Page 50

“You seem to be handling it very well.”

“Yes, well, I’ve always known that this would be a part of my life, even if I wasn’t expecting it to happen when it did.” He shrugged. “It’s not such a dramatic thing when your whole life has been spent in preparation for the day you would assume a title.”

Amanda pressed her lips together. He seemed to be opening up. This wasn’t the time, and she knew it, but maybe now when they were surrounded by people, he would speak to her. She could see that he was trying to make her comfortable. Maybe that mattered enough to him that he would answer a question or two.

At any rate, he can’t walk away. Doing so would cause a scene, and I know he doesn’t want that.

“Sampson?” she began, her stomach fluttering with nerves.

“Yes?”

“When you thought about your future, when you were young…well, did you think about marriage? Was that always a part of the picture for you?”

“No,” he said quietly. “My parents did not have a happy marriage, and I always felt that…it would be better to stay well away from that sort of thing. It seemed to bring nothing but misery upon the both of them. My mother, particularly. My father was a difficult man, and he wasn’t kind to her, and I…well, I didn’t want to end up like him.”

She was quiet for a moment. He’d hinted around his complex relationship with his father before, and it was something she felt she could understand, at least somewhat. Her own relationship with her father had been equally difficult.

But that wasn’t at the heart of what she wanted to discuss right now. “You changed your mind, though,” she said. “And don’t mistake me—I’m glad you did. You’ve never been a cruel or difficult husband.” Well, perhaps difficult. But not in the way I think he means it.

“Then I haven’t brought misery upon you?” A small smile cracked his features.

“No,” she said, smiling back, though her heart still thrummed with nervous energy. “No, there’s been no misery. But perhaps…some confusion.”

“Confusion?”

“Well, it’s just that I can’t quite understand why you married me,” she explained. “It did seem to come out of nowhere.”

“But we’ve talked about this,” he said, frowning. “I told you my reason. George was a comrade of mine in the war, and he asked me to look after you.”

“That’s just it, though,” Amanda said slowly. “I find it…difficult to believe that that happened.”

“It did happen,” he insisted.

She sighed. “I didn’t want to push the matter, Sampson, but I know it didn’t. That’s not what George would have prioritized during wartime. I know he wanted me to be cared for, but also…I was an afterthought to him even on our wedding day. I told you that he had too much to drink and didn’t come to me that night. He married because society required it of him, not for love or desire. So, when you talk about him at war, constantly worrying about his poor wife back home…I don’t mean to call you a liar, but I do believe that to be a lie. I don’t think he was so preoccupied with me. And I don’t think he told you that he wanted you to marry me if you made it back and he didn’t.”

Sampson was quiet for a long moment, so long that Amanda began to regret having said anything at all. It had felt good, at first, to get these things off her chest, but now that she’d done it, she found herself wishing she hadn’t. The evening had been going so well up until now. Apart from the discomfort of knowing people were looking at her—and that was unavoidable—she couldn’t point to anything in particular that had gone wrong, and she’d begun to imagine that they might return home happily.

But that felt very far away all of a sudden. He wasn’t even looking at her. Her heart galloped, and she tried to think what might be the right thing to say to remedy the situation. To let him know that she had intended to be curious, but not accusatory.

He probably thinks I was calling him a liar.

I did sound like I was. I can understand why he’d think it.

She hadn’t just sounded like it. She knew that. The truth was that she had accused him of lying to her. And even though she regretted speaking up about it, she didn’t regret the idea.

She still thought it was true.

After a while, Sampson spoke again. “If you don’t think that what I told you is what really happened, what do you think?”

There was a new tension in his voice, a sort she’d never heard there before. She searched his gaze, trying to make sense of it. Was he offended? He almost seemed…anxious. Worried about something. But what did he have to worry about?

“I don’t know what happened,” she confessed. “I’m not saying I have some theory about it. Only that the story you told me doesn’t fit with what I knew of George, or with our relationship to one another. And I’m just saying that if there’s something more to it, you could tell me. I’d want to know. He was my husband, after all, and though we weren’t in love, I considered him my friend.”

“And is it so hard to believe that your friend might have wanted to provide for your future?”

“I can believe he’d have wanted it,” she said. “But the way you describe it, as if it was his only concern…no, that I can’t believe. It doesn’t feel true of the man I knew.”

Sampson said nothing.