15. Chapter 15

CHAPTER 15

S ylvie’s skill on the pianoforte failed to entice Thomas into the library as Sylvie had hoped, and her friend was at her wit’s end in trying to seduce the earl.

Izzie had to give Sylvie credit—she had worked every angle she had to entice Thomas to look at her, speak with her, laugh with her. Hell, Izzie was in love with Sylvie herself, for the kind heart that she knew Sylvie possessed.

When Sylvie had pondered with her that maybe Thomas’s interests were not in the realm of females, Izzie had shared the fact about Thomas being celibate. That had only spurred Sylvie to work harder at enticing him. He was a man ready to explode, and Sylvie was determined to be the one to make it happen.

But in Izzie’s own mind, hidden away from Sylvie, was the possibility that Sylvie was not the one drawing Thomas’s eye, again and again.

It was her.

She’d assumed the many times she’d caught Thomas staring at her, it was mere curiosity on his part—trying to tease out where her feral ways had come from and how she’d made it in the world.

Except now she was rethinking every one of those times, debating about how he’d truly been looking at her.

Their latest plot was for Sylvie to be absent from dinner as a test to see if Thomas even noticed she was gone.

Much to Izzie’s discomfort, at twenty minutes into the meal, Thomas hadn’t made the slightest note of Sylvie’s absence, or even glanced at her empty chair at the table.

The table had been much quieter with Sylvie gone. Something Izzie both appreciated and was uneasy about. This wasn’t her forte, witty conversation at dinners, aiming to pull men into lively discussions. There was a reason she and Sylvie each had the role they did.

The meal thus far had been in silence. Even when she had mentioned Sylvie had taken ill and gone to bed with a dreadful headache, Thomas had only grunted in response, his attention focused on cutting up the beef tenderloin on his plate.

She’d seen him react more to her mentioning there was a raven on the sill of a window than to her mention of Sylvie.

Not even a courtesy inquiry of concern as to Sylvie’s health.

For as unsettled as she felt in thinking she had to fill the silence left by Sylvie with something—anything—or she wasn’t doing her job properly, she had to admit the silence was nice. Silence that was easy, even with the general sour disposition of Thomas hanging over the table.

More dinners like this would be nice. Without the tension in her body high, waiting to see if Thomas took Sylvie’s bait. If he would laugh with her. Stare into her eyes with more than just polite interest.

The truth was, Izzie didn’t want him to fall for Sylvie. But that was a part of her she needed to ignore, for she had a very specific job here at Ravenstone. And it wasn’t to pine after the earl.

She popped a bite of sweet potatoes into her mouth, dwelling on how awful a person she would be if she suggested Sylvie take ill to her bedroom more often.

“You don’t eat a lot.” Thomas’s sudden comment drew her attention up from the wine glass she had been staring at.

Her brow furrowed and she glanced at her plate. It was mostly empty. “I do.”

“I mean, you don’t eat a lot of meat. I have been trying to figure it out, why there was always food on your plate at the end of the meals. Especially with how slight you are and how you must have been hungry at times.”

Well…hell.

She squirmed in her chair. It would have been nice if he hadn’t noticed that.

She looked up at him, a smile on her face. “You have had Mrs. Havergrove filling the table so full, there is no way I can eat all that is served.”

“Yet you never eat the meat. It gets placed on your plate and you don’t eat it. I’ve been watching it for days.”

The smile on her face faded. “You are correct.”

“Is there a reason for that?” He popped a bite of the beef into his mouth. “It is rather delicious.”

Setting her fork down, she looked just to the left of Thomas’s head at the large tapestry depicting Bacchus and a number of cherub boys celebrating harvest that hung in the line of tapestries that warmed the stones of the great hall. Purchasing time, she picked up her wine glass and took a long sip.

“Well, is there?” Thomas asked.

“Is there what?”

“A reason.”

She held the glass to her lips, draining the contents. With the empty wine glass, her delay evaporated. Her bottom lip jutted upward as she glanced at him to find his hazel eyes ever watchful, ever digging into her. “There is.”

