The apology sounded painfully insincere, but he was willing to accept the gesture she had made for now. It was a start, at least.
He inclined his head. “Thank you, Mother.”
“If you’ll excuse me,” she said. “I must return to my apartments to prepare for my call to Lady Althorp.”
She didn’t wait for him to respond before sweeping from the chamber, still in high dudgeon. Still refusing to accompany them on a call to Hattie. Torrie waited until the door had closed with more force than necessary at her back to turn toward Bess.
“I’m sorry for her coldness toward you,” he said, regret filling his chest with heaviness. “She has been having difficulty accepting my lack of memory and the changes in me for a long time. Unfortunately, my marriage to you appears to have further strained the relationship between she and I. However, the fault is not yours, and I’ll not stand for the disrespect she continues to pay you.”
Bess’s fingers tightened on his sleeve. “Thank you. You must know that I don’t wish for there to be any discord between yourself and your mother. Certainly not on my behalf.”
Christ, even after the cutting words his mother had issued concerning her, Bess was still capable of such kindness. It was humbling. He would protect her with his dying breath. The depth of feeling he had for this woman astounded him. She was so good, so compassionate, so caring. And how he hated that she had been overlooked and taken advantage of, used and ignored and derided and abandoned for so much of her life. It ended with him, this he vowed.
“No one was there for you in the past, to stand up for you, to champion you,” he said past the rising lump in his throat. “But I’m here for you now, Bess. Now and forever.”
She surprised him by rising on her toes to press a chaste kiss to his cheek. “I am so grateful, Torrie. If you don’t mind, I think that I should like to go and speak with her, just to clarify matters between us if I’m able.”
Once more, she amazed him. “After that dreadful display, you would still wish to speak with her?”
“Yes.” Bess gave him a small, sad smile. “Her heart is hurting. She is my mother-in-law now, and I would hate for her to feel uncomfortable in her own home because of me.”
How good she was. How kind. He felt like the world’s greatest cad in her shadow, knowing what he had done to her and having just born witness to his own mother’s treatment of her.
He took Bess’s hand in his, raising it to his lips for a kiss, her compassion lighting an answering warmth deep inside him. “If you wish it. But be forewarned, if she is unkind to you, it won’t go well for her.”
Torrie could only hope that, in the face of Bess’s kindness, his mother’s ice would at last begin to melt. If anyone could manage such a feat, he had no doubt it would be his lovely wife.
What had he ever done without her?
* * *
Elizabeth knewshe was taking a tremendous risk, seeking out the dowager after what had happened in the breakfast room. However, she had hated seeing the pain in the older woman’s eyes. And she knew that she had to, at the very least, make an effort to forge some manner of truce, if there could be one. Now that she and Torrie had been married for the span of a week and she’d had the opportunity to settle in to her new life and home, she was feeling far stronger than she had upon her initial arrival.
She reached the dowager at the top of the stairs after hastening from the chamber in her wake and leaving Torrie to finish his breakfast alone.
“My lady,” she called to the dowager’s departing back. “Wait, if you please.”
Her mother-in-law stopped and spun about to face her, resembling nothing so much as an angry stray feline attempting to defend her territory. “What cheek you have, following me. What can you possibly wish? The opportunity to gloat at how you have won my son and I am left with nothing?”
Elizabeth rushed forward, thinking that she finally understood the other woman, in a way she hadn’t been capable of doing before. For the dowager viscountess, it didn’t matter that Torrie’s accident had happened two years before and Elizabeth had only just entered his life. Their sudden marriage, coupled with the scandal that had been the cause for it, had driven a further wedge between the woman and her son.
“Don’t you see?” she asked, stopping when she reached the dowager, her breath ragged from the haste with which she had departed the breakfast room. “You are hardly left with nothing. Torrie is still your son.”
“A son who doesn’t remember me and is a shell of his former self,” the dowager said with a sniff. “That is what I am left with, a son who takes the side of his scheming governess wife at the first opportunity, who chooses you over me. How can that be any less than nothing?”
Tears glittered in the other woman’s eyes, but she blinked furiously, clearly too proud to allow them to fall.
Too late, for Elizabeth had seen them, and it was a sure sign that the dowager was not unassailable. Rather, she was all too vulnerable.
“I am sorry for all you have lost with him,” she said quietly. “I can imagine how difficult it must be for you. I lost my parents when I was a girl, and I mourn them still, every day. There isn’t a sun that rises or sets without me remembering them fondly, wishing they were still here. But you haven’t lost Torrie. He’s not dead.”
“He may as well be,” the dowager snapped, her linen cap bobbing wildly in her distress. “I kept hoping that with time, his memory would return. The physician said that it was a possibility. But as time has gone on, and he has scarcely remembered anything of note, my hopes have waned. And then when he married you, I knew for certain that he would never be the same son I knew again.”
“I’m not to blame for his amnesia,” she reminded the other woman gently. “The accident was two years ago.”
“Don’t you see? You are the symbol of everything I’ve lost. His mesalliance with you signaled the end of my last dream for him. I had such high aspirations for his marriage. Lady Althorp’s eldest daughter would have made him a perfect match. Such a lovely young woman, in her second Season, a veritable diamond of the first water, her lineage impeccable.” Her voice broke, and she pressed a hand to her mouth, as if she were too broken to continue.
Long ago, when she had been a child and her parents had still been alive and everything had been right and wonderful in Elizabeth’s world, she had been running wild in a field. Quite against the advice of her mother, and without any shoes. Barefoot and giggling, she had raced through that flower-dappled field without a hint of care for the consequences.
