There was a hint of taunting in those words. Did his wife hear it? Tightening his jaw, Christian stiffly walked over and claimed the only available seat on the opposite side of Blackthorne. As he slid into the King Louis XIV chair, he realized his former friend had carefully placed himself in a way that put him between him and Prudence, and also placed the scarred and burned portion of his face on display to Christian.
…Oh, God…Derek…I am sorry. Oh, God forgive me…
His wife’s words came as though down a long stretch of empty hall. “My husband has spoken of you,” Prudence said softly, favoring Christian with a small smile that yanked him from the hell of the battlefield memories.
“Has he?” The duke wrapped those words in a jeering whisper.
She held out a cup of tea to Blackthorne, but he deliberately ignored that offering.
“And just what else has your husband told you?”
She wetted her lips. Color blossomed on her cheeks.
“Blackthorne, perhaps we should meet alone,” Christian said quietly, appealing to the gentleman the recent duke once had been—before he had gone and destroyed the other man’s existence.
The duke thumped the floor once with his cane. “Come, surely what you would say to me in private you would say to your beautiful, new bride?”
His mouth went dry as all the shame of his past bubbled to the surface, fresh as though those crimes belonged to yesterday and not years ago.
“My husband spoke of your friendship,” Prudence said, finding words when he himself had none. “And I assured him that friends as you were, what happened in the past surely could not keep you apart now.”
Ah, how he loved her. She possessed an effervescent light in an otherwise dark world; this inexplicable ability to see good in him, in Blackthorne, in the now.
They were two dark souls, however, who could not dwell in that world.
As she spoke, Blackthorne’s frame stiffened. Perhaps it was his wife’s words or perhaps it was the years of dwelling in his own townhouse with the world shut outside, but his former friend remained silent. He proceeded to bang the bottom of his cane upon the floor in a slow, grating rhythm. “My you are the forgiving type? First wedding the gentleman who made a public wager involving you and now this.”
His wife’s mouth parted on a small moue. She fluttered a hand about her heart. Prudence, in her innocence, was no match for this stranger’s ugliness.
“Blackthorne,” he warned, infusing a steely edge to his command.
“My how your life has worked out, St. Cyr. You find yourself not the impoverished baronet your father was,” he continued over Prudence’s gasp, “but rather a marquess.” He jabbed his cane in her direction, brushing the hem of her skirt with the bottom. “You have secured a lady’s fat dowry and if that touching display when I first entered the room was any indication, you are even…” He peeled his lips back displaying the gleaming, even row of his white teeth. “Happy.” The jeering emphasis placed on that one word indicated he found that sentiment as real as fairies and other fey creatures. “Despite my best efforts.”
His best efforts? Then a wave of shock slammed into him. “By God, it was you.” Air left him on a slow hiss.
Prudence shook her head and looked back and forth between him and the duke. “I don’t…”
He clenched his jaw, resisting the urge to drag the other man across the table and beat him bloody. “It was Blackthorne who bandied those falsities to the gossip columns.” A chill ran through him. He’d known the duke despised him, but he’d never before believed he’d become this ruthless, vengeful bastard.
Instead of being properly shamed, his one-time friend inclined his head. “Brava. As cowardly as you were on the battlefield and foolish as you were with Lyn—” Christian’s stomach lurched and he glowered the duke into momentary silence. The other man continued as though he’d not missed a proverbial beat. “You still were clever enough to know I handed your words over to the correct people.” A cruel grin formed on his lips. “I always have servants listening wherever you are concerned.”
Christian gritted his teeth. “Then your blasted source would know they were not my words.” He stole a look at Prudence to see whether or not she believed the duke’s lies. Their gazes locked and she gave him a slow nod. She believed Christian. Some of the tension went out of him.
The duke frowned, alternating his one-eyed stare between them.
