Chapter 12 #2
A grimace tensed Kenneth’s face. “I overheard. I was coming to ask when Father’s guests would be leaving, as I was tired of the noise, and…
I heard everything.” He paused. “I attempted to go after you, to support you, but I took too long to pursue. By the time I had saddled a horse, I reasoned you would be rather far ahead of me, so I took a shorter path through the fields. I arrived at the Maybrook crossroads and… I waited. I knew you could not be ahead of me, so I kept on waiting. But, of course…”
“The accident.” Thalia shuddered as a chill ran down her spine.
“The accident,” Kenneth parroted with a nod. “Only, I did not know of it until I rode back along the route you should have taken and saw the overturned carriage and the lack of driver and horses. I raced here to Farhampton and arrived not two minutes after you.”
Thalia gulped. “Did I seem… well?”
“Aside from your sudden willingness to marry the duke, yes,” Kenneth replied.
“There were some cuts and bruises and scrapes, too, but you did not seem bothered by them. I maintain, to this day, that you hit your head harder than any of us knew. I tried to tell Father that, at the time, but he would not listen. Why would he, when he had gained what he wanted?”
“No one told me any of this,” Dorothy muttered, her arms folded across her chest. “I could have helped argue with Father too. I am told I can be rather ferocious when I want to be.”
Kenneth mustered a soft chuckle. “You were thirteen then, Dorothy. You could not have said anything to change Father’s mind. No one could.” He paused. “And you, Thalia, did not try to after you returned from the scene of the accident. It was the strangest thing.”
Grounds for an annulment? The thought popped into Thalia’s mind for a moment, as her gaze moved back toward her husband.
Her heart jumped as she saw him fold the newspaper with slow care and begin to rise from the armchair by the fireplace, evidently unwilling to allow the siblings to speak among themselves any longer.
“You should stay here with us,” Kenneth said in a hurry as if he, too, had noticed Henry’s movements. “We can take care of you properly. We can remind you of what you have forgotten, and you know that we will be unbiased and honest.”
“Honest?” Henry scoffed, striding over. “There is not an honest thing about you, Mr. Carter. You, more than anyone, would be more inclined to take advantage of my wife’s condition. She may not be able to remember certain things, but I have not forgotten.”
Thalia blinked, taken aback by the edge of bitterness in Henry’s voice, the frost in his blue eyes. “What?”
“Do not listen to him,” Kenneth urged, shooting a dark look back at Henry. “Whatever quarrel you and I had, Thalia, I am not who I was two years ago.”
“What?” Thalia repeated, her head pounding with the confusion of it all, frustration beating out a relentless rhythm on the inside of her skull.
Henry stopped. “The last time you saw him, Thalia, he swore he would have vengeance on you. You have not seen him for two years, for good reason.”
“Do not,” Kenneth warned. “She is my sister. Let me explain.”
“I do not trust you to tell the truth,” Henry retorted sharply. “Indeed, I do not trust you at all, but my wife insisted on seeing her siblings and I hoped it might help. I see now that I was mistaken.”
Kenneth’s lip curled. “How dare you!”
“I dare because I suspect one of you was behind the attack upon my wife,” Henry seethed, the cords straining in his throat. “Both you and your father have enough motive. You, certainly. And you did promise you would make her suffer.”
“I was desperate!” Kenneth snapped. “I was not thinking clearly! I spoke from anger, but there was no true threat in my words! She is my sister; I would not do a thing to harm her, and if you continue to say otherwise, I shall—”
“What? Seek vengeance upon me too?” Henry interrupted, both men oblivious to the fact that Thalia was on the brink of collapse.
Her head hurt, a vicious bolt of pain slicing through her brain, her eyes now possessed of their own violent heartbeats, her stomach churning with the pressure of so much dizzying confusion.
“Will you cease!” Dorothy yelped, hurrying to her sister’s side, putting a comforting arm around her shoulders. “Can you not see what this is doing to her?”
Even Thalia could not have known what those raised, sniping voices would do. One moment, she was holding her palms to her temples to try and ease the pressure that pulsed within; the next, her mind exploded with visions, playing out like fragmented scenes of a theatrical.
She saw her brother, red-faced and wild-eyed, jabbing an accusatory finger in her face.
The surroundings seemed to suggest he was in the drawing room of Holdridge Court, though she could not focus on the wallpaper or the furnishings to be certain when Kenneth looked so…
twisted and frightening in the glimpse of memory.
“You think yourself above me! You think you are somehow superior because you married into a fortune!” his voice snarled, spittle flying. “You will learn, sister… You will not rest easy after this!”
His words and expressions jumped in a jarring patchwork of fractured memory, roughly stitched together. She was aware that parts were missing, and she was almost glad of it, for she could not imagine that anything her brother had to say in this memory was pleasanter than this.
She put a hand to her heart and rubbed slow circles, as if that might ease the sudden ache that twinged there. A pain of… what? Betrayal? Hurt? Fear? She did not know, her feelings as disjointed as the fleeting return of those memories.
We fought. I do not know when, but we fought. A gasp slipped from her throat as she realized that what Henry had alluded to might be true, after all.
“The last time you saw him, Thalia, he swore he would have vengeance on you. You have not seen him for two years, for good reason… And you did promise you would make her suffer.” That is what Henry had said, and her memory seemed to support it.
Yet, the Kenneth standing at her side, staring at her with the most intense concern in his hazel eyes was not the one screaming at her in her recollection.
The Kenneth who settled his hand on her shoulder and whispered urgently, “Are you well? Can I fetch you anything? Truly, I think I must take you upstairs to your old room, where you can rest,” was not even an echo of that howling, threatening terror in her mind.
And he had said that he was not the same man he was two years ago.
Is that when we fought? What did we fight about?
She could not coax the question into spoken words, her throat so dry and tight it was a wonder she could breathe.
“I swear to you, Thalia, I would never do anything to harm you,” Kenneth said, his voice cracking. “I know you do not remember, but I have been so ashamed of how we parted ways. Please, Thalia. Stay.”
She scrunched her eyes shut. She did not know what or who to believe anymore. Even Dorothy was not much comfort, as Thalia’s brain fought to weave together the thirteen-year-old girl that she had known and the seventeen-year-old woman trying to help.
“You are every bit your father’s son,” she heard Henry hiss at Kenneth, the two of them shooting daggers at one another.
My father is selfish, but what reason could he have to want me dead? He has everything he wanted, does he not? Nausea crept up Thalia’s throat, and she rose sharply from her chair with her hand to her stomach.
Maybe, she muttered an apology. Maybe, she did not.
All she knew was that she needed to get out of there as swiftly as possible before she keeled over or worse.
How was she supposed to recover or hope to focus on getting better when she now had to worry about whether or not her family had attempted to have her killed?
It was all absurd and terrifying and she could not endure it anymore.
Struggling for breath, she ran for the carriage.
She was not aware that anyone had followed her until a hand reached past her shoulder and grabbed the handle of the carriage door, opening it wide for her.
“Thalia, I—” Henry began to say, but she waved his words away, turning with blurry eyes to stare at him.
“I just want to sleep,” she said crisply. “I want to rest.”
She headed into the peace of the carriage, able to take her first full, deep breath as the door quietly closed and Henry moved out of sight.
Would my father or Kenneth really try to kill me? was her only thought as the carriage pulled away from the only home she could remember; a place that no longer felt like sanctuary, but a place of knotted mysteries that she did not yet have the strength to unravel.