Page 70 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

“That is about me,” she said. “The folly. Someone has printed the folly.”

“It names no one. It cannot be proved. I will have it suppressed within the week, and the man who paid for it will be sorry he was ever born, and your name will not once be spoken in connection with any of it.”

“Who is Greaves.” She cut clean across the reassurance before he had finished making it.

He had known the question would come. He had not expected it so flatly, or so soon, or to feel the floor of the conversation tilt under it the way it tilted. “The Earl of Greaves. A man who has loathed me for nine years over a matter of business in the Lords. He hired the lieutenant. He built the folly, in the sense that matters. Vance was only the instrument.”

“He hired Vance.” Ellen set down her cup. “To meet me at the folly. To ruin me. As a way of striking at you.”

“Yes.”

“And this you have known since when.”

“Since the morning after. Carrow’s report came a fortnight later and confirmed the whole of it, the grudge, the money, the rest of it.”

“No.” She had gone very still, and very pale, in the particular way he had learned to dread, the way that had nothing of weakness in it. “Not when you learned it was Greaves. When did you learn that the folly was a snare? Not who set it. That it was one. That a man was waiting for me in the dark with witnesses in the trees. When did you learn that, Theodore?”

And there was the choice. He could fabricate the truth. He had fabricated the truth his whole life with great facility and could have fabricated it now, smoothly, and she would likely have believed him, and the morning would have been saved and the door would have stayed open. He stood at the edge of it and looked down into how easy it would be, and then he did the thing he had promised himself in the garden, and did not lie.

“The afternoon before,” he said. “A footman saw a man in a red coat near the kitchen-garden door, studying the house. I did not know the whole of it. I knew enough to understand that something was being planned, and that it involved an officer, and that it involved you.”

The silence that came down then was worse than any sound.

“You knew the afternoon before.” Her voice was almost gentle, which frightened him more than fury would have. “I came down to dinner that night and you asked me whether I had had any letters, and I said no, and was untruthful, and felt sick with the falsehood, and you sat across the table from me knowing there was a man in a red coat circling the house and knowing I had a letter hidden in my workbox, and you said nothing. You permitted me to deceive you. You let me go upstairs and put on a dark cloak and creep out my own kitchen door into the dark to be grabbed and frightened and nearly ruined, and you knew it was coming, and you let me walk into it.”

“I set men in the trees. I kept a horse saddled. I was within reach of you the whole of that night.”

“That is not what I asked you.” She was on her feet now. “You let me go. You could have stopped me at the door, you could have said spoken the words at that dinner table, Ellen, do not go, and you said nothing and let me walk out into the worst night of my life. Why. I want you to say it to my face. Why did you let me go?”

He had said it to Augusta, in this very house, weeks ago, and Augusta had told him to his face that one day this girl would ask him exactly this, and that he would have no answer that was not a confession. He had thought himself prepared. He was not prepared.

“Because if I had stopped you,” he said, “you would have believed for the rest of your life that you would have gone. That Vance was the road out and I had barred it. You would have wondered, for years, whether I had robbed you of the one man who ever held you in his highest esteem. I could not bear for you to wonder that. I decided it was better that you learn what he was with your own eyes, once, terribly, than wonder about him gently forever.”

“You decided.” The two words came out of her like something breaking. “You decided what I needed to learn. You decided I needed to be taught, and you arranged the lesson, and you stood in the dark and watched it taught to me. You let a man put his hands on me and terrify me nearly out of my senses, all because you, in your supreme judgment, had concluded it would serve my greater good. Do you hear yourself? Do you hear what you are telling me, in your own dining room, with your hand still warm from holding mine?”

“I hear it.” He did. It was worse, said back to him in her voice, than it had ever sounded inside his own head. He began to say her name and got no further than the first sound of it, because she was already speaking again.

“Did you know about him before?”

“Before?”

“Before we wedded. You investigated him, you have just told me you had a report. Did you know, before you wedded me, what Vance was? That he had abandoned me over for a fortune. That he was a fortune-hunter who would have left any woman without ten thousand pounds standing in a ballroom. Did you know that before our wedding, while I sat beneath your roof, mourning him like a maid at a graveside, wasting my devotion upon a man who had bartered me away for gold, in the very same manner as my brother? Were you aware?”

The room was very quiet. The folded pamphlet sat on the cloth between them.

“Yes,” he said. “Pearce had it within a week of the betrothal. Vance had jilted you the previous autumn the moment your brother’s debts became known, and offered, the very same season, for a banker’s daughter with a great deal of money, and been refused, and gone back to his regiment poorer than he came out of it. I knew it before our wedding. I knew it on our wedding night. I have known it every day of our matrimony.”

“Why.” Her voice cracked on the single word. “Give me the reason. You have a reason for every other thing, you have just handed me a whole architecture of reasons for the folly, so give me the reason you sat on this one for four months while I grieved.”

“Because telling you would have been cruel, and would have looked like jealousy, and I could not for the life of me think how to say to a grieving girl that the man she wept for had weighed her at ten thousand pounds and found her wanting, without it sounding like a husband clearing a rival off the field.” He did not look away from her, and the not looking away cost him. “And because, since I am evidently giving you the whole of it this morning, some part of me did not want you to stop grieving him. A wife in mourning for another man wants nothing from her husband. She asks him for nothing. She keeps to her own rooms and her own garden and leaves the wall exactly where he built it. While you wept for Vance you were no danger to me at all. I did not put it to myself in those words. But it was there, underneath the kindness, the same as it is always there underneath my kindness, the small cold sum that keeps me safe.”

“At least that is honest.”

“It is the most honest thing I have ever said aloud. I am discovering this morning that I have a great backlog of it, and that it has all chosen to come due at once.”

“And you never told me.”

“No.”