Maximilian was numb. Lisette had refused him. Thanks to his cruel words, he’d lost her.
He shouldn’t have called her mother a whore. He deeply regretted that. But damn it, he’d had a right to be angry. She thought him a pampered aristocrat, an arrogant arse who wouldn’t even admit to the vices of his family—vices that she and the others had drummed up out of some assertions from his lying madman of an uncle.
“You’re a bloody fool, you know,” came Victor’s voice across from him.
He stiffened. That was the last thing he needed right now—more idiocy from his cousin. “Thank you for your opinion, but at the moment I don’t want to hear anything from you. I believe I’ve heard enough today already.”
A long silence fell between them, punctuated only by Victor’s coughing. Then the man struggled to sit up, and Maximilian scowled at him. “Stop that. The doctor says you need to rest.”
“I don’t like being a damned invalid,” Victor grumbled, though he drew the blanket over his lap. “And you’re going to hear my opinion whether you like it or not, cousin.”
Maximilian scowled at him. “I’ve had just about enough of your disgusting insinuations about—”
“I wasn’t referring to that.” For the first time since they’d met, Victor looked distinctly uncomfortable. “I . . . er . . . shouldn’t have speculated on the relationship between your mother and my father. As you said, I didn’t know your family—I had no right to assume anything. Miss Bonnaud made that very clear.”
Maximilian froze. “Did she?”
“She gave us quite the lecture after you left the infirmary.” He coughed a bit, then got it under control. “She told us we ought to be ashamed of ourselves for saying things that served no purpose except to wound you. And she called us both ungrateful.”
“Both?” Maximilian said, surprised.
“Yes. Bonnaud got the worst of it. She thought he behaved badly, in light of what you said you’d do concerning the warrant against him.”
“I meant what I said,” Maximilian retorted. “As soon as I get you settled, I will see to having the charges against him dropped. I have to find out more about it and learn who’s the magistrate who swore out the warrant, but we should have time for that. Since he traveled under an alias, no alarms will be rung at customs. And I’m sure Lisette and Manton will find a place to keep him hidden in the meantime.”
Though he probably should have spoken with Manton about all that. He’d just been so . . . angry over the situation. He hadn’t been thinking about Bonnaud’s troubles.
“Tristan couldn’t really blame you if you chose not to help him,” Victor clipped out. “He didn’t actually find your brother, did he?”
Maximilian leveled him with a steady glance. “No, but he found a member of my family, and that is just as valuable to me. I haven’t had much of anyone until now.”
“Neither have I. That’s why I traveled here.” He raked back his disheveled hair. “Although Miss Bonnaud accused me of coming to England not to find my family, but to punish them.”
“Is that true?” Maximilian asked.
“Partly, I suppose.” His gaze turned resentful. “My mother died a few months after Father. She never recovered from the loss of both him and Peter. Even though she’d been told that he was just the result of some previous liaison of Father’s, she loved your brother like a son.”
“I’m sure she did,” Maximilian choked out. “But Peter had a mother who missed him desperately. Who died asking for him. What your father did was . . . unconscionable.”
“Yes, but what your father did in response was cruel, too. How could he have hidden the fact that Mother and I had family? His investigator gave her a pittance, which barely covered our debts in Gheel regarding my father’s care. And once Mother died, I had to use what little was left to bury her.” His voice hardened. “My fine relations could have shown some Christian charity and at least made sure she was taken care of, even if they didn’t want to acknowledge me.”
Maximilian stiffened. “I’m sorry. I agree that Father was wrong to do what he did. Though you can hardly blame him, considering that his son had been kidnapped by your father.”
“I had nothing to do with that!” Victor said hotly. He reined himself in and added, “Mother had nothing to do with that. We didn’t even know about it.”
“And I had nothing to do with Father cutting you off. I swear it.”
“Yes, I gathered as much.” With a sullen look, Victor crossed his arms over his chest. “But Mother was my father’s legitimate wife, no matter what you said about her.”
Maximilian winced, remembering his heated words. “Do you have any proof of that?”
“As a matter of fact, I do. I knew that would be asked of me, so I brought it with me.” Reaching into the satchel they’d placed in the coach with him, he pulled out an old piece of parchment and handed it over.
Maximilian examined it. Marriage lines, between Elizabeta Franke and Nigel Cale. He supposed the document could have been forged, but to do that Victor would have needed to know beforehand how significant it would prove to be, and he hadn’t, according to what Bonnaud had said.
“Father met Mother while the British Navy was in port in Ostend,” Victor explained. “She was a Belgian tavern wench, and he got her with child. So he married her.”
Taking the document from Maximilian, he restored it to his satchel. He breathed hard for a moment before continuing. “Now that I know he was a duke’s son, I realize that’s nothing short of miraculous, but Mother did always say he loved her. That was the reason he gave her for retiring from the navy—so he could be done with that life.”
“That may have been the truth. The war was halted at that point. Perhaps that was why he visited England—to set up a place for you and your mother. As a retired naval captain, he could have had a comfortable life here, assuming . . .” Maximilian mused a moment. “To reinstate himself in English society with a lowborn foreign wife, he would have needed Father and Mother to accept her into the family. Perhaps he mentioned to Father what sort of woman he’d married and Father refused to help him. So Uncle Nigel kidnapped Peter out of spite.”
