“So I can kill them for you.”
She gave a startled, wry laugh. “Men.”
“Such fools who do not recognize the true wonder of you should not still roam the earth freely, Angelique. It cannot be safe for anyone.”
The wonder of her.He was teasing a very little again. But his eyes were serious.
“That is... so very kind of you, Lucien. I am quite touched by your offer of murder.”
“I don’t suppose I am a kind man. I try to be a truthful man.”
“Perhaps those men weren’t altogether terrible people. Perhaps they did care for me after a fashion. Perhaps they were merely careless in the way of most men. Men often blithely do terrible things to women without realizing it all. Because they, like your father, don’t need to care.”
“But how could anyone who...” he began.
And then realization dawned on him.
“How could someone who loves you so thoughtlessly hurt you,” he said slowly. “Ah. Aren’t you clever, Angelique. You led me to that, did you not. It is a good question and I take your point. Because people are not perfect, I expect is the correct answer. Present company excepted, of course. People are weak and riddled with flaws and still go about loving people like a toddler with a rifle. They do not know the damage they do.”
“No one would ever love anyone at all if perfection were a requirement first.”
“Perhaps we don’t love as well until we have lost a good deal,” he suggested. “Perhaps one takes love for granted if everything else is easy, too.”
“Perhaps.”
“And when people loom very large in our lives, we forget that we might, in fact, not be so very consequential to them. That... they are the mountain, and we are just one of many trees at the base of the mountain.” He added, with rich irony, “And mountains, of course, must consort only with other mountains.”
He’d turned toward the fire, and she thought this might be a sensible time for her to leave.
“My mother was a good person.” He said this swiftly, rather gruffly. In the way that people do when they speak of things closest to their hearts.
“What was she like?”
“You would have liked her, Angelique. She loved music and singing so much the duke bought a music box for her, made of ormolu with tiny insets of amber and carnelian.” He held up his hands a few inches apart. “A pretty thing, about this big and not terribly expensive, but it played a tune by Mozart. It enchanted her. It had a false bottom and in it she kept locks of my hair and hers, entwined. Today I asked my father if he would give it back to me. And he said... he said the duchess is quite fond of it and would never part with it.”
Angelique remained silent. But she took this like a blow.
She felt her stomach contract from the hatefulness of it.
“She is a dreadful person. The Duchess of Brexford.”
He paused, as though he were about to say something, then thought better of it. “Yes.
“My father... the esteemed Duke of Brexford... wrote aletterto my mother to tell her he could no longer see us or speak to us because he was getting married. He would provide a small settlement only and we were to leave straightaway.”
She was stricken silent.
“Good God,” Angelique breathed.
“I will never forget my mother’s expression that day. The... confusion... as she read the letter. She thought perhaps at first it was a joke. Then the realization that he did not, in fact, love her or me, had never actually loved her any more than he might have loved a favorite plaything. I watched this dawn on her face and you do not want to see such a thing. This... what it did to her, Angelique... another woman might have been furious. Sometimes strength and clarity can be found in fury. But it merely broke her heart. I stood there and watched the moment he broke her heart. She was never the same and she died knowing she had loved a man who had never loved her.” His voice didn’t quite break. But the pain made his voice hoarse and Angelique could very nearly not bear it.
“But she lovedyou, too, Lucien.”
“Of course she did. How could she not? Behold this remarkable creature. They all cried when I emerged from the womb.”
Angelique couldn’t smile.
It was difficult to breathe; she could feel his pain as surely as if it were her own.