Chapter 37
The second rung held, the way it always did.
Leonora came up over the edge of the platform in a coat and a pair of boots and a great deal of black gauze, and stood up.
The small room was full of light. Colin had lit it like a chapel. There were candles on the sill and on the bench and in a row along the beam. The ceiling was golden with it.
The smell of the place was the same as it had always been: sawdust and cold air and the pipe he never smoked in the house. And on the sill, standing square on four legs with its head turned as though it had heard a sound behind it, was the horse.
“Oh,” Leonora murmured.
“You finished it.”
“This afternoon, while you were at your mother’s.” He was standing with his back to the far wall and his hands at his sides. “I sat up here from noon until five and did the ear, and I could not think what else to do with myself.”
She crossed the room, crouched down in front of the horse, and did not touch it, which he noticed but did not comment on.
“It’s beautiful.”
“It’s a toy horse.”
“It is four months of a man’s evenings and a hock you had to cut twice,” Leonora countered.
“Katherine is going to drag it about by the tail until its ear comes off, and you are going to mend the ear. That is what it is for.” She stood up.
“Thank you for showing me. But it is nine o’clock, and it is cold.
It could have waited until tomorrow, could it not? ”
“It could.”
“Then why am I up a tree in my nightgown, Your Grace?”
Colin did not answer. Instead, he reached up, untied the black silk eyepatch, and took it off.
Leonora did not move at all.
He closed his eye; that was what she had not been prepared for. He took the patch off, closed his eye, and stood there in the light with his hands down and his face bare, waiting like a man waiting to be struck.
The scar began high, up in his hairline where the hair grew through it white, and came down across his eyebrow and through the socket and onto his cheekbone, silvered and old and much wider at the top than she had imagined.
Under it, where the eye had been, the lid had healed shut, and the whole side of his face was slightly out of true, so that even in stillness he looked as though he were about to say something bitter.
He was not hideous. He was not hideous in the least. He was a man who had been cut open at fifteen and had grown up with it.
Leonora crossed the floor. She was aware that he could hear her coming and that he had not opened his eye, and that he had gone rigid. She slowly lifted her hand and touched two fingers to the top of the scar.
He flinched.
“I’m here,” she murmured. “I am not going anywhere, and I am not going to make a noise. You may stand there as long as you need to.”
She traced it down—all of it, unhurried, the way he had stroked up her ankle in this room a month ago—over the closed lid and down the ridge on his cheekbone to where it stopped. Then she pressed her palm against that side of his face and held it there.
“Open your eye,” she whispered.
He opened it.
“There,” she said. “That is the whole of it, is it not? That is what I was going to weep at.”
“Duchess—”
“I have been married for five weeks to a man who thought I would scream.” Her voice was shaking, and she let it.
“I have looked, and I have looked properly, and I shall tell you exactly what I see. I see that it must have been very deep and that somebody stitched it in a hurry, that it must have hurt for a year, and that you were fifteen.” Her thumb moved once across his cheekbone.
“I see that you are extremely handsome, which I have thought since the first time I laid eyes on you, and which I have never said out loud because you would have found some way to make it my mistake.”
Colin made a sound. It was not a word, and it rose from somewhere deep. Then he sat down on the floor of the treehouse with his back against the wall, as though his legs had simply given way, and put his hands over his face.
Leonora sat down beside him.
She did not touch him again. She sat with her shoulder against his and her knees drawn up, and waited.
After a long while, he dropped his hands and told her the whole of it.
He started in the wrong place, went back, and started again.
He told her about his mother. That she had been small and fair and could not sing at all, and had done it constantly, and that she had lit up the house like a fair because she would not live in a place that looked like a family vault.
He told her about his father. That he had loved her past all sense, which people called a fine thing when they had not watched it done.
He told her that there had been three days of jealousy for every good week, and a great many raised voices, and that they had always made up. That at eight years old, he had known the whole shape of it and had learned to read a room from a doorway.
He told her about the year his mother had died giving birth to William, and a house with every shutter closed. That his father had gone quiet for a month and then had not been quiet again.
He told her about Mrs. Pike on the back stairs three weeks after the funeral, and about his nine-year-old self watching from four steps up and doing nothing because there had been nothing to do.
And then he told her about the birthday.
He told it flatly, in order, without one word of apology for any of it, and she sat beside him and did not interrupt once.
It had been William’s sixth birthday and the anniversary of his mother’s death, and his father had been drinking since morning.
William had asked twice for a wooden horse he had been promised, and had gone on asking in the way of a child who could not read a room because nobody had ever taught him to.
His father had grabbed the knife from the table and come around it, saying that the boy had killed her, and Colin had gotten between them without deciding to.
“I did not feel it,” he rasped. “That is the part nobody believes. I have told this to two people in my life, and neither of them believed me. I put my arm up and went down. The room was full of noise, and I could not see out of one side. I thought I had been struck with the flat of something.”
“Colin.”
“He did not stop.” His hands were flat on his knees. “He did not stop, Leonora. I got up and told William to run to the treehouse and lock the door, because it was the only door in this house with a bolt a child could work. I went after him up the ladder, and my father came after us both.”
He paused for a moment.
“He was very drunk, and he came after us across the lawn in the dark with the knife still in his hand.” Colin’s hands were flat on his knees.
“There is a stone trough at the bottom of the yew walk. It has been there since the house was built. He went over on the wet grass six feet short of it and hit his head on the corner of it, and that was the whole of it. It took perhaps four seconds. I was on the second rung of this ladder with my back to him, and I did not see it. I heard it.”
Leonora looked at her hands. “You were on the ladder.”
“Yes.”
“You were fifteen years old, bleeding out of your face, halfway up a rope ladder, running to a six-year-old who was locked in a treehouse because you had told him to lock himself in it, and a drunk man hit his head.” She turned her head.
“And you have called yourself responsible for that for fifteen years.”
“I made him chase me.”
“You made him chase you away from your brother.”
“I went over it a great many times.”
“I am certain you have. I imagine you have gone over it every day since, at about four in the morning, up in this tree.” Leonora’s voice had gone very steady, which surprised her.
“And I imagine that somebody did try to tell you,” Leonora said.
“I imagine a woman of four-and-thirty with a bad hip sat you down in a kitchen at some point that winter and told you it was not your doing, and I imagine you were fifteen and did not hear one word of it, because there was nobody else in the world to hold it against.”
Colin did not answer.
“So I shall tell you again,” Leonora continued, “and you will hear it this time, because you are thirty and not fifteen and you have nothing left to hold it against. You did not kill your father. Your father killed himself over the course of six years with a bottle, and on the last night of it, he chased his own children with a knife. The only thing in that room that behaved well was a boy of fifteen who has been apologizing to this household in wood ever since.”
He turned his head and looked at her. “Mrs. Pike said that to you.”
“Mrs. Pike said it to me in a stillroom in May, and I have been carrying it with me ever since, waiting for you to let me give it to you,” Leonora murmured. “I would be obliged if you take it, because it is extremely heavy.”