Chapter Sixteen #2
Bernard whirled around, almost expecting to see a dozen Frenchmen, each equipped with a dozen iron bars, but there was nothing. The hallway was empty; no servant had appeared, and none of the three Chances in the drawing room had evidently considered the coast clear enough to venture out.
He turned back to Lucy, his brow furrowed. “What is it?”
Lucy was still staring, eyes wide, as though…as though she had never met him before, and a stranger had been caught intruding in the house. “You… I don’t know you.”
Bernard’s stomach dropped.
Surely, this was not possible; he had never heard of a medical situation in which amnesia could occur without any head injury or illness. How could she not know who he was? How was this even feasible?
“Lucy—Lucy, it’s Bernard,” he said quickly, stepping toward her.
But Lucy half-walked, half-ran away from him, stepping around him toward the front door as though she were fleeing an intruder. “But are you? Who are you, Bernard?”
Bernard swallowed. Oh, dear.
Her laughter was pained, but it caused Bernard even more pain as it scorched through him.
“Lucy—”
“You told me you’re not a criminal,” Lucy said quietly, her voice unnervingly level. “That you’re a spy.”
Bernard blinked. “Yes, but I don’t know what that has to do with—”
“But how can I know you’re speaking the truth?” she whispered, staring with wide eyes. “How can I know that anything you’ve told me about yourself is true?”
Oh.
This was something he had not considered. Bernard had always told the truth, except… Damn. Except when he lied.
But that was for the job, for his country. A spy couldn’t gander about the place telling everyone the truth. He wouldn’t last five minutes!
“You have offered me no proof of your innocence, nor of your service to this country,” Lucy said slowly, folding her arms before her as though they were a protective barrier. “I have only your word—”
“And you trust my word, don’t you?” Bernard said desperately.
It was all unraveling. It was all falling apart.
He knew well enough that, perhaps until he claimed his title, there was no way he could prove his innocence—quite to the contrary, Hovell always made some wonderfully falsified records for the courts and prisons.
That was one of the reasons they worked so well as a team.
Lucy swallowed, and her hesitation told him more than enough.
“Lucy, you have to trust me—”
“Why? You could be a criminal, or—or married, or—”
“I am not married,” Bernard said sharply. And was not likely to be, at this rate.
Now the tears were flowing from Lucy’s eyes and it was a dagger to his heart to see her so upset—but he had tried to approach her and she had shied away from him like a horse who had suffered through too many whippings.
Dear God. He had done that.
Him. He had hurt her.
“I don’t know anything about you,” Lucy whispered as another tear trickled down her cheek.
“You might not know about my past, but—but, Lucy, you know everything important about me, about who I am,” Bernard said desperately, feeling the moment slipping away from him like sand through his fingertips.
“I don’t even know your real name, do I?”
Bernard hesitated, his mouth dry.
She turned away from him, her hand lifted to her mouth as she stifled a sob.
Dropping his head into his hands and rubbing at his tired eyes, Bernard desperately tried to think of a way to convince her—to show her he was a man who could be trusted.
But she was also not wrong. What did she know of him that could be proven? That he was afraid of swimming and that he knew how to read. He had the skills to beat up four men who jumped on him unawares, and he could dance a country dance.
It wasn’t exactly the best foundation for a life of wedded bliss.
Her body was shaking. “I-I can’t believe how stupid I’ve been—”
“You’re not stupid,” Bernard said, stepping toward her and placing his hands on her shoulders. “You—”
Lucy shrugged off his touch and strode away from him, the hallway somehow becoming a boxing ring within which they circled each other. “I have been! And I’ve been distracted, distracted from my work, from the importance of the Prison Reform Society—”
“Did all those letters I wrote not count?” Bernard could not help but say.
It was the wrong thing. Ire sparkled in Lucy’s eyes. “And for all I know you were placed here, by the enemy!”
Bernard blinked. Now he was the one utterly lost. “The… ‘The enemy’?”
“Judge Bonner!” Lucy declared, as though she had managed to untangle a great web of deceit and had found him, Bernard, right in the center of it. “For all I know, you and Judge Bonner cooked this up to distract me!”
“Lucy, that’s ridiculous!”
“Is it?” Her finality, not the volume of her voice, was what stopped Bernard in his tracks. Lucy stared as though he were a stranger, as though he were someone she did not know and could never know. “More or less ridiculous than the story that you’re a spy?”
Bernard swore in a mutter and turned away from her, unable to look at the woman who was simultaneously infuriating and delightful in every twisting second.
How had this gotten so out of control? How had this gotten so out of hand? How was it possible?
“Ask me.”
Bernard almost looked around to see why Lucy had spoken, before he realized those two syllables had come from his own lips. Then he turned around to see Lucy’s face.
Distrust marred her wrinkled brow. “Ask you what?”
“Anything. Anything. I’ll tell you anything.” And the importance of his missions, Hovell, his own true identity…all of that faded away.
Nothing was more important than this. Nothing was more important than her.
Bernard had expected Lucy to brighten, to start pouring question after question into his lap, but instead, she…frowned.
“You should want to tell me,” she said, her voice breaking and her arms now hugging around her as though she needed them to be able to keep standing. “You should want to share your life with me, Bernard. Isn’t that… Isn’t that what marriage means?”
“I…” Bernard swallowed, unable to continue.
When had this happened? When had it become so difficult to even think about his old life, his real life? When had ‘Bernard Dixon’ become such a part of him that he hardly knew how to parse it from the rest of him?
Why did his mind go blank when asked about his real life?
Lucy’s shoulders slumped. “I see.”
“No—No, Lucy, I can do this. I can be anything you need!”
“But I don’t want you to fabricate who you are just to please me,” she shot back, the tears flowing again. “Bernard, I… Maybe you should go.”
Bernard took a long, slow breath as he tried to calm himself. She was right. As usual, Lucy was right. “Yes, I’ll step aside for a moment, and then when I come back—”
“No, I think you should go.”
Her voice wasn’t sharp. It did not need to be, for there was a finality in it that brooked no argument and denied any clarification.
Go.
Bernard blinked. “‘Go’?”
“I think it is fair to say that you have overstayed your welcome,” Lucy said, a coldness in her voice he had never heard before.
He’d done that. His lies, his secrets, his inability to tell the truth.
And in the face of losing her, of seeing a life stretching out before him with no Lucy in it, Bernard impulsively did the only thing that he could think of.
He told the truth.
“I am a viscount,” Bernard blurted out, pulse thumping painfully. “I’m a viscount, Lucy. I’m Viscount Moray—”
“You wish to tease me, after all this?” Lucy said bitterly, turning away and storming past him. “You really are low.”
She entered the drawing room and slammed the door behind her before Bernard could reach it—but as he rushed forward and was about to open the door to go after her, he heard it.
The sound of Lucy’s sobs.
“Oh, Papa!”
“Oh, my darling girl!”
“Come here. Mother’s got you.”
“You’ll always have us, Luce.” That was Lord Percy’s voice. “You’ll always have us.”
Bernard’s fingers had already twisted the handle, but he did not push the door open. He hesitated, listening painfully to the sobs from within the room. Then he twisted the handle back to its position and released it.
Time for him to go.