Or perhaps Father refused to help him because he knew of Uncle Nigel’s affair with Mother.
The errant thought made him stiffen. That was not what had happened, damn it!
“Perhaps,” Victor said, obviously now wary of saying anything on the subject.
Maximilian should drop it, since it gave them both so much pain. But he couldn’t let it go. Not understanding why Peter had been taken had always gnawed at him, and he had to get to the bottom of it. “So after your father brought Peter back to Belgium, he enlisted in the British army. Right?”
Victor nodded. “He said he had to do his part for his country once the war was back on. Mother asked why he didn’t return to the navy, but he gave her some reason he couldn’t.”
“Well, he couldn’t go back to the navy because my family would have found him. And he couldn’t very well have been an officer anymore—he might have run into someone who knew him. He had to stay low. If he intended to remain in the military, he had no choice but to enlist.”
“He always said that fighting was all he knew how to do. So I suppose being in the army was the next best thing to being in the navy. And since he took all three of us with him to his postings, it was better than when he was at sea.”
“Did Peter . . .” Maximilian swallowed. “Could he remember his family from before? Or what happened when he was taken?”
“If he did, he never told me. You have to realize, I wasn’t yet four when he was brought home. I don’t even remember it. To me, he was always just . . . my big brother.” His voice grew choked. “Why do you think I kept his handkerchief all these years? Because it was his.”
“I had just turned four myself when he was taken, so I don’t remember him at all.” Maximilian felt the unfairness of it like a punch to the gut. He had all sorts of Peter’s things at Ma
rsbury House, but they meant nothing to him. “Tell me about my brother. What was he like?”
On the long journey from the dock to Mayfair, Victor regaled him with stories about Peter. It was bittersweet for Maximilian, hearing about his brother secondhand, but at least it kept his mind off of Victor’s speculations earlier.
Not to mention keeping his mind off Lisette.
They had already entered Mayfair and Victor had fallen silent, staring out the window at the grandeur they were passing, when he suddenly said, in a halting voice, “So your father went mad, too.”
Maximilian tensed. “Rather spectacularly, yes.”
“That’s a good way to put it. It nearly killed my mother to watch it.”
A lump caught in Maximilian’s throat. “Mine too.”
It dawned on him that not only had he found family now, but he’d found family who understood what he’d suffered. That meant a great deal. It meant that perhaps he’d also found a friend.
Depending on what his new cousin thought of him, that is. “You said earlier that I was a damned fool. You never said why.”
Victor turned a direct gaze on him. “I don’t know Miss Bonnaud very well, only what Tristan has told me about her, but I can tell she cares deeply for you. She defended you vigorously, even after what you’d said. And she seems like a woman who would stick with a man through thick and thin. Yet you left her there.”
His heart lurched in his chest. So she did still care. She didn’t think the worst of him.
And yet . . . “I offered her marriage. She refused.”
“Then you didn’t offer it right.”
Maximilian released a shuddering breath. “Actually, last night I had gotten her to agree to marry me, but this morning she reneged.”
“After what you said in the infirmary.”
He nodded. He couldn’t think of it now without loathing. “She told me that we both knew it was for the best if we parted ways. Which means she thinks it for the best that we part ways.”
And perhaps it was. Being married to Lisette would mean opening his heart to the knife, tearing down his walls, giving up his precisely ordered existence to a woman who always spoke her mind. If they dined with the king, she would probably inform His Majesty that he could use more exercise.
When that thought made Maximilian smile, he shook his head. Might as well admit it—he would give his right arm to see her speak her mind to King George. He would stand there with a glass of champagne in his hand, cheering her on and enjoying every minute. Then he would take her home and make love to her until the sun came up.
Images filled his mind—Lisette lying in bed in her frilly bedchamber, Lisette slipping off that nightdress . . . Lisette comforting him last night as he fell apart.
His pulse quickened in spite of everything. Being married to Lisette would also mean passion and light and love. It would mean the end of his solitary nights and lonely days. It would mean children.
For the first time since he’d met her, he thought about having children with her. Children who would banish the curse on his family line by growing up healthy and strong and beautiful . . . like their mother. Children who would populate the long-dead nursery, who would pick flowers in the massive gardens at Marsbury House and float miniature ships in the pond and—
“Damn it, she was wrong,” Maximilian bit out. “It is not for the best that we part. Not for either of us.”
Victor cast him a hard stare. “Did you tell her that?”
Maximilian thought back to the conversation, how he’d stood there protecting his heart and his dignity. How he’d walked away just as she’d finished telling her brother she had nothing to reproach him for.
Coward.
“No,” he said, regret hitting him like a blow to the chest.
“Ah.” Victor lifted an eyebrow. “Do you love her?”
“Yes.” Funny how he didn’t even have to think about it. He knew it bone-deep, just as he knew that marriage to Lisette would be wonderful.
“Did you tell her that?”
He groaned. He really had botched their parting, hadn’t he? “No.”
