She rubbed her eyes, then glanced around for a clock. Midnight. They’d made good time. But where was Byrne? Did he mean not to share her bed while they were here? That didn’t seem likely of her lusty lover.
She surveyed the room more closely. Come to think of it, this didn’t look like a bedchamber prepared for the master’s imminent arrival. Though the fire was starting to warm it, the air was still chilly, and bore the musty smell of a room long in disuse. Most of all, it was far too pink to be his, with lacy pink draperies, a pink canopy and coverlet on the delicate bed, and even a pink-and-cream rug. Not a Byrne room at all.
So where was he? Leaving the bed, she went to the door and opened it onto the main hall for the bedchambers. When she heard low voices from a few doors down, she went in stocking feet to explore.
As she drew nearer the last bedchamber, she could make out Byrne speaking to someone. “So the doctor has seen her again? He’s sure she’s improved?”
Her? Who might that be? Her heart sinking, Christabel edged nearer, careful to stay out of sight of the doorway.
“Yes, sir,” said another voice. “I’m sorry that I sent for you.”
“I told Ada not to,” another voice complained, this one reedy and thin, though the tone somehow managed to be imperious. “It’s nothing but a piddling cold.”
“That’s what you always say, even when you’re coughing up blood,” Byrne replied in the mildly indulgent tone of a man dealing with an invalid. “Fortunately, Ada has known you long enough to ignore you, Mother.”
Christabel’s heart began to hammer in her chest. Byrne’s mother was alive? And living here on his estate? Dear Lord, she couldn’t believe it!
What about the fire? Mrs. Byrne was supposed to be dead! Why did he continue to let the world think that she’d died? Though this did explain why he came to Bath whenever he was summoned.
“I’ll be here until tomorrow, Ada,” Byrne continued, “but I’ll have to leave first thing in the morning. If you’re sure she’s all right.”
“Dr. Mays says that she is, sir, but you did tell me—”
“Yes, and you were right to send for me. Thank you, Ada, you may go on to bed now. I need to speak privately to my mother.”
“Very good, sir.”
The woman’s low murmur sent Christabel into a panic, but before she could even hide, the woman left the room and headed down the stairs away from where Christabel lurked in the shadows. She didn’t even see her.
Uttering a silent sigh, Christabel edged back toward the door.
Byrne was speaking again. “I brought someone with me on this visit, someone I’d like you to meet.”
“Another doctor? Please, Gavin, no more doctors. I’m doing better these days, no matter what Ada says, and Dr. Mays takes good care of me—”
“It’s not a doctor,” he broke in. “It’s a friend. A woman.”
“I see.” A long silence ensued. “So you’ve told her about me then.”
“Of course not. You vowed me to silence, and I’ve kept my vow until now.” When his mother said nothing, Byrne went on in a tight voice, “I’ve always abided by your wish to live in the country when I could make you more comfortable in town, and I know how you feel about meeting new people. But I’m asking you to make an exception for her. Please.”
A lump lodged in Christabel’s throat. She’d never heard Byrne use the word please to anyone.
“All right,” the woman rasped. “Before you leave in the morning, bring her to me, and I’ll speak to her.”
“I’ll do that, thank you.” His voice turned gruffer. “Now let’s see about making you more comfortable. This room is too damned cold. And your water jug is half-empty, too. I’ll call a servant to come fill it—”
That was all the warning Christabel had before Byrne came out the door and saw her. Caught in the act of being kind, he blinked at her like a fox startled by the hounds.
“Gavin?” his mother called out when he just stood there without summoning a servant. “What’s wrong?”
He let out a breath. Then a slow smile curved up his lips. “It appears you’ll be meeting my guest sooner rather than later, Mother.”
“I-I’m sorry,” Christabel stammered. “I didn’t mean to pry…I woke up, and you weren’t—”
“It’s all right.” He offered her his arm. “Come. Let me introduce you.”
Painfully aware of her rumpled gown and her lack of shoes, she touched a hand to her fallen hair, and said, “Oh, Byrne, I don’t know—”
“She won’t care about that, I promise you,” he said with a trace of irony. “Come on.”
