“That was surprisingly solicitous of you,” Jeremy drawled.
“I do care for this family, unlike you,” Grégoire retorted. “If you marry Lady Boadicea, you will injure her the next time you fall into a fit. You will damage your wife, and quite possibly your children as well. You might kill them.”
Jeremy clenched his teeth together. It wasn’t a solution to kill his cousin, though it felt like a necessity. “Just to clarify, you didn’t know I was in Bedlam until Parth rescued me?”
“Certainly not. I dislike interfering in matters of the heart,” Grégoire said with a pious smirk, “but I feel that the duke ought to be informed of the particulars of your stay amongst the madmen. Any father would wish to know of it.”
“‘Amongst the madmen,’” Jeremy echoed. “Nice phrase.” He gave Grégoire a flat look, a soldier’s warning.
His cousin paled slightly. “I could bring the attendants to Lindow Castle to talk to His Grace,” he said shrilly. “No man would allow his daughter to marry a man with a tendency toward violent fits. You don’t remember what happened, do you?”
Jeremy didn’t. It bothered him, the gap in his memory that stretched from the sound of exploding fireworks to waking in Parth’s house.
“You can’t risk it,” Grégoire said, ladling compassion into his voice, as if he thought Jeremy was agonizing over the experience. “You would be destroyed, cousin, if you injured your wife or children. Yet the damage caused by war is irredeemable.” He reached out to the book he had been reading. “This doctor attributes such effects to cardiac damage. Soldiers can be suddenly stricken with visions of warriors attacking them. They do the same to their loved ones, unbeknownst to themselves.”
Grégoire decided to demonstrate his ability to read. “They raise a wild cry as if their throats were being cut even then and there. They fight as bitterly as if they were gnawed by the fangs of panthers or of fierce lions.”
It was a valid concern so Jeremy thought about it while Grégoire amused himself by reading aloud more depictions of soldiers in extremis.
Jeremy had no doubt but that some men did experience illusions and respond to them violently. Yet he had been surprised by the charge that he had been violent to the point of needing a straitjacket. On the other hand, he hadn’t bothered to investigate. Likely all patients were restrained, and complaints about violence made things easier for the attendants.
He didn’t believe it, in his case: not because he was incapable of violence, but because no one had reported dead attendants.
If his experience at war had taught him anything, it was how to kill in hand-to-hand combat. It was a skill he wished he didn’t have, but too late. If he had truly believed he was facing enemy combatants, at least one attendant would have died and most likely three to four.
Grégoire’s artful disclosure that attendants had actually described fighting with him suggested that the truth was different from what he’d been told. Jeremy held up his hand, and his cousin stopped reading mid-sentence.
Then he leaned forward and smiled, showing his teeth. Grégoire actually flinched, which showed some sense. “What do you want?”
“I want to preserve the Thurrock line!” Grégoire shrilled. “You—you are not fit. You have never been fit. A future marquess shouldn’t go to war, risking everything. You could have died when your colonel deserted—”
He stopped.
“How did you know that?” Jeremy asked, his voice grating. “The general buried the question of desertion. The official story is that conflicting orders left my platoon alone on the battlefield, and I told no one but my father.”
Grégoire shrugged. “You really think that secrets remain secrets?”
It was a good answer. Grégoire could have bribed someone, which would have been easy enough.
The issue was irrelevant.
“I did not fight the attendants, and I will never injure my wife,” Jeremy said, pacing the words so that Grégoire could not miss the import. “Nor my children. I don’t know what happened in Bedlam, but I don’t believe I was violent.”
“Your confidence in yourself is touching but meaningless, since you have no memory of the episode,” Grégoire scoffed. “You are not a reliable witness and I am quite certain the duke will agree with me.”
Jeremy was certain that the duke would consider the lack of dead bodies a clue—besides, a bribed attendant could be bribed again to tell the truth.
“What’s more,” Grégoire said, “it wasn’t the only time, was it? You lost consciousness during that episode with Lady Diana’s mother. After you were shot, you showed little sign of knowing where you were. The grooms felt you might have attacked the entire party if a well-placed order from Lord Northbridge had not jolted you back to yourself.”
Yet he remembered everything of that afternoon, from the shot, to the rushing noise in his ears, to his own violent—verbal—reaction.
“They’d never heard such blasphemy,” Grégoire said. “Like a beast, they said. In front of ladies too! Your eyes were blank, and you only came to yourself when Lord Northbridge barked an order.”
It was true. Luckily he had the strong feeling that no language would startle Betsy, if that part of the episode recurred.
“Men have killed their wives, even strangled their babes in similar fits. They find themselves back in the heat of battle. They smell the smoke of gunpowder, when there is none. They think they are in a field strewn with dead bodies and hostile soldiers. I can show you a book if you wish.”
“No, thanks,” Jeremy said. “I regret the pain those men experience, but my reactions are not as extreme.”
“If you’re so certain, you should demonstrate it,” Grégoire spat.
They’d reached the crux of the matter, the reason Grégoire asked for this meeting.
“How would I do that?”
“I can prove that you pose a risk to your wife and even your unborn children,” Grégoire said. He reached down to a case by his chair and pulled out a pistol. Before he was conscious of moving, Jeremy had the pistol in his right hand and Grégoire’s wrist in his left.
“What are you doing?” his cousin cried.
Jeremy moved back a step, dropping Grégoire’s wrist. Grégoire began shaking it as if his bones had been crushed. “I’m looking at a man who wants my title; why would I allow you to wield a weapon in my presence?”
“I’m trying to help!” Grégoire squealed. “I don’t need your money. I never have. I speak this truth for the good of the family. You’re a menace to those you love, and all I want to do is demonstrate it.”
“By shooting me.” It wasn’t a question.
“Of course not!” Grégoire’s eyes bulged with indignation.
Jeremy actually believed him. Grégoire was a monster, but a sneaky one. Probably not a murderer. At least, not face-to-face. Murder left a mark on a man that he recognized, even if the death happened on a battlefield.
He looked down at the pistol. “What the hell are you thinking, keeping a loaded gun in the castle?”