The Duke’s Perfect Wife (MacKenzies & McBrides #4)(36)
Author: Jennifer Ashley

He is still Ian, and he isn’t. He sits in silence, not answering when we speak to him, not even looking around when we address him. He is somewhere inside, trapped by years of pain, frustration, and out-and-out torture. I do not know if he resents me for not helping him sooner, or if he is grateful to me for bringing him home—or if he even knows he’s home. Curry, Ian’s valet, says he behaves no differently here as he had there. Ian eats, dresses, and sleeps without prodding and without help, but it’s as though he’s an automaton taught the motions of living as a human being, with no real knowledge of it.

I try to reach him, I truly try. And I can’t. I’ve brought home a shell of my brother, and it’s killing me.

Hart folded that letter and opened the last with slow fingers. This one was dated 1874, a month or so before the letter about Ian. The pages were still crisp, the ink black, and he knew every word of it by heart.

My dearest El,

My father is dead. You will have heard of his death already, but the rest of it I must confess or go mad. You are the only one I can think to tell, the only one I can trust to keep my secrets.

I will deliver this by my most trusted messenger into your hands alone. I urge you to burn it after reading—that is if your unshakable curiosity makes you open a letter from the hated Hart at all, instead of putting it straight into the fire.

I shot him, El.

I had to. He was going to kill Ian.

You once asked me why I let Ian live in that asylum, where doctors paraded him like a trained dog or used him for their strange experiments. I let him stay because, in spite of it all, he was safer there than he could be anywhere. Safe from my father. Whatever they did to him at the asylum is nothing compared to what my father could have done. I’ve long known that if I managed to talk Father into taking Ian out of it, Ian would only end up in a worse place, perhaps entirely out of my reach and at my father’s mercy.

Thank God the Kilmorgan servants are more loyal to me than they were to Father. Our majordomo approached me one day with what a housemaid had told him—that she’d overheard my father whispering to a man that he would pay him to slip into the asylum and kill Ian, by whatever quiet method the man chose.

As I listened to the majordomo report this horror, I realized that I could no longer wait to act.

I believed the truth of what the housemaid had overheard, because I knew that my father was capable of such a thing. It was nothing to do with Ian’s madness. You see, Ian witnessed my father commit a crime.

Ian told me about it in bits and pieces over the years, until I finally put together the entire truth. What Ian saw was my father killing my mother.

The way Ian described the incident, I don’t believe Father intended to kill her, but his violence certainly caused her death. He grabbed my mother and shook her by her neck, until that neck snapped.

Father found Ian crouched behind the desk and knew he’d seen it all. The next day Ian was hauled to London to sit before a commission for lunacy. Ian had always been half mad, but facing the commission was beyond him, and of course, they declared him insane. The action saved my father—if Ian were declared mad by a commission, then whatever story Ian told about my mother’s death would likely not be believed.

At the time, I had no idea of any of this, but I fought my father’s decision. In vain—Ian was taken straight to the asylum, where my father had prepared a place for him in advance by paying them an obscene amount of money. I wasn’t yet old enough or experienced enough to know how to defeat him. I simply did all I could to make Ian comfortable where he was, as did Mac and Cam.

Of late, for some reason, Father began to believe that Ian was going to expose him. Perhaps Ian had grown more coherent about the incident, perhaps one of the doctors reported to my father that Ian was talking about his mother’s death—I never learned. In the end, I assume that my father feared someone at last believing Ian’s words and investigating. So he set his plan in motion.

I stopped that plan; I stopped it dead in its tracks. I found the men in my father’s pay, and I paid them to go far away. I sent my own people to guard Ian and had all missives from the asylum waylaid and passed to me.

My father found out and raged at me, but I knew he would try again. And again. My father was a ruthless man, as you know, selfish to the point of madness. I started proceedings to release Ian from the asylum into my guardianship, but the process was slow, and I feared my father would find a way around me before Ian was safe.

I knew I had to confront my father, to stop him for good.

One evening, two weeks ago, I went to his study at Kilmorgan. Father was well drunk, which was nothing unusual for that time of day. I told him that Ian had confided the story of our mother’s death to me and that I believed it. I told him that I was perfectly willing to testify to the truth of it, and I told him that I had put plans in motion to get Ian’s commission of lunacy reversed.

My father listened as one stunned, then he tried to attack me. But I am no longer a terrified little boy or a fearful youth, he was drunk, and I easily bested him.

He was surprised when I punched him full in the face. He’d trained me to be his obedient slave, to let him beat me any time he wished and to not shed a tear over the pain. He said he’d done it to make me strong. He’d made me strong all right, and now he was understanding how strong.

At the same time I started proceedings to have Ian’s commission reversed, I’d had my man of business draw up documents for a trust, one that divided the current wealth of the dukedom and the Mackenzie family into four equal pieces, one for each son, Ian included. The documents also give me custody of Ian, making Ian’s fate mine to decide.

Father railed against me, of course, but my man of business had done a thorough job. With one stroke of a pen, my brothers would be free, and Father’s money would be given to the sons he despised.

He shouted at me and told me he’d kill me, told me he’d kill my brothers and see us in hell. I had to threaten him with violence, and I do not want to tell you about what I had to do. It is enough to say that, in the end, he signed the document and regarded me in stark fear. I’d become a monster, in his eyes, but I am only the monster he created.

I gave the papers at once to my man of business’s courier, who was waiting outside. He took one copy to Edinburgh and one copy to London, and there they both reside.

My father raged until he fell into a stupor and was put to bed. The next day, he strode out with his shotgun, saying he was going after a buck. He took the ghillie along, but I didn’t trust him not to double back, get himself and the shotgun onto a horse, and ride across country to the asylum where Ian still resided.