There was bitterness in his tone, and she flinched at it. “Your mother. How?”
His gaze flitted up to her, his mouth turned down in a frown. “Hetold her. Crowed to her, that craven bastard. When they would argue, which was often, he loved to cut her with those facts.”
“And you overheard them?” Katherine whispered, thinking of her own loud, ugly childhood.
He nodded. “Sometimes. But more often than not, she would tell me all about it herself.”
“How old were you?” Katherine gasped, shocked to hear not only of the cruelty of Robert’s father, but of the indiscretion of his mother.
He gazed off in the distance again, leaving her, returning to his childhood, reliving what she could not see but felt pulsing in him. “The first time I recall her telling me about it all I was five, maybe six. And I was ten when she died.”
“For four years, she burdened you with her pain?” Katherine asked softly.
He looked at her, almost shocked, like he hadn’t considered that part of it. But he didn’t pull away. “I suppose now that I’m an adult, I can see that it would be a burden for a child. But when I was a boy, I only wanted to help her. Make her smile, make her laugh. Make her forget him.”
“But you couldn’t,” Katherine encouraged gently.
“No.”
Silence hung between them. Heavy. As meaningful as any words they had ever said. She drew a few calming breaths and then took his hands in hers.
“How?”
“She took laudanum. She said it was for the pain, and I suppose it was.” He blinked, but the tears still gathered in his dark eyes. “The pain in her heart. It numbed her to it all. It put her into a stupor where no one could retrieve her. And it got worse and worse.”
“She took too much?” Katherine asked. “Could it have been an accident?”
“No.” He bent his head. “As a boy I didn’t even realize what she’d done. My governess woke me one day to tell me she was dead.”
Katherine sucked in a breath. “With no more delicacy than that?”
“Not much more. My father didn’t hire servants to be soft on me. She woke me, told me to dress, and by the way, your mother is dead. Died in the night.”
Katherine felt her tears begin to fall but made no effort to wipe at them. She clung to Robert instead, pressing any strength she’d ever had into him. Seeing how deeply he was hurting and how much he needed to say these things.
“My father was vague,” he continued, his voice thick. “An illness, he told me. He hardly looked up from his desk to say it. I was not allowed to see her, to say goodbye, to be at her funeral, nor even to know where she was buried. I used to sneak out, searching for her in the family graveyard at my estate and she was not there.”
“You must have been devastated,” she whispered.
“I was, but showing it was not an option. It was not long after that I was sent away to school. My father did not allow me to speak of her on the rare occasions I was let home. My questions went unanswered. Until I turned twenty.”
Her breath felt heavy now, difficult to draw as she waited for the next part in this terrible, terrible story. “You pressed him,” she whispered.
“Yes. We were in London, and I admit I had been drinking. It was April—April is when she died, and I have never handled the anniversary well.”
Katherine blinked as her mind was brought back to that night on the terrace three years before. That had been April, too. Robert had been drunk then. Had that been around the anniversary of his mother’s death?
He was still speaking and she forced focus. “I was so bloody angry. I confronted him. I was screaming at him as he stared up at me, almost impassive. I vented all my rage, railed at him for probably five solid minutes with hardly a drawn breath. And when I had no more energy, he rose up before me and told me she had killed herself. He told me how weak she was, how worthless. He told me where she was buried and why she was buried there. Then he called me her son, told me I was as bad as she was.”
Katherine jerked a hand to her lips, tears streaming over it as she stared at his blank face. “Oh, Robert. That is terrible. What did you do?”
“I hit him,” Robert said softly. “As hard as I could. I spat on him. And then I walked away.”
He pushed to his feet and paced off. She stayed where she was, despite how much she wanted to follow him. To fold him into her arms and hold him. Comfort him.
He leaned against a tree for a moment, his breath short. “I never saw him again. I left every letter unanswered. I avoided him strenuously. I threw myself into sin and sex to forget it all. He died three years later and I inherited.”
She did stand now, stepping toward him. “Do you regret not talking to him in the final years of his life?”
