“Verena, calm yourself,” Denzell commanded, taking her shoulders and holding her fast. “Come, don’t speak yet.” He smiled. “Where is that famous control I have had so much reason to deprecate? What, snow maiden, have you thrown away your mask?”
An involuntary gurgle of laughter escaped her, bringing her back to the present. The confusion lifted a little. “My mask has rather deserted me,” she offered shakily.
“Never!” Denzell declared, and putting an arm about her, led her off the path and into the shade of a tree, for the sun was hot. He stripped off the olive-green coat and laid it down, instructing her to sit.
Glad to be relieved of the necessity to think for herself, Verena sank down, the pale yellow muslin spreading about her, and watched Denzell settle before her, his attitude relaxed as he sat in shirt-sleeves, his hat at one side, the queue of his tied-back fair hair falling over his shoulder to lie upon the subdued green of his waistcoat.
There was an expression of tenderness in the blue eyes as they looked her over with that smoky glow that had the effect of ruffling her breath a little, but her heart and mind were still too full to leave room for what this might mean.
Denzell’s own thoughts were all for her distress. He had found himself unable to go all the way home, his concern for Verena’s safety causing him to dally in the square of open ground. When he had seen her leaving the house, he had been glad of his own irresolution, and had hurried after her at once, for it was obvious from her demeanour she was greatly overset.
When he had stopped her, the distraught look in her face and the trembling outburst of that hurried speech had gone straight to his heart. He wanted only to comfort her, to alleviate her distress by any means in his power. She was looking at him with more openness than she ever had before. Expectantly almost, as if she trusted in him to deliver her.
He smiled warmly. “Now, my princess, tell me the whole.”
Verena noticed nothing amiss in this form of address, nor in his assumption that she would confide in him. She fetched a sigh, and shrugged.
“What am I to tell? I am in dread he will succeed with Mama. He will cozen her with his pleas and promises, for she is in no condition to resist him.”
“You mean your stepfather?”
“Nathaniel, yes.” She sighed again. “I have been persuaded to let them alone — that is why I came out. I could not abide the waiting. It was too reminiscent of earlier times.” She threw her hands up to her face, pressing them to her cheeks, closing her eyes. “If you knew the dreadful, unkind things he said of her. All to give himself reason to inflict upon her the vicious punishment of his heavy fists.”
Despite the fact that he had understood this must be the meaning behind the little she had told Unice, Denzell found himself shocked and distressed by the picture these words painted. Almost he shied away from asking further, from hearing any more, for, to himself — and he was persuaded, to those of his intimates whom he knew almost as well as he knew his own mind — such a shameful use of a man’s strength was not to be tolerated. No gentleman would strike a lady, never mind administer this kind of beating. Deuce take it, but that was for prize-fighters! Were such a thing known in his circles, the perpetrator would be shunned by society — and rightly.
But here was Verena, whom he loved, and who had memories she must long to eliminate from her heart. He had no mind to hear them, but he would share them, for her sake.
“What sort of things, Verena?” he asked. “What would he say?”
Verena’s shoulders shifted, as if the burden of the memory was too great to bear. But she answered, her hands dropping down to pluck aimlessly at her muslin petticoats. “Oh, that Mama did not love him. That she had an eye to some other man. That she was his alone, despite her desires for others — despicable lies! Mama never looked at another man. She would not have dared to do so, for fear of such consequences as must ensue.”
“And then?” Denzell urged.
Verena shivered. “And then, when she denied it all, when he had driven her to a quarrelsome frenzy, he would hit her. Whenshe cried out, he would do so again. He would say he must demonstrate his mastery this way, if she would not permit him to do so — the other way.”
Denzell went cold. But Verena was still speaking, her eyes unseeing, her mind far away, receding into the memories that haunted her.
“When he was satisfied — when he had punished her enough for his temper to begin to cool, he would leave her, slamming himself from the room.” Verena drew a shuddering breath. “That was the moment when I used to find the courage to creep in. I had to, for Mama was incapable of tending to her own hurts. Either myself or Betsey had to do it.”
She did not notice the tears that slipped down her cheeks, tears that rent Denzell in pieces as he forced himself to remain still, and to listen while she talked on, moving into the present tense as if the events she related were happening this moment.
“She lies there, swollen and bleeding at the mouth. Her eye half closed — you can see the bruise beginning there already. I take the basin and bring some water, and gently — very gently, for she is hurting so — I clean away the blood and press the cold flannel to her bruises.” One hand came up and her fingers dashed at the wetness on her cheeks, and she sniffed, shaking her head. “So many, sometimes, I could not do them all in time. She suffered them on her back and her neck, for she must have turned from him to save her face. Then I had to hurry, for you see he would always come back — in due time.”
“Come back?” The protest was drawn from Denzell out of the confusion of compassion and revulsion warring in his breast. “How could he dare to come back?”
Without thinking, he plunged his hand into the pocket of his buckskin breeches and brought forth a handkerchief. He thrust it into her restless fingers, and Verena held it, her eyes focusing on his face as the tears gave way to the stirrings of that rage hehad seen in her countenance when she met Nathaniel earlier in his presence.
“Oh, yes, he dared. He would come back all right, with a mouthful of apologies, a heart — so he claimed — full of remorse, speaking of his great love for her.” Her face twisted as she repeated with an inflection of sickening disgust, “Love— oh, how often have I heard him use that word and wished I might cut it on his skin with a blunted knife!”
Denzell heard the vicious wish with a surge of emotion. If he had known with what a legacy he had to deal when he spoke to Verena of love! Small wonder she reacted as she had. He watched her dab at her eyes with his handkerchief, and his chest tightened. But his heart stilled as she spoke on, for there was worse to come.
“I should not have heard these things,” she said, and her voice was hard again. “Only there were occasions when I was not quick enough to escape before he would re-enter the room. I used to hide under the bed, and be forced to listen to him begging forgiveness, saying he had not meant a word of it, mingling his false tears with her own. And then … and then he would…”
She could not go on, her fingers wrestling his handkerchief into a ball. Denzell, quite appalled by the implication, reached out a hand and seized her fingers, handkerchief and all, almost crushing them in his anxiety to relieve her mind.
“Say no more. I understand.”
What a hideous fate! That a child should have been obliged to witness such scenes and learn of lovemaking in this crude manner. The thought crossed his mind that he had taken on an impossible task, but it was overborne by the need to give Verena what comfort he might. To let her begin to know that what she had been so unfortunate as to experience was the exception rather than the rule.