Taking his arm, Christabel let him lead her into the room. A massive half-tester bed presided over the darkest corner of what must have once been the master bedchamber. Now it was a sickroom, the pungent odor of medicinal concoctions mingling with the sweet scent of freshly cut roses.
She couldn’t see much in the dimly lit room, but the furnishings appeared feminine—delicate Windsor chairs, an elegant dressing table, and drapes in pretty prints that were probably cheery in the morning with the sun pouring in through the two massive windows. The bed itself wasn’t cheery in the least, however, for its hangings draped its inhabitant in impenetrable shadows.
Byrne led her near it. “May I present my friend Christabel, the Marchioness of Haversham. Christabel, this is my mother, Sally Byrne.”
“Good evening, my lady,” his mother said in a taut whisper. “And where is your husband this fine night?”
“She’s a widow,” Byrne bit out.
Not sure what else to do, Christabel gave a little curtsy. “I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance, Mrs. Byrne.”
Apparently that amused his mother, for a reedy laugh sounded from the depths of the bed. “Are you indeed? Never thought to have a marchioness in my bedchamber claiming the pleasure of my acquaintance.” A gnarled hand emerged from the shadows, beckoning to her. “Come closer, dear. Let me look at you.”
Swallowing, Christabel approached the bed. She could now make out a small form practically swallowed up by the night. But though the face was hidden, the eyes reflected the candlelight to play over her with an insulting scrutiny.
“She’s a pretty one, I’ll grant you that,” Mrs. Byrne finally said. “But short.”
“Mother,” he warned, “be nice.”
“It’s all right,” Christabel put in wryly, “there are plenty of times when I find shortness to be a defect myself.”
The woman chuckled, then coughed. “I’m almost as short as you, so if it’s a defect, it’s one we share. Don’t know how I managed to produce anything as tall as that rascal standing next to you.”
Silence fell as they all thought the same thing: The prince was tall.
“Gavin,” his mother added, “would you go fill that water jug for me while I chat with your friend?”
“Why?” he demanded. “So you can pummel her with questions about her character and her family?”
“Don’t be impertinent, boy,” the woman declared, though her affection came through in every syllable. “You’re not too big that I can’t still rap your knuckles.”
That brought a reluctant smile to his lips. He turned to Christabel. “That was Mother’s favorite punishment—knuckle-rapping. It’s a miracle I can even hold a deck of cards.”
“Indeed it is, since I had to rap them often enough, you rapscallion,” his mother retorted. “Now go on, get that water.” She coughed. “I’m growing more parched by the moment. And I could use some of that good brown bread I had at supper, too. Fetch it for me from the kitchen, will you?”
Byrne eyed her askance, but released Christabel’s arm and headed for the door. Just as he reached it, however, his mother called out, “Don’t you dare stand outside listening. I want a full jug of water and a nice slab of bread and butter. If you don’t produce it in fifteen minutes, I’ll know you’ve been eavesdropping.”
Byrne cast Christabel a wry smile. “She knows me well.”
As soon as he was gone, his mother said, “Sit down, Lady Haversham.”
Her commanding tone with its faint hint of an Irish burr reminded Christabel so much of Byrne that she couldn’t help smiling as she took a seat in the chair nearest the bed.
“Now tell me,” Mrs. Byrne went on, “why is a woman of your station with my son?”
That wiped the smile off Christabel’s face. What was she to say? How much would Byrne want her to say?
She went on the offensive. “Why shouldn’t I be with him? He’s a charming man and a hard worker—”
“Not something most marchionesses admire.”
“I was a general’s daughter long before I was a marchioness. So I do happen to admire a man willing to work hard.”
Mrs. Byrne digested that a moment, coughing behind her hand. “But that doesn’t explain why you’re here with him when you could be moving in the highest levels of society.”
Oh, if the woman only knew. Christabel tried for the most innocuous answer. “Your son has been helping me regain something my late husband…er…lost through gambling.”
