Page 183 of Courting the Wrong Duke

“His love.”

The words came quietly, stripped of all the anger that had filled his voice only moments before.

Rosalind lowered her gaze for an instant, a tear escaping despite her effort to contain it.

“He loved you because you existed,” Algernon continued. “You walked into a room and he smiled. You spoke and he listened. You made mistakes and they became amusing stories told over dinner.” His mouth trembled before he pressed it flat. “I spent years trying to become a son he could bear to look at.”

William stared at him. “I didn’t know.”

“Of course you didn’t.”

“I was a child too.”

“Yes.” Algernon gave a broken laugh. “His precious boy. His perfect little jewel. Why would anyone tell you that your brother was being dragged to Wales and locked in a room because he could not say his own bloody name without stumbling over it?”

Rosalind looked at William through the blur of tears she no longer bothered trying to hide.

The pain on his face was unmistakable. He had only recently discovered how different their childhoods had been, but this was something worse. Rosalind wondered whether even the Dowager Duchess knew what had happened in this house. Whether anyone had known there was a frightened little boy in Wales trying to force himself into becoming worthy of his father.

“I never asked for any of it,” Algernon said.

The anger had almost entirely left his voice now, and what remained was infinitely harder for Rosalind to hear.

“I did not ask to be born. I did not ask to be brought into that family. I did not ask anyone to call me his heir.” His gaze returned to William. “I was a little boy who wanted his father to love him.”

Rosalind pressed her lips together, but another tear slipped down her cheek.

“But he didn’t.”

The cellar fell silent.

Rosalind looked at Algernon and, for the first time since he had emerged from the darkness, found it impossible to see only the man who had taken her father.

She saw the child whose handwriting she had found upstairs.

A frightened boy abandoned in a strange house, filling pages with words his mouth refused to form properly. A boy who had been told there was something wrong with him before he was old enough to understand why.

Who had believed that if he worked harder, spoke more clearly, became cleverer and quieter and stronger, he might finally earn what William had been given without asking.

Love.

Her heart broke for the child he had been, and the realization frightened her almost as much as the man standing before her now.

She understood why those two words had appeared again and again upstairs.

Why, Father.

How many times had he written them before he stopped expecting an answer?

Rosalind looked past him toward the iron bars. Pity did not erase those. It did not change the fact that her father had been taken, imprisoned, and kept from everyone who loved him.

“Papa helped you,” she said.

Algernon’s gaze snapped back to her.

Rosalind forced herself to hold it. “You told William yourself that my father helped you when yours would not. He listened to you. He taught you that taking longer to speak did not mean you had less worth saying.”

“Do not.”