A Governess for the Brooding Duke(69)

“I am aware that you have become close to my aunt, and I am sure that you know a good deal of the circumstances. You need not trouble yourself to feign surprise at any of it, Miss Darrington.”



“No, Your Grace,” she said.



“She was a young and beautiful girl of just nineteen years. He taught her that song and the meaning of the words, and she was mesmerized by him. She was so full of romantic notions for him that it was almost as if she were under a spell of some sort. Or at least, that is what I told myself.” He sighed deeply and continued to look across the room, in quite another direction altogether. He did not look at her once. “And I was not concerned by the whole thing in the beginning. Rather, I was amused by it, amused by her determination to learn the language of the Welsh so that she might understand the poets that Carwyn Thomas had introduced her to. But I thought it a folly then; a fancy that would change with the wind.”



“I am so very sorry,” Georgette said, wishing with all her heart that she had not asked Eleri to sing.



“Miss Darrington, you would be forgiven for thinking that to hear Welsh spoken in this house makes me angry with my sister, or more likely, with Carwyn Thomas for taking her away. And for many years that is exactly what I have allowed myself to be. And I am angry. Every time I hear it, I am most desperately angry. But you must understand that I am not angry at the girls. I am not angry at my sister, and I am not angry at her husband. I am angry at myself.” He rose so suddenly from his seat that Georgette stepped back a little.



However, as he walked off across the room towards the window, she realized from his mannerisms that he had undoubtedly swept a tear from his face. A tear that he had not wanted her to witness.



“I was so determined that she would not marry the Welshman that I ended up pushing her away from me. In my arrogance, I had never thought that she would have chosen Carwyn Thomas at the expense of our own relationship. I had assumed, throughout the whole thing, that I had the upper hand, as it were. She was my adoring little sister, and she would do nothing in this world to hurt me.”



“And I am sure, Your Grace, that she would not have done so lightly.” Georgette spoke tremulously, wanting to say something but knowing, at the same time, that she was very likely overstepping the mark.



“At the time, I would not have agreed, Miss Darrington, but I have come to know it as time has gone by. At the time, I simply assumed that she had changed beyond all recognition and that she had wilfully set out to hurt me. But I know how foolish I have been, and I know that I was the one who left her without a choice. And even then, after the thing had been done, and she was a married woman living in some tiny abode in the Welsh mountains, still I could not forgive her. Still, I saw it as a wilful act, something she would come to regret as the years went by and she mourned her lack of status and the luxuries she had always known here.”



Georgette simply remained silent. She knew that there was nothing she could say that would help, and she had the very strongest sense that the Duke needed to go on. He needed to come to a conclusion in all of it.



“What I failed to recognize was that she was happy. She had married for love, and that love had produced two children she adored. But I missed all of it. She wrote to me, not long after she had married. She sent the letter to my aunt who brought it to me. She clearly had much to say, for the packet of paper was thick. But I never read a word of it. To the dismay of my aunt, I simply threw the thing on the fire, unread, and shall never know what it was that Josephine wanted to say to me. And my aunt must have told Josephine.” He went on, staring out of the window as he spoke. “For I never received another letter from her. Josephine never tried to re-establish our connection ever again.”



“Your Grace, I am so very sorry.”



“But I do not deserve it, you see,” he said, finally turning to look at her. Even though there were several feet between them, she could see how his eyes shone with tears and dreaded that they might fall. “My sister despised me in the end, Miss Darrington, and I earned it.”



“Surely you cannot think that she despised you, Your Grace,” Georgette said, feeling herself extraordinarily emotional at the telling of the tale.



“How can I think anything but? When she was a child, Josephine turned to me for everything. And I so adored her,” he said with the faintest smile on his face. “Even as a young woman, she would always come to me. And then, in those last days of her life, she did not want me there. She did not send for me even though she knew she was dying. It is that you see, which I cannot get away from. And to know that it is all my fault does not help for a moment. Rather, it makes it worse because I can no longer think myself the victim in it all. My sister despised me in the end, Miss Darrington, and I can never forgive myself.” And with that, the single tear fell.