Chapter 25
W
“He hates me, and he makes everyone in the family pay for it. It is even worse now that Mother is gone.”
David knocked on Julia’s door the instant we reached it.
“Who is it?” Garrett’s voice answered low and protective.
“David,” David replied. “Is Julia in there with you?”
The latch from the door slid free, and Garrett opened the door wide. “Yes,” he said, motioning for us to come in. Julia was sitting on her bed, eyes dry but not focused on anything. She didn’t even look up when we entered the room.
David dropped my hand as soon as we were safely in the room, then strode to Julia and knelt in front of her. “Show me your arm.”
Julia’s eyes came into focus. She searched David’s face and shook her head. “No.”
“What is this about?” Garrett asked. When the two of them wouldn’t answer, he turned to me.
“I’m not exactly certain.” It was the truth.
“When did he hurt you?” David’s voice was dangerous. My stomach twisted at his words; pieces of a puzzle I should have put together sooner clicked into place. David didn’t have a skin condition. He never had.
Julia shook her head again. “He didn’t. He’s never hurt me. Not in that way.”
“Then why did Anna see a scar on your arm?”
“What?” Garrett’s face went pale.
A scar. Those marks were scars. Scars made by someone intentionally hurting the person who bore them.
I stumbled backward until my back pressed against the door.
David didn’t have just one or two of those scars.
I’d seen dozens of them, and I’d only seen a very small portion of his skin.
There was only one he David could mean. What had Lord Murphy done to his children?
Julia straightened, all her strength from dinner returned. She met David’s gaze without flinching. “Father didn’t hurt me. I did it to myself.”
Did what to herself? What exactly had Lord Murphy done to them? Suddenly, David’s resistance to bringing me into his family made a lot more sense. He was protecting me, not from a terrible person but from a fiend.
“You did it?” David’s voice was a hoarse whisper, almost a plea. If he asked the question softly enough, maybe her answer would change.
Julia’s eyes filled with tears, and she swallowed hard. “Do you know how many times I had to watch him burn you? Do you?”
Burn. Bile rose to my throat at the word.
David reached out his hand. “I know very well how many times. I can count them.”
She shook her head violently. “No, you can’t. There are a multitude on your back that you cannot see. But I can. I see them whenever I close my eyes. I can see them happening, over and over. I feel them, and I . . .”
David pulled her into his arms. “No, Julia, no. I don’t want this.”
Julia collapsed into him. “None of us wanted this. But it was what we were given, and I needed to know—” Her voice caught, and part of her hard exterior collapsed. “I needed to know what it was like, not just the burning but also the scar.”
She carefully extricated herself from David’s arms and lifted her short sleeve to show the mark I’d noticed in the oak tree.
“It’s barely there. I couldn’t—” She broke again.
“I lit the cigar, made myself smell its stench, and then pressed it on my arm, but I couldn’t hold it there.
It was too painful, and I was too weak.”
“You are not weak.” David shook his head. “I cannot understand why you would do it.” His voice held a sob.
Instead of answering, Julia glanced up at Garrett. Their eyes met, and an understanding passed between them. “Tell him.”
Garrett held his sister’s eyes for a long second, then undid several buttons on his shirt, pulling it open to expose a perfectly formed circle, deep and rough at the edges, just above his heart.
“You both did it? Together?” David’s voice gained strength with his anger. “How could you let Julia do such a thing?”
Garrett shook his head. “I didn’t know she had.”
“But you told her you did?”
“No.” His answer was quiet.
“Then how did she know?”
Garrett ran a hand angrily through his hair. “Because we both lived through it. Watched or, at a minimum, had to listen to your screams. And most of the time”—Garrett’s spine stiffened, and his hands fisted—“it was for stupid things I had done.”
David shook his head, falling from his knees into a sitting position on the floor.
“They were excuses, Garrett. Those stupid things were excuses. Do you think he cared about mud on your boots or not eating your dinner quietly enough? He wanted to hurt me, and he was always going to find a way to place blame on someone—me or you or Julia for not getting her piano pieces perfectly right. He wanted to pit us against each other.”
What kind of sick man . . . ? I held my stomach and concentrated on keeping my breath steady, but it was a lost cause.
