Page 45 of The Captive
“How can you not care about them?” she wailed softly. “They were your family, and you don’t even care…”
“Not care?” He sat back, setting his claw-toothed tool aside. “You conclude I didn’t care for my family because I am indifferent about the ground where their remains lie? Is that it?”
“You’re…almost jolly, and they’re d-dead.”
She was crying. Hell and the devil, the Countess of Starch and Disruption was crying. To shut her up—to make those damned tears stop—he stood, put distance between them, and spoke over his shoulder.
“Would you have me crying, Countess? I haven’t seen you crying over your departed husband. You have rejoiced in his death, rather, and told me you are happy he’s gone.”
“You cannot be happy Evan is gone.” She glared up at him, her face dirty and tear streaked and furious. “You cannot.”
“Why not? He cost me access to my duchess’s intimate favors, did he not?”
Christian had no idea where those ugly words had come from, but he knew they weren’t true. He’d loved his son, loved his wife, even, though not in the manner he’d wanted to. And he hated himself—not Girard, or not only Girard—because he, the husband, the papa, hadn’t been here when they’d needed him so desperately.
He braced himself on the wall, back to her, as a pair of arms slid around his waist from behind.
“You don’t mean that, Christian Severn.”
She held him fiercely, her female shape undeniable, as if she would impress the words on his very flesh. “You cannot mean that. Helene said you doted on the boy. She wrote me thus as well. And you always treated Helene with respect. She gloated over that to me regularly.”
He nodded, hoping to shut the woman up. She was fearless in her willingness to put into words what ought to remain unspoken. He turned, thinking she’d step back, but she instead attacked him from the front, leaning into him, wrapping him in her arms, pushing her nose against his throat.
He surrendered to the moment and brought both arms around her. She was little and sturdy, and very obviously female, and holding her was a pleasure and a…relief.
“I’m sorry. I do not mourn my husband properly, and I am nobody to tell you what you ought to feel.”
Still, she didn’t move. Christian used his teeth to tug off one glove, his left, and stroked his damaged hand over her hair. He wanted to comfort her, but she sought words from him, not caresses and silent wishes.
“You worry nobody will tend your grave,” he said. “It’s real, that worry.”
She moved against him, getting closer when he’d thought she would pull away. She ought to be pulling away, ought to be running back to Town or Greendale Hall, or anywhere to get quit of a place where she was made to cry.
“When you are imprisoned,” he went on, “you suffer bodily. War is hard enough on the soldier in service to his country. Prisoners cannot be spared a great deal of charity, else who would fight to the death to avoid capture? The physical deprivation is not so hard to understand, but inside your mind… Your captors assure you that your people have forgotten you, that nobody came to find you, that you were allowed to fade immediately from memory, and you…”
She was crying still, making miserable little noises against his chest, but he forced himself to find more words. For her.
“You are told and shown and shown again that you do not matter, and you never mattered. Not to your captors, which is only fair, but not to the mates you fought beside, not to your King, not to your own family. They tell you that until it makes sense, and you cast aside whatever you believed that doesn’t fit with that truth. But, Countess, I promise you, your grave will be tended when God calls you home, and you will be mourned.”
He had not comforted her with those words, for she shuddered against him, her tears the more profound for being so quiet.
He didn’t know what else to do but to hold her, stroke her hair, and wonder at this capacity for sorrow. Her grief felt as if she cried not for Helene and Evan, not even for herself, but for him.
“I’m s-sorry,” she said, sighing like an overwrought child against his chest. “I’m so sorry.”
He did not ask her for what or whom she was sorry, and neither did he let her go.
Nine
Gilly stood in the door to the nursery suite, arrested by the scene before her.
“This…this vermin is not to be brought into my house, is that clear?”
The duke spoke softly, with a lethal edge, while an orange kitten mewled piteously from its place in his gloved hand. He wasn’t squashing the thing, but his tone of voice alone would terrify it.
“Very clear, Your Grace.” Harris bobbed a curtsy. “Very clear.”
But Lucy stretched up a hand toward the kitten, wiggling her fingers in a silent plea for the little cat. The duke held the beast higher, the epitome of the school yard bully as he glared down at his daughter.
