Harlequin Historical September 2021--Box Set 2 of 2

by Annie Burrows

  He gritted his teeth. He had to tell her. Confess. Because if she didn’t hear it from him, she’d eventually worm it out of someone.

  They’d reached the gate that led onto their land. The servants were well ahead of them, trampling down the trail they’d already worn through the long grass over the past week or so. He stopped walking, turned her to him, and gazed at her lovely face.

  One last time. He had to kiss her one last time, while she could still look at him with such...trust and openness in her beautiful blue eyes. For once he told her the truth about himself she’d never look at him in the same way again.

  He put all his heart into the kiss. Drank in her generous, trusting response to the man she’d married. The man she’d thought she’d married. The Earl of Bramhall.

  But he couldn’t put off the moment for ever.

  ‘The truth,’ he said, letting go of her, and turning away so that he wouldn’t have to see her shock, ‘is that the Fourth Earl was not my father.’

  ‘Not your father? What do you mean?’

  He ran his fingers through his hair. She was so...innocent. Had been brought up in such a...close-knit family, with such strait-laced parents, that she wasn’t going to be able to work it out from hints. He was going to have to explain every last sordid detail of it.

  ‘My mother conceived me at a time when it was impossible for the Fourth Earl to have fathered me.’

  ‘She...she had a lover?’

  ‘By all accounts, from that moment on she had numerous lovers.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Daisy. With no inflection in her voice that gave any clue as to what she might be thinking.

  ‘So I am a bastard.’

  ‘No...’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I mean, not technically. Your parents were married.’

  ‘Yes, but the man to whom she was married was most definitely not my father. And he never let me forget it!’

  She came up behind him and placed one hand on his back. ‘That was extremely bad form. On his part. I mean, if your parents had a...fashionable marriage, then he had no business exposing her...um, indiscretion.’

  He whirled round to look at her. Really look at her. He’d expected to see revulsion in her eyes. Withdrawal. But she just looked puzzled. A little cross perhaps. As she had every right to be.

  ‘They didn’t have a fashionable marriage in the sense you mean, where each partner takes lovers whenever they feel like it. It was a love match. Or so the story goes. My father was obsessed with my mother. To begin with.’

  She frowned. ‘So what went wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know. All I do know is that for some reason, during a spell when the Fourth Earl was away for an extended period on a mission abroad to some embassy or other, she took a lover. And the result was me. When he came back, he...’ Ben shook his head.

  ‘I always wondered why your parents appeared to be so neglectful of you,’ she said, placing her hand on his arm. ‘But it was wrong of them. Very wrong to take out their own sins on an innocent child.’

  He examined her face closely. She appeared to be in earnest. There was nothing false, or contrived, or strained about her expression. As though she really didn’t care about his parentage.

  His heart swelled up with love for her.

  ‘They weren’t so bad,’ he said. ‘The Fourth Earl just ignored me, for the most part, until my older brothers died...’

  ‘He made you eat in the kitchens, didn’t he?’ she blurted, looking outraged. ‘You told me you were used to eating with the servants. Now I can see why...’

  ‘No! He didn’t make me eat with the servants. But he was always going on about how my mother might have had an affair with some male member of staff for all he knew, because she refused to name my true father, and in spite of all his enquiries he could never discover that any strangers of rank had visited this area while he’d been away. Which made him dismiss all the male staff, eventually, so she couldn’t repeat the offence. After she died, he became so...abusive to me during the few times our paths crossed, like at mealtimes, for example, that I chose to eat in the kitchens with the servants since that seemed to be where I belonged when I was here. Which was as infrequently as possible...’

  ‘Oh, Ben. No wonder you spent so much time at the Priory. No wonder you became so fond of my own parents.’ She caught her lower lip between her teeth again. ‘I have always complained about them, and what I perceived to be their faults, but compared to your parents, mine were absolute paragons. I feel ashamed now for moaning about them so much. Or even at all.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ he said, running his hands up and down her arms to comfort her. ‘You weren’t to know... I hid it from everyone. As much as I could anyway. Especially from you. I never wanted you to find out I am a bastard. That I wasn’t fit to breathe the same air as you, let alone aspire to...well, when I didn’t have the excuse any longer of an injury making it acceptable for you to converse with me...’ he faltered, gathering courage to tell her the truth about the way he’d behaved all those years ago. ‘You see, when you came and sat with me and played cards, people knew it was your choice. But what right, what reason could I give for approaching you and spending time with you when I was fit again?’

  ‘You mean...it wasn’t because of the spots?’

  ‘Not only because of the spots. I’m sorry, Daisy, I used having them as an excuse to explain why I couldn’t just act as if we could be friends. Because I didn’t, even after we married, want you to learn of my deepest shame.’

  Her eyes flashed. ‘You have nothing to be ashamed of,’ she said hotly. ‘You were not responsible for how your mother behaved. Though...’ A faraway look came to her eyes. ‘Oh, well, now I understand the destruction your f... the Fourth Earl wrought in the Countess’s bedroom.’

  ‘Yes. He did that when she died. Then locked the doors and refused to let anyone go in and clear it.’

