“It tears me up inside that someone made attempts on her life. It’s all I can do not to lock her and Phoebe in a tower so no one can hurt them. I doona want to be the husband of a game maker, nay, but more than that, I doona want to live with the fear that every day she spends in that den of vice, she puts herself at risk!”
He’d expected the proclamation to make him feel weak and vulnerable, but something inside him warmed at the approval he read in the old man’s expression.
Jean-Yves tipped his glass at Ramsay. “Do you not put yourself at risk on that bench of yours, Lord Chief Justice?”
“That’s different,” he grunted.
“Because you are a man?”
“Aye, goddammit. Because I am a man.” He paced, railing against the unfairness of it all. “Because I have fought for my country and my life, because I can survive what she cannot—I have conquered hells on this earth she couldna even conceive of. And because it is my duty, nay, my privilege to protect those I love.”
Jean-Yves sat back and regarded him through squinted eyes. “Yes, Lord Ramsay, I believe you have done some very manly things. You have come a long way from here.” He gestured to Elphinstone Croft and the surrounding glade. “I heard some of your troubles and I commend you for your accomplishments. But now you must listen to me.” He struggled to his feet with an ornery grunt, waving off the helping hand Ramsay offered before reaching for the whiskey.
“For all you’ve revealed to Cecelia, you know very little about her,” Jean-Yves said. “Locking her in a tower would be her personal hell, because she spent so much of her youth locked in a vicar’s cellar.”
An ache in Ramsay’s belly turned into a stab of pain for her, followed by a whip-burn of anger prickling across his flesh. “What?”
“When the man she called Father wanted to punish the world, which was often, he punished her, instead. He would lock her in the cellar for days. He would starve her. Beat her. Humiliate her. He would make her feel both small and fat. She would have the indignity and anger of a bitter, impotent man heaped upon her young shoulders. She bore the shame of every woman and every sin starting at Eve and ending with her.
“So perhaps you were abandoned here, but at least you had water to drink and the sky to look at. You could have run to the city, and you chose not to because you had the will to survive and the means to do so. She had nothing but the darkness and the hatred of a pious man with a dead prick.”
A wall of emotion pushed Ramsay against the porch post, and it creaked dangerously beneath his weight. “Nay,” he whispered.
She’d mentioned knowing a bit about loneliness.
About being unwanted.
He had no idea she’d such a deep, devastating understanding of it. His fingers curled; he could already feel the throat of the Vicar Teague snapping beneath their strength. “But she was rescued … and sent to Lake Geneva … to you.”
“Yes. Rescued by Henrietta, apparently, and sent to school at de Chardonne. But do you think her troubles ended there?” Jean-Yves scoffed. “When I met her, she was a plump and friendless little girl alone in the garden I tended. No one would eat with her, because she was nobody to them. They laughed at her for being clever. They laughed because she was round and quiet and shy. And when it is in the nature of many bullied children to become cruel, she cultivated kindness and empathy.”
The man’s eyes warmed with veneration. “I was nothing but a peasant, yet she took an active interest in my life and my passion for the garden. She befriended me, hungry not just for the food we shared but for any kind word. Any companion, even an ornery, lonely old widower. She dug in the dirt beside me, heedless of her pretty dresses. She made diagrams of my gardens and memorized all the names of my favorite flowers.”
A tender smile touched Ramsay’s mouth, even as his heart broke for her. Cecelia as a little girl had faced very similar cruelty to what he’d known from other children. A child with no title, no name, but endless expectations to live up to in an institution full of people who thought they were better. She understood him perhaps more than anyone else.
And he never tried to return the favor.
Jean-Yves was right. He didn’t deserve her love. No man alive did. And yet she would give it. Endlessly. Because that’s who she was.
“Did you know that your brother’s duchess killed her rapist?”
Stunned, Ramsay gaped at the Frenchman, who lifted his hand to smooth back wisps of disappearing hair.
He and Redmayne had become close. Why hadn’t Piers confided this in him?
Possibly because of his status as a justice.
Possibly … because his family didn’t trust him to put them above his principles.
A new wave of shame threatened to pull him out into the cold.
“Our Cecelia helped me carry the dead body without hesitation,” Jean-Yves continued. “She put the duchess’s monster in the ground and she toiled next to me with a shovel to bury him.”
The old man’s eyes glittered a little in the silvery shafts of moonlight, suspicious moisture gathering at the corners. “And then Cecelia took responsibility for that traumatized girl. She bathed her, cared for her, slept beside her, loved her through the aftermath of her terror.
“Did you know she hired me, and barely allows me to work? Because of her my tragic life has become full of adventure and contentment. She sacrifices everything she is, everything she has, and asks for so little in return. She is kindness personified, even though very few have shown her a modicum of what she is willing to give. And you…”
The man leaned forward, thrusting an accusing finger toward Ramsay. “You would ask her to forfeit her newfound legacy? To choose between her passion for life and her passion for the man she loves? This world is cruel to women, mon ami, and I thought if anyone had the fortitude to be different, it might be you.”
“The man she…” Loves? Unable to say the word, Ramsay looked down at his hands trying to process all he’d learned in the space of a few breaths. He’d known her to be extraordinary but … “I didna ken,” he breathed. “I didna know any of this about her. I thought her sunny disposition and optimistic idealism came from a life of mostly privilege and contentment.”
“Her brightness has always come from within. She looks into the darkness, and smiles,” Jean-Yves said poetically, his features arranging into an expression of adoration. “She was—she is—like a flower forever starved for rain. If you show her one drop of kindness, of love, she will bloom for you. But what you cannot do, Lord Ramsay, is ask an exotic orchid to be an English rose. Because that woman in there would love you. Would accept you. She would raise your child beside you and lay her life down for you both. But what she will not do is allow you to mold her into something she is not just so you are comfortable. If that is the kind of woman you seek, then you must let her go and find that elsewhere.”
The truth of it slammed into Ramsay with all the weight of a steam engine.
Of course. How could he claim the woman only to change what made her captivating? Would he love the parody of herself she would become if she capitulated to his supercilious demands?
He stalled. That was the second time the word love had snuck into his thoughts.