Page 68 of Darkest at Dusk
Her lips tipped, not quite a smile; the expression undid him more than tears would have. She glanced toward the door, then back at him—as if choosing—and leaned a fraction nearer. The quiet between them tightened, warm now instead of cold. Gratitude brightened to something more dangerous.
“Rhys,” she whispered, testing his name like sugar on her tongue.
Desire skated through him, inappropriate in this moment, but there nonetheless.
The smallest shiver went through her. He reached, slowly, so she might refuse, and brushed the backs of his fingers against her cheek. Her eyes widened, dark and deep.
Turning her face, she caught his touch against the corner of her mouth.
He forced himself to drop his hand and look away. He was not a good man; he had never claimed he was. But he was not such a ruffian as to take advantage of the moment.
Beside him, she took a slow breath and said, “I have questions. About the house. About…all of it. But one first.” Her throat moved. “Catrin. What happened to her?”
He had not meant to reveal it so plainly. He had meant to measure it out, careful as medicine. But she had asked, and the truth had sat in him for years like a stone.
His gaze flashed to her, and he did not look away.
“I killed her,” he said, voice steady as stone. And in the silence that followed, he waited for her to pull away, to see him for what he was. Not a savior, but a murderer.
Isabella lifted the glass to her lips and took a tiny sip, letting herself absorb Rhys’s words before she spoke. The brandy burned a small sun in her throat. Then she set the glass on the small side table because her fingers had begun to shake. He sat very straight, the brights and darks cast by the fire dancing over him.
He had neither lied nor omitted. He had placed a boulder between them and named it, trusted her with it. Relief and dread braided tight inside her—relief that she was no longer alone in what she knew; dread of what truth might demand of her. And under it, a warmth she did not dare yet name for he had put the worst of himself in her keeping, and still she did not look away.
“Tell me.” She did not know if she invited punishment or absolution or simply the truth, but she would hear the tale because not knowing was making a maze of her mind. “From the beginning.”
His gaze flicked to her hands, to where they knotted in her skirt, and the corners of his mouth tightened. He did not move closer but neither did he shift away. His restraint pressed on her as heavy as a touch, as if he held himself taut against the pull between them.
“Catrin was my cousin. My father’s brother’s daughter. She would visit when we were children, quiet, watchful. She came to live at Harrowgate after my aunt’s fall and my uncle’s apoplexy. I was away at school, but when I visited, I saw her careful grief and mild manners. She was ever agreeable, sometimes so precisely agreeable it felt learned, as if she fashioned herself into whatever shape the room required.
“Something about her felt wrong. I spoke with Mother. She said that Catrin had lost everything and was afraid of losing even more, that she was careful lest she be cast out, lest everyone desert her. She said only must I show her compassion.”
He paused. The room sighed around them, lamp glass ticking as heat touched it. Isabella could not help noticing his hands, the long fingers, the strength of them she had felt when he pulled her from danger. She brought her gaze back to his face.
“Then my brother, Ned, drowned. Seven years old, he was, and barely that. His birthday only three days before…” He clenched his jaw and stared into the fire. “Then Will took sick. Mother did not leave his side until Catrin offered to sit with him. Even then, Mother only went as far as the chair at the foot of his bed. She dozed, and when she woke, his breathing was slow and faint and then gone altogether. You know all this from the letters.” His mouth flattened. “The ordinary catastrophes of a house, one might say. But they were not ordinary.”
“Catrin,” Isabella said because the name sat cold on her tongue and would not be swallowed.
“Catrin,” he agreed. “She was clever in the way that looks like gentleness if you want it to. And they wanted it to, Mother and Father. One believes what one must to keep the world square.”
“Because believing she was a monster was more than they could bear,” Isabella said, understanding what it meant to choose not to see, because to do anything else was inconceivable.
Rhys shook his head. “Because believing she was a monster was more than they could imagine. She learned to match action to expectation so the eye would see only what she wished while her hands were busy elsewhere.” He paused. “Mother fell and broke her neck. Fell down the stairs she had walked for decades. Odd, isn’t it, that she died the same way as my aunt?”
The fine hairs at Isabella’s nape prickled and rose. In her pocket, the singed bit of pink ribbon lay, a coiled serpent.
On instinct, she reached for him, taking his hand between her own. His skin was warm, his palms rougher than her own. He did not pull away. Instead, he placed his other hand atop hers. The weight of it was a vow pressed to her skin, protective, claiming, intimate. The pulse at her wrist fluttered against his thumb.
“Father brought me home from school,” he continued. “That first night, I heard them, whispers that sounded like my brothers weeping, my mother sobbing. Grief, I told myself. And then I saw him by the pond, little Ned. And I saw the willow clear through him.” He looked around. “Will came to me in this very room. Sat by my bedside, eyes dark and fathomless, face translucent gray. Mother did not come, but I heard her weeping, always weeping. I hear her still.
“I told Father what I saw, what I heard. Told him that I thought Catrin to blame. I thought, foolishly, that if I stacked my facts neat enough, he would see the truth of it. But he did not wish to see, because if I was right, if she had done all of that, then what manner of man was he that he had allowed it? What manner of man was he that he had summoned death into the midst of his family? He sent me to St. Jude’s, to Hargreaves, believing grief could be taught out of a man like bad penmanship.”
Isabella gasped, the name Hargreaves sending a cold finger down her spine despite the warmth of the room. She had known Rhys had been locked away in St Jude’s, but knowing was not the same as hearing it stated in his voice, heavy with remembered suffering. She tasted the memory of limewash and fear, knowing that her brief encounter barely scraped the depth of what he had endured.
“Six months I was there,” he said. “In the beginning, I was honest, and then I was not. Honesty would only have extended my purgatory. Instead, I told Hargreaves what he wished to hear and was sent back to Harrowgate cured.”
The horror of six hopeless months in that place made Isabella’s heart wrench. Her fingers tightened on his.
“What happened the night of the fire?” she asked. Her voice sounded even. It felt like a thread.