“What is it?” His question casual, not demanding, as he reached for the decanter of wine on the table, filling her glass as soon as she set it down.

Just conversation. He only wanted conversation.

She tried to calm herself, drawing a deep breath into her lungs, then reached for her refilled glass of wine to take another long sip of fortitude.

She could do this. Casual conversation, that was all he wanted. Stay as close to the truth as possible. That was always how she handled conversations. She couldn’t stop now. She could tell him this and it would fill the void. Anything to fill the void and to get his hawk eyes off of her.

She opened her mouth several times without words coming forth before she made actual sound.

Thomas waited, silent, his stare eating into her with what she guessed was his form of patience.

Best to just start. “My father, before he disappeared—died, I imagine, on some barren road, drunk into the grave—he was the cruelest bastard. My older brother hated him and left before I was five. My mother hated him and he constantly drove her away before she died. I was little, but I knew she was never in our home. Never. I don’t know where she lived. I just knew I would see her occasionally, when my father would drag her into our home by her hair. But she would leave again at the first opportunity she could. And she never acknowledged me. So that left me and my father, and I was the only object left for his cruelty.” She paused, her lips pursing.

“He forbade me to ever go into the town. But he would be gone for long stretches of time—sometimes months at a time—and I loved those times. I could visit Mrs. Dellcrane every day and I did. But then she died. It was during a stretch of time when my father was gone and I walked in and found her. Yet no one came to bury her.”

Her gaze dropped from Thomas to stare at the one spear of asparagus left on her plate next to the slice of beef she hadn’t touched. Not a minute and she’d already admitted to more than she’d intended. This story was definitely not light, casual conversation, and she wondered how she’d just ventured down this path.

Her fingers drifted to her fork, playing with the handle of it, not that she was going to pick it up. Her appetite had vanished, her stomach turning into a heavy lead ball. “For days, Mrs. Dellcrane’s body stayed there, slumped over in her chair by the fireplace, the herb pickings in her lap going to rot. I went every day, early in the morning until late at night, waiting for something—anything—to happen. And the lamb that she had gotten in exchange for some poultice sat by her side for days, baaing. I fretted, day after day, but no one came, so I finally dug a grave and buried her the best I could. Close to her cottage because her cottage was her favorite place in the world. Then I cried the tears over the mound of dirt that no one else would cry. And I brought the lamb home with me.”

She paused, her throat choking her words. It was a long time ago, but she never let herself think of those days. Those days when it had all gone so terribly wrong. But now that she was waist-deep into this story, there was no turning back, only trudging ahead.

That was Mrs. Dellcrane’s legacy, living through her. How to walk straight through hell because there was only one way out—one foot in front of the other.

“The lamb, I loved.” A sad smile came to her lips at the image in her mind of the lamb’s sweet snout, its huge eyes always searching her face as though it could see her soul. “My father was gone, so I brought it into our home and it slept with me, was my pillow when I had none, because by then, there was nothing left in our cottage. It had all been hauled away—sold, I imagine.”

Her eyes closed, her head tilting down. “The lamb would stay by my side constantly, as though it knew I needed something alive in this world to keep me waking up every day. It did, but it also woke me up to a hard existence. The thing was, with Mrs. Dellcrane gone, I had a lack of food. She’d always fed me—my father never did so.”

“Then?”

Her eyes opened at his voice, her stare going hard on the plate in front of her. “Then my father came back from wherever he was and he brought some food with him. Cheese that was rock hard and moldy bread, but it was something.” Her eyes glazed over.

“And?”

“And he saw how much I loved the lamb, even if it was inside the house. But he let it be. Didn’t make me keep it outside where it should be. For weeks he let it be, until he disappeared for another month. And I had peace. Just the two of us again—me and the lamb.”

