“I’ll not apologize! I am your mother. I was saving you from a mistake like the one I made!”
“Callum is not Father,” Constantine said with a calm she did not feel.
“No indeed!” her mother shot back. “Your father was simply cruel, not mad!”
“Go home, Mother,” Constantine said with a sigh. “I don’t want to say things I’ll regret.”
“This is a fine way to treat me after all I’ve done for you!”
“You lied to me,” Constantine repeated. “I was in love with him, and you knew it, and rather than speak of your concerns with me, you were deceptive.”
Her mother puffed up her chest, an offended look upon her face. “You’ll come running to me for help in no time at all, I have no doubt. But God only knows how we can fix this.”
“Youdo not need to fix anything, Mother. I have it all quite in hand.”Lies.“White,” Constantine said, turning from her mother. “Please assist my mother to her carriage.” She was frankly unsure her mother was actually going to leave of her own free will.
He looked uncertain for a moment and didn’t move, and she had the sinking feeling he was not going to comply. But then he asked, “Is that the butler’s duty?” The words came out haltingly, as if he’d had trouble stringing the sentence together. She noticed then that a tic had started in his one eye. He pressed a beefy finger to his temple. “Cal said I should perform all the duties the butler would perform.”
“For now, it is the butler’s duty,” she replied, wanting to get him to move out of the doorway and wanting her mother to leave as well.
He moved then in an awkward, lumbering way.
“I do not need your assistance!” her mother screeched, but White ignored the protestations and passed Constantine and Frederica, stalking toward her mother as his pace increased with shocking rapidity.
Constantine ignored her mother’s carrying on. She and Frederica exchanged a look, and then she tugged Frederica through the door of her townhome and toward the stairs, unsure what she would find. “I need to see Callum,” Constantine said.
“I should think so,” Frederica replied.
They released each other as they climbed the stairs, a sense of urgency pressing in on Constantine, but just as she reached the top of the stairs, quick, uneven footsteps sounded behind her. She cast a glance over her shoulder, not surprised to find White following them. For a man who moved rather awkwardly, he seemed to have no problem hurrying when he wanted to.
“Lady Kilgore!” he said. “C-Cal said not to allow ye inside.”
She paused at that and turned to look at White, who was now two steps behind her but also eye-to-eye with her. “Not to allow me inside my own home?” Surely she had misunderstood.
The man shook his head, and relief weakened her knees. “Before he left for the church, his s-s-specific instructions to me were to keep ye away from his bedchamber and to have ye p-pack.”
She frowned. “Whatever for?”
“For yer move.”
“My move?”
The tic by his eye became more furious, and he pressed his thumb against his temple again.
“He said to tell ye to pack yer bags and have the coachman take ye to his country home. That is to be yer n-new residence.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, though a terrible foreboding settled in a small part of her heart, the piece that would never forget how her father had rejected and left her.
White looked suddenly miserable, as if he did not want to say any of this. “Cal does not w-want ye here.”
She swallowed in an effort not to scream or cry. Beside her, Frederica squeezed her arm sympathetically.
How dare he! How dare Callum show up after disappearing over a year ago, interrupt her wedding—never mind her relief—act like a wild barbarian, make even wilder accusations, collapse, relieve her servants of their positions, instill a stranger in her home, and give the order, before he’d even spoken to her, that she be banished from their home and, apparently, London!
Sick or not, she needed to speak with him, and according to Peter, Callum was not in mortal danger. “I am going to speak to my husband,” she said, eyeing the man who was now the butler. “And the only way I will not go to him is if you physically stop me. Do you intend to do that? Tomanhandleme?” At his wince, she knew she’d found a sensitivity of the man’s. “Will you mistreat me so?”
“I’d never m-mistreat a lady,” he said, frowning fiercely. “Mam taught me manners, and I remember them always. Always, always, always. Even d-during all the years at the asylum.” His shoulder jerked upward in a rhythmic motion to match the tic in his eye.
Her skin prickled at his words, which seemed to imply that there was truth in Callum’s accusations. Guilt pierced her. White clearly had some sort of mental ailment, and it seemed that worry and unease, which she was causing him, made it worse.
