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“That’s not what I meant, you know that. I was teasing you. I wasn’t accusing you of being a monster. I was only trying to cut you down to size.”
“It cut me. Made me think. Made me wonder if despite all of my rules, I’d become him, after all.” He sighed. Kissed the top of her head. “You couldn’t have known the demons I was battling. The ones I’m still battling.”
Yes, she could sense that his demons were noisy, clamoring in his head, telling him he was bad, that he was wrong.
She traced the whorl of hair on his chest with her finger.Keep talking, Edgar. If you keep talking, you drown out the demons.
“When he had the drink in him, he chased after the servants. And when he wasn’t at home, he was whoring and purchasing mistress after mistress. Again, trying to escape his sadness, his anger, in a frenzy of meaningless sexual congress.”
She held perfectly still, willing him to keep talking. She sensed that this was the first time he’d shaped these thoughts into something he could tell another soul.
“When I was young, I couldn’t do anything about his reign of terror. I couldn’t defend the serving maids, or stop him from hitting our mother. He tried to kill us all. Here, at Southend. He was drunk and he set fire to the curtains. He wanted to die. He wanted us to die.”
Mari soothed the hair back from his brow. “That’s too much for a young child to bear, Edgar.” And she’d thought her childhood had been hard.
“When I grew older,” he continued, “I learned boxing. Fencing. Anything that honed my body to be a brick wall that he could batter, but never break. A wall that would deflect his fury from others.”
A tear slid down her cheek. She ached for him. For the young man he’d been, trying to absorb all of that anger. Protect everyone else.
“There’s something about you, Mari.” He lifted her chin. “Something that makes me trust you. Even that first night, in my library, I told you things I’d never told anyone else.”
“Sometimes we need to speak of the bad things in order to silence them forever.”
“I think you’re right. That’s why I’m telling you this story.”
“Keep going, Edgar. I want to hear. I need to know.”
“When Sophie left me, I was so furious with my father. More furious then I’d ever been.”
His chest rose and fell more rapidly now. She deliberately slowed her own breathing, showing him how to be calm.
“I came home one evening, and my father had... my father had...”
The words twisted inside Edgar’s mouth, blocking his tongue, choking his throat.
Her small hands framed his face. Rubbing his temples, soothing him with the scent of her. Warm and good and wholesome.
He took a deep breath. “He’d tried to choke my mother. There were marks around her neck. She was sobbing in her chambers when I came home. Something snapped inside me. The rage swelled up, obliterating anything good. Anything human.”
She didn’t betray any shock. Didn’t draw away in disgust.
“I saddled my horse and I found him at his club, drinking brandy and laughing with his friends. I walked into that club and I spat upon his boots. I challenged him to a duel, in front of dozens of witnesses. He laughed at first. And then he saw I was deadly serious.”
Noonday sun on his face.
Raising the heavy pistol. Correcting the tremble in his fingers.
His father’s mocking smile.
The crowd that had gathered despite the privacy surrounding the duel.
Grafton had been his second. He’d attempted to talk him out of his folly.
Too much like a Greek tragedy, old boy,he’d said. Nothing good can come of it.
“I wanted to murder my own father,” he said. “Actually imagined the bullet ripping through his heart, taking his life. In the end, I found I couldn’t do it. I fired at nothing, several feet away from him.”
Mari inhaled. Let her breath out again.
