“No, you didn’t. Yet you asked for Dane’s.”
He had. God help him, he had. He’d put aside his pride, had thrown himself on his cousin’s mercy. For nothing had been more important than his mother.
And his begging had been thrown back in his face.
“Yes, I did,” he replied in a low voice. “And look where it got me. My mother could have been saved had he helped as I’d asked.”
Her lips, already thin, pressed so tight they disappeared completely. Sadness flashed in her eyes. “No one act could be more regretted, Peter.”
The words were so unexpected, he did not immediately hear the maid arrive with a tea tray. Suddenly it was there before them, and Lady Tesh had placed her pet aside and was preparing a cup.
“How do you take your tea, Peter?”
He stared at her long and hard. “This is not a social call.”
“That does not mean we need to abandon all civility. Come now, how do you take it?”
He could see it in the stubborn set to her chin, the steely glint in her eyes, that she would not give this up. “Milk, no sugar,” he grumbled.
She smiled, for all the world as if he had done a particularly brilliant sum, and set to work. “You will just have to accept that what I did, I did without expectation of remuneration,” she said pleasantly. “A gift, if you will.”
He accepted the cup from her, staring down into the opaque depths of the brew. “Nothing is done without expectations attached,” he said darkly. “And I will not be indebted to you.”
“You are not, and never have been.”
“Yes I have!” The words exploded from him, the force of them making the tea slosh dangerously close to the edge of the china cup. A tempest in his hands. “You don’t understand. You never will. What it means to have nothing, to have less than nothing. To fight for every scrap. My pride was all I had. And to have to go tohim—” He broke off, his rage nearly choking him. He drank the tea in one swallow, feeling it burn down his throat into his gut, sending the rage down with it to someplace dark and hidden. He looked back to the cup, to the dregs that clung to the bottom, as if he could see his future in it. “I did it for her. I would have done more if it had meant I’d have her even a day longer.”
There was a moment of silence. It closed in on him, that silence, until he felt he was suffocating in it. He had lost control, had let Lady Tesh see a part of himself he rarely showed, even to those closest to him. He set the cup down carefully, more than aware of the burning urge he had to take the damned thing and send it smashing into the wall.
“I can see now you will not take the money no matter what I say,” he said, rising, tucking the heavy sack of gold back into his pocket, feeling the emotional weight of it far more than the physical weight. “It is no consequence to me whether you do or not. I have made the effort, and so I will consider my debt repaid in full. Good day, madam.” He turned for the door.
“You cannot go, Peter,” she called after him. “Your mother, she wanted me to care for you.”
He let loose a bitter laugh, not bothering to turn, his boots eating up the distance to the door. “I’m a bit old for looking after, madam. You may consider yourself freed from that particular request. Time has seen to that.” He gripped the knob.
“And what of the promise she had you make?”
A punch to the gut could not have stunned him more. And suddenly he was no longer in Lady Tesh’s vast, opulent sitting room, but that cramped, drafty attic room again. The paint was peeling and stained, the cracks in the single window stopped with grimy rags. The light was dim, barely reaching to where Peter sat huddled in the corner, his bare toes digging into the rough floorboards as he tried not to cry.
And Lady Tesh, so out of place in her brocade gown and jewels, perched on a rickety stool next to the single, narrow bed. Her expensive skirts dragged in the dust at her feet, her hair, white even then, coming loose from her coiffure after hours of tending. She must have been exhausted, yet she sat forward, arms braced on the dingy sheets, his mother’s skeletal hand held with infinite gentleness in her own.
But more powerful than that, his mother’s voice, the once strong and ringing tones made brittle with illness. “Take him, my lady,” she’d begged. “Take my Peter and care for him.”
“Of course,” Lady Tesh had soothed.
Panic had filled him. To leave everything he knew, to go with this strange woman who talked with such precise, clipped words, terrified him. “I won’t do it!” he’d cried, lurching to his feet.
“Come here, my darling,” his mother rasped, her eyes shifting to him, bright with fever. He went to her on trembling legs. When she reached for him, he took her hand in his. Her skin was thin, the bones so delicate, he feared they’d snap.
“You must go with Lady Tesh.”
Tears had filled his eyes. He’d dashed them angrily away with a dirty fist. “No—”
“You must, Peter. Promise me you will.” When he merely stared at her beloved face, ravaged by illness, she gave a weak laugh. “My stubborn boy,” she said, her voice wheezing in her sunken chest. “I’ll make you a deal. Give Lady Tesh a month. That’s all I ask. If after that you don’t want to stay with her, you can leave.”
Agony filled him. She knew he would not go back on a promise given. His father had done that enough, his broken promises leaving nothing but destruction and hopelessness behind. He shook his head in mute appeal.
“Promise me!”
