Page 61 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

“Nothing I am ashamed of.”

“That is not an answer, and you know it is not, which is precisely why you offered it.” She set down her spoon. “The child came in at near midnight in a man’s greatcoat, on Selby’s arm, white as the cloth and not able to say a word. Selby will tell me nothing, because Selby would walk into the sea before she carried your business to me. You came in by the back stair and shut yourself in your study. And this morning your wife will not speak, will not eat, will not weep, and has sat at her window since it was light. What have you done?”

“I have done nothing to her. A thing was done to her, and I prevented the worst of it, and that is the whole of what I will tell you, because the rest is hers and not mine to give away, even to you.”

Augusta searched his face a long moment, and found, evidently, that she believed him, and that the believing did not comfort her at all.

“Then it was the officer. The name you would not give me weeks ago.”

“It does not matter whose name. He will not trouble her again, in this world or very likely the next.”

“Names always matter, that is the whole of my point, and you have gone through your life behaving as though they did not.” But the heat had gone out of it. “She thinks she has ruined herself. She thinks you despise her. She will not be told otherwise by me, because I do not know the half of it and she will not let me near the rest.”

Theodore set down his own spoon. His soup went cold in front of him, and he was quiet for the space of three of his aunt’s breaths.

“Do not leave her alone today, Augusta. Whatever else. Sit in the room with her if she will have you, and outside the door if she will not. I shall not be at dinner.”

“You will not go to her yourself.”

“No.”

“Theodore, the child needs to hear it from you, and soon.”

“She went to that folly to be chosen by another man, because she has spent two months in this house believing no one ever chose her.” He heard his own voice and did not soften it. “If I go to her now, today, while it is raw, she will hear whatever I say as a sentence read over her head. I have been a sentence read over that girl since the day her brother sold her to me. I will not be one more man standing above her telling her what she is. When she is ready she will know where I am.”

“And how clever of you,” Augusta said, “to have arranged it so that being ready is left entirely to her, when the rest of it was arranged entirely by you.”

He looked up.

“You were at the folly, Theodore. At midnight, half a mile from the house, in time to the minute. That is not a husband caught taking the air. You knew.”

“I knew something was coming. Not the whole of it.”

“You knew enough to put men in the trees and keep a horse to hand. You knew enough to be there.” She laid both hands flat on the cloth. “And you let her walk out into it. You stood in the dark and watched your wife go to that man and waited for the last possible moment to ride in. Why? Why not stop her at the door, or send Selby after her, or go to her yesterday and say plainly, I know what is being planned against you, for goodness sake do not go?”

He was a long time answering.

“Because if I had stopped her at the door she would have believed for the rest of her life that she would have gone. That the lieutenant was the one road out of this cold house and I had barred it against her. She had to learn what he was with her own eyes, in her own time, or she would have spent her entire life wondering whether I robbed her of the only man who ever cherished her.” He said it quietly, and believed it. “Now she knows. It cost her a dreadful night. It has bought her a truth that nothing gentler would have bought.”

“And you call that kindness.”

“I call it the only thing that would have answered.”

“It is the thing you always call it.” Augusta’s voice was very tired, and very old, and entirely without mercy. “You decided, alone, what your wife needed to suffer in order to be taught, and then you arranged the suffering, and you will go to your grave certain it was affection. Hear me, because I will not say it twice. One day that girl is going to see the whole of what you arranged on her behalf, the watching and the waiting and the trees, and she is not going to thank you for the lesson. She is going to ask you what right you had to set it. And you will have no answer, Theodore, because there is none, and on that day all your careful kindness will look to her exactly like every other man who ever decided her life for her without troubling to ask.”

“You are wrong.” It came out without conviction, the first words he had spoken all day that he did not entirely believe even as he said them. “I did not arrange it to teach her anything. I arranged it because I could not bear to be the man who took from her the one thing she still believed she had left, it was nothing but a fabrication which was slowly devouring her.”

“That is the same decision, Theodore. You merely prefer the second telling of it.” Augusta rose, and gathered her shawl, and there was nothing in her face but grief.

“I am going to sit with your wife,” she said. “Since you will not.”

She went out, and left him with his cold soup and the whole of what she had said, and he sat under it for some minutes before he could make himself rise.

***

He rode until the gelding was blown and his own hands were numb, the long way, over the south ridge where he had given her three true words about himself a lifetime ago. It did not help. He had known it would not, and had done it regardless, which he recognised, with grim humor, as exactly what his wife had done the afternoon she met the lieutenant in the town.

He worked until midnight on accounts that did not need him. He sent word by her maid that he hoped Her Grace had rested, and that nothing whatever would be required of her until she was ready, and he did not knock at her door, though he stood near it once and made himself walk on.