A Dangerous Collaboration (A Veronica Speedwell Mystery) Deanna Raybourn (books to read for self improvement .TXT) 📖

“And so you went to Russia?”

“I did. My father had been increasingly insistent that I travel with him on an extended tour of Russia, where he was bound by his diplomatic interests. He was noticeably pleased when I finally agreed. I could tell he was delighted because he unbent enough to smile at me. Whilst we were abroad, I consented to another of his schemes. I permitted him to arrange a marriage with the daughter of an English duke who had taken a diplomatic posting at the court of the tsar.” He paused, then pushed on, unburdening himself of the last. “I loved Rosamund with every atom of my existence, and still I married another woman, a plain and unlovely woman I loathed and whom I punished with silence and unloving attempts to get an heir until she died from sheer disillusionment. There was not a moment of our marriage that I did not make her feel the weight of my disappointment that she wasn’t someone else.” He went on, cataloguing his sins for me in a quiet voice limned with self-loathing. “I thought to make a decent husband, at least I meant to try. I went along with Father’s arrangements for my marriage. I played the dutiful husband, whatever the cost. I gritted my teeth and made love to my wife. Until the telegram arrived.”

“What telegram?”

“The one Rosamund sent on the eve of her wedding to Malcolm,” he said. “I didn’t receive it, you see, not for a month. My wife and I took a wedding trip.” His lips twisted as he said the word “wife.” “Her family had a villa on the Black Sea and we went there for some weeks. Our communications with the outside world were spotty. Few letters and no telegrams were forwarded. We collected all of it when we returned to St. Petersburg, a pile of correspondence that had been accumulating for four weeks. Four weeks during which Rosamund believed I received her wire and did not care enough to respond.”

“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