Chapter Twenty-Five #4
“It’s all right. This was her mangala sutra. Her wedding necklace.”
Elswyth thought for a moment, considering. “I still wear my mother’s necklace,” she said, “the one she wore when I was a child.”
He shrugged. His hand moved up to the necklace, toyed with the beads. “It’s only an old habit, I suppose. But it helps me remember her.”
Elswyth adjusted her head on his chest. She listened to the beating of his heart. “What happened to her?”
“It’s a sad story,” Silas said. He kissed the top of her head. “We don’t need to tell it right now.”
Elswyth shrugged. She played again with the hair on his chest. “I want to know everything about you.”
Silas sighed. “Ever curious,” he said. “My father wanted me to marry a princess from one of the Indian princely states. He couldn’t marry me to an English noblewoman, not given the nature of my birth.
But there were plenty of royal families in India eager for a political connection to Lord Harrow.
My mother was a princess, so I have noble blood on that side as well.
And since I’m the last living member of her family, Lord Harrow intended to legitimize my claim through a beneficial marriage and install me as the prince of Rajpur. ”
Elswyth froze with her hand woven through his chest hair.
She thought of what Captain Burr had said at the Forscythes’ dinner—how Silas’s mother had been a princess.
How his father had killed the royal family of Rajpur and made Silas watch.
But certainly they were not the same family.
No one, not even Lord Harrow, could be that cruel.
“While my father planned my wedding to one of his ally’s daughters, I was apprenticing for an Indian professor. Aranyani was his niece. She wanted to become an ornithologist.”
Aranyani. He said the name like it was a bird in his hands, like saying it too loudly would scare it away.
“She was nothing to my father. Another useless scholar. But she was everything to me. We spent three months together on an expedition. By the end of it, we were in love. We were married without my father’s knowledge.
“When he found out, he was furious. We fled to London, and I introduced her to society as my lawful wife. I thought that if I introduced her to the queen, if she came out in society, then we would be safe. He couldn’t separate us, couldn’t pretend as if our marriage never happened and marry me off for political gain. I was wrong, of course.”
Elswyth said nothing; Silas seemed far away while he spoke, lost in a dark dream.
“He sent an assassin. Our anniversary dinner. I held her as she died.”
She thought she heard tears in his voice but couldn’t bring herself to look and see. She felt frozen there, the sweat cooling on her skin.
“It was my fault. I should have never married her. If I had not followed my passion… If I hadn’t yielded to my baser instincts…
she would still be alive. But bastards can’t help ourselves, can we?
I only wish he’d poisoned my dinner that night as well.
But no—he needed me alive to make an advantageous match.
To be another soldier he could move into position. ”
“Silas…”
He placed a hand on her arm to quiet her. “Nothing you can say will make it better, Elswyth. I have spent so long wishing I had the courage to end my own life and join her. To deprive Lord Harrow of the pawn he created when he sired me.”
“It was not your fault, Silas,” Elswyth said. She pressed herself up on one arm, looking down at him. Tears streaked across his face, falling in the dirt. “You loved her, and you married her. That is not a baser instinct. That is a noble one. Lord Harrow is the only one to blame.”
“Or did I simply follow another whim? Fulfill another pleasure?” He sat up, pushing himself from the dirt. She could see where dried flower petals stuck to the sweat of his back.
“That is not you. I know you, Silas. You pretend to be careless. But deep down, you care more than anyone. You are good.”
He turned his face away. “I am sorry, Elswyth, but you are wrong. And I’ve done it again—I’ve taken your honor tonight.”
“My honor has nothing to do with my virginity,” Elswyth said. “And you took nothing. I gave it freely.”
“I have still deflowered you.”
Elswyth moved around him, cupping his face in her hands. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “And I would let you do it again and again,” she said. “I would give you every flower I have, Silas. For a lifetime.”
His eyes flickered to hers. “You and I both know that we cannot be wed,” he said.
