Olivia remembered very little of her only visit to Shepwich, which had not lasted above an hour or two. She remembered a house, infinitely large and empty. An old woman who had tried to pull Olivia onto her lap—but Mama had snatched her back. And she remembered an argument, very angry, as Mama wept.
These were not details that provided much help in locating her mother’s childhood home. But Shepwich itself was smaller even than Allen’s End, no more than a dozen houses sparsely arranged around the bend in the sandy road, and the proprietor of the general store, who greeted her with curiosity, answered at once: “The Holladays? Aye, you’ll want the white house half a mile down the lane with the old stone barn in back. Can’t miss it. A relation, are you? You’ve the look of a Holladay, about your eyes and . . .” He gestured toward his nose.
“Yes,” Olivia said, “a relative,” and beat a hasty retreat to the coach, where Marwick was waiting—his presence, she’d felt, being somewhat too grand to induce easy admissions from a shopkeeper.
She gave instructions to the coachman, an easygoing young man who’d proved remarkably tolerant at devoting his day to haring about the countryside. Inside, Marwick was slouched against the wall, looking sullen. The effect of sexual congress obviously varied widely: it rather enlivened her, but he always behaved afterward as though he’d been hit hard on the head. “What do you think of my nose?” she asked him.
He pushed himself up from his slouch, and frowned at the item in question. “I never have, particularly.”
“Exactly,” she said with satisfaction. Her nose was straight enough, if a touch too large for true beauty. But she deemed it in no way remarkable. “Yet the man in that store said it marked me as a Holladay.”
She did not intend the remark to pose some revelation, but Marwick looked arrested. He leaned forward, considering her so narrowly that she felt, after a moment, somewhat flustered, and held her hand up to block her nose from his view. “It’s a very normal nose,” she said. “Don’t tell me otherwise.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “I wouldn’t dare,” he said. “It’s a lovely nose, in fact.”
She dropped her hand and ogled him. “A compliment! I change my mind: my nose must be the eighth wonder of the world!”
Expression darkening, he settled back against his bench. “I’ve complimented you before.”
“Have you?” She shrugged. “Very well.”
“I have.”
She saw no point in arguing. She looked out the window, aware suddenly of a certain nervous flutter in her stomach. This stretch of Kent, the last ribbon of fertile soil before the ground turned to salt and sand, was the land of her ancestors. Flat green fields stretched endlessly beneath the gray sky. If these people, the Holladays, tried to slam the door in her face, she would not weep. Had it not been for the . . . interlude . . . on this very bench, she would have been primed to rage at them. Instead, she decided she would task Marwick to coldly intimidate them.
“I’ve told you you’re beautiful,” he said.
She glanced at him, startled. “Oh, yes, of course. But that was during . . .” She felt herself blush. Peculiar how one could do things without shame, but not be able to speak of them.
His smile now was deliberately suggestive. “It counts,” he said. “But I’ll say it again, lest you feel skeptical: you are beautiful, Olivia.”
She frowned at him, puzzled by why he might say so. “I’m not, particularly.”
He frowned back at her. “Yes,” he said. “You are.”
What nonsense was this? “You and I both know what beauty looks like.” A waspish tone had crept into her voice. She did not like to be patronized. “Your late wife was beautiful. The very picture of beauty.”
It was a calculated decision, mentioning her. Olivia expected it to end the conversation. But he merely shrugged. “She was lovely to look at,” he said. “But not beautiful.”
She smiled despite herself. “That’s ridiculous. Do you mean to say that beauty lies in a lantern jaw?” She touched her chin. “A perfect square?”
His eyes followed her hand. “Determination,” he said. “Resolve. Yes, those things are beautiful.”
“I’m talking about my jaw.”
“That is what your jaw looks like to me.”
She felt a fluster of confusion. Was he serious with this mad babble? But he appeared quite serious. He was gazing at her with perfect sobriety.
She suddenly could not hold his eyes. She looked out the window again. If he was mocking her . . . “Obviously you find me attractive,” she said. “And I’m handsome, no doubt. I have all my teeth. But that’s a different thing from beauty. That’s all I mean.”
