It was the last thing Gil had expected to hear, and he gazed at the other man in surprise for long moments, heat creeping up his neck, before he replied.
“I believed myself to be in love with someone else at the time, that is true. But I made my wedding vows, and I ought to have kept them. I intended to, when I made them. But things went…awry.”
“So it’s true what Rose says,” Davenport said. “You were unwilling.”
Gil shook his head. “I had a choice. It might not have been a choice I liked, but I could have said no.”
“So why did you agree?”
“My father—” Gil began, then he broke off again. His neckcloth suddenly felt too tight, and he raised a hand to tug at it. “My father lost everything to you.”
“Not Stanhope Abbey,” Davenport pointed out.
“Stanhope Abbey wasn’t able to support itself—not then, anyway. We needed the unentailed properties to shore it up. When my father lost those properties to you, he ruined himself.”
Davenport’s face was unreadable. “I see.”
“So I agreed to marry Rose.”
“And the girl—the one you loved?”
Gil frowned. Had he really loved Tilly? He supposed he must have, though the memory of that boyish admiration felt very different from the way he felt about Rose.
He shrugged. “I couldn’t have married her without the means to support her. Her father would have turned me away.” Strange to realise that thought brought him no pain or even the smallest stab of regret now.
Davenport sighed. “I assumed you were happy with the match. I would not—I hope I would not—have allowed the marriage to proceed had I known.” But he looked doubtful, that oddly familiar gaze of his troubled.
“What did my father tell you?”
“Merely that you were agreeable. I did not ask for more than that. I should have done so, of course. I was careless with Rose’s future, carried away with arranging such an illustrious match for her and eager to be off on my travels.” He passed a hand over his mouth, rubbing at his cheek with long fingers. “I’d wanted to travel since I was a boy and the thought of handing Rose over to a husband to look after was…heady.” He sighed heavily again, then looked at Gil, his gaze flat and grey, like flint. “I do not say this to absolve you of blame, you understand.”
“I don’t ask to be absolved. I deeply regret the way I have behaved toward Rose. It has been the besetting sin of my life.”
“Then what will you do to put it right?”
Gil stared into his glass of wine for a long time. “I would do anything in my power to put it right,” he said in a low voice. “But I cannot. I cannot give her what she deserves.”
“And what is that?”
“To go back and choose a better life than the one she got with me. To choose a husband who would treat her as she deserves to be treated.”
“But why can you not treat as she deserves?” This in an impatient tone.
Gil looked up from his wine. Davenport was leaning forward in his chair, waiting for Gil’s answer. He wore an expression of mingled confusion and irritation.
“I’m not going to impose myself on Rose again,” Gil replied. “She has suffered enough of my company these last months. The best I can do for her now is to leave her alone.”
Davenport stared at him for a long time, his expression unreadable, and Gil steadily gazed back. At last the older man shook his head. “I cannot believe what I am hearing,” he said. “Do you really believe that?”
“I know it,” Gil replied. “She made it very plain to me that she wished to leave me, and I will not ignore her wishes in this. The least I can do—”
“Has anyone ever told you that you are a fool, Stanhope?” Davenport interrupted.
“I beg your pardon?”
“A fool,” Davenport repeated succinctly.
Gil stiffened. “I do not believe I understand you.”
“Tell me this, and no more of this pokered-up attitude. Do you love my daughter?”
Gil stared at his father-in-law. At the man—or rather one of them—who had brought his disastrous marriage about. The man he had hated and resented for five years. The feelings he’d been bottling up for months seemed to swell inside him, forcing a confession to his lips he’d never uttered before.
“Of course I do,” he said hoarsely. “More than anything.”
There was an infinitesimal softening of Davenport’s expression. “Then go to her. Tell her. Ask to start again.”
“She does not want me to—”
“Just ask her. Have you asked her?”