He heard her march down his hall and up his stairs. Heard a door slam while he remained rooted to the spot. His mother bustled in seconds later, looking alarmed and exasperated in equal measure. ‘She didn’t deny it, then?’ She lowered herself to the arm of the chair, stunned. ‘I cannot believe it.’
It took all his strength to shake his head. ‘She denied it. Claimed she never said a word to another living soul and never would. Suggested someone must have overheard you both discussing it in the garden at the Renshaw ball.’
‘Did it occur to you to believe her?’ Of course it had. He had wanted to believe her so much he was still sorely tempted to chase after her and beg her to stay for ever. ‘As I cannot believe it was done with any malice, even if it was done at all.’
‘Whether it was intentional or not makes no matter.’
‘If we were overheard it certainly matters, as the way I recall that particular conversation, it was entirely one-sided. I did all the talking and Hope listened, so if they overheard anyone, it was me. Doesn’t that make it all my fault and not hers?’
‘She fed you the questions.’
She vehemently shook her head. ‘I had a speech all worked out. I wanted her to know the whole truth about what happened in case it was my illness which was keeping you both apart. In fact, I told her much more than was printed in the papers. Things I have never even dared to tell you.’ She frowned then. ‘Things about my first bout of madness which I’d have thought were much more salacious than all the nonsense about them treating me in a spinning chair and bleeding me twice monthly.’
As much as he wanted to believe it, he needed proof. ‘Like what?’ Because they certainly knew all about the laudanum and the restraints and how nonsensical she had been by the end of those three long years.
‘Like the fact that it was birthing you that sent me mad in the first place and that I couldn’t bear to look at you at all until you were nearly three years old. I hated you that much.’
‘What?’ He was reeling. ‘You hated me?’ How had he not known that?
‘I don’t hate you any more, dear, so don’t look so distraught. I was ill. Dr Long Fox calls it the insanity of childbirth and he believes it is more common a condition than most people realise, although I had a particularly dreadful dose of it. Hope and I talked extensively about it, yet the newspapers made no mention of it. Their report was too obsessed with Mill House, which we barely touched upon at all as I recall, and when we did I am sure I was vague on the details, though the ones they printed were so accurate.’
‘Not that accurate! They said you tried to hang yourself.’
‘I did, dear. But I certainly never mentioned that shameful secret to Hope any more than I ever did to you. In fact, not even Clowance knew. Some things are just too personal.’
It was his turn to slump in the chair.
Chapter Twenty-Four
If Hope expected him to cool down and quickly see sense, he didn’t. As the storm raged outside, and long after an overtired Faith had gone to her bedroom, he remained resolutely downstairs ensconced with Maria.
As miserable as she was by this depressing turn of events when she had hoped the grand gesture would be enough to get through his thick, Cornish skull, she flatly refused to cry herself to sleep. She had shed enough tears over Luke and the tragic truth was, if he couldn’t trust her and her love for him, then they really were done and the wretched long journey from Bath in the worst possible weather had all been for nothing. With as much dignity as she could muster, she would leave first thing and never darken the dratted fool’s door again. And good riddance to him!
She furiously tossed her brush back in her overnight bag and hauled out her nightgown. Let him wallow in his self-inflicted martyrdom alone for ever. She wouldn’t care and she wouldn’t miss him. In her temper, she knotted the laces on the back of her dress rather than undo them, forcing her to fight her arms out of the stupid thing done up. Which meant she was in the midst of wrestling the too-tight bodice over her breasts when her door was flung open and he came in uninvited, still dressed in the crumpled damp clothes he had come home in, like a wet dog with his tail between his legs.
‘Can we talk?’
Trapped neither in nor out of the dress, she grabbed a pillow to cover herself before she glared at him with haughty disdain. ‘I tried that and you refused to listen!’
‘I thought we had already established weeks ago that I am a ham-fisted clod with straw for brains. If we hadn’t, then I’ll reiterate it now.’ Defeated, he sat heavily on her mattress. ‘I am sorry, Hope. I should have believed you and I certainly should have afforded you the right of rebuttal before I stormed off like a lion with a thorn in his paw, dragging my poor mother with me and behaving like a coward.’ Two dark and very miserable eyes peered up at her through a windswept riot of wild hair. ‘My only defence, not that it is any way a defence, is I have never been hopelessly in love before, so had no concept of how irrational that state would render me.’ He shook his shaggy head, his expression more wretched than she had ever seen it. ‘My mother went mad because she gave birth to me.’
Hope nodded, feeling sorry for him for that awful fact. ‘She told me.’
‘Yet you never told a soul—even me.’
‘It wasn’t my secret to tell but I did urge her to talk to you about it as she carries a lot of unnecessary guilt for it. For it wasn’t her fault. Apparently, many physicians are starting to recognise such melancholy after childbirth as an uncommon side effect.’ In the absence of anything else to fill her time between the interminable carriage ride from Bloomsbury to Bath, Hope had done her research.’
‘She said she didn’t tell me because she didn’t want to make me feel any more guilty than I already did for not being there when they took her away to Mill House.’
‘And do you feel guilty for that? Even though you know none of it was your fault?’
He sighed and his big shoulders slumped. ‘It’s like an enormous sack of potatoes which I continually carry on my back and likely, according to my considerably much more rational mother, I use it to justify being an overbearing, self-righteous and controlling idiot.’
‘You are all those things sometimes, I cannot deny.’ They were part and parcel of his legendary Duff charm.
He nodded. ‘I would have picked you roses but the bushes have only just been planted and the damn things are only twigs.’ Then she saw tears swimming in those soulful brown eyes and all her residual anger at him melted in one fell swoop. ‘She tried to hang herself at Mill House. Twice.’ He held up two fingers just in case she couldn’t count. ‘Because in her confused state thanks to the drugs and the punishments, and because she never knew I tried to visit, she thought I had abandoned her and wanted all the pain to end.’
He swiped a tear away and Hope couldn’t stand it any more. She dropped the pillow and wrapped her arms around him. ‘None of that was your fault, Luke. You cannot take on the guilt for Cassius’s cruelty. You were only eighteen, powerless and all alone. He was the villain of the piece and both you and your mother were his unwitting victims.’