“Self-possession,” he said. “Dignity. Gorgeous qualities. I see them in your straight spine. In the way you hold yourself, your carriage.”
Did she hold herself so distinctively? She had never realized it. She felt a flush of gratification, quite unfamiliar, stemming as it did from her neglected vanity. “Don’t be silly.”
“I’m the fifth Duke of Marwick,” he said. “Also the Earl of Beckden and the Baron Wellsley. I am many things, but I am not silly.”
She rolled her eyes at the clouds.
“Resilience,” he said. “In the tilt to your chin.” Dryly he added, “It verges on stubbornness, of course, but all the virtues extend into flaws when carried too far.”
She cast him a quick, mocking glance. “In the manner of compliments that edge on criticisms?”
He smiled at her. She looked away again, but now she was holding her breath, hoping (ridiculous of her!) that he might go on.
And he did. “Passion in the vibrant colors of your hair,” he murmured. “I see new shades every time I look at it. I’ve counted at least nine.”
He’d been cataloging the shades of her hair?
“Intelligence in your brow. Thoughtfulness in the way it has furrowed, as you try to figure out whether I’m speaking truthfully. Which I am. And you would be wise to believe me. I’ve been making a study of you for quite some time now. Yours was the first face I’d seen in months, after all. The face I saw through the darkness. And it seems that I know it even better than you do, if you doubt your own beauty.”
She’d been holding her breath, and now she could not catch it. She looked back at him wonderingly, and the expression on his face . . . It was sober and tender and intent. She had wondered, in his garden, if any man would look this way at her again. She’d never dreamed that he might be the one to do it.
But that had been her secret hope.
“You’re mad,” she whispered. She felt shaken. “Perhaps you need the spectacles.”
He gave her a gentle smile. “Humor and wit, in the quirk of your lips. And in your eyes . . .” His smile faded. “Hope.”
She swallowed. He had commented on that before, in the library.
Would you always look at me so? She bit her lip to stop the words, and put her hand over her chest, which twisted painfully. For she knew the answer to that question better than he did. He thought he would never recover his old life. But one day he would. The world would not be content to move forward always without him. And he, eventually, would not be able to endure the sidelines.
He would stop looking at her like this once he remembered who he was.
The coach began to slow. She made herself look out. She did not recognize the house. It was only a single story, weatherboarded in white, barely larger than the cottage in which she’d grown up. A stone barn stood a short way beyond it, through a field of waving grass.
“Of course,” he said as the vehicle rocked to a halt, “the final element, which shows nowhere in particular, and everywhere at once, is your courage.”
She took a deep breath.
“I know you’re ready to face these people—your family, Olivia. But there is no need for you to do it. You can stay here while I speak with them. And then, if they wish to meet you, they can make the approach themselves. I think you deserve that—to be the one who is approached.”
Her throat closed. He had not mentioned kindness. That was his quality, which she lacked. But it suffused every part of him, though he fought so hard to hide it. Perhaps she was the only person in the world who managed to see it so clearly in him. Even he himself seemed blind to it. “Thank you,” she said. “But today . . . I seem to want to do it all.” He thought her very brave, but without him, she would never have dared approach those women on the promenade. By his side, she discovered new parts of herself fashioned from steel and armor, parts that she liked very much. She would take advantage of them now. “I want to get through it all in one fell swoop.”
He moved onto her bench. “For luck then,” he said, and lifted her hand for a single kiss that she felt all the way through her bones.
Mrs. Holladay, white haired and petite, had the rosy cheeks and bright eyes of a figure in a fairy tale: the white witch who saved children from wolves. But she wore the weeds of a widow, and when she received them at the door, her courteous greeting was sluggish, dulled by obvious fatigue.
Her mourning black, and the lock of hair she wore at her wrinkled throat, silenced Olivia. Marwick spoke for them both, but he only shared his own name, and conveyed that they had come on a matter of delicate but urgent import. “You should sit,” he said, “before we speak.”
Mrs. Holladay ushered them into her parlor, where tea was laid. After handing them each a cup, she said, with a polite but bewildered smile, “How may I help you, then?”
