By their first anniversary things had quite deteriorated. She’d barred the door to her bedchamber and he, well, he did not wallow in celibacy. They no longer dined together. They no longer even spoke when they occasionally came upon each other.
They might have carried on in that state for decades but for something he said—and not to her.
It was a summer evening, some four months after she first denied him his marital rights. She’d returned home rather earlier than usual, before the stroke of midnight, because she’d been awake for forty hours—a small-scale outbreak of dysentery and a spate of strange rashes had kept her at her microscope in the laboratory when she wasn’t seeing to patients.
She paid the cabbie and stood a moment outside her house, head up, the palm of her free hand held out to feel for raindrops. The night air smelled of the tang of electricity. Already thunder rumbled. The periphery of the sky lit every few seconds, truant angels playing with matches.
When she lowered her face Leo was there, regarding her coolly.
He took her breath away in the most literal sense: she was too asphyxiated for her lungs to expand and contract properly. He aroused every last ounce of covetousness in her—and there was so much of it in her, hidden in the tenebrous recesses of her heart, a beast barely held back despite steel bars an inch thick.
Had they been alone they’d have nodded and walked past each other without a word. But Leo had a friend with him, a loquacious chap named Wessex who liked to practice gallantry on Bryony, even though gallantry had about as much effect on her as vaccine injections on a corpse.
They’d been having excellent luck at the tables, Wessex informed her, while Leo smoothed every finger of his gloves with the fastidiousness of a deranged valet. She stared at his gloved hands, her insides leaden, her heart ruined.
“…awfully clever, the way you phrased it. How exactly did you say it, Marsden?” asked Wessex.
“I said a good gambler approaches the table with a plan,” answered Leo, his voice impatient. “And an inferior gambler with a desperate prayer and much blind hope.”
It was as if she’d been dropped from a great height. Suddenly she understood her own action all too well. She’d been gambling. And their marriage was the bet on which she’d staked everything. Because if he loved her, it would make her as beautiful, desirable, and adored as he. And it would prove everyone who never loved her complete and utterly wrong.
“Precisely,” Wessex exclaimed. “Precisely.”
“We should leave Mrs. Marsden to her repose now, Wessex,” said Leo. “No doubt she is exhausted after a long day at her noble calling.”
She glanced sharply at him. He looked up from his gloves. Even in such poor soggy light, he remained the epitome of magnetism and glamour. The spell he cast over her was complete and unbreakable.
When he’d returned to London, everyone and her maid had fallen in love with him. He should have had the decency to laugh at Bryony, and tell her that an old-maid physician, no matter the size of her inheritance, had no business proposing to Apollo himself. He should not have given her that half smile and said, “Go on. I’m listening.”
“Good night, Mr. Wessex,” she said. “Good night, Mr. Marsden.”
Two hours later, as the storm shook the shutters, she lay in her bed shivering—she’d sat in the bath too long, until the water had chilled to the temperature of the night.
Leo, she thought, as she did every night. Leo. Leo. Leo.
She bolted upright. She’d never realized it before, but this mantra of his name was her desperate prayer, her blind hopes condensed into a single word. When had mere covetousness descended into obsession? When had he become her opium, her morphia?
There were many things she could tolerate—the world was full of scorned wives who went about their days with their heads held high. But she could not tolerate such pitiable needs in herself. She would not be as those wretches she’d witnessed at work, wild for the love of their poison, tenderly fueling their addiction even as it robbed them of every last dignity.
He was her poison. He was that for whom she abandoned sense and judgment. For the lack of whom she suffered like a maltreated beast, shaking and whimpering in the dead of the night. Already her soul withered, diminishing into little more than this vampiric craving.
But how could she free herself from him? They were married—only a year ago, in a lavish affair for which she’d spared no expenses, because she wanted the whole world to know that she was the one he’d chosen, above all others.
Thunder boomed as if an artillery battle raged in the streets outside. Inside the house everything was silent and still. Not a single creak came from the stairs or the chamber that adjoined hers—she never heard any sounds from him anymore. The darkness smothered her.
Love me, Leo. Love me as no one has ever loved me. Love me until there are no more shadows in my heart.