A Flaw in the Blood

There it was again: the sharp sense of his own bewilderment, his profound ignorance. Why, exactly, had all this happened? Why was he, Patrick Fitzgerald, a source of injury and death to his friends—even to complete strangers?

He closed the letter abruptly, with a plea for any information Sep might consider significant, to be forwarded to Shurland; and then, in a fit of petulance and frustration and profound self-pity, went looking for Gibbon.

He found him in Mrs. Coultrip's scullery, running a stiff boar brush over yesterday's trousers.

“Will they do?”

“Aye,” the valet said dubiously, “but only for second best, mind. Were you shoveling coal on your knees yesterday, afore you saw fit to take ship down the filthy Thames?”

“I was set upon by ruffians. While attempting to scarper across a tenement roof. Sure and you found blood on the cloth. You'll have guessed, Gibbon, that life has taken a surprising turn.”

“Miss Armistead did just mention the overturning of your carriage in Hampstead,” the valet conceded, “when I took up her breakfast tray—me having presumed to inquire after the nasty bruise on her temple. When considered together with Mr. Sep's unfortunate accident—”

“As you say. We live in terror for our lives.”

“Pity you didn't think to mention that in all your haste at quitting London,” Gibbon remarked matter-of-factly. “I might just have placed your pistols in your leather grip. As it is—”

“Ask Coultrip for the keys to the gun room. Master Theo will have kept some pieces in working order, no doubt. We might borrow them for our—for the duration.”

“Right you are, Mr. Fitz. And what is the duration, if I may be so bold?”

“I hardly know.” Fitzgerald glanced at the letter still clutched in his hand. “I've asked too much of you already, my Gibbon, without so much as a by-your-leave. Better, maybe, if you took the Dauntless back to London and waited on my pleasure in Bedford Square?”

“I'm not nearly so pigeon-hearted as you think me, seemingly,” Gibbon said with withering contempt. “Will you be wanting that letter posted in Sheerness?”

“Yes.” Gibbon was intimate enough with Shurland's habits to know that there was no post in Eastchurch, the village on Shurland's edge, but that the ferry collected letters for the mainland at its dock in Sheerness, a good eight miles distant. “Mr. Theo might be willing to go—his mount is said to need a gallop; or perhaps I can roust Coultrip and his trap.”

“Coultrip can drive me just as easy, and I might fetch a London paper while I'm about it. You bide where you are, Mr. Fitz—and look to Miss Georgie.”

Something in the valet's tone brought Fitzpatrick's head around. He had not yet seen Georgiana that morning; he had been preoccupied with the letter. And Theo.

“Is she ailing?”

“Sickening for an inflammation of the lung, by my thinking,” Gibbon answered succinctly, “but you can't tell the ladies anything, bless them—particularly once they've been to school in Edinburgh.”

Drawing room, library, billiards table were all deserted, and the fire dying to embers in the morning room. Her bedroom door was ajar, and the interior equally lifeless—although, he was relieved to see, presentable enough for Shurland. In her better days, Lady Maude had been a devotee of the fanciful—and though the Hall was indeed twelfth century in its foundations, she had plastered and painted the interiors in an exuberant riot of shades: burnt umber and Carrera gold and dusky peach, picked out with startling greens and blues. Fitzgerald could still recall the distant summer when a boatload of Maude's friends—theatre people, brought in from London—had set to painting scenery all over the walls; and now, a progression through Shurland's upper storey was a trip through Indian jungles and Oriental landscapes, across the Russian steppes and onto the shores of Tahiti. Georgiana's room was more restrained— the chamber offered Shakespeare's Globe to the wondering eye, with a quotation from As You Like It running in gold script about the perimeter of the ceiling. Mrs. Coultrip had placed a bowl of nuts, a clutch of apples, and a ewer of water on a side table as a hasty form of welcome. Georgie's bags still sat on the carpet—she had not fled from him entirely, then.

He glanced through doorways, a kaleidoscope of set-pieces, all empty and sadder in this barren December than he had ever found them—and paused in the hallway to think.

“You are in search of your chère amie, Monsieur Fitzgerald?”

“She is not my chère amie. She is my ward.” He turned his head to stare down the corridor in the direction of the West Wing—where Lady Maude spent her hours of nightmare and waking. A figure stood there, quite still, the folds of her long green gown disappearing into the scenery against which she was arranged. “Madame duFief. Top o' the morning to ye. I trust you're flourishing?”

She inclined her head. “I cannot complain—being a daily witness to the most frightful suffering in another. I do not need to inquire after your health, monsieur; you have never looked better.”

She was a woman he could not like: fierce in a subtle and unforgiving way; avaricious in petty things; prone to the special hypocrisies of the paid companion. She remained at Shurland because she had little choice—the Hastings family trustees paid her too well for her service to Lady Maude. Odaline duFief preferred to pretend, however, that it was loyalty and love that kept her marooned at Maude's side; that she, alone of all the world, remained true as more exalted friends fell away. She regarded Fitzgerald with a special contempt for neglecting his wife.

“Such a sweet creature as Miss Armistead looks,” she said now. “I conducted her myself to Lady Maude's apartments. She wished most earnestly to see her. I suppose she is conscious—as who could not be, that possesses a heart?—of the tragic genius confined and wasting in these rooms.”

“I am sure she thinks her ladyship a fit subject for observation,” he returned impatiently. “The lass is trained in medicine, look you.”

He uttered the words too harshly; Madame duFief drew a breath, on the verge of retort; but they had reached Maude's doorstep now, and all conversation was suspended.

She lay on a divan, with a shawl about her shoulders and an expression of ecstasy on her ravaged features; Georgiana's look was alert and intent, the scientist collecting data.

“ ‘. . . the drumbeat quickens, the deathless partners race/to meet that heartfelt orison/on hellish carapace . . .’ ”

“Poetry,” Fitzgerald said quietly. “That'll be a new bit, surely, me darlin'?”

“ ‘. . . until the dawn of . . .’ something . . . and something something face . . . Is that you, Patrick? I have been declaiming my odes. For the girl. But I cannot remember her name. Or what comes next. Perhaps there are no more words—”

“Miss Armistead,” Georgie supplied; her expression was closed, unreachable, and she did not look at Fitzgerald.

“Armistead! That was it!” Maude turned her head toward the voice, eager and reaching, once more on familiar terrain. “I knew a Robert once—I don't suppose he is any relation?—in Bath. He refused my invitation to take his clothes off; unaccountable behaviour.”

“He cannot have understood the honour you did him,” Fitzgerald said.

“Years ago. When I was a Beauty.” Her head swiveled once more, in Fitzgerald's direction, and she extended one claw of a hand. “Dear Patrick! How I longed to see you! How happy I am you are here! But I am tired now; you must all go away and leave me with my odalisque. That is what I call duFief, you know—my odalisque.”

“And the honour, your ladyship, is always understood,” Madame duFief said quickly.

She was kneeling at Maude's side, pressing a folded square of linen against her brow, when they left her.

* * *

“You know she has gone blind?” Georgiana asked.

“I suspected it,” he answered. “The way she turns to follow a voice—”

“Yes. She can barely make out shapes.” Georgie paused at the threshold of her room. “I should apologise for my presumption, I suppose—you didn't ask me to examine her.”