Olivia took a breath. “You won’t recognize me. But my mother was Jean Holladay, your daughter.”
Mrs. Holladay dropped her cup. Tea splashed across the carpet, but she did not seem to notice. She stared, lips trembling. “Oh. Oh. Oh, you’ve come home!” She lifted a hand to her mouth. “If only Roger had lived to see it . . .”
Roger, it transpired, was Mrs. Holladay’s late husband, only two months’ deceased. She rushed to find a photograph of him, then changed course and flew outside. Olivia heard her tasking the coachman to take a note to the neighboring farmstead—the denizens of which must have worked to spread the news very rapidly, for within a quarter hour, the parlor had filled with strangers, all of them claiming to be Olivia’s relations.
Cousins, uncles, nieces and nephews, dear old friends of her mother’s, swarmed to introduce themselves. Amid this strange and ardent welcome, Olivia found herself quite unable to cut to the point of her visit. She felt numb, overwhelmed, a cold point of sobriety amid tears and laughter. Marwick, now seated on the sofa watching her with an inscrutable look, now cloistered in the corner in conference with a farmer (whose trousers were still coated with stray bits of hay), proved no help at all. But when she finally extricated herself from embraces and found a seat again, he somehow managed to appear beside her, asking in a low voice if she was all right.
Of course she was. She reached for her resolve. “Mrs. Holladay,” she said (making clear with a pointed look that she did not mean any of the four other Mrs. Holladays, two of whom had babes in arm). “I must speak with you privately.”
“Of course, dear!” Mrs. Holladay proposed a supper, and this seemed a signal for everybody to disperse, with promises of a quick return, and a dish or two each to contribute.
Once the three of them were alone again, Mrs. Holladay (Grandmother, you should call me) took a seat opposite, taking up her knitting, beaming as her needles clacked.
Olivia took Marwick’s hand. Mrs. Holladay’s rheumy gaze flicked down to take note of it, and somehow, that faint whisper of propriety finally jarred Olivia into speaking the question that, once voiced, sparked a burn of anger: “Why are you being so kind to me? You turned my mother away from your doorstep when she most needed you. Why?”
Mrs. Holladay dropped her needles. “Gracious, child! Turn her away? Did she say that? We never did any such thing!”
Curiously, Olivia felt Marwick’s surprise more than her own. It registered very clearly in the sharp squeeze of his fingers around hers. “But you did,” she said. “I remember it. You quarreled with her, and then we went away in the dark, and she said we couldn’t stay.”
“But that’s because she refused to listen to us.” Mrs. Holladay sat forward, looking white as paper. “We told her she needn’t put up with him. We told her she should sue him in court. And she refused. She wouldn’t do that to him, she said. As though she owed him anything! And yes, by heaven, we quarreled with her for that—your grandfather would have no part in letting that rascal abuse her. He wanted justice. He would have sold every inch of this land to fund a lawsuit, if she’d only allowed it.”
The woman might as well have been speaking in tongues. But a strange, prickling foreboding came over Olivia. “A lawsuit?”
“Yes, a lawsuit! How else were we to go about it?”
Marwick spoke then. “A lawsuit on what grounds?”
Mrs. Holladay made a disgusted noise. “On the grounds of bigamy, of course! How could he marry that American girl, how dare he do it, when he was already married to my daughter?”
Olivia sat on a fallen log, by the edge of a pond choked with lily pads. The dark water glimmered in the late afternoon light. As if winter had forgotten about this stretch of Kent, many of the branches still bore leaves, and the air was temperate, scented by mulch and sap.
She heard Marwick coming long before she saw him. Branches cracked underfoot, and then a stone flew past her, skipping across the pond’s surface.
“Well done,” she said.
“I can do better.” He came to sit beside her on the log. After a brief study of the ground, he plucked up another stone and proved his claim.
She rather thought she knew how that stone felt when it made the final plunge. Surprised to be so suddenly out of its depths.
She had listened as long as she’d been able. But when the family had begun crowding into the parlor again, carrying dishes and bottles, full of merriment, her numbness had cracked. She had excused herself to the washroom, then ducked out the door and followed the path through the scraggly wood to this pond.
