She didn’t meet his eyes. “Of course not. I loved you.”
“And I love you.” Foreboding filled him. Her unease was visible. Nor did he miss the significance of the past tense in her statement. “Whatever you did, my beloved, I wouldn’t hurt you.”
“Stop it, stop it, stop it!” She raised her hands to her ears and turned away in a fury. “I told you what happened. Now go away and never come near me again.”
Her distress lashed at his heart, convincing him further that he could never injure her. “Isabella, tell me what you remember, not what you’ve heard a string of confounded gossiping fools say in this house.”
Her shoulders trembled. Damn it, he’d made her cry. His voice softened and he fought the urge to take her in his arms and reassure her. She was no longer the terrified cypher who had discovered him in the east tower, but he knew she’d scarper if he pushed her too far. “Sweetest love, tell me.”
She turned. “I—”
She raised a shaking hand to her lips as though afraid to say the words. But when she spoke, her voice was surprisingly steady, for all that her cheeks glistened with tears. “I was on the landing at the top of the grand staircase above the great hall. All the wedding guests were shouting and crowding around something on the floor. I bent over the banister to see and realized that it was my body. Lying on the tiles. I…I tried to say something, to tell them that I wasn’t dead at all, I was here alive. But even though I cried and screamed and pleaded, nobody paid a moment’s attention. Then my father gathered the men and they rushed upstairs and grabbed you. The family story is that you were hauled out of the Chinese bed, but that’s not true. You were standing next to me looking down into the hall. I tried to call out to you, but you didn’t hear me either.”
Josiah frowned. “Do you remember me pushing you?”
Reluctantly she shook her head. “No. But everyone says you did and that was the law’s verdict. My father had you carried off to London in shackles. You were tried in the House of Lords. Then they hanged you. You never said a word in your defense.”
Her matter-of-fact tone confirmed her unshakable faith in what she said. He felt like all the blood drained from his body. Which was lunatic. He had neither blood nor body.
Dear God, what an awful fate. For anyone. Perhaps it was a mercy he remembered nothing. His silence at his trial was a damning detail.
She was still speaking. “After that, they closed up Marston Hall and dismantled the bed, saying it brought bad luck. I’ve been here alone for seventy years, barring the few servants who acted as caretakers.” In spite of the misery in her face, her lips twisted in a wry smile. “You’d think, given I was the innocent party, I’d waft up to heaven and you’d linger to expiate your sins down here. Where have you been?”
There was so much he wanted to say, so much he wanted to disagree with in her dramatic story. But his resistance to what she’d told him was purely emotional. He had no facts to go on. Nothing she said had stirred a shred of memory in him. His history remained a blank from the moment when as the happiest man in the world, he’d swept Isabella into his arms.
He forced himself to answer, although where he’d been was one of the least important issues between them. “I don’t know. I woke up in the Chinese bed last night. I remember marrying you, then kissing you behind the vase, then carrying you up the stairs. That was almost seventy years ago with nothing in between.”
“There’s a wedding in this house in the morning. Perhaps that conjured you from hell.”
He wished she sounded like she was joking. “I don’t think I’ve been in hell. Or if I have, I don’t recall it. It’s like no time has passed since we wed. When I woke up, I thought I was still alive. That you were still my wife.”
Her lips twisted in another bleak smile. “I suppose I still am. Although we vowed to stay together till death us do part, and death did indeed part us. It’s quite a conundrum. One for the ecclesiastical courts, I’m sure.”
It was his turn to find her mockery grating. How could she accept so unquestioningly that he’d murdered her? When she’d known how steadfastly he’d loved her.
But then she’d had nearly seven decades to come to terms with what had happened. He’d only been extant for one bewildering day.
“Don’t,” he couldn’t help saying.
She shot him a hostile glance. “Perhaps your spirit is attached in some way to the bed. The thing’s been in pieces in the cellar since they shut the house. They only finished reassembling it yesterday.”
The theory made as much sense as anything else in this topsy-turvy world. So many mysteries. So many puzzles. But just one was important. Had he killed this vivid woman he adored?
He forced himself to ask the question. “If you don’t remember, how can you be sure?”
Her eyes remained guarded. It hurt him to think how openly she’d once trusted him. “I’ve had plenty of time to listen to the people at the hall talk about what happened. We quarreled in the Chinese bedroom. The servants heard us.”
Their wooing had been a tempestuous affair, marked by passionate clashes and even more passionate reconciliations. “We were always quarreling. That was nothing new.”
She shrugged, although he didn’t find her nonchalance convincing. “This time, your rage attained such a pitch that you shoved me down the stairs.”
It could make sense, he supposed, with another man and another woman. But still the story seemed wrong. Yet what did he have to place in opposition to what had been accepted for nearly seventy years? Isabella believed he’d killed her. Family history confirmed he’d killed her. What did the revulsion in his soul matter compared to all these hard facts?
“I cannot believe it. I will not believe it,” he said in a flat voice, even as cruel reality beat at him, insisted he accept the completely unacceptable.
She regarded him sadly and for once he saw past her anger to her desolation. “No, you don’t want to believe it. Neither did I.” She paused. “But you will, over time. Anything is possible over time.”
When she slipped out of the room and left him alone, he didn’t have the heart to stop her.