The duchess sighed and set her tea on the table. “Henry, I think you had better lie down. I’ll call for Ellsworth.”
“No, Mama. I’ve been going over and over it in my mind, and I must tell someone.” Someone who wouldn’t call the men from Bedlam to cart him away. “Do you remember when Papa sent me to St. Andrew’s?”
“I do. It was our last resort.”
Henry didn’t doubt it. Even as a child, he’d liked to take risks. Such behavior was one of the reasons he had trouble at school. Prestigious schools like Eton and Harrow wanted pupils who would toe the line. They valued discipline and conformity. Even at thirty, Henry wouldn’t have counted either trait among his strongest. He didn’t know if he ever would possess those qualities. If the headmaster at St. Andrew’s hadn’t managed to beat them into him, what hope was there? The beatings or the isolation of that part of Scotland might have broken his spirit if he hadn’t had Rory and King with him. Together the three of them wreaked enough havoc to find themselves on the receiving end of the headmaster’s rod at least once a week.
“You remember my friends Rory and King?”
“Ah, the Marquess of Kingston? The one whose father is in the Tower for treason? I do hope you are not still calling him a friend.”
Henry was indeed still calling him a friend, though he didn’t know if King felt the same way. King had asked him for help, and Henry had ended up losing everything and leaving London without even telling his friend goodbye. Fat lot of help he had been.
“We must have been about thirteen at the time, and I don’t remember whose idea it was, but we decided to play a prank on the local witch.”
“There was a local witch? I very much doubt that. The Scots can be very superstitious. My grandmother was Scottish.”
Henry would have agreed with her about it being mere superstition a few days ago. He might have looked back and felt sorry for that old woman. She was obviously poor and had enough troubles without a gaggle of schoolboys calling her a witch and spreading rumors about her.
But after what he’d seen at White’s, Henry wasn’t so sure that gaggle had been wrong. “Just hear me out, Mama. I swear I’ve been cursed.”
His mother took what sounded like a very deep breath.
“I must have been about thirteen, and I don’t know who first came up with the idea. You know how boys are once a dare is issued. But before I knew what was what, King, Rory, and I were on our way to the witch’s hovel to steal her whiskey.”
“Oh, Henry. No.”
Henry felt a rush of shame, the same shame he’d felt a hundred times when remembering what he’d done. “I am an idiot. Yes, you’ve said as much. I was more of an idiot then. We stole the cask and were on our way back with it, but somehow it slipped and fell. The wood splintered and the whiskey spilled everywhere. I remember it was pouring rain, so the ground might have been slippery. We didn’t mean to drop it. In any case, the witch—er, the whiskey’s owner—appeared and began to curse us. And I don’t mean with expletives.”
Thinking back, Henry remembered the evening as equally hilarious and terrifying. For months afterward, he’d feared the witch’s curse and expected lightning from the heavens to rain down on him any moment.
But nothing had happened.
Until that night at White’s.
“I honestly didn’t think much of it again, except, of course, to contemplate my wrongdoing and vow never to do so again.”
“I’m sure.” His mother sounded dubious.
“But on the night I wagered the town house, I saw her again.”
“At your club? Have the rules at White’s changed? I didn’t think women were allowed.”
Henry rubbed at the dull ache in the center of his forehead that had plagued him for days now. It seemed to be spreading behind his eyes. He probably should lie down, but not until after he told his mother his suspicions. “I didn’t see her in the club proper. She was, er, in the fireplace.”
His mother blinked.
“In the, er, fire.”
“Have you added hashish to your list of vices now?”
“No, Mama. I was not even drunk. At first, I thought I’d had some bad brandy, but I couldn’t stop thinking that she looked familiar. And then that night or the next, I dreamed about her. In my dream, she was chanting the same curse she’d been chanting in the fireplace.”
“She was not only in the hearth at the club, she was also chanting?”
“Yes.”
“What did the other gentlemen say or do when they saw her or heard her?”
