The Madness Of Lord Ian Mackenzie

Chapter Nine

Beth stared at Inspector Fellows until she realized this wasn’t a joke. “I beg your pardon?”

“Marry me, Mrs. Ackerley,” Fellows repeated. “I am a respectable man with a job and income, although I know you no longer need to worry about money. But you’re in deep waters, too deep for your own good.”

“And you fear that I’ll drown?”

Fellows grasped her elbow. His fingers were strong, like Ian’s. “The Mackenzies will pull you under. Look what they did to Lady Isabella. She was an innocent debutante, and now she’s not received by her own family. You have even less social position than she does, and once you’ve lost public regard, you will have nothing. Doesn’t matter about all your money.” Fellows’s words rang with sincerity. But there was something behind the sincerity, a watchfulness that she couldn’t quite place.

“It is the best offer you’ll have,” he said. “I’ve seen the gigolos here running after you, panting after your fortune. They’ll ruin you. I care nothing for your money—I am happy being a detective, and I will continue to forge ahead at Scotland Yard.”

Beth clutched her parasol’s handle until her knuckles hurt. “You amaze me. Why should you worry so much about my reputation?”

True anger blazed from his hazel eyes. “Because the Mackenzies destroy everything they touch. Any lady who goes nigh that family comes to grief. I’d like to save one, at least.”

“One?” she asked sharply. “There have been others?”

“Do you not know the stories?”

Fellows’s eyes glittered. It was obvious he wanted to tell her, and Beth was cursed with wanting to know. She studied the sad ruin of-the palace, which the Parisians had already started to knock down. Clearing out the past, ridding itself of its ghosts.

“Please tell me, Inspector,” she said. “You are going to anyway.”

“I am talking about the wives of Hart and Cameron Mackenzie. Hart married a slip of a girl, a marquess’s daughter. This was after another young woman jilted him—came to her senses in time, most like. But the poor thing His Grace married was terrified of him by all accounts. He shut her up in that great house in Scotland and never let her out. She died trying to give him the heir he wanted. It’s said he took five minutes out to bury her in the family mausoleum, then went back to his houseful of fancy women.” “You’re very certain of this information.” “I have my sources. The duke now won’t talk about his wife and refuses to have her name mentioned.” “Perhaps he is grief-stricken.”

Fellows snorted. “Unlikely. Did you forbid all and sundry to speak your husband’s name when he passed, Mrs. Ackerley?”

“No.” She remembered the emptiness of her life after Thomas had gone. “You’re right. I didn’t want people to forget him. I wanted his name mentioned everywhere. Thomas Ackerley was a good man.”

“You see? Lord Cameron’s wife died equally as tragically, though she was a much more spirited woman. She was a firebrand her own family couldn’t handle. Then after she had her son, she went crazy with a knife, tried to kill the baby and Lord Cameron both. No one knows quite what happened in that room, but when Lord Cameron came out, his face was cut up, and his wife lay dead on the floor.”

Beth blenched. “How dreadful.” She’d seen the scar on Cameron’s face, a deep gash on his cheekbone. “Yes,” Fellows agreed. “If they’d left those ladies alone, they’d be alive today.”

“Were either of them friends of yours?” Beth asked him.

“Are you persecuting the family to avenge their deaths?” Fellows looked surprised. “No, I never knew them. The ladies in question were well above my class.” “But someone you cared about was hurt by the Mackenzies.” His look told her she was right. “They’ve hurt so many, I doubt they’d even remember.”

“And because of this slight, whatever it is, you want to blame Ian for the High Holborn murder.”

Fellows reached out and clutched Beth’s elbow. “Ian killed her, Mrs. Ackerley. You mark my words. He never should have been let out into the worlds—he’s completely mad, and I intend to prove it. I will do anything to prove he murdered Sally Tate and Lily Martin, and I’ll lock him away forever. He deserves it.”

