The Punishment of Ivy Leavold (Markham Hall Book 3) Read online

  “I wanted this to be easy for you,” Gareth said. “I so wanted it to be easy.”

  And this time when the cloth came, I couldn’t fight it. I squirmed and tried to roll and tried to hold my breath, but it was impossible. And when I finally relented and inhaled, I could feel the substance leaching the fight from my limbs, the will from my mind. My eyelids started to close of their own accord and everything began to spin away, distant and distorted, like the world through a magnifying glass at the wrong angle.

  And then nothing.

  Heaviness clung to me. A thick drowsiness. A sopping wet blanket of disorientation and dizziness.

  I was in a sitting room. A very nice sitting room, although the furniture was covered in sheets and the portraits were taken down from the walls.

  I was not at the docklands. I was in a house.

  I couldn’t lift my head, but I knew without looking that it was now early afternoon. And I knew that I was on a chair, my hands bound behind my back and I knew that I wasn’t alone.

  “Why?” I mumbled, struggling to make my mouth move. My lips felt numb, my tongue felt fat. But that one question crystallized in my mind, galvanizing me. Why?

  Gareth knelt in front of me. Had I ever noticed before how cherubic he looked? I hadn’t—my senses had been stolen by the master of Markham Hall the first night I’d arrived. But Gareth was handsome. Blond hair and blue eyes and a face that was so smooth and beautiful, it looked like a statue in the British Museum. He looked like an angel.

  An angel that had me tied to a chair.

  “I am really sorry about this, Ivy,” he said. His voice was rather apologetic. “This was never my original plan—but I had to improvise after Violet’s death.”

  I managed to raise my head a few inches and then it bobbed back down.

  “Do you know where we are?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “We’re in Mr. Markham’s Hampton house. It’s quite a ways from London proper. It’s where he and Violet shared their wedding night, you know.” Gareth tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “I was here for that too. I had to go in the valet’s room in the attic and wonder if every creak, if every thump, was them making love. I’d been fucking her for two months by that point.”

  “You loved her,” I managed. Somehow, I knew to keep engaging him, to keep feeding his tangential thoughts, even though the other parts of my mind that were firing into alertness begged me to find a way to end this madness. But how? My legs were free. That was quite an advantage. But I wouldn’t be able to turn a doorknob with my hands behind my back.

  “I did love her,” Gareth mused. “I did. She didn’t love me. But she could have. After she had our child, perhaps.”

  “Mr. Markham would have raised it as his own,” I said. My mouth was feeling closer to normal again, my words coming out in my usual voice. “She wouldn’t have risked falling in love then.”

  “I wouldn’t have let him have the child. There was a time when I thought I might, when the thought of him raising my son was satisfying—fitting even, but I loved her too much. I loved her too much to let her be his. Even if she didn’t want to be mine.”

  I didn’t understand. Maybe it was the lingering effects of the agent he’d used to put me to sleep or maybe it was that none of this made any goddamn sense. Something about Gareth and Violet and the baby, but why was I here? Why was I involved?

  And why was there a creeping fear that I would be made to suffer for someone else’s sins?

  “Do you know how I first met Mr. Markham?” Gareth asked, standing up. “Do you know when I first met him?”

  “When you applied to be his valet?” It was a reasonable assumption, but it seemed to annoy Gareth.

  “No. I had a life before working for Mr. Markham, you know.” He started pacing. “I was born at the same level as him. I was born to a wealthy man and raised in a fine house. And I was but a boy when he married my sister. My half-sister,” he corrected. “The first time I really saw him was at their wedding, at the York Minster, but before that, I felt like I knew him. My parents adored him. Arabella wouldn’t stop talking about him. It was like he was part of the family before he ever actually married into it.”

  Arabella.

  Arabella.

  The name almost didn’t make sense. It didn’t compute. Why was Gareth talking about Arabella and Mr. Markham, why was he talking about a childhood growing up with the Whitefields…

  “You were the Whitfield bastard,” I breathed, realization clicking into place. “You were Josiah’s son.”

