“Nothing.” Thomas shrugged. “What is done cannot be undone.”
“Then you do not love her?” His grandmother narrowed her eyes at him.
“It does not matter how I feel about her.” Thomas’s chest ached. “She is gone now.”
“Itdoesmatter, Thomas. If you love her, you should go to her. And beg her forgiveness for being such a fool.” His grandmother shook her head. “Why on earth did you let her go? You are clearly miserable without her.”
“Because she will be happier without me.” Thomas picked up an empty whisky bottle and shook it forlornly, throwing it to the side.
“If you believe that, then you are an even bigger fool than I thought.” Her eyes drifted to the empty bottles beside him. “Do not tell me you have drowned your sorrows in ten-year-old scotch? Thomas, drink swill if you are going to drink to be drunk. This is a waste of perfectly good whisky.”
“I thought you were here to tell me that I had made a mistake with Vivian, not critique my choice of whisky.” Thomas massaged his aching head.
“As in all things, I am a woman of many talents and can, in fact, do both.” She tapped his foot with her walking stick again.
“Well, consider your piece said. It will not change my mind. She is better off without me.” Thomas shrugged. “We should be apart; that is the best solution.”
“Yes, clearly a perfect choice. That’s why you look like death warmed up, and the poor girl has cried herself to sleep every day for nearly a week, and her lady’s maid has been desperately trying to find a way to hide the puffiness of her mistress’s eyes.” Sarcasm dripped off every word.
Thomas felt as though someone had punched him in the gut.Has she cried herself to sleep? Every night?Something stirred within him, but he quashed it down.It is painful in the short term, but it will be better after this. She will get over this.
“It may hurt now, but in time, the pain will fade.” Thomas wished he sounded more convincing.
“Why are you so determined to do everything the hard way?” The dowager duchess banged her stick on the floor.
It made Thomas wince. “I thought we had already established that I am an idiot.”
“You do not have to remain one. Pull yourself together and go after her! It is clear that you are heartsick without her.” She gave him a frank look.
“It would be selfish of me to chase her. To ask her to stay when I can offer her no future.” He let his head thunk back against his desk, wincing at the sound and feel of it.
“What do you mean?” His grandmother frowned.
“I tried to break the curse, but I was too late,” he admitted. “The symptoms have started for me as well. The cough, the shaking, the heartburn, and this damned headache.”
“I can hear no cough now, and I suspect that your heart, shaking, and your headache are not related to any curse and more likely a result of excessive drinking and stupidity.” His grandmother knocked one of the many empty bottles on the floor.
He would not let her dissuade him. “How can I ask her to stay when I saw what losing Grandfather did to you? When I lived through the same grief, taking my own mother from me?”
“Do I look like a woman who succumbed to grief? I have been married thrice, and though I mourned your grandfather, I would rather have had the time I had with him than a lifetime without him.” She put a hand over his chest. “I treasure every minute with him, and even if I had known I would still have lost him, I would still have chosen to marry him.”
“But what if she is like my mother? What if the grief kills her?” He thought of his mother’s sobbing, heard her crying, mingling with his memory of Vivian’s tears.
“Grief is not what killed your mother; she died in a Phaeton crash! Why do you think I forbid the blasted things?” His grandmother threw up her hands in frustration. “I forget that you were only six at the time, but honestly, I thought you knew.”
“What?” Thomas was still reeling from the revelation that his mother had died in a carriage crash.
His blood thundered in his ears as he closed his eyes, trying to remember that day. It all seemed such a blur. He could remember his mother and the way she had wept at his father’s death. He remembered his grandmother visiting them often, whispered conversations.
He remembered a door opening, his mother smiling, and then…She died in a carriage crash.She had not died of a broken heart. He felt something inside him shift.
His grandmother’s words brought him back to the present. “And even if grief had killed her, how dare you deny your own wife the choice of her own destiny. You have decided for her; you have decided what she can handle and what she cannot. Have you told her about your fear of the curse? Have you told her any of this?” His grandmother poked him in the chest.
He swallowed and shook his head, immediately regretting this decision as it made his stomach twist most unpleasantly.
“Exactly. She is operating with half the information, and for what? Because you think that it is better to live life miserably without one another than to risk losing one another to death?Your father wasted his life trying to fight a curse that may never have existed. It was probably the cures that killed him.” His grandmother shook her head. “Mercury, laudanum and goodness only knows what else! And of course, he drank like a fish. Even if you are not cursed, we all die eventually, Thomas. That is simply the way of things.”
Thomas reeled. Everyone died. His mother had died in a carriage crash, he could just as easily suffer the same fate. Curse or no, he was mortal.
