Fool Me Twice by Meredith Duran Read Free Book Online Page A

grave. Drunk, enraged, he’d cursed the life in the garden.
    Now, on a late October morning, he woke to silence. The garden was dead. He could feel its sterility. Its silence pressed against the curtained windows like a fist ready to explode through the glass.
    The silence, so loud, bore a message for him: he had missed something crucial, let it pass by. Now it would never return for him.
    He rose. (Why? What point?) The long mirror atophis dressing table showed a lean face and sunken eyes, the face of a starving wolf. “Damn you,” he said to the mirror. His eyes burned; his lip curled, exposing teeth.
    Once, he wielded this sneer in Parliament, a handy tool to silence his opponents. Now it functioned only to silence himself.
    He resisted it. “Will you not go outside?” he snapped.
    Outside: a crush of eyes to watch him. Countless mouths poised to spread news of him. Look at what he has become. England’s hope, they once called him. Thoughts of that world, the eyes, the mouths, swarmed over him, nested in his chest, and grew heavy like stone. It crushed the breath from his lungs to think of the world outside.
    In the world’s memory, he was a statesman. Not a fool or a cuckold, not a man whose hubris had blinded him to his own idiocy.
    Let the world remember that other man, then—even if, in retrospect, he had always been a lie, after all.
    Kneeling, Alastair commenced his calisthenics. Twelve years ago, drunk at a pub in Oxford, his friends had paid an old soldier to show them his mettle. He had led them through his army routine, and none of them—save the soldier—had gotten through it without puking.
    That might have been owed to the alcohol. But the routine was punishing. As Alastair pushed himself off the ground, there seemed to be nothing but bile in him. He welcomed the sensation. He had followed this routine for four weeks now, needing the exhaustion that followed. Exhaustion was the only cure for this acid in his veins, the restlessness that built like ground glass, the rage .
    Once finished, his labored breath searing his throat, he laid his forehead atop his drawn-up knees and let the sweat cool on his skin. Here, now, only now, once a day,was the game he would allow himself to play, having earned it with physical exertion:
    This silence might be any silence. This time, any time.
    It is four years ago, or five. The beginning of it all. His wife is dressing in the adjoining apartment. If her mood is happy, then she sings to herself as she tries on jewels. She is dressing for a party. Every night brings parties: a politician requires friends, resources to use and abuse.
    Perhaps the party is here. Margaret is an excellent hostess, as celebrated for it as her husband is for his good deeds, his noble causes, his leadership. You chose very wisely, someone has told him. She will make a fine wife for a prime minister one day. How the compliment gratifies him. How well Margaret looks on his arm, and how cleverly she converses.
    But it cannot be four years ago. It must be five. Four years ago, Fellowes returned to town. And there it began. Fellowes, Nelson, Barclay, Bertram . . .
    Alastair lifted his head. He was done with this mantra, these names of the men with whom she betrayed him. He had read her letters so many times now that he might have recited them like soliloquies, speeches from some lewd and puerile script.
    My husband is a fool; he has no inkling of who I am, what I do.
    He believes the bill will pass, I tell you. But he worried last night that Dawkins would waver, if only somebody knew to push him. So go find Dawkins, and promise him a few coins, and the bill will die on the floor.
    I lie next to my husband at night and burn for you . . . I imagine his hands are yours, and then I open my eyes and want to wretch . . .
    He stared at the broken shards of glass along the baseboard. Why were they there? After a moment, it came to him: these were the remnants of the bottle he’d thrown . . .