“So the marquess lost money at the Blue Swan, did he?”
“Yes, but that’s not—”
“And you mean to pay off the debt by sharing my son’s bed.”
“No!” Christabel jumped to her feet. “I would never share a man’s bed for money. And you insult your son by even implying that he would take advantage of a widow in such a scurrilous fashion.”
“True.” Those sharp eyes assessed her from the shadows. “So you aren’t sharing his bed.”
Christabel blushed, unsure how to tell a man’s mother that she was his mistress. “I…well…it’s just that…”
“You don’t have to answer. I can guess that much.” When Christabel groaned, she added in a dry rasp of a voice, “I’m not a fool, you know. I’ve heard about my son’s mistresses. Not from him, mind you—a man doesn’t tell his mother such things, after all. But there’s always the scandal rags, and Ada goes into Bath often to hear the gossip.”
Mrs. Byrne paused to cough. “The thing is, Gavin has never brought one of his women to meet me, never even asked to introduce one to me. Never, do you hear?”
Christabel wanted badly to take heart at that, but she didn’t dare. “I hate to disappoint you, but his bringing me here means nothing. He had no choice. He was forced into it.”
Mrs. Byrne surprised her by laughing. “Forced? Gavin? Have you ever known my son to be forced into anything?”
That gave Christabel pause. “No.”
“He brought you here because he wanted to, whether he admits it or not. So now I want to know why. What exactly do you mean to him?”
“I wish I knew,” Christabel answered woefully. “But I really have no idea.”
“Then tell me what he means to you.”
That brought Christabel up short. What did Byrne mean to her? Merely a way of getting invited to Lord Stokely’s party? Clearly not, since she’d started sharing his bed long after the invitation had arrived.
He was her lover, yes, but he meant more than that, more than she wanted. More than she feared he could ever reciprocate.
“I can’t answer that…either.” She couldn’t keep her voice from cracking.
“Do you love him?” Mrs. Byrne asked, her raspy tone substantially softer than before.
Christabel’s throat felt tight and raw. “If I do, I’m a fool. Because he will never love me back.”
“Nonsense.” She coughed a moment. “He fell in love with that idiot Anna, so how could he help falling in love with a sweet girl like you?”
She blinked. “But only a few minutes ago you implied—”
“I wanted to be sure of you, that’s all. I trust Gavin not to choose a fool, but he is still a man and susceptible to pretty women.”
“Not as susceptible as pretty women are to him,” Christabel muttered.
His mother laughed. “True, true. The man has a way with women, I’ll grant you. But none has ever touched his heart. If you mean to do it, then you should know some things about him.” She gestured toward the fireplace. “There’s a candle over there, dear. Light it and bring it here.”
Sucking in a breath, Christabel did as Mrs. Byrne asked. As she approached the bed, the light from the candle fell full on the woman.
Though she’d half expected to find such a thing, Mrs. Byrne’s face was so hideously disfigured that Christabel couldn’t keep a gasp from escaping her lips, though she then tried to mask it with a cough.
“Stop that silly coughing, girl,” the woman snapped. “I have a mirror—I know what I look like.”
“I’m sorry—” Christabel began.
“Don’t be. These burns are my badge of honor for saving my son. I wear them with pride.” Her scarred lips twisted into a half smile. “Most of the time, anyway.”
Now that she could see the woman better, Christabel was horrified at the pain Mrs. Byrne must have suffered to have such scars. Her ears were half-gone, and no hair grew on her scalp, which was simply a misshapen mass of healed flesh. “I heard that you were in a fire, but I cannot imagine how you managed to…”
“Live through it? That was hard, I’ll grant you, but I was determined not to die. I couldn’t leave Gavin with no one in the world.”
“Then why did you let everyone believe you dead?”
