Страница 57 из 64
Trevelyan shrugged and took the dipper.
“Not really. It’s only that that was when I first noticed the sore myself.”
“Rather a shock, I suppose,” Grey said.
“Rather,” Trevelyan replied dryly. He drank, then dropped the tin cup back into the barrel.
“Perhaps it would have been better to say nothing,” the Cornishman went on, as though to himself. “But . . . no. That wouldn’t have done.” He waved a hand, dismissing whatever his thought had been.
“I could scarcely believe it. Went about in a daze for the rest of the day, and spent the night wondering what to do—but I knew it was Mayrhofer; it had to be.”
Looking up, he caught sight of Grey’s face, and a wry smile broke out upon his own.
“No, not directly. Through Maria. I had shared no woman’s bed since I began with her, and that was more than a year before. But clearly she had been infected by her whore-mongering bastard of a husband; she was i
Not only i
“I said that she had lost a child, just before I met her? I got the doctor who attended her to talk; he confirmed that the child had been malformed, owing to the mother’s syphilitic condition—but naturally he had kept quiet about that.”
Trevelyan’s fingers drummed restlessly on the lid of the barrel.
“The child was born malformed, but alive—it died in the cradle, a day after birth. Mayrhofer smothered it, wishing neither to be burdened by it nor to have his wife learn the cause of its misfortune.”
Grey felt his stomach contract.
“How do you know this?”
Trevelyan rubbed a hand over his face, as though tired.
“Reinhardt admitted it to her—to Maria. I brought the doctor to her, you see; forced him to tell her what he had told me. I thought—if she knew what Mayrhofer had done, infecting her, dooming their child, that perhaps she would leave him.”
She did not. Hearing out the doctor in numb silence, she had sat for a long time, considering, and then asked both Trevelyan and the doctor to go; she would be alone.
She had stayed alone for a week. Her husband was away, and she saw no one save the servants who brought her meals—all sent away, untouched.
“She thought of self-murder, she told me,” Trevelyan said, staring out toward the endless sea. “Better, she thought, to end it cleanly than to die slowly, in such fashion. Have you ever seen someone dying of the syphilis, Grey?”
“Yes,” Grey said, the bad taste creeping back into his mouth. “In Bedlam.”
One in particular, a man whose disease had deprived him both of nose and balance, so that he reeled drunkenly across the floor, crashing helplessly into the other inmates, foot stuck in a night bucket, tears and snot streaming over his rutted face. He could but hope that the syphilis had taken the man’s reason, as well, so that he was in ignorance of his situation.
He looked then at Trevelyan, envisioning for the first time that clever, narrow face, ruined and drooling. It would happen, he realized with a small shock. The only question was how long it might be before the symptoms became clear.
“If it were me, I might think of suicide, too,” he said.
Trevelyan met his eyes, then smiled ruefully.
“Would you? We are different, then,” he said, with no tone of judgment in the observation. “That course never occurred to me, until Maria showed me her pistol, and told me what she had been thinking.”
“You thought only of how the fact might be used to separate the lady from her husband?” Grey said, hearing the edge in his own voice.
“No,” Trevelyan replied, seeming unoffended. “Though that had been my goal since I met her; I did not propose to give it up. I tried to see her, after she had sent me away, but she would not receive me.”
Instead, Trevelyan had set himself to discover what remedy might be available.
“Jack Byrd knew of the difficulty; it was he who informed me that Finbar Scanlon seemed an able man in such matters. He had gone back to the apothecary’s shop, to inquire after Mrs. O’Co
“And that is where you met Sergeant O’Co
He felt his blood rising at the thought—but Trevelyan was staring at him blankly.
“No,” he said. “I met O’Co
“And you did not have him killed?” Grey demanded, skepticism clear in his voice.
“No, why should I?” Trevelyan frowned at him a little; then his brow cleared.
“You thought I had him done in, in order to get the papers?” Trevelyan’s mouth twitched; he seemed to be finding something fu
“You think it unjustified, do you?” Grey inquired acidly.
“No, I suppose not,” Trevelyan admitted, wiping a knuckle under his nose. He had not been recently shaved, and tiny drops of water were condensing on the sprouting whiskers, giving him a silvered look.
“But no,” he repeated. “I told you I had killed no one—nor had I anything to do with O’Co
Trevelyan glanced, as though despite himself, at the door that led to the quarters below, and then away.
“Should you be with her?” Grey asked quietly. “Go, if you like. I can wait.”
Trevelyan shook his head and glanced away.
“I ca
Seeming to detect some unspoken accusation in Grey’s ma
“I did stay with her, the last time the fever came on. She sent me away, saying that it disturbed her to see my agitation. She prefers to be alone, when . . . things go wrong.”
“Indeed. As she was after learning the truth from the doctor, you said.”
Trevelyan took a deep breath, and squared his shoulders, as though setting himself for some unpleasant task.
“Yes,” he said bleakly. “Then.”
She had been alone for a week, save for the servants, who kept away at her own request. No one knew how long she had sat alone, that final day in her white-draped boudoir. It was long past dark when her husband had finally returned, somewhat the worse for drink, but still coherent enough to understand her accusation, her demand for the truth about her child.
“She said that he laughed,” Trevelyan said, his tone remote, as though reporting some business disaster; a mine cave-in, perhaps, or a sunken ship. “He told her then that he had killed the child; told her that she should be grateful to him, that he had saved her from living day after day with the shame of its deformity.”
At this, the woman who had lived patiently for years with the knowledge of infidelity and promiscuity felt the bonds of her vows break asunder, and Maria Mayrhofer had stepped across that thin line of prohibition that separates justice from vengeance. Mad with rage and sorrow, she had flung back in his teeth all the insults she had suffered through the years of their marriage, threatening to expose all his tawdry affairs, to reveal his syphilitic condition to society, to denounce him openly as a murderer.
The threats had sobered Mayrhofer slightly. Staggering from his wife’s presence, he had left her raging and weeping. She had the pistol that had been her constant companion through her week of brooding, ready to hand. She had hunted often in the hills near her Austrian home, was accustomed to guns; it was the work of a moment to load and prime the weapon.