Edward had attempted to answer his questions as he asked them, but David interrupted before he was able to finish any of his explanations; he was unable to comprehend anything Edward said. The only things he had brought with him from Washington Square were the bundle of Edward’s letters answering his own, and the report from Wesley, which he finally retrieved, still sobbing, from his own coat pocket and handed to Edward, who took the pages and began to read, first with curiosity and then with anger, and it was witnessing this anger, Edward’s explosions of “Blast!” and “The devil!” that, curiously, quieted David’s own upset. When he was finished, Edward threw the pages across the room, into the blackened hearth, and then turned to David. “My poor David,” he said. “My poor innocent. What must you think of me?” And then his face hardened. “I never thought she would do this to me,” he muttered. “But she has, and has placed in peril the relationship I value most.”
He said he would explain, and so he did: His parents were indeed dead, his elder sisters in Vermont, his younger in New Hampshire. But, he admitted, there had been a schism between himself and his mother’s sister, Lucy, who was his great-aunt Bethesda’s caretaker. He had lived with Bethesda for a period after leaving the conservatory—“I did not want to tell you, because I wanted you to think me independent; I wanted you to admire me. It would be too cruel if this omission, one motivated by my own fears, becomes the thing that now makes you doubt my truthfulness”—but had left to find his own lodgings after a matter of months: “I am enormously fond of my great-aunt; I always have been. She and my aunt arrived soon after we settled in the Free States, and she has been the closest I have to a grandmother. But the idea that she is wealthy, much less that I have stolen money from her, is laughable.”
“So why would Lucy have said you did?”
“Who can know? She is a spiteful, petty woman, never married, never made a mother, friendless, but possessed of a vivid imagination—as you can see. My mother used to tell us all that we were to be kind to her, as her sourness was a reaction to her enduring loneliness, and we were, all to the best of our abilities. But this is too much, too far. And at any rate, my aunt Bethesda died two years ago; I have not seen my aunt Lucy—my aunt in name only—since; but this is proof, though of the worst kind, that she is still alive and still vengeful, still irreparably destructive.”
“Dead? But earlier when you spoke of Bethesda, you said you were enormously fond of her, as if she were still alive.”
“She is not. But can I not be enormously fond of her still? My affection for her hardly ended with her death.”
“And so you were not adopted by a Free State couple?”
“No, of course not! Lucy’s lies about my supposed thievery—conjured out of what I can only imagine is sport and resentment for my youth—appalls, but her denial of my family （and hers, might I add） absolutely sickens. For her to deny my parents that—！ She is an unwell woman. I wish Belle were here so she could tell you herself what absolute rubbish this all is, and about my aunt’s character.”
“Well—can she not?”
“Of course, and it is an excellent notion—I shall write her tonight and have her answer any questions you might have.”
“Well, I have more—many more.”
“And how could you not, after that report? （I have only the greatest respect for your grandfather, but must admit I’m somewhat shocked that he would place so much trust in someone who would believe everything told him by one lonely, clearly deranged woman.） Oh, my poor David! I cannot tell you how disgusted I am that this woman’s—mischief-making should have caused you such distress. You must allow me to explain.”
So he did. Edward had an answer for all of David’s concerns. No, he was assuredly not in love with Aubrey, who, anyway, was married to Susannah （His sister! My God, of course not! The depravity in this report!） and not one of their kind besides. The two were dear friends, but nothing more—David would see for himself in California, and “I would not be surprised if you and he should become even better friends than he and I are; you are both highly practical people, you see. And then I shall be the suspicious one!” Yes, he had been in a relationship with Christopher D., and yes, it had ended poorly （“He had become—and I say this not to boast, but as fact—besotted with me, and after he proposed marriage and I declined, he became fixated on me, and I, I am ashamed to say, began to avoid him, for I knew not how to convince him I was not in love with him. Although he was overbearing, my cowardice was my fault, and mine only, and I am deeply remorseful about it”）， but, no, Edward had certainly never been with him for his money, nor had his parents ever tried to intervene on their son’s behalf: He would introduce David to Mr. D. so he could ask for himself. No, he would! He absolutely would! He had nothing to hide. No, he had never stolen anything from anyone, least of all his parents, who, after all, had nothing for him to steal, even if he had been that sort of person: “Of all the cruelties of this report, the cruelest is the denial of my parentage, of my childhood, of the sacrifices my mother and father made for me and my sisters, of the slander levied against my father: A gambler? A runaway? A cheat? He was the most honest man I ever knew. For him to be manipulated into this…this criminal is a level of evil to which I had not known even Lucy capable of sinking.”
On and on they talked, and after an hour and more had passed, Edward seized David’s hands. “David—my innocent. I can and will refute everything in these pages. But the primary thing I must disabuse you of is this: I do not love you, I do not want to make a life with you, for your money. Your money is yours, and I have no need of it. I have not ever lived with it—I would not know what to do with it. Besides, I shall soon have my own, and—though I intend no ingratitude—I prefer it that way.
“You asked what I had done with the tea set. I sold it, David, and it was not until afterward that I realized what a mistake I had made, that it was something you had given me out of love, and I, in my desire to prove to you that I could take care of you, take care of us, exchanged it for money. But do you not see that it was done out of my own sense of love? I never want to ask you for anything—I never want you to be in discomfort. I will take care of us both. Dear David. Do you not want to be with someone who will not expect you to be David Bingham but merely beloved companion, trusted husband, dearest spouse? Here”—and here Edward reached into his trouser pocket and drew out a purse, which he pressed into David’s hand—“here is the money from it. I will go buy it back tomorrow, if you wish. It, and the silver set, too. But either way, the money is yours to keep. We shall spend it on our first meal in California, on your first set of new paints. But the important thing is that we shall spend it together, making our life together.”
His head ached. He was overwhelmed. The tears had dried on his cheeks and left his skin stiff and itchy. His limbs felt boneless, and he was taken by a tiredness so intense that when Edward began to undress him and then laid him in the bed, he felt none of the anticipation or excitement he usually did in those moments, just a kind of dullness, and although he responded to Edward’s commands, he did so as if in a daze, as if his arms and legs were moving of their own accord and he was no longer their master. He kept thinking of what his grandfather had said—“They need you: Edward and his beloved”—and when he woke early in the morning, he slipped out from beneath Edward’s arm and silently dressed and left the boardinghouse.