Free The Bride Wore Pearls by Liz Carlyle Page B

across the roofline opposite. Leaning into the glass, he savored the coolness that radiated from it. Up and down in the street below, he could see the bankers and the barristers alighting from their carriages and going up the steps to kiss their children or take a glass of wine with their wives.
    Soon, however, the doors and carriages would fall silent. Then, in another hour, the Commons would recess for dinner and a second wave would begin. It was upper-middle-class Britain at its most industrious—which was to say, not very—and Lazonby had no more part in it than he did in his own so-called class.
    He had lived too long in a different world, forgotten the comforts and petty follies of an ordinary life, and become more comfortable there than here. He belonged with people more like himself; the self he had become after long years spent, both emotionally and literally, in the desert. He’d been twice imprisoned, and in between those years, he’d steeped himself in blood and debauchery. He did not belong with someone like Anisha—or her two impressionable young children.
    So it was easier, then, to simply not think of what might have been and live only with what was . What had to be done. And as he swirled about what was left of the cloudy green liquid in his glass, he forced his attention to the fact that he never had made it to Quartermaine’s.
    For a moment he considered dressing and heading back across Westminster for the evening. Though he was no longer the infamous gamester he’d once been—Hanging Nick Napier had cured that habit—Lazonby still felt drawn to the hells. To the elegant atmosphere. The hope and desperation. The faces feverish with excitement, or deathly pale with dread. And then there were the women, so beautifully befeathered and beribboned, and trained to urge a chap on; to encourage him to part with just another sou—for this one, this one, would surely be the charm.
    But he did not go. L’heure verte, along with its inevitable languor, was upon him now, and Lazonby could think of nothing save Lady Anisha Stafford. Of the hopelessness of it all.
    He drained the glass, his fourth, perhaps, then plucked another lump of sugar from the silver bowl and perched it delicately atop the pierced spoon to begin the process again. He watched the liquid emeralds drip through it to pool like sweet poison in the bell of his glass. Then came the water, and the swirling nebulousness that reminded him of life itself; so sharp and clear one moment, so utterly obscure the next, all its many truths hidden in a milky, celadon haze.
    He drank it down, knowing, of course, that the absinthe had already affected him, and that what seemed a brilliant insight was little more than the ramblings of a madman’s mind. But he scarcely cared. In time, the bottle became half empty, his carafe of water the same, and Lazonby had no memory of the glass which followed—or the one after that.
    When he did not go down to dinner, a servant brought up a tray, which sat forgotten. Vaguely he recalled hearing a clock strike midnight. He must have gone to bed thereafter, for at some point he began to reemerge into pitch darkness, caught in the tentacles of an all-too-familiar dream.
    He was on the gallows again, the noose growing tighter and tighter. And this time there was no brace beneath his collar. No trick knot to slow it. He realized in a panic that Sutherland was not there. That the priest wore instead a hooded cloak, eyes burning like the coals of hell. He fought to force his lungs to work and failed. He felt death slip nigh.
    And then the noose softened, relented, and became something else altogether, and he was floating above, looking down at himself. He lay naked across a bed, caught in a tangle of sheets as he stroked himself. The rough rope had become a silken cord. Coldwater lay naked beside him, his hand slowly drawing down the knot, watching Lazonby’s face almost lovingly as he choked the breath of life from his body.