“It’s a long story.” The woman beckoned her to sit on the bed. Taking the candle from her, Mrs. Byrne set it on the bedside table. “You see, right after the fire, there was a great deal of confusion. After I carried Gavin out, I collapsed. He didn’t rouse for a few minutes, and by then I’d been taken off to St. Bartholomew’s with others from the fire. They told him I was dead—most of those who survived the fire did die later, and we were unrecognizable when they carried us to the hospital. Indeed, it took weeks for me to recover enough to be able to speak my name and ask about him.”
Mrs. Byrne took her hand, and now Christabel could see that it wasn’t gnarled with age but twisted from the fire. “By the time I could find out about him,” the woman continued, “he was living with a blackleg who’d taken him under his wing, and he was doing all right. I thought he’d be better off without a crippled and disfigured mother to support. So I ordered the people at the hospital not to say anything to him about me.”
“Then how—”
She gave a rueful smile. “The boy is too clever for his own good, that’s how. It was nearly a year before I could even leave St. Bartholomew’s. Then a widowed nurse there offered me a place to stay in her cottage in the country. She had a chance at a lucrative position as nurse to a fine lady, but she couldn’t bring her babe with her, so I agreed to be the child’s nursemaid.”
Her hand squeezed Christabel’s painfully. “But I couldn’t leave London without seeing my own dear boy. I didn’t mean for him to see me, too, truly I didn’t.” She coughed a moment. “I went to the races in a hooded cloak, and I stayed well out of his way to watch him work, my fine strong lad, running an E-O table as if he’d been born to it, coaxing the country bumpkins into betting.”
She shook her head. “Unfortunately, the races are a rough place for any woman, much less one like me, hobbling with a cane and dressed oddly. Some fool pulled down my hood to see what I looked like. You can imagine the reaction of those around me—a lot of silly screaming and such.” Tears welled in her eyes. “But my boy…he just came up and pulled the hood back in place. ‘There you go, miss,’ he said. ‘Don’t you pay attention to that lot of fools.’”
Christabel was crying by then, too, the tears falling heedlessly down her cheeks.
“I only said ‘Thank you, my boy.’ But it was enough for him to realize who I was, to put everything together. You should have seen the two of us then, hugging and laughing and carrying on. People thought we were mad.” She let go of Christabel’s hand to wipe at her eyes with the sheet. “Look at me—it’s been years, and it still turns me into a sniffling fool to reme
mber it.”
“That’s all right,” Christabel whispered. “Who wouldn’t cry over a story like that?” Drawing out her handkerchief, she dabbed at her own tears, then handed the square of linen to Mrs. Byrne.
Mrs. Byrne blew her nose. “Gavin would laugh at us for crying, you know.”
“Probably. Men don’t understand.” She waited until the woman had composed herself, then added, “So what happened then?”
“That’s when I made him swear not to tell anyone I was alive. I told him I would disappear, and he’d see me no more if he didn’t swear it. So he swore, the poor dear boy, and I went out to the country to live in Ada’s cottage—she was the nurse, you see. And Gavin stayed in town.”
“But why? You could have lived in town with him. You could have worn a wig and veil and gloves if people’s reaction to your appearance bothered you.”
She coughed into the handkerchief. “That’s not why I wanted us to live apart. It was hard enough for Gavin before the fire, hearing people call me ‘the Irish whore.’ I told him it didn’t matter as long as we both knew I wasn’t one, but it mattered to him as soon as he was old enough to understand it. He got into fights over it, constantly in trouble for defending my honor to shopkeepers and idiots in taverns who bloodied his nose for his trouble.”
Christabel gave the woman a half smile. “He is still rather…er…sensitive about the term.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. Only think how much worse it would have been if he’d had to hear people talk their nonsense about his mother being punished by fire for her sins. They said such things after they thought me dead, but once a person’s gone, gossip fades.” A cough wracked her. “If they’d known I was alive, he’d have had to hear it daily, to witness how people took my disfigurement, to endure the silly jokes about the ‘burned Mrs. Byrne.’”
At Christabel’s groan, she added, “You’ve heard it, too, haven’t you? People are cruel sometimes. And I knew he’d need every ounce of his strength and will to survive in London. If he were a man alone, rootless, free, he might do it, but if he had me to take care of—”
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