Page 182 of Courting the Wrong Duke

“The writing?”

His mouth twisted bitterly. “My writing.”

Rosalind stared at him.

Algernon moved farther into the cellar, passing close enough that she instinctively stepped aside. He scarcely seemed to notice. His attention had drifted upward, toward rooms none of them could see from where they stood, and when he spoke again, some of the fury had left his voice.

“I was eight the first time he brought me here.”

Rosalind felt something tighten painfully in her chest.

Eight.

She had imagined someone young when she saw the exercises upstairs, but not a child of eight.

“Eight years old,” Algernon continued, looking at William now, “and I could barely finish a sentence without him looking at me as though I disgusted him.”

The pages upstairs returned to Rosalind with terrible clarity. The repeated syllables. The words copied so many times that some had nearly torn through the paper.

“He would sit me at a desk for hours. Reading. Reciting. Again and again until I could speak a passage without stumbling over it. If I stuttered, I began again. If I cried, I began again. If I told him I was tired, he reminded me that a future duke did not have the luxury of being tired.”

“Algernon,” William said quietly.

“Do you know what happened when I could not do it?”

William said nothing.

“He left.”

The simplicity of the answer hurt more than Rosalind expected.

Algernon looked around the cellar, though Rosalind suspected he was seeing something very different from the room surrounding them now.

“He would lock the door and leave me here. Sometimes for hours. Sometimes all day. He said perhaps hunger would teach me discipline where kindness had failed.”

Tears burned behind Rosalind’s eyes.

She tried to blink them away and could not.

The dark corridors above seemed to rearrange themselves in her memory. She no longer saw merely an abandoned house or pages left behind by someone long gone. She saw a little boy sitting alone at a desk, hungry and frightened, forcing the same sounds from his mouth until they came correctly because perhaps this time his father would be pleased with him.

Perhaps this time he would stay.

Her father had never made her wonder whether she was loved.

The realization came with an almost painful force. Her father had corrected her, scolded her, worried over her, and occasionally driven her half mad, but never once in Rosalind’s life had she been made to believe his affection depended upon how perfectly she behaved.

She could not imagine being eight years old and believing otherwise.

Algernon turned toward William.

“And then there was you.”

William’s face tightened.

Something close to anguish crossed Algernon’s. “You never had to earn it.”

“Earn what?”