But her husband was silent for a long time, and finally she looked at him. He sat with his hands on his knees, elbows splayed out. She could just make out his profile, his jaw hard as he faced grimly ahead.
“Dalway said I should tell you all,” he said at last, his voice low. “I thought him mad, but perhaps he was right.”
Despite her bravado earlier, Bianca felt a strange twinge at the thought of him telling her about all his previous lovers. Women who knew things about him, who knewhimin ways she did not, even though she was his wife.
“Do you want to hear?” he continued. “Or would you prefer to consider it a closed chapter of the past? I will tell you as much as you want to know.”
She thought about it. The idea of listening as he listed all the women he’d taken to bed was viscerally revolting. But he, who had been so closemouthed about everything, was offering to tell her anything...
“I would prefer to know about you, not about them,” she said softly. “About your parents, your youth... your grandfather.”
After a long pause, he let out his breath. “My mother was beautiful.” His voice was quiet and wistful. “Dark hair, gentle blue eyes... She never deserved what my father did to her. He was a thorough scoundrel. I think he married her only because she held him at arm’s length. My father wasn’t accustomed to being refused. But she did, and old Maxim refused to give up her funds, modest though they were, until they went to church. So he married her, poor creature.”
“What was he like?” she couldn’t resist asking.
Max growled in disgust. “The most selfish man I’ve ever known. Nothing mattered except his own desires and wishes. He would scold her and abuse her, then disappear for a month with no word—and leaving no money. One winter we had to go back to my grandfather’s farm in Lincolnshire to avoid starving to death.”
“But your father—!”
“He didn’t care if we starved,” said Max with scathing malice. “He preferred the finer life, and he was determined to have it, even if that meant leaving us behind. That year he’d found a wealthy widow—I don’t know if she knew he was married, or if she didn’t care—and they went off to France or the Low Countries. He always came back when they tired of him, but never for long. He was never pleased in one place for more than a few months together, never satisfied with his wife and son, although I suppose he might have also wanted to stay ahead of his debts.”
Oh goodness. Bianca had never suspected that. Her father would never have left any of their family to starve—indeed, Samuel routinely took on distant cousins or their widows, wives of drunkard nephews and children of feckless neighbors. He gave them employment, annuities, hampers of food... And all that in addition to what he gave his workers, above and beyond what other employers did. Perusia supported far more than their own little household in Marslip. Her chest filled with a burst of love for her father, irascible and stubborn though he could be.
But she sensed Max didn’t want to talk about his father. “Were you happy at your grandfather’s?”
“In Lincolnshire?” His shoulders rose and fell on a sigh. “I suppose. He had a good property and I was a boy, left at liberty to explore. Freedom suited me.”
“And your mother?”
“She died when I was a child,” he said after a moment. “In the spring. Too much worry and not enough money.”
Bianca bit down on her lip, picturing a brokenhearted young boy, abandoned by his father and left to fend for himself. “What was her name?”
“Adelaide,” he said softly. “Adela, her family called her. My father came back long enough to collect anything valuable. He went to France, as far as I know. If there’s any grace in the world, he fell into a privy ditch in Paris and rots there still.”
She was frozen by the calmness of his voice. “But—but you’re cousin to a duke,” she faltered.
“Distantcousin, and not one worthy of His Grace’s kindness. My mother tried to interest them in our plight,” he went on, as calmly as if they’d been discussing the weather. “Desperately. My father had been quite boastful of his connections, you see, and she’d thought that meant something. She never knew until later that his father and grandfather considered my father the worst sort of reprobate—not that they were any pillars of propriety themselves, mind. She named me after them, hoping one of them would grant me a living or at least favor me with a position. She thought I might make a fine secretary.” He tilted his head, and incredibly, Bianca thought he was smiling. “Imagine that, someone trusting me with their business affairs and correspondence.”
That stung, even if he hadn’t meant it to. She had met his arrival in Marslip with open suspicion, considered him a shallow fortune hunter and called him simple to his face. She wet her lips. “You did read law for a year...”
“Ah. You remember that?” He nodded. “After my mother died, her younger sister, Greta, took me in. Her husband at the time was a solicitor. She sent me off to Oxford for a year, and then I read law under her husband before he died.”
“But then you left,” she said slowly, trying to put together these disparate pieces of him into a coherent whole. A useless father, but a loving mother and family. University and a solicitor’s office, but no profession. Nearly starving one year, but possessed of the manners and airs of a gentleman. Even the first time he came to dinner at Perusia his reputation had preceded him: a rakish sort of fellow, a gambler, a dangerous scoundrel.
“Yes, I left,” said Max, with a dry emphasis on the last word. “It happened that my uncle’s partner thought I was bent on seducing his wife. If I hadn’t left, he would have thrown me out.” He paused. “He told all his fellow solicitors I’d done it, and none of them would take me on. That was the end of my career in law.”
Outrage filled her chest. Without thinking she put her hand on his. “What vicious slander!”
He was as still as stone. “Don’t you think Ididseduce her?”
Bianca flushed. No, she did not. “Did you?”
“No,” he said softly. “But I am grateful you didn’t presume I had.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. And when she tried to slip her hand from his, she realized his fingers had closed around hers, so lightly she’d barely felt it. “You must have been a very young man,” she said unsteadily. It felt shockingly right to sit here, letting him hold her hand.
“Eighteen,” he agreed. “Old Tibbets knew his wife favored young men, and so he only employed older clerks. My uncle persuaded him to allow me, but I expect he set his heart against me from the start, certain I would betray him.” His voice turned mildly contemptuous. “She did invite me into her bed, but—not only was she my employer’s wife—she already had a young lover. Tibbets never suspected the tailor’s apprentice was warming her bedlinen every time he delivered a new coat or trousers. And he was a vain man, who ordered a new coat every month.”
