The Decline and Fall of Rowland Graves Read online

  You’re a miracle, Elinor. I don’t know if I deserve you.

  It was clear what would happen, right here in this very carriage. Their need was simply too great.

  The hand that had been at her breast was now tangled in skirts and petticoats, gathering material aside as his kisses trailed up the side of her raised arm. She was astonishingly wet when he found her with his fingertips, and he might as well have choked on his responding groan.

  Here you are telling her to be quiet!

  His lovely, surrendering dove brought her knees outside of his and tilted her hips for him. His fingers accepted the invitation. He teased and delved and slid, revelling in her responses as she writhed in his lap. It was both a magnificent and excruciating idea to shush her occasional whimpers by sliding the first two fingers of his other hand into her mouth. She began suckling at him at once and he nearly unravelled.

  Rowland Graves was reckless in his lust. Their compulsion to silence magnified the feverish sound of their breath hurrying in and out, and brought his attention to every jerk of her hips and rise of her breast. He slid the wet fingers from her mouth down to capture a tight nipple again and toy with it, while his other hand busied itself in making his little dove squirm with delight.

  The clenching of her flesh around his fingers proved to be too much. Pulling his hands away from her body, he began piling up masses of fabric in a fury. She sensed what he was about at once and raised her bottom away from him, pulling the rest of the material out of the way herself.

  He had breeches fumbled aside in the space of a breath. Elinor lowered herself so his hot length rode up against the soaking furrow between her thighs. He moved his hips to glide along the wet heat, and to his utter delight, she reached down with dainty fingers to grasp and stroke him, her hand slick with her own moisture.

  Always ask permission, Rowland.

  He remembered his promise to himself through a haze of desire, and felt the need to keep it, though he wanted to be quiet. A word would have to suffice.

  “Please,” he breathed, hoping his question was clear.

  When she angled him and sank her full weight down on his straining cock, he took that for assent. She was exquisite, as always.

  Hands at her hips now, he wasted no time falling into the cycle of plumb and draw he needed so very much. He felt full and heavy inside her clutching walls. Soft, rolling, tongues of flame were licking low in his belly, and he began to drive up into her with a desperate will.

  As he pushed and worked, bent on release, his right hand found hers at her side and he laced their fingers together. His thrusts became more erratic as he approached the edge, and her grip tightened on his hand, pinching some ring she was wearing painfully between their fingers.

  Odd, I don’t remember her ever wearing any rings.

  In the midst of his building climax he felt a set of dainty fingertips tracing over the skin of his bouncing scrotum, and colours flashed behind his eyelids. He drove into her now with astonishing violence and sank his teeth into the curve between her neck and shoulder. This beastly turn became too much for his angel, and she gasped and choked out his name.

  “Rowland!”

  Paralysis.

  It was not Elinor’s voice

  It was not Elinor’s voice!

  Horror. A flash. A sundering of bodies. He couldn’t breathe.

  The blunt, abrupt impact against the wall of his back might have come from either the carriage door as he tumbled backwards out of it, or the accusing blow of the earth when he met it as he skittered away from the implosion of wrongness inside the still-moving coach.

  Either way, that one call of his name had unmade his world, and Rowland Graves scrambled to his feet and fled from reality on shaking legs into the night.

  * * * *

  “Rowland! Wait!”

  The black, fluttering shriek of her voice darted after him, pricking his skin as he ran stumbling over damp grass and earth, headlong into his nightmare. His mind was a void of denial as he flew, but jagged fissures of terror threatened to breach the abyss.

  Impossible.

  Run! There is nothing! Run!

  Impossible!

  Something yanked at the flapping hem of his coat. A pulling weight made him spin about and one of his shoes slid in the loose dirt. Hands out, he braced for the inevitable fall, only to find himself landing in a tangled mass of limbs and petticoats. A voice on the verge of tears burst out of the woman he now straddled.

  “Please!”

  His arms shook, uninterested in supporting his weight over the fallen body beneath him. There was a buzzing between his ears and, for a brief time, as he struggled with the task of breathing, not a single coherent thought formed in Rowland’s mind.

  When at last the notions came, they came one at a time, as if he had no means to process more than one at once.

  Judith Barlow.

  He wrenched the dove mask away from her face, drawing a pained squeal from her as its ties snapped. The night was dark, but so were the eyes he could barely see. Elinor’s were pale blue.

  Elinor was the dove. Judith was the fox. Trap the fox, free the dove. That was the plan.

  His weight was on her shoulders as well now as he pinned her with his palms, chest heaving.

  “What have you done?”

  The voice that came out of him was almost inhuman.

  “Please, Rowland!”

  A crisp slap cut off her wailing plea as his palm made a sharp connection with her cheekbone before returning to her shoulder.

  “What have you DONE?”

  “It was the only way!” She burst out sobbing. “I had to! Rowland, listen to me! I—”

  Another, sharper slap, and he slammed her shoulders against the ground for good measure.

  “How dare you call me by my Christian name! And what do you mean ‘the only way’? The only way for what?” He was unhinged now. Rabid.

  “For us to be together!”

