Chapter 28 #2
“My mother was a very brave woman,” he managed to say at last, stroking Louisa’s hair and breathing in her perfume, “but my father was evil and she had no one to protect her as she protected me. Her parents were dead and she was an only child.”
“My aunt said she knew your mother before she married.”
“Yes, my mother had many friends before she married, I believe. My father drove them all away. I dare say most were as terrified of him as our servants and neighbors were. There was only the two of us and my mother’s life was hellish.”
“When you told me of riding out for the physician, that was because your father had…”
“…beaten my mother unconscious, usually. He broke her arm or her ribs more than once too, and I think she lost other children although I was too young to really understand what was happening. I was always scared that one day she would not wake up.”
“You poor boy!” Louisa cried out, holding him even more tightly in her arms and seeming ready to weep.
Benedict gently unhooked her hands and held them in his own. All of his tears had been cried a lifetime ago.
“It was all a long time ago, Louisa,” Benedict reminded her. “You need not feel sorry for me now. I only need to tell you the truth, because you deserve to hear it from me, and because I want you to know.”
“But was there really no one to help you? It is so terrible that something could happen in England, in such a noble family.”
“No one ever came to help us,” he told Louisa frankly.
“My family was me and my mother, and the brute who ruled our home. I had a Godfather, Lord Wilberforce, but he lived on the Continent then, and had not seen me since my Christening. I cannot blame others for staying away. Almost no one can stand up to a man as wicked as my father.”
“You did, though, didn't you?” Louisa noted quietly, looking up at him with an expression of sadness and respect.
“Too late,” Benedict answered with a sad laugh. “If only I had done what I did months before, weeks, even minutes. Then, I might have…saved her.”
God, the words almost choked him! No, it wasn’t the words, it was the feeling behind them, the sincere and hopeless wish that Benedict had carried with him every day of his life. If only he had acted in time, had done something, anything, differently!
“What happened, Benedict? Can you tell me?”
Louisa’s questioning was gentle and respectful, and he knew that if he chose not to say anything more, she would not press him further. However, he genuinely wanted her to know everything. He wanted this woman to understand him as he had never sought understanding before.
“I remember sensing a row brewing,” Benedict told her, amazed at how sharply the details still came back to him after so many years in untouched memory.
“It was February and the snow had melted, although the ground was still partly frozen. My father had allowed my mother and I to go to church, which was unusual. I expect he generally didn’t want the neighborhood to see her bruises. ”
Louisa shook her head in sympathy and compassion.
“My father watched my mother like a hawk every moment we were out of the house. Then, as soon as we were back in the carriage outside the church he started… Christ! He struck her across the face right there, as soon as the door closed, angry that she had smiled at a neighbor, accusing her of some ridiculous impropriety…I tried to reason with him…”
Benedict’s breath was coming hard, as though he was back in that coach, scared more for his mother than himself and shouting as loud as he could to be heard above his father’s roaring.
Louisa said nothing, only listened and waited.
Somehow her arms were around his waist again and her closeness held him close enough to Rosemere that the past could not entirely burst its bounds.
“When I put myself in front of my mother, my father opened the coach door and threw me out onto the road while the carriage was moving.”
“You might have been killed!” Louisa exclaimed, horrified.
“My mother likely feared so and her screams were terrible,” Benedict recalled. “Luckily I rolled along a grass verge and into a hedge. I was more concerned with yelling to my mother that I was unhurt than any minor cuts and bruises I had acquired. Then, I had to run home.”
“How far?”
“The church was six miles from Northwick Park, so likely five miles or so. It seemed to take forever and I was terrified about what might be happening to my mother in my absence. At least I didn’t feel the cold.”
“Ten years old,” Louisa reflected and Benedict knew the gleam in her eye was a tear.
“The row was still happening when I got to Northwick. I could hear the violence even before I reached the front door, my father calling my mother the foulest names as he beat her, and my mother begging him to stop. They were upstairs in my father’s suite and the servants tried to make me stay downstairs but I would not. ”
Benedict remembered pushing past the old butler who likely meant well when he tried to stop the angry boy but could not have known the extent of his rage and determination.
“My mother was out on the balcony by the time I got up there, trying to get away from my father, her eye blacked again and her nose bleeding. The lovely clothes she had worn for church were ripped and torn. Do you know what he said when he saw me?”
Louisa shook her head.
“He pointed to me and said ‘At least I know this one’s mine. I can never be sure of another.’ Then he struck my mother so hard that she reeled across the balcony and hit her head on the stone.
I ran to her but she was so still that I guessed she was dead even while I was shouting, begging for him to bring the physician. ”
A gentle hand reached up to stroke Benedict’s hair as he gasped for breath. Perhaps Louisa thought the story was over, when it was not. There was worse to come.
“My father laughed at me, kneeling there on the floor with my dead mother in my arms, crying for her not to leave me. He just got up on a chair at the edge of the balcony and gestured out over the Northwick Park estate. He said…"
There’s no point in crying over a woman, boy, dead or alive. I can always marry a new duchess. Northwick is the only thing that should count in your life and you will be its duke someday…
While they were burned in his memory, these particular words could not pass Benedict’s gritted teeth, despite his resolution.
“My father said something spectacularly wicked and unforgivable,” he summarized for Louisa as best he could.
“He made it clear that my mother was nothing to him, just as she had been everything to me. After that, my mind is hazy but I know I ran straight at him and that he fell over the edge of the balcony. No one could survive that fall.”
Two stories down onto the flagstones below, a sprawled and suddenly diminished figure surrounded by rapidly spreading bloodstains, a monster vanquished too late…
“That is why some people believe I am a murderer,” Benedict concluded. “I cannot say I entirely blame them, although I do not dwell on the past. My father died due to my actions and I regret only that I didn’t act earlier. I can offer no defense.”