When he said nothing, she looked up.
At some point, he’d ceased his writing and openly studied her.
“These belong to them, do they not?” The earl . . . Except that wasn’t quite right. “Lord Bolingbroke’s three sisters?” She needed him to say it.
“I suspect,” he said with a casual shrug.
“What need have you of”—she glanced down at the three items which had ultimately given her pause—“worn slippers, ribbons, and a . . . wooden peg doll?”
“I don’t.”
“You don’t.”
That was all he’d say? “But they did, Malcom.” Just as Verity had desperately needed the dresses and slippers and boots she’d been forced to sell at her father’s passing. But this time, for these women, it had been Malcom who had been the one to see all that taken.
“Why don’t you say what it is you’re thinking?” he snapped.
It was a challenge. If he expected her to back down, however, he was to be disappointed. “Very well,” she said slowly, resting the book on her lap. “They are no more responsible for the decisions of their parents than you are responsible for what happened to you that night.” The night he didn’t speak of . . . or remember. The one shrouded in mystery.
“You care so much for people you’ve never met?”
Verity angrily flipped through the book and stopped at the back. “And you should hate—” She froze. Her gaze landed at the center of the page. Her mind slowed as she struggled through those annotations.
“I did it because I hate them,” he said quickly. Too quickly. “Don’t make more of it than there is.”
And yet . . . how could she not? Her eyes scoured the pages, making sense of the numbers and details written there. “You didn’t intend to simply take their belongings,” she said softly, stroking a finger over the words. Understanding at last dawned.
“Don’t, Verity,” he snapped.
“You were giving it all away.”
A stiff silence met that revelation.
Verity fell back in her seat. Here she’d been berating him. Believing the worst. Accusing him of wrongly directing his anger at the wrong people. When all along, he’d been diverting those resources to others. Ones who were deserving in an altogether different light. “Malcom,” she said softly.
He wiped a hand down his face. “As I said, do not make more of it than there is.”
Only, what else was there to make of it?
Salvation Foundling Hospital
Ladies of Hope
London Hospital
The list went on. He was so very determined that the world see him in the darkest possible light. He was content to be seen as ruthless, and yet at every moment, with every decision he made and every person he saved, he revealed himself to be one of great honor.
Verity lifted her eyes from that evidence before her.
He met her with nothing but a mutinous silence. Of course. Because he was determined that the world would despise him. He, in fact, made it easy for them to do so. “But you didn’t just take it, though, did you, Malcom?” She needed him to acknowledge that truth. Not for her. But for him. “You gave it to others.” Verity clicked the ledger shut, and set it down. “Just as you gave this townhouse to Fowler and Bram to retire. Because you knew.” She shifted to the edge of her seat. “You knew they were too proud to not contribute, but were also too old to continue on in their current role as toshers.”
Malcom looked away, confirming everything that had just slid into place.
It all made sense now.
He made sense now.
“I did it because I hated them.” Fury rolled off Malcom in palpable waves, and there could be no doubting he spoke of Lord Bolingbroke and his family. He seethed as he spoke. “I took it all because why should they have known any comfort when they’d stripped me of mine?”
She weighed her words a moment. “No one will ever believe you aren’t deserving of your hatred and every other emotion you’re feeling for what was taken from you . . . and what was lost. And yet”—Verity tapped the ledger—“you didn’t let your hatred destroy you.” Hadn’t that been her earliest opinion of him? “You used your resentment to give to others whom you saw as more deserving than that family who’d wronged you. You gave away belongings that were rightfully yours, the ones linking you to your past and your family, Malcom, and gave them new beginnings to help others.”
A muscle rippled along his jaw in the only outward reaction that he’d been affected by her words. “I don’t have a family.”
And then it hit her like a blow to the chest all over again. They were the reason he kept the world at bay. Even if he himself didn’t realize the intent behind his guardedness. His insistence that friends were associates and his desire for complete isolation. “You did. And now, you have a new family. In Fowler, Bram, and Giles.”
The grip he had upon the arms of his chair drained all the blood from his knuckles, leaving that scarred flesh white.
“I thought we’d agreed your interviews would be conducted in the evening.”
She was unable to stifle the hurt at his response. “That isn’t the reason for my questions or words, Malcom. Not everything is about . . . that.”
“Isn’t it?” he asked curiously. He leaned forward in his chair, dropping his elbows on the desk, and proceeded to study her the way she’d observed the tiniest bugs crawling in the soil of her and her mother’s Surrey cottage property.
“Not for me.”
He continued to search her face. “Then why did you seek me out?”
Her heart broke for the wary way in which he moved through life. How very exhausting . . . How very lonely it must be for him. “Livvie and I intended to journey to Hatchards. I thought you might join us.” There was a beat of silence.
“Hatchards.”
“It is a bookshop.”
His gaze grew distant over her shoulder. “I know what Hatchards is.”
Just as he’d been familiar with Gunter’s and Hyde Park. Whether he knew it or not, those small revelations offered a window into who his parents had been. Only . . . mayhap he did know it. Mayhap that was what made him so very determined to keep out the memories of what had been. And of what he’d lost.
“For appearances’ sake, of course,” she said when he still didn’t speak. Not because I yearn for your company and enjoy being about with you. Liar. “Simply, it would be beneficial if we were seen about.” Stop talking. Verity bunched her skirts, noisily wrinkling the light silk cloak. She made herself stop, and smoothed her palms along the top of one of his many ledgers. “If we were seen out together.”
Setting down his pen, he cracked his knuckles. “I’ve an appointment.”
Did she simply hear regret in his voice because she wished it? “Oh,” she said dumbly, unable to explain the flood of disappointment that swept her.
What did you expect him to say? That he wanted to join you?
As if on cue, there was a knock at the door.
“Enter,” Malcom’s voice boomed.
A moment later, the aging butler pushed the door open and admitted a tall, heavily scarred man. A very familiar one.