Lord Murphy had tortured David and made his other children watch.
That was the boy I’d met all those years ago.
The days he’d seemed sickly or tired but had tried to smile anyway, he’d been burned by his father recently.
And if muddied boots or not eating food according to their father’s demands had warranted those scars, then being caught spending time with me would have definitely come at a cost.
And still, he had come. Almost every day I had been there that summer, he had come. I sank to the floor and put my head between my knees.
David was there in a heartbeat, his arms around me, his hand smoothing my hair.
I sobbed against him, my world breaking apart.
I’d thought I’d known what hardships were.
I’d thought losing my father had been excruciating, but having a father like mine—even if I’d had to lose him—had made my life a paradise compared to David’s.
David was whispering something, consoling me, his mouth on my cheek, his hand stroking my back.
His words were soft, with a rhythm-like chant.
“It was a long time ago. I was young. Garrett found a way to control him. He lost interest in hurting me once I was large enough to hurt him in return. Not long after you left, he gave up on the sport.”
At the word sport, my stomach rebelled. I covered my mouth with my hand, but to no avail. Julia had the washbasin in front of me before I had the chance to move. She’d known. She’d known I was going to be sick.
Because she’d lived through this, only much, much worse.
And I’d tried to fix that with an orchard.
“She didn’t know?” Garrett asked.
“I was about to tell her when . . .”
“She told you about my arm.” Julia finished.
David nodded.
I lifted my head from the bowl and found David’s eyes. I was wretched, my hair a tangled mess, my mouth foul. I didn’t care. I was like an animal in that moment. “How could he do this to you? To his own children?” My voice shook. “He is the kind of man who shouldn’t be allowed to live.”
“He’s a viscount,” Julia said in a hollow voice. “Anyone who lays a hand on him will go to prison, and if someone were to kill him, they would hang.”
Lord Murphy’s words after David had floored him echoed in my ears. He’d taunted him about that fact. That he was untouchable. And judging from the flat way Julia had said the words, it wasn’t the first time he’d made that point.
Then he’d pulled out a cigar and asked for help lighting it.
I was sick again, even though there was nothing left in my stomach. When I finished, I looked back up at the three of them. “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling lightheaded and unsure about what I was apologizing for.
“Don’t be.” David’s voice was soft, his hands brushing away the tears that streaked my face.
Garrett walked to Julia’s table, wetted a cloth, and gave it to me. “Don’t worry,” Garrett said while I scrubbed at my face and hands, trying to wash away the images of that younger version of David in pain. “None of us are going to hang because of him. He’s done enough damage already.”
Julia handed me a ginger candy, and I sucked hard on it. The sharp taste did nothing to distract me from everything I’d just learned. I couldn’t look at any of them, not without leading to a rise of more tears.
“Why did he do it?” I asked, looking down at the floor, knowing there would never be an answer that made any sense.
Garrett sighed deeply. “Our father was always a violent man, but when I was very young, he managed to hide it quite well. I’d seen him injure servants, but he was always so certain it was the right way to train his employees that I didn’t question him.
” Garrett jammed his hands into his pockets.
“Sometimes I worry about what kind of man I would have grown into if it weren’t for our mother. ”
The only thing I knew about David’s mother was that she’d died a few years before I’d come to visit Breckenridge.
Garrett took a deep breath before continuing.
“He hid that part of him from her, but one day, about a year before David was born, she saw him beat a servant savagely, and she never looked at him the same after that. He tried to explain his reasoning to her as he had to me, but Mother wasn’t a child—she knew depravity when she saw it.
And after a few months of trying to convince her he wasn’t that kind of man, he gave up and no longer felt the need to control himself. ”
“I was born at a time when my father knew our mother didn’t love him anymore.
” David continued Garrett’s story, his voice soft and careful.
He knew how close I was to breaking. “He always questioned my birth. At first, he would talk about it as if he wasn’t certain he was my father, but as the years progressed, he became more and more convinced I wasn’t.
And because of that, I became a tool to discipline the children he knew were his. ”
“Do you actually think . . . ?” I couldn’t ask the question, David’s anger at Dr. Clarke’s questioning my virtue making a lot more sense.