  “See, you call me a bastard, but he never made me feel illegitimate,” Gareth said. “I was educated and introduced to the finer members of society and groomed to inherit the estate. He never had a son with his wife, and he always planned to write me into the will…”

  “But he didn’t.” Part of me sensed it was dangerous to be so blunt with him—he was clearly mad—but the other part of me was desperate to piece together the reasons I was tied to a chair in an empty suburban mansion. I recalled all of Aunt Esther’s tale. “He died before he could.”

  “Because Arabella died. Because Markham killed her.”

  “She was sick—”

  “She was alive until she married him. She didn’t worsen until after their wedding, until he dragged her all over Europe, and then she died, and left my father unable to cope.”

  “And then he died,” I said softly.

  “He died and his wife died, and the estate was sold off to the nearest heir, because I wasn’t legally able to inherit. And then I was practically sold off as well. No one wanted me, no one would claim me. My birth mother was dead. Some distant relation of hers, a farmer, took me in and I was forced to finish my childhood among ignorance and poverty.”

  He stopped in front of me. “So do you see now? Do you see all he’s taken from me? Not just Violet, but my sister, my parents, my home. All of it obliterated in the face of Julian Markham.”

  “So why would you want to work for him? If you hated him so much?”

  “Hate is not the right word, Miss Leavold. Not at all. I never had a plan, I never had an elaborate revenge plot that I’d dreamed up like in the novels, but every major event in my life was tied to him, as if he were a port my fate had to return to over and over. I’d found work as a footman in my youth, and when I heard that Julian Markham was looking for a valet…it seemed like destiny. I didn’t know why or what for, but I knew I had to. He didn’t recognize me, of course. I doubt he ever paid much mind to his little bastard brother-in-law, and in case he had, I changed my name.”

  “So what…you were biding your time?”

  “It’s not like that,” he said, almost impatiently, as if I were being deliberately obtuse. “I wasn’t biding at all. I was working. I just felt like it was right somehow, that I should be close to him. I even thought that one day I would tell him my real name and he’d help me reclaim my place in the world. I never planned on doing anything injurious until…”

  Until you fell in love with the same woman. I could see it now, the valet—overeducated and overbred, one small tragedy away from being at the same level in society as Violet and Julian—and then of course, Mr. Markham himself, wealthy and magnetic. Both handsome. Both attractive. Knowing Violet as I did, I wasn’t surprised that she’d been unable to choose. Why not dally with the valet—who after all was born and raised a gentleman—while waiting to be made wife to one of the wealthiest men in the north?

  And in true Violet fashion, she hadn’t really loved either of them. It had been another game for her.

  A game that had killed her in the end.

  “I loved her. And I wanted her to bear my child.” Gareth was truly agitated now, the pain of Violet’s death clearly much more recent and raw than the death of his sister and parents. “And I knew, finally, what I had to do. It all became clear that night he caught us together. He had killed Arabella, and by extension, my parents. He was going to keep Violet and my child away fr
om me…and then what he did to Violet after he found us, the things I heard coming from that room.” He shuddered. “He deserved to die. He deserved it at least three times over, if not four.”

  “What did you do?” I whispered.

  He met my eyes. “I knew I had to kill him, but I didn’t have the stomach to do it directly. I went out to the stables and cut the cinch of Raven’s saddle.”

  I stared back at him, understanding but not fully absorbing what he was saying. I had chosen to trust Mr. Markham. I had believed that he hadn’t cut that saddle, that he wasn’t ultimately responsible for Violet’s death, but after that, I had let the matter lie, shoving the hand that held the knife to the back of my mind. An unsolved mystery.

  But here it was: solved, confessed, laid bare.

  Gareth had done it.

  “You killed Violet.”

  “No!” He was beginning to shout now, all pretense at calm abandoned. “He did! He killed her with what he did to her in that room. If he hadn’t tormented her, she would have stayed inside where she belonged and he would have been the one dead in a field. Fuck!” He kicked viciously at a nearby end table, and it fell over with a crash.

