Goddess of the Hunt (The Wanton Dairymaid Trilogy #1)(89)

Lucy had a sick feeling she knew where this story was headed. She might as well spare him the difficulty of saying it. “So which was it, with Thomas?”

“A spring gun.”

“And you were with him?”

He stared out the window, unblinking. “Yes.”

She quickly renewed her vow of silence. Any words she might manage to utter would be most unladylike. She tried to imagine being eight years old and watching her brother shot down like an animal. Then she shook herself, cursing her imagination.

It was as though he heard her thoughts. “I didn’t see it happen.” He cast a sidelong glance at her. His voice grew gentle. “It was dark, and I had fallen behind him. I only heard the shot.”

The words had the ring of a merciful lie. Lucy suspected he said them only to soothe her feelings. Bless him, it worked. A bit. But the very idea still tied her stomach in knots. “And then?”

He turned to her with a blank expression. “And then he died.”

She shook her head. “No, I mean after that. You said it was a long story. There are twenty portraits of Thomas in this house. His death can’t be the end of the story; it’s just the beginning.”

He turned back to the window and exhaled slowly. His broad shoulders shrugged beneath his coat. She was quickly learning to recognize that motion. A shrug, for Jeremy, was not a lazy rise and fall of the shoulders. It was a powerful action—an explosion of brute strength, barely checked. And when his shoulders heaved, she could practically hear the rusty creaking of armor about them. The heavy, plate-metal shell that a child constructed to shield himself from pain. Lucy knew the armor. She carried a fair bit of it herself.

She also knew the armor had chinks. “It’s a long story,” she repeated levelly. “And yes, Jeremy. I really wish to hear it.”

He pierced her with an icy gaze. Lucy refused to blink. If he thought he could scare her off with that Look of his, he was mistaken. “And then …?”

He looked out the window. “And then everything changed. My father had always been stern. Whatever heart he had, it died with Thomas. After my brother’s death, he only doubled the mantraps and authorized his gamekeepers to shoot trespassers on sight.” He shook his head. “I resented him for Thomas’s death. He resented me for being the one who survived. But he could no longer ignore me, once I was the heir. He redoubled his efforts to mold me in his image, and I resisted his every attempt.

“My mother—” He turned back to the portraits and nodded toward a painting of a delicate-featured lady wearing the lace-trimmed sleeves and powdered curls that were the fashion some thirty years past. “She had always been fragile. Thomas’s death destroyed her. She took to her chambers and went into permanent mourning. She couldn’t bear to look at me, because I only reminded her of the son she’d lost.

“My father only spoke to me to criticize. My mother couldn’t speak to me without bursting into tears. And I …” That shrug again. “I was sent off to school.” He firmed his jaw and cast her a sidelong glance. “It’s not such a long story after all. But there you have it. No need to go asking the servants.”

Jeremy turned and locked gazes with her, clearly awaiting her reaction.

Her reaction. Several reactions battled within her for prominence, and they all involved an explosion of physical energy. The first was an irrational impulse to simply turn on her heel and run. Run away and hide. Her second thought, equally childish, was to pick up the china vase from a nearby table and hurl it against the wall. The third reaction that sprang to mind was to run at her husband, climb him like a tree, and kiss him until he forgot his own name, much less the fact that he belonged to this ghastly assortment of relations.

But none of these seemed the appropriate reaction for a countess. Moreover, she knew none of them were the reaction Jeremy needed. His eyes were clear and unwavering. Daring her to run away or fly into rage. Forbidding her to pity him. And were their situations reversed, Lucy knew pity to be the last reaction she would wish.

So she fought against all three impulses and a good dozen more for an age. And then, because the still air around them and the silence between them threatened to suffocate her, she spent all that hard-won equanimity to purchase a single, round syllable.

“Oh.”

His mouth softened slightly. She had the terrible suspicion that he might be priming his lips to impart another grim detail. Desperation loosened her tongue. “Is that all, then?”

He blinked.

Lucy forced a smile into her voice. “No raving bedlamite locked away in the turret?”

He slowly shook his head.

“No bastard children peeling onions in the scullery?”

The corner of his mouth quirked. “No.”

“Well, then. And here I was expecting something truly dreadful.”

His face relaxed. Relief washed through her. They couldn’t have been standing more than a dozen inches apart. It was twelve inches too many, but she settled for narrowing the gap to two. Lightly threading her arm through his, she pivoted him back to face the portrait of his father.

“When I was a girl,” she said, “I used to lie on the floor and stare up at my father’s portrait. I would look up at him for hours, just listening.”

“Listening?”

She nodded. “He told me long, fantastic stories. About his childhood, or mine. Sometimes about Tortola.”