His face was red with fury, his mouth shaking. The anger went deep, nursed for years, and Beth was suddenly consumed with curiosity. What on earth could the Mackenzie family have done to a police inspector to make him so determined to destroy diem?

She heard shouting and looked behind her to see the tall bulk of Ian Mackenzie running toward them. He had a walking stick in his hands and rage in every step. The wind carried lan’s hat to the ground at die same time he dropped the stick and jerked Fellows away from Beth.

“I told you to stay away from her.”

“Ian, no.”

Last time, Ian had shaken the man and pushed him off. This time, lan’s strong hands closed on his throat and didn’t let go. “Leave her alone, or I’ll kill you.”

“I’m trying to save her from you, you filth.”

Ian roared, his rage so bright that Beth backed up a step. “Ian.” Mac Mackenzie sprinted across the grass and grabbed his brother’s arms. “Curry, help me, damn you.” A lean, wiry man wrapped his hands around lan’s huge arm, but it was like a small dog trying to drag down a tree. Mac was shouting in lan’s ear, but Ian ignored him. A crowd began to gather. Upper-class Parisians out for their morning stroll, nannies with their children, and beggars alike moved closer to get a look at the mad Englishmen brawling in the middle of the park.

Mac spewed foul language as he pried lan’s hands from Fellows’s neck. Released, Fellows fell to his knees, then hauled himself up again, trousers stained with wet grass. His throat was red, his collar ripped.

“I’ll have you,” Fellows snarled. “By God, I’ll have you swinging for the hangman before you know where you are.” Foam flecked his lips. “I’ll destroy you, and I’ll put my heel in your brother’s face when he begs me for mercy.”

“Fuck you,” Ian screamed.

Beth pressed her hands to her face. Katie stared, openmouthed, as Curry and Mac laced their arms around lan’s middle and dragged him away from Fellows. lan’s face was purple, tears tracking his cheeks. He coughed as Curry jerked a fist against his breastbone. “You have to stop, guv,” Curry said rapidly. “You have to stop or you won’t breathe sweet air anymore. You’ll be back in that hellhole, and you’ll never see your brothers again. What’s worse is I’ll be stuck in there with you.”

Ian coughed again, but still fought, like an animal not understanding it had been caught. Mac stepped in front of Ian and grabbed his face.

“Ian, look at me.”

Ian tried to pull away, to do anything but look his brother directly in the eye.

“Look at me, damn you.”

He swiveled Ian’s head, forcing Ian’s eyelids open until finally, Mac’s eyes and Ian’s met.

Ian stopped. He gasped for breath, tears shining on his face, but he stilled, staring, mesmerized, into Mac’s eyes. Mac’s hold on him softened, and Beth saw that Mac’s own eyes were wet. “That’s it. You’re all right.” His grip on Ian’s cheek turned to a caress, and then Mac leaned forward and kissed Ian on the forehead.

Ian’s breath was hoarse and audible. He dropped his gaze and looked away across the park, seeing no one. Curry still had hold of his arms. Ian shook him off, then turned his back and started toward the carriage that had stopped in the lane.

Its coachman was standing on the ground, holding the horses and looking agitated. Beth guessed that Ian and Mac had been riding by, and Ian had leapt from the coach when he’d seen Beth with Fellows.

She realized then that Mac and Ian both wore rumpled evening dress, Ian in the same suit he’d worn the night before. They weren’t up early; they were still returning from the night’s revelries.

Ian never looked at Beth. Curry retrieved Ian’s hat from the ground, dusted it off, and strode after him. Mac turned to Fellows, his eyes like cold copper. “Go back to London. If I see you again, I’ll thrash you until you can’t stand.”

Fellows was breathing hard, rubbing his throat, but he wasn’t cowed. “You can hide Lord Ian behind the duke as much as you want, but in the end, I’ll get him. That terrifies you, doesn’t it?”

Mac growled. Beth pictured another outburst of violence in this quiet, sunny park, and she stepped between them. “Do as Mac says,” she begged Fellows. “Haven’t you caused enough trouble?”

