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“He didn’t tell you about himself? What he was doing at court?”

“Nay, he often talked about…me.” She looked away, as if she was embarrassed.

“Ah, the poetry,” he said, feeling grim, but trying not to show it.

“He could make one feel special,” she murmured.

“And when he was with you?” Though he hated hearing the details, he wanted everything in the open between them, so that he knew the memories he was up against. How else to change her opinion of him?

“He was often with my father, of course, but he never forgot about me, even if it was a smile as I crossed the room, or a song he sang dedicated to me.”

John didn’t like the dreamy sadness on her face—and he couldn’t sing. But he told himself that it was good that his brother paid attention to Elizabeth.

“You did not know these things about your brother?” she suddenly asked.

“We did not have a close bond.”

“I’ve already gathered that,” she said dryly.

“I was so much younger than him that I proved something of an embarrassment because I was small and⁠—”

“Plump?”

He shot her a startled look. “I was going to say awkward, but aye, I was that, too.”

“And William didn’t try to help you? He seemed so considerate of others.”

“He thought I should already be better than I was. He decided when I was fifteen that training me would be his mission in life.”

“Then he was trying to help,” she said brightly.

For just a moment, John saw true happiness on her face, instead of endless worry or the mask of her disguise. He wondered if she would ever smile like that for him.

Was Elizabeth right? Had William been trying to help in his own stupid way?

“So he worked with you every day?” she asked.

If he told her the truth, would she just think he was trying to make his brother look bad again?

“He did,” John said gravely. “And I was bloody and bruised every night.”

“He worked you hard.”

Too hard, John had always thought. But had he? Had John taken it all personally, because it was his brother? Were not other squires as beaten as he was? It had seemed so humiliating to him, and the fact that his father hadn’t stepped in and put a stop to it was the worst part.

“Mayhap…though I didn’t see it,” he began slowly, “they thought they were helping me.”

“They?”

“My father and my brother. After the humiliation of failing so often, I was glad to squire at my cousin’s home. In fact, maybe I trained hard there just to prove myself to my family.”

Something deep and troubling shifted inside him, and he didn’t know how to react. Suddenly Elizabeth’s knowing gaze was too personal. He was not yet ready to forget William’s last betrayals.

And here he was trying to clear William’s legacy between them, and this conversation had probably convinced her that she was right.

She faced forward again, saying with resignation, “William was a good man, who didn’t deserve to die young.”

John remained silent, considering.