“Roland. He had been a soldier when I first met him.”
“Was he a brute?”
Sarah had to think on that a moment. There had been times when she’d been happy with Roland. When all had been well between them.
This was the problem. She could never paint him completely black—until she remembered him pushing her . . .
“I always wanted to be better than I am.” Her damning words came out as barely a whisper, but he heard them.
“Is this what he told you?”
Sarah sat back in the seat. “No, my mother.” She fell silent, feeling guilty for she knew not what. It didn’t make sense and yet the indictment, especially since she’d lost the house on Mulberry Street, was a heavy mantle around her. “She hated what she called my ‘airs.’”
“Because?”
“It is as I told you last night,” she answered, finding it easier to breathe the more she spoke. “She assured me there was only one role for a woman like me in life.”
“And so she ordained you to it?”
“But I married instead. She had already died by then but I remember standing in front of the parson and feeling her spirit. I could hear her mocking me.” She looked down at her gloves. “I know I sound silly.”
“My father mocks me all the time from the grave,” Gavin said. “I don’t find you silly at all. A disapproving parent is an impossible weight.”
“Why would he disapprove of you?”
“He had exacting standards for me and no matter how much I gave or how hard I tried, I always fell short of the mark. He considered my brothers as little more than fortunate spares in case anything happened to me. I was his project and the complete focus of his life. I understand why my brothers wanted to escape him.”
“But you never did.”
“No, I believed in my responsibilities. He started my training at a very young age. He let me know that I was not on this earth to think of myself.”
“And so here you are—alone.”
“The Duke of Baynton must always think of others before himself,” he replied as if by rote.
“A girl like Sarah can’t be anything more than what her mother was or her mother’s mother before her,” she recited back. “When my mother realized how much I hated having the men she entertained around, how frightened I was, she’d slap me and tell me I’d be wiser to learn a trick or two from her. I’d still hide. I didn’t want those men to know I was there.”
“That was wise.”
She nodded. She knew she had been. “But then I married the worst of the lot. Roland was bold and handsome and I fell in love—whatever that means. However, by the time I received word he had died, I was glad to be rid of him. Then again, I also believed I’d failed him.”
Those last words poured out of her, spontaneous and unconsidered. The tightness left her chest, but there was the shame. “The cruel trick was, I had no idea what a wife was supposed to do or be and so I was a miserable one to him.”
“What did he expect?”
“For me to be there when he wanted to remember he had a wife. And to do whatever he bid.”
She was not conscious that she had curled her hand into a fist until he covered it with his own.
Sarah looked at their gloved hands. She tried to unclench the fist, but it held firm . . . then she said, “I have done things of which I am ashamed.”
“Such as?” His voice was gentle.
“He whored me out.”
There, she’d said it. The thing she’d not spoken of to any other soul. She’d just confided in Baynton, and she wasn’t certain why.
“It had been over a card game,” she said. “He lost. I was the debt that had to be paid. We didn’t have money and I was so afraid he would be locked up that I did it. I hated myself, but I did it.”
