Chapter 27
Victoria sobbed into her pillow until her eyes were sore.
She wept for the na?ve young debutante who had caused all of this, simply because she had not been able to look past a devil’s handsome facade.
She wept for her father, still uncertain if he would ever wake up again.
She wept for Melody, whose whereabouts were unknown.
And she wept for what might have been with the man that her heart wanted, but could not have.
When Charles’ family and acquaintances hear of this, they will come for us.
Arran will be torn away from me by the strong hand of the law, and I will not be able to bear the loss.
She scrunched her eyes shut and turned her face into the soft give of the pillow once more.
I must pretend that I wanted none of it.
I must pretend that he is nothing to me.
I must protect my family, as he must protect his.
She could not be certain of what was the greater motivator for putting as much distance between herself and Arran as possible.
All she knew was that, no matter what, it was going to hurt more than anything that Charles had ever inflicted upon her, for this was an agony from which there would be no escape.
I must leave to save him too, she realized, as she rested her arm on the pillow and stared at the scars on her wrist. Society would make its own opinion of what had happened here, but she had the power to ensure that no repercussions hunted Arran.
Her scars would be her proof, while a tearful version of events to those who might avenge Charles ought to keep them on their side of the border.
A duel that had gone awry would be the most palatable explanation for English sensibilities. But then there were the debts to think about: no amount of scars and slightly fabricated stories would be able to deal with those.
She twisted around to glance across the room at her father’s bed… only to gasp in shock as she saw him awake and struggling to sit up.
“Father?” Victoria scrambled out of bed, halting at the bedpost as a wave of dizziness swept through her; she had stood up too quickly.
When it subsided, she staggered onward to her father’s bedside and dragged a chair so she would not risk keeling over again. She sat there for a moment, uncertain of what to say. His hand lay limp at his side, and though she wanted to, she could not reach out and take it.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
How would someone feel when they had just had a knife in their back? Not good, presumably.
Her father strained again in an attempt to sit up, and Victoria jumped to her feet once more, holding him by the arm as she aided him.
She stuffed a few cushions behind his back to prop him up, struck for a moment by the realization that it had been a very long time since she had been so close to him.
He was not a father who showed affection; she doubted she could think of a single moment where he had hugged her, even as a child.
That role had belonged solely to her mother. Her father had often scolded his wife, somewhat playfully, that she was too affectionate with her girls.
Even when Mama died, he did not embrace us…
A lump formed in her throat, her eyes suddenly stinging with tears she had not shed in years for the mother she had lost.
“Water,” her father croaked.
Victoria snapped out of her sad reverie and reached for the ceramic jug on the bedside table, pouring into a pewter cup. She held it to her father’s lips so he could drink, a frown furrowing her brow as he wrinkled his nose and pushed the cup away.
“What… is that?” he rasped.
She sniffed the contents of the cup, struck with an earthy, herbal aroma. “I suspect it is good for you, so you ought to drink it.”
Feeling rather like the parent instead of the child, she put the cup to his lips again and did not remove it until she was certain he had swallowed enough. Only then did she set the cup back down and resume her awkward perching, still struggling to figure out what to say.
“What happened?” her father asked, once he had drunk enough. “Are you hurt?”
Victoria shook her head and quietly began to explain, not just what had happened between his collapse in the hallway and hers shortly after, but everything: Charles’ torture of her, Arran helping her on her wedding day, Melody’s escape to Emma’s and the uncertainty surrounding that, and how all of this had been a lure to deal with Charles, once and for all.
“You were not supposed to be part of it,” she murmured. “You were not supposed to get hurt.”
For a long while, her father said nothing. Ruminating.
“I have… made a great mess of this,” he said a last, his chin dipped to his chest. “I did not mean to. In truth, I… do not quite… remember when I lost my way, but… I know I have wandered onto a troublesome path, and I have dragged you and Melody along it with me.”
Victoria blinked, for just as she could not recall the last time her father had embraced her or tried to comfort her, she could not recall a single moment of apology or regret from him either.
“I daresay it began when Mama and Emmett died.”
It was not to be unkind, but she would not sugarcoat the truth anymore.
Her father’s eyes widened as if she had just plunged another blade into his back. “Do not… speak his name.”
“Why not?” she replied with a heavy sigh.
“He has haunted you for years; if you had allowed us to speak about him, about Mama, then perhaps he would have stopped. If you had allowed us to speak about them from the beginning, maybe things might have been different. You might not have relied on drinking and gambling and frittering away your fortune to smother every memory of them.”
The conversation was long overdue. There had been times when she had tried to bring up her mother and the brother who had been lost in childbirth, both of them taken at a moment that should have been joyful instead of tragic, but her father had always refused to speak of it.
So much so that, most of the time, he had left the room, rather than face his grief and that of his eldest daughter.
But her father could not leave now; he could not even sit up by himself.
“I will cover the debt,” her father mumbled. “It can… be fixed. If we can just… explain this to society and find you a new husband, then it can be fixed.”
Victoria’s gaze hardened along with her heart.
“That is the only thing you can say to me? You wish to just rush me into a new marriage?” Her voice wavered.
“You know that I would do anything to protect my sister. We would not be in this situation at all if that were not true, but… how can you speak of the mess you have made and then immediately start thinking about finding a new match for me?”
“Because… I do not know what else to do,” her father croaked, his head snapping up.
There were tears in his eyes. “I do not know how else to ensure that you do not end up destitute. My daughters left… with nothing because of me! Marriage is how I can see to it that you are secure, and your marriage will keep Melody safe in turn. There is nothing… else I can do.”
He began to cough violently, his hand shaking as he covered his mouth.
Victoria hurried to grasp the cup of cooled herbal brew and brought it to his lips once more, urging him to drink. Spluttering and trembling, he managed to gulp down a few mouthfuls. The coughing subsided, his breaths evening out, and he sank back into the cushions with a grimace.
“I am sorry,” he murmured, turning his watery gaze toward her.
“You are right; I thought I could forget them if I distracted myself enough, but… I had to drink more, gamble more, distract myself more as the years went by. I am the cause of this mess, and I hate myself for my… cowardice. I hate that I must… sell you, in essence, to undo what I have done. I am so very sorry, Victoria. So very, very sorry.”
With great effort, he stretched his hand across the bed to where hers rested and took hold of it. He squeezed her hand with more comfort and affection than he had shown in all of her twenty-two years on this earth.
“If I had realized sooner that my missteps would mean losing what is the most precious to me, I might have found the… strength to stop,” he added, his voice hitching. “I should not, at the very least, have… trusted the man.”
Clearly, he meant the man who had put a blade in his back.
But Victoria wasn’t ready to forgive so quickly, for there was one more thing that needed answering.
“Why did you side with him, even as he had you marched into this keep by mercenaries? At what point exactly did you realize what manner of devil you had handed me over to? I need you to be honest, or you and I have no chance of ever coming to an accord.”
Her father hesitated and looked at her imploringly for a moment or two, as if to confirm what she had already guessed: that he did not want to respond because she would not like the answer.
“Honesty is how we start afresh,” she said flatly, waiting.
With a strained breath and a few anxious glances around the room, her father finally seemed to understand that he could not escape this conversation.
“When he asked for you to spend the weeks before the wedding… at his manor,” he wheezed at last. “I did not think of him as a devil per se, but I knew he might be… unusual. But the engagement was announced, and the banns were to be read out and all seemed otherwise respectable, so I did not see… the harm.”
“And when did you see the harm?”