  ‘And...the rest of the house? When did he start to lay waste to the rest of it?’

  It was strange, but now that he’d started talking about it, it was something of a relief. She didn’t seem at all shocked by the discovery that she’d married a bastard. And once he’d got it all out in the open he wouldn’t need to worry about what she might be thinking of the state of the Park any more. He wouldn’t feel as if he was keeping secrets from her.

  ‘After both my older brothers, his true sons, died, he was beside himself with anger to know that it would all come to me. Particularly since he’d taken steps to make sure it wouldn’t. That is, he had hoped that buying me a commission and sending me into the army would bring a swift and hopefully brutal end to my existence.’ She gasped as though horror-struck. ‘Ironically, I soon felt more at home in the army than I ever had anywhere else. They accepted me on my merits, you see...’

  She flung her arms round him and hugged him tight. Pressed her face into his chest, dislodging her Sunday bonnet as she did so.

  He stroked her hair, which came straggling down in the process as he continued unburdening himself.

  ‘He was particularly devastated when Paul, who was his second son, died, because he’d tried so hard to shield him from every breeze that blew. He was a bit...delicate, you see. And so the Fourth Earl got him into university and procured a curacy for him so that he could live in comfort for the rest of his days, if he weren’t called upon to step into my older brother William’s shoes in the event something happened to him.

  ‘But within the space of five months first William was thrown from his horse and broke his neck, and then Paul took some fever from one of the poor parishioners he’d been visiting. And he saw that I, the despised bastard, the cuckoo in the nest, was going to inherit it all. Because legally there was nothing he could do by then. He’d never disowned me publicly because he was too humiliated by Mother’s adultery, or so he said. And he...took to the bottle.’

  ‘And burned all the books
in the library, ordered the furniture to be burnt...’

  ‘Gambled away what ready money there was and sold anything of value to fund that habit. All so that I would have nothing to inherit but debts and dilapidation.’

  She pulled away and looked into his face, her mouth pulled into a tight line.

  ‘He had nobody to blame but himself for any of it,’ she said vehemently. ‘He sounded as though he was extremely unstable. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that your mother had good reason to take a lover. He had probably been beastly to her. Well, it stands to reason, doesn’t it, if he could behave the way you told me to an innocent child. I mean, why didn’t he take her with him on this mission to some foreign embassy? If my father had been sent abroad on business for the Crown, he would have either taken Mother with him or refused to go.’

  ‘I have no idea, Daisy,’ he said, stroking the hair from her face, then setting the bonnet back on her head. ‘But it doesn’t alter the fact that I am a bastard, and everyone around here knows it. If they didn’t when I was a lad, they certainly did so after my brothers died. The Fourth Earl seems to have made sure of it. So that nobody would be in any doubt, when I returned to try and take over, that I have no right to do so. He must have done, or Miss Fairfax would not have been able to tell you so.’

  ‘Of course you have the right to inherit! Good grief, Ben, how many third or fourth sons of the aristocracy can honestly say they know who their real father is?’

  So she wasn’t as innocent as he’d first thought. Though how on earth she’d learned such things...

  ‘Well, perhaps so,’ he admitted. ‘But most of them can be certain that their father was a lord. Mine might have been a footman. A groom...’

  ‘It doesn’t alter the fact that your mother was a lady. Does it? Wasn’t she the granddaughter of the Duke of Cransley?’

  ‘She was...but how did you know that?’

  ‘Oh, well, Mother had the Peerage out the moment marriage with you was first discussed. Traced your antecedents on both sides. Not that the paternal side is relevant now. But the point is,’ she said, seizing his lapels and giving him a little shake, ‘that you are, indisputably, the great-grandson of a Duke. And, to be perfectly honest, now that you’ve told me all that stuff about the Fourth Earl, I’m jolly glad that none of his blood will run through the veins of any of our children. He sounds like a monster.’

  ‘He...’ All his life Ben had thought the same. But now he’d talked it all through, for the first time he was beginning to wonder if that was true. ‘He was not a monster,’ he suddenly perceived. ‘Just a very sad, disappointed man, who let anger and bitterness rule him at the end of his life. I can remember him being...jovial sometimes when I was very little. Oh, not with me but with my brothers. He was a good and protective father to them...’

  But now he was wondering how he would feel if Daisy were to take a lover and bear that man a child. Every time he looked at that child, he’d see the face of a man who’d taken Daisy to bed, and a pain would rip through him, a pain far worse than any physical injury he’d ever suffered on the battlefield. He just knew it.

  ‘I think he must have loved her very much at one time,’ he said. ‘Or he could not have acted with such rage when she played him false.’

  ‘We’ll never know,’ said Daisy pragmatically. ‘And, anyway, it doesn’t matter now, does it? We have our lives to live. Our marriage to tend to.’ She placed one hand on his cheek, his scarred cheek, and smiled at him. ‘But at least now that you’ve told me all that stuff about your conception I can understand you better. It must have been horrid growing up with all that hanging over you. I totally understand why you have never referred to the man as your father but always as the Fourth Earl. He didn’t deserve that you should think of him as your father.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Horrid. What an inadequate word to describe what Ben’s childhood had been like. Growing up in a family who not only told him he didn’t belong but actively hated him, by the sound of it.