  Even Chaos stopped its spinning. Rowland’s breath hitched and he blinked down at her in the gloom. All was still.

  “I tried to show you, my love, but—”

  “Never call me that!” he roared, his fingers digging into the flesh of her shoulders like claws. She seemed not to notice, though, and her mad words tumbled on in a rush.

  “But you wouldn’t see! She was too good for you! Too innocent! My sister could never be what you need! But you were both so blind! She wouldn’t be convinced, and neither would you! You could have just seen reason with her engagement to Dunning, but you wouldn’t! I had to make her unavailable to you! So you would see!”

  Her speech was a torrent of insanity and he lowered his face to within inches of hers, snarling, surges of dead light beginning to come in at the edges of his vision.

  “So I would see what? Judith?” He spat her name like a curse.

  The look of utter, senseless devotion he saw in the lines of her face then made him want to be ill. The viper went limp and pliant beneath him.

  “I know what you are, Rowland,” she said, as if the words were a lover’s caress, heedless of the warning against using his name. “You try to hide it from everyone, but I see it. The darkness. This.” She made a gesture with her head indicating his cruel grip and the way he had her pinned. “We’re alike, you and I. We need each other. I promise, I’m better suited to you than my perfect, wholesome sister ever could be!”

  If he’d been given the ages of gods, Rowland Graves would never have expected, even in that span of time, to hear a declaration such as this. He shook his head, attempting to fling the shock away into the night.

  “You will never be what I need!” His voice broke on those words, the vaulted dome of his reality collapsing in on itself at last. “Oh, God, what have you done, you vicious, cursed witch!”

  He rolled off her then, hopeless, flopping onto his back, blotting out his vision with a hand over his eyes. His guts were knotting and he wanted to curl himself into a tight bundle against the o
nslaught of dawning misery.

  Elinor!

  My angel! What has she done?

  What have I done?

  The last notion made him want to retch, to claw himself apart.

  A cool hand was stroking his face, and a feminine form huddled near.

  “Shh, Rowland,” the traitor was saying in a sweet voice that had no business issuing from such a foul source. “You will see now. I’ll be everything for you. I’ll be anything you need me to be. Anything you want.”

  She’d meant the words to seduce, to quell fear and anger. Instead he shuddered with a laugh that began low under his ribs.

  The fissures split wide and light poured in, bloody crimson, queasy yellow, and sinister coiling threads of bile green: goading, throbbing, promising. The wet laugh blossomed into a throaty chuckle and madness embraced Rowland Graves.

  Her hand fell away.

  “Anything I want?” he asked in a predatory purr, coming up on his elbow again, turning towards her.

  “Of course.” There was hope in her voice now. “Anything.”

  In a liquid move, he slid his body back over hers, laying her back down against the earth. Like the impossible lover she seemed to be hoping for, he ran his knuckles down across her cheek. It was at once maddening and heart-wrenching to see the sweet joy in her eyes as he did so.

  “Well then,” he said to her, “can you be Elinor?”

  Her face fell.

  “No.”

  That one word echoed with such hungry, aching sorrow, but Rowland was beyond compassion. He was beyond humanity.

  “Then I want you to be gone.”

  Her slender throat was under his fingers. He bore down, putting the deliberate, inevitable weight of his grief into his crushing palm.

  At first there was kicking and struggling as she choked and clawed at him with her nails, but the rents in his skin were delicious and he lapped up the pain along with the vision of her widening eyes and the feel of bucking hips.

  Doctor Rowland Graves was no stranger to those things that might block an airway. He pressed the first knuckle of his other fist now into the hollow at the base of the frantic throat.

  Calm now.

  He floated on a smooth sea, detached as he watched her movements reach their delirious, scrambling peak.

  And then, Judith Barlow did as he wished for the first and final time.

  She was gone.

  And so was his soul.

  * * * *

  V

  Descent

  The carriage was where he left it, the coachman leaning away from its side, squinting into the night as Rowland returned. The man was smart enough not to abandon his fare, and yet knew better to stay with the horses.

  “The lady is not feeling well,” he called out as he drew near with a limp female form draped over his arms. “She’s had an upset and fainted. We’ll need to return to where I left my horse.”

  The man was quick to open the door for Rowland, but the movements of his limbs betrayed nerves. Another who didn’t want to admit a fear of being outdoors on Hallowtide.

  “But Doctor Graves,” he said, “I could take you straight back to her house. And then I could wait for—”

  “I don’t intend to keep you out any longer on this night,” Rowland said, playing into the man’s unspoken superstitions, as he arranged the body on the bench inside the carriage. “Just back to my horse will do. I’ll see to the matter from there.”

  “Sir.” The man nodded his acceptance of this, no doubt quite relieved he might no longer be tasked with driving the team straight on through the night.

  The carriage bumped and jerked him about as the coachman drove the horses most of the way round a circle to face them in the other direction before setting off back into Bristol proper.

  A numb impassivity had settled over him, and his neck and shoulders rolled loose along with the bumping and jostling of carriage wheels, the same as the shell of the woman opposite him did. He said nothing. Thought nothing. All he could to was ride along, waiting to be borne back to the seat of his failure.

