“Who is?” Hubbard shot back.
“Enough.” Matthew didn’t raise his voice, but there was a timbre in it that lifted the hairs on my neck and instantly silenced Gallowglass and Hubbard. “Has the blood rage always affected Jack this way, Andrew, or has it worsened since he met Benjamin?”
Hubbard sat back in his chair with a sardonic smile. “That’s where you want to start, is it?”
“How about you start by explaining why you made Jack a vampire when you knew it could give him blood rage!” My anger had burned straight through any courtesy I might once have extended to him.
“I gave him a choice, Diana,” Hubbard retorted, “not to mention a chance.”
“Jack was dying of plague!” I cried. “He wasn’t capable of making a clear decision. You were the grown-up. Jack was a child.”
“Jack was full on twenty years—a man, not the boy you left with Lord Northumberland. And he’d been through hell waiting in vain for your return!” Hubbard said.
Afraid we might wake Jack, I lowered my voice. “I left you with plenty of money to keep both Jack and Annie out of harm’s way. Neither of them should have wanted for anything.”
“You think a warm bed and food in his belly could mend Jack’s broken heart?” Hubbard’s otherworldly eyes were cold. “He looked for you every day for twelve years. That’s twelve years of going to the docks to meet the ships from Europe in hopes that you would be aboard; twelve years interviewing every foreigner he could find in London to inquire if you had been seen in Amsterdam, or Lubeck, or Prague; and twelve years walking up to anyone he suspected of being a witch to show that person a picture he’d drawn of the famous sorceress Diana Roydon. It’s a miracle the plague took his life and not the queen’s justices!”
I blanched.
“You had a choice, too,” Hubbard reminded me. “So if you want to cast blame for Jack’s becoming a vampire, blame yourself or blame Matthew. He was your responsibility. You made him mine.”
“That wasn’t our bargain, and you know it!” The words slipped out of my mouth before I could stop them. I froze, a look of horror on my face. This was another secret I’d kept from Matthew, one that I’d thought was safely behind me.
Gallowglass’s breath hissed in surprise. Matthew’s icy gaze splintered against my skin. Then the room fell utterly silent. “I need to speak to my wife and my grandson, Gallowglass. Alone,” Matthew said. The emphasis he placed on “my wife” and “my grandson” was subtle but unmistakable.
Gallowglass stood, his face set in lines of disapproval. “I’ll be upstairs with Jack.”
Matthew shook his head. “Go home and wait for Miriam. I’ll call when Andrew and Jack are ready to join you.”
“Jack will stay here,” I said, my voice rising again, “with us. Where he belongs.”
The forbidding look Matthew directed my way silenced me immediately, even though the twenty first century was no place for a Renaissance prince and a year ago I would have protested his high handedness. Now I knew that my husband was hanging on to his control by a very slender thread.
“I’m not staying under the same roof as a de Clermont. Especially not him,” Hubbard said, pointing in Gallowglass’s direction.
“You forget, Andrew,” Matthew said, “you are a de Clermont. So is Jack.”
“I was never a de Clermont,” Hubbard said viciously.
“Once you drank Benjamin’s blood, you were never anything else.” Matthew’s voice was clipped.
“In this family you do what I say.”
“Family?” Hubbard scoffed. “You were part of Philippe’s pack, and now you answer to Baldwin.