“They must be wondering where I am,” she said now.
He shrugged. “They’re aghast that your mother didn’t tell you the truth.”
She bit down hard on her cheek. Yes, all right, it was anger she was feeling. Anger and . . . deep, deep injury. “She must have had her reasons.”
He said nothing.
“She loved him.” A jagged laugh spilled from her. “This, above all, is the ultimate proof of it.” To have protected him against his own evildoing, even at the cost of her own happiness.
“She might have loved you better,” he said quietly. “To have put you through such a childhood—”
“Don’t.” She snatched up a rock and hurled it. It did not skip once, but it made a mighty splash as it sank. “She loved me very well. What could you know about it? And who knows? If she hadn’t taken his bigamy quietly, perhaps he’d have sent a man to throttle her.”
“Perhaps,” he said after a pause. “I suppose it does solve the mystery of why he hounds you. If he feared you had the proof of his marriage to your mother . . .”
Tears pricked her eyes. Why now? She had been staring dry-eyed for half an hour. “What a joke. I don’t.”
He turned to her. “Olivia. You do.”
She dashed a hand over her eyes. “Do I?”
He brushed his thumb over her cheek, his handsome face grave. “That’s what your mother meant by that line in her diary. The ‘hidden truth’—that’s the parish register. Your grandmother explained the whole of it. The night your mother brought you here, the family conferred with the rector who had married your parents. He decided to hide the register—a very wise decision, for the church was later burgled. A few pieces of silver went missing, along with the registers—save the one which the rector had locked away.”
“Oh.” The syllable seemed to flop out of her mouth. She stared at the ground where it would have landed.
“So it can be proved,” he said.
She nodded once.
His hand found hers. “Is that all you have to say?”
She glanced at him and felt a strange flutter of anxiety at his frown, which she identified after a moment: concern that she had disappointed him. She pulled her hand free and stared at the lily pads again.
She had never felt obligated to anybody but her mother—and perhaps Elizabeth Chudderley, for whom she’d felt such deep gratitude for employing her without a proper reference. But what was this uneasiness now, but proof that she felt beholden to him? Beholden not only in simple matters, like their shared aims in regard to Bertram. She also worried over his moods. She wanted him to be . . . happy.
But she knew that his happiness lay in his return to a world she could not join. Lovely. She’d fashioned a perfect pit for herself.
She cleared her throat. “It has certainly been . . . odd,” she said. “The afternoon.”
“Odd in the best of ways.” She heard in his voice that he was attempting to cheer her. “Had we a copy of Debrett’s, we could edit it.”
She did not want to think on that right now. It would be a rageful undertaking to reflect on the consequences of exposing Bertram—and she had spent long enough in this dark mood. She was not a woman to sulk. Better to focus on the simpler, happier facts: she had a family. She had a place. She had everything she’d once longed for.
Yet where was her triumph? Why did she not feel compelled to return to the house, to meet everyone, to bask in their welcomes, their affection so easily offered?
They didn’t know her. They had no idea who she was, only that a woman they loved had birthed her. But the man sitting next to her knew her. And he was all she needed. All she wanted.
God help me.
She watched him toss another stone, then let herself take his hand. Only that. “I never could do that,” she said, after the fifth skip finished the stone’s run.
“It just takes practice. And a pond, of course.”
“Then that’s what I lacked. The only pond in Allen’s End was the cow pond—and I promise you, the smell kept me away.”
“Little girls are so picky.”
She laughed despite herself. “I can’t imagine the young heir to the dukedom got his practice in a stinking cesspit!”
“More of a small lake, really.” He grinned, and ran his thumb across her knuckles. “Far more manicured. There was a gardener’s assistant whose only task was to keep it cleared of weeds.”
She tried to match his smile. This was one of the happiest days of her life, wasn’t it? And he was sharing it with her. He was here with her—for now.
“I wonder,” he said, but did not continue.
If her happiness depended on keeping him, she was sunk. “I wonder, too.” She felt very cold, suddenly.
