she had to accept the fact she had always known in her heart of hearts and yet had chosen to deny: that her brother had been worse than a wastrel and a rogue. He had been arrogant, vain and dangerous. He had played with people’s lives, with Garrick, with Kitty, with herself, as though they were counters in a game.
She buried her face in her hands again as the shivers racked her.
She felt Garrick move and then he pressed her glass of wine into her hands, holding them steady as she drank obediently and once again felt the warm liquid flower within her giving her warmth and strength. She raised her head and looked at him. The lines of grief and unhappiness were etched so deep in his face that she wanted to reach out to him and smooth them away.
“I’m sorry, Merryn,” he said. “I wish I could say it was not true.”
“You took Kitty away to protect her,” Merryn said. “I thought you had run to escape trial.”
“I thought I would have had a good chance of acquittal if I had stood trial,” Garrick said. “I wanted to stay, to face justice for what I had done.” A muscle worked in his jaw. “But it was impossible. Everything would have come out—not merely Kitty’s affaire, which we could not hide, but her pregnancy, too …” His voice fell. “She would have been utterly ruined and the future of the baby, too.” His face twisted.
“I would have given the child my name if I could have done,” he said, and Merryn could hear the rawness in his voice. “I would have done anything for her to be mine—” He stopped.
“You could not claim her as your own because it was too late,” Merryn said. She watched the way that his fingers tightened around his wineglass and wanted to ease that pain in him. “Kitty was already pregnant when you wed her.”
“Three months gone,” Garrick said, “and I had been out of the country until a month before our wedding.” He shook his head. “Even so, I thought there might be a way, if I took Kitty abroad where nobody knew us. I thought we could pretend and that I could give the child my name.”
“But if the child had been a boy,” Merryn said, “he would have been your heir.”
Garrick shrugged. For a moment a hint of amusement lifted the harsh lines of misery on his face. “That would not have mattered to me,” he said. “God knows, it was not the fault of the child—it was innocent in all of this—and there have been bastards aplenty in the Farne line before. Ethan …”
There had been Tom, too, Merryn thought. Soon she would need to explain to Garrick about Tom but not until everything else had been laid bare between them.
“My father, though,” Garrick said, his voice bitter and hard. “He would not stand for a bastard inheriting the Farne Dukedom. He had too much arrogance and pride. It was our final quarrel. And in the end—” His shoulders slumped. “It did not matter because Kitty had no will to make a future with me after Stephen had died. Susan was born prematurely and Kitty slipped away. It seemed as though she had no reason to live.”
Merryn took his hand and laced her fingers tightly in his. She felt his surprise and his instinctive move to draw away from her before he relaxed and let her hand rest in his.
“You had a reason to live, though,” she said softly. “You had Susan.”
Garrick looked down into her face. “She had lost her mother,” he said, “and I had robbed her of her father before she was even born. What else could I do other than to protect her?” His fingers tightened painfully on Merryn’s. “I could not keep her with me,” he said, “in exile, alone. Besides Kitty’s family wanted her.” He raised a hand to Merryn’s face and touched her cheek. “Just as you wished for something to remember Stephen by,” he said, “so they wanted to have something of Kitty, something good and unspoiled and true that need not be tainted by the scandal. So I gave Susan to them and I promised to keep the secret of her parentage. I swore never to speak a word to anyone to protect her always.” Again his fingers brushed her cheek, his touch full of regret. “I did not know you then,” he said harshly. “I did not know how much I would come to love you and how desperately I would want to tell you the truth. When we were to wed I wrote to Lord Scott begging to be released from my oath. But he …” He stopped.
“He forbade you to tell,” Merryn said. Her voice shook. “I understand. No one had cause to hate the Fenner family more.”
She thought of the way that she had hated Garrick in the beginning with such a blind passion that it could not be quelled. Kitty Scott’s family had had equal reason to hate.
It was then that Merryn realized that she was crying, silently, big fat tears dropping onto the arm of the chair like the snowflakes outside. She rubbed them away with her fingers. Garrick took her damp hands in his and his touch was warm and comforting and for a moment she clung to him before he freed himself and moved away. She could sense the loneliness in him again, the solitariness that she had seen from the first, that had set him apart. She remembered the way he had rejected her love for him because he believed that what he had done had made him a pariah, unworthy of love. First she had hated Garrick Farne with a passion, she thought, and then she had wanted him to be a hero and neither was fair to the man he was, the man who had been forced to make terrible choices and had lived with the consequences ever since. Now at last she saw Garrick as he truly was: an honorable man who had been in an intolerable situation, who had made mistakes and tried to make reparation, too.
“I don’t understand why you blame yourself, Garrick,” she said carefully, wanting to reach out to him, to breach that frightening coldness and give him the comfort that she knew he needed in his soul. “You acted to protect Kitty and her daughter. Everything you did, you did for their sakes, out of honor.”
Garrick shook his head. There was stark unhappiness in his face, so sharp it cut Merryn to the bone. “Don’t seek to give me absolution, Merryn,” he said. He turned away from her as though he could not bear for her to look on him. “You were right all along,” he said briefly. “I was jealous of Stephen. When I discovered that he had bedded Kitty I hated him for his careless arrogance and the way he could simply take whatever he wanted.” He shook his head. “Every single day,” he said, “from that moment to this, I have thought that I need not have killed him. I could have put a bullet through his shoulder or shot the pistol from his hand …” His voice fell. “But I did not. And I will never be sure that I did not act through jealousy and revenge.”
Merryn got up slowly and crossed to him, putting her arms about him. He did not respond. She could feel the resistance in him. “You have tortured yourself every day, Garrick,” she said softly. “You had no time to think, no time to do anything other than to react. And if there was an element of anger and jealousy—” she shook her head “—then every day since you have atoned for that by protecting Kitty and then her daughter from harm.”
She felt a tiny slackening of the tension in him. “I acted out of duty,” Garrick said. “What else could I do?”
“You acted out of honor,” Merryn corrected. “What else would a man like you do?” She freed him, stepped back. There was something that she had to tell him now. “Listen to me,” she said. Her voice shook. There were tears in her eyes. “We all do wrong,” she said. “There is something you do not know.”
Garrick had heard the painful note in her voice. He turned toward her.
“I was Kitty and Stephen’s go-between,” Merryn said.
There was a silence. Garrick stared at her, dark eyes narrowed. He looked incredulous.
