Etta nodded.
“It’s not…it’s not such an easy thing to discuss,” he said, his low voice drowned out for a moment by the cracking of thunder. “For a time, I was blind to the real role I was playing. I told myself I wasn’t there as Julian’s servant, but as a brother; a friend and protector. I think he did see me as a confidant, but…I’m afraid I’ve too much pride. The realization that I was actually there to play valet festered in me. Made me resent him. Just before he died, I told him that I didn’t want to travel any longer—I wanted out of the trap of servitude again. Ironwood had promised me status if I returned to the arms of the family—promised me wonder, adventure, all the things that sound exciting to a boy of fourteen. But I was never given freedom. I was issued orders. I did not receive the full training, or the locations of all of the passages, you see—I wonder now if Ironwood feared I’d escape through them and somehow disappear.”
She did see. Cyrus was a masterful manipulator. He would probably have promised to lasso the moon and bring it down to Nicholas in order to get him to travel with Julian.
“I wanted to make those choices again. Build my own life, feel like I was at its helm again—the way I only felt with the Halls, when I sailed with the captain.”
“What did Julian say when you told him you wanted out?” she asked.
Nicholas was silent a long while. “He told me there was a contract I’d signed, and not a single drop of shared blood would compel any of the Ironwoods to break it. He said it was my purpose, one way or another; that it was the order of things. Terribly sorry, old chap, and all of that. I don’t believe he had a black heart in him; he’d only been poisoned with these justifications like all the rest of them.”
Etta itched to take his hand, but by the way his shoulders were bunched, she wasn’t sure he wanted to be touched.
“I realized my mistake. I had been planning to slip away from the family once we returned to the eighteenth century, to fall back into place in my own natural timeline, and I thought I might be able to, after we returned from…” He trailed off again. “Does Sophia still believe I let him fall?”
Etta winced, giving him his answer. “I told her that was impossible.”
“Is it?” he said, brushing a branch out of the way, “I don’t blame her. The whole family must have known I was desperate to escape my contract of service. Exile is a rather neat, if extreme, method of accomplishing just that. I’ve…I’ve even wondered if something in me let him fall, knowing what the consequences would be.”
She shook her head. “No. And, for what it’s worth, Sophia does recognize it was an accident.”
“But she does blame me,” he finished. “I blame myself. And I’m the fool, because in spite of everything, he was my brother. I never saw him as anything less, or cared for him less than Chase, who is my brother in everything but blood. And it clearly wasn’t the same for him.”
She tried to remember what Sophia had said—that Julian had insisted he and everyone else should think of Nicholas as his brother—but words must have meant very little when he clearly hadn’t demonstrated any of those feelings.
“That doesn’t make you a fool,” Etta huffed, wiping her sopping wet hair out of her face. “You deserve to be loved and treated with respect.”
If he heard her, Nicholas didn’t acknowledge it. He turned his face up to the rain for a moment, then continued forward in silence.
“I should have saved him,” he said after a long while. “When I came back to find that you’d gone…it brought me back to that moment on the mountain. It…gripped me and wouldn’t let me go, even after I saw that you were all right.”
A panic attack? she wondered. Or an echo of a terrible memory. That would explain the overreaction.
“All that’s left in the end is the certainty that I can’t protect you from every small thing, and it’s difficult to accept,” he said. “But I am truly very sorry for the things I said.”
“It drives me crazy to be treated like a child,” she told him. “I know that wasn’t your intention, and I know things are different in your time, but almost nothing gets my temper going faster.”
He nodded. “I know. It was irrational.”
Etta shrugged. “I’m no stranger to irrational thoughts, believe me. I spent the better half of my life secretly convinced I was a mistake my mom regretted bringing into the world, and that’s why she was so distant. Hardhearted and impossible to please. But I know it’s not true—when I was younger, she was…very different. And she’s given me everything I’ve ever needed.” Except, of course, for the truth about traveling. Etta looked over at him, meeting Nicholas’s gaze. “I’ve never told anyone that before. I’m not sure I’ve even let myself put that feeling into words before, even in my own head.”