James let the poker drop from his grip. “Mama, I do not understand what he was talking about. Some man…”
She shook her head wildly. “Darling, he is imagining things. I promise you. Your father and I have never kept such secrets from each other. There has never been a need. We’ve always…understood each other. I do not understand what has overcome him now, though. Do you believe me?”
“I do believe you, Mama,” he whispered.“He did not even know who I am. How could the accusations be true if he did not even recognize me?”
She blinked slowly. A tear slipped down her cheek to mingle with the blood. She dashed it away, leaving her skin streaked. “Send for the doctor,” she said. “Go to the footman and tell him I need assistance immediately.”
He nodded and rushed out into the hall, his world spinning apart.
James swallowed as he tried to shove the memory away. He did not go to the brandy as some men might have done. No, he strode to his bedchamber window, whipped it open, and stuck his head out into the air. He drew in slow breaths, attempting to drive out the vivid pictures and calm his rioting heart.
That night everything had changed.
It had been but the beginning.
James had not known it then, but no one would stop his father for several months. Not over such a thing as confronting his wife. Men were allowed to beat their wives. It was completely permissible by law, if not publicly done.
He was lucky that he had not been punished for defending his mother. After all, ladies were supposed to submit to their husbands.
His mother had left for London the next morning, but that had not stopped it. Again and then again, his father had seemed as if he was well.
But then small things would happen.
His father would imagine things, see things, not recognize them, and his temper would be unleashed and violence would ensue and no one would stop him. For he was a duke.
Until one day it had become impossible to ignore. Too many outbursts, growing confused in parliament…and at last he had begun to leave the house in London in his dressing gown, wandering the streets, forgetting what year it was.
The doctors had said he must either be locked away at one of their country estates or put into an asylum.
They had decided that he would be locked away and cared for as kindly as someone so violent and unpredictable could be. His mother had stopped seeing him, for whenever she visited, the duke would fly into a rage.
James, too, had only visited to observe from afar. Or sometimes he would pretend to be a stranger. For as a stranger, his father wouldn’t insist that his son, James, was but an infant and grow agitated and furious when James tried to insist that he was an adult.
Each visit, his father had grown more confused, more angry, and more convinced his wife was a whore. He’d railed about it to anyone who would listen.
The footmen had kept him clean, well fed, and gave him much fresh air. But they’d also had to be careful lest the duke escape.
James had known in those final years that he could never, ever marry and never, ever have children, for he could never risk doing the same sort of thing to his family that his father had done to his mother and to himself.
It wasn’t just the madness. The decline. It was knowing that his father would have murdered his mother out of passion, out of a warped sense of love, if James had not intervened.
He let his gaze travel to the dark house beside his. Jack was in her chamber, no doubt. Sleeping. He hoped her dreams were far sweeter than his.
He did not know how he would have survived without her family. And now that he let himself remember it, withouther. She’d been so kind. So gentle. So understanding and full of jokes. She knew when to simply sit beside him, slipping her small hand into his as they sat by the river on her family’s estate, or regale him with stories of mischievous fairies.
She had been a balm to his soul.
And he knew now. He had to repay her. He had to save her as she had helped to save him.
He would find her safety and freedom. He would scour every family line. Every family history. And he would find the perfect solution, the perfect marriage to bring about her heart’s desire. He would give Jack freedom. And he didn’t care how.
…
“Good God, man, you look like death.” James eyed his friend, Alexander Peabody, the Marquess of Blackbrook, with barely concealed alarm. The previous night’s black dreams had left him on edge, and he’d rather hoped meeting with his friend would lighten his spirits.
But Jack’s eldest brother looked as if someone had run him over with a carriage, paused, turned the horses about, and had another go.
“Have you been in a fight?” James asked as he stood in one of the rowdier rooms of their club, contemplating his friend’s woebegone state.