised as a singular poet. I myself have read Bohemian Odes. And I understand she is quite . . . beautiful. Although she does not frequent Society of late.”
“You know that we separated years ago—that we live apart?”
“Yes.”
It seemed to Fitzgerald, as he looked at the young woman standing by the changeling fire, that his next few words must forever alter the feeling between them. Georgiana stood for a world entirely free of the suppressed violence of Sheppey, the sordidness of his marriage; she stood for order, and reason, and London, and the semblance of sanity he had found there. Now he had chosen to drag her through the barrier he'd set between present and past. Why had he done it? What reckless need had forced this meeting? He was about to speak—to find the words to explain Lady Maude Hastings Fitzgerald—when the drawing room door screamed on its hinges and Georgiana's countenance changed. Fitzgerald did not need to be told who stood there; she transformed the air of a room simply by entering it.
“Maude,” he said, as he turned to face her. “May I introduce Miss Georgiana Armistead to your acquaintance?”
Chapter Twenty-One
IT was true—Maude had once been beautiful.
Fitzgerald could remember how she'd looked at twenty: her rich auburn hair dressed with flowers, her gowns too daring for an unmarried lady of good birth. Maude was tall and elegantly spare, her face a composition of oblique bones and green eyes. She was famous for riding punishing hunters; for stealing her brother's cigars; for the poems she wrote and circulated among her two or three hundred friends—and for meeting young men alone in Hyde Park. One of them had been the dangerous Patrick Fitzgerald.
She stood now in the wide doorway, staring at him as though he were a ghost. Thirty-eight years old, most of her hair and teeth gone, an open sore where her mouth had been.
“Patrick? Is that Patrick? I thought I heard your brogue.” Her voice was as insubstantial as dust. She moved toward him slowly, one hand extended. “A dream, I thought. Patrick. A memory of the dead.”
“Hello, Maude.” He took her hand.
“What are you doing here?”
She ignored Georgiana—perhaps she had not really seen her. It was hard to know what reality Maude distinguished from the chimera in her brain. At times she could finger the truth with punishing acuity; at others, she recalled nothing of what was said. Fitzgerald could not assume she was safe—he could tell her nothing of the true business that brought him here.
“Sure, and I was passing in a boat,” he managed. “I couldn't help but call.”
The hideous mouth opened in a smile; for an instant he was afraid she would throw her arms wide and kiss him. But some memory of their past inhibited her; she remained, swaying slightly, a few feet away.
“Armistead,” she murmured. “I knew an Armistead once—Berkshire family. The assembly rooms at Bath. Robert. A fusty old-womanish sort of fellow.” She turned away, an expression of worry crossing her ravaged features. “Don't let her drown, Patrick. The wind is up and the tide advancing. It will drown us all one night, in our beds. Our sea-bed. Full fathom five thy father lies . . .” She drifted toward the door, already forgetting him, her dressing gown trailing behind her.
Coultrip was standing there.
“So charmed to make your acquaintance,” Maude murmured to the butler, and floated by him unseeing.
Fitzgerald watched the sway of her skirt as it mounted the stairs, the bones of her fingers rising along the baluster; he closed his eyes abruptly.
“I did not know her la'ship was abroad,” Coultrip told him steadily. “I thought her retired some hours ago. Mrs. Coultrip has prepared your room, Miss Armistead. Supper is served in a quarter of an hour. May I show you upstairs?”
Fitzgerald had dragged a comb through his unruly hair and straightened his cravat by the time he rejoined Georgiana in the dining room. She had exchanged the twilled silk for a fresh gown packed in her satchel. Her hair was tidily bandaged and her face washed. “I shall never take hot water for granted again,” she declared, as he pulled out her chair; “and that wine is a luxury past dreaming.”
There was, as promised, the bread and cheese and cold ham; but Mrs. Coultrip had added a tureen of cottage soup—a comforting concoction of turnips and braised mutton—and Coultrip a bottle of Burgundy from the cellars. It was half-past midnight. A profound weariness nipped at the edges of Fitzgerald's mind, and anxiety shouted its dim chorus; he ignored both. He braced himself for Georgiana's questions.
“How long has she suffered from syphilis?” she asked calmly.
“Nearly ten years.”
“She takes mercury against it?”
“Twelve cures in the past decade. I suppose the torture has prolonged her life.” He drank deeply of the wine.
“And her mind?”
“As you see. She passes in and out of dreams. Or nightmares.”
“And you escaped it. The disease.” Her tone was clinically neutral.
“Sure, and I did,” he agreed. “We're a lucky race, the Irish. As I'm forever being told.” That was the real question she was asking: If you escaped, who gave her syphilis? Behind the unspoken words lay the broken ground of his marriage.
He rose restlessly and turned before the fire, the wine glass glinting in his hand. “Would you have me tell you all of it?”
“Not unless you want to, Patrick.”
“But I do.” He shifted a log with his boot. “I've kept the faith of lies and smoke, Georgie, so long—so long. Do you know what her high-born friends say, in their infinite wisdom? She should never have married a dirty Irishman; that was her mistake. I've allowed the world to believe it.”
“Why—if that is untrue?”
“Because I've become a gentleman, for all that, and it's a gentleman's duty to lie.” He emptied his glass, reached again for the decanter. “She was an earl's daughter, you know. Beautiful as sin. And so clever—all the power of life at her fingertips. When I met her, I thought Lady Maude was a girl the gods loved. And now look how they've broken her mind on their rocks.”
“You still care for her,” Georgiana said distantly; was it the knowledge of Maude's fate that pained her, or the unavoidable fact that Maude was Fitzgerald's wife? She had set down her fork. “How did you meet?”
“The Earl—her sainted father—hired me to defend his son when the buck killed his man in a duel. I kept the Viscount from hanging—that being my specialty—but young Hastings was forced to repair to the Continent, and there led such a life. . . . No matter. His sister watched the trial from the gallery. She fell in love, so she said, with my high courage; but faith, I think it was probably my voice.”
Georgie smiled faintly. “Or your words. She writes poetry, Patrick.”
“None of it comforting. She seduced me with poetry, you know.” He finished his wine and reached for Coultrip's brandy. “Her verse could rip the skin off a man. As though her life was hollow, already consumed—an orange whose flesh she'd devoured, leaving only the pith. I think of her that way—her long, supple fingers clutching bruised fruit. The look of disappointment. That's what she felt in her life with me. I disappointed.”
“Surely not!”
He snorted derisively. “She eloped with me, Georgie, because her father would never abandon his priceless girl to Irish trash. And God forgive me, I met her that dawn in a hired carriage with my whole heart in my hands. Did I think the tie between us would spur my career? Did I dream of a place in her perfect, peerless world? Maybe I did. Maybe I was already corrupted. But God, I loved her passionate mouth and her need for beauty and her lust for life in all its forms, lowborn and high, wretched and noble, ugly and gorgeous. I loved her greediness in drink and her flamboyance in dress. I even loved her petulant rages. I never understood they were signs of madness.”