She let out a little shriek and dropped the chain; a splash sounded, as the bucket plummeted to the bottom of the well.
“Good Lord,” she said. “Hugo. Whatever are you doing here?”
He met her eyes. “What do you think?”
“I...I think...”
“I’m here to horrify you,” he said. And then, because he couldn’t bear it any longer, he reached out and pulled her to him. She was warm and soft in his arms, and she smelled so deliciously right. He could have inhaled her scent for hours.
“Hugo—”
He didn’t want to talk. He didn’t want to answer any questions. He didn’t know who he was or what he wanted or what dreams would come to fill his heart. He only knew that if he couldn’t have her, nothing would ever be right again. And so he kissed her. He tasted her, sweet and steady against him, put his hand in the small of her back and drew her toward him.
She kissed him back.
“I love you,” he said. The truth took root inside him. For the first time in years, the dark words of his past receded.
“But, Hugo…”
He set his fingers over her lips. “Let me do this,” he said. “I thought I had to prove myself with money and accomplishments. But those will always ring hollow. They will never be enough. I want to be somebody. Let me be your husband. Let me be the father of your child—of all your children. I got more satisfaction from striking Clermont than I did from any success I found in business.”
She pulled back from him. “You struck Clermont?”
“Twice. And—that reminds me—I blackmailed him into promising to send your child to Eton.” Hugo tightened his grip around her. “I’ve never pretended to be a good man, you know. It’s just that…I’m yours.” He leaned his head against hers.
Her breath was warm against his face. “Did you hit him hard?”
“I’m afraid I did.”
“That’s my Hugo.” There was a grim satisfaction in her voice. “I love you, you know. If you hadn’t come, as soon as winter set in and the ground became too hard to work, I’d planned to come for you.”
“Well, I’m glad I came to my senses,” Hugo said. “You shouldn’t have traveled, not in your condition. Yet curiosity impels me to inquire. What did you plan to do, once you arrived?”
“Allow me to demonstrate.” She lifted her face to his, traced the line of his jaw with her fingers. “This.” She pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “And this.” She kissed the other corner. “And…” She took his mouth full on, her lips soft against his, tasting of all the things he’d most wanted.
“I’d do that,” she whispered, “until you were forced to admit you loved me.”
“I love you.”
“Well, that’s no fun.” She kissed him again. “Now what excuse do I have?”
He drew in a shuddering breath and pulled her closer. “You could make me say it again,” he whispered. “Make me say it always. Make me say it so often that you never have cause to doubt. I love you.”
Aftermaths & Beginnings
Eton, not quite twelve years later.
“‘PEACE SHALL GO SLEEP with Turks and infidels, and in this seat of peace tumultuous wars shall kin with kin and kind with kind confound…’”
Robert Blaisdell, the Marquess of Waring and also the eleven-year-old heir to the Duke of Clermont, looked up from his seat at the window. Sebastian Malheur, his cousin, paused in the midst of reading his lesson in Shakespeare aloud.
The other boy frowned at his book. “What does tumultuous mean?”
What flashed through Robert’s head was not a definition, but a series of noises: the sound of china crashing against a wall; his father’s shouts, the words rendered indistinct through the walls, but the intent still clear. Tumultuous meant the slam of a door and the quiet sound of his mother’s sobs. But most of all, it was the long silence that followed: the servants not daring to draw attention to themselves by speaking, and Robert, holding his breath, hoping that maybe if he was very quiet and very good, it might not happen again.
“Tumultuous,” he said, “means broken to bits.”
Sebastian wrinkled his nose. “That doesn’t make any sense. How can a war be broken into pieces?”
Robert was saved from answering by a shout in the yard below, and then a great clamor. The other boys who were studying in this upstairs library—all four of them—were only too happy to leave their books and press their noses to the windows that overlooked the fracas.
A crowd was forming on the green below: a mix of boys of all ages gathering in a circle around one child. While Robert watched, an older boy grabbed the child by the collar; another hit him.
“Someone should stop that,” Sebastian said next to him.
Someone was going to have to be Robert. He usually did put a stop to these rows; it was what a knight-errant would do. And while Robert would never admit it to the other boys, he still fancied himself one.
“Who is it?” Sebastian added, peering down at the crowd. “Is he new?”
“Yes. He’s a first form lag,” someone else said. “A Colleger.”
“Ah,” one of the older boys said. “A scholarship student. No wonder. Who are his parents?”
“Some kind of farmers. Or soap-makers.”
A derisive noise came at that. But Robert brushed his hands and stood up. Knights protected the weak, after all.
“Even worse,” the older boy was saying. “Davenant asked the boy who his father was, and he said, ‘Hugo Marshall.’ When Davenant said he’d never heard of him, the little lag said, ‘It doesn’t matter; he’s a better man than your sire, anyway.”
Robert froze.
Sebastian hadn’t moved from the window, but the other boy snorted. “He’s got stones, that’s for sure. Not so clear on the brains, unfortunately.”
Robert’s own brain fogged over. He set his fingertips against the glass and peered down once more. “Who did you say his father was again?”
“Hugo Marshall.”
Robert had heard that name before. He had heard it a few years ago, after another awful round of arguments ended in vicious separation. That time, it had been his mother who had left the house in a slamming of doors and a pointed ordering of carriages; his father had stayed morosely behind in the study.
Robert had tiptoed into the room, and, gathering up all his courage, he’d spoken. “Father, why is Mother always sad?”