“Never.”
She swallowed, gathering her courage. “It begins with my mother, whose tale is the typical one of woe that befalls any noblewoman who is thrust out into the world unexpectedly.”
Allie spoke quickly, breathlessly. She merely needed to get this story over with.
Ethan looked up at her with trusting open warmth, and she had to glance away before the tightness in her throat swelled enough to spill tears out her eyes.
He lifted a hand off the counterpane and touched her elbow. “Lass?”
Focusing on the candle beside the bed, she said, “As you likely already know, my mother received a divorce of bed and board from my father, effectively cutting all ties with the previous Duke of Kendall. It freed us from his cruelty and most likely saved my mother’s life. But it left us impoverished, as Kendall—true to his nature—refused to give a single additional farthing for our future support. Additionally, we were ordered not to correspond with Tristan. My mother agreed to my father’s terms because she assumed her family back in Italy would not leave us to starve. But in that, she greatly erred.”
Ethan watched her as she spoke, his brows drawing down, head tilting toward her on his pillow. His palm had moved from her elbow to rest against her hip. Allie could feel the heated press of each finger.
“Once we arrived in Venice,” she continued, “our staunchly Catholic Italian relatives shunned my mother as a divorced woman and refused all help. They insisted she must return to her husband, which of course, was impossible. After much pleading on my mother’s part, an aunt granted her the use of a smallpalazzoin the San Polosestieri. But even with a roof over our heads, there was no money. My mother was too proud to abandon the aristocratic lifestyle to which she had been raised. And so, she sold what jewelry she had, and that sustained us for a while. But eventually, she began to take lovers.”
By then, Allie had been old enough to understand what was going on behind her mother’s closed door at night. Old enough to know that her mother wasn’t always eager to welcome a gentleman into her bed but saw no other path.
The guilt still haunted Allie. That her mother had, in essence, prostituted herself in order to ensure Allie had food in her belly and new frocks in her wardrobe.
“Ah, lass.” Ethan’s hand flexed on her hip, the light from the single candle on the bedside table casting his features in soft shadows. The sheen in his eyes said he understood what she didn’t say. That he comprehended the desperate lot of a woman without the protection of a husband, brother, or father.
Allie looked away from his empathy. “My mother protected me as best she could. And to be clear, she didn’t take more than one lover at a time. She merely existed somewhere between a kept mistress and a courtesan. And I simply remained in the background, watching . . .”
“A quiet witness tae all she endured.” Apparently even copious amounts of whisky could not suppress Ethan Penn-Leith’s perceptive soul.
“Yes.” Allie bit her lip to stop its quivering.
She simply couldn’t say the rest. How at times the gentlemen her mother chose became violent. That Allie, more than once, had tended to her mother’s cuts and bruises.
During those dark years, Tristan’s vow became a guiding light. He would come for her; he had promised. And Allie’s trust in her twin was absolute.
At night, she would look up at the stars and imagine Tristan seeing the same constellations. She would reach a hand skyward, sending her love winging into the heavens and praying he would feel it.
During her longest days, she would replay his words over and over. He would find her. Allie simply had to survive until their twenty-first birthday when they reached their majority. Then, she could finally write him again. Then, he would be free to come join her.
Until that time, she merely had to see their mother through.
“My mother purchased her freedom from Kendall,” Allie continued, “but in a sense, she simply exchanged one man’s cruelty for that of many others. But as Mamma always pointed out, leaving Kendall allowed her a choice. She could decide which men to let into her life.”
“And that is why ye long for freedom of your own,” Ethan murmured. “Tae be free from men entirely. Kendall keeps ye captive. Like other men kept your mother, I ken.”
Yes, far too perceptive.
Allie refused to follow her mother’s path—blindly hoping that some man would solve her problems. No, Allie would never be so naively trusting.
“I thought you were drunk.” She dashed an irritated hand across her eyes, banishing away the emotion there.
“Your story sobers me.” Loosing her hip, he lifted a finger and caught an errant tear off her cheek. “Ye have said that your twin died in all tangible ways. When did Kendall stop being Tristan to ye?”
“After my mother’s death,” she whispered.
“When did your mother pass?”
“Six years ago, just after my twenty-first birthday.” She attempted to say the words woodenly, but a sob threatened. “A bout of cholera swept through Venice. I survived. She did not.”
“And Tristan?”
Allie’s chest heaved and a hiccup escaped—a pained keening for the twin she had lost.
