"James, I know you don't want me to speak to him, but you can't very realistically control who I do and don't communicate with," Victoria said. "I do have manners, you know, and if someone greets me, I am going to respond in kind. I'm sorry you don't like that, but that's the way it's going to be."
"Perhaps I shouldn't allow you out at all anymore, if you can't follow a simple request!"
She sighed and met his gaze. "Are you so desperate to prevent me from speaking to Benjamin that you would lock me up in the house and forbid me from seeing anyone at all? Remember, James, that's the life I was living before you returned to London. That's the life you found so unacceptable. You said that I had destroyed my own reputation to the point that it was doing harm to your business interests. And now I try to go along with your attempts to force me out into society, and your only response has been to tell me that you don't like the fact that I'm socializing with people? You want me to go out, but you just don't want me to actually speak to or communicate with anyone. Is that it?"
"What else did he have to say?" James asked. "Let's get this over with, since you seem so determined to talk to me about Benjamin."
"Well, he considers you his brother," Victoria said.
James scoffed. "He was never a brother to me when we were growing up. He enjoyed the fact that his mother favored him over me. He liked being the golden child. If he had ever shown any interest in being a brother to me back then things might be different now."
"He was a child," Victoria said. "He confesses that he was wrong not to stand up for you. He regrets it."
"Oh. Is that what he told you?"
"I think you already know it, James. You said yourself that your anger wasn't really toward him, that you just associatedhim too powerfully with your stepmother and her treatment of you." She hesitated. "You know, he mentioned the fact that your stepmother did care for you, even if you weren't her favorite."
That was such an absurd statement that at first James was sure he had misunderstood. "What on Earth are you talking about?"
"Benjamin told me that your stepmother arranged a private tutor, that she kept you at home instead of sending you off to school," Victoria said.
"He presented that as evidence of her caring for me? And you believed that?"
"He said…well, he said you were a sickly child, and that you didn't have the proper constitution to attend school," Victoria said. "If she had hated you so much, wouldn't she have insisted you leave the house regardless of whether your health could take it?"
James laughed bitterly. "I wasn't a sickly child."
"What do you mean? Benjamin told me you were confined to your bed several times when the two of you were in your youth."
"Oh, for pity's sake—I was confined to my bed because my stepmother waspoisoningme."
The words burst forth unplanned. He hadn't intended to tell her. He so rarely spoke of this to anyone at all. He didn't knowwhether he would be believed, and he didn't want anyone to think he was asking for sympathy.
She stared at him, her eyes going wide.
"What?" she whispered.
"What did you think—that I resented her and cut ties with her because she served me smaller slices of pie at meals than she did Benjamin? Did you think I stayed away from London all these years because of the trauma of my stepmother just not really liking me all that much? She tried to kill me, Victoria. She did it more than once. I was desperate to get away to school and out from under her thumb, but she wouldn't let me go for fear I might tell someone what she had done. It was only when I grew up and became too old for her to control that I was able to get away."
"She was trying to kill you?" Victoria repeated, seeming as if she needed to say the words over again in order to force them to make sense.
"She wanted Benjamin to be my father's heir," he explained. "She resented me for being the firstborn, and for being my mother's son—she felt it was a threat to her, to her status and her position, or maybe to her claim on my father's love. I don't know. All I know is that she hated that her son wasn't his firstborn, and she would have done anything to remove me from the picture. I know she asked my father to disinherit me, but he didn't. A part of me wishes he had. I never needed to be a viscount. I justwanted to be left alone, to have no part in her machinations. But that was never an option for me."
"And that's why you don't like Benjamin," she realized. "You blame him for it?"
"Of course I don't blame him. He didn't have anything to do with it. But I can't look at him without revisiting those memories. And…all right, maybe I do blame him a bit. Maybe I do wonder why he looked at everything that was going on and drew the conclusion that I was justill. That nothing suspicious was going on. I could have died, and I had no one on my side to help protect me against that. It was too much to ask of him, of course. He was only a child. But I was a childtoo."
He was surprised by the swell of agony that rose up within him as he spoke.
Victoria stared at him, her eyes full of pain.
"Of course you were," she said gently. "Of course you had no way to cope with all that—you should never have had to. Oh, James, I wish you had told me."
"Why? Would you have done something differently?"
"I don't know what I would have done," she confessed. "I just…wish that I had known. I wish I had understood what you were going through." She reached across the dinner table as if to take his hand.
Was she really going to take his hand?