Fellows turned hard hazel eyes to her. “One last warning, Mrs. Ackerley. Don’t throw in your lot with them. You do, and I won’t be merciful.”

“Didn’t you hear her?” Katie said, planting her hands on her hips. “Be off or I’ll call the police on you. Wouldn’t that be a laugh? A Scotland Yard ‘tec arrested by the French coppers?” Mac put his hand on Katie’s shoulder and pushed her toward Beth. “Get your mistress home and make her stay there. Tell my . . . Tell her she needs to look after Mrs. Ackerley better.”

Katie opened her mouth to snap at him, but she took one look into Mac’s eyes and quieted. “He’s right, Mrs. A,” she said meekly. “Best we go home.”

Beth gave Ian’s retreating back one last look, and then gazed up at Mac. “I’m sorry,” she said, her throat tight. Mac said nothing. Beth ignored Fellows and let Katie turn her toward the lane that led to the Rue de Rivoli. She felt Mac’s eyes on her all the way, but when she glanced back, Ian had entered the coach and was sitting with his head turned from her. He never once looked out at her, and she walked away with Katie, the garden’s brilliance blurred by her tears.

“I’ve lost her, haven’t I?” Ian grated.

Mac landed next to him in the carriage with a thump, and slammed the door himself.

“You never had her, Ian.”

Ian let familiar numbness flow over him as the coach started. He rubbed his temple, the rage having brought on his headache.

Damn the demon inside him. Seeing Fellows reach out and touch Beth—and worse, Beth do nothing to stop him—had unleashed the beast. All he’d wanted was to wrap his hands around Fellows’s throat and shake him. Just like Father—

Mac sighed, cutting through the memory. “We’re Mackenzies. We don’t get happy endings.” Ian wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and didn’t answer.

Mac watched him a moment. “I’m sorry. I should have sent the bastard packing the minute you told me he was in Paris.”

Ian sat back, unable to speak, but his thoughts spun, words tumbling over words until he had to keep mute. He looked out the window, but instead of the passing streets, he saw Beth reflected in the glass, her hands white lines on her beautiful face.

“I’m sorry,” Mac repeated wearily. “Damn it all, Ian, I am so sorry.”

Still gripping Ian’s arm, Mac rested his forehead on lan’s broad shoulder. Ian felt Mac’s distress, but he couldn’t move or say a word that could offer any comfort. Mac’s studio was not what Beth expected. He’d rented a shabby apartment in the Montmartre area, two rooms to live in on the first floor and a studio at the top of the house. A far cry from what she pictured a wealthy English aristocrat would live in.

A man built like a pugilist with iron gray hair and hard brown eyes opened the door. Beth stepped back in alarm, clutching her satchel to her bosom. This was a man one would find in a wrestling match or a brawl in a pub, not answering doors in Paris.

But no, he seemed to be Mac’s valet. Isabella had told her that the four brothers picked up their unconventional valets off the streets, thus saving them time and expense at the agencies. Curry had been a pickpocket, Bellamy a pugilist, Cameron’s valet a Roma, and Hart’s a disgraced clerk to a London financier.

The sneer left Bellamy’s thug like face when Beth said who she was. Looking almost polite, he directed her up three flights of stairs to the door at the top.

The studio covered the entire floor, with two huge skylights letting in the gray Paris sky. The view, on the other hand, was breathtaking. Beth saw across rooftops down the steep hill to the flat plain of Paris and cloud-bedecked hills in the distance.

Mac was perched on a ladder in front of an enormous canvas, his hair covered by a red kerchief that made him look like a Gypsy. He held a long paintbrush in his hand and scowled bleakly at his canvas. Paint splattered his hands, face, painter’s smock, and the floor around him.

On the eight-foot canvas that reared in front of him, the figures of a pillar and a plump naked woman had been roughed in. Mac was concentrating on the folds of a drape that just missed the woman’s intimate parts, but the model kept twitching.

“Stay still, can’t you?”

