Or maybe it was Free’s world that stopped instead. Her heart ceased to pound. Her breath ceased to circulate. Every atom of her being seemed to slow and come to a standstill.
What’s the difference between a lord and your husband?
None. There was no difference at all.
Chapter Twenty-Three
FREE STOOD ALL OF FIVE FEET from Edward, real and solid and safe. He’d spent the night worrying about her. She was separated from him now by a mere two paces on the one hand, and a gulf of lies on the other. Edward didn’t know if he could reach her if he tried.
“Free,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Her eyes seemed an impenetrable wall. At least she didn’t turn on her heel and walk away.
“I’m dreadfully sorry,” he said. “I ruined everything, absolutely everything. What I did was unforgivable.”
She didn’t move.
“Inexcusable,” he kept on. “I know you’ll want nothing to do with me. Whatever it is you want—a sworn statement that I’ll not interfere with your business, a promise to keep my distance—whatever you want, Free. You can have it. I owe you that much.”
She opened her mouth once, closed it, shook her head, and then opened her mouth again. “Why did you do it?” she managed to get out. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you let me know?”
“Because I’m stupid,” he said. “And selfish. I should never have asked you to marry me.”
Free held up a hand. “That isn’t what I meant. You had to know I would find out—and find out soon. Why didn’t you tell me the truth before?”
“Because…” He frowned. “Because I knew you wouldn’t marry me. I wanted to make sure you’d be safe—and as I said—there was a hefty dose of selfishness involved.” He didn’t have any good reasons to offer her—just that feeling of sickness at heart, of panic at the thought of losing her, at what might happen to her if he didn’t have her…
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Free said. “I don’t know that I would have walked away if you’d told me the truth. How could you know I would?”
He swallowed. His heart beat a painful rhythm against his chest.
“You had to know there was no future in what you were doing,” she said. “So why did you do it that way? Wasn’t it worth the chance that I would say yes?”
Everything hurt. He shook his head. “I don’t know anything of planning for futures. I always assumed…”
She raised an eyebrow.
“That whatever happened to me was going to be awful, no matter what I chose.”
She let out a long breath and looked about. And that was when Edward realized that they stood in her parents’ hall, surrounded by her father, her mother—good God, that man standing over there was the Duke of Clermont, and what he was doing here, Edward didn’t want to know.
Free let out a long breath. “Come. Walk with me.” She gestured.
Her mother twitched, frowning, but didn’t say anything.
Free turned and went out the front door into the sunshine. He followed. She didn’t wait for him outside, though. She turned to the left and began picking her way along a path. He trailed after her, feeling as if he were Eurydice following Orpheus out of hell. Except that he had the strangest feeling that if she looked back, she would disappear, not him. She took him over a faint path worn through the fields, over a hill, down an embankment, to a line of trees along a stream.
A few massive rocks lined the bank. Free seated herself on one of them, smoothing her skirts before looking up at him.
God, her eyes. He never wanted to see her eyes like this again—so hurt, so uncertain. He’d done that to her.
“If it helps,” he said, “I’ve always known I didn’t deserve you.”
“How odd. I’ve only begun to doubt that in the last twenty-four hours.”
He seated himself across from her. “Yes. You’ll only doubt it more the better you know me.”
She shut her eyes. “How could you be so certain?”
“Because I hurt everyone I love. My best friend as a child—I convinced him and his brother to speak, and my father had them whipped in front of me.” Edward glanced down. The next words came out low. “And that’s not the worst of it.”
“What is the worst of it?”
The worst of it was a dark, echoing memory, one that at odd times seemed to have happened to someone else. “I told you that I stayed with a blacksmith near Strasbourg,” he said. “That was my father’s punishment for my earlier choices.”
She nodded at him.
“It was a lovely punishment,” Edward said. “I was there for two years. He was paid to look after me, but I expect my father thought of me ‘laboring’ and imagined I would hate it. I didn’t. He taught me things like how to shoe a horse. He’d lost his own son years past, and he never treated me as a burden. I loved him.” His voice roughened on those last words, but he shook his head. “He showed me how to work metal. His name was Emile Ulrich.”
She nodded again.
“And then Strasbourg was taken. I thought to get the two of us out of occupied territory. I failed, and I was taken in by Soames after my first attempted forgery. Ulrich found out what had happened, and he came to Soames, determined to get me out. He started to raise a stink about what Soames was doing, holding me in a cellar.”
Edward swallowed and looked away.
“He was the first person Soames made me implicate as part of the resistance. They shot him summarily in front of me.”
She inhaled slowly. Her eyes reminded him of storm clouds on the horizon: dark and impossible to read. “What did you do?” she asked.
“What else could I do? I had no way to escape, and I was so turned around in my head that I wouldn’t have known what to do with one if it were offered. I stayed as Soames’s pet forger, believing what he told me to believe. People say sometimes they’ve lost hope for themselves.” He shrugged. “They rarely mean it the way I did. I lost all sense of myself for months. There was no future, no past. Only him and the prospect of pain. He kept me until the French lost Paris and sued for peace.”
She looked at him.
“Eventually, I got away. My friend Patrick came and took care of me until I was well enough to send him off. I spent several years wandering about Europe, honing my craft as a forger, learning how to commit crimes and not get caught at it.” Edward couldn’t look at her now. “It took me years to untangle what had really happened. When I did, I went back to Strasbourg. Soames was still there—and he was rather successful, in fact. I knew enough about him to change all that. So I forged the right letters and took control of his accounts. I left evidence that he’d played both sides during the war. And then I took his money and left him to account for what he’d done. That’s how I established myself.” He shrugged. “I always expected, every day, to be uncovered. There are times I wonder if everything is not a lie after all, if maybe I’m still in that cellar, so terrorized that I cannot bear the truth.”