He glanced over at her. “Go on.”
She shook her head. “You first.”
He gave her a half smile. “I wonder what we, both us, would have been like, growing up in a place like this.”
We. Some bittersweet feeling constricted her chest. She tried to pull her hand away, but his grip tightened, and after a moment, she surrendered to it. “I think we would have been spoiled rotten,” she said.
He gave a low, rusty laugh. “No doubt you’re right.”
They sat hand in hand, unspeaking, as the light changed around them. The pond reflected the late afternoon sun, bits of pollen and fuzz drifting in the sunbeams that fell through the trees. Bubbles rose on the water, popped, and disappeared. A fish surfaced, mouth gaping. Somewhere in the distance a bird called out.
“You would have thrived here,” he said. “The brightest girl in the district. Petted and admired by everyone. That’s what you deserved.”
Her throat felt tight. “But I would not have learned to speak Italian, I fear.”
“Oh, you would have found a way.”
She shrugged. Perhaps she would have. But it would have required the desire to learn Italian—and bereft of others’ contempt, of the hostility and suspicion of Allen’s End, what would have planted her so firmly before her books? She might have spent her afternoons playing chase and hunting treasure instead. Shouting and quarreling and jumping rope . . . learning to make friends, instead of learning how to hide herself.
She cleared her throat. “If you had grown up here, I should have had to learn chess. Otherwise who would have explained Blackburne’s Gambit to you? You’re hopeless on your own.” She looked at him from the corner of her eye, and saw that he was smiling. Encouraged, she said, “But you still would have gone into politics. You’d have made a fine MP, in time—a true hero of the common people. We would have called you . . .” The notion amused her. “The salt of the earth.”
He laughed. “There’s a wild idea. But I’m not so certain. It’s a hard road from the paddock to Parliament.”
“You would have found your way.” She dared to tread on dangerous ground. “You did not get your ideals from your father. You discovered them on your own. You would have found them here, too.”
He glanced at her, visibly struck. “Yes,” he said slowly. “All my ideals. You see how they’ve guided me, this last year.”
The words were cynical. But his tone was speculative, testing. She pressed his hand in encouragement. “Those ideals are part of you still. You only took a rest, Marwick. You needed a rest. But soon you’ll take up the gauntlet again—very soon, I think.” And there would be no place for her then.
He gazed at her. “Perhaps. If I remember how to care about such things.”
“You still care.”
“I’ve learned to care about different things now.” Very gently, he reached out to brush her cheek. “You should call me Alastair,” he murmured.
She swallowed. Suddenly it seemed important to say something. “We would have been true friends, had we both grown up here.” She made herself say it: “Alastair.”
“I think you’re right. Olivia.” He stroked her face. “And we might have come here, to this very place, to sit and talk, as friends do.”
“Very often. And perhaps . . .” She smiled. “Not only to talk. This is where you would have kissed me, I think. The first time. When we were both . . . sixteen?”
“Fifteen,” he said. “Fourteen.”
“Precocious young things!”
“Yes,” he said. “Brash. Barely out of childhood. And the first time I kissed you . . .” He leaned toward her, and she inclined to meet him. “It would have been like this,” he said against her mouth.
His lips were warm, indescribably sweet. It felt as though he sought something from her, something precious that must be coaxed rather than taken. And she gave it to him, gladly.
After a long minute, he turned his face to kiss her temple. “You would have been shocked,” he whispered. “But no more than I, at my own temerity.”
She put her face into his shoulder to hide her smile. “Is that so?”
“Well. A rude country boy. No large experience. I should think he’d be shocked.”
“But as a farm girl, perhaps I wouldn’t be. Farm girls are saucy, I think. When you pulled away in shock, I would have dragged you back for another kiss.”
“Would you?”
She liked the startled pleasure in his voice. She lifted her head to show him her smile. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Like this.”
His kiss had been slow and wooing. But country girls had little patience for that. She licked his lower lip, made him groan; then she slid her hand through his hair and pulled his mouth hard into hers.
In a flash, hunger leapt between them: electrical, overwhelming. His palm pressed flat against her lower back and held her in place as he angled his head, kissing her more deeply yet.
