I rose. “This must not become public, Aquinas. I could not bear that. I will speak to him myself first.”
“My lady, you must permit me to be present when you interview him. For your own protection.”
“You may wait outside. He will not harm me.” I still do not know what made me so certain of that, but I believed it then.
I rose, having no appetite for pudding, and beckoned Aquinas to follow me out of the door and up the stairs to Edward’s room. Once there, in those still, quiet rooms, where Edward seemed to linger, I hesitated, then gave Aquinas his instructions. He raised a brow, but did not demur. I moved across the hall and waited. After a moment, there was a soft scratch and Desmond entered. He did not look about him, but stood, staring at the floor.
“Does it make you uncomfortable, to be here? In his room?”
He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing sharply in his slender throat.
“My lady?”
“Do not pretend with me, Desmond.” I held out the list of supplies with its tiny testimony of his guilt. “You should never have put one of your drawings on the note you sent to threaten Sir Edward. It was foolish.”
I do not know what I had expected. Angry denials, violence, insults? Instead he crumpled inward, folding himself over like a wounded animal. He hugged himself tightly with both arms, as if to contain the pain.
“I never meant it,” he said, so softly I had to move nearer to hear him. “Not really. I meant only to frighten him, to make him see what he had done to me.”
“What had he done to you?” My voice would not go gentle. It cracked, and through the cracks, I could hear my own anger and disgust. But there was pity there, too, in spite of myself.
He shook his head angrily and scrubbed at his tearing eyes. “Oh, do not make me say it, my lady. You must know.”
I did not make him say it. I did know, and that was enough. “When did it begin?”
He took a deep, shuddering breath and his head fell back, tears slanting backward down his cheeks. “Two years back,” he said finally. “I did not wish it, but he was so kind when he wished to be. It was as if he cast a glamoury over me.”
I started at the word, so old-fashioned. But then I recalled where Desmond came from—a tiny village, buried in the countryside. They still believed in such things, I had seen it in my own village of Blessingstoke. We even had our own white witch there. Why should Desmond not believe that Edward could ensorcell him into lovemaking against his will?
Of course, if he believed himself bewitched, it excused him from the greater crime of wanting it, I thought cynically. I looked at him carefully, from his pretty hands to his lightly-limned profile and wondered. How much force had Edward had to use? Persuasion, certainly, but force? I did not believe it.
“Why the notes? Was it really necessary to torment a dying man?”
He went all sorts of unnatural colours. White about the nostrils and fingers, red everywhere else. He wiped again at his eyes, shaking his head. “I was angry, my lady. There is no excuse for it.”
“Angry? Why, then? By your own reckoning you had been his lover for a year already. Why then?”
He gave a shudder, like a tiny convulsion of pain.
“Because it was then that I fell ill,” he said softly.
I felt my own breath leave in one sharp exhalation, as if I had been struck hard and fast in the stomach.
“You have syphilis.” It was not a question; I stated it flatly, knowing it.
He nodded. “We were not always careful about using the sheaths. Sometimes, we were overhasty together.”
If I had doubted this boy’s passion for the affair before, I did not now. He had convicted himself with a pronoun. We.
“Were you angry enough to kill him?” I asked blandly. He stared at me, as if I had suddenly begun speaking another language, a foreign tongue he had never heard.
“Kill him? My lady, I loved him. I could not raise my hand against him enough to leave this house as I should have done, as I prayed to do so many times. How could I want to kill him?”
He still had not grasped the truth, and I watched him carefully as it was borne in upon him. A paleness washed over him, and a stillness with it, of so profound a shock and despair that I knew it could not be feigned.
“My God,” he said softly. “Tell me this is a poor jest, my lady, for pity’s sake.”
“I wish that I could,” I said evenly. “But my husband is dead by another’s hand.”