Victor snorted. “Well, there’s where you went wrong, cousin. I don’t know much about women, but I do know that telling a woman you love her—assuming that she loves you too—is the only way to gain her. Because if she believes you love her, she’ll follow you to the ends of the earth.” He shook his head. “Women are irrational like that.”
“Not Lisette. She’s perfectly rational.”
Then again, when he first met her she’d had some fool idea about wanting to become one of Dom’s agents. And it had been her idea for him to masquerade as a “regular person.” She’d been the one to throw herself into his bed full-bore because she couldn’t bear that he intended to spend his life in a “cold and loveless marriage.”
Come to think of it, the woman wasn’t rational at all. Or at least not when it came to him. So perhaps he did still have a chance with her.
If not for one thing.
“I called her mother a whore.” He choked down bile. “I really hurt her. And she didn’t deserve that.”
“If she loves you, she’ll find a way to forgive you. As long as you make it clear that you’re truly sorry.” Victor turned pensive. “No, that’s not enough. My father used to throw my mother’s low birth up at her whenever they argued, and then apologize after. It used to infuriate me.” He gave Max a long look. “You have to apologize and never do it again.”
“Trust me, I have no intention of repeating my mistake.”
They were pulling up in front of his palatial London town house now, but Victor merely cast it a quick glance before returning his gaze to Maximilian. “And speaking of calling people’s mothers ‘whores,’ I’m sorry about what I said, too. I didn’t mean to sully your mother’s memory.”
“Apology accepted,” Maximilian said tersely.
“I wasn’t just being cruel, though. I really did think that an affair between your mother and my father explained a great deal.” When Maximilian glared at him, he said quickly, “But obviously I was wrong.”
“Obviously,” Maximilian said as the carriage halted.
Nonetheless, long after he’d introduced Victor to the staff as his cousin and had got him situated and had greeted the doctor, Victor’s words lingered in his mind.
Maximilian hated to admit it, but it did explain a great deal. It explained those strange words of Father’s near the end. And the fact that Father had contracted syphilis despite never having been the whoring type.
It even explained Mother’s guilt, which he had never understood. Not that an affair would have given her reason to blame herself for the madness—she wouldn’t have thought there was any connection between syphilis and madness.
But it might have been as Lisette had hinted—Mother’s guilt over the affair and the resultant abduction had made her fiercely determined to make up for those things by nursing Father devotedly in his final days.
After Maximilian changed into clothes more befitting a duke, he stood staring out at the garden, his throat tight and his hands clenched. There was one person who might shed light on the subject—the Cale family physician. Assuming he was still alive, he would surely know if Mother had ever had syphilis . . . and more important, when she and Father had contracted it.
So before Maximilian went courting, it might be good to have all the facts straight in his mind.
It took him only a few hours to hunt the man down. The doctor was nearly ninety and his memory faulty, but he had kept copious notes on his patients, and he was perfectly happy to show them to the man whose family had practically made him rich.
And there, buried in the notes, was a reference to Mother’s bout of the “pox”—almost exactly nine months before Peter’s birth. Then Max went through the rest and found the notation of the first signs that Father had the “pox.” It had apparently been more virulent than Mother’s. And it had come after Mother’s.
He left
the doctor’s home in a turmoil of emotion. All these years, he’d had everything wrong. He had planned every detail of his future, basing it on a monumental lie. Perhaps it was time he stopped trying to predict the future. Perhaps it was time he embraced the present.
Or rather, perhaps it was time he embraced the one woman who made the present livable. The one woman who’d never wavered in her faith in him.
The only woman he could ever love.
Victor was right—he was a damned fool if he didn’t at least attempt to convince her to marry him, no matter what she thought was “best” for both of them.
With that decision made, he headed off for Manton’s Investigations. When he arrived there, the place looked eerily quiet. Odd—it was only eight o’clock.
He knocked at the door. When no one answered, he kept knocking louder until the door opened. Manton’s odd butler stood there glaring at him while tying on a voluminous cloak.
“Would you inform your mistress that I wish to speak with her?” Maximilian said.
“You certainly took your sweet time getting here, didn’t you, Your Grace?”
Maximilian blinked. “What are you talking about?”
“Miss Bonnaud sent a desperate message to you hours ago.”
His heart leaped. She’d changed her mind? She’d actually asked him to come to her? “I haven’t been home for hours. So if you’d just announce me—”
“She’s not here,” Mr. Shaw said with a sniff, obviously not yet ready to forgive him for his negligence, “and I am late for rehearsal.”
As the butler hurried down the front steps, Maximilian kept pace with him. “Where is she?”
“Not that it’s any of your concern, Your Grace, but after she and Mr. Manton tried unsuccessfully to get Mr. Bonnaud out of gaol—”
“What the devil? How did he end up there?”
Shaw eyed him askance. “Rathmoor had him seized before they could even leave the ship. Apparently Mr. Manton unknowingly led him there, since that scoundrel Mr. Hucker intercepted a note from Miss Bonnaud that was supposed to warn Mr. Manton off. It seems Mr. Hucker has been watching the place.”
The Duke's Men [1] What the Duke Desires Page 27