  She tucked her arm through his as they began to make their way slowly back to the Park. At least her family were all fond of her, in their own ways. The fact that they hadn’t ever treated her the way she had wanted them to treat her was her problem, not theirs.

  Take her Season, for example.

  At the time she’d thought her brothers had been interfering and insensitive, and had done all the things they’d done to spoil any fun she might have had if they hadn’t been there. And ruin any chance she might have had to find romance, the way heroines in story books found it.

  But now that Ben had offered her a different perspective, she could see that they’d been trying to keep men they considered fortune-hunters at bay. Or men they had thought unworthy in other ways, too, she supposed. Gamblers, or libertines...all of her brothers despised men of that ilk, and would never wish her to end up married to that sort of man.

  So, whenever one of them had approached her, or looked as if they might, they’d pushed one of their friends forward so she wouldn’t even have to dance with anyone they considered unworthy. Every ball she’d attended they’d roped in a good handful of their friends, even though none of them really wanted to be there.

  Never, she would swear, had any young lady been so protected, in such an organised fashion by her older brothers. Because they all knew how badly young men could behave towards unprotected females, and they had no intention of letting anyone treat their Daisy with such disrespect.

  She almost groaned. Even the nickname of Daisy, the name she had hated for so long, showed that in their own way they considered her one of them. Because they’d all given each other rather derogatory nicknames. If they hadn’t cared about her, one way or the other, they wouldn’t have bothered at all, would they?

  Goodness, but all that thinking she’d been doing during the sermon had made her look at a lot of her past with fresh eyes. She could see now that she’d always wanted all her family to behave like characters in a book. But, of course, they hadn’t because they were real people, not fictional characters, who had moods that affected their behaviour, and motives to which she was not privy. For there was no narrator to spell it all out for her. Or there hadn’t been until Ben had opened her eyes. She glanced over at him.

  In the face of what Ben had gone through, she had never had any right to complain. Her father might have acted disappointed that she was a girl, and not expected anything of her but to marry well, but Ben’s father, or the man who had stood in the place of a father to him, had actively hated him. Hoped he would die rather than inherit.

  She squeezed his arm as hard as she could. But it wasn’t enough. She wanted to gather him to her bosom and rock him, the way she’d rock a child who was hurt. She wanted to weep for the poor, lonely, maltreated little boy who still lived deep inside Ben’s adult frame, always braced for a rebuff, never daring to hope anything good might come his way...

  No wonder he hadn’t trusted in the youthful friendship they’d started to form. No wonder he’d pulled away. He’d been taught that he was unworthy to associate with ‘decent, respectable’ people. And so he’d assumed she’d change her attitude to him if she ever found out about his parentage. Even once they were married he had only told her the full truth when he’d been backed into a corner. He’d even made up the excuse that he’d been sensitive about having spots rather than come clean.

  She stifled a sniff as a huge wave of emotion flooded through her.

  But could not walk one step further. She had to fling her arms round his waist.

  ‘Ben, oh, Ben, I’m so sorry,’ she breathed into his coat. ‘I wish there was something I could do... I feel so...inadequate.’

  ‘What? Tears?’ It was only when he brushed at her cheeks with her thumbs that she realised that, yes, she was crying.

  ‘You should have been loved as a boy,’ she told him. ‘Every child should be loved. N
o wonder you have always been so...quiet. So disinclined to laugh, the way other boys do. How I wish I’d been more...sensitive. Seen that you weren’t just grumpy but hurting...’

  ‘But you did, don’t you remember? That summer when I broke my collar bone and couldn’t join in with the others, you came to me every day and kept on at me until you’d lifted my spirits. You were so kind, so...playful, such good company. That...that was when I fell in love with you,’ he said.

  ‘You fell in love with me?’ He loved her? Had loved her all this time? ‘That summer?’

  He nodded, shifting from one foot to the other as though he was embarrassed to admit it. But he wasn’t denying it. Or trying to laugh it off, saying he’d spoken on the spur of the moment and hadn’t meant it really.

  Though, come to think of it, he had mentioned that his admiration for her had started then. Only she hadn’t thought that he was using the word admire in place of love.

  ‘Because I took the time to cheer you up?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Not because of...the way I look?’

  He shook his head.

  That meant a lot to her. To know that he had always looked beneath the surface, the surface that she’d been told was the only valuable thing about her, to see something lovable in her. But for once she was not going to put herself and her own feelings first. Well, it was about time, wasn’t it? She’d been selfish and spoiled for far too long. Ben needed to know that she could see beneath the outer layer of him as well. To his heart.

  ‘Ben, if you didn’t fall for me because of the way I look, surely you can believe that what I feel for you is not affected by the way you look either?’

  His face, which had been softening, closed up. Oh, how could she reach him? How could she make him believe that he was worthy of love? And then it struck her that she had a brilliant example she could use.

  ‘You can believe that my father loves my mother, can’t you? Even though he is always saying she is so plain and homely? Because she has a good heart.’