“You have your father’s shock of light hair and your mother’s lovely gray eyes,” the justice continued. “I’ve been half convinced it was really you since you walked into the courtroom.”
The lord chief justice cleared the surprise out of his throat before rapping his gavel to silence the wave of whispered exclamations echoing in the hall. “Nothing is final until I have the writ of the Queen,” he said. “But I don’t think I’m presumptuous in offering my congratulations, Lady Farah Leigh Blackwell, Countess Northwalk.”
“Thank you, my lord justice!” Farah’s face split into a smile so wide it made her cheeks ache. She turned to Dorian and threw her arms around him. “Thank you!”
He stiffened inside her embrace and she remembered herself, pulling away quickly. She didn’t dare look up at him just then, remembering he was still angry about something. Reaching for him in this public forum couldn’t have helped the situation.
“Arrest this woman, Lucy Boggs, and hold her for investigation,” Rowe commanded.
The lord chief justice leaned over his desk toward Farah. “May I ask you, Lady Blackwell, just where you have been all this time?”
“I—took a job at Scotland Yard under an assumed name,” she answered honestly.
“Why in God’s name would you do that?” he asked with an incredulous laugh.
Dorian cut in. “My lord, I’ve brought two more witnesses who would speak to an evil conspiracy on the part of Sir Warrington. Lady Blackwell was in hiding because she knew he was a threat to her life. My agent Christopher Argent and Inspector McTavish of Scotland Yard are both willing to testify that Warrington approached them about payment for the assassination of Lady Blackwell. I request he be arrested—for his own safety as well as hers,” he added.
“So ordered!” The lord chief justice banged his gavel one last time. “And may I add my congratulations to you both on your nuptials?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Dorian looked out of the third-story window of his London home and pondered the storm clouds gathering over Hyde Park. He’d tried to open the window and let in the cool wind of the approaching storm, but the ancient, wrought-iron lock handle had been stuck in the upright position for so many decades it may as well have been welded.
He ached for Ben More. For the concealing mists and the untamed sea. For the cold stone fortress whose halls he haunted at night like a restless spirit. There were too many people down there in the city. Too much color and noise, pleasure and pain, need and want and movement. Chaos in its purest form. So many suffered bereft of care. So many lived without a name. So many died, everyone died.
Even the powerful Dorian Blackwell. Though he’d made a name that was recognized in every corner of the realm and beyond, one day fate would pay him back for all the trouble he’d caused. And the empire would churn on, expanding and accumulating. Perhaps reaching to encompass the world, somehow. It wasn’t impossible. With their intrepid and enterprising cousins across the pond to the west, and their far-reaching interests in the east, perhaps in a hundred years or so, they’d all be connected. The economy would expand. Telegraphs would improve. Technology advance. And the world would become a small and manageable place, nothing but a ball trapped in the hands of greedy men like him until they closed their fists and crushed it.
And where did that leave him? What part of that inevitability did he control? More than most. Less than he’d like. A truly insignificant amount in the grand, global, eternal scheme of things. Damned irritating, that. The more one conquered, the more conquest was presented. Where did it end?
Taking his eye patch off, Dorian scrubbed his tired eyes and plunged his hands through his hair, scoring his scalp in frustration before leaning against the windowpane on one outstretched hand.
He’d done this for as long as he could remember. Controlled, dominated, and manipulated all those within his purview. First Newgate. Then Whitechapel, stretching his influence to the entire East End. It was never enough. None of his victories had ever made him feel safe or satiated his incessant need for more. Not manipulating members of Parliament. Not fixing judicial appointments or socially and economically crushing members of the peerage. Not reaching across the Atlantic and dominating Wall Street.
What was left to take? Without a Napoleonic motion of conquest on a corporate and imperial scope, he’d reached a sort of pinnacle.
And he felt as lowly as he ever had.
A blue eye reflected at him from the windowpane. The ghost of a boy long dead, and yet who lived on. Perhaps not in name, or perhaps in name only.
Who knew anymore?
For at this moment Dorian realized that, though he controlled the machinations of so much, he’d lost control of one small, four-chambered organ. One whose existence had been in doubt until now. It wasn’t that the Blackheart of Ben More hadn’t been born with a heart. It was that he’d not been in possession of it for nearly twenty long years.
And he had to abandon it, before the one who held it uncovered the secret buried within.
A tingle at the base of his neck and a quickening of his blood alerted him to her approach before the rustle of her skirts swept into the long solar.
“Dorian?”
A distant growl of thunder answered her. He didn’t.
Of course, Farah was never one to be deterred by brooding, scowling men. Damn her. She moved closer when she should flee. She soothed when she should scold. It had always been thus.
“Dorian, I know you’re cross with me,” she began. “Today was quite a victory, and I’d like to celebrate it as friends.”