  I jumped in the chair, adrenaline singing through me, every nerve and muscle alive, every synapse firing. We were nearing the end of the talking time, I saw, moving closer to the reason he had brought me here. I wanted to fight and resist, to somehow bolt for the door, but I knew better. I needed to stall as long as possible, even as I realized there wasn’t much point in it. Mr. Markham was detained by the police, and my aunt would have no reason to worry about me in the care of Mr. Markham’s servant. The thought depressed me, scared me. No one knew where I was. No one knew that I was about to die.

  But I had to try.

  “I know you didn’t mean to kill her,” I soothed, hoping he couldn’t hear the shaking in my voice. “No one blames you. It was an honest mistake.”

  “It was,” he mumbled to himself. “But don’t you see?” His voice grew plaintive, loud, discordant. “He’s taken everything now—including the child I never got to meet. I am going to take something of his.”

  He stepped so close that his feet touched my feet, and my instinct was to hiss at him, like a cat, but I resisted. Instead I looked up at him. “This isn’t necessary, Gareth,” I said. “Please. I’m sure if you just explain it to Mr. Markham—”

  “Explain what? That he deserves to suffer for what he’s done to me? And what do you think he’ll say in response? ‘Yes, you’re right, please take my fiancée?’”

  That had not been what I had meant, but I didn’t know exactly what I had meant, only that I was trying to appeal to whatever sense of sanity still lived in this man. This man who had seemed so steady, so damn sunny and friendly before. “There’s got to be a way around this,” I said. “What will killing me solve?”

  Gareth shook his head. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.” He went over to the fireplace and started building a fire. “There’s nothing that can fix what’s happened to me. It’s too late for that. But I can make sure that Julian Markham suffers like I suffered. And that will be a small comfort in itself, I think. All I really want is one glimpse of his face when he learns the truth. When he knows that you’re dead.”

  “He’ll kill you.”

  Gareth shrugged, still attending to his work. “He can try. I’m very good at hiding, Miss Leavold. I hid in plain sight for three years.”

  Whatever he was planning with this fire, I didn’t like it. I tried to move the chair, gratified when I found I could force it across the low carpet with a minimum of noise. If I could make it to the door…

  What then I didn’t know. But damned if I’d sit here waiting to find out what happened if I didn’t.

  “I tried to save you, remember, the night he took you for his own? I tried to save you from being loved by him. I didn’t want to hurt you. I like you. But I have no choice. You are the sacrifice with the most value. I delayed as long as I could, but then I realized that someone else in the house knew. I didn’t have long before Julian learned who and what I was…”

  The fire was catching now, licking at the sticks and logs in the fireplace, dangerously close to the pile of wood halfway in the fireplace and halfway on the hearth. I kept trying to move the chair as quietly as I could, having made it almost three feet since he’d turned away.

  Three things happened at once then. The first was that Gareth stood up and turned around. The second was that I decided to run for it, no matter how hopeless it was. I stood in the chair and tried to run for the door as he chased me.

  The third thing was that Mrs. Brightmore appeared in the doorway.

  I blinked at her a minute, as I’m sure Gareth did too, her presence so incredibly incongruous with the setting and the circumstances that it was almost impossible to reconcile the two.

  Oh, and she was holding a gun. A shot cracked through the air and plaster rained down, showering the room in granules of white dust.

  Gareth froze behind me.

  “Brightmore,” he said, his breathing labored from his sprint across the room.

  She walked farther into the room. “Sit down,” she told me. I reluctantly obeyed. I wanted to keep running, I wanted to beg for help. I wanted to take her gun and shoot Gareth, but I sensed the wisest course was to make myself as quiet and as easy to forget as possible, so I sat, keeping my feet firmly on the floor as I did in case I got a chance to run again.

  “Don’t you want to know how I found out?” she asked Gareth. “That it was you?”

  “I don’t care,” he said honestly. “It makes no difference now.”

