He shot to his feet. “I hope I am nothing like my mother.” The words squeezed out like blood through a clenched fist, so tight was his jaw.
Eva blinked, gasping softly—a direct contrast to the storm raging outside and the one within him. “You sound as if you did not love her.”
Hah! How did one love someone he did not know? And yet love really had nothing to do with the strained relationship between him and his mother. “It is not that.”
“Then what is it?” Eva angled her head, the picture of a curious tot.
Suddenly far too warm, he stepped away from the question and the fire, pacing into the shadows of the empty room. How could he tell her, a woman of innocence and virtue? It seemed ungodly, somehow, to share such a naked wickedness with her.
“Bram? You need not be afraid of what I might think. As you have said, we are friends.”
Her words were a soothing balm. She was trustworthy—always had been, even as a girl. Were he to finally give voice to the dark side of his mother’s past, Eva was the only possible choice to whom he would speak of such things. He doubled back to her, hardly daring to believe he was even considering this. “I am afraid I shall need the same vow of secrecy you required of me.”
“Of course.” Her fine brows cinched tight. “I would not dream of sharing anything you tell me with anyone else. You have my word on it.”
“All right.” He sucked in a breath, retreating a step. Better to allow Eva some space to recoil or turn away altogether once she heard the full truth of his parentage. “Being a girl at the time, you may have been too young to notice such a thing, but my mother did not socialize with the other women in town. She did not join their clubs or go to teas. She could not, for they would have nothing to do with her despite her carefully crafted story. I am not sure why they did not believe her, for there was no proof otherwise, and yet I suppose a harlot’s ways can never fully be erased.”
Eva shed her blanket, folding it up as her nose scrunched. “What are you talking about?”
And here it was. The moment of truth. Once he crossed this threshold, there’d be no going back.
He stiffened like a condemned man awaiting a firing squad. “My youngest years were spent in a London brothel. The truth is, I was born out of wedlock, the whelp of any one of several men who had visited my mother. I have no memories of it—thankGod. I only know so because my Uncle Pendleton told me as much.”
Her lips parted. Closed. Parted again. A fish out of water. “I...” It was more a breath than a word. “I had no idea.”
“Of course not. Such a disgrace is better left in the shadows.” He rubbed the back of his neck, his fingers digging hard into the damp fabric of his collar.
“How did you come to be in Royston?”
“My mother struck it lucky—as she said, though I prefer to think of it as God’s providence—when a well-to-do toff took a fancy to her. He kept her as his mistress, giving her a steady income and the means to advance us to a flat of our own. I could not have been more than three years of age at the time.” Disgust twisted his gut into a knot. “When the man died, he left her a substantial amount of money, enough to allow her to move to Royston to live out the rest of her life. She concocted a story of having been married to a navy man who was lost at sea.”
Recollection dawned on her face as she set the blanket on the floor. “I do remember that. You always said your father sailed the seas and would one day return with a walrus tusk for you.”
“So I was told. So I believed.”
“Well, at least that wealthy gent did some sort of right by your mother in giving her money when he passed on.”
“That was not all he gave her.” Bram snorted. It couldn’t be helped. And now that he was this deep into dredging through the truth, he might as well scrape out the rest of it. “He gave her the pox as well—the slow kind that rots you from the inside. Much to my shame, and hers, my mother died of the French disease.”
Rage welled, hot and thick. What sort of man did such a thing? What sort of woman allowed him to? And what sort of misbegotten aberration must Eva think him? He hung his head. “So there you have it. Now that you know, perhaps youwould prefer if I sleep out in the barn with the horses. Is that what you want?”
He dared a peek at her. Her brow crinkled, not in judgment or contempt, leastwise not what he could detect as she stood with her back to the fire and her face in the shadows.
“It seems to me your situation is no different than mine,” she murmured.
“How can you possibly say that?”
“Like me, you have blamed yourself far too long for things you ought not.”
He flung his arms wide. “My mother was a strumpet, Eva. There is no getting around that.”
“Exactly. Your mother, not you. You did not have any more control over her behaviour than I did over my father’s melancholy. It was not you who caused her to take up such a lifestyle any more than I caused my mother to die or inflicted my sister’s blindness ... if, that is, I am to trust your earlier words of God’s sovereignty. Do you still stand behind that sentiment or not?”
He shook his head, hardly able to grasp that she extended such grace to him—the illegitimate child of an unknown father. “Unbelievable,” he breathed.
“What?”
“Any other woman would be aghast at what I just shared, and yet you—” His voice cracked, far too many emotions welling, and he cleared his throat. “You challenge me with the very hope I gave you.”
