Lord of Secrets (24 page)

Her hands clenched in her lap. Had David failed her, or had she failed David?

She was still asking herself that question, her thoughts in confusion, when a sharp report echoed through the house.

Chapter Nineteen

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.

—
William Shakespeare

Rosalie leaped from her bed and dashed across the room, her heart in her throat. She wrenched open her bedroom door and raced out, flying along the carpeted passage and down the stairs.

She could taste the acrid bite of gunpowder in the air even before she reached the bottom of the stairs. The butler and two footmen were emerging into the marble-tiled hall, frightened looks on their faces, as she sped down the last few steps. She was already dressed for bed. At any other time, she would have been mortified to be seen in her nightgown and wrapper by an audience of male servants. Now, she had no thought to spare for modesty.

“We heard a shot, my lady—”

“It’s nothing.” Where had that come from? She seemed to be speaking from some hidden reserve of calm she hadn’t known she possessed. “Go back to whatever you were doing and—and I’ll call you if I should need you,” she finished on a less confident note.

Without a backward glance, she raced off in the direction of the report.

The gunpowder tang in the air grew stronger as she neared the study, though the door was only slightly ajar. Her heart hammered in her breast. She took a deep breath and pushed her way inside.

David, seated behind his desk with a pistol in his hand, looked up with a startled face. “Rosalie—”

Relief flooded through her. Thank God, he was alive and in one piece. “I heard a shot.”

He reddened faintly and glanced at the pistol he was holding. “Yes, I was loading this and it went off by accident. I seem to have put a ball through the second volume of Dr. Johnson’s
Dictionary
. If I were a more careful marksman, I might have taken out his
Rasselas
instead.”

Something about the familiar, almost tender way in which he held the weapon sent a chill through her. “Why were you loading a pistol, David?”

“I don’t know.” There was a pause, and then he said, “That’s not true. I came in here thinking I had an excellent reason, but suddenly it doesn’t seem like such a good idea anymore.”

“You were going to kill yourself.”

“Yes,” he acknowledged with a slow nod. “Forgive me. I didn’t stop to consider you might hear the shot.”

“Oh, God. David, you wouldn’t really—”

“Never fear, I’m not going to do it. It may be little more than stubbornness on my part, but I realized I’m not ready to give up that easily. Besides, I’d hurt you, even if that wasn’t my intention. A new bride whose husband took his own life less than a month after the wedding? Only a coward would leave you to face that kind of scandal.”

Rosalie sagged with relief, her knees like water. “Oh, thank God. You had me so frightened.”

He shut the pistol away in his desk, though his gaze lingered on the closed drawer. “It might not be such a bad thing for you, Rosalie. You’d be well provided for. You could marry again.”

She shook her head, horrified by the hopelessness in his voice. All her anger and bitterness had left her in the space of a single gunshot. “No. I don’t want to marry again.”

He looked up and his eyes met hers. “You mustn’t give up on marriage. You could still find happiness with a man who deserves you. The kind of man you can trust and respect. One who can be a real husband to you.”

“I haven’t given up on marriage. I didn’t mean those things I said earlier. You are a real husband to me.”

“Not in one particular.” He stared past her. “I’m not even sure I can be.”

She took in his chiseled, intelligent face, his easy grace. Other women had been with him in bed. They’d known his strong, muscular body above theirs. They’d seen desire smoldering in those dark eyes.

She spoke as patiently as she could. “I still don’t understand. You’ve been with so many other women. Why not me? Is there really something so unappealing about me? I may not be alluring or pleasing to you now, but I could learn how to make you happy. You could teach me.”

He frowned. “Don’t say that. You make it sound as if it’s your fault. I’m the one who’s never been right.”

“But that’s just it.” She swallowed down a lump in her throat. “You have been. You’ve had lovers.”

“Lovers?” His mouth twisted. “Strange, I never think of them that way.” He shook his head. “The things I’ve done, the women I’ve bedded—none of those choices made me happy. None of them felt good or right. From the very first, there’s been something dangerously wrong with me.”

His face had taken on that look again, the strained one that appeared whenever his thoughts turned to the past. She slipped into one of the two leather-upholstered chairs before his desk. As gently as she could, she asked, “David, what was it like—the affair you had with your aunt?”

“What was it like? It was utterly sick and sordid.”

“Then why were you with her, if it troubled you so much? What did you feel inside, when it was going on?”

He looked away. “You don’t really want to know that.”

“You’re wrong.” She sat forward. “I do.”

He stared past her for a time before answering. “I felt everything one ought to feel, and even more things one shouldn’t. I felt a crushing sense of guilt that I should be sinning with a married lady, the wife of my uncle. I felt secretly proud that I should be accepted and schooled and even desired by an appealing and experienced older woman. I felt an ever-present sense of dread, certain I was going to be found out at any moment and exposed for the lying snake I was. Mostly, though, I just felt sick with shame, knowing all the while that what I was doing was wrong, yet somehow completely powerless to stop myself.”

“How did it begin?”

Restless, he pushed his chair back from his desk and went to stand by the window with his back to her. “I’m not even sure I can say. It began chastely enough, I suppose. I was literally still a child when she came with my uncle to live at Lyningthorp. She took an interest in me when everyone else was too put off by my father’s suicide. We talked. She seemed to understand me. We had heart-to-heart conversations, punctuated by occasional small gestures of affection—a pat on the back, a comforting arm about the shoulder, a quick press of the hand.” He glanced over his shoulder at Rosalie, his face bleak. “I began seeking out excuses to be with her. The affectionate touches became more frequent. They lingered. Little by little, they became less innocent.”

“She seduced you.”