The model saw Beth and stopped wriggling. Mac glanced over his shoulder and also went still.

Ian moved out of the shadows. His hair was rumpled, as though he’d been scraping his hands through it, perhaps massaging one of his temples, as he often did. His gold gaze darted over Beth, and then he deliberately turned to look out the window.

Beth cleared her throat. “The porter at your hotel said you’d come here,” she told Ian’s back.

Ian didn’t turn.

“Cybele,” Mac snapped, “go downstairs and tell Bellamy to give you tea.”

Cybele squeaked, then spoke in a heavy accent. “I’ll not go near Bellamy. He frightens me so much. He looks at me like he wishes to lock his hands around my throat.” “Can’t imagine why,” Mac muttered, but Beth broke in.

“It’s all right. It doesn’t matter. I only came here to apologize. To both of you.”

“What the devil do you have to apologize for?” Mac said. “Fellows is to blame, blast the man. He was told to stay away from us.”

Beth walked to the window, her gloved fingers closing tightly on the handle of her satchel. She looked up at Ian reflected in the glass, his face utterly still.

“You were quite right, Ian,” she said softly. “I should have sent the inspector away with a flea in his ear. I didn’t because I was curious about things that were none of my business. Mrs. Barrington always said curiosity was my besetting sin, and she was right. I had no call to pry into your family’s history, and for that I soundly apologize.”

“Very pretty,” Cybele sneered.

Mac leapt from his stepladder, threw a dressing gown at Cybele, took her by the ear, and pulled her with him out of the room. Cybele shrieked and swore in French. The slam of the door shook the walls, and then everything went silent Beth studied the unfinished painting as she gathered her wits. The painted woman gazed at the bowl of water at her feet. Patches of wetness suggested she’d just stepped out of it. She held a thin scarf across her back as though she’d been drying off.

It was a sensual painting, like the one Isabella had shown her, but Beth understood the difference right away. The woman in this picture was a thing, a curve of colored flesh. She was no more a person than was the bath at her feet or the pillar behind her.

The woman in Isabella’s picture had been Isabella. Mac had painted his wife, every stroke lovingly placed, every shadow carefully laid. Any woman could have modeled for this bather—only Isabella could have been the woman in her painting.

Beth turned from the easel and faced the solid upright that was Ian. “I bought you a present” He still didn’t move. Beth unlocked her satchel and pulled out a small box.

“I saw it while I was shopping with Isabella. I wanted you to have it.”

Ian continued to stare sightlessly away from her, the shape of his broad shoulders reflected in the grimy window. Beth laid the box on the windowsill and turned away. If he didn’t want to speak to her, there was nothing she could do.

Ian pressed his hand flat against the windowpane, still not looking at her. “How can you be to blame?” Beth dropped the skirt she’d caught up in preparation for leaving. “Because if I’d refused to speak to Inspector Fellows yesterday in the park, you’d never have seen him. I should have had him thrown out when he came to Isabella’s house and began those awful accusations, but I’m too curious for my own good. Both times, I wanted to hear what he had to say.”

Ian finally turned his face to her, keeping his hand on the window. “Don’t protect me. They all try to protect me.” Beth went to him. “How can I possibly protect you? It was wrong of me to poke and pry, but I fully admit I wanted to speak to Fellows to find out all about you. Even his lies.” “They aren’t lies. We were there.”

“Fellows’s interpretation of the truth, then.” One hand fisted on the windowsill. “Tell me what he said to you. Everything.” His gaze rested on her mouth as he waited for her words.

She told him what Fellows had told her, including the man’s abrupt proposal of marriage. She did keep Fellows’s speculations about her father to herself, something she’d have to explain to Ian someday, but not now.

When Beth got to the proposal, Ian pivoted to the window again. “Did you accept?”

“Of course not. Why on earth should I want to marry Inspector Fellows?”

“Because he’ll ruin you if you don’t.”

