Chapter 36
“Good God! Look what the gutter spat out on my carpet.”
Samuel rose from his chair by the fireplace with a glass of port in his hand. His expression was full of fastidious disgust as he looked over Magnus from the dirt in his hair to the bloodstain spreading along his side. He did not even bother to ask what happened to him.
Magnus stood in the doorway and caught his breath.
Every part of him hurt, and he had stopped trying to staunch the blood around the second mile of his ride.
He was here for one reason and one reason only, and it certainly wasn’t to see this smarmy, fastidious man sitting in front of a warm fire.
He was at the last frayed edge of his patience, and he felt it giving.
He had ridden home to Greythorne Hall first. He had been half out of the saddle before the horse even stopped, ignoring the wound in his side.
He had dashed into the house only to find the great rooms cold and empty and Rosaline nowhere in them; a frightened footman had stammered out that she had gone to visit her sisters and hadn’t returned yet.
So, Magnus climbed back on his horse and rode through the dark streets to Darton House, bleeding and single-minded in his purpose to see the one person who could ease the pain in his chest.
He had stridden past the butler, who had been too astonished to stop him, and followed the lamplight to find his wife. Instead, he found the one man in London whom he had no desire to lay eyes on.
“I have had a tryin’ evenin’, Darton.” His voice came out rough. “I’d appreciate it if ye stepped outta me way.”
“Your way?” Samuel set down his port. Cruelty settled over his features like a familiar coat.
“You come into my house bleeding, stinking of the docks, and looking like something dragged out of a Highland ditch—which I suppose is your natural state—and you think you can simply walk through it? My sister has been a fool ten times over, but I confess even I do not think her foolish enough to be beaten by a husband who—”
Magnus punched him.
He had not decided to do it. Instead, his body decided for him with the energy of the entire cold, dark night behind it. His fist caught Samuel cleanly in the face with a crack.
Samuel went down over the arm of his chair.
The chair rocked hard on its legs and struck the little table beside it, and the port he had set down went over with it, a dark arc flung across the carpet and the glass ringing away over the floorboards.
He reached up to clutch his nose, blood spurting between his fingers.
“I’ve never beaten her. Her only misfortune was to be born yer sister.
” Magnus towered over him. He was not shouting, and that made matters worse.
“Yer sisters deserve better than ye, Darton. They always have. Rosaline gave every hour of every year to keep this house standin’, and ye never once saw her worth, because ye’re a wee, petty man, and her soul was too bright and beautiful for ye to hold.
” He flexed his hand. “That’s for three years of it.
There’s more where that came from if ye’d like. ”
“Magnus?”
He turned.
Rosaline stood in the doorway with Beatrice by her side. The sight of her went through him like sun through water. It made him feel cleaner than anything had in the past two weeks.
Then her eyes caught the blood on his shirt, his filthy hair, and his split knuckles, and the light went out of her, leaving only fear.
“You’re injured!” She ran to him, this woman who had walked out of his life and rightly so, given that her fears had almost come true.
Her hands went to his face, then his side, hovering over the wet, dark stain, not quite daring to touch it.
“Magnus, you’re bleeding. What has happened? ! Who did this to you?!”
“It’s done.” He caught her hand in his and held it tightly. In that moment, he could think of nothing else to say. “It’s over, Rosaline. All of it. I’ll tell ye all of it, I promise ye I will, only—”
“Of course. Of course you run to him.” Samuel had dragged himself up against the chair.
He had one hand clamped tightly around his nose, and his voice came out thick and nasally and filled with venom.
“Look at you. Look at what you have chosen over your family. You threw everything away. Your name, your sisters’ futures, and every advantage I sacrificed to give you, and for what?
For this… this Highland animal who cannot even enter a house without leaving blood and filth behind him.
You have brought a beast into my home, Rosaline, and you fawn over it.
Well, I hope you are proud of yourself. I hope that Mother, wherever she is—”
“Don’t.”
Beatrice was already drawing breath to let loose something scathing that would wither Samuel’s soul. Magnus saw her small shoulders square, but it was not she who spoke. It was Rosaline.
She let go of his hand and turned slowly to face her brother across the wrecked parlor.
There was something in her face and the set of her shoulders that Magnus had never seen before.
Not in the maze, not in the garden, not in all their months together.
He understood with a jolt that he was watching something break loose inside her that had been chained her entire life. And she looked glorious.
“No,” she bit out. “You do not get to speak of our mother. Not one more time. You have used her memory as a whip against me since the day we buried her. It ends tonight in this room. You are going to stand there with your broken nose, and you are going to listen to me, Samuel. I have been silent in this house too long, and you will not say a word until I am finished.”
The parlor went as still as a mouse hiding from a cat.
Magnus did not move. Every instinct screamed at him that he should step between Rosaline and Samuel to protect her from the three years of pain she had endured. But he did not. He stood by her shoulder and kept his mouth shut and his hands loose.
This moment was hers. This moment had always been hers, and the one thing he could do for her was to let her have it.
He had spent months teaching her to command a room back when it had been a game for them, a lesson traded for a bargain. Now, he realized he had taught her nothing at all.
It had been inside of her all this time, banked under three years of her brother’s boot and a lifetime of her father’s disinterest. It had only been waiting for the moment she finally decided that the cost of her silence had grown greater than the cost of speech.
He stood and watched her set fire to the thing that had caged her. He had never been so proud of another living soul, nor so certain of what he felt for her.
