Read Online A Soul of Steel by Carole Nelson Douglas - Free Book Online

to approach the bed. “My wife always speaks the serious truth, but often spouts ambiguities, like the Oracle. She means that she and I are wrongfully presumed dead and that we have not sought to correct that mistake. In my case, at least, it does not matter, as I was virtually anonymous before the misunderstanding occurred.”
    “And”— the man looked into my eyes for the first time— “is... Miss Huxleigh in truth the household terror your wife implies?”
    “Miss Huxleigh is a stalwart member of the company, but at times her stringent standards do terrify my wife... a little, as I believe Irene meant to intimidate you into saying what you may wish to keep to yourself.”
    “What of this deliberate death she spoke of?”
    Irene wasted no words. “Poison,” she said. “Borne on the prick of a hatpin. You were infected in the crowd before Notre Dame, but I believe your chronic fever foiled the toxin by forcing your body to perspire it away before it could do its damage.”
    The man laughed. “Yes, it’s hard for civilized toxins to harm a system that has been suckled at the breast of hellish Afghan and Indian plains for over a decade. I have quinine rather than blood in my veins by now.”
    Godfrey frowned and drew another side chair to the foot of the bed. “News of this attempted murder does not surprise you?”
    Hazel eyes burned in the bezel of that lean, dark face. “Living in India—not as the White Man does, in separate settlements and cool hill-stations, but as the native does—is a form of attempted murder far more serious than poisoned hatpins, sir.”
    “Oh, you must tell us your story,” Irene ordered rapturously, “but first you must explain yourself to poor, dear Penelope. She has suffered enough confusion.”
    I wanted to die of mortification as those hazel eyes searched mine. He seemed to look only at me, and deeply into me. “Do you not know me, Miss Huxleigh?”
    “I—I believe that I do.”
    “Do you wish to know more?”
    “I believe that Irene is right. I believe that I must know.”
    He sighed, spread his brown hands on the coverlet and examined them with a kind of weary wonder. “You have before you a dead man, too, Mr. and Mrs. Norton, in everything but the fact of my breathing despite all attempts to end it—my own and others’. In my youth, I was the flower of English gentility, one of hundreds of sturdy blossoms stripped from the bush of England at their peak and exported to a foreign clime. I was sent off to war in a smart uniform with scarlet trousers, with white-gloved hands. With no blood on anything but my morning razor.”
    “Who were you, in this world of long ago?” Irene wondered.
    He studied the figured coverlet, as if its loose-woven hummocks and valleys were an unfamiliar landscape from which he could not tear his eyes.
    I found myself answering for him, saying the words he had lost the will to affirm. It has often been my role in life to act for others in this fashion, but at no time has it been more difficult.
    “Young Mr. Stanhope,” I said, my voice remarkably clear, remarkably formal, as if I were announcing him to the Queen. “Mr. Emerson Stanhope of Grosvenor Square.”
    “Stanhope.” Godfrey raised a raven eyebrow. “It’s an honored name in the Temple.”
    “And so it shall remain as long as I stay lost and forgotten. But now... I must venture from the foreign bolt-holes in which I have hidden for so long.” He glanced at me. “And I fear I will bring pain and disgrace upon those who have known me.” A flush of color surfaced again in the hollows of those sunken cheeks.
    “How do you mean ‘disgrace’?” Irene probed.
    “That bitter battle is long forgotten. If I survived, others as deserving died that day. Others even more deserving had their reputations tarnished far beyond what the mere metal of medals and history books can honor. I was content to let the dead lie unavenged, coward that I am. Now I fear that a living man will pay