Page 186 of Courting the Wrong Duke

“You have kept him here for weeks because you were frightened he might tell William something he had already spent years refusing to reveal.” Her voice shook, but she made no effort to hide it. “What happened to you in this house was cruel. It was unforgivable, and I am sorry anyone ever made a child suffer that way.”

Algernon’s expression faltered.

Rosalind felt the tears still damp upon her cheeks and did nothing to wipe them away. She meant every word. Some part of her would probably always ache now when she remembered those pages upstairs and imagined an eight-year-old boy writing Why, Father over and over again.

But the man who had hurt that boy was dead.

“My father did not do it to you,” she continued. “He does not deserve to be punished for the man who did.”

Algernon’s face hardened once more.

“Open the door.”

His gaze moved past her toward Edmund, and the silence stretched long enough that Rosalind found herself hoping some part of the man her father had once helped might still be reachable.

Then Algernon looked back at her. “No.”

William struck him.

Rosalind cried out as Algernon staggered backward from the force of the blow. William had moved so quickly that she had barely seen him cross the distance between them, but the fury on his face told her the refusal had broken whatever restraint remained.

“William!”

Algernon recovered before she could reach either of them. He lunged at his brother, catching William around the middle, and the two men crashed onto the stone floor together.

Chapter 27

William had never struck his brother before.

The realization came somewhere between Algernon driving an elbow into his ribs and William catching him by the front of his coat and forcing him backward against the stone floor.

He had never wanted to.

Even during the past several days, when every new discovery had forced him to question another piece of the man he thought he knew, William had never imagined this. Algernon had been his brother before William understood what the word meant. The person who had always been there.

Older, quieter, occasionally exasperating, but permanent in the way family seemed permanent when one had never been given reason to question it.

Now they were wrestling on the floor of the same house where Algernon had once been locked away as a child.

“Stop!”

Rosalind’s voice reached him from somewhere nearby, but William could barely hear it over the rush of blood in his ears.

Algernon twisted beneath him and struck him hard enough across the mouth that William tasted blood.

“You sanctimonious little bastard.”

William caught his wrist before he could strike again. “You imprisoned him!”

“He was going to destroy everything!”

“He helped you!”

William shoved him back against the floor.

“Eastmere helped you when Father would not. He taught you. He listened to you. You said yourself that he was the reason you learned to stop being ashamed every time you opened your mouth.”

“And then he betrayed me.”