He nodded, his free hand curling into a loose fist. “Iwasangry,” he said. “Old habits are hard to break, Claire. I felt betrayed, humiliated. As if you might have been laughing at me all the while. I shared things with you that I shared with no one else. To discover that you had already known them, thatyouhad known more of those lost years than I did…it was a blow, to be sure. When you live in the darkness, you begin to envy those who possess the light.”
Swallowing hard, she said, “I was never laughing at you. Never. Not once. I felt—so guilty.” She swiped at her eyes and then dropped her hands back into her lap. “I didn’t know,” she said. “And then I didn’t know how to tell you—if Ishouldtell you. You had said you wanted to stop trying to live in the past, and—I thought it might be kinder—”
“Claire.” His hand covered hers, and she curled her fingers beneath it. “It’sall right. You were not to blame. I should never have suggested you were.”
“I don’t want you to be kind to me,” she sniffled, annoyed by her own inconvenient bout of sentiment, by his unsolicited pursuit of equanimity. “It makes it so much more difficult to dislike you.”
Perversely, that seemed to have amused him, and a rogue snicker escaped him before he could manage to clear his throat and suppress the sound. “I’m not the same man I was, then,” he said at last. “But neither are you the same woman.”
That was true enough. She had been a starry-eyed girl in love for the first time. He had been an idealistic young nobleman, full of fun and with the certainty that nothing could ever come between them. Reality had crashed down upon the both of them, subverted their grand dreams, and set them on different paths.
But who could say that diverging roads might not meet again somewhere, miles—or years—away?
His hand squeezed hers. “Will you speak with me tonight, Claire?”
For the first time, she thought it might be…necessary. Healing, in a sense. There were so many old wounds. Between the two of them, she couldn’t say whichof them was the more damaged. The past could not be rewritten, but it could be understood, explored, and cleansed of its power to hurt.
And at last she nodded and said, “Yes. I would like that.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Claire had put off her evening dose of laudanum despite the obnoxious ache in her shoulder. Just a few drops seemed to make her fuzzy-headed and prone to nodding off, and she didn’t intend to stumble through the evening witless as a peahen.
Bed rest was more of a chore than she had expected, and though Gabriel had been kind enough to retrieve a number of books from the library to keep her entertained, she found herself instead fretting about the proliferation of dust on the spines and wondering if Bradshaw was managing the rest of the servants well enough in her absence.
Sukey had arrived an hour or so earlier with a dinner tray, but it had not been servant’s fare—absent her directives, someone had made the determination that she ought to be given the sort of meal that would have been served to the master of the house. Or the lady.
Unnerved by the presumption, she had picked at her stuffed partridge, but even the crisped golden skin had tasted like ashes on her tongue. She had felt like a sneak-thief, filching luxuries to which she was not entitled. Eventually Sukey had come to take the tray away, but she had seemed ill at ease, and every statement she had uttered had been accompanied by an awkward pause, as if an unspokenmy ladytrembled in the air between them. Despite her request, Gabriel seemed to have done nothing to disabuse the staff of that notion, and now they treated her with extreme deference coupled with not a little fear.
An hour or so after dinner, the door creaked open, and Matthew tumbled into the room, his hair freshly washed and combed, clothed in a pristine white nightshirt. He held a book tucked beneath his arm, and he scampered across the room to climb onto the bed and nestle in beside her, burrowing beneath the covers like a hedgehog in a garden.
“Papa says I may sleep with you tonight, Mama,” he informed her, “as long as I ask youvery nicely.” He seemed to think this counted sufficiently as a polite request, for he thrust the book into her lap and settled in, pulling the covers up to his chin.
“Did he?” she asked, turning onto her side to press a kiss to his forehead. “How lovely.” She slid her arm around him, ignoring the ache in her shoulder to hold the book open before them. “Just one story tonight, darling,” she said. He frequently plied her for more, but running back to the nursery for a new book would doubtless keep him awake longer.
Matthew frowned, his lips pursed into a dissatisfied pout. “But I’m not atallsleepy,” he said. “What if I need another?”
“You’ve brought only the one book,” she reminded him.
He shrugged his small shoulders. “You could read this one twice, couldn’t you, Mama?”
“I suppose I could.” Truthfully, she would have read the book a dozen times had he asked her to, because each moment that remained was precious, one more treasured memory to lock away in her heart. It touched her that Gabriel had thought to send Matthew in to her, as if he had known that she would sleep easier knowing he was nearby, that she had only to reach out to find him should she wake with another nightmare.
Despite his protests to the contrary, halfway through the story Matthew was fighting to keep his eyes open. He lost his battle with a huge yawn, turning his face into the pillow and drawing up his knees only moments before Gabriel entered the room at last. He carried a tray in his hands, stepping lightly to avoid unnecessary noise which might disturb Matthew.
“I had Sukey prepare some chocolate,” he murmured. His lips quirked into a wry smile as he watched her set the book aside. “He prefers it when you read to him,” he said. “I don’t do the voices correctly.”
She shouldn’t have taken such pleasure in that, that there was at least one thing in which she reigned supreme in their son’s eyes. But it was just a bit gratifying. To assuage the prick of guilt, she murmured, “You’ll improve with practice.” He would have to, after all, unless he intended to pass off bedtime stories to the nanny.
Silently he poured and passed her a cup of chocolate. It was the sort of luxury in which a housekeeper would never have been afforded the opportunity to indulge, and also one in which she was relatively certainhedid not. At least, drinking chocolate hadn’t been listed amongst his preferences, nor had it been mentioned in the notebook that the former housekeeper, Mrs. Cartwright, had left to her—and she had been thorough, indeed.
“I didn’t know the kitchen stock included chocolate,” she said.
“It didn’t. I had Bradshaw send one of the maids out for some.” He took up a seat at the edge of the bed, eschewing the chair that remained set out. “I recalled your fondness for it, actually.”
“But I haven’t—”Oh.He was speaking ofthen. Her fingers curled tightly around her cup, soaking in the warmth. “I suppose you’ve remembered, then.”
He shrugged. “Little things,” he said. “Flashes. Impressions.” His green eyes swept over her face. “I’m not asking you to fill in the gaps. Your memories belong to you.”