  “I always recognized you,” she said, continuing on anyway. “I knew you the moment you came to work at Markham Hall. But I didn’t say anything. If you didn’t want the master to know that you were Josiah Whitefield’s bastard, that was nothing to do with me. But still—I watched you. You were a sneaky thing as a child, all dimples and bows for the lords and ladies, but devilish and cruel when they were out of sight. I knew what happened to those cats that ended up drowned. To those outbuildings that mysteriously caught fire.”

  Gareth sounded impatient again. “I. Don’t. Care. What. You. Know.”

  Brightmore didn’t stop. “See, I thought the mistress was unhappy simply because of her marriage to Mr. Markham. But then I realized it was you. You were the one who made her unhappy. Who made her desperate for help.”

  Gareth shook his head. “She didn’t give me a choice, Brightmore.”

  “She wanted to stop interacting with you. Wisely. But of course, you wouldn’t let her stop, would you?”

  “What did you do?” I asked, unable to help myself.

  He looked down at me. “I did what I had to.”

  “He threatened to kill her. And the rest of her family—which is you,” she pointed out looking at me, “and she cared enough about you, for whatever reason, to comply.”

  Gareth took a step toward her. “How did you know that?”

  “The same way I finally figured out that it was you who tampered with the saddle. Who’s always awake in the middle of the night? Who is running inside and outside, up and down stairs, from three in the morning until nine at night?”

  And then Gareth visibly paled.

  “The kitchen boy,” Brightmore said with cold satisfaction. “The police talked with Wispel, but they never spoke with him. And I began to wonder, what did you do after the master caught you that night? Where did you go? The kitchen boy had seen it all, running firewood inside the house. He saw you go into the sables. And he heard you threatening the lady all those nights. As soon as I spoke with him, I made plans to come to London. Mr. Markham needed to know.”

  Gareth was only a couple of steps away from her by now. “Why do you even care?” he said. “This doesn’t concern you.”

  “Everything to do with my master concerns me.” And in her eyes was the burning fervor of a religious convert. She raised the gun. “And while I don’t care partic
ularly what you do with the whore—”

  It took a second to realize she meant me, but her words drowned out my noises of protest.

  “—I do care that you tried to have the master arrested. And that you might try to kill him.”

  “It is a pity then,” Gareth said, “that you won’t be there to stop it.” And he grabbed for the gun.

  The moment I realized what he was about to do, I tried to stop it, flinging myself toward him. Another bullet fired, sending a wave of fear through me, and both the housekeeper and the valet fell to the floor in a tangle of limbs and skirts. There was shouting and grunting and the roll of heavy bodies on the floor.

  I was on the floor now too, on my side, my breath forced from my body, all my weight on my arm, facing away from the struggle behind me. All I could see was smoke. The gray veil of smoke as the fire leapt from fireplace to hearth to rug. The house was catching fire.

  The noises behind me died down, as if the struggle had stopped. I felt my chair move as Gareth stepped around me, gun in hand and blood running from his nose. He wiped at it with his shirtsleeve as he aimed the gun at me. “I was going to let the fire do its work,” he said. “But now I think I shouldn’t leave it to chance, don’t you? We’ve had enough unexpected variables this afternoon—”

  I kicked out viciously with my leg, making contact with his knee. He cried out and dropped and I kicked again, determined not to die passively. If I couldn’t run, I would fight.

  I kicked again and again, landing two or three good ones before he managed to force himself to move through the pain, and then I heard an unearthly scream from behind me, like a banshee or a ghost caught by the sunlight away from its grave. A scream and then a roar as Brightmore came off the ground and charged at Gareth like a woman deranged.

  He’d still been reacting to my kicks and so he didn’t have time to duck or to dodge, and they both went flying backwards as their bodies collided, right into the trail of the fire.

  Instantly, they both lit up, human pyres in a dark room, like ancient sacrifices in a wicker cage. The light was almost too bright to look at, searing and intense, and I could smell the distinct smell of burning hair and clothes and something sweet and meat-like that had to be flesh.