Finn needed to hit something, someone. Hard. Over and over, until his knuckles bled, and his bones cracked, and the physical anguish would drown out the pain crushing his heart, the sorrow he heard reflected in her voice, felt in her slight trembling. He wasn’t even certain she was aware she was shaking, like a leaf struggling to remain tethered to a branch when the wind was determined to see a different outcome. He fought to keep his body from coiling with the need to strike out, so she wouldn’t be aware of the struggle within him. If her father weren’t dead, he’d have found a visitor in his rooms later that night.
Placing his hand against her cheek, he tucked her face into the hollow of his shoulder, his throat tightening as he felt the cool dampness left by her tears. “It wasn’t your shame, Vivi.” He bit down on his back teeth to keep himself from howling at the unfairness of it all. “Why didn’t you tell me? That night when we first crossed paths or when we spoke in the nuns’ kitchen?”
“I was ashamed. I didn’t want you to know how weak I’d been. Although that first night, I was still angry with you, thinking you’d left me. Later when you were no longer looking at me with hate, I couldn’t bear the thought of you doing so again.”
He hated now, hated himself for not being there for her, even if others had been responsible for keeping him away.
“I couldn’t stop her from taking it, and afterward I fell into such despair. I was in a lot of pain after the birthing. A midwife was on hand, but they had to send for a doctor. He gave me laudanum. It not only eased the aches in my body, but in my heart and my soul. So even after I healed physically, I continued to take it. For a year, more, I lived in a fog. Then one day Mother came into my bedchamber and told me she’d had quite enough. It was time for me to stop moping about and get on with my life. I asked her where my child was.
“‘If God is merciful, it’s dead,’ she said. And I went mad and slapped her. So hard, Finn, but it wasn’t enough to stop the terrible grief and the anger. That’s when I started packing to leave, but instead I was hauled off to the madhouse.”
“My God, Vivi.” He held her tighter, wanting to block out that for which he’d been responsible, in which he’d had a hand. He’d thought he could have her without consequences. He’d been a young man so full of himself, unwilling to recognize the differences between her place in the world and his.
“I thought I would go truly mad there. I told you what it was like. Then Father died, and she came for me because eyebrows would be raised if I wasn’t there to mourn. Mother blamed me for his passing, said my sins were responsible, laid his death at my feet. And I let her. So when I might have left, I stayed, striving to make up for the wickedness, determined to bring honor back to myself and my family. To uphold the contract my father had made, to marry Thornley. But as you’re well aware, I wasn’t strong enough to do that either.”
“Leaving took more courage than staying.” He turned her face up until he could look into her eyes. “My brave, brave girl.”
He kissed her temple, the corner of her eye, the tip of her nose.
Tears again welled. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of him... or her. The shade of his eyes. The color of her hair.” She shook her head slightly. “It never occurred to me they’d be so cruel as to take it, and then to hold their silence on the matter as though none of it had ever happened. Between the laudanum and the madhouse, so much time passed that I knew I would never find it, so all I could do was carry on.”
He didn’t know how she had survived any of it because the ache in his chest was such that he could barely draw in breath.
A knock on the door had them both giving a startled jump.
“Miss Kent?”
Vivi gave a huff of nervous laughter. “Meg. No doubt come to help me prepare for the day.”
“Tell her to come back. We’re not done here.”
With a little nod, she slid off his lap, adjusted the covers around her, and padded from the room. He almost followed. He didn’t want to lose sight of her ever again. Instead he shoved himself out of the chair and walked to the window, surprised to discover she wasn’t the only one who’d been trembling. So many emotions—anger, grief, hatred for what they’d done to her, to them, might have done to their child. Their child.
Looking out on the street, busy with wagons rolling by, carts being pushed, people strolling, children running, he seemed incapable of focusing on a single thing other than the fact that he had a child. A son or a daughter somewhere. It would be seven by now, if it still lived. How could he care so much for someone he had never met? And yet he did.
He heard the patter of feet, was aware of her coming to stand just behind him, felt the warmth from her skin radiating toward his. “Do you take children from baby farmers because you’re searching for ours?” he asked quietly.
“In a way, although I know it’s unrealistic to think I’d even recognize the child as ours. So if I saved him or her from an unhappy life, I probably wouldn’t even know, although it brings me comfort to think I might. However, all the children I’ve managed to rescue so far have been younger. Three or four in age. But even then, if the child is blond, like either of us, I think... perhaps he or she is ours.”
He caught sight of Robin strutting up the walk with a walking stick the Duke of Thornley had given him, decked out in the fine attire the same man had purchased for him, his dark hair flowing out from beneath his pint-sized beaver top hat. “My hair was darker when I was younger.”
Turning he faced her. “You know I’m going to confront your family.”
She nodded. “It’ll only increase your frustration. The person who knows the most, my father, is dead. I don’t think my brother even knows I gave birth. He was a young buck off gallivanting, sowing his wild oats, and they’d sent him to one of the distant estates to manage it for a while. My mother keeps her lips tightly sealed, knowing her silence is a punishment to me. So what will you do? Strike them? Threaten them? With what? Bodily harm?” She skimmed her hand down his arm. “That’s not you.”
“I have to do something, Vivi.”
“Then help me find more children who are in need of a better home.”
He didn’t want to find more children. He wanted to findhischild.
He’d left her then because he hadn’t known where to put all her revelations, how to categorize them, how to deal with them. Plus there was still much to see to in planning for the evening when they would introduce their club to the ladies of theton. Although at that particular moment, he couldn’t seem to work up any enthusiasm regarding the future of the establishment. He could barely work up any enthusiasm for properly dressing himself.
How had Vivi managed it all these years?
That hurt the most, imagining her going through it all alone. She’d been so young, had barely crossed over the threshold into womanhood, and she’d had to face so much responsibility, so much worry, so much unkindness from her family. What she would have endured from Society would have been much worse had anyone discovered her state. She’d had to set aside all she knew, her friends and acquaintances—
And then to have been locked away in an asylum. Even though she’d told him that part of her story the night they went to the festival, now that he knew the full extent of the agony she’d endured... it was all too bloody much!
