“You have brothers,” he choked out.
“They didn’t know John. Not the way you did.”
He moved away, stood, and then, as if that weren’t enough, backed up as far as he could, all the way to the window. His eyes flared slightly, and for a moment she could have sworn that he resembled a trapped animal, cornered and terrified, waiting for the finality of the kill.
“Why are you telling me this?” he said, his voice flat and low.
“I don’t know,” she said, swallowing uncomfortably. But she did know. She wanted him to grieve as she grieved. She wanted him to hurt in every way she hurt. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t nice, but she couldn’t help it and she didn’t feel like apologizing for it, either.
“Francesca,” he said, and his tone was strange, hollow and sharp, and like nothing she’d ever heard.
She looked at him, but she moved her head slowly, scared by what she might see in his face.
“I’m not John,” he said.
“I know that.”
“I’m not John,” he said again, louder, and she wondered if he’d even heard her.
“I know.”
His eyes narrowed and focused on her with dangerous intensity. “It wasn’t my baby, and I can’t be what you need.”
And inside of her, something started to die. “Michael, I—”
“I won’t take his place,” he said, and he wasn’t shouting, but it sounded like maybe he wanted to.
“No, you couldn’t. You—”
And then, in a startling flash of motion, he was at her side, and he’d grabbed her shoulders and hauled her to her feet. “I won’t do it,” he yelled, and he was shaking her, and then holding her still, and then shaking her again. “I can’t be him. I won’t be him.”
She couldn’t speak, couldn’t form words, didn’t know what to do.
Didn’t know who he was.
He stopped shaking her, but his fingers bit into her shoulders as he stared down at her, his quicksilver eyes afire with something terrifying and sad. “You can’t ask this of me,” he gasped. “I can’t do it.”
“Michael?” she whispered, hearing something awful in her voice. Fear. “Michael, please let me go.”
He didn’t, but she wasn’t even sure he’d heard her. His eyes were lost, and he seemed beyond her, unreachable.
“Michael!” she said again, and her voice was louder, panicked.
And then, abruptly, he did as she asked, and he stumbled back, his face a portrait of self-loathing. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, staring at his hands as if they were foreign bodies. “I’m so sorry.”
Francesca edged toward the door. “I’d better go,” she said.
He nodded. “Yes.”
“I think—” She stopped, choking on the word as she grasped the doorknob, clutching it like her salvation. “I think we had better not see each other for a while.”
He nodded jerkily.
“Maybe…” But she didn’t say anything more. She didn’t know what to say. If she’d known what had just happened between them she might have found some words, but for now she was too bewildered and scared to figure it all out.
Scared, but why? She certainly wasn’t scared of him. Michael would never hurt her. He’d lay down his life for her if the opportunity forced itself; she was quite sure of that.
Maybe she was just scared of tomorrow. And the day after that. She’d lost everything, and now it appeared she’d lost Michael as well, and she just wasn’t sure how she was supposed to bear it all.
“I’m going to go,” she said, giving him one last chance to stop her, to say something, to say any thing that might make it all go away.
But he didn’t. He didn’t even nod. He just looked at her, his eyes silent in their agreement.
And Francesca left. She walked out the door and out of his house. And then she climbed into her carriage and went home.
And she didn’t say a word. She climbed up her stairs and she climbed into her bed.
But she didn’t cry. She kept thinking she should, kept feeling like she might like to.
But all she did was stare at the ceiling.
The ceiling, at least, didn’t mind her regard.
Back in his apartments in the Albany, Michael grabbed his bottle of whisky and poured himself a tall glass, even though a glance at the clock revealed the day to be still younger than noon.
He’d sunk to a new low, that much was clear.
But try as he might, he couldn’t figure out what else he could have done. It wasn’t as if he’d meant to hurt her, and he certainly hadn’t stopped, pondered, and decided Oh, yes, I do believe I shall act like an ass, but even though his reactions had been swift and unconsidered, he didn’t see how he might have behaved any other way.
He knew himself. He didn’t always—or these days even often—like himself, but he knew himself. And when Francesca had turned to him with those bottomless blue eyes and said, “The baby was to have been yours in a way, too,” she’d shattered him to his very soul.
She didn’t know.
She had no idea.
And as long as she remained in the dark about his feelings for her, as long as she couldn’t understand why he had no choice but to hate himself for every step he took in John’s shoes, he couldn’t be near her. Because she was going to keep saying things like that.
And he simply didn’t know how much he could take.
And so, as he stood in his study, his body taut with misery and guilt, he realized two things.
The first was easy. The whisky was doing nothing to ease his pain, and if twenty-five-year-old whisky, straight from Speyside, didn’t make him feel any better, nothing in the British Isles was going to do so.
Which led him to the second, which wasn’t easy at all. But he had to do it. Rarely had the choices in his life been so clear. Painful, but painfully clear.
And so he set down his glass, two fingers of the amber liquid remaining, and he walked down the hall to his bedchamber.
“Reivers,” he said, upon finding his valet standing at the wardrobe, carefully folding a cravat, “what do you think of India?”
Part Two
March, 1824
Four years later
Chapter 5
…you would enjoy it here. Not the heat, I should think; no one seems to enjoy the heat. But the rest would enchant you. The colors, the spices, the scent of the air—they can place one in a strange, sensuous haze that is at turns unsettling and intoxicating. Most of all, I think you would enjoy the pleasure gardens. They are rather like our London parks, except far more green and lush, and full of the most remarkable flowers you have ever seen. You have always loved to be out among nature; this you would adore, I am quite sure of it.
—from Michael Stirling （the new Earl of Kilmartin） to the Countess of Kilmartin, one month after his arrival in India
Francesca wanted a baby.
She had for quite some time, but it was only in recent months that she’d been able to admit as much to herself, to finally put words to the sense of longing that seemed to accompany her wherever she went.
It had started innocently enough, with a little pang in her heart upon reading a letter from her brother’s wife Kate, the missive filled with news of their little girl Charlotte, soon to turn two and already incorrigible.