Page 2 of The Good Duke
He stared uncomprehendingly at her.
While balancing her book on her lap, Persephone wiggled closer and laid her small, ink-stained hand over his much larger one.
“Your hat, Simon.” She tapped the tip of her pencil against the white-knuckled death grip he had on the article in question. “See? You’re crushing the edges.”
“Myhat?” he asked incredulously, his voice creeping up. He looked at the object in question. “Thatis what you’d express concern over?” That and not the likely end of their friendship?
Her cupid’s bow lips formed a small frown. “They’ve quarreled before, Simon.”
She wasn’t oblivious, then.
“Not likethis, Seph.”
He may as well have spoken to himself. Persephone had turned her focus back to her drawing.
“Your boy is a deviant,” Mr. Forsyth bellowed. “It isn’t normal.Heisn’t normal.”
In the course of Simon’s sixteen years of life, he’d been leveled by both words and fists more times than he could count. He’d been regularly beaten, tormented, and bullied for his inability to get his words out.
This was, however, the first time Persephone’s father had leveled the charge.
Mr. Forsyth wasn’t evencloseto being done with his verbal flogging of Simon.
“The only reason, the absolute only reason, I’ve allowed my Persephone anywherenearyour addle-pated son is because I took him as harmless,” Persephone’s father shouted. “I assumed, in addition to his altered mind, he was altered inotherways.”
“Other ways?” Simon’s father barked back.
Please, don’t ask it, Father. Please, don’t ask…
“What exactly are you suggesting about my son?” the earl demanded.
He’d asked it.
Holding his hat in front of his face as a futile shield, Simon slunk lower in his seat, all the while wishing he could continue dissolving all the way down and through the floor and disappear forever.
“I didn’t believe him capable of usingthatpart either and considered him safe for Persephone to be friendly with,” Persephone’s father was saying.
Funny that. One would expect after the verbal abuse Simon encountered throughout his life, he’d be immune to any insult, leveled byanyone, only to be proven wrong in this instant.
The two men continued shouting over one another; venomous invectives flew.
“That stutter,” the gentleman shouted. “And n-now…and n-now…”
In that moment, even as Simon himself was the subject of the disparagement-laced tirade, he commiserated with the other man’s inability to just say what he wanted and needed to say.
“Thisssss?”
Simon winced.
He was never going to speak to Persephone again.
It was official.
In fairness, it wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk to her. It was just that there was no way her father…or his would ever dare allow it.
“I’m sorry, Simon,” Persephone whispered.
Simon glanced over.
