Page 89 of Ne'er Duke Well
“Who was she—Morgan’s mother?”
“Josephine was a French servant in the house. A maid he took a fancy to.” He’d asked Josephine once—when he was much older—if his father had forced her.No, she’d said.Peter, child, no.
But his father had been the new master of the house, Josephine an unmarried girl of eighteen with a little sister to care for. There were many ways a woman could be forced.
“Was he… much like Freddie?”
“No.” His hands closed into fists on the bed. He couldn’t saymore. He didn’t want to think of Morgan’s face, even as he could think of nothing else.
“How did he die?”
Christ, she was relentless in her questions. He opened and closed his fingers on the bedsheets, angry and ashamed of his own anger.
“Consumption,” he managed.
“Was he sick for a long time?”
“Selina.” He grasped at her name like a lifeline. “Why are you doing this?”
“I don’t know!” To his surprise, her voice rose on the words, and he turned toward her, though he could scarcely make out her features in the dark room. “I have no idea what I’m doing, Peter. Only that you are hurting and alone, and I want to be with you, and… and take on some of this burden, only you will not let me!”
“Selina—”
“No, I’m sorry,” she said over him. “I’m sorry, God, I’m so sorry. I am frightened, and I don’t know what to do, and I’m so sorry I can’t do more. That’s what I should have said, not speared you with recriminations when you do not deserve them.”
He didn’t know what to do with all the emotions that clogged his throat, burned at the back of his eyes. He seized on the easiest thing to express. “I won’t let you take on this burden? Selina, you have done—you have arranged everything. The doctor, the water—even the bed in this room, damn it.”
“I—but—” She hesitated. “Peter, those are justthings.”
He remembered when she had said the same about the great empty house, the day they were married. The furnishings were justthings. “I don’t know what you mean.”
He felt, more than saw, her helpless shrug. “It’s easy for me. To arrange minutiae. To call for someone, to pay someone to fetchfurniture or fresh cloths.” She drew a breath, let it out shakily. “I do not know how to make someone stop hurting. How to help when… when someone is afraid or grieving. I’m not good at things like that, at being gentle or kind or…”
He reached out blindly in the dark and found her hands, locked together in her lap. He closed his fingers over hers and squeezed.
“Don’t you hear what I’m doing, Peter? Right now—talking about myself, how frightened I am, when all I want to be doing is easing things for you.”
“You do ease me.”
Her hands unlocked and grasped his, cradling his fingers between her palms. “How can you say that?”
“You make it possible for me to be beside him. You make it so that I don’t have to worry that the children don’t know where they belong. You have made this goddamned house, which reminded me of nothing so much as my father, into a home. For all of us.”
They sat in silence for long moments. He looked at the small outline on the bed that was Freddie, motionless but for the coughs that occasionally rippled through him.
He wanted to talk to her. He wanted to answer her questions and make her understand—who Morgan had been, and their father, and Josephine—and yet it was so hard to do it. He couldn’t find the words that usually spilled from him like water from a cup.
“I didn’t know he was my brother,” he said finally, “for a very long time. Stupid, really—we looked so similar. I was older, by two weeks, but Morgan was bigger. And better than me at”—somehow, a breath of laughter slipped free—“everything, he would have said. Swimming and starting fires and finding the most interesting places to hide. I was better at convincing his mother not to punish us.”
He would have expected that seventeen years after his brother had died, Morgan’s face would be hazed over by time, but he could still call it up: hazel eyes in a pale face, the deep notch of Morgan’s upper lip. Perhaps because Morgan’s face had been so like his own.
“Our father married my mother because she was rich, and when they married all of her property became his. She was a woman alone, her parents dead, and he convinced her that he believed in what she did. Abolition. Self-government.” Josephine had told him, over a dish of her rice and beans, of how charming Silas Kent had been. How easily Peter’s mother had been taken in by his pretty words, wanting to believe that she had found someone to share her life’s work.
“After they wed, he told her he wanted to purchase a plantation,” Peter continued. “She fought him tooth and nail, and every time he went back to England—which was often—she dismantled what he’d done. She wrote to Wilberforce, to Thomas Clarkson, long letters against slavery that she asked them to read aloud in Parliament. She tried to convert to Quakerism but, because she was married, they wouldn’t allow it.
“He was always angry. His name, his reputation—she dragged it through the dirt and spit on it, he’d say.”
It was easy, too, to call up these memories—his father, red-faced and screaming.Stupid selfish bitch! You have no idea what you’ve done.
