Page 56 of Winterset

“Tell me.” His voice was harsh. “You lied to me. You ripped my heart from me. Surely I at least deserve the truth. Why could you not marry me?”

Anna looked away from him, unable to meet his eyes. “Because my blood is tainted. I—my family is mad.”

There was a long silence. Reed stared at her, astonished.

“What?” he asked finally.

Anna drew herself up, forcing herself to meet his gaze. “There is insanity in my family.”

“Insanity,” Reed repeated blankly. He shook his head. “Anna…every family has a few eccentrics. Why, my own family is known far and wide as the ‘mad Morelands.’ Surely—”

“No.” Anna stepped back, crossing her arms across her chest. “I am not talking about a harmless eccentric or two. There is madness in the de Winters. It has been passed down to Kit and me.” She drew a long breath. “A few days before you asked me to marry you, my father took me into his study and told me the truth. He had wanted to spare me, but when he saw how—how things were between the two of us, he grew frightened. He knew he had to tell me. That is why I pretended to be sick those days when you came to call. I could not bear to face you. Finally I realized that I had to send you away. I hadn’t expected you to propose that day, but, clearly, when you did, I could not accept.”

Stunned, Reed passed his hand across his face. “Are you sure about this?”

“Of course I am sure,” Anna retorted. “Do you think I would cut myself off from love, from ever marrying, if I were not sure?”

“No. I just—”

“What my father told me that day was that there had always been rumors of…oddities…within the de Winters. Obviously the de Winter who built Winterset was, at the least, peculiar. But my mother, raised as she was from an early age by her maternal aunt, was unaware of the possibility. And it—the madness comes upon them late. She did not know about it, not for sure, until after she had married my father. It was only then that her brother, my uncle, began to exhibit symptoms of his madness.”

“Your uncle? The one who left Winterset?”

Anna nodded her head. “Kit and I had thought, like everyone else, that my uncle had moved to Barbados. But what my father told me that day was that my uncle’s madness, which began with episodes of bizarre behavior in his late twenties, had become increasingly worse in character, and more and more frequent. In one of his few rational periods, he realized that he had to do something, and so he and my father concocted this scheme to—to allow my uncle to live as his…illness dictated and also to spare the family embarrassment. Uncle Charles did not want Kit and me to know. He didn’t want us to be shamed by his behavior.”

Her voice wavered, close to tears, and Reed took a step toward her, saying, “Oh, Anna…”

She shook her head sharply, moving back. “No. Please. I don’t want your pity. I don’t want you to feel anything for me. Just let me finish.”

Reed stiffened, color flaring on his cheeks, but he only gave her a formal nod of the head. “Go on.”

She sent him a searching look. “If I tell you this, you must promise me that you will never breathe a word of it.”

“Of course.”

“My uncle did not leave. He moved into a small house deep in the woods, by Craydon Tor. He lives there with his valet. No one else knows of this besides Kit and me and our gamekeeper, who takes them food. Even Norton, who drew up the power of attorney, believes that Uncle Charles moved far away. Uncle Charles has elaborate delusions. He believes that—” She sighed, then continued. “He thinks that he is somehow the legitimate descendant of the Stuart kings. I don’t understand it, though he is able to draw a long chart showing one how the line comes down to him. He is quite certain that the Queen wants to get rid of him, because he is really the one who should be sitting on the throne.”

“Good Lord.”

She gave him a long look. “That is perhaps the sanest of his beliefs. He thinks that the Queen sends spies and assassins after him. He also believes that the angel Gabriel comes to him and tells him how to protect himself from the Queen’s assassins. He has laid out circles of rocks around his house in a certain pattern that is intended to somehow thwart the Queen’s men. He paints strange symbols on his skin and sleeps between two wooden slats painted with the same symbols, because he thinks this makes him invisible to the assassins—or something like that. I have trouble following his logic sometimes. He cannot bear to live indoors. He spends very little time in the hut where he lives, and he will accept it only because it is so hidden against the rock, with trees and shrubs all around it.

“The Queen’s men come mostly at night, he says, and so he does not sleep at night, but roams about the area outside the house, looking for enemies. Sometimes he watches from up in the trees. Other times he slips around, hiding behind rocks and bushes and trees. He sleeps outdoors, but only during the daytime, when his valet can keep watch for him. He is certain that cutting his hair or nails will sap his strength, or that letting his hair and beard grow conceals his true identity—I’m not sure which. He looks…In recent years, when people have sworn that they have seen the Beast of Craydon Tor, I have wondered if they actually saw my uncle. He looks like a wild creature.” She stopped and looked at Reed.

He gazed back at her, his face still stunned. “Anna…I—this is so difficult to take in.” He frowned. “Maybe your uncle’s condition is an aberration, something peculiar to him, and would not affect you.”

She shook her head. “No. There have been others. My father said that after my mother found out about Charles, she talked to her aunt, Margaret. Margaret was the sister of my mother’s mother, Lady Phillippa, who married Lord de Winter. After Lord and Lady de Winter died in a fire in the summerhouse, Great-Aunt Margaret took my mother and raised her in London. My mother forced her aunt to tell her what she knew, and Great-Aunt Margaret said that their parents had some suspicions about the de Winters. There were rumors. But they were so eager for their daughter to marry well that they ignored the rumors. My aunt said that my grandmother Philippa told her that her husband had described a great-uncle of his who heard voices and saw visions. He was kept out of everyone’s sight.”

Reed ran his hands back through his hair. “But that’s not you. You aren’t mad.”

“No. Not yet. But I could become so. What if my visions are a precursor of madness? Besides, do you really think that I would risk passing it on to our children? That I would contaminate your family’s blood? I would have had to be without honor to do something like that! Is that what you think of me?”

“No. No, of course not.” He paused, then said, “Why did you not tell me this three years ago? Why did you just turn me away?”

“I could not tell you! I didn’t want you to know. I couldn’t bear to have you think of me with pity and shame. To know that about my family.”

“But I loved you. And you let me think that I meant nothing to you. Less than nothing. You didn’t trust me enough, didn’t love me enough—”

“How can you say that?” Anna flared. “If I had loved you less, I would have married you and said to hell with all the consequences. What would I have cared about your family and its reputation? What would I have cared about burdening you with a wife who might turn mad in a few years?”