Her fingers snatched away from the handle of the fork, curling across her belly. “I was fine for a few weeks. I’d emptied the cupboards at Mrs. Dellcrane’s cottage, scrounged the last of the flour from our larder and picked the weevils out of it. Added water and cooked it into mush. But then the food ran out. It was winter, so there was nothing to pick, nothing to find. And I began starving. Weeks, it took, the vicious pangs in my stomach keeping me up at night, not letting me sleep.”

Her voice drifted off, lost in the memory to the extent she could feel the jabs deep in her belly, like a blade was cutting through her.

“What happened?” Thomas’s voice was soft. Softer than she’d ever heard it.

Her look lifted to him. “My father reappeared one day, walking into our cottage and dropping a sack onto the floor. I went to it, desperate, so weak my hands were shaking, but there was no food inside of it, just a mess of filthy clothes. And I broke. I screamed at him—I had never dared to do that and I did. Even at that, I was pathetic, so weak as I screamed at him, furious that I was so hungry and he wouldn’t let me go to town to find food. He would never let me go to town—I didn’t even know where it was, how to get to it.”

Thomas winced, easily understanding how yelling at her father would go over.

She nodded. “He hit me. Hard. So hard I hit the floor and went to black. I don’t know how long I was unconscious for, but when I woke, my father was sitting on the one chair left in our home at our patched together table that had one leg missing, so it was wobbly and propped against the wall. He was eating. There was his plate and one plate for me.”

Her left finger lifted to touch the long scar on the side of her scalp above her ear, buried deep within her hair. “I was so groggy from the gash on my head, and so hungry that I crawled over to the table. I wasn’t able to stand right, so I just grabbed the plate and I sat on the floor and started eating the food without thinking anything of it.”

The wince hadn’t left Thomas face. If anything, the lines around his eyes had deepened, holding dark shadows.

“I was so hungry, it wasn’t until I had three bites left of the food—of the meat—that I’d realized what was missing in the room. My lamb. The one friend, the only thing I had in the world. I knew instantly what the taste of the meat had been. He’d killed my lamb, butchered it, and roasted it up for me because I was hungry and he was an evil bastard.”

Her eyes closed, her lips pulling inward as she drew in a deep breath, fending off any and all emotion so she didn’t wretch onto Thomas’s table like she had wanted to that day. Again and again and again until there was nothing left of her. Nothing left of her spirit.

And that was the wicked shame of it that would always cut her to the bone.

“The despicable part is that I wanted nothing more than to retch it all up. I shoved my finger down my throat again and again. But my body wouldn’t do it. It needed the meat so badly, it refused to give it up.” Her voice quivered, rough. “After that, I was never hungry. Ever. For anything. I eat because food is set in front of me, or I eat if I pass out. Those are the times I eat. And even at that, I have not been able to set meat to my tongue since that day.” She opened her eyes and looked to Thomas.

The wince had left his face, replaced with fury, his lips pulling tight as he seethed breaths in and out. She glanced downward and noticed his fingers had moved next to his plate, both of his hands gripping the side of the table, his knuckles turning white.

She’d ruined this.

Enraged him in some visceral way she didn’t quite understand. Turned this entire meal into a horror.

Because she’d told him something real of her. Real and painful and nothing he wanted to hear.

Her head bowed as she pushed back from the table. “My apologies. I did not mean…I did not mean to be so crass at the table and ruin your meal.”

Without looking at him, she scurried out of the dining hall, her feet not taking her upward to her room, but downward along the cool stones of the castle, down into the undercrofts.

Down to where the dank cold of the rock the castle was built into seeped inward. Down to the dark corner she’d found early in her days here when she had wandered about, committing every twist and turn of the castle to memory. She knew this would be the only place she could escape to where she wouldn’t be found—could be alone.

At the wall, she turned, her back pressing into the cold wet stone behind her as she sank onto her butt. Her elbows balanced on her upturned knees, her face sank down into her upper arms as she held the threatening sobs in.

The pain of the past always held at bay, accidently set free.

Pain that she took inward, rather than letting outward.

Right where it had to stay.