“Let him try.” Beth glared. “I’m not a hothouse flower to be sheltered; I know a thing or two of the world. My new fortune and Mrs. Barrington’s approval have done much for my standing—I’m no longer the girl from the workhouse, or even the poor vicar’s widow. The wealthy get away with much. It’s disgusting, really.”

She realized, when she ran out of breath, that Ian hadn’t registered a word. “I beg your pardon. I do run on sometimes, especially when I’m rattled. Mrs. Barrington often remarked on it.”

“And why the devil do you drag Mrs. Barrington into every conversation?”

Beth blinked. He sounded more himself. “I don’t know. I suppose she had great influence on me. And opinions. Many, many opinions.”

Ian didn’t answer. He reached to the windowsill and picked up the package, his strong fingers making short work of the paper. He opened a wooden box and stared into it, then lifted out a flat gold pin embossed with stylized curlicues.

“For your lapel,” Beth said. “I’m sure you have dozens of them, but I thought it was pretty.”

Ian continued to stare at it as though he’d never seen such a thing.

“I had it engraved, on the back.”

Ian turned the pin over, his eyes flickering as he read the inscription Beth had mulled over for so long in the shop.

To Ian, In friendship. B.

“Put it on me,” he said.

Beth slid the pin through the cashmere with a trembling hand. His body was hard beneath his coat, and she let her fingers rest a moment on his chest.

“Do you forgive me?” she asked.

“No.”

Her heart beat faster. “I suppose I shouldn’t expect too much.”

“There is nothing to forgive.” Ian caught her hand in a crushing grip. “I thought you would leave Paris after you saw me in the park.”

“I can’t possibly. Your brother hasn’t given me drawing lessons yet.”

A line appeared between his brows. Beth amended quickly, “I was joking.”

His frown deepened. “Why did you stay?”

“I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

Ian’s gaze flicked past hers. “You saw.”

Beth remembered his nearly purple face, his hoarse curses, his hands in hard fists, his brother and Curry dragging him away.

“It stays away most of the time. But when I saw him touch you, my Beth, it rose like a fire. I frightened you.” “You did, rather.” But not in the way he meant. Beth’s father had been prone to violent rages when drunk. She’d run from him and cowered behind whatever would hide her small body until he’d slammed out of the house.

With Ian, she’d not wanted to flee. That he could have hurt Fellows she had no doubt, but she hadn’t been afraid Ian would hurt her. She’d known he wouldn’t. She’d been more afraid that he’d hurt himself or that a passing policeman would decide to arrest him.

Beth rested her cheek against the stiff white fabric of his shirtfront. “You told me not to protect you, but I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“I don’t want you to lie for me.” His voice rumbled under her ear, overshadowing the strong beat of his heart. “Hart lies for me. Mac and Cam lie; Curry lies.” “Sounds like verbal conjugation. I lie; you lie; he, she, it lies....”

Ian fell silent, and she looked up. “I’m a very truthful person, Ian. I promise.”

He ran the backs of his fingers down her cheek. Beth felt an insane need to keep talking. “Those clouds are thick. It might rain.”

“Good. Then it will be too dark to paint, and Mac will send that bloody girl home.”

“He isn’t her lover, is he?” Beth put her ringers over her lips. “Oh, dear, I can’t stop asking questions. You don’t have to answer.”

“She’s not his lover.”

“Good.” She hesitated. “Are we lovers?”

“The pin says ‘in friendship.’”

“Only because I was too put off by the shopkeeper to have him engrave ‘to my love.’ Besides, Isabella was standing right next to me.”

Ian went silent for a long time, looking at her and avoiding her gaze at the same time. She saw his eyes flicker back and forth, restless, never wanting to settle. “I told you I can’t fall in love,” he said. “But you have.”

Her heart thumped. “Have I?”

“With your husband.”

So many people wanted to talk about Thomas Ackerley.

“I did. I loved him very much.”

“What was it like?” His words were so low she barely caught them. “Explain to me what loving feels like, Beth. I want to understand.”