Page 91 of His Mad Duchess
A long silence stretched. Margaret’s face had paled, her lips parted as though to speak, but no sound came. She looked as if the walls themselves pressed inward.
Sebastian’s voice cracked like thunder. “How long?”
His mother did not answer. Her stillness was deliberate, her chin lifting as though silence itself might dismiss his demand.
Sebastian’s jaw clenched, his chest rising like a man holding back a tide. “I said—how long?” His voice thundered through the room, reverberating against the paneled walls.
Her lips thinned, her fingers resting lightly against the carved arm of her chair as though poise might hold back truth.
“Not long,” she said at last. “I learned only days before his death. He confessed to me in his final letter.”
Margaret’s breath hitched as a cold wave of shock swept through her, leaving her momentarily unmoored. She wanted to speak,but her voice was lost, buried beneath the thunder of what unfurled before her.
She could only sit, every nerve raw, while Sebastian stood like a storm contained only by his own fury. He did not look at her. She almost wished he would, though part of her feared that if his gaze touched her now, the blaze of it might sear her as surely as it scorched his mother.
“He was promised,” the Dowager said at last, her voice low, measured, and terrible in its composure. “Promised to Margaret’s mother. Not for love but for alliance, for the strength of our names. It was understood. It was settled. Yet she chose otherwise. She chose Everly. She chose love.”
The Dowager drew a long breath, her spine a column of iron. When she spoke, it was low, deliberate, every syllable measured, as though she had rehearsed this confession for years and only now dared to lose it. “And from that moment… he was… undone. His obsession?—”
At that word, her mouth tightened as if it left a bitter taste. Her eyes flickered, almost against her will, to Margaret before darting away again. “—drove him to unspeakable deeds.”
Silence crashed down, heavy as stone. Margaret’s heart gave a violent kick. Her mother. Her father. To hear their story reduced to this, spoken so coldly, as though their very love were a crime. The world swayed, her fingers dug into her skirts, twisting the fabric until the stitches bit her palms.
“Unspeakable?” Sebastian’s chest heaved, his breath loud in the silence. He leaned forward, his voice rising, each word sharpened to a blade. “No… no. We will speak to them. He murdered them, didn’t he? He set the fire, didn’t he? Margaret’s parents—God help us—he burned them alive because they defied him.”
The Dowager’s lips pressed tight, her gaze fixed on some dark distance only she could see. “He would not release her. Even with a child in her arms, he clung to the fantasy that she might yet be his. He contrived a bargain meant to ruin Everly, a snare from which no man could escape with honor, one that would have left him shamed and stripped of his standing, probably leave him dead if done well. Then, when Everly fell, George would stand ready, righteous and waiting, to claim what he believed should have been his from the first.”
Her voice wavered once, but she mastered it, each word emerging like iron hammered thin. “But Everly discovered the trick. He confronted George, threatened to expose him for what he was. And that?—”
Honoria’s breath drew sharp, her knuckles whitening on the arm of her chair. “That was the moment jealousy curdled to fury. He told me once, in a madness I scarcely recognized, that if he could not have her, then no man should. I didn’t know he would actually act on his words. So he lit the match. He took them both and would have taken the child too, had Providence not spared her.”
The horror struck like a blow to her ribs, sharp enough to unseat her breath. She clutched the arm of her chair, the words Sebastian spoke still searing in her mind. A single, dreadful possibility stirred at the edges of her thoughts. It was too wild, too monstrous to take shape.
But then she looked at Sebastian. His chest rose hard and fast, his throat working as though he fought to choke something back. And in that instant, as the shape of it forced itself into her mind, she saw it forming in his eyes, dragging itself from the shadows of memory she had tried to forget. Her stomach turned.No. God above, no.
She tried to swallow it down, but it rose, relentless, until it scraped her throat raw.
He shook his head faintly, as though to fling the notion off, but still his gaze clung to his mother’s face… searching, pleading… for the denial Margaret herself craved.
“And Margaret’s uncle…” His voice broke, raw, almost a whisper now. “Was it George as well? Did George silence him, too, because he knew what he had done, all these years ago?”
His throat closed as if the silence crashing in on him was unbearable. He lurched forward, voice hoarse and breaking. “Say it, Mother. Say the word.”
She shut her eyes as if against a blow, her lips trembling on the cusp of denial. But no denial came. At last, in a voice low and strangled, she said,
“Yes. Her uncle… he pieced it together. George, in his arrogance, let slip more than he should have, a word here, a name there, spoken in drink.”
She spared a glance at Margaret. “Your uncle was no fool. He went to the ledgers, traced the accounts, and saw the bargain George had contrived for Everly’s ruin. And from there, the truth was plain. He knew the fire was no accident. He meant to speak, to drag it into daylight. And George…” Her voice cracked despite her iron composure. “George could not allow it. He silenced him, as he had silenced the others.”
The words seemed to tear from her throat, a confession forced out like blood from a wound.
Sebastian’s breath left him in a shudder, his whole frame seeming to cave in upon itself. His shoulders bowed, his hand dragging over his mouth as though he might choke on the truth. His eyes, wide and hollow, fixed on her with something between grief and disbelief.
“Why, Mother? Why did you not let the truth out?” The question scraped out of him, ragged and emptied.
The Dowager’s composure faltered, her throat working, but she drew herself upright with the rigid pride of a queen upon her throne. “He was my brother, Sebastian. My blood. You cannot fathom what it is to carry such a burden. I did what I must.”
The words Honoria spoke hit Margaret like a blade. Her knees buckled, and she collapsed back into her chair, clutching thecarved armrest as though it alone kept her from sliding to the floor.
