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"I don't really sleep anymore," the Duchess eventually said after a long, strangely comfortable silence. He looked from his own untouched plate and stared at her for a while, occasionally taking a puff of smoke from the cigarette. He knew she knew how to read his usual quiet moments, and that she might have sensed his curiosity, maybe even a little hint of worry on his part when hearing about something as sinister and relatable as unpeaceful nights.
"I haven't for years, over a decade actually." She added as her voice grew a bit quieter than usual, "In Tbilissi, I sometimes had the habit of nodding off for almost a full hour in random chambers whenever my body absolutely needed to, but I never rest beyond that."
He kept staring, gauging her sincerity behind the thin little smoke cloud, and got caught off-guard by the realization that she was indeed telling the truth.
"You don't eat, you don't sleep…" he trailed off, with an echo of judgment in his tone that he of course knew to be hypocritical. She snickered, probably thinking the same thing, then pushed her full plate further away on the table with one delicate hand and took her glass wine in the other, right before sipping generously off it. He grabbed his whiskey glass and did the same.
"I've seen photographs of the shell-shocked men back in Georgia, then again when the British crown had given the priest and Isabella files from the War Office as information for the robbery. I guess you know whose files I read, among other soldiers."
He tensed up slightly, enough to know she noticed.
"Some of them have terrible, atrocious wounds, others look on the verge of collapsing even when the threat has long gone away. All of them have eyes that look beyond the camera lens."
He butt out his cigarette then took another sip. He didn't feel like sharing or justifying anything, his only instinct was to retaliate.
"And I've walked through numerous brothels neighbourhoods in Birmingham and London. There are women there who make their kids wait right outside the door when they work, with little to no sound isolation, when they're not putting on too much make-up powder on their skin to hide a disease they caught three weeks earlier from a new client. Regular, "respectable", women on the street were either wary or angry at me and my brothers and crossed the road to avoid us, the younger girls giggled freely when my brother John winked at them." He took yet another fakely smug puff of smoke,"But I noticed that the women in the brothels weren't afraid, curious, defensive, or the least bit infatuated. " He paused to fill up his glass" They didn't even look like they could process human emotions anymore."
She gave him an obviously fake, fronting smile. None of them knew which one had cut the other deeper, and none of them felt even remotely better after the exchange, on the contrary.
"Why can't you sleep?" He asked out of the blue.
She sighed and pecked lazily at her food, bringing only a small piece of potato to her lips. She then looked down at the rest without any will left to touch it. "You said it yourself, human emotions."
It was a very unusual behaviour on her part, her poise and class seemed to have worn out as she chewed some food she picked up with her bare hand like a peasant, like who he used to be just two decades ago. But at that moment she looked as natural and as absent-minded as the little boy he was back then.
He began daydreaming as well, his gaze wandered towards Grace's portrait that he hung in the dining room to help give himself some appetite when his own body begged him to feed himself. As if he knew, when looking at those caring eyes that his son's were a spitting image of, that he had to keep going.
She followed his gaze and ended up studying the painting too.
"You know, I didn't really hate your wife, it was more of a vague resentment."
He frowned at her, offended and confused, but she went on :
"I remember her from the foundraiser, on that cursed day. The British crown didn't let us have anything on her, so all I know-and knew at the time- what that she had a little child, she built projects such as orphanages, she smiled a lot and she loved, dearly. That's not the kind of life I was ever allowed to have."
- And what exactly stops you from gaining such a life?" He answered a bit more harshly than initially intended due to the mention of that evening that destroyed almost everything, which made him feel a bit guilty afterwards.
She sighed as tears came to her eyes, as it always did when mentioning Tbilissi. He never saw her cry fully, she didn't let him, but she couldn't keep everything at bay everytime, so she simply talked with watery eyes.
- Women like me don't have soft first kisses under a quiet tree, or make love for the first time with the boy our teenage minds tell us we could die for. In fact, do you want to know how my first time went, Mr. Shelby? In the bathroom of a family relative that my aunt had presented me to, a father of two boys my age, pressed so hard against the cold wall that my ribs kept hurting for days, a month after I turned thirteen. Two weeks later I bought my first gun, a revolver just like yours, a bit too easy to hide now yet too heavy for my little hands at the same time, and on the same evening, he was dead." She tried to smirk but only gave a sad grimace,"I remember wishing it had only been my ribs that hurt that badly."
He listened silently, thoughtfully. He saw how tight she held her cristal glass, how she forced herself to swallow yet another gulp of booze down her tensed throat.
"That's why people like us don't sleep, Mr. Shelby."