Arnaud loosed a scoffing laugh. “You have granted me…? Is that what you call refusing to discuss something?” He strode across the space between them and gave Thad a push that would have sent a smaller man tumbling backward. “It is time you give me answers. Is this how you treated my wife, Thaddeus? How you convinced her to marry you while I was rotting in a louse-infested pit in Istanbul?”
Gwyneth staggered back as if she was the one he had shoved. What could he be talking about? Arnaud had been married to Marguerite. Thad’s wife had been Peggy.
Peggy—short for Margaret. Gwyneth tried to blink away the realization, but it still clouded her eyes. Had she not found it amusing that Captain Arnaud called his son Jacques while everyone else used the Anglicized version? Yet she had never once considered he was doing the same with his wife’s name.
She felt Thad’s gaze on her and refocused her own past the shock. Why did she feel betrayed? He had never lied to her about it, had never said anything to deliberately make her think Marguerite and Peggy were two different women—but he had certainly never explained it, either.
Still, there was no missing the hurt clouding his eyes as he looked again at his friend. “Alain, you had been gone two years. Dead.”
Arnaud held out his arms, needing no words to point out the lie.
But Thad shook his head. “Dead. Your crewman saw you struck down. You were gone. And you know well what that did to us all.”
His friend pivoted away, strode to the fireplace, and braced himself on the mantel. The clouds in her painting suddenly seemed darker, feeding off his inner storm. “Two years would not have been enough for her to grieve me.” His tone proved it, so heavy with mourning for his Marguerite that she must have felt the same.
Gwyneth’s gaze went again to Thad, whose Adam’s apple bobbed. “No. Nowhere near. But she was dying, Alain, and the money was gone. What was I to do? Leave her and Jack to starve?”
Arnaud speared him with a sharp glance and a quiver at the corners of his mouth. “You take them food.”
“To where?” He lifted his hands and let them fall again. “You know well she sold the house to buy medicine. They had no place to go. Your widow, the son you had never even met, would have been left to the streets.”
“My wife.” Slashing a hand through the air, Arnaud’s nostrils flared. “So you swoop in to play the hero as you must always do. As you are doing now, again, with another grieving woman.”
A second blow to her chest. Wishing she had a shawl to clutch around her, Gwyneth stumbled another step to the left.
Thad sent her a helpless look before turning it back to his friend. “It is not the same. Peggy needed someone to care for her. It was a matter of survival—”
“She was carrying your child when she died!”
That accusation ripped through the room like a bolt of lightning, making Gwyneth feel stranded in a tossing, tempest-ridden sea. Having no part in this, not really, yet trapped within it. And she shook her head. That was why no one would mention Peggy and the babe. Not because of Thad’s grief, but because of Arnaud’s.
A grief so very understandable. She took another step away from them. To come back from death, back from slavery, and find that one’s wife had died in one’s absence…as the wife of one’s closest friend. To find that the woman supposedly so ill she could not survive on her own had been with child…
The slight stoop of Thad’s shoulders hinted at the weight Arnaud’s words brought crushing down on him. “We believed you were not coming back. And we were left with whatever we could make of the pieces that truth brought upon us. She was my wife—”
“She was my wife!”
Thad sighed. “Please try to understand. Please. Every day I fell to my knees and prayed for her healing. Prayed the Lord would touch her and make her well. Because the only future I could see was the one that seemed true at the time—that you were dead, that she and Jack were all I had. And so my priority was not to guard your feelings. It was to try to forge a sound marriage, one that could grow strong when my prayers were answered. That was the only reality I had, Alain.”
A soul-rending cry tore from Arnaud’s lips as he flew across the room, heading straight for Thad.
Gwyneth spun away and darted out the door. She understood that Arnaud had long bottled up his feelings over this and they were now erupting. She understood she had been an unintended casualty from an issue too long ignored.
But understanding did nothing to hold together the shards of her heart.
She nearly collided with the elder Lanes, who stood in the hall a few steps from the door. Her face flaming again, she tried to hurry away.
Winter’s hand on her arm stayed her. “Gwyneth, I am sorry. You did not realize…and I never paused to consider you wouldn’t. I should have explained it to you.”