When he returned his attention to Blackthorne, he turned his palms up. “I am sorry.” And he would forever carry the regret of his own failings and what those failings had cost Blackthorne and so many others. “I do not expect you can ever forgive me.” Even if his young wife had been foolishly optimistic of that possibility. “But I would have you know that not one day has passed where I have not regretted…” Everything. “What happened,” he finished lamely.
A cold, winter wind slapped at the crystal windowpanes. That desolate reminder of the season’s chill was suddenly punctuated by Blackthorne’s slow, precise clap. “Ah, brava, St. Cyr. How heartwarming. How utterly touching.” He grinned another feral, soulless smile that sent shivers skittering along Christian’s spine. “That would be perfect, would it not?” He waggled his black eyebrow. “You have your fortune, your title, your lovely wife, your happiness, and freedom from guilt. Then you are fit to go on as the cheerful, charming bastard you always were while all the men who had the misfortune of calling you friend or brother-in-arms suffer for you ineptness.”
Prudence leaped to her feet. “That is enough,” she gasped. She planted her hands akimbo and glared at her guest. “How dare you come here and spew such…such venom.” His wife seemed to remember herself for she patted her cheeks once and then drew in a calming breath. “I understand why you are so hurt,” she conceded to the stoic duke who took in her brave display through the hooded lid of his lone eye. “But what good can come from this darkness? It is time to find your light. Both of you,” she said, looking to Christian.
Through her defense, he sat numbed, empty, and shamed by the truth of Blackthorne’s charges.
“How very forgiving you are of your husband’s failings.” Blackthorne made a tsking sound. “Would you be so forgiving if it was your face destroyed or your friends killed?”
She tipped her chin up a notch and held the duke’s cold stare. “I believe I would.”
His lip pulled in a snarl. “Ahh, so you must know everything.”
Christian sat forward in his chair and made one more attempt at separating her from this looming exchange. “Prudence, if you’ll excuse us?”
His wife’s hesitation hinted at her desire to hear the rest of Blackthorne’s words.
“Surely you’ll not invite me over for tea and refreshments and flee merely because I wish to discuss your heroics with Lady St. Cyr?” The other man’s carefully placed barb knotted his stomach.
“I know more than you think,” she said quietly. So sure. So confident that she did, in fact, know all, because she’d asked and he’d promised her the truth. Instead, he’d withheld that darkest, most shameful secret.
“Ah, so you know of lovely Lynette, then?”
“Prudence,” Christian tried again, her name an entreaty. Waves of panic slammed into him, threatening to pull him under. For everything she had forgiven, she could never simply ignore this greatest sin.
His wife froze and gave her head a slow shake. He willed her gaze to his but her shocked, horrified eyes remained trained on Blackthorne.
“Tsk, tsk, you’d not tell her the most shameful part of your time in Toulouse.” No, he wouldn’t. They’d, after all, established the extent of Christian’s cowardice. Bitterness singed his throat. God, how he despised himself. “The lovely Lynette. Your husband’s Belgian lover. If he had devoted half as much of his attention to the battlefield as he did that lush beauty, he’d have been made Commander of the Royal Guards.”
The color leeched from his wife’s cheeks and he reached a hand out for her fingers,
but the space between them was too great. Her attention was riveted on Blackthorne and so he let his shaking palm fall to his lap. “Blackthorne,” he seethed, fury coursing through him. Crimes of his past aside, how dare Blackthorne speak so to his wife?
“Ah, I gather by your stunned silence, madam, you were not aware of these particular pieces of your heroic husband’s past. How he was fool enough to arrange to meet with the lovely Lynette after the battle at Toulouse, unwittingly giving over our regiment’s position and through that, costing far better men their lives.”
Had the other man knifed him with a dull dagger, the pain could not be greater.
“Enough,” Prudence commanded. The faint quiver to her words hinted at her threadbare control. She met Christian’s gaze and in her eyes was so much pain, questioning, and hurt it ravaged him on the inside.
