Page 51 of Unmasking the Silver Heiress
"It has been an unseemly amount of intrigue," she allowed. "You must know that I do not intend to surprise you."
"It would not be nearly so effective, were it deliberate," he said, dropping a kiss on the crown of her head. "The answers to your questions are all party to the same sad story, I'm afraid. Meridian reminds me of my family. Kent reminds me of the years after. Being reminded of what you have lost and all you have suffered is painful, and so I left it behind me."
"Your parents died," she said, half question, half statement. "Kit told me that you were raised as brothers."
"I was ten," he confirmed with a sigh. "My mother and father, along with my baby sister, Alice, drowned when their boat capsized on the Channel. It was a mysterious thing to happen on a calm and mild day. Suspicious, to say the least."
"You had a sister," she said, her voice tinged with unbearable pity.
"Barely. She was not yet even a year old," he told her. "Some years before tragedy struck, my mother's brother, Archibald, settled near to Meridian with his family. The Coopers are not from wealthy stock, but because my mother had the good fortune of marrying well above her station, she gifted my aunt and uncle a plot of orchards as a wedding gift, which provided them the opportunity to build their fortune and status. So, when I was orphaned, at least it was a simple thing to be sent to family living so near."
"Archibald is Kit's father?"
"Yes. You must understand that he was not of sound mind. Uncle Archie always had a touch of madness about him, but over the years a charming touch of eccentricity devolved into self-destruction. He was quick to believe in conspiracy and suspect others of working in secret to betray him. The older he got, the more tenuous his grasp on reality became. One was never certain if a conversation he recounted had happened with an actual human being or with the conjurings of his mind. He used to pull Kit and me out of bed and demand to know which of us was hiding in the walls, whispering to him."
He took a breath, remembering his uncle's panicked rage, his desperate hope for an explanation for the things he believed to be happening. As a child, it had made him angry. Now, it only made him sad.
"His fragile mind made him easy prey for unscrupulous men who profit from the gullibility of others. When it came to my parents, it was very difficult to know when to believe his stories and insight or disregard him entirely. It was difficult for me, because I craved anything he might divulge about the parents I had lost, both of whom I felt I had hardly known."
"Madness is always a tragedy," Nell said, without an affectation of sympathy or disgust. "My grandmother forgot who her children were, toward the end. She did not recognize the world around her anymore, and yet could not die until nature deemed the time appropriate. It terrifies me, Nathaniel. I cannot think of any illness more cruel than losing part of my mind."
Nate nodded, even though she could not see him. "Me too. He told me wild stories and I wanted to believe them all. He'd say that my parents had been involved in wartime espionage, that they had tangled with dangerous spies, betrayed people, sold secrets to the French, and so on. The stories varied, but his insistence that their deaths were no accident never did, and so I began to wonder if perhaps there was a nugget of truth amidst his delusions. I began to take serious note of the bits of his ramblings that were consistent."
"It must have been very difficult for a child, to be at the mercy of such a man."
"I daresay it was harder for Susan. Between Uncle Archie's unpredictable temper, often based on fabricated events for which we had no defense, and his tendency to enter into business dealings with money he did not have, he very quickly ended up both in debt and friendless in his time of need. I suspect that he entered Meridian House many times, looking for anything of value he might sell in a pinch."
"Was he violent?" she asked quietly.
"Not in the way you imagine," Nate replied. "He'd take the switch to us from time to time, but he never laid a hand on his wife. Some part of him knew that he was confused, and there would be these terrible moments of lucidity in which he would weep and apologize and promise never to lose himself again. It was a promise he could not keep, no matter how much he wished to."
She was quiet, her hand still moving on his chest, tracing shapes and swirls in a way he found strangely soothing.
"Rather than go to debtor's prison, he began to sell off the orchards, piece by piece, until nothing was left but a pair of cherry trees next to the house. The only thing left for him to lose was the house itself. Kit had enlisted in the army as soon as he'd finished school, and likely by deliberate design, was too far away to assist as things worsened."
"I do not blame him," Nell whispered. "Poor Kit. Poor Susan. Even your uncle was a victim to his own demons."
"By the time he had truly lost everything, I had already finished my education and begun my first term in the House of Commons. I had a singular, obsessive intention of rising as high as possible in Society, so that I might someday uncover the truth of what had befallen my parents. If indeed they were traitors, then they deserved the dignity of a trial and, if guilty, a humane execution. Alice should not have been harmed. I wanted answers. I wanted revenge."
She nodded, clinging to him in such a way that he thought they were silently comforting one another.
It did help, having her there. Her presence was more reassuring than any words she might have offered. He had recited some of these events once, when Kit had returned from the Continent, but it had still been so raw then, so unreal. Part of him felt as though he were piecing together the narrative of his own life for the first time, watching the events unfold in the dark as he spoke to another person in the anonymous safety of the witching hour.
"Susan found me in London one day, as I was leaving a pub. She had been crying and rushed toward me like I was the only thing that might save her from drowning in her own tears. She told me he'd been dragged off for his debts and that their home was being auctioned out from under her.
"It was an easy task for me to purchase the house. I restored the deed to Susan alone, so that once we got Uncle Archie back, he could not barter with it again. It turned out that saving my uncle was a far more complex matter than I had anticipated. In the days between his arrest and settling the business with their house, he had been tossed onto a boat due west, across the ocean, for a period of indenture against his latest slew of financial misfortune. He would be serving as a slave on a sugar plantation in Jamaica, in an aging body and a fragile mind."
He sighed, the memory of it conjuring forth the ghost of the weight he'd felt on his chest that day, the panic and resentment that had buried every facet of his humanity, fraying his emotions at the ends, until the only way to go on was in an armor of icy disposition.
"I knew that if I immediately took off to the other side of the world in search of him, I would lose everything I had worked for. It was difficult to be sensible about it, but I managed it. I spent two weeks soliciting every powerful contact I had, in the hopes that there was business in Jamaica that I might take on to justify departure while Parliament was in session.
"It took some doing, but I found a handful of tasks to legitimize my journey. In the end, colony tax defaults on British imports gave me a plausible issue to tackle, and some suspicions about the veracity of the current governor’s dealings an additional incentive to set off under the appearance of state business."
"That was smart," she whispered.
He wondered if she was picturing it correctly. Could she conjure the image of his aunt in her tattered pink dress, sobbing on Oxford Street? Did she know the smell of brine and sodden wood at sea? She could not know Uncle Archie's face, which had become craggy with age by that point, and the terror he must have felt at being parceled off on a ship, surrounded by strangers.
"I was never certain if I hated my uncle more than I loved him," Nathaniel heard himself saying, as though his voice belonged to someone else. He paused in surprise at the statement, a twinge giving way in his chest. He had never said that to anyone before. He wasn't even certain he'd allowed himself to think it in such clear terms. It was the truth, however.
