Gwen’s mouth twitched. “That sounds like something he would say.”
“I was not permitted to speak,” Victor sighed. “My opinions then were limited to the quality of my Latin.”
Gwen gave him a quick look. “After Papa died, Mama… broke. Or so it felt like. She cried for weeks. Months. The house felt empty and loud at once. People came and went with condolences and lists and questions. I wandered about like a ghost, trying not to disturb anyone.”
“No one disturbed you either,” he guessed.
“Not after the first few days,” she said. “Then there were merely kind pats on the head and suggestions that I should be brave. As if bravery were a shawl one could put on against grief.”
He said nothing, so she continued.
“Then Howard appeared. Handsome. Smooth. So confident. He brought flowers. He sat with Mama and spoke of my father as if he had been his dearest friend, though I had never seen him inour house before Papa’s illness. He took charge of small things at first, then larger ones. He arranged accounts, advised Mama on tenants. He made everything seem easy. Mama looked at him as if someone had turned on a lamp in a dark room.”
“And you,” Victor asked, “what did you see?”
“A man who smiled too much when people were watching and not at all when their backs were turned,” Gwen muttered. “A man who always knew precisely where I was and what I did, yet never seemed pleased by the knowledge. I told Mama once that he frightened me. She said I was being paranoid. That I was jealous.”
He could hear the old hurt beneath the words.
“I was not jealous of him,” she went on. “I was jealous of the way she ceased to see everything else when he was in the room. My opinions never counted before, but after he came, they seemed to count even less.”
“And now,” Victor said softly, “she is bound to him by vows and habit.”
“And love,” Gwen added bleakly. “However misplaced. She believes it is love; she cannot imagine a life without him now. He hurts her, with his words, with his hands, with his choices, and she forgives him because she cannot bear the thought of him elsewhere.” She paused briefly. “I will not be that woman.”
Victor believed her.
Silence stretched, filled with the small sounds of the inn: a door closing somewhere down the hall, a muffled laugh, the creak of timber. The fire in the hearth popped softly.
“You think yourself nothing like her,” he murmured.
“I hope not.”
“You are loyal. You love fiercely. You cling harder than you admit. Those are her traits, too.”
“Then I am doomed,” she muttered.
“No,” he said. “Because you can see where her loyalty blinded her. You have already stepped away. That is difference enough.”
Her eyes searched his face. “You speak as if you know what it is like to be loyal to someone who does not deserve it.”
He looked up at the ceiling. “I know it very well.”
“Tell me,” she breathed.
CHAPTER 21
Gwen lay on her side, facing him in the dim light. His voice dropped to something lower, older, worn smooth from being kept hidden for too long.
“My father believed children should be shaped, not raised,” Victor said quietly. “He thought that fear was a better tutor than affection.”
Gwen felt a chill race up her arms, though the fire snapped warm against her back. She swallowed. “That does not surprise me.”
“I was his only son. His heir. His project.” Victor stared at the timbered ceiling as if he could still see the ghost of his father. “From the time I could stand, he measured me against a line only he could see. Lessons from dawn until supper. Tutors dismissed if I did not excel within a fortnight. Punishments if I faltered.”
A knot formed in her stomach. Gwen hesitated, then whispered, “What sort of punishments?”
“The usual,” he said dryly. “Canes. Isolation. Cold. He liked the cold. He said it sharpened a man.”