He turned back to face her, his eyes clouded and dark. “No. You’re wrong. I seduced her.”

A chill ran through her at the note of bitter resignation in his voice. “She was your aunt,” Rosalie said, refusing to believe him. “She was older and more experienced.”

He shook his head. “I wanted her. It’s different for a man, you see. A woman can be forced, overpowered. A man has to want it, to feel desire, or it’s physically impossible. And I did want it. That much was obvious. I couldn’t have stopped myself from desiring her even if I’d tried.”

Rosalie wanted to cover her ears, to block out the disturbing pictures he was painting. But if it pained her to hear his confession, how much more painful must it be for him to live with the guilt—to carry such secrets around with him every hour of every day?

There must be something he could say in his own defense. “You were years younger than she was,” Rosalie said. “She could have refused you.”

“Perhaps, but the actual transgressions were all my doing. In the beginning, I would see how far I could go before she’d stop me. If she didn’t protest, I would go a step further, and then a step beyond that. Urges would pop into my head, and before I knew what I was doing, I’d find myself acting on them.” Suddenly the words were pouring out of him, coming quickly and furiously.

“How old were you?”

He gave an impatient shrug. “Eleven, twelve when it first started. Thirteen when it got really out of hand. By fourteen I didn’t have a particle of innocence or virtue left.”

“Eleven or twelve!” Rosalie sat bolt upright. Any doubts she’d had about him vanished in a flash of shock.

His hands clenched at his sides. “Old enough to know it was wrong. Yet even after I realized what I was, how sick and deceitful, I couldn’t stop myself. And it wasn’t only that I was so young when it began, or that she was my aunt and the wife of my guardian. Both sins were bad enough, but I couldn’t even remain faithful to her. I’d feel lonely—restless—and I’d seek out other women. And every time, it just left me feeling empty inside, as if I’d given away another piece of myself.”

He was staring stonily ahead, only his rush of words betraying his agitation. Rosalie longed to go to him, but sensed he didn’t want to be touched or pitied.

He hunched his shoulders. “It went on for years, the lying and the sneaking and the self-disgust, until finally I attained my majority and my uncle’s guardianship came to an end. On the very day I came of age, I thanked him for having tended my interests with such scrupulous care and sent the two of them packing, Uncle Frederick and Aunt Celeste both, to live on the farthest-flung estate I own, a drafty old farmhouse in the North Riding of Yorkshire.” He brushed past her, pacing back and forth across the carpet. “I spent the years leading up to that day in an agony of guilt and dread. I was sure my aunt and I were going to be found out, that someone was going to discover our secret. She was convinced she was unable to conceive, but I worried just the same she might be mistaken. Once she even suspected she was increasing, and I was so sick with apprehension I couldn’t eat for three days, until she told me it had been a false alarm. And still I did unspeakable things with her, every time we were alone together.”

She’d thought his expression stony, but now that she looked more closely, she could see the tense lines of his body and the haunted look lurking behind his eyes. For once, he was holding nothing back. “It doesn’t sound exciting, not the way you describe it. It sounds more like a living nightmare.”

He laughed humorlessly. “Yes. But it was no worse than I deserved.”

His earlier admission still rang in her ears:
eleven
or
twelve
. He prowled back and forth, as restless as a caged animal. Rosalie had suffered from a guilty conscience before in her life, but never over anything more serious than a shirked obligation or an unkind word. David’s guilt was something else entirely, a gaping wound that refused to heal.
Eleven
or
twelve
. That was the piece of the puzzle she’d been missing.

She twisted in her chair to face him. “David, do you really think it’s possible for a boy of eleven or twelve to seduce a grown woman?”

He stopped pacing but made no reply.

“Answer the question, please. Do you really believe it’s possible that a boy that age could seduce a married woman, an accomplished lady of maturity and experience?”

His mouth twisted. “Only if he was unspeakably depraved, and she was...”

Rosalie waited, but he didn’t finish. “Only if she was what?”

“I don’t know,” he said haltingly. “Susceptible, I suppose.”

“Weak-willed? Unmindful? Too open and trusting?”

He gave a grudging nod. “Yes. All of those things.”

“Aside from those times when the two of you were alone together, did your aunt impress you as weak-willed and unmindful? Was she an empty-headed woman, so indiscreet you worried she might give away your secret in a thoughtless moment?”

He turned his head to look at her, his eyes narrowing. “No.”

“Then she must have been susceptible in some other way. Perhaps you mean she lacked the strength to stand up to you. Perhaps she was so tender and so vulnerable she possessed no real defenses against the assault you made on her virtue.”

He paled. “Yes, that’s it. That’s how it was.”

Rosalie paused, her head tilting to one side. “I wonder how it is, then, that a woman that guileless managed to conceal such a shocking secret from everyone, her own husband included, for all those years?”

He stared back at her without replying.

“I expect it must have taken quite a bit of artifice on her part, pretending even to your uncle that nothing was amiss.” Rosalie inclined toward him, one arm propped on the back of the chair. “When you began to cross the bounds of decency, did she resist in any way? Did she avoid you or rebuke you? Did she ever insist on the limits you fully expected her to set?”

He grimaced. “You make it sound as if what happened was her fault. I’m telling you, she was completely passive. I was the one who made all the advances. Perhaps she could have resisted more strongly, but I controlled everything that happened.”

Her brows rose in a doubtful expression. “As a boy of eleven or twelve?”

“It sounds incredible when you put it that way, but I was there. I know what I did.”

“You were a
child
, David, when it all began.”

He frowned. “That doesn’t excuse my sins, it only makes them worse. What kind of child does something so monstrous, and with his own aunt?”