But then, like a motion in a symphony, there came a moment when they both paused by tacit accord. “I wonder,” she said against his lips, “how saucy I would be? I would know you so well, after all. But until this moment, you would have only been a friend.”
He loosed a soft breath. “But there was never really an ‘only’ about it. We would always have known, somehow, that it would be more.”
“Yes.” She caught his hand, kissed his palm and then pressed it to her cheek. “I think I would be very bold. I wouldn’t feel any fear. You would be so safe . . . and not safe, all at once. I would trust you completely, somehow.”
“And I would never fear disappointing you.” He put his face into her hair, so his voice came out muffled. “Because I would require your trust like I required air. And if you were bold with me, then it wouldn’t feel like boldness. It would feel like wisdom.”
“Would it?” she whispered.
“Yes. Because we would both know that you need never plan on kissing anyone else.”
She felt dizzy, breathless. “And how would I know that?”
“You would know that I meant to marry you.”
She could barely speak. “Would I?”
“Yes. Before the next harvest,” he said roughly, and pulled away from her. His expression now looked black as he gazed out at the pond.
She loosed an unsteady breath. It was only a fantasy. But didn’t he see how painful such games must be? Did he imagine she would have slept with any man who rescued her from prison? Did he not know what it meant that he could say I know you?
She had wanted a place. Now she had one. But now she realized that not any place would do.
She frowned at herself and reached for good sense. “I would refuse to marry you, of course.”
He cast her a fleeting, one-sided smile. “That would be a mistake. You deserve love. And a family. All those children you once told me you won’t have.”
She recoiled. “Don’t tell me that.” Why did he taunt her like this? Why did he dare her to dream of love, while he sat across from her? “You, of all people!”
“I, of all people.” He repeated it softly, then turned to her. “Indeed. Let me tell you, then, the truth you once asked of me. I wanted to love my wife, Olivia. I believed I did. I certainly thought her everything worthy of love, when we married.”
Oh, God. She sucked in a breath. She had not wanted to know it. Not really. But he was holding her eyes and she could not look away, even though she knew the blood was draining from her face, and she lacked the skill to mask how he wounded her.
“I loved the idea of her,” he said evenly. “The perfect wife for a man of my station. Well bred. Elegant. Not a woman who would be led astray by passions or tempers, as my mother was.” He paused. “But she had her heart set on another man. Roger Fellowes was his name.”
She covered her mouth. Fellowes had been one of the duchess’s lovers!
“Yes, you’ll recognize the name from the letters, of course. He was her first revenge on me—the first man she took to her bed. But they met years beforehand, during her first season. He was not moneyed enough to win her father’s approval, but they were set on each other. I knew it. Everyone knew it. But I wanted her, regardless.”
She felt suddenly afraid. “Why are you telling me this?” Now, of all times; and so calmly, his voice only darkening when he spoke of his own role in it.
“Because you need to know.” He watched her, his face impassive. “Had you asked me three days ago, I might have told you that I could trust nobody else. But now I think the problem is that I cannot trust myself—what I feel, what I believe. And you should know why.”
She had a terrible, sinking feeling. This confession was not a sign that he longed to unveil himself, to grow closer to her. It was, instead, a warning of why he would never do so.
“I knew she did not want me,” he said. “But I thought I could win her anyway.” He picked up another rock, turning it over in his hand. “She was too good for Fellowes. And I was the heir to a dukedom, after all. President of the Union Society at Cambridge. A double first behind me, predictions of fame abounding. I’d already made a splash in the Commons. I would be prime minister one day; everyone said it.” He gave a pull of his mouth, mocking himself. “In short, I was precisely the kind of man she deserved. And she, ideally designed for me: educated, well connected, mannerly. How could she rebuff me?”
His smile was a grim slash across his features. He paused for a long moment, seeming to look inward.
“Her father came to me,” he said at last. “He had noticed my interest in her. I knew if I confirmed his suspicions, he would take some measure to remove Fellowes from the picture. But I told him the truth. I wished to marry her.”
