A Curse of the Heart

“Did you know that your mother was not a member of the original cast? Did you know she was a late addition to the bill — an interloper?”

Rebecca shook her head. “No. I doubt they deemed it important enough to mention.” The words dripped with contempt in retaliation for his insult.

“Oh, it’s important,” he countered, pointing the tip of the blade at her face. “My mother was cast as Cleopatra. My mother was forced to suffer the humiliation of being downgraded to the role of Octavia, forced to play a powerless woman, a woman lacking any strong emotion.”

“What does that have to do with me?” she said pushing aside the need to challenge his interpretation.

“Everything,” he spat. “You mother sauntered in like a queen of Egypt and took away everything my mother held dear. Your father was generous with his time, and my mother loved him for it. When he failed to return her affections, she admired him all the more, as a man loyal to his family. Then he took Dorothea Carmichael as his mistress, and my mother took solace in a bottle of laudanum. So you see, your father became the ‘strumpet’s fool’ and like Mark Anthony, chose desire over duty, emotion over reason.”

“He could not help who he fell in love with.”

“He should have bloody well helped it,” he yelled, his face turning scarlet, the words exploding from his mouth with such vehemence that saliva bubbled at the corners. “That one decision ruined my life. My mother soon became addicted to laudanum, soon lost her position and took up with a Scottish laird, who was more than happy to finance her addiction. She died of an overdose a few months later.”

Rebecca knew the pain of losing a parent. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she said, feeling the tiniest sliver of sympathy, “but you cannot hold me responsible for that. Doing all of this will not ease the pain of your mother’s death.”

His face grew dark, his lids almost obscuring his black eyes. “This is not about my mother,” he said, his voice slicing through the air like the swipe of his blade. “Her death pales in significance to what happened to me after that.”

Rebecca examined his fine wool coat, the starched cravat tied in the latest style. This was not the figure of someone abandoned to the streets, left to pull a dust cart and scavenge for scraps.

“The laird had no real interest in my mother,” he continued, “and was quick to accept me as his ward. I became the entertainment at his debauched parties. While you were educated in a whole host of feminine accomplishments, I became accomplished in other areas, more base, more …”

He did not complete the sentence.

“And you blame my parents for what happened?”

“I have a long list of those responsible, and I’ll see vengeance brought down on every last one of them. Starting with you. And so we come back to our play, to the final act, where your suicide will avenge my mother’s death.”

“My suicide?” Rebecca gasped. The man was insane.

“Don’t worry,” he said removing a small brown bottle from his pocket. “I’m not going to pull a poisonous asp from a fig basket. In this case, an overdose of laudanum will be far more fitting.”

He would have to pin her to the floor and pour it down her throat. “Don’t fool yourself into thinking it will be an act of suicide. It will be murder.”

A dull thud resonated from beyond the auditorium and his gaze flew to the door. During his lapse of concentration, Rebecca slid her fingers into her reticule and wrapped them around the handle of her pistol.

Hearing no other sound, he shook his head and turned to face her. “You will drink this,” he said with a sense of urgency. “Every last drop of it.”

“And if I refuse?”

He flashed the silver blade. “Then I’ll gut you like a fish.”

One jab was all it would take to pierce her clothing, for the blade to sink into her skin. The only hope she had was to try and distract him long enough to escape.

Taking a deep breath, she whipped out the pistol and with as steady a hand as she could muster, pointed it straight at his head. “Take one step closer and I’ll pull the trigger,” she said, cocking it for effect.

The threat took him by surprise, and he took an awkward step back.

Then Rebecca saw a vision: an angel from Heaven in the guise of a Greek god, as Gabriel appeared in the wings, his burly coachman at his side.

Chapter 27

Rebecca was alive.

An intense feeling of euphoria flooded Gabriel’s body: a giant w

ave of emotion scooped him up in its dizzying heights, so he felt light and free. He could have drifted along on the wave forever, but elation turned to anger as the reality of the situation brought him crashing back down to the rocky shore.

“Rebecca.” Her name tumbled from his lips, the muttered whisper the only way of expressing his frustration, the only way of offering reassurance.