“I’m sure he—” Cami bit her lip to stop herself from offering the platitude. Perhaps his father had felt that way about his son, and perhaps he’d made his misery known, cut himself off from the child whose birth had changed his life so dramatically. She recalled a detail from earlier in the evening. “Before supper, when you said you used to eat in the schoolroom, you were going to say something about your father and stopped yourself. Did you never even dine together?”
Gabriel shook his head. “He didn’t eat. Sometimes not for days at a time. He didn’t bathe, either. He slept, he moaned her name, and when his physician gave him laudanum to dull his senses, he slept some more. Once in a while, he would rouse himself, promise to shake off his doldrums. And he would, for a few days, a week or two at most.” The memory roused him to his feet, and he paced across the hearth rug as he spoke. “Then, he would dress, read, take an interest in Stoke. In me. I would fall asleep, letting myself dream of the next day, but inevitably when I woke, it would be as if a window had shut, or a light had gone out.” He threw himself once more onto the sofa, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “I knew I had done this to him, and I could never be enough to make up for what I had taken from him.”
Her heart threw itself against her ribs, as if it were trying to break free and go to him. “Gabriel—”
“Don’t.” The fire painted his expression with streaks of light and shadow. She wished she could see his eyes. “I know now that it was a sickness. Of the heart. Of the mind. But I couldn’t understand it then. The week before my tenth birthday was one of his good weeks. We read Robinson Crusoe and declared this Stoke Island and tromped through the woods on the lookout for cannibals. For my birthday, he promised to take me out and teach me how to shoot a stag. I imagined making a suit of its hide, patterned after poor Crusoe’s, though his was made from goatskin, of course.”
He paused, and she leaned forward too, apprehensive of what was to come. “I was up and dressed before dawn,” he continued. “I’d even slept with my gun at the ready beside my bedroom door, just like Robinson in his cave. As soon as there was light to see by, I picked it up and went downstairs to my father’s room. All was dark, quiet. When he didn’t answer my knock, I went in and—and found him. He’d taken his gun to bed too. Don’t,” he said again, though she’d been careful not to make a sound. Tears glimmered on his cheeks, but he warned off her sympathy with the wave of his hand. “He had no manservant. No one had heard the shot. And all I could think—” A rattling, rasping breath shook his shoulders. “All I could think was that he’d go to hell if anyone found out what he’d done, and he’d never see my mother again. So I—I opened the window, and I fired my gun into the air. Then I called for help, and when help came, I told them I’d done it. That I’d killed my father.”
Camellia dug her fingers into the arm of the chair to keep herself still. “And they believed you? You were a child….”
“I thought it was my fault he’d done what he did. I wanted them to believe me. I made them believe me. And when my Uncle Finch arrived, he was only too happy to think it was true. He seemed sure I’d be hanged for my crime. But there wasn’t even an inquest. The magistrate declared the shooting had been an accident, I went to live with my Uncle Will, and that was that. It wasn’t until I went away to school that I learned everyone seemed to know my history—and they were only too willing to believe the worst of me, thanks to Uncle Finch. I couldn’t deny having done it, of course, or I’d tarnish my father’s name. Even Fox does not know the truth.”
She wanted to contradict him, certain Mr. Fox knew more than Gabriel realized. But she didn’t, conscious as she was of the enormous trust he had placed in her. Stories were powerful things, whether told or untold, and to hold such a story inside, for twenty years…
“I buried myself in my schoolwork,” he went on, his voice calmer, more distant. “But there were no books, no lessons, deep enough in which to drown my guilty secret, or to hide me from the taunts of my peers.”
“But—but you weren’t really guilty of anything,” she protested.
The familiar, cynical smile crept across his lips. “If that’s true, I’ve made up for it since. I discovered I had a certain knack for cards. As well as what dear Foxy calls ‘a way with women.’ I ceased to be Gabriel and became ‘Lord Ash.’ Blackening reputations and charring hopes, remember?” he said wryly, repeating what he’d told her the night of the Montlake ball. “One year, I was to spend Christmas with
