Chapter 21 #3
Lord Charborough strides into view. She gasps, but neither hears her.
They are too focused on one another and the tirade that has reddened the marquess’s face.
She only catches every second word, so low is his voice, but it’s about money and pride and names and glory, and he’s spitting the words now, their existence mere vehicles for the purging of his rage.
“You should have given it up, Val. Instead of us.”
For the first time she sees something like real pain flit across her husband’s face, but before she can make sense of this sign of humanity, he’s taken a step forward.
Is speaking. “I know,” he says. “But we don’t live in a world where choices can be unmade.
I’ve signed. You’ve signed. This is what we have now. ”
Lord Charborough closes the space. He grips her husband’s chin, fingers digging into his cheeks with anger and hatred and yet something far more primal.
Still holding him there, he presses a kiss to his lips—a fierce, hard thing that pushes him back against the door with a thud, and her duke doesn’t fight.
Or he does but it’s a battle for supremacy, and while the goal is each other’s destruction, they are fighting with their hands and their tongues and their weight and the lean musculature of their increasingly naked bodies.
She watches longer than she ought, her body aflame.
She has enjoyed Francis’s company many times, yet it has never been like this, never a battle of wills as much as of bodies.
Never full of a hunger she can feel as though it’s her own but can give no name.
She has hidden her tryst well. But here, in Charborough House, within hours of the marquess’s wedding, they live only for each other.
“Master Nicholas?”
Nic dropped the diary onto the table as though it had burned his fingers, and looked up to find Silla standing by the door, her surprise slowly turning into a disapproving scowl.
“Silla, I—”
“That is not yours to read, Master Nicholas.”
“I know, but… she isn’t writing as herself, and it’s just the same dates over and over like she’s trapped in her own past. Tell me you’ve read it too.”
For a moment, Silla just stared back, then she carefully closed the door. “They are the years she cannot let go. For a while, I hoped she would work through them and emerge out the other side, but no. The time we live in is only a dream to her. That”—she pointed at the diary—“is her reality.”
“She wishes she never married my father.”
“Every day.” It was a whisper, yet it cut deep.
“It was just the two of them by then, Miss Georgiana and her brother. Her father had left her a fortune, and marriage to a duke ought to have been such a boon for the family. But then, you know, or perhaps you don’t, that Mr. Cardwell—her brother—died not long after, leaving her no one she could reach out to for help.
And with his death there was also no one to benefit from what she increasingly saw as her sacrifice. ”
“She was alone.”
Silla drew herself up. “She had me. It just wasn’t enough.
You were born into this lonely prison, Master Nicholas, but she came here from a rich life full of parties and gaiety and flattering suitors, a world where she had her whole life ahead of her.
A shock to find, upon arriving, that her money had disappeared and her whole life was already behind her. ”
And so she lived in a dream world, because the desert the duke had made of their existence was too much.
For a full minute, Nic found he couldn’t speak, could only stand there as anger boiled through him—not just anger at the duke for what he had wrought, but at the society that had made it possible.
But what shocked him most was the flare of anger he felt toward his mother, for abandoning him to protect herself—unfair, he knew, yet it burned hot all the same.
“Did she do it, Silla?”
The maid’s brows contracted into a harsh line. “Are you asking me if Her Grace poisoned that poor girl?”
“I need to know.”
“Of all the people I thought would ask that,” Silla whispered, a whisper that cut its disappointment deep into Nic’s heart.
“I ask because the Serrals have suggested it and will no doubt suggest it again to the king’s men when they come. I have told them it is not true, but—”
“But you doubt.”
Nic looked away. “You told me yourself that in certain moods you feared she would harm my father. One teacup is very much like another, after all.”
Silla folded her arms, glaring at him, the reticent servant vanishing in the flames of stubborn loyalty.
“I’m not telling you anything, Master Nicholas.”
“Why? What is there to hide that won’t just make her look guilty?”
“Why?” Silla hissed. “Because I know what you’re doing. It’s what everyone does. Ask only the questions that will prove her guilt and nothing else.”
Nic stepped forward, shocked that Silla flinched back. “Silla, look at me. I love my mother. I wish I could go back in time and tell her to run. I don’t want to believe she could harm anyone—”
“No one, Master Nicholas.” Silla shook her head, tears sparkling in her eyes.
“She couldn’t hurt anyone. Yes, I know I said I worried that in her dark moods she could harm His Grace, and I meant it, but that is in a fit of rage, not a calculated attack.
I’ve known her longer than anyone and I can promise you she would never knowingly hurt a soul. ”
Knowingly. The word had weight. Doubt. Was a crack in her assurance and Silla seemed to recognise it, grimacing when Nic asked again, “Then tell me what you know. About last night. About all of this. About Lord Francis. Anything that could help.”
The maid looked to the ceiling, blinking away tears. “If I do, Master Nicholas, you have to promise me you will be her ally, because without you she has none. Only me, and no one ever listens to me.”
Tears sprang to Nic’s own eyes and he nodded. “You have my word, Silla. I promise I will do everything I can to make sure she is safe, but I can’t without knowing what I’m keeping her safe from.”
Silla sighed, letting go not only a breath but a sliver of fear.
“Her Grace has said nothing about last night, but she also took nothing with her, unless you think she can manifest poison out of the air? And since she never leaves the house, I’m not sure where she is even supposed to have gotten it from.
As for Lord Francis. Yes, he did make her an automaton—something she could have of him when he wasn’t around.
” Her little laugh was bitter. “It conjured his face and spoke to her. And to you. Awful thing, it was.” Staring into the past, Silla’s eyes burned bright.
“Turned it on him she did, yes, but not like that. She might have hated him by the end, but it was his own experiments that did for him.”
Might have hated him by the end. Nic’s thoughts slid back to the snatches of diary he’d read, and he found that his budding suspicion had grown solid.
“Lord Francis was my father.”
Even as he spoke, Nic realised it wasn’t a question. And when Silla went silent, he knew the answer all the same. The headache that had begun threatening earlier was growing more insistent now.