Olivia’s brow lifted in surprise. The polished Right Honourable Jakob Radclyffe, Fifth Viscount St. Alban, wasn’t the sort of man she associated with smiles and jokes andmuddling through. He was a man who most would characterize as utterly serious himself, a man who shouldered the weight of his responsibilities, dutifully and honorably.
It was a quality she found most attractive. So many men in thetontook nothing seriously and frittered their lives away.Like Percy. At least, the Percy she’d known and married in London. She hadn’t the faintest idea of the sort of man he was now.
“I asked for her hand in marriage before the month was out,” Jake continued. “I wouldn’t return for another six months, as only two ships a year were allowed on the island, and I wanted to ensure that she would still be mine when I did.” The shake of his head was near imperceptible, but Olivia caught it. “Dr. Oelrichs nearly laughed me out of his house before shoving a tumbler of whiskey into my hand and asking me what I thought I knew about his daughter. ‘Maybe it will turn her head straight again.’ Those were his words, and that was it. Clemence came home to find herself an engaged woman.” He paused as if weighing his next words. “Later, I realized Dr. Oelrichs must have caught wind of Clemence’s activities.”
“What activities?”
“Clemence was in love, but not with me.”
“Then with whom?” Olivia asked impatient to know. She’d never been able to stop herself from racing to the end of a story.
“I sailed the next day,” he said, making it clear that he would tell his story in his own time, “confident and arrogant in my belief that Clemence may as well become accustomed to my long haul trips sooner rather than later. I made such a hash of it.” His mouth twisted in bitterness. “I’d been raised by a mother and aunts who bore the long absences of husbands as a natural part of life. I couldn’t imagine Clemence would be any different. Brash, young men can have surprisingly small imaginations.”
“I am well acquainted with the worldview of brash, young men,” Olivia inserted.
“When I returned, we took a moonlit stroll to the bridge where I’d first seen her. Very romantic until she told me that she’d fallen in love with another man while I was away and was now increasing.”
“Increasing? With another man’s child? How—”
“Devastating?”
Olivia nodded. She detected a shadow of that devastation in his voice fifteen years later.
“Mostly it was my pride that was devastated. And like any young man whose pride has taken a slicing, I lashed out. I demanded the man’s name, determined to exact satisfaction. Clemence laughed humorlessly and told me there would be no satisfaction for either of us.” He paused a beat. “A better man would have softened in that moment.”
Regret soaked into the air and weighed it down. The past could do that to a person. Yet Olivia detected another emotion, too. In his refusal to meet her eyes, she sensed shame. A shame he’d carried these last fifteen years.
“I pressed her for the name,” he continued, “until she told me that her lover was the younger son of a noble Japanese family, Kimura of Nagasaki. He was too powerful to touch. Then she asked for my help getting off the island before she started showing signs of the pregnancy. She knew I’d have no problem smuggling her onto my family’s ship.” He inhaled deeply. “I told her she could go to the devil and live with the consequences.”
Olivia gasped. “Oh, no.”
“My fiancée was with child, and not just any child, but a Japanese child.” His gaze, bitter, raw, shamed, met Olivia’s. “It was unbearable to me that the instant the child was born, the world,myworld, would know that I couldn’t be the father, that I was a cuckold. I won’t relate back to you the entirety of my words, but they were cruel. My overriding thought was that the world mustn’t know I was betrayed by her. I fled the night our cargo was offloaded and didn’t look back.”
“Then how did Mina become yours?”
“By the grace of whichever god you worship.” He swung his legs off the reclining chair and stood, tension coming off him in waves. “Six months later, one of my uncles fell ill with a malarial outbreak in Singapore. The company needed me to captain the ship the rest of the way to Dejima to offload the cargo. It was my first opportunity to captain a long-haul ship, and I couldn’t refuse. My first night back on the island, a note slipped under my door. Clemence wanted to see me. I would have ignored it but for a line that caught my eye,There isn’t much time.”
He strode to the edge of the roof, placed a hand on a low parapet, and peered down at the street below. He was half a world away and completely alone in his memories.
“I rushed to Dr. Oelrichs’ house, and still I was nearly too late. Clemence had contracted a childbirth fever.” He faced Olivia, his back propped against the low wall, catching her gaze with his tormented one. “I don’t remember ever having been afraid of anything in my life until that day, not the way Clemence brought the fear of God home to me. Fading before my eyes was a Clemence quite unlike the one I’d known. Or, I should say, the Clemence I thought I’d known. I hadn’t taken the time to truly know her, or to truly love her. Not the real her.”
Olivia wanted nothing more than to go to him. To lay some part of her body on his. To comfort him. Her feet, however, possessed more sense than her heart and refused to move.
“She begged me to take the child as my own. Neither her father nor the Kimura family would agree to take the babe.”
“Who wouldn’t make that promise to a dying woman?” Olivia interjected, unable to help herself. “Even if it was a lie?”
“Maybe they had. I don’t know. But Clemence understood the truth of the matter.”
Olivia’s hand found its way to her mouth as the horror of the dangerous and bleak future that had stretched before a motherless and fatherless Mina unfolded in her mind.
“Clemence died in the small hours of morning. I found a wet nurse willing to travel to Singapore, and we left Dejima within two days’ time. I let everyone believe Mina was my by-blow from a relationship with a Japanese servant, and, in the blink of an eye, I was the father of a beautiful, squawking baby girl.”
Olivia saw that the fact bewildered him to this day, but that it also enlivened him. Pride sounded in his voice, powerful and fierce.
“And that was the end of it until recently.”
Olivia’s head cocked to the side. “Until recently?”
