Page 63 of Stealing His Duchess

“What do you mean?”

Hudson closed his eyes briefly, forcing himself past the old, familiar reluctance to speak of it at all.

“She manipulated Father from the very first day, though he never saw it – could never see it, because she thoroughly managed his affections from the start. But she saw quite clearly that I did see her, that I understood what she was long before anyone else in this household did, and rather than fear my suspicion, she used it. She told me, when I was perhaps twelve years of age, that I had a choice – I could continue opposing her, and watch her make my life as difficult as she was capable of making it, or I could align myself with her, help her manage Father’s affections and his purse, and in exchange, she would ensure that no harm ever came to you.”

Cornelius went very still. “She threatened you? With harming me?”

“Not outright, at first. She was cleverer than that. She simply reminded me, again and again, in a hundred small ways, how easily a young boy’s accidents might occur in a large house, how quickly a father’s attention might be turned entirely away from a second son if his new wife found reason to discourage it. She told me that no one would ever love me for my own sake – that I was too watchful, too suspicious, too much trouble to be worth loving freely – but that I might yet make myself useful, if I was clever about it. Useful enough that she would have no reason to turn her attentions toward harming what mattered most to me.”

Cornelius sank slowly into the chair behind him, as though his legs could no longer properly support the weight of what he was hearing.

“All those years,” he said, half to himself. “I thought you simply preferred solitude. I thought you found my company tiresome, that you had grown too serious for a younger brother’s foolishness. I never once considered that you were standing guard the entire time.”

“I did not want you to see it that way,” Hudson admitted.

“Hudson –”

“I believed her,” Hudson continued, his voice rough now, the old shame of it rising fresh even after all these years. “Or perhaps I simply could not risk the possibility that she spoke true. So, I did as she asked, in small ways, for a time – smoothed things over with Father when her spending grew excessive, held my tongue when I ought to have spoken plainly against her – all so that she would have no cause to turn her cruelty toward you instead of me. And somewhere in all of it, I convinced myself that controlling every circumstance around us, managing every risk before it could fully form, was the only way to keep you safe from a danger no one else in this house could even see. I had tried to warn our father several times. But he was too prideful, too arrogant to see what she was doing. Until he grew, I’ll and she used the physicians who were supposed to nurse him back to health to extort even more of his wealth. Even then, he preferred to stand on her side rather than mine.”

Cornelius stared at him, the anger in his face slowly giving way to something like horror. “Why did you never tell me this?”

“Because you adored her, at first. Because Father would not hear a word against her, and I did not think a child of your age needed the burden of knowing what I suspected. And later, once she was gone — something I had made sure of, following Father’s passing — and the danger had passed, it seemed a wound better left closed than reopened for no purpose beyond my own comfort.” Hudson shook his head slowly. “I told myself I was protecting you from the truth, the same as I told myself I was protecting you from Edith. I did not stop to consider, in either instance, whether you might have preferred the truth to my protection.”

The study fell silent, the weight of two decades of unspoken history settling over all of them. Anna had gone very still in her seat by the hearth, her expression stricken, and even Edith looked as though she had forgotten entirely why she had come.

Cornelius, for his part, simply stood in the middle of the room, staring at his brother as though seeing him properly for the very first time.

“All this time,” he said, very quietly, “I thought you simply enjoyed having power over me.”

Hudson said nothing. He did not trust his voice to hold, and the silence that followed felt, for the first time in twenty years, entirely honest between them.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Cornelius’ anger seemed to drain out of him all at once, like water through a cracked vessel.

Anna watched it happen from her seat near the fireplace, watched the fury that had carried him through a year of estrangement finally give way to something rawer and far more vulnerable – grief, perhaps, or simply the belated understanding of a burden his brother had carried silently on his behalf for the whole of their shared childhood.

She thought, watching the two brothers stand there in the wreckage of decades of misunderstanding, of her own relationship with Rowland – how fiercely he had always protected her, how she had sometimes chafed against that protection without ever once doubting the love behind it. She wondered if Cornelius, in time, might come to see his brother’s overbearing nature in the same forgiving light, once the sting of tonight’s revelations had eased into something closer to understanding.

Edith, beside her, had gone very quiet, her hand pressed to her mouth as though she too were only now grasping the full weight of what Hudson had endured, and had inadvertently caused Cornelius to endure in turn, through the whole tangled mess of the past two years.

“I had no idea,” Cornelius said, his voice unsteady. “All this time, I believed – I truly believed you simply enjoyed controlling everything around you. That it satisfied some need in you to hold power over the people who depended on you. I never once considered that you might have been protecting me from something I never even knew existed.”

“I did not want you to know,” Hudson told him again, quietly. “I wanted you to have the childhood I could not have – one free of the particular fear that comes from understanding exactly how precarious a father’s affection can be, how easily it might be redirected by someone clever enough to manage it.”

“You should have told me,” Cornelius said, though there was no more heat in it, only a soft, aching regret. “Not so I could have protected you in turn – I do not know that I could have, at that age – but so that I might have understood you properly, rather than spending years resenting a man who was only ever trying to shield me from something far worse than his own overbearing nature.”

“I know that now,” Hudson admitted. “I am sorry, Cornelius. Not merely for Edith, though I owe you that apology as well, but for every year I spent managing your life rather than trusting you to live it. I told myself it was love. Perhaps it was, in its own flawed fashion, but that does not excuse how thoroughly I failed to let you choose your own course.”

“Did she ever hurt you?” Cornelius asked suddenly, his voice tight. “Truly hurt you, I mean. Beyond words and threats.”

Hudson hesitated, and Anna saw something pass behind his eyes – an old memory, carefully buried, surfacing now against his will.

“There were incidents,” he said carefully. “Nothing I could ever prove was intentional. A loose stair rail, once, that I very nearly fell from. A hunting accident that came rather closer to striking me than good sense would suggest was accidental. I never spoke of them to Father, because I had no proof beyond my own suspicion, and because by then, I had already decided that silence and vigilance served us both better than accusation.”

“Hudson.” Cornelius’ voice cracked entirely on the name. “You carried that alone. For years. While I resented you for being too controlling, too cold, too determined to manage every corner of my life – you were quietly standing between me and a woman capable of far worse than either of us ever properly understood.”

“It does not excuse my methods,” Hudson stated, shaking his head slightly. “Whatever my reasons, I still denied you the choices that were rightfully yours to make. I still treated Edith with a cruelty she did not deserve, based on fears that had nothing to do with her own character.”