  * * * *

  For a second time since the sun had set, the body of Judith Barlow lay draped behind the saddle of his horse, hidden beneath a blanket. This time, however, it was actually her. Something in his chest constricted at that thought.

  The coachman had been easy enough to dismiss, with promises that a medical man had the situation well in hand, and Rowland was now plodding once again towards the cemetery. Just as he’d done earlier, only not the same at all.

  He didn’t know it yet, but the protective torpor he’d been in since he’d stood in what might have been Earls Mead—if he’d been paying any attention at all at the time—and hoisted the dead woman’s body, was a blessing. A blessing which became painfully apparent as he approached the freshly-filled grave for a second time.

  At first, the crumbling was nearly unnoticeable. A few grains tumbling down from atop a hill of sand. But as he light from the horse and his shoes neared the edge of the recently-disturbed earth, his knees buckled beneath him. Palms caught his fall, fingers clawing into the soil, and his breath seized in his throat.

  Some foreign, rational part of him which existed apart from the utter horror of the moment made him turn his head to the side. He sank his teeth into the meat of his own upper arm and stifled the keening wail that spiralled up and out of him.

  No.

  No!

  No no no no no no nooooooooo!

  His eyes came open and he saw the spade leaning where he’d left it. He staggered to his feet and went to snatch it up, returning to thrust it back into the ground against all reason.

  Stop, Rowland. You know it’s too late. She’s gone.

  There was no sign from his body that it had heard his mind. The earth flew.

  She’s gone!

  Perhaps the repeated denials that sung in his veins came from some source more essential than mere thought, but either way his muscles, his bones, the sweat now at his brow all disobeyed logic. He wielded the spade with an unnatural fury, carving deeper and faster into the hallowed ground than the drunken sexton ever could.

  It must have been well into the wee hours when metal met wood with a hollow thunk. He flung the implement aside at this and went to his hands and knees in the hole, scrabbling what remained of the soil away with raw, desperate, hands.

  Rowland was hardly aware of the lid he’d never nailed down as he flipped it aside. He yanked the cloth sack from her head, scraping his knuckles on the coffin wall as he went, and tore at the fox mask, flinging it into the open pit.

  Open, pale blue eyes stared back at him, sightless, and he clutched at the too-cold face with both his battered hands. Her once-lovely mouth, the one that called him Love, was slack around the makeshift gag.

  You did this, Graves.

  This is how his angel had died. Hands and feet bound, sight blinded, wedged bucking and frantic into a narrow box to choke on her own screams until she’d sucked in the last available breath.

  You did this to her.

  A pointless urgency took him as he fumbled the strap away and plucked the handkerchief from her lips, unable to bear the sight of her that way. Forehead pressed to hers, he tried to catch up her body, hold it to him. The stiffness had already set in, though, and a guttural wail of grief rode out of him as he released her to fall back into the coffin.

  “Elinor! Elinor, Elinor, Elinor …”

  Her name came again and again, a mournful incantation, and his fists struck at the wood walls surrounding his only, broken little dove.

  Monster.

  It was destroyed. Everything. All of it. All of him.

  Hours might have slid by, or perhaps only minutes. Rowland was no longer functioning within confines that could be explained in those terms. All he knew was that at some point he’d laid a final light, reverent kiss on his angel’s brow and, after removing the bonds at her wrists and ankles, he’d replaced the coffin lid and ascended from the grave. />
  A surge of protective fury lashed out against the idea of burying Elinor’s hateful sister in the same place, but there was no time for other plans and nothing to be done for it. With the second body rudely deposited in the hollow with no enclosure of its own, whatever remnants of a man were left that might be piled together and still named Rowland Graves, began filling the hole a final time. Tired didn’t matter, nor did empty. The thing must be done, and it was.

  He stood there for a time after, blank eyes staring into the night, fingering the scalpel in his coat pocket.

  There’s another thing that can be done.

  The cut would be clean. His pain: ended.

  A clean end is too good for you. Monster. You deserve to suffer.

  He mounted his horse again, setting off without thought for destination. The grave behind him was a sucking mire, and he only wanted to be away from it.

  Somewhere in the fog of events there was another inn, not The Hatchet this time, and there was drink, and then more drink, bought with coin from a purse he’d meant to buy passage on a ship to Amsterdam, a lifetime ago. There were stairs, and stumbling, and a foreign bed to break his fall.

  Bone weariness pulled him down, yet some insistent voice didn’t want him to sleep. There were monsters in this room.

  Just the one.

  Angel, I’m sorry.

  Oblivion.

  * * * *

  His throat was full of sand, his eyelids swollen. The inside of his skull was a womb of pain. There was light in the room, but not much of it. He’d drifted between sleeping and almost waking for most of the day, and now it seemed to be late afternoon. Or perhaps the ruddy light from the window meant he’d been welcomed to Hell, at last.

  With a groan and cough, he rolled onto his back and began a quiet, groggy assessment of himself. At some point he’d managed to get one of his coat sleeves off, but the other still covered an arm and the bulk of the fabric of his coat was rucked up behind him. His shoes were still on, and it didn’t seem he’d bothered to make his way under the bed coverings.