Page 23 of Til Death Duke Us Part
The straighter her body became, the more his curved in on itself. He’d not felt shame in years. He’d killed it to keep going. But a woman wailing like her heart had just been cut from her chest could bring a soul back to life.
Only to kill it again.
He let her cry until her tears were gone. He had a sister. He knew what to do when this sort of thing happened. And when she stopped, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her gown and sniffling, he didn’t beg her for conversation.
She gave it, though, her voice raw but steady, determined but low. “I had my own ring, you know. Mr. Graves, my husband, he forged them—mine and his own—from a bit of nickel.”
She’d had a life of passion and love poured into two bands of metal. Realizations could dawn cruelly cold sometimes. And too late. “What happened to it? To them?” He didn’t want to know. Already guessed.
“Destroyed. He sold them to buy potion, and when I finally tracked them down after his death, they’d been stripped. The same way you stripped these.”
It was worse than he’d thought. He tugged his hat low to hide his hot face. “How did he die?” He shouldn’t ask it, shouldn’t heap more pain on her head after the unintentional emotional torture he’d just foisted upon her. But he couldn’t keep the question behind his teeth.
She picked at a thread on her skirt. “He loved potion. Not the useful kinds for healing a wound or a cough or to help clean a house. He liked the ones that got you as foxed as five ales with a single swig. He couldn’t pick himself off the floor most mornings. He stopped inventing entirely. The only coin he could bring in was from digging graves between bouts of intoxication.”
“Did you do anything? Before your, erm, current occupation.”
“I taught at a foundling hospital. I enjoyed working with children, helping them find their places in the world. But he showed up there once, drunk and raving, and I was dismissed.”
He tried not to let anger—irrational and ridiculous—bubble up from his chest and clog his throat.
She swallowed, and her hands made a wrinkled mess of her skirts, clutching the already wrinkled folds of cotton tightly in her fists. “I tried to stop it, him. I hid our money, so he couldn’t buy any more. He hated me for it. I woke up one morning, and he was gone. And my ring was gone. And I couldn’t find him. The constable did. Dead at the end of an alley.”
“Bloody hell.” The words like bile on his tongue. “How did you end up married to such a worthless man?”
Her head snapped toward him like a rope breaking, eyes wide and mouth dropped. “Some things are better left unsaid, your disgrace.”
That was better. She was insulting him again. “But it’s true.” He uncurled himself.
“Yes. It’s true. He was, in the end, a bit worthless. But so was I. I couldn’t save him.”
Victor winced. “I know that feeling well. My father was a philanthropist.”
“No! Impossible.”
“True, true.”
“But how did a philanthropist raise a man like you?”
“Some thoughts should remain unspoken, Mrs. Graves.”
She rolled her lips between her teeth, fighting a smile. There. Finally. If he had to commit crimes against humanity past, and against widows present, he’d rather it be with a laugh. A little joviality to cut the moral tension.
“Yes,” he said, “my father was a paragon. Quite virtuous. And I was determined to follow in his footsteps.”
“Lies.”
“Unfortunately not. I’d much rather I’d set out to be a rogue. Then I could consider myself a smashing success. Alas, that is not the case.”
“What happened?” She’d dropped forward, digging her elbows into her legs and resting her cheek in her hands. That cheek plumped up over her fingers and even more curls fell loose from her coiffure to play in the wind.
His fingers itched. He held them steady. Not yet. “My father was sick for some time before he died, and he’d spent much of the estate’s money on remedies that proved worthless. We—my sister and I—had no idea. He’d used glamours to hide the extent of his illness as well as the extent of our financial woes. He left me three houses, innumerable tenants, farms and dairies and servants and laborers and even an entire foundling hospital filled to the roof with homeless waifs. And he left me no means by which to care for them all. Thus began my life of crime. Well, after I tried to sell my sister to the highest bidder.”
“After? Selling your sister sounds like the inaugural crime to me.”
He shrugged. He’d already paid well for his careless treatment of Jane. He deserved it. It was a damned miracle she and Nico still allowed him in their lives. “I was an arse.”
“Imagine that.”
