Page 51 of The Trouble with Tweed

“Because I do wish to marry,” she huffed.

“You wish for marriage, but not love. You wish for wealth, and judging by the cut of your lovely gown, you’d like to spend some of it. Yet you expect your husband never to have any risk of losing his fortune. Is that about right?”

Claire twisted her pleated taffeta reticule in her fingers. “You’re making me sound awful.”

“I’m pointing out the incongruity of your multitude of desires.” Michael frowned, then said gently, “I understand that things were hard for you.”

“You understand nothing,” she mumbled.

“And whose fault is that? I understand nothing only because you won’t explain it to me. It’s quite petulant of you, Claire, to expect sympathy for events that you won’t explain.”

“You always do that,” she blustered. “You always twist things around to make me seem like the unreasonable one.”

“I’m not twisting anything.” His eyes were wide. “You know very well that I can keep a secret; otherwise, you never would have dared to ask for my assistance with the Season. So why haven’t you told me the full truth about what happened when your brother lost the family fortune? Or about why you wouldn’t speak to me all those years?”

Claire shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. It can’t be fixed. I don’t see the point in talking about it if there’s no solution.”

“I don’t think that’s it at all. I think you want to hoard your pain and tease other people with it. You want to hint that something’s wrong without giving me the opportunity of offering any real solace. You haven’t told me the truth, because then you might actually have to get over it.”

“Get over it?” she said, her eyebrows raised.

“Yes,” he said stoutly. “Get over it. Forgive me, Claire, but you’re no longer impoverished. Your sisters—whatever may have happened in the interim—are now well provided for. You hint that these terrible things happened, but you’ll neither define them nor move past them. It’s as if you have drawn your own pain around you like a shield to keep people away, and you don’t really want to heal from anything because then you’d have to move on.”

She stared at him, her eyes wide, her mouth agape. “You have no idea what we went through.”

“Because you won’t tell me!”

Claire slashed her thin hand through the air. Her eyes were bright with tears. Her pointed chin quivered; she looked as if she were momentarily incapable of speaking.

Michael hated that he had been the cause of her distress, and yet he didn’t want to take his words back. This was the only way forward, and he wanted a way forward with Claire far more than he wanted to avoid this fight altogether.

He took a deep breath. “Please, Claire.” He seeped his voice with every ounce of his sincerity. He prayed she saw the earnestness in his eyes, heard the vulnerability in his tone. “Please. Even if you can’t tell me all of it, just tell me something.”

Michael knew he perhaps should have felt ashamed for begging, but he had little pride where Claire was concerned. Besides, he suspected that she’d never told anyone the whole of it. She’d admitted as much—that she’d protected her sisters from the worst of their circumstances. No one should bear such a burden alone, especially not the woman he’d fallen in love with all over again.

Claire’s jaw was twisted so tightly that he thought it would crack when it opened. He held back a sigh of relief when she began speaking.

“I was the one who had to tell the servants they had to leave,” she croaked. “And then some of them took things when they left. Not that I can blame them. They hadn’t had wages, but it still was a shock to find Mother’s jewelry gone.” She blinked back tears. “In the end, I was the one who did the marketing. I would go out early so no one would see me. I dressed like a servant. I…I haggled for food. I know that is how many people live their entire lives, but I had to learn.”

She swallowed and continued, “I’m ashamed to say that I found it humiliating. I never thought before that I was a prideful person, but I was wrong. Maybe that was one of the hardest things about being brought low in that way—realizing how much I had considered myself above poverty. I know that things are supposed to be all better now, but I have nowhere to go with all of this anger that I still feel towards Richard. With all of this fear that William is one bad year away from poverty himself. You’ve seen how he furnished the house. It’s too extravagant. I know he’s not a whoremonger like Richard was. But what if he’s just as irresponsible?”

“He’s not.” Michael shook his head and bit the rest of his words back.

This was not about him explaining away her fears. He knew that fear was often irrational. But sometimes looking fear straight in the face was all that was required to diminish it.

“I know he’s not,” Claire surprised him by admitting. “I can tell. But why am I still so frightened then? I feel it here.” She curled her fingers into her stomach. “And sometimes I wake up in a sweat, remembering those days when I came home from market without being able to find something we could afford. I remember how hard it was. How embarrassing it was the first time I brought our things to a shop. And they swindled me.” She slapped her hand against the seat next to her. “The first few times, the shopkeeper could tell I didn’t know what I was doing. And he took advantage of it. I look back on how naive I was, and it makes me sick. I should have gotten far more for that first batch of jewelry than I did.”

Michael let the silence stretch between them. Instinctively, he knew there was more, if she’d just gain the courage to be able to speak it. This moment would be the deciding factor.

Claire finally took a deep breath and then let it all out in a rush, deflating like a soufflé brought out too early from the oven. “I told you that I went to see him. Richard, I mean.”

He nodded. “Yes, and he mistook you for—” Michael couldn’t bring himself to say the words.

Claire cleared her throat. Her gaze was pointed out over the park, but she looked as if she weren’t seeing any of it. “One of his women, yes. But I didn’t tell you the entire truth of it.”

Michael waited. He didn’t trust himself to speak—he was frightened that he’d say the wrong thing and silence her on the subject forever. Instead, he pulled the carriage off the path behind some shrubbery.

“It was late. I had been looking for him all day, going to a hundred different doors that I never should have visited. I saw him on the street and I followed him into a building. I thought it was apartments or some such.” She swallowed deeply. “It wasn’t.”