“You call it an advantage,” she said, taking a step toward Samuel.
Her voice was cool and collected, and the most frightening thing in the room.
“Everything you sacrificed to give me? You gave me nothing, Samuel.
You took. You took every choice I might have made and chose for me.
You took my days and filled them with your errands.
You took my nights and filled them with dread.
You watched me hour after hour and called it caring.
You dressed up your cruelty and called it your duty, and your control as love.
“I flinched every time you told me I was ungrateful. When I bent to your will, you told me it was not enough. It was never about our sisters’ futures.
It was your need that I stay small, afraid, and under your thumb.
You need someone beneath you to feel large, and you picked me because our mother had just died and I was young, and there was no one left to tell you no.
“In all these years, you have never asked me how I was. Not once on my worst days, not on the anniversary of our mother’s death, nor on any of the hundreds of mornings I came down to your table with my eyes swollen from crying.
Crying that you could not be bothered to hear through the wall.
It never occurred to you that I had feelings at all.
That I could feel grief, or happiness, or anything at all.
Because to you, I am a tool, and a tool does not have feelings.
A tool is a useful thing, and that is what I was to you. Well, I am not your tool anymore.”
Samuel sputtered and then straightened. “You forget yourself.” His eyes had gone wide over his bloody hand. “You dare talk back to me in my own home! You dare talk back to me in this—”
“You destroyed this home with your cruelty,” Rosaline went on as if he hadn’t spoken.
The words landed like a stone in still waters, and the ripples spread through the entire cold house.
“There is no home here, Samuel. There has not been one since Mother died.
There is nothing but a beautiful stone building full of rules and your fear and your two sisters growing up and learning to be small the way you taught me.
“I have carried the guilt of leaving them since my wedding, but I am not carrying your cruelty anymore. That, I am setting down tonight. It ends. However I have to make it end, it ends. And if you think your broken nose is the worst thing that awaits you, should you ever raise your voice to Beatrice or Ivy again, then you have not been paying attention this evening.”
Samuel stared at her, his mouth gaping like a carp out of water. And then, because he really was a coward, he pushed off the chair and snarled something about lunacy and ingratitude and the men he would be speaking to as he made his way out of the parlor.
Magnus caught him by his collar before he could make his escape. He turned him and held him at arm’s length, as if taking stock of a side of beef and deciding what to keep.
“Nay, ye’re nae leavin’ yet.” His voice had dropped to a low growl that would have made harder men go still. “Me wife is speakin’ to ye. Ye’ll stand, and ye’ll listen to the end of it, or I’ll break somethin’ of yers that mends a deal slower than a nose. D’ye understand me, Darton?”
Samuel’s eyes flicked from Magnus’s face to the blood on the floor. Then they moved to the split knuckles on the hand tight around his collar. He nodded, fast and almost frantic, before his mouth had caught up.
“Yes. Yes. Let go of me—”
“In a moment.” Magnus did not let go. “First, ye’ll make me a promise, and ye’ll keep it, because I am a patient man, Darton.
I have just spent sixteen years provin’ exactly how patient I am.
Ye’ll be a better braither than ye’ve ever been.
Ye’ll be kind to yer sisters, or ye’ll be silent, and silent will do if kind is past ye.
And ye’ll ken, every hour of every day for the rest of yer life, that I am watchin’.
I’ve friends in high places now, and higher ones after tonight.
There is no room in England ye can be cruel in that I’ll nae hear of it.
One word. One cruel word to me wife or yer sisters, and I’ll come back and finish what I started on yer face this evenin’.
I’ll take the tongue that spoke it to finish ye off. Are we agreed?”
“Agreed. Agreed, God, yes—”
“Say it.”
“I will be—” Samuel’s voice cracked, and Magnus could see that he hated it. “I will be a better brother. I swear it. Let me go.”
Magnus looked at him a moment longer, taking his measure, finding him exactly as small as he had always suspected. Then he opened his hand.
Samuel staggered backward, caught himself, and pressed his sleeve to his bleeding nose.
Then, he ran, actually ran, out of his own parlor and into the hall.
He shouted hoarsely for his coat, his carriage, and a physician.
The front door banged open, and the house he had ruled by fear for three years spat him out into the cold.
The silence that ensued was thick.
Magnus stood in the middle of the parlor. The hand he had hit Oldbrook and then Samuel with was throbbing at his side, but he regretted none of it.
He slowly noticed the wound in his side again, the warmth of the fire, and Beatrice standing wide-eyed by the door with an expression of delighted respect she was clearly trying to decide whether to be ashamed of. And he became aware of the small pale face on the stairs.
Ivy stood halfway down the stairs in her nightgown, with both hands wrapped around the banister, having seen God only knew how much.
Her eyes were huge in the lamplight and stared not at the blood, not at the door her brother had fled through, but at Rosaline, standing tall and unbroken in the middle of the wreckage.
Beatrice moved at once.
“Come on, darling.” She gently gathered the little girl up off the stairs and tucked her small, dark head against her shoulder. “You have seen quite enough for one night, and if you are very good, I will tell you the parts you missed, suitably embellished.”
At the bend, she paused and looked back. Her sharp eyes flicked from her sister to Magnus and back again, warming briefly.
“We will be upstairs,” she said. “Take as long as you need.”
With that, she carried Ivy up and away. A moment later, a door closed softly above, and the two of them were at last left alone in the empty room.
Magnus turned to his wife.