Shoving to his feet, the legs of his chair scraped along the hardwood floor. “Prudence, I—” Am a failure. “I—” Never deserved you. With her imploring eyes begging for him to deny Blackthorne’s words, he spun jerkily on his heel and fled the room. His former friend’s empty, maniacal laugh followed in his wake.
Chapter 25
Lesson Twenty-five
When in love, a lady will become her husband’s staunch protector…
Prudence stared at the door her husband had just fled through, and then with rage thrumming inside her veins, swung her attention to the Duke of Blackthorne. He came slowly to his feet. Instead of the triumph she expected from this cold, callous man, the unmarred portion of his face remained peculiarly blank. She fisted and unfisted her hands into tight balls until her nails left jagged crescent marks on the soft palms. “How dare you?” she seethed. “I invited you to come to find peace with Christian.”
He blinked his sole eye as if he did not know what to make of a person who challenged him. Then he found his inner ugly. “Did St. Cyr use you to try and soften me? If he did, he is as foolish as he was a rotten soldier.”
She shot a hand out and she cracked her palm against his cheek. Fury vibrated through her being. There would be time enough later for horror at striking a duke and one Christian called friend, but for now, all she knew was the white-hot anger clouding her vision. “You, sir, are a monster.”
“A beast,” the Duke of Blackthorne did not so much as miss a proverbial beat. “They call me the beast, and but one glance at your husband’s handiwork and you can certainly understand why.”
Icy chills danced along her spine at his gravelly whisper better reserved for nightmares than afternoon visits. She studied Christian’s former friend a moment; a man whom she’d optimistically believed had ceased to hold her husband culpable for the dangers of war. Looking at him now, with the palpable rage emanating from his person, fury rolled together with pity and sadness. This man was broken beyond repair.
“You are a beast,” she said at last. “But you are not a beast for the marks upon your face or the damage done your leg. You are a beast because you are a cold, cruel man who does not have forgiveness in his heart.” She took several jerky steps toward him. “You are a beast because you hold a man responsible for mistakes he made as a mere boy and torture him with the guilt of those mistakes. I feel sorry for you, Your Grace.”
The Duke of Blackthorne leaned down, shrinking the greater than one foot of space between them. He stuck his scarred face close to her gaze. “I do not want your pity, Lady St. Cyr,” he hissed.
She recoiled, but then dug deep for the courage to not be cowed by this more monster than man figure. “Well, you have it regardless of whether you wish it or not. For any man who could go through life hidden away, hating all, including himself…” A mottled flush stained the unscarred and shockingly handsome portion of his face, a testament to the truth of her supposition. “A man such as that should be pitied. A man who would only drag himself from his closed off world to taunt and torment a man who is already tormented.” Prudence gave her head a disgusted shake. “He called you friend and yet you would condemn him so. Shame on you, Your Grace.” The winter wind howled its approval outside, rattling the floor-length windowpanes. “If you will excuse me?” Without allowing the eerily silent stranger another word, she spun on her heel and sailed off in a flurry of skirts.
As she put the White Parlor behind her and removed herself from his cruel, sapphire blue eye, she allowed her shoulders to sag with the relief that came from being away from such a vile, nasty human being. No wonder her husband carried the weight of this guilt. How could he not when a man who’d once been more brother than friend spewed such venom? Her heart swelled with love for him. Prudence quickened her steps, her slippers soft on the threadbare carpets as she set off in search of her husband. She would show him he did not need to spend the remainder of his life seeking an absolution he would never find; for it needed to come not from Blackthorne, or Maxwell, or any of the other soldiers who’d fought alongside him. It needed to come from within Christian himself.
She reached his office when Dalrymple’s voice sounded beyond her shoulder.
“He is not here, my lady.”
Prudence looked to him and found his heavily pockmarked face tense with anger and concern. “Where—?”
“Asked for his mount to be readied and set off like the devil himself was hot on his heels.” He touched a brim of an imagined hat. “My apologies, my lady.”
Prudence waved off that apology. With a silent curse, she started in the butler’s direction. “Have the carriage readied please, this instant, Dalrymple.”
