Chapter Twenty
What the hell are you talking about?” Anthony asked, dumbfounded. “Mother, you had nothing to do with it.”
“I did!” she sobbed into the folds of her handkerchief. “I did. You would never have purchased a commission had I not encouraged you to it!”
Encouraged him to it? She had never; not once. It had been a perpetual war between them when he had made his decision, right up until the day he had left, so severely had she been set against it.
“I never meant to do it. I didn’t see my mistakes until long after they had occurred. But I brought you up upon stories of your uncle, gave you the tin soldiers that had been his in childhood. I only wanted you to know your family; I never imagined—” Her voice broke upon another sob. Tears slid down her cheeks in a ceaseless flood. “I might as well have sent you off to die myself.”
Shaken, Anthony reclaimed his seat, breathing deeply. His uncle—his mother’s middle brother—had passed away well before he had even been born, in the American rebellion. His mother had been little more than a girl at the time. “Mother, I never even knew him,” he said.
But hehadalways thought it…rather odd that Mother had been so passionately against him taking up a commission. Being an officer was a respectable career for a gentleman, and a suitably patriotic one.
“You never had to know him,” Mother whimpered. “It was enough that I glorified him to you. I put the idea of military service in your head practically from the cradle. All those tin soldiers, all the hours I played with you at imaginary military campaigns.”
Those had been some of his fondest memories of her when he had been a child. But they hadn’t had a thing to do with his decision. It had only been childish play. The fact that it had involved tin soldiers had been immaterial. “Lots of little boys play such games,” he said. “Mother, you know as well as I do that I was always going to have to find a vocation. I haven’t the temperamentfor the clergy, and my marks in school were average at best. I’d have been a dismal barrister and a worse doctor. What is there otherwise for a gentleman but the military?”
“You never had to have a career,” Mother said. “Your father and I would have supported you. And eventually, your brother—”
“William would have had enough to contend with of his own. His own family, the management of the estates, his parliamentary duties. There was no reason he should have had to support me, too.”
There was something vaguely familiar about this; the peculiar drama of it. He’d seen something similar from time to time on the campaign, in men who had lost friends in battle. A strange sort of guilt, of blame taken upon themselves for things well beyond their control. Too manyif onlyshad peppered their conversations.If onlythey had been a few steps to the left, they might have been close enough to save one of the fallen.If onlythey hadn’t turned their back for a fraction of a second, they might have seen the strike of a bayonet coming.If onlythey had arrived a few moments earlier, then some unspeakable tragedy might have been averted.
He had never been able to make sense of it, himself. But he had long learned that therewasno sense in war. That theseif onlys, as senseless as they had felt, had only needed to make sense to the one issuing them. Guilt borne upon shoulders that had never earned it for actions unpredictable, consequences unforeseeable.
“This is why,” he said, “you were so against me taking up a commission?”
She gave a single, miserable nod. “I tried to prevent it,” she wept. “I thought—hoped—that cutting you off would force you to relent, to reflect. That you would reconsider and come home.”
Perversely, it had only cemented his decision. “You never even wrote to me,” he said. “I wrote to you. I wrote to you every week, for years.” Up until he’d been wounded. When his recovery had been long, and his own spiral into self-pity had convinced him that there would be no point to it. That if she hadn’t wanted his letters before, certainly she would not want them after.
“I kept them,” Mother whispered. “Every one. I had hoped my silence would bring you to your senses. And then, after—” Her chin quivered. “I knew you would not wish to hear from me.”
“I would have loved to hear from you,” he said, his voice scratching at the inside of his throat. “I hated that we had grown so distant. I thoughtyou detested me.”
A small, shrill wail eked from her throat, and she shook her head. “I prayed for you,” she admitted, and the slump of her shoulders felt foreboding, laden with yet more guilt. “Every day and every night. I prayed for God to bring you home to me. I promised anything, anything at all, so long as it would bring you home once more.”
A queer, sour nausea churned in his gut. “Mother—”
“And my prayers were granted,” she said. “At the cost of your father and your brothers.” Her eyes closed on a fresh wave of pain. “How was I meant to face you, knowing what I had done, knowing what I had cost you? What I had cost Esther and Helen and the children?” She swiped at her eyes, unable to stem the flow of tears. “You were my littlest boy,” she said. “You were never meant to bear the burden of the title. And I had given it to you, and you were so unprepared for it.”
Somehow he had forgotten, while weathering Mother’s coldness and condemnation, that she had been suffering every bit as much as he. William had been raised to be a duke, and he had not. Perhaps she had, in some manner, been attempting through the weight of her grief to give him that instruction he had been lacking. But the shame he had so often witnessed upon her face had never been meant for him—it had been only her own. It had manifested only more coldness, more distance. And he—
He had done the same, he realized. He, too, had acquired an unearned sense of guilt, for the position he now inhabited, for all that had been lost to place him within it.Captain Sharp, he had insisted upon, becausedukehad been too painful to bear. He had adopted the same coldness, the same reticence, made certain assumptions that had turned out to be erroneous and allowed them to guide his own actions. And the whole of the household had frozen over entirely, until Charity had chiseled through that icy barrier.
“Mother,” he said softly. “It wasn’t your fault any more than it was mine. It was an accident, bad luck with terrible consequences. You couldn’t have known. Just as with my accident—it wasn’t anyone’s responsibility.” It was just the ugliness of war. He, like so many others, had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. “But I wish you had told me.”
“What purpose would it have served?” she sobbed.
“Well,” he said. “I might have forgiven you sooner.”
And then her composure, fragile as it had been, splintered altogether. Mother wept in heartrending sobs that shook her whole frame. Anthony lifted himself from his seat, crossed the room to kneel beside her chair, and for the first time since he had returned, reached out to her. Just her shoulder, justwith his fingertips. But it was enough to clog her sobs in her throat, and her breath hitched as she lifted her head.
“I forgive you,” he said. “For not seeing me off when I left. For not writing to me when I was away. For being so cold to me upon my return. Those are the only things I am capable of forgiving, because the rest of it—none of it merits anyone’s forgiveness. It was never your fault.”
And for the first time in years, Mother embraced him, weeping upon his shoulder not as if her heart had broken, but as if it had, at last, begun to heal.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice cracking across the words. “I’m so sorry, Anthony. I’m so very sorry.”
