“I was devastated. I didn’t understand.” He struggled for the words that would convey the depth of his sorrow. “For years, I mourned you, Olivia. The first year was the worst. I scared my friends. My family. I know I did. I drank to excess. It was a foolish reaction, I know, wasteful and stupid, but it felt like the only path before me. The only thing that helped the pain a little was to forget who I was. To feel nothing.”
He met her gaze again. She had that little furrow between her brows.
“I don’t understand. When we were”—she paused, seemingly uncertain as to how to characterize their relationship back then—“involved, you never… you never said anything that indicated that you imagined a lasting attachment.”
“I should have, Olivia.” His heart pounded at the justness of this reproach. “It’s no defense, but I was practically a boy. I should have known better. I should have understood that I needed to tell you what I felt, what I intended for us.”
“When I received that note, I believed it. After all, I had no reason to think that I was anything more to you than a passing fancy.”
His heart clenched at those words, even as he felt a rising tide of indignation.
“You must have known that I felt more for you than that. I told you at the time.” He paused and then realized he needed to say the words. “I told you that I loved you.”
Her gaze flared. “Yes, you told me that you loved me when you were inside of me, or when you had your mouth on me and were near to spending yourself.”
“How does that change the matter?” He felt his cheeks heat as she recounted the tender passion of those past scenes. These moments, which had been some of the most intimate of his life, he could not see in another light than how he had experienced them. They had been pure emotion, pure sensation, pureher.
“Augustus. Don’t mistake me. Those times when I was with you, like that, they are some of my happiest memories—or they would be, if they hadn’t been tainted by what came after. How humiliated I felt.”
She withdrew her hand from his own and clenched her hands together.
“Even though I knew you cared for me—and I did, or I thought I did—I was still a maid in your house. Who knows how many lords have said such things to maids and never think of it again? You were young and passionate and, while I had hoped that you felt more for me, while you had indicated that you did, when I got that note, it seemed clear that you didn’t. That I had hoped for too much.”
Her words pierced him.
“I do see. Now,” he said, realizing the magnitude of their misunderstanding, “And I might have even back then, if I had known about the note. But I didn’t. I thoughtyouwere the one who didn’t care forme. That you had picked up and left when another, better situation had presented itself. Or that perhaps you had found another lover. And that I was just a love-struck fool.” He smiled. “Perhaps, I was, either way. As I recall, you never said it back. When I told you I loved you, even then.”
She gave him a small smile. “I didn’t need to. How you made me feel, how I opened myself for you, how I couldn’t resist you—I was totally in your power. You must have known it.”
“I never saw it that way.”
“Augustus. Please. I—”
“What?” He reached again for her hand again and she yielded it back to him. “Tell me.”
“I was an orphan. A young woman with nothing. I had never known family—or care. The way you spoke to me, and listened to me, and comforted me…I had never known anything like it. Of course, I was besotted with you. I was beyond besotted. I would have followed you anywhere. I would have done anything that you asked.”
Her voice broke on the last word and, suddenly, he felt too far from her. He pulled her towards him. She didn’t resist. He folded her into him. He felt, rather than heard, her tears. He put his hand to her head and tried to soothe her, whispering sweet nonsense into her ears as he did so. After a few minutes, she quieted and pulled back again, the veins around her eyes swollen. She pressed her fingers to her face, wiping away the lingering moisture.
“When I received that note,” she said, her voice softer than it had been, “I was destroyed. I was so humiliated that I had believed in our relationship. The other girls in the kitchens, I don’t know if they still work there, Hannah and Astrid—”
“Astrid does,” he supplied, thinking of the sallow woman who had grown up from the awkward girl.
“They knew about our relationship. I shared a room with them. I could hardly hide it. And they were cruel to me about it—or, at least, it felt that way at the time. They made clear what they thought of my wantonness and what they thought I was to you. I had never been close with them, as some girls grow to be in such situations, because they always looked down on me. They had families who visited them, who helped them and cherished them to the extent that they could. Whereas I was a workhouse orphan.”
“I remember once,” Montaigne said, recalling now what he hadn’t thought of in years, “that they upset you. But you wouldn’t tell me what they had said.”
“You told me it could be the same with your friends,” she said, with a smile. “That, at times, you felt apart from them, that they shared jokes you didn’t find funny, or laughed at your expense.”
“Yes,” he said, surprised to hear from her that he had felt that distance with his friends as far back as that. That he had talked about it so frankly thirteen years ago. He didn’t realize that he had felt that way for so long.
“You thought they were my friends and we had quarreled—and I let you think that. It didn’t seem fair to complain of them to you. If our relationship had led to their dismissal, if you had gotten indignant on my behalf—”
“I would have.”
“It didn’t seem fair. And while their words about our relationship were cruel, I also did think they were genuinely trying to warn me. They told me that men like you only got girls like us with child and then abandoned us. That once you got me with child, I would lose my place.”
He scoffed. “I always took care.”
