She jerked away from him so violently, his hands were still outstretched as she retreated a few steps to the corner of the garden.
“Yes, we are different,” she insisted, her trembling intensifying again, but for an entirely different reason than before. “We are absolutely different.”
He stared at her, his head cocked to the side in almost doglike befuddlement.
“You avenged your sister’s death, and I do not think I condemn you for that. But I…” She clasped both her hands to her chest. “I did not. I’m innocent of any and all crimes but the one you and I perpetrated together in that garden.”
She wanted to cry again, but, it seemed, she’d been wrung out of tears. Now, all she had left was a raw and open wound where her heart used to reside, one that ached and stung with every breath. “The fact that you still think I’m guilty is more disappointing than the condemnation of every paper and person in the whole of the empire. Don’t you see?” She shook her head, knowing that, even now, her husband’s mind, his heart, was closed to her. “I could face all this, every last individual I know and love turning their backs on me, if I could only hope that you believed me.”
He stepped forward, reaching for her until she held up a hand against him.
“What I’m telling you, Prudence, is that it doesn’t matter what I believe,” he said fiercely, gesturing with fervent, sharp swipes of his hand. “It doesn’t matter what happened in that room, I’m taking your side. Come what may, you have every tool at my disposal, every cent to my name, and every ounce of my power, influence, and expertise. I will get you out of this, you have my word.”
“And I thank you for that, but does it not destroy you to do so? Should you not only take up my defense if I am worthy of it? You don’t know that I’m innocent.”
“And I don’t bloody care!” he roared. “I’m telling you, dammit, that I would do anything for you. Do you understand? I would take responsibility on my own shoulders if I thought it would help. I would bring back the bastard and kill him, myself. I would commit perjury for you, Prudence, hell I’m afraid I’d commit murder if you asked me—”
“But I wouldn’t. I. Would. Never!” She threw her arms up and turned away from him, pacing toward the fountain, wishing the sound of the water didn’t bring up memories of the night they’d met. “All I ask, is that you find out who killed George and clear my name.”
She felt him behind her, a looming shadow of conflicted torment. “Why are you angry?” he asked in a hoarse and ragged whisper.
“Because you don’t trust me,” she told the fountain, unable to look at him. “I’m sorry but you can’t imagine how frustrating that is.”
“Please,” he beseeched her. “Try to understand, Prudence. I want you. I…am fond of you. Christ, you’re the mother of my child and I believe we’re building something of a life here. But in my line of work, it matters not what you believe. It matters what you can prove. The feelings I have for you would already influence the outcome of any investigation, and that’s a liability I’ve decided to live with.”
“How altruistic of you.” With his every word, the wound in her heart began to stitch together. Not with a balming comfort, but with glacial sort of frigidity. She’d begun to erect her own fortifications, it seemed, so she didn’t bleed out entirely right here in the middle of the midday meal.
And still he went on. “Try to appreciate the chance I took becoming your spouse. A woman I’d met only once in a reckless encounter. One with a knife in her hand and the blood of her would-be husband soaking her. Had we never met before. Had we not…” He trailed away with a brutal noise. “I have to look at the evidence, Prudence, and when it’s all laid out in front of me, there is only one conclusion to be drawn from it.”
“That I’m a murderer.” She spun on him, her fists clenched at her sides. “Is that why you don’t sleep in my bed? Why you lock the door to your rooms and to the nursery? To keep yourself safe from me, your mad, murderer of a wife?”