The lock proved to be frozen, the key useless, but a firm shove broke the bolt right out of the wall.

I walked into a dim, dust-coated interior. A carpet lay on the floor but so thick with grime that its original color was indiscernible.

I left footprints in the dust as I moved through the wide entrance hall and looked into rooms on either side of the corridor. I expected memories-good and bad-to come flooding at me, but this ruined house looked so different from what I'd left that it spoke to me not at all.

I vaguely remembered the fireplace in the dining room, where my father had leaned while he regaled my mother and me with his pompous lectures. The fireplace had been painted wood, but now the mantelpiece had fallen, exposing the brick behind it.

Bartholomew coughed and pulled out a handkerchief. I moved on to the next room, the library with windows looking over the back garden. The garden was nonexistent now, a stretch of weeds that ran down to join sapling trees at the bottom of the field.

In here, at least, I did feel the touch of my past. My father had beaten me bent over the desk so often, my face pressed into its wooden surface, that I remembered every swirl of the grain.

He'd beaten me for every sin, real and imagined. He'd been trying to make me obedient, and instead had made me rebellious. As I'd grown older, I'd started deliberately inviting the thrashings, because I'd realized that if Father were beating me, he wouldn't be beating my mother.

Memories were hell. As I stood in this room, I remembered why I'd been so keen to follow Aloysius Brandon and his young wife into the army, why I'd hurried to procure a wife of my own. My mother had died long before, and I'd wanted out of this existence, to get away, to find the world outside these walls, to live.

Well, I'd done that. And now here I was, twenty years older, injured, world-weary, far more cynical, and about to marry again. To a lady who'd have put my father in his place faster than a cat swats a sparrow out of the sky.