Against all better judgment, against all control, he hung on, riveted to this, the widest window she’d let open on the questions he had of her own existence. That world she described, of a solitary girl, awaiting a beloved papa. Isolated even as it had been, it was far more than Malcom had ever known, and because of that, as fictional as the books he’d filched as a child from unsuspecting patrons outside Hatchards.
“One day,” Verity carried on, her voice murmurous, “I received the missive, and I went out to meet him.” Her expression darkened. “Only he didn’t come. He wasn’t there . . .” The long column of her throat moved up and down several times. “There was another. A man.” Verity shook her head and returned to the moment—and to Malcom. “Apparently, he was my father’s man-of-affairs. He’d come to inform us of my father’s passing.” She rested her callused, ink-stained fingers on his knee, and lifted her gaze up to meet his. “The thing of it is, Malcom . . . from that moment on, for so long I couldn’t remember anything of that day: not the weather, not what I was wearing. Not what he said. And all the memories I carried of my father were lost. Occasionally, I would hear echoes of my own sobs. Or . . .” She creased her brow. “I thought they were my tears. It was as if they belonged to another. I couldn’t make anything clear of the happiest memories that had come before it. I couldn’t bring them into focus. Because it was just too h-hard.” Her voice broke, and she immediately made a clearing sound with her throat. His chest constricted with an all-too-foreign pain . . . pain for another. For her. “Perhaps, Malcom, it is easier not remembering than fully owning the pain of that moment.” There was a heartbeat’s pause. “For me,” she added softly. The meaning of her telling was unmistakable: he didn’t remember because the memories were too dark. Too painful.
“And yet you speak of them now,” he noted quietly, without recrimination and rather with a desperate need to know—to know about her and her past. To understand why his mind failed him. “How?”
“One day, when I was returning from my work, the skies opened and it began to rain . . . and a memory slipped in of my father and mother and I twirling in circles in a storm.” Her gaze grew distant, and he knew the moment she lived within that memory. “And we were laughing and just so happy, and I realized I wanted to remember, Malcom. I wanted all the other happy remembrances I could have and every other in between.” She held his gaze. “Even the ones that brought with them great sadness, too.”
Malcom sat there with her words.
And then the truth slammed into him. He had fought to suppress those earliest parts of his life, and he’d done so because if he owned his past, fully, in every dark, evil context, then what would he be left with? What, other than lowered defenses that left him weak to all . . . this woman included?
That’s what she would have of him. That is what she would have him do. He directed his stare at the front of Gunter’s. Honest enough to admit that he was a coward and couldn’t face her square on.
She rested her fingertips on his sleeve. His muscles jumped under that tender, unexpected touch.
He forced his gaze away from that palm that, even with the swath of fabric as a barrier between them, burnt.
“I understand you resent me.” Nay, he didn’t resent her. Not truly. He resented all this. Being thrust into a life he didn’t want. He regretted that was what had brought them—and kept them—together. “But our agreement will have us together for . . . some time. And as such, I’d like to broker a truce.”
Verity held out a gloveless palm.
He stared at it for a moment. “What is that?” he asked flatly.
“Well,” she said slowly in those governess tones, as he’d come to think of them. “It is a handshake.”
“A handshake?”
“During the medieval times, men would conceal weapons in their hands, and so shaking another person’s hand conveyed that no harm was intended, and that is what I would convey to . . .”
Her voice faded out of focus, as something vague stirred in the chambers of his mind. Another echo, this one in a gentleman’s voice.
“I know that story,” he said hoarsely, cutting into Verity’s telling.
And that is how the handshake has come to be, my boy . . .
Verity lowered her palm to her side.
Dark pinpricks flecked his vision.
She didn’t ask how. And he needed to hear her voice. He needed her to anchor him to this moment, and pull him back from the memories that wouldn’t come.
And then it came tumbling from her lips, her quietly spoken question, the mooring he needed. “Who?”
“My father. It was my father . . .” Only, that admission didn’t suck him into the abyss, trapping him with thoughts of who he’d been . . . before. Rather, there came with that acknowledgment an unexpected buoyancy as the blackness tugging at his vision receded. Malcom drew a breath in slowly through his teeth, filling his lungs with it.
In that moment . . . he felt . . . free . . .
Chapter 20
THE LONDON GAZETTE
The Earl and Countess of Maxwell were recently seen at Hyde Park. Despite the whispers and rumors of marital strife, witnesses maintain that the recently married couple appeared very much in love . . .
E. Daubin
For nearly twenty years, Verity’s life had been her work at The Londoner. For three of them, she had been a reporter. Her nights had been spent outlining stories, and then drafting interview questions for the subjects of her article.
She began with a mock title. An outline. And then came the questions she’d piece together that would fill in the details of the story that would ultimately be printed.
As such, she should be considering questions to ask and record for her upcoming meeting with Malcom.
Instead, her notebook lay open before her, blank.
Since their quiet but not tense return to Grosvenor Square, she’d been unable to think of anything but him and the last utterances to leave his lips.
My father. It was my father . . .
It had represented a deeply personal admission that, once coaxed into further details, would likely have been sufficient enough to garner her work with any newspaper office. But in the immediacy of that moment, and even now, it wasn’t her story or future employment she thought of.
She thought of him. Who Malcom had fleetingly been before he’d been forced to become someone else. The darkness he’d endured. And just as importantly, the point she’d never contemplated before now: What happiness had he known? The only son of an earl, he’d have been cherished for his role as heir.
And yet, he’d memories of Gunter’s ices. And tales of handshakes. Information that had been imparted to him, that echoed in his mind still, all these years later.
And you’d ask him to expose those most intimate parts of himself to slake the hunger of gossips who don’t truly care about the man Malcom North.
What alternative do you have, however?
Is his quest for privacy more precious than Livvie’s and Bertha’s survival?
Verity bit down hard on the end of her pencil, her teeth depressing the soft wood, leaving indentations upon it.
Footsteps sounded in the hall.
The pencil slipped from her mouth, and heart hammering, Verity jumped up. He was h—