The words pierced through him.
She loved him and he would never emerge from this prison.
He’d gone mad. No other explanation for this darkness and these delusions. For the rest of his life, he’d always be searching for the lavender scent of her hair and the turquoise color of her eyes.
Not knowing why.
Just searching, as his father searched for orchids everywhere.
Finding orchids in the cotton stuffing of chairs.
Mistaking dandelions for rare blooms. Or even, once, a tuft of white hair the duke snatched from his hairbrush. Holding it up, so proud.
Lovely things, the coelogynes, he’d said, stroking the puff of hair.
Soft, yet hardy. I brought these back from eastern India. Tolerate drought and neglect, and flower faithfully—snow-white or emerald-green with black stripes. Scent like a freshly peeled orange.
Nick had dutifully sniffed, gulping back emotion. Wanting to cry.
Never allowing himself to cry.
That’s how Nick would be with Alice. He’d see her everywhere. Hear her voice everywhere. He’d feel her soft hand on his cheek.
She kissed him. Holding him like a punishment for everything bad he’d ever done. It was a punishment because her love would torment him the most. Her love was his final error.
The darkness came again then, blotting her out, snuffing her voice to silence.
His bright, curious Alice. His greatest mistake.
Chapter 29
It is only, moreover, when she is certain that she is truly loved, and that her lover is indeed devoted to her, and will not change his mind, that she should then give herself up to him.
The Kama Sutra of Vātsyāyana
The next few days passed in a blur of carrying on with life, while her heart and mind lay sleeping in the bed with the still unconscious Nick.
Patrick came to report that he’d had Coleman arrested for attempted murder and he was being held in jail awaiting trial.
Lear assured her that Jane was halfway to Scotland now and safe from pursuit.
Alice sat with Nick every day, as she was sitting now, in a chair beside his bed, holding his hand, reading to him, crushing lavender and soothing it over his temples.
Kali liked to sleep curled up against Nick’s side. She was here now, sniffing Nick’s cheek inquisitively.
“He’ll come back to us, Kali,” Alice said. “He must.”
Dr. Forster entered the bedchamber for his daily visit. Even though his medical specialty was lunacy, Alice wouldn’t allow another physician to tend Nick. She trusted the doctor completely.
“How is he today?” Dr. Forster asked.
“The same.”
“Please go out, Lady Hatherly. You’ll make yourself sick and he needs you strong and healthy when he recovers.”
“You think he will come out of this?”
“I have seen patients in a comatose state for months that suddenly recovered. Now go outside. The sun is shining. You’ll do him no good if you are weak with an illness.”
Reluctantly, Alice left the bedchamber.
She walked the path to the orchid conservatory.
She hadn’t been out of doors in days. The sun felt like a kiss on her cheeks.
She found the duke in the conservatory with Berthold, tending his orchids.
“How is he?” Berthold whispered with worried eyes.
“The same. But the doctor said I needed to come outside and enjoy the air. So here I am.”
“It will do you good, my dear,” said the duke. “Remember the orchid you helped me water last week? See what you did? Isn’t she lovely?”
Alice knelt on her knees to have a closer look.
The orchid’s beauty almost hurt her.
The perfect swooping formation of the five overlapping petals, the cup in the center with its two symmetrical tendrils, the small bud inside bordered by very precise marking like the stripes on Kali’s flanks.
The petals weren’t uniformly purple, but crisscrossed with a spider’s webbing of violet veins, like the veins visible beneath the skin of her wrist.
She loved those flowers with the fierce awe of possession.
She had helped create this beauty and now it was here, in this world, a burst of velvet purple and a secret spiraling darkness inside.
Several more small buds, as long as the distance from her nail to her knuckle, were close to opening. The power to form blossoms surged in the roots of the plant, replete with life and possibilities.
The duke handed her a watering can. “Why don’t you water it, my dear? Remember, only a small amount of water. And don’t leave even one drop on the petals or the leaves. They don’t like that.”
Alice tended the orchid, giving it a nice soaking drink and wiping the waxy green leaves dry with her skirts.
Some of the root tendrils curled straight up into the air instead of down.
Dr. Forster had been right. Being here with such beauty was good and right.