The Sins of Lord Lockwood (Rules for the Reckless #6)(2)

This rising tide of fury was not better. It was apocalyptic. This nightmare was by design. Someone had plotted it for him.

He knew who had plotted it. He had only one enemy.

My God. What must Anna be thinking? For all she knew, he had disappeared of his own volition. Was she weeping at this moment? Was she raging against him?

From the darkness came a vision of her at the altar, her face alight with joy. Freedom tastes sweet, she had whispered as they’d kissed.

Freedom was what they had promised each other. Not love. He had not dared speak of love to her, though he’d wanted to, badly. Later, he’d told himself. On the honeymoon. In Paris, at sunset.

The ship shuddered. Groans and gasps filled the pen as the floor abruptly tilted.

“God save us,” muttered the old man.

“A storm is coming.” Liam could offer this. Above deck, he had caught the crew’s mutterings, their fear, which they had then exorcised, violently, on his body.

This would not be the first transport ship to be sunk in a storm, if God willed it.

But God clearly had no interest in men’s affairs.

“First test,” said the old man. “First of many to come, I expect. Count yourself lucky. Young lad like you. Young lad with enemies—the strongest kind.”

“Strongest.” He was bound in chains, stripped of his name, kicked and beaten like a dog. He had never felt weaker.

“Strongest,” the old man confirmed. “Ain’t no cure for lunacy, lad. But an enemy—oh, that can be fixed.”

Liam did not want to think of his cousin. But Stephen’s face came to mind, regardless.

The hatred did feel stronger than despair. It boiled through him, caused his battered hands to clench.

“Yes,” the old man muttered. “A man can learn to live for revenge.”





CHAPTER ONE




London, spring 1861

Anna had never set foot inside her husband’s London townhouse. They had met and fallen in love in the north of Scotland; he had wed and then abandoned her in Edinburgh. But she felt as though she knew the house from top to bottom. The newspapers were full of florid descriptions. The Times particularly admired the Moorish touches that Lockwood had added to the salons. The Telegraph preferred the stately dignity of his Louis XIV dining room. Everybody agreed that the Earl of Lockwood had laudable taste. Nobody mentioned that this taste was funded by Anna’s money. The earl had been broke as a fishmonger when she’d married him.

Since she had paid for Lockwood’s furnishings, she felt no compunction at going to explore them, regardless of the hour, regardless that her husband had no idea she was in town. Then again, after years spent traveling only heaven knew where, he had not bothered to inform her of his return. So why should she prove more polite?

Indeed, did he even know she was alive? Had he bothered to check? How much more of her money had he spent this week? Would he guess that she was armed, and not in case of brigands?

These questions made fine games as she watched London pass, the streets wet and dirty. The hired coach was moving at a good clip, but the interior smelled musty. Had the city outside it not smelled worse—a fetid mix of coal smoke and sewage—she might have opened the window.

It was nine in the evening. Beggars gathered around burning cans of rubbish to keep warm. Respectable folk strode past them, mufflers drawn against the spring chill, no tenderness in their faces as they looked through their starving brethren. A faint suggestion of lilac sunset still clung to the rim of the English sky.

“This city’s huge,” murmured the girl across from her. Jeannie’s eyes were wide with wonder.

Anna spared a moment’s pity for her. Jeannie had been raised on romances. She believed that all the filth might be hiding something interesting.

As they passed Westminster Abbey, Jeannie sat straighter. “I know what that is! I’ve seen it in books!”

“You read the wrong books,” Anna said. She had tried to train Jeannie into assisting with her experiments, but the girl’s literacy proved strangely changeable: when science was involved, Jeannie forgot how to read. She made a passable lady’s maid, though; her favorite magazines included extensive discussions of au courant hairstyles.

“And there!” Jeannie laid a finger to the glass. “Is that the Tower, where they killed poor Nan Boleyn?”

Jeannie also enjoyed history, but only the gruesome bits. “No. But it would not surprise me if every inch of this city were haunted by unfortunate wives.” At Jeannie’s skeptical look, Anna shrugged. “Englishmen make very poor husbands.”

Jeannie grimaced. She was petite, with a doll-like, heart-shaped face, peaches-and-cream skin, and striking black curls. Gentlemen on the train had stared. Jeannie’s mother, suspicious of her daughter’s enthusiasm for this trip, had begged Anna to make certain she didn’t elope with a Sassenach.

“Not all of them, surely!” Jeannie said. “Some Englishmen must be—”

“All of them.”

Jeannie slumped.

The sights out the window changed, grew cleaner and more orderly. The hackney driver had lifted his brows at the address Anna had given, and now she saw the reason for it. Mayfair looked a different species of city from the environs they had passed: clean and well-swept pavements, smooth roads, and manicured parks around which large houses with bright-striped awnings marched in orderly lines.