The Duchess War

“Why, Mother,” he finally drawled. “I didn’t know you cared.”

For all the sarcastic cast of his words, there was a good deal of truth to them. She’d never done anything that could be termed remotely motherly. Interfering in his marital prospects was almost as good as a kiss on the cheek from her. It was…touching. Infuriating, too. Wrong. High-handed. But…touching.

She sniffed and looked away. “It was just money. Don’t make anything of it.”

“On the contrary. I am excessively grateful. If she can be bought off so cheaply, it’s best that I know it now.”

She watched him for a few moments, as if she didn’t believe that he could be so calm, so unruffled.

“I told her,” his mother said, “that if her betrayal was bad enough, you’d never think of her again. It turns out I was right.”

She seemed to take no joy in her victory. She didn’t smile. There was no hint of gloating in her voice.

“You are too forgiving,” she said, “until you don’t forgive at all. So tell me. At what point did you finally give up on me?”

He sucked in his breath. “What an odious assumption. I never had any hope of you.” He couldn’t look at her as he spoke, though. She’d had too many letters from him to believe that.

“It was your father’s funeral, wasn’t it?”

He did not even allow himself to blink.

“You wrote me beforehand, asking me to come. Now that he was gone, you said—”

He slammed his fist on the table. Tea splashed everywhere. “Asked you to come?” Now he looked at her, glaring. She didn’t shrink back from him. She didn’t glower in return. She simply looked at him calmly, as unruffled as she always was. She might have been a china doll for all the response in her eyes.

“I didn’t ask you to come,” he said quietly. “I begged. Did you know, I honestly believed that you would take me back with you? I had convinced myself that the only reason you put off knowing me better was that you could not abide my father’s presence. That once he was gone, we might have a chance. When you weren’t at the service, I told myself you would come after it was finished. When you didn’t come then, I convinced myself that you’d wait until everyone else had departed. Finally, I said that once it was dark and nobody would know, you’d come and get me. Until that day, I believed—I don’t know how, as I had no evidence of it—that it was only my father that kept us apart. But it wasn’t that. You didn’t care.”

“No,” she said softly. “I didn’t.”

“Did you ever? Or do you hate me as much as you hated him?”

“As much?” She frowned. “I would say that I hated you in a different way.”

He wished he could find that imperturbable calm he’d had just a few moments ago. Even though he’d known it had to be true—even though he’d suspected that his mother disliked him—to hear it spoken out loud made it real. Even after all these years, after all that time he’d spent making himself indifferent to her, it still cut.

“Those first months,” she said, “when your father took you from me—I thought I’d never breathe again. But I could not let him know how important you were. If I had, God knows what he might have threatened you with. So I woke every morning and dressed and went in company. I laughed when things were funny and expressed sympathy when they were not, all the while feeling as if a cavern had been made of my chest.”

She didn’t look as if she’d ever had anything inside her chest, so smoothly did she speak.

“By the time you were three, you were a trap for my heart. Every word that came to me of you, every short visit your father grudgingly allowed, was like a wall closing in around me. The more adorable you became, the more certain your father was of my return—and the more he’d threaten me. I had to pretend not to care. After a while, I became so good at pretending that…that perhaps I stopped caring in truth. And yes, I resented you every time you made me feel anything.” She shrugged, nonchalantly. “But what was I to do? Stay with him? I tried it. But by that time, he was impossible. After that last time, when you were nine… I spent an evening barricaded in my room, with him bellowing and pounding on the door, threatening to…” She gave him another sidelong look. “I believe if he had not been quite so drunk, matters would have become exceedingly ugly. I couldn’t stay. And legally, you were his. What was I to do, except stop caring?”

Robert shook his head. “Every time you left, he used to tell me it was my fault. That I had failed to captivate you. That I should have been more—”

More lovable, although his father had never used that word.

She looked at him. “When your father died, I assumed he’d made you over in his image. By the time I realized it wasn’t so…” She shrugged again. “By then, it was too late to salvage anything of mother and child. Luckily, by then, I didn’t care. I didn’t feel anything at all. So now, knowing I’m far too late to do anything, now…”

She looked up at him.

“Now,” she said, “I find I still don’t care.” Her eyes glistened momentarily, and she looked away, her jaw squaring as she clamped her lips together.

“I see,” he said in puzzlement.

“I really don’t care. I can’t. I don’t know how anymore.” So saying, she took out a lace-edged handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes.

“Are you…”

“No. I never cry.” She met his eyes fiercely.

“I see,” he repeated.

And he actually thought that he did. This trip—her visit out here, her ham-handed pronunciations, her foolish interference—maybe she didn’t care. Maybe, after all these years, she’d forgotten how to care about him. But she was trying to. She made him think of a foal just-born, struggling up onto spindly legs, attempting to stand and falling down flat.

She sniffed again. “By the time I figure it out,” she said, “you’ll have given up on me entirely. It seems a fitting punishment.”

She set down her handkerchief and glared at him, daring him to contradict her.

Once, when he was young, she’d come for a visit. He’d run out to meet her at the carriage. He didn’t know how old he had been at the time, but he remembered hugging her knees, as high as he could reach.