Even then, she wasn’t left in peace. His grandfather let the curst doctors hack into her poor, dead brain to satisfy their grisly curiosity. The brain tissue was weak, and they’d found evidence of blood seepage. A vessel had burst during the last fit—one of many that might have burst at any time, so fragile they were. Her earlier decline, the doctors decided, must have been the first outward sign of an inner deterioration that had begun long before. The headaches were further symptoms, caused by the slow leakage.
There was nothing anyone could have done for her, they claimed. Just as medical science had no way of detecting such defects early on, it had no way of curing them.
And so Borson and his associates absolved themselves of all blame—as though they had not made her last months a living hell.
And the Camoys saw to it that no blame or shame would be attached to the family, either.
She had “sunk into a fatal decline”—that was the story they gave out, because no Camoys, even one by marriage, could possibly be mad. No hint of insanity had ever appeared in the family in all the centuries since Henri de Camois had come over from Normandy with the Conqueror.
Even among themselves, they never openly referred to her insanity, as though giving the truth the cut direct could make it go away, like an unsuitable acquaintance.
That was just as well, as far as Dorian was concerned. If he had to listen to the heartless hypocrites pontificating about his mother’s madness, he was bound to commit some outrage—and be destroyed, as she had been.
After the funeral, he returned to Oxford and buried his feelings, as usual, in study. It was the one thing he could do, the one thing his grandfather could not crush or twist to suit his tyrannical purposes.
Consequently, at the end of the term, Dorian not only earned his degree but did what no Camoys had ever done before: he won a first, In Literis Humanioribus.
The traditional celebration followed at Rawnsley Hall. It was the usual hypocrisy. Dorian had never truly been one of the Camoys and he knew his academic triumph stuck in the collective family craw. Still, they must give the appearance of family unity, and for Dorian, pretending was easier this time, with freedom so near. In a few weeks, he would be upon the Continent—and he would not return to England until his grandfather was sealed in the tomb with his saintly ancestors.
In the meantime, Dorian could play his role, as he’d done for years, and bear their pretense and hypocrisy.
Pretending, always pretending, his mother had said.
Her mind had broken down under the strain, she’d believed.
Too many secrets . . . too weak to keep them in.
He didn’t know that hers were not the only secrets she’d let out.
He did not find out until twenty-four hours after the so-called celebration. And then Dorian could only stand and listen helplessly for an endless, numbing hour to the chilling speech that shattered and scattered his plans like so much dust and left him with nothing but his pride to sustain him.
DORIAN WAS TURNED out of Rawnsley Hall with six pounds and some odd pence in his pocket. This was because Lord Rawnsley had expected him to hang his head and make penitent speeches and beg for forgiveness—and Dorian had decided that the earl could wait until Judgment Day.
His grandfather had called him a whoremonger, a slave to the basest of appetites, who shamelessly and recklessly pursued a path that could only lead to madness and a hideous death from the foul diseases contracted from the filth with which he consorted.
Though Dorian knew this was true, he found he must be sunk beyond shame as well because he could not find a shred of remorse in his heart, only rage. He would not, could not submit to his grandfather, ever again. He would starve and die in a filthy gutter, rather than go crawling back.
He left fully aware that he’d have to survive entirely on his own. The earl would make trouble for anyone who aided his errant grandson.
And so Dorian went to London. There he assumed a new identity and made himself one of the insignificant masses. He found lodgings—a dank room among the teeming tenements of the East End—and employment as a dockworker by day and a legal copyist at night. There was no future in either occupation, but then, he had no future, with all respectable doors shut to him. Still, even when the dock work dwindled from time to time, the lawyers kept him busy. There was little danger of their running out of documents. And when the drudgery threatened to crush his spirit, a few coins could buy him the temporary surcease of a relatively clean whore and a bottle.
The months stretched into years while his grandfather waited for the prodigal to crawl back on his hands and knees and the prodigal waited for his grandfather to die.
