She came right inside and sat on the blanket he had spread earlier. She arranged a cushion behind her back, then took off her bonnet when she discovered that she could not lean her head back with it on. She set it down beside her. They sat across from each other, their knees drawn up, not quite touching.
“I thought you were with Maria,” he said.
“I was,” she told him. “One of the gardeners gave a large group of us a very interesting tour of the greenhouses. He knows everything there is to know about all the plants, including the countries from which they all came. Everyone went their own way after that. Maria’s Yorkshire aunts and uncles went off to sit in the summerhouse. I was going to suggest that Maria come here with me to relax for a while, but before I could say a word she decided to go after them and wanted me to go with her. She asked them about her mother and insisted upon the truth as they knew it. It was an uncomfortable conversation for them all, but I believe it is going to help enormously. I left them hugging one another and shedding tears.”
“Ah, reconciliation,” he said. “It is what I hoped for. Though there was always the chance the opposite would happen and they would all part forever after a bitter quarrel.”
“I do not believe that will happen now,” she said. “I believe Maria has discovered a family who will stick withher in the future. Poor thing. She loved her mother very dearly. But I think she is beginning to understand that the countess was not always perfect.”
He gazed at her while Captain nudged at his hand in the hope of being petted. Justin obliged him.
“I did not meet her,” Lady Estelle said, her eyes steady on his. “But I think she must have been an unpleasant woman. I cannot imagine any other mother refusing help from professional nurses who had been sent to her, no doubt at considerable expense, and insisting instead that she be tended exclusively by her very young daughter. Maria was barely nineteen when she died.”
What could he say? He chose to say nothing.
“I am sorry,” she said, smiling fleetingly. “It is none of my business—as usual. But I have interrupted your musings. I ought to leave you to them and continue my walk.”
“I made it your business, Lady Estelle,” he said, smoothing his hand along Captain’s back, “when I asked you to come here as a companion for my sister. I will say this much. I was badly hurt when my father remarried. Perhaps children always are under such circumstances, but—”
“No, not necessarily,” she said. “How old were you?”
“Thirteen,” he said.
“I was seventeen when my father married my stepmother,” she said. “There were complications in their courtship and they broke off their betrothal and went their separate ways. Bertrand and I had to work very hard to bring them back together and get them to marry each other on a Christmas Eve. We did it because it was obvious to us that they were painfully in love with each other, and because our father would never have been happy without her. And because his happiness mattered to us. I will always love my mother, though I have no consciousmemories of her. But I adore my stepmother. Children are notalwaysresentful of the second marriage of their surviving parent.”
“My father and mother were very close,” he said. “There was affection and laughter in the house when I was a child, and I was included in it. They made me feel that I was their most prized treasure. I thought my father would go insane after she died. I thought he would never be happy again. After three years he was just beginning to pull himself back from the brink. But when he went to London for the parliamentary session and came back with a... agirlnot quite five years older than me and announced that he would be marrying her within a month, I thought I must be in the middle of a bizarre sort of nightmare. I was biased against her, of course. I will admit that. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not understandwhyhe was doing it. Apart from the fact that she was extraordinarily lovely, that was. But it seemed so unlike my father to be bowled over byjustthat. It seemed to me that she lacked character and... and anything else that could possibly interest him. I was terribly hurt. We had been closer than ever since my mother’s death. He had promised to return from London just as soon as he possibly could. We were going to go to Cornwall, he to spend time with his sisters and brothers-in-law, I to frolic with the cousins. We had been planning it since Christmas. But... Well, I felt abandoned, forgotten, pushed aside for someone who was more important to him, though I could not for the life of me understand why. It hurts to lose faith in a parent you have always looked up to as perfect in every way.”
“The story Lady Maple told a few days ago about the first meeting of your father and stepmother was new to you?” she asked.
“Entirely,” he said. “But it explained... everything.” And he did meaneverything.Even the way it had all ended between him and his father. For before all else, his father had been an honorable man. An honorable man married a woman whose reputation he had compromised, even if he had been tricked into doing so. And an honorable man defended his wife at the expense of all else. Even his only son.
“Yes,” she said. “I suppose it did.” She moved as though she intended to rise.
“Stay awhile,” he said.
She settled back against her cushion.
She was wearing some perfume. Something floral. Gardenia? It was not a harsh scent, though, as many women’s perfumes were. It was soft and subtle. It seemed part of her. He had not consciously noticed it in the summerhouse or when he stood with her in one of the twin sitting rooms in the state apartments, but he must have done so unconsciously.
“When you were banished from here,” she said, “you did not take a fortune in jewels with you. Presumably you had nothing or next to nothing. You were gone for a number of years. Where did you go? What did you do?”
He had never mingled his worlds. Wes and Hilda had known nothing of his life here. They had not even known until he got word of his father’s death that he was heir to an earldom. All they had guessed was that he was a gentleman by birth, down on his luck. No one in this world, not even his aunt and uncle, knew about his other life. They knew only that he had survived and that three or four times a year he had gone to pick up the letters they had written or forwarded to him and had sent them a brief note to acknowledge their receipt. He had been thinking earlier of a plan that would bring his worlds together, but it had notyet taken definite shape in his mind and perhaps never would. It might be preferable to leave well enough alone.
Was he now to bring those two worlds together simply by answering the questions this woman had asked him? This woman who less than a week ago had refused his offer to make her his countess? This virtual stranger?
“I went,” he said. “I had a choice of four directions and infinite subdirections within each. I went west. I stayed at inns and ate at taverns for a week or so while reality set in. There was no going back home. Ever. Not while my father lived. There was no home. There was no replacement for the little money I had. There was no income.”
“You had no friends to go to?” she asked. “You would not—or could not—go to any of your relatives? There was no chance of genteel employment—perhaps in London?”
There had been possibilities. He had had a few friends who might have helped. His uncle Rowan would have recommended him to some employment suited to his education and background. His aunts and uncles in Cornwall would almost certainly have taken him in and pointed him in the right direction if he had told them he wished to earn his way. He had chosen instead to go his own road—quite literally.
“There was a matter of pride and some stubbornness,” he said. “And despite all the pain I was feeling, I had an image of myself as a young adventurer striding off into the world and into the future to make his fortune.”
“And did you succeed?” she asked.
“I made my future,” he said. “One really has no choice over that, short of ending it all. I never considered taking my life. I worked wherever I could, and pride—as well as necessity—led me to take anything I was offered. It was never anything even remotely attractive. The respect withwhich I had been treated as a matter of course for the first twenty-two years of my life meant nothing when I stepped out of my own... bubble. It was in fact a cause of ridicule at best, of vicious hostility at worst. I was considered good for nothing—and was told so. I swept out taverns and cleaned latrines. I fed pigs and mucked out their pens. I worked in a coal mine until there was a cave-in along one of the underground tunnels—I was in the other at the time. I worked on a dock, loading and unloading freight. I could go on and on. Some jobs lasted a few days, others a few weeks. I slept wherever I could, sometimes under a solid roof, sometimes in a barn or beneath a hedgerow. After two years I met the man who was to become my best friend.”
“The one who broke your nose,” she said.
