present situation and preserve Sophia as his wife, it was he who must make the sacrifice. The cavalry did not win the day by refusing to take the field.
Vane exhaled. Cleared his throat, which had tightened with nervousness. “I feel as if I owe you some explanation of myself. Not excuses, mind you. I don’t believe in making excuses for imprudent decisions or behavior. But I feel as if last night our conversation ended prematurely and that you as my wife deserve something more.”
“I would not disagree.” Her shoulders remained rigid and her gaze guarded.
“Mind you.” He smiled thinly. “Explanations are not something I’m in the habit of offering. They do not come easily. You see, I have had several years to become quite obnoxiously full of myself.”
Sophia let out a laugh, a quiet little sound, and appeared surprised by his humor. Yet her gaze met his only fleetingly.
Her smiles. How he’d missed them. Like sunshine, they’d once fed his soul. When she’d stopped smiling, his soul had withered. He wanted nothing more than to be the reason she smiled again. He wasn’t an idiot. If he wanted to return to her good graces, he would have to regain her trust.
“As an officer in the army,” he said, “one’s orders are carried out, not questioned.”
She lowered her fork to the plate. “Yes.”
“And then of course, once I became duke, every sycophant in London came calling, endeavoring to be my new closest friend.”
“I know they must have.”
He surveyed the room about them. Every familiar panel and beam. “It seems so long ago that Haden and I lived here—”
“You never told me much about your mother or your father,” she responded, rather tentatively, it seemed. “You didn’t seem to want to.”
He nodded. Touching crystal to his lips, he drained the glass of negus and sat silent for a long moment, allowing the resultant languidity to suffuse through his limbs until he felt numbed enough to continue.
“My mother, Elizabeth, had a gentle and loving spirit.” Just speaking his mother’s name reopened a wound that had only scarred over, but never fully healed. “Her illness came upon her suddenly. In a matter of days, she was gone. The Kettles were a great comfort to my brother and me, and very naively, I expected that life would go on with them acting as our surrogate family.” He grinned, seeking to assign a lightness that did not exist to the memory. He turned the empty glass in his hand so that the cut crystal caught the firelight and reflected like an illuminated diamond against her skin. “They had always been here, you see, every day, and had no children of their own.”
“It’s obvious that they hold you very dear.” Speaking of the Kettles, her demeanor softened.
He rubbed a hand over his upper lip, bristly from a day’s growth. “I ought to have come back before now. It was wrong for me to have waited so long.”
“Go on,” she urged quietly.
“On the morning of my mother’s funeral a conveyance came up the drive. There were footmen and outriders and, of course, a driver, all in full, glorious livery. They were the most magnificent things I’d ever seen. I remember Haden shouting that the king himself had come to pay his respects to our dear mother.” Vane glanced at the portrait over the mantel. He breathed through his nose, subduing a low tremor of rage. “But, of course, it wasn’t the king.”
Beside him, Sophia straightened in her seat, her hands curling into fists upon her lap.
“It was your father,” she whispered.
Claxton was silent for several moments before he continued. “What I wouldn’t discern until later was that Camellia House, the home I considered a happy paradise, had been intended as my mother’s prison. He’d exiled her here years before as punishment for some perceived betrayal. He was like that, you see, his behavior marked by constant paranoia, always accusing those closest to him of offenses and treachery where there were none. Forgiveness was a word of which he had no comprehension. As my mother had no family or protector to prevent this, she remained here at his discretion, virtually imprisoned in near poverty for the remainder of her life.”
Sophia whispered, “What could she have done to deserve that?”
“He told Haden and me before the carriage ever left the property that she was a whore.”
Sophia’s face flushed with sudden fury. “No child should have to hear such an ugly accusation about his mother, especially when the mother is no longer there to defend herself.”
“You must understand that she was not a—” he said, his voice suddenly thick.
“Of course she wasn’t,” Sophia assured.
“She was kind and loving and devoted to Haden and me. The rumor about her running away with a lover and dying in Italy all started with my father. I heard him repeat the same contrived story, over and over, to anyone who would listen. When I contradicted him—well, I did not contradict him again.”
That particular whipping had sent him to his bed for three days.
Sophia’s face paled. As if she knew. As if she could read the truth of his father’s cruelty on his face. How he’d always admired her softer nature and her caring sympathies toward those less fortunate. He did not, however, rest comfortably as a beneficiary of those sentiments himself.
“You were just a boy,” she murmured.
He could not stop there. He had to explain himself. Not his father. It’s just that one explanation could not come without the other.
“Not for long. Needless to say, having been raised by this so-called whore, I was considered by my father to be completely and utterly lacking in every way. Within days after our being collected from Lacenfleet, he sent Haden to Eton, and I did not see my brother for some years after that.”
“What happened to you?”
“The duke preferred that I travel with him from estate to estate, or wherever else his whim took him, and that I learn from private tutors, hand selected by himself. I received an immaculate education worthy of the duchy. But my father took upon himself the duty to educate me to be a man. His sort of man.”
“His sort of man,” Sophia repeated with a frown and dread in her eyes. “What did that mean, Claxton?”
Vane chose his words carefully, wanting Sophia’s understanding but not wishing to reveal the true magnitude of darkness his sire had instilled inside him.
“It means that my first visit to a brothel occurred when I was not yet eleven.”
“Vane.”
He could not look into her eyes until he was done, not yet. “It means that because violence and the shedding of blood so amused him, he paid the largest and meanest of his servants to challenge me in pugilistic matches, for the enjoyment of him and his friends. I got the living hell beat out of me until I grew strong enough and angry enough to beat the living hell out of them instead.”
Sophia shook her head.
Now her hand did go to his arm. He stood from the table, as if unable to bear her touch, not wanting it this way.
“It means that when he discovered I was sneaking away to Lacenfleet to visit the Kettles, he whipped me for, as best as I can determine, humiliating him by preferring the company of lowly country servants to his unquestionable magnificence. To punish the Kettles, he terminated their employment and shuttered this house.”
The fire shifted. Sparks burst out, fledgling embers. Realizing the room had grown colder, he took up the poker and with its curled tip pushed the smoldering mass to the center of the grate. Before he stepped away, he added another log.
“That’s why you haven’t come back before now, isn’t it?” said Sophia. “You felt responsible. Claxton, it wasn’t your fault.”
“Don’t pity me,” he answered in a low voice. “By that time, I’d already become just like him.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“If I told you the rest”—he lifted his gaze to hers—“you would.”
“Then tell me.”
Claxton felt the blood drain from his face. He poured the remainder of the claret into his empty glass. “No.”
