Captives of the Night Read Online Free PDF

acquaintances moved in more exclusive circles than her Parisian ones. Here, the position of a bourgeois female artist was far more tenuous, and Francis' increasing profligacy wasn't calculated to strengthen it.
    He had plenty of friends. The English upper classes, too, bred debauchees in abundance. But they were increasingly disinclined to invite him to their homes and respectable assembly halls to dine and dance with their womenfolk. Since Society would not invite the husband, it could not, with very rare exceptions, invite the wife.
    Leila was too busy, though, to feel lonely, and it was futile to fret about Francis' worsening behavior. In any case, being shut away from the world made it easier to disassociate herself from his vices and villainies.
    Or so she thought until a week before Christmas, when the Earl of Sherburne — one of Francis' constant companions and husband of her latest portrait subject — entered the studio.
    The portrait of Lady Sherburne wasn't yet dry. Leila had finished it only that morning. Nonetheless, he insisted on paying for it then — and in gold. Then it was his, to do with as he wished. And so, Leila could only watch in numb horror while he took a stickpin to his wife's image and, with cold, furious strokes, mutilated it.
    Leila's brain wasn't numb, though. She understood he wasn't attacking her work, but his evidently unfaithful wife. Leila had no trouble deducing that Francis had cuckolded him, and she needed no details of the affair to realize that this time Francis had crossed some dangerous line.
    She also saw, with devastating clarity, that the wall between her life and her husband's had been breached as well. In alienating Sherburne, Francis had put her in peril… and she was trapped. If she remained with him, his scandals would jeopardize her career; but if she ran away, he could destroy it utterly. He need only reveal the truth about her father, and she'd be ruined.
    He'd never threatened her openly. He didn't need to. Leila understood
his rules
well enough. He wouldn't force her to sleep with him because it was too damned much of a nuisance to fight with her. All the same, she was his exclusive property; she wasn't to sleep with anyone eke, and she wasn't to leave.
    All she could do was retreat as far as possible.
    She said nothing of the incident, hoping Sherburne's pride would keep him silent as well.
    She ceased painting portraits, claiming she was overworked and needed a rest.
    Francis, lost in his own drink and opiate-clouded world, never noticed.
    For Christmas, he gave her a pair of ruby and diamond eardrops, which she dutifully donned for the hour he remained at home, then threw into her jewel box with the previous nine years' accumulation of expensively meaningless trinkets.
    She spent New Year's Eve with Fiona at the Kent estate of Philip Woodleigh, one of Fiona's ten siblings.
    Upon returning home on New Year's Day, Leila heard Francis angrily shouting for servants who'd been given the day off. When she went up to his room to remind him, she discovered, with no great surprise, that he'd had his own New Year's Eve celebration — mainly in that room, judging by the stench of stale perfume, smoke, and wine that assaulted her when she reached the threshold.
    Sickened, she left the house and took a walk, down Great Ormond Street, onto Conduit Street, and on past the Foundling Hospital. Behind its large garden two burial grounds lay side by side, allotted respectively to the parishes of St. George the Martyr and St. George, Bloomsbury. She knew not a soul interred in either. That was why she came. These London residents couldn't disturb her, even with a memory. She'd escaped here many times in recent months.
    She had wandered restlessly among the tombstones for an hour or more when David found her. David Ives, Marquess of Avory, was the Duke of Langford's heir. David was four and twenty, handsome, wealthy, intelligent and, to her exasperation, one of Francis' most devoted