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I turned to glare at him.
“Give me the ledger.”
He handed it over unhappily.
I cross-referenced the ledger account with the pallets, matching the unique number printed on each trunk to the inventory listed in the ledger. And, lo and behold, there was a discrepancy.
“The trunks scheduled for shipment nearly a week ago have not been shipped, evidently.” I said icily, slapping the ledger back into the man’s hands with violent force.
He opened his mouth to protest, but I fixed him with a look that immediately shut him up.
“You can cross reference the numbers if you like. But I am telling you that there’s been a mistake. You will have these trunks sent off now, while I watch. Unless, of course, you want me to inform Mr. Jennings of your… lackluster performance.”
He gulped, recognizing defeat, and retreated outside, carrying out my order.
After he had departed, I stood in the drafty building for a moment longer, staring at the trunks in front of me. Any anger I had felt for the man dissolved as I remembered the real reason I was here: my mother.
This whole predicament had started many years ago… indeed, shipments of opium had been arriving in this very room like clockwork since I was a mere boy, far too young to oversee their care.
My parents had taken many trips to China when I was child. So many, in fact, that I had barely seen them. Their chief business in the East was opium. At first, they were mainly involved in its trade within China. It was a dirty business, but it was profitable and dangerous – and my parents were, by all accounts of those who knew them, morally unscrupulous and bored.
At some point, my mother must have become addicted to the drug. That’s when they’d started importing opium straight to England… for her own personal use.
Opium has a way of making a person completely numb to the world. Heavy users live in a dream-like state, as if they asleep at all times, their eyes heavy and drooped and their brains dull and useless. Many times, as a child, I would run to find my mother, only to realize thatshewas totally gone. Only her body, wasting away on a divan, remained, enclosed in a thick cloud of opium smoke.
By the time I was a teenager, I didn’t bother to go to her at all. And now, well, I couldn’t even stand to be in the same house with her. She was virtually a zombie. The remembrance of her empty eyes sent a chill up my spine.
Yes, my mother was addicted to opium - and she always would be.
In my younger days, I had hoped that I could find a cure for her… discover some way to break her reliance on the drug. I’d even attended Cambridge to study medicine, hoping naively that I could learn how to save her.
But there was no cure. Had she been stopped sooner, perhaps. But after decades of abuse, the doctor’s had been clear about one thing: if she stopped using the drug now, she would die.
Her body had become so reliant on the exotic poppy, she wouldn’t survive the detoxification process.
The only solution was to ensure that she had more of the evil substance that had gotten her into this devastating state of affairs in the first place. That’s why the shipments still arrived, and why I ensured that they were sent to Bedham House, where she lived in solitude with only a few servants. All I could do was placate her.
But it killed me to do it.
By providing constant opium, I was keeping her alive – but also enabling her eventual, total destruction.
I had never told anyone about my mother. Many in the ton guessed at where she was. Dead? Abroad? Sick? Lord Turley himself had guessed at her condition, but even he had not known that she was still alive… if only barely.
No, I wouldn’t speak of it. It was almost too painful to think about.
I took one last look at the opium before striding out to oversee its shipment. I took a swig of my flask, and I was reminded of the bitter irony of my own alcoholism.
I had never really had a mother, not one that was present, anyways. I longed for the love and stability that a woman could bring to my life – but I knew that I would never it. Not because I wasn’t handsome or wealthy. I was self-aware enough to know I possessed those qualities.
But because I was a drunk and a rake.
Just like my mother, I had picked my poison.
Chapter Fifteen
Amelia
NomatterhowhardI tried, I couldn’t stop thinking about Will. I couldn’t stop replaying the events of the day before – hide and seek, the party, and the way things ended – over and over again in my head. I’d woken at daybreak, and before the birds could even begin to chirp, Will was on my mind.
