Page 96 of A Bride for the Forbidden Duke
He sighed.
“He was cruel to you,” she said. It was not a question.
Henry’s jaw worked, and eventually, he nodded. “Very much. To my mother and myself.”
“And I know something happened in your family,” she pressed quietly. “Something… terrible.”
“Many things happened in my family, but there is one night particularly, yes. If you are finished, then perhaps we can promenade.”
Veronica nodded, and they left the tearoom, walking past their carriage towards a nearby park.
Silence shrouded them until they reached a small, arching bridge over a lake, and Veronica stood at the fencing around the bridge, watching Henry carefully.
“My father…” He sighed again. “My father was callous, and cruel and had not an ounce of kindness in him. Not to me, not to my mother. Not to anybody.”
Henry avoided her eyes, but she ached to have them on her. She wished to drown in them—to read him much better than his tone, already closed-off, told her.
“He… he preferred his mistresses to his wife and gambling to his son. He was not a father nor a husband. He was a man who came home after indulging himself and remembered we existed. And when that did not please him, he raised his fists.”
Henry’s face was detached, his voice flat as though entirely removed from the heaviness of the words.
“I am sorry,” Veronica said quietly, clasping her hands before her. “I should not have asked.”
“I tried to protect my mother,” Henry said quietly, looking down into the lake below them. “I grew up hearing her muffled cries and the sound of blows that would always echo terribly from their chamber. And when I cried, only a young boy who was scared of his father, those blows turned to me to quieten me down.”
Veronica’s chest swelled with sadness. She moved closer to him, and Henry let her. “What happened to him?”
“I intervened one night.” Henry’s shoulders were tight, and she ached to soothe them with gentle touches, but she could not. “It got too much. I was around twenty years old, and I could no longer stand the cruel things he said or did to her. I intervened, only trying to push him off my mother, but he—he slipped and fell. I still remember how his head hit the marble floor in the entrance hall. I remember the blood and my mother’s scream.”
He shuddered, his eyes vacant for a moment before he squeezed them shut. When he reopened them, he was stoic.
“My mother never recovered,” he told Veronica. “As awful as he was to her, the abuse ensured she was a puppet with her strings cut when he died. As though, without him, she lost her capability. But he had taken everything away from her already.She sank into an illness borne from that grief and stress, and the guilt ate away at me for causing it. His death was an accident, but it leaves me with guilt nonetheless.”
His head hung.
“And that is why you keep your distance,” Veronica whispered. “For fear of repeating your past. Your guilt for not being there for your mother sooner.”
Henry eyed her, witheringly. “Yes.”
It sounded as though it hurt him to admit such a thing.
“Henry,” she murmured, reaching for his hand, but he pulled away.
“That man—that vile plague of filth that ruined my childhood and every year after—is the very reason I shall not have children, Veronica, and I vow that to you. His blood runs through me, and I have stared my own anger in the face and seen what Icouldbe capable of. I could be my father’s son, well and truly.”
His face was tight, as if it pained him to think about.
“I cannot put you through that. I cannot put any child through that possibility.”
Veronica gaped at him in disbelief. “You truly think that is what you will become? Henry, I believe such actions are a choice, and you are too good of a man to choose such ways.”
“I have treated you roughly,” he told her.
“I have asked for that,” she countered. She lowered her voice. “Such pleasurable moments are not the same as heavy fists and cruel ways.”
He looked at her, devastation pinching his brow, tightening his mouth.
Moving closer, Veronica pulled him from the bridge and tucked them within an overhanging willow tree that concealed them from view of passersby.