But the influenza epidemic that bore off Dorian’s father, his Uncle Hugo, two aunts, and several cousins in 1826 left their lord and master untouched.
Then, in the summer of 1827, Dorian suddenly fell ill—and sank into a decline.
Chapter 1
Dartmoor, Devon
Early May, 1828
DORIAN STOOD IN the library of Radmore Manor, looking put the window. In the distance, the moors stretched out in all their bleak beauty. They beckoned to him as strongly now as they’d called to his sickly fancy months before in London, when he’d fallen so dangerously ill, too weak even to hold his pen.
In August, Hoskins, a solicitor’s clerk, had found him barely conscious, slumped over an ink-splotched document.
I’ll fetch a doctor.
No. No doctors, for God’s sake. Dartmoor. Take me to Dartmoor. There’s money . . . saved . . . under the floor-board.
Hoskins might have absconded with the little hoard, and heaven knew he needed money, living on a clerk’s pittance. Instead, he’d not only done as Dorian asked but stayed on to look after him. He’d remained even after Dorian recovered—or seemed to.
That apparent recovery had not deluded Dorian. He’d suspected, early on, that the illness, like his mother’s years earlier, had simply been the beginning of the end.
In January, when the headaches began, his suspicions were confirmed. As the weeks passed, the attacks grew increasingly vicious, as hers had done.
The night before last, he’d wanted to bash his head against the wall.
. . . pain . . . tearing at my skull . . . couldn’t see straight . . . couldn’t think.
He understood now, fully, what his mother had meant. Even so, he would have borne the pain, would not have sent for Kneebones yesterday morning, if not for the shimmering wraith he’d seen. Then Dorian had realized something must be done—before the faint visual illusions blossomed into full-blown phantasms, as they had for his mother, and drove him to violence, as they had done her.
“I know what it is,” Dorian had told the doctor when he came yesterday. “I know it’s the same brain disease and incurable. But I had rather finish my time here, if it can be managed. I had rather not . . . end . . . precisely as my mother did, if it can possibly be helped.”
Naturally, Kneebones must satisfy himself and arrive at his own conclusions. But there was only one possible conclusion, as Dorian well knew. His mother had died within eight months of the onset of the “visual chimera”—the “ghosts” she’d begun seeing while awake, not simply in dreams, as she’d said.
Six months was the most Kneebones could promise. He said the degeneration was progressing more rapidly in Dorian’s case, thanks to “a punishingly insalubrious mode of living.”
Still, Kneebones had assured him that the violent fits could be moderated with laudanum, in large doses.
“Your father was too sparing of the laudanum, fearing overdose,” the doctor explained. “Then, when your grandfather came, he raged about my turning that unhappy woman into an opium addict. And then the fancy experts came, calling it ‘poison’ and saying it caused the hallucinations—when it was the only means of subduing them and quieting her.”
Dorian smiled now, recalling that conversation. Opiate addiction was the least of his anxieties, and an overdose, in time, might offer a welcome release.
In time, but not yet.
Outwardly, he was healthy and strong, and in Dartmoor, he’d been free of the self-loathing that had haunted him since his last year at Eton, when temptation, in the shape of a woman, had first beckoned, and he’d found he was no match for it. Here, as his mother had said, there was no temptation. When he felt the old itch and grew restless, he rode through the moors, riding long and hard, until he was exhausted.
Here he’d found a refuge. He meant to enjoy it for as long as he could.
Hearing footsteps in the hall, Dorian turned away from the window and thrust his hair back from his face. It was unfashionably long, but fashion had ceased signifying to Dorian years ago, and it certainly wouldn’t matter when he lay in his coffin.
The coffin didn’t trouble him much, either, and hadn’t for some time. He’d had months to get used to the idea of dying. Now, thanks to the promise of laudanum, his remaining anxiety was eased. The drug would stupefy him, sparing him full awareness of the wretched thing he would become, while those who looked after him needn’t fear for their lives.