“Do you like it?” he asked again gently.
“Liking has nothing to do with it.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“No. No, of course not. The home is a charity. One doesn’t have to enjoy charity.”
He half smiled. “Then there is no shame in admitting you don’t like it.”
“I’ve never thought about it one way or the other. I like the children, naturally, and I do sometimes feel satisfied when we place one in a good position. I must enjoy it, mustn’t I? I’d be a monster if I didn’t.” She appealed to him, as if she couldn’t answer the question herself.
He shrugged. “It’s neither good nor bad—how you feel about the home and working there—it just is.”
“Well, then, of course I—”
“No,” he said sternly. “Tell me without lies or evasions.”
“I don’t lie!”
He smiled at her affectionately. “Oh, my little martyr, you lie every day, to yourself, I fear, most of all.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she whispered.
“Don’t you?” He gave up on the bindings for the moment; she seemed comfortable enough anyway. “You refuse to admit love for Mary Whitsun or even tiny Mary Hope—I’ve seen you refuse to touch the baby. You hold yourself back, deny yourself pleasure—unless pressed. You make yourself work at a hopeless job that is killing you, and all for some ridiculous sense of unworthiness. You are the most saintly woman I know, and yet you think yourself a sinner.”
Abruptly, white lines appeared around her mouth.
“Don’t you…” She gasped for breath. “Don’t you dare tell me I’m saintly. That I don’t know what sin is.”
She was truly angry; he could see that. She yanked wildly at her bonds.
“Explain,” he demanded.
“Let me go!”
“No.”
“You don’t know me!” she screamed. Her mouth was wide, and tears had started at her eyes. “I’m not good; I’m not a saint. I need to work at the home.”
He pressed his nose to hers. “Why?”
“Because it’s a good and true thing to do. It doesn’t matter a whit how I feel about it.”
“You’re doing penance, aren’t you?” he whispered.
She shook her head, red-faced, the tears running into her tangled hair. “I don’t deserve—”
He leaned close, capturing her face between his palms. “Tell me.”
She gasped, closing her eyes. “When my husband died… when Benjamin died…”
He waited patiently as she sobbed. He’d known that something was here. Had she not loved her husband? Perhaps even wished him dead? He was prepared for such mundane confessions, but not the one that came from her mouth.
“I was with another man.”
He blinked, so startled that he let her go. “Truly?”
She nodded jerkily. “He was… Well, it doesn’t matter who he was, but I let myself be seduced by him. I was at his rooms, with him carnally, at the exact moment Benjamin was run down by a brewer’s cart. I came home, trying to decide how I would keep my sin from him, and he was dead.” Her eyes suddenly flew open. “He was dead.”
He looked at her a moment, as a horrible realization began to form at the back of his mind. Abruptly he stood and went to his desk to find a penknife.
“How long had you known your lover?” he asked as he cut through the binds at her ankles.
“What?” She knit her brow in confusion. “Not long. It was the first time I’d been with him. What does it matter?”
He laughed shortly, but the sound was not amused. “It matters only in the irony, I suppose. The first time you sinned, you were punished overhard, I think.”
He cut her wrists free.
She stared at him. “Don’t you understand? This isn’t a simple wrong. It isn’t eating too many sweets or desiring another woman’s bonnet. I slept with a man not my husband. I committed adultery.”
He sighed, suddenly weary. “And you expect vilification from me for such a human failing.”
“It wasn’t a failing.” She sat up and wrapped herself in his coverlet. She was beautiful—he could see that in a dispassionate way—the most beautiful woman he’d ever known. “I betrayed my husband.”
“And yourself,” he said quietly.
She blinked. “Yes, and myself.”
“Sexual congress was your downfall,” he said. “Sexual congress with a man not your husband was the worst thing you’d ever done in your life.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
He closed his eyes for a moment, wishing irrationally that he hadn’t pressed her. “You’ll never forgive yourself, will you?”
“I…” She seemed taken aback by his unemotional articulation of her dilemma.
“Sexual congress is the most unpardonable sin to you,” he said. “And when you decided you needed to punish yourself, you used your worst sin.”
He opened his eyes and looked at her, so beautiful, so strong. Everything, he suddenly realized, that he would wish for in a woman, had he ever thought to wish, and he finally identified the emotion in his heart. Hurt. She’d hurt him as thoroughly as if she’d shoved an arrow through his chest.
“You’ve used me to punish yourself, haven’t you?”
He watched dawning realization spread over her face, a confirmation more positive than anything she could ever say, and that arrow twisted deep in his chest. Yet still he had to ask the last question.
“Am I anything to you but a punishment?”
Chapter Seventeen
Meg looked at the most powerful man in the kingdom. “Your Majesty, may I ask why you wish to know what love is?”
The king frowned. “I know what it is to face death in battle. I know about ruling a vast kingdom, about meting out justice and showing mercy, but despite all this, I do not know what love is. Can you tell me?”
Meg thought about his question as she ate. How was she to explain love to a king? At last she looked up and saw the king feeding a date to the little blue bird.
“Open the cage door,” she said….
—from King Lockedheart
“Punishment?” Temperance stared at Caire.
He was dressed while she was entirely nude. He’d not even removed his coat to make love to her. She felt at a terrible disadvantage. She’d just told him of her greatest shame—a thing she’d told no other person, not even Silence—and he’d accused her of… what?