He stood a moment longer in the hall, wondering if he wasgoing mad or if that was everyone else, and then, for lack of better ideas, went to the library.
Bram was sitting in there, smoking one of the unpleasant perfumed cigarettes, with a half-full ashtray in front of him. He glared. “Perhaps you would have the goodness to leave me be.”
“I didn’t seek you out,” Zeb assured him. “But since I’m here, I did not intentionally slander your wife to Wynn. He drew an inference I didn’t intend from a throwaway remark, and I’m very sorry about that, but I did not set out to make him think ill of her or undermine you. If I wanted to do that, I would tell him exactly what you promised Father on his deathbed, and the thousand ways you have broken that promise since.”
Bram gazed up at him. He looked twitchy, as if he hadn’t slept well. “Why should I believe you?”
Zeb wanted to say,I don’t care if you believe me, and was irritated it wasn’t quite true. “I don’t suppose you will, because your inflated self-esteem depends on telling yourself I deserve the shabby trick you played on me. But Wynn clearly doesn’t like Elise and he didn’t need my help to reach that conclusion.”
“Is that his reason for changing his will? His sole reason?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care.”
Bram shook his head, in dismay rather than denial. “I was promised this. I am the heir. To have it snatched from me because ofher.” The pronoun hissed out with venom. “That succubus has taken this from me as she has taken everything from me. She has drained me dry. Even you, even my own brother—”
“That was you,” Zeb said. “You made a promise, and youbroke it. Don’t you dare blame Elise.”
“She made me do it!” Bram shouted. “You don’t understand how I loved her! It was an obsession, an enchantment.”
“Oh, for—”
“I was under her influence! And look what I have gained by it. My inheritance exhausted, my brother estranged, my marriage a laughing stock.Shedid this to me. And I am irrevocably chained to her malice, her spending, her infidelity and spite.”
Zeb shifted uncomfortably. He didn’t know his sister-in-law well, or like what he knew, but nobody ought to be talking with such thick hatred about their spouse. “Then get a separation. A divorce, even.”
“I can’t. She would contest it, and the scandal would be intolerable.”
“How could she possibly contest it?”
“Oh, she will make me out to be the villain in court. A roué, destroying his innocent wife. Ha.”
“Innocent?” Zeb said incredulously, since Elise’s adulteries were notorious, and realised too late that he’d been more accurate than polite. “I mean—”
Bram stubbed out his cigarette and reached for another. His hands were trembling a little. “It was before our marriage. I was in a fever before the wedding, consumed by anticipation of my wedding night.”
“I don’t want to know,” Zeb said firmly.
“I needed a way to relieve my natural urges—”
“Idon’twant to know.”
“—and to prove to myself that Elise did not entirely own me. To resist her spell. A man cannot be subservient to his wife, slave to her whims. I ensured my needs were met, that was all, and yes, perhaps I should have put an end to the business afterwards. I grant that freely. But it did no harm, and prevented me making excessive demands on a new wife. Is that so wrong? And yet, to hear Elise tell it, I ruined her life and despoiled the marriage bed. As thoughshe—”
“Wait, wait, wait.” Zeb had been translating that out of Brammish. “You’re saying you took a mistress before your marriage and kept her on afterwards? While bleating about how much you adored Elise? For God’s sake!”
“I have a man’s natural urges!”
“You have a man’s thick head, is what you have. She found out?”
“The wretched girl came to our house,” Bram said. “I had been married less than two months when she forced her way in and told Elise everything. And Elise has punished me for a decade. Ten years of anger and resentment over a trivial affair! They ruined my marriage between them.”
“Jesus wept, Bram. Elise was, what, nineteen, just married? And your mistress turned up at the family home?”
“The girl meant nothing! I proved it at the time, but Elise has used her as an excuse for ten years of frigidity to me and harlotry with others, in which she has spent everything I have. I cannot rid myself of her because she will recount my every misstep in court—”
“More than just the one mistress, then?”
“And now this!” Bram said, ignoring him. “It is a bitter irony.She only stayed for the money, because I was to be Wynn’s heir, and thanks to her I am to be disinherited.”