“Why not? Ours would not be the first love to cross the boundaries of race.”
“Society would shun you. And I have no money to help your family,” Silas said.
“I don’t care about money,” Elswyth said.
“I don’t care about what society thinks.
” Even as she said the words she knew they were true, despite everything.
No, he did not have the money to help with her father’s medicine, or to give her a lavish life.
And she would be shunned by society if she married him, which meant she might never learn what happened to her sister.
These were things that she wanted, that she needed, but she realized now they were not all she needed.
Somewhere along the way, she had grown to need Silas, too.
He turned his face away and then stood, leaving her kneeling there. She watched his silhouette in front of the forest pool, his broad shoulders heaving. His expression twisted between fear and longing.
“I’m sorry, Elswyth. I can’t.”
Elswyth reached for him but then pulled her hand to her chest. She felt horribly exposed then, kneeling naked in the dirt.
Anger began to boil inside her, and she stood, grabbing her shift and covering herself.
“And yet you still bed me. What if I am pregnant, Silas, what then? Will you let another bastard into the world?”
“If it means keeping you safe…”
“From your father? Is that why you won’t marry me?” Elswyth asked.
Silas turned back to her, but said nothing. His face was drawn and drained of blood. Had he come to regret what he’d done so quickly? Had his passions stirred him to touch her, and only now, in the clearheadedness of release, had he realized just how repulsive she truly was?
“It’s more complicated than that, Elswyth.”
Elswyth began sliding her shift over her head, desperate to cover her scar. To think she’d let him see her—touch her—to think that she was just another conquest of his, some woman easily tricked.
“Is it so complicated, Silas? Or is that just your excuse—what you tell all the women you bed in the hedgerows? Is that what you told Venus?”
“This is different—”
“Is it? Or is that just what you do? Seduce some unwitting girl with a sad tale about your dead wife, leaving her with nothing but pretty words and a bastard in her belly?”
“No, Elswyth—”
She shook her head. “Mrs. Rose was right. Bastards make bastards.”
Silas looked wounded. He reached out for her, but she was already stepping into her gown and pulling it up over her breasts. Panic began to rise in her throat. She was filthy, covered in dirt and leaves, and without anyone to fix her gown. How could she go back to the party now?
“If you’ll excuse me, I have my future husband to return to.” She bunched the gown about her waist and started back into the trees.
“Wait—Elswyth, wait!” Silas reached out and grabbed her. “You cannot marry him.”
Elswyth laughed bitterly. “What else am I to do? If I am pregnant now, I will be ruined. I must marry him, bed him, and pretend the child looks nothing like his true father.”
“Elswyth, please—”
“What, Silas? You will not marry me, but you will not let me wed anyone else? Are you so vain that you must toy with me?”
“No!”
“Then why?”
“Because… because…”
She watched his face. She watched him fall apart, his arms slumping to his sides, and she knew what was coming.
“Don’t say it,” she whispered. “Don’t you dare say it.”
“Because I love you, Elswyth,” Silas said. His voice broke over the words, and he was defeated, standing there with nothing left to say.
Elswyth stared. That horrible feeling—that prickling, floating feeling that she prayed was not love—rose up inside her, threatened to fly out of her mouth in a string of four fatal words: I love you too.
He lifted his arms in a helpless gesture, palms up in supplication. “It’s because I love you. Is that enough?”
Tears welled in her eyes. “If you loved me,” she whispered, “then you would marry me, and damn what anyone else says.”
His face said everything: mouth open, searching for the words. Eyes dark, flickering back and forth around her face, full of emotion. He closed his mouth, defeated. Then he dropped her arm, the warmth of his hand vanishing.
Elswyth nodded. She straightened her back and tucked a stray hair behind her ear. “Then that is all we have to say. Goodbye, Sir Silas.”
Elswyth turned away, unable to look at his face for another moment. She marched through the greenhouse, toward the door, and left him there, alone.