“It is already done, my lady,” he said, lengthening his stride to keep up with her. From the corner of her eye, she took in the worry creasing the other man’s brow.
“What is it?” she asked, concern making her voice tremble.
“There was a panicked look to His Lordship. I’ve seen that look before in others…in myself, my lady.” A muscle ticked in his cheek. “He’s a good man,” he said, defending his employer needlessly. “He made mistakes. We all did.” So Dalrymple knew and had loyally devoted himself to Christian. Did her husband even realize how many men respected him and saw past more than the whispers of his own past? They reached the foyer. “But those mistakes should not be held against the marquess.”
There was an assessing gleam in his eyes, as though he sought to gauge whether his mistress was one of Christian’s staunch defenders, or one of the whisperers.
Prudence took the other man’s hands. He started at her unexpected touch. “I know my husband is a good man. I thank you for your devotion.” She gave his hands a squeeze and then promptly released them as a footman rushed forward with her cloak. Prudence quickly shrugged into it and fastened the hooks.
“We do not know where His Lordship has gone,” Dalrymple said gruffly, pulling the door open.
She gave him a reassuring smile. “I know where my husband is.” And she’d not return home until he was at her side. Prudence raced down the steps to the waiting carriage and then accepted the groom’s assistance up. “Hyde Park,” she ordered. Prudence settled into the torn squabs of the carriage. Her husband had been shamed and hurt this day by her inadvertent actions. She’d not have him retreat within himself.
Filled with a panicked restiveness, she yanked back the velvet curtain and stared out at the quiet London streets.
It was snowing. Christian stared up at the enormous, aged elm with its overhanging branches. Through those mangled and crooked limbs, the faintest specks of snow filtered through and danced to the earth.
Standing there at the trunk of her tree, their tree, a sheen of tears dusted his vision. In a bid to keep those useless tokens of his own weakness at bay, he pressed his forehead against the tree. The brittle bark bit sharply into his forehead and he welcomed the sting of pain. With Blackthorne’s visit, all the shame he’d carried these eight years, the deserved guilt, his own lack of self-worth came rushing forth with a potency that threatened to swallow him.
He’d deluded himself into thinking he deserved to be happy
. What right did he have? What right, when Blackthorne remained shut away, scarred and ruined by his haste with his weapon? What right, when he’d casually tossed away that one crucial bit of information to a French sympathizer, focusing on the time he’d have with that woman after the battle was done. The wind shook the branches noisily overhead as if in agreement.
“I thought I’d find you here.”
He stiffened but did not pick his head up from against the hard trunk of the elm. Old leaves and gravel crackled as his wife’s footsteps carried her closer. Then silence reigned with nothing more than the gusting, winter wind about him, so that he wondered if he’d merely imagined her voice.
“I am so very sorry, Christian.” Her tenderly spoken words shattered any such illusion. “I thought if you and the duke spoke once more, that with time’s passing you could find peace.”
Christian drew in a steadying breath. “It is not your fault, Prudence,” he said tiredly, turning to face her.
“But it is.” She stood wringing her gloveless fingers together. Her flyaway curls spoke of the haste in searching for him. In her slippered feet and naked hands, she had no place being here. “I foolishly interfered where I had no place.” His wife scrunched her mouth in that endearing manner he’d come to love. “My brother and mother are always lamenting my poorly thought out efforts.” How casually she stood here, speaking as though they were two merely walking through Hyde Park and yet nothing could be normal. Not with the mention of Lynette and Toulouse. She must have seen something in his eyes, for she stilled her distracted movements and looked at him squarely. “Did you love her?”
Christian ran his hands up and down his face. “No. Yes. I thought I did.” He shook his head once. “No.” And perhaps that was the greatest tragedy of all. He’d shared just enough information that the French sympathizer passed along those details to French forces who correctly deduced the 2nd regiments’ positioning at Toulouse.
Lords of Honor-The Collection Page 46