A Dangerous Collaboration (Veronica Speedwell #4)(57)

“What did the wire say?” I asked gently.

He shrugged. “She had bridal nerves. Thought of calling the whole thing off and coming to me. I had only to say the word and she would be mine. I suppose it finally got to her, the notion of spending the rest of her life with a fellow so profoundly unexciting that his notion of hedonism is to take two baths a week instead of one.”

“Would you have responded?” I asked. “Would you have told her to call off her wedding to Malcolm and come to you?”

“I would have torn down the Caucasus with my bare hands to get to her,” he said simply.

“Even though she had already broken your heart by refusing you?”

“Nothing would have mattered to me,” he insisted. “Only that we were together. But by the time I received it, she had married Malcolm and vanished. I learnt of it from the English newspapers the same time I received the telegram.”

“What a cruel irony,” I said. “I wonder what became of her?”

“That is the question which torments me. It tortured me then, it tortures me still. The idea that I had been so very close to my dearest wish annihilated me. I am afraid I became rather unhinged. I lashed out, principally at my wife. The night I learnt of Rosamund’s disappearance, I made my wife sit up until dawn, pointing out her every shortcoming. I told her about Rosamund, in detail, lurid, disgusting detail. She was a gentle creature and I flayed her with my scorn, choosing each word with care so it would wound the deepest. I never struck her, but by God, I opened her to the bone with every word. I broke something within her that never recovered. She had conceived a child, and heaven only knows what sort of little monster it might have been, gotten in such circumstances. She suffered in childbed, and when they told her she had to rally, to fight for herself, she simply turned her face to the wall. She had no will to live because I took it from her. And all because I could not forgive her for being someone I did not want.”

His eyes were veiled with tears, and I slid to the floor in front of him, holding out my arms. He collapsed into them with a suddenness I could not have anticipated. He clung to me as a drowning sailor will grasp a spar, too desperate even for hope. He did not weep, at least he made no sound. But his shoulders heaved once or twice, and when he drew back, I kept my face averted until I was certain he was once more in command of himself.

“So now you know the worst of me,” he said in a ragged voice. He cleared his throat hard, smoothing his hair with one elegant hand, trying to regain something of his dignity.

“You must have been in such terrible pain,” I told him.

He gaped. “I just told you—”

“I know what you said. And I know from my own observations that you are difficult and capricious and sexually rapacious. But I hope you will credit my experience where men are concerned. You might have been monstrous to your wife, but you are not truly beyond redemption, no matter how diabolical you care to think yourself. You could not be such a blackguard and still regret your treatment of her, Tiberius. You are warm and generous and you are a man of honor, at least by your own lights. You must have suffered acutely at Rosamund’s hands to have paid back your pain upon your innocent wife.”

He shook his head as if to clear it. “Dear God, no wonder Stoker—” He broke off. “I have never, until this moment, known true loyalty, Veronica.” He seized my hand and kissed it. “Whatever you ask of me, from now until I draw my last breath, I am your sworn cavalier.”

I retrieved my hand. Tiberius had, as was his custom, taken refuge in gentle mockery, but I knew he was sincere.

“What happened after your wife died?”

He passed a weary hand over his eyes. “We were still in Russia at the time, so I consoled myself with every imaginable sort of Slavic debauchery. I marinated myself in vodka and slept with half the court, including the tsar’s brother. A few months of that should have been the end of it.”

“But it wasn’t,” I reminded him.

“No. Rosamund haunted me, I dreamt of her,” he said, shutting his eyes. “I used to drink enough to stupefy me into sleep because then I would be certain of seeing her.”

“Did Malcolm ever know of your attachment to one another?”

He paused. “I don’t know. We had to be very careful because of Rosamund’s reputation. She had a living to get, and the merest hint of a dalliance would have ruined that. Anything short of an engagement would have spelt doom for her prospects of employment.”

“But it’s possible?”

He shrugged. “Anything is possible. She might have told him. Someone else may have discovered it. She may have been observed in the act of sending that telegram. It is not significant in any case.” He spread his hand in a gesture of magnanimity. “You know why I have come, my dear. I am here because Malcolm requires my friendship and support and I mean to give it.”

“Liar,” I said pleasantly.

His gaze narrowed. “I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, don’t come over lofty now, Tiberius. I have no doubt you’ve been called worse by a much better class of woman. You had an ulterior motive in coming here. You want to know what became of Rosamund and you suspect Malcolm had something to do with her disappearance.”

“If I did, I was a fool,” he told me in a silken voice. “Perhaps there is nothing to be gained by raking up the past.”