Page 82 of Her Beast of a Duke
She nodded again. “And what of your face and body?”
“Oh, I am certain you can tend to my body scars soon enough.” He smirked at her, and she almost forgot what she was there to do.
Instead, she started busying herself with the salve, and Oscar sat back onto the small, cot-like bed that looked makeshift. Just like in a healer’s tent on a battlefield.
Perhaps it provided a strange sort of comfort.
As she got to work, slowly but carefully addressing his scars, Oscar began to speak.
“I was twenty-one when I joined the army,” he told her. “After leaving Cambridge, I tried to go home, but it was an endless string of parties where my parents boasted about all my achievements. They did not care about what I was passionate about, and already they were speaking of my getting wed. When they returned home after every dinner party and ball, the fighting got worse and worse, until I could no longer endure their mess.”
“You never should have had to,” Isabella said quietly, rubbing over each and every scar carefully. “You are not a puppet; you were their son, and they should have boasted ofallof your achievements, for I imagine there were many.”
He only nodded, lapsing back into his stillness again.
It was several moments later that he spoke. “I got my scars during the war, as you’ve already gathered. I returned to London at twenty-five, no longer handsome in their eyes, no longer a pretty—what did you call it, bauble?—to parade. Nobody would want their ugly, disfigured son any longer.
“My father called me broken. My mother claimed I was now useless to her, and everybody whispered wherever I went. The invitations to events, as tedious as they were, stopped coming. My university friends stayed away—save for Edmund, that is—and my parents’ families no longer visited. Even my parents stopped dining with me; my mother claimed my face began to make her lose her appetite.”
Isabella hissed through her teeth in revulsion at the disgusting behavior. She pressed harder as she applied salve to his other arm, trying to work through her fury at how Oscar had been treated.
“Although one night,” he began again, and she looked up, for she could not detect why there was a change in his voice. “My mother had a change of heart. Suddenly, she wanted to dine together. Celebrate my return. She apologized for not doing so sooner and apologized for her behavior. She told me her son ought to be commended, and it was terrible such an honor had to come at the price of my whole life.”
“That in itself is an insult,” Isabella spat, and Oscar nodded, laughing bitterly.
“Still, I was naïve and hopeful, lost in the abandonment I had come to know, so I clung to the change of heart she showed. I thought they had finally accepted me, that we could all move on together, that they would help me rebuild my future. We sat in the drawing room,” he told her, “and my mother served me brandy while my father asked me about my medals. He smiled at me as if he were proud. I rarely saw my cruel father smile, butI yearned for it, so I did not think anything of it. The welcoming had been everything I had wanted for many weeks.”
“I am scared,” Isabella confessed, her voice lowering. “I am sure that something went wrong.”
Oscar pressed his lips together. “It did. I woke up hours later, the night too dark around me, and I was in this room, violently ill. My whole body was drenched in sweat, and there was a terrible ringing in my ears. I will never forget how I thought my heart pounded so fiercely it would burst out of me. It was fighting as hard as I did. I could barely take a breath. All I knew was that there was a terrible aftertaste in my mouth, and it had come from the brandy I had been served.” His voice was flat, utterly dead and bitter.
Isabella’s hands stilled on his arms, the ointment slicking her fingers. She looked up at him, appalled. “They tried to poison you.”
“They tried to poison me,” he confirmed. “I was truly no use, so they put on their own show, one last finale, to try to get rid of the problem I had become for them.”
She barely managed to speak his name in devastating sympathy, her hands clenching around his arm to keep hold of him, to let him know she was right there.
“What happened?” She was scared to ask, but did.
“I looked for Mrs. Tisdale,” he told her. “She, along with my valet, acquired help beneath the notice of my parents. I was brought back to myself, and I recovered at one of Edmund’s residences. I confronted them days later once I was strong enough to stand and move, and talk. Of course, they denied everything.” He let out a hard laugh. “They said the war had made me unstable, that I did not know my own thoughts from left and right, and that nobody would believe me if I went shouting about it.”
“They are the vilest people in the world,” Isabella whispered harshly, shaking her head.
Tears pricked her eyes, her sorrow growing, for she understood why he was the way he was. Why he trusted nobody, why he always chased instincts that told him to fight first. Danger was everywhere for him where it should not have been. Safety had rarely been a factor in his life, so he had created it for himself.
“They are gone now,” he muttered. “Dead, how they deserve to be. I do not mourn them, and I have not mentioned the poisoning, even to Mrs. Tisdale, since my recovery. Afterward, my mother retired to another countryside estate, claiming her nerves were shaken by her ruined son. My father, while he stayed in the ton, avoided me, and so I learned to avoid everyone. I became a ghost in my own and their lives, and I was happier for it. They both died some years ago.”
The whole while, Isabella had continued to work the ointment into his skin, and she wrapped the bandages around his arm, pressing a kiss to the coarse fabric before she sank onto his lap.
“You have survived everything. Them, the war,” she reminded him. “They are gone, and you are alive, and you fight every single day of your life to be better than ever you were. You listen to me, and even when you have been bad-tempered, you have adjusted your behavior. You—you are strong, Oscar, stronger than your parents ever let you believe. You have had to create your own safety where they did not provide it, and it is time you stopped punishing yourself for that. Come to me when the worries get too great, and I shall simply seduce you into a distraction.”
She paused, allowing a small, lighter moment to break his tension.
“Or I will listen, depending on what you need. I have known for years this estate has not known light, even before you were born, but you can let it in now.” She turned around, gesturing to the dimness of the room. “Your shadows only keep your past alive, and you deserve to put it to rest, tolive, to exist in more than just darkness.”
She swore his own eyes glimmered with tears, but he blinked them away just as quickly as they appeared. He cupped her face, stroking over her cheek with his thumb. She realized one of her own tears had slipped free.
“Your light is all I need,” he told her. “I am terrified of extinguishing it, though.”