“No.” Garrett’s voice was firm. “Our mother was heartbroken about who our father ended up being, but she had almost no contact with anyone outside of our family, and she didn’t have the heart of a deceiver.”
“Besides,” David said firmly. “She would have told me if it were true. I wished for a different father and begged her to tell me I had some other man’s blood running through my veins.
But she couldn’t. Lord Murphy is my father, but nothing I can do will ever make him believe it.
He’s built his whole life around that hurt in order to excuse his actions. ”
I forced my head up, and just as I feared, tears coursed down my face when I caught David’s eyes, so tender, so loving, and so full of a hurt he’d hidden for the whole of his life.
I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled myself to him.
Needing to hold him, needing to let him know I saw his worth, his pain, and his heart, needing him to know I loved him.
Not in spite of those things, and not because of them. I simply loved him.
His hands went around my waist, and we sat on the floor, my arms not letting go of him and his gathering me into his lap. The room was silent, save for our breathing, for several minutes before Garrett eventually coughed softly.
“We need to arrange a way to get you away from the house,” Garrett said.
David loosened his hold on me but only slightly.
I glanced up to see Garrett giving us an extremely apologetic look.
“One of your servants, a Miss Mortensen, who I assume must be one of Obadiah’s daughters, was able to catch me on the stairs to let me know she was taking Mrs. Atwood to her house. ”
I nodded. Bless Maren for seeing a need and immediately taking action. It couldn’t have been easy to convince Mama to go.
“Yes, she is one of Obadiah’s daughters,” David said.
I was trying to catch my breath and make sense of everything around me. Meanwhile, the three of them were already moving forward with plans, making me appreciate the businesslike tone in which their family communicated when faced with Lord Murphy.
Garrett nodded. “That’s good. Father wouldn’t set foot in a tenant’s home.” Garret caught my eye. “As far as I know, our father doesn’t even know your mother was ever in the house.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“You will have to thank Miss Mortensen when you see her next,” Garrett said. “It was all her doing and quite brilliant of her. Now we just need to find a way to get the three of you away from here without him knowing.”
“All of us?” David asked in surprise. “You don’t think Anna should go and I should stay here?”
Garrett looked at his brother like he was an idiot. “She’s your wife. If she leaves, you need to go with her.”
“But I told you—”
Garrett brushed a hand through the air. “That was hours ago, before I saw the two of you together and long before you walked in here disheveled after obviously showing her some of your scars.”
In a different world, I might have been embarrassed by Garrett’s comment. David hadn’t actually shown me his scars; he’d stopped me from opening his shirt. Embarrassment simply felt like too weak of an emotion after everything we’d just been through.
David slid a hand down my hair. “Do you still want me to come with you?” he asked, looking around the room to remind me of what had just transpired.
“Yes,” I answered as firmly as I could. “Of course I do.”
“It is decided, then,” Garrett said.
“What will Father do when he wakes in the morning to find us all gone?” Julia asked. “And what of our servants?”
Garrett’s mouth was a flat line. “I can handle Father. I’ve managed him quite well over the past few years.
And if you give me the names of everyone who works here, I will write to them.
It might be a few weeks until I can offer them work again, but Father will need his servants in London.
Their positions will remain secure. As long as you have somewhere safe—farther away from here than the Mortensens’ home—to go. ”
David wrapped his hand around mine. The familiar warmth of his fingers settled some of my nerves. “We do.”
“Lincolnshire?” Garrett asked.
David nodded.
Garrett put a hand on David’s shoulder. “Do not write to me. When I feel it is safe, I’ll contact Mr. Mortensen, and we can communicate through him.
” Garrett reached into his interior pocket, pulling out several bills and a coin purse.
“Take this.” Julia’s eyes widened. There must have been over a hundred pounds in his hand.
“Apparently, I was particularly bad at gambling this month.”
David grabbed the bag and embraced his brother. “Someday, Father is going to discover you aren’t a wastrel.”
Garrett returned David’s embrace, a flash of pain crossing his eyes that I’m not certain anyone else saw. “Let’s pray that day is a long way off.”