“Surely you are not serious.” Summer gaped at him. “My lord, you haven’t changed at all. Still thoughtlessly generous. I — ” She pressed her lips together and shook her head. “I cannot. You are married now, and even though you are parted … what would people think?”
She pulled the veil from her hair, crumpling it in her hands. “Please do not tease me with what I cannot have. I never knew you to be cruel in your generosity before.” Very quietly, she added, “I still have everything you ever gave me.”
“They’d think nothing, I give you work. Or do you want to live off your family the rest of your life?” he said. “Besides, I am the scandal of the whole of England, and France. And the Low Countries, for what they are worth. Nothing can make it worse, since when do we think of what other people think anyways? I am the duke of Gloucester, I shit on what the peasants think.” He shook his head annoyed, in his disbelief. He’s never been a patient man, but lately he had none of his previously thinly spread perseverance, he could not remain calm if he didn’t get what he wanted, immediately. Leaning back on the bench, his thoughts wandered away from convincing her. She mentioned his wife.
“You would like her, you know,” he said softly. “My wife, you would like her. She’s tough, I mean even for me. Yet you would not tell when you meet her. She’s like this carefree nonchalant little thing,” he said, pointing at a butterfly on the bush in front of them. “She cannot be tamed. If she could, I would have her here. But she could not and so she stayed in Ghent to wait until my tourney with that pompous clown of Burgundy, and now she is imprisoned for it.”
“Work,” she repeated, still in that low voice. He seemed to brighten when he spoke of his wife, and she hung suspended between jealousy and happiness. “Even if I don’t care what others say, I still cannot accept your offer. What would I do, in your silent castle? If you do not care what others think, what of your wife? What will she think, to come home and find your old mistress living there with you?”
He wanted to persuade her, she knew, though she wasn’t clear why. Couldn’t he see what a torment it would be for her? He had moved on, fallen in love elsewhere — she hadn’t. Stupidly. It hadn’t seemed so stupid until he had reappeared in her life. “Why aren’t you with her?”