“But—” Her hands dropped into her lap. “But Imustdosomething. I can—I can fold the linens. Polish the silver.” She reached out once again for the bell pull, ignoring the twinge in her shoulder.
Gabriel stalked across the floor and batted her hand away. In just a moment he had removed the ornately embroidered bell pull, rendering it useless. “You may have this back,” he said, tucking it into his pocket, “when you can be trusted to use it responsibly. And that doesnotinclude summoning work for yourself. You’re supposed to be resting.”
“Youpayme to work,” she reminded him. “There are still too few servants on hand. So much will be going undone. I must at least do what I am able to manage.”
His jaw worked as if he were struggling to rein in his temper, biting back responses that would not endear him to her. At last he managed, rather gruffly, “No. Just—no. It’sthree days, Claire, and you’re already half through the second.”
“There is nothing to do!” Her voice tripped through several octaves in aggravation. “Perhaps you are accustomed to spending your time in idleness, my lord, but I am not. Iwork. I have done for years.”
She thought he was going to lose his temper entirely. He certainly looked as if he was mere moments away from doing so. Probably he was unaccustomed to being challenged, to someone—anyone—arguing with him. He pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose and drew a deep breath, his shoulders slumping. Then he stalked to his dresser, rummaged about through a small set of drawers atop it, and withdrew a few objects, which he tossed onto the bed. They landed near her feet—a deck of cards and a scoring board.
“I hope you play cribbage,” he muttered at last. “Because I amnotteaching you how to gamble.”
∞∞∞
“Sequence of three,” Gabriel said, laying down his cards. “And the fifteens make eight points altogether.” He nodded to the board, indicating that she should move his peg forward for him.
Claire sighed. She’d turned up an incredibly lucky hand with a pair royal, but that amounted only to six points and he’d effortlessly outstripped her once again. “You should take up gambling,” she said. “You’d make a fortune.”
“I already have a fortune,” he said. “There’s little satisfaction to be had in stripping another man of his. It’s your crib.”
She collected the cards that had been set aside and turned them over. Nothing. Again. “This is hardly a fair match,” she said, with an uncharacteristic petulance.
Scraping up the discarded cards, he tapped them into order and began to shuffle the deck. “You’re only saying that because you’re losing.”
“Well, it stands to reason that I’d hardly be saying it if I were winning.” Even to herself, her voice sounded sulky, like a child denied a coveted sweet.
His hands paused mid-shuffle, his eyes going distant. A moment passed in silence. Finally he shook off his daze and resumed shuffling, dealing out five cards to each of them.
She collected hers, arranging and rearranging them, struggling to make something out of the terrible hand she’d received. No matter how she ordered the cards, they amount to the same thing. Not much. She sighed and discarded two. “What was that?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just a—nothing.” He discarded two of his own cards, looking distracted.
“I want to know,” she insisted as she cut the deck and flipped over the top card. The knave of hearts was revealed, and she tipped her head back in annoyance. Two more points for him. But at least she had gotten a pair out of it herself. She led the play with a seven.
“Fifteen,” he said as he laid down an eight. “Two points, if you please.” And then as she moved his peg forward on the board, he said, “We’ve had that conversation before. I taught you to play cribbage.”
It was her play, but her remaining cards blurred before her eyes. Shehadasked. He deserved a response. “I don’t think I ever won,” she said. “Not even once.”
He palmed his cards in one hand, rubbing his forehead with the other. “I can see it so clearly now that it seems impossible to ever have forgotten.” He heaved a sigh. “It’s…difficult when everyone else remembers more than you do,” he said. “Like blundering in on a gathering to which you were not invited, feeling as if everyone might be laughing at you behind your back. You offend people quite by accident—things to which they attach great significance are meaningless to you, because you cannot recall experiencing them. No matter how well you conceal it, on some level they are all aware that something with you isnot quite right. Truthfully, no one is more aware of it than yourself, but there is simply nothing that can be done about it. Everything of importance is locked behind a door to which you do not possess the key. And so you withdraw, because it seems the safest course of action.”
She had known he had isolated himself, of course. It was no secret that he rarely left the house these days, that piles of ignored invitations had stacked up upon his desk. But it still seemed a sad way for a man to live.
“Three months,” he said abruptly.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Three months—that’s how long our relationship lasted, am I correct? From the middle of January to April. Roughly three months.”
She nodded, because there didn’t seem a reason to do otherwise.
“I lostfour years, Claire,” he said. “When I was…sensible again, after my accident, I thought I was in danger of being removed from Oxford for failure to attend. I had no idea that I had taken my degree three years prior. I lost friends I’d made, trips I’d taken. In all, what I lost amounted to a sixth of my life, every event, minor and major, that had shaped me in those years. I lost them all. But nothing I lost—not one thing—was of more importance to me than those three months.Youwere always the greatest part of what I’d lost.”
Her cards dropped from her hand, abandoned. It had occurred to her before that in the grand scheme of his life, their relationship represented only a tiny fraction of time—it had not occurred to her that he had lost so much else. She had thought him so selfish, so self-centered, and perhaps it was true—but could she claim any differently? She had only been the most recent in a long string of memories he’d lost, and she could not recall placing any significance on the rest of his missing life. Only on that which had personally affected her.
“When you shared with me your own memories,” he continued, “I began to recall them myself. I dreamed them.” A hint of a smile touched his lips. “You were the key,” he said, “to that locked door I could never open myself. It wasn’t enough to know something was missing. I had to know what it was.Whoit was.”
Surprised by the sudden sting of tears behind her eyes, she averted her gaze. “You were…so angry,” she said, swallowing hard. “And everything I said only made you angrier.”
