“I will walk. Go. Now.” With every ounce of willpower he possessed, he was unbound enough to press a kiss on her head. “I must see my uncle.”
She nodded once and turned away, walking with him to the stairs and down them and outside. He waited just long enough to see her safely into the carriage before walking down the street with long, determined strides.
The reason for his anger was not the fact that his mother had engaged in a relationship—as inappropriate as it was—with his uncle. No, his anger was because of everyone in his family, he had believed the worst of his mother and the best of his uncle. His uncle had always, or so he had thought, been on his side. Now, he had discovered how untrue that assumption was.
By the time he arrived at his uncle’s house, his rage had cooled into something hard and sharp; a weapon of sorts, to use as he would. And he had every intention of using it. By God, would he make his uncle see the hypocrisy of his actions. The selfishness of being with a woman who could condone such cruelty to a child who knew no other mother but her.
“He is in bed, Your Grace,” the butler, polite but firm, told him.
“Then wake him. Tell him his nephew is here to see him. Tell him I refuse to leave without an audience. Tell him, in short, that he had better come down and see me before I come up.”
The butler inclined his head. “Yes, Your Grace.”
George didn’t wait for an invitation before entering the house, pulling off his gloves and slapping them distractedly against his hands. Every part of his body fizzed with the knowledge that his uncle had committed the worst of crimes against him. It was like a brand, every time the thought came into his head of the two of them together.
To his relief, his uncle didn’t keep him waiting, venturing downstairs in a lurid red robe that cinched tight around his stout waist. “What is it?” he asked without preamble. “What is so very urgent that you could not wait until the morning?”
“Precisely how long have you been dallying with my mother?”
His uncle froze. “You may go,” he told the butler, and as soon as the door was closed, turned to George with an uncharacteristically serious expression on his face. “What do you know?”
“I know that you wrote letters expressing your love for my mother in terms that would be quite inappropriate for me to repeat,” George tossed back. “The letters do not have dates, but considering my mother kept them under her pillow, I presume the affair to be current.”
His uncle’s eyes widened. “She what?”
“How long has it been going on for?”
“My dear boy—” His uncle sat as though his knees had given out from underneath him. “This is a delicate situation, you must understand—”
“I must understand nothing. It is a simple question, and one I demand an answer to.”
His uncle looked up at him with a tired expression. “Over thirty years, my boy.”
“Good God.”
“Of recent years, I have been—” He sighed and toyed with the tassels on the rope around his waist. “I have been less enamored by the idea of continuing a relationship that has become distasteful to me.”
“Oh, distasteful, is it, to have dallied with my mother behind my father’s back? You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
Robert looked up at met George’s gaze directly. “I am. You may be certain of that.”
“Butwhy?”
He sighed. “Because your mother was a beautiful and beguiling woman. We fell in love long before she married your father—a fact I had not forgotten at any stage, I can assure you of that. At first, when she was forced into marrying him, I was angry that he was the one chosen when I had been overlooked, and I continued the affair out of spite. Then, when I saw the way he treated her, I continued the affair out of pity.”
“And love?” George asked, scorn in every word. “At what point did your love for her fade?”
“I hardly know. It was hardly completed in a day, or even a month, or a year. We were familiar, and even if I felt for you and the way she treated you, I also was… it’s an addiction, to have craved someone for so long you have forgotten what it is to not want them.” He sighed. “But I never wanted her actions to hurt you.”
“You were complicit in sending me to Italy,” George said, but the worst flare of his anger had faded into something rather more like pity. “You sent me to work as a footman!”
“Only for a little while. I thought if you could remain in your post even briefly, I could convince your mother to accept you into the family again. I did what I could to shield you.”
“It was not enough.”
“It was not,” he agreed with a sad smile. “Do you think me a coward?”
“I would not be wrong for doing so.” George rose and strode around the room. “You see her still, even knowing what she is doing to make my life Hell?”