She guessed where the story was heading now. Finally, she began to understand his wife.
He blew out a breath. “I can only imagine what picture you drew from those letters. That she was deranged? But she wasn’t. She had cause to loathe me. Her father offered Fellowes a handsome bribe to decamp to the Continent. He told me so the same day that Fellowes booked passage abroad. I could have stopped Fellowes. But I didn’t. He let his love be purchased away, after all. Why should I reason with such a man? And when Margaret collapsed into heartbreak, I stood ready to help her, to offer an antidote for her wounded pride. She had no notion of why Fellowes had abandoned her, and I never breathed a word of it. But a year after we wed, he came back from Italy. And he told her his own version of the truth. That he was forced away, instead of bribed.”
“She blamed you,” she whispered.
He shrugged. “Of course. Wouldn’t you?”
She recoiled. “Never put me in her shoes!”
He looked at her then, a long, clear look that seemed to see to the heart of her. “No,” he said quietly. “I don’t.”
She exhaled. And he was silent for a time, long enough for a chorus of birds to begin chirping around them.
“She accused me of colluding with her father,” he said finally. “Cheating her out of her only chance at happiness, and I was not . . .” He sighed. “Patient with her. Fellowes had abandoned her. And she and I had been happy—had we not? This was love . . . was it not? Mannerly, polite. Never an argument between us.”
That did not sound like love to Olivia. It sounded like courtesy. But she said nothing.
“I couldn’t understand,” he said, “how she might prefer such a man to me. And she seemed, finally, to agree . . .” He trailed off, his mouth twisting. “I thought we had reconciled. Only, as it turns out, we had not.”
“You blame yourself,” she said. No wonder he had no compassion for himself. No wonder his anger had taken so long to turn outward, toward Bertram and the others. “You blame yourself for what she did to you.”
“I blame myself for a good many things—delusion being first and foremost. I thought we had made the perfect marriage. That love was bound to come, to develop naturally. That I had become a man utterly unlike my father, and made a marriage that would answer for all the sins and mistakes my parents had made.” He shrugged. “In retrospect, my blindness is extraordinary. I was arrogant, ignorant—”
“No.” All at once, she understood him completely. He was still blind, entirely. “The problem was not you.” A choked laugh escaped her. “Bertram was not worthy of my mother’s love, either. But she loved him all the same. Don’t you see? Love is not earned. And it’s not born of perfection. It—”
“You call that love?” he said sharply. “The cause of all her difficulties—and yours. That isn’t love; it’s idiocy. Selfish, thoughtless—”
She rose. “How dare you judge her?”
His jaw hardened. “Very easily,” he said as he stood. “You deserved better, Olivia. And she might have fought for you. Instead, she placed the interests of a scoundrel over her own child.”
She opened her mouth, quivering with rage—and what came out instead was a sob.
She clapped a hand over her lips, appalled. But oh, God, he had lanced her as expertly as an assassin. For within the space of a minute, he had shown why he would never trust his own feelings for her, and why she should not have trusted her mother’s.
She heard him curse. And then his arms were around her, and he was forcing her face into his shoulder, though she resisted him. His murmured apologies washed over her. She did not want them. She willed herself to be as hard as iron in his embrace, indifferent to him.
“You deserve to be put first,” he said into her hair.
He meant it as a comfort, no doubt. But it was the cruelest thing he’d ever said. “And who will do that?” she choked. “You?”
His arms tightened. But he did not reply. Of course he didn’t. For all his sins, she could never say he had lied.
She pulled away from him, roughly wiping her eyes. “I want to go to London. Now, at once.”
He stared at her, face haunted. “Olivia . . .”
“I want you to arrange a meeting with a lawyer, a very nasty one.”
“Let me handle it.” He reached out to touch her, but she stepped backward. His hand fell, curled into a fist. “Stay here,” he said. “This is your family. You ask who will put you first? They will. They are so eager to know you—”
“They are strangers!” She hugged herself, hating him, though she could not say why. “No. I am going to London.” She took a ragged breath and lifted her chin. “I am putting myself first. And I want to look into his eyes when he finds out he’s ruined.”