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“Because he was a brute with money—enough money, anyway. Nothing like …”

He could imagine her looking around the property.

“Here. He had some kind of inheritance from his father, and he made a fine case to my sister, wooing her with small gifts, which for her, I imagine must not have seemed small.” She paused. “I have referenced my family’s fall from fortune.”

“Yes.” He did not tell her he had asked the others about it.

“My father was overfond of gambling.” She paused again. “That is understating the matter.”

“I understand.”

“Do you? I don’t. I don’t understand how a man could spend the money needed to sustain his family on a high-stakes card game common sense tells him he is almost certain to lose.”

He wanted to tell her how sorry he was, but he suspected she would not respond well to such an overture; it would be interpreted as pity. Part of him wondered if she was only speaking so openly because he wasn’t looking at her. He settled for saying something less than he wanted to. “I suppose logic is not at work in the minds of gamblers.”

“Yes, but that implies I ought to feel sympathy for him. I do not.”

“This is the rage you spoke of.”

“I suppose this is its origin, yes. But lest you think me overdramatic, allow me to tell you one story about my father’s … Well, I was going to say ‘follies,’ but the correct word is ‘crimes.’”

“I am ready to hear it, if you are ready to tell it.”

“He gambled my sister away.”

“Good God!”

“Yes. He was very deep into a game of cards, a game that included a visiting American industrialist who was trouncing the lot of them. As a last-ditch effort, my father wagered my sister’s hand. My sister was just out, and very pretty. He carried miniatures of both of us. I imagine he showed the gentleman.

“Mr. Hill—the man who became my sister’s husband—had been making overtures. My sister had rebuffed him. But when my father came home with the news—he was quite distraught, I will give him that—she changed her mind. She ran away with Mr. Hill.” She sniffed. “She should have gone with the American industrialist.”

“Miss Brown, I am endeavoring to remain calm in my listening, but it is difficult to imagine a father wagering away his child.” Simon was continuing his strategy of saying less than he would’ve preferred.

“I can’t pretend to understand it. I know only that he could never walk away from the table.”

“Do you think he started out like that?”

“I know he started out like that. His father covered his debts, so it wasn’t an issue for a while. At worst, he had a ‘habit’ people would gossip about when he sustained major losses. But then his father died, and his fortune went to his son by his second wife—my father’s mother died in childbirth. I do not know the mechanisms behind the inheritance. I do know that my father appealed to his stepmother for funds, and she turned him down. For the record, I do not blame her for that.

“We economized. My mother took in piecework.” She paused again. Every time she did so, Simon wanted to jump in, whether to encourage her to continue or to tell her that he understood and she needn’t say more, he wasn’t sure. But he kept himself silent. He would wait until she felt she was done.

It brought to mind a few instances from his childhood where he’d tried, at some family dinner or other, to recount something that had happened at school. His brothers had always been talking. They’d been so boisterous. He’d hadn’t minded, inherently, but it had made it hard to get a word in. And on the rare occasion he had made a toehold, if he paused at all to gather his thoughts, that was the end of that.

He endeavored never to do that to others, and doing it to Miss Brown was unimaginable.

“My lord, I am glossing over a great deal of suffering here. I should prefer not to recount it all, but suffice it to say that things became quite unpleasant. And then, about a year later, my father disappeared. His body was found in a river. We never knew the circumstances of his death. Perhaps the American industrialist—we never knew how my father settled things with him after my sister married Mr. Hill—came to collect. Perhaps he could no longer face the consequences of all that he had done—after the business with my sister, my mother had gone into an almost catatonic state. She didn’t talk to anyone. She barely ate. She just slept and, when up, either worked obsessively on the piecework she had taken in to attempt to sustain us, or sat in a chair by the window stared listlessly. We had lost our house by this time and were living in a small cottage, so it was impossible to avoid her melancholy. Then, a few months after my father died, she did, too. Consumption, they said, but I believe she simply willed herself to die.”

Simon had never felt such a mix of sentiment before. He wanted to resurrect Mr. Brown from the dead so he could murder him. He wanted to find this nameless American industrialist and interrogate him—and possibly murder him, too. But mostly, he wanted to take young Miss Brown and her sister in his arms and spirit them away from all that had befallen them.

He expressed none of this, merely said, “So you went to live with your sister and Mr. Hill.”

“Yes. And things were improved materially in that household, though only marginally. Mr. Hill did have some money, but once he’d wooed my sister with it, he closed the taps. She never had enough for the meals he expected, forget clothing and the necessities of life.”

“Or for ribbons.”

“Or for ribbons,” she agreed. “Poverty would have been one thing, had he been kind to her, or even indifferent. She never shared the worst of it, but I often heard him shouting at her. She was never able to give him a child, and the more time passed, the angrier he became. He would insist they … try all the time, whether she wanted to or no.”

Simon winced.