Brandon ground out his cheroot. “Of course, I was conceived. Father was faithful to neither his wife nor his mistress. He was incapable of fidelity in any fashion. Because of my mother’s ill health, I was actually delivered before Parker. Hannah’s hopes of having both Belletraine and the folly for her son vanished.”
“What of Oliver Grant? Did he ever know that Parker was not his son?”
“Never,” he said heavily. “Though it was later known to most of the Tidewater. When Parker was four, Oliver died of smallpox and left Belletraine to his wife and only son. It was after Oliver’s death that Hannah began to visit the folly openly again, this time with Parker in hand. She came several times a year and stayed for a month or more at a time. My mother simply took to her room, feigning illness until Hannah was gone.”
“And what of you, Brandon?”
He shrugged, refusing to be drawn out. “I survived,” he said simply, as if it were unimportant.
Shannon knew differently. She imagined Brandon as a child, bewildered by his mother’s inaccessibility and his father’s indifference to it. Then her eyes were pulled to the man he had become. Perhaps survival was the correct word after all, she thought with sudden insight. He had emerged, if not unscathed, then with the ability to put his pain in perspective, as a thing not to be dwelled on. It did not rule his life. Shannon wondered if she might someday learn to say, “I survived.”
Brandon leaned back in his chair, stretching his legs in front of him. “Hannah’s arrangement with my father lasted until I was fifteen.” He laughed to himself, shaking his head. “But ‘hell hath no fury,’” he quoted softly, glancing at Shannon. “And, in my father’s case, there were any number of women he used and later scorned. Mother’s health was failing rapidly by then, but before she died, she made certain that Hannah found out about the other women—and their children. That these women were, in Hannah’s view, far beneath her merely added to the insult.
“Hannah’s revenge came out of the seeds she had sown years earlier when she first brought Parker to the folly. She encouraged him to believe that it was rightfully his. After she broke with my father she became even more insistent that Parker should not forget that William Fleming owed them something.
When my father died, his will made it clear that the folly was mine. In order to manage it while I went to school in England, I enlisted the aid of his bastard offspring. That incensed Hannah. She thought I should have given sole responsibility to Parker instead of offering him a share, as I had done with the others.
“Cody, for all intents, had become an orphan when his mother died in childbirth. I knew him better than Jake, who lived in Williamsburg, or Daniel and Steven, who grew up in Jamestown, and liked him infinitely better than Parker. He was born here, in the servants’ quarters, since his mother was a bondwoman, and was raised at the folly, although he was never acknowledged as anything but an errand boy. I brought him to live in the house proper along with the others. Hannah was predictably outraged.”
Shannon nodded, her mind racing ahead to what had to have occurred once Brandon left for England. “She must have caused a great deal of trouble while you were away,” she said.
“She did,” he agreed. “Or rather, she did it through Parker. None of that matters now. My other brothers kept everything together in spite of Parker’s deliberate attempts to mismanage the holding. He might have done real damage had he not had Belletraine to concern him. While I was gone he never spent more than a week here at a time. His visits were carefully calculated to promote confusion and dissension among the others. It is a credit to their character that he never really succeeded.”
“But when you returned, why did you allow Parker to continue to come here?”
“Because I believed I owed him something. If he had been my legitimate brother, part of the folly would have been his. It was not his fault he was my father’s bastard. I did not understand clearly then that Parker could never be satisfied with only part of the whole. His mother saw to it that Belletraine would never be enough for him. For me to offer even a portion of the folly was an insult that neither of them could easily forgive.”
“And Parker’s revenge was taking Aurora away.”
“Yes,” he said dully. “That was how he chose to get back at me. Parker met her during a party I arranged to celebrate my marriage and introduce Aurora to my friends. He did not stay long on that occasion because Hannah was ill. She died a short time later, and affairs at Belletraine kept him away. In the meantime Aurora had managed to alienate my brothers. One by one they began to express a desire to leave the folly. I settled money on each of them except Cody, whom I convinced to stay. When Parker visited again, he realized that most of his competition for the folly had vanished, and set his cap for Aurora. In her defense, I don’t think she ever held a chance of resisting Parker, even if she had wanted to.”
“Brandon! How can you say that? Surely it was her own choice.”
“You’ve never met Parker,” he said, mocking her vehemence.
“But surely—”
“You’ve never met Parker,” he repeated. “Poor Cody has borne the stigma for years of being almost the exact image of our father, but it is known to only a few of us that it is Parker who thinks and acts most like him. Parker is as thorough a rake as our father ever was. He is ruthless, without scruples, and powerfully manipulative. Like a wolf in the wild, he calculates weakness and preys upon it. And like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, his striking looks have stood him in good stead. He simply captivates most people, especially if they are female.”
“Then Aurora is to be pitied, Brandon. She was one of his victims.”
“She may have been a victim at first, but she eventually became his accomplice. I can pity what she was, not what she became. At one point she convinced me that a reconciliation was possible between us. I slept with her. Once. In the morning I could barely look at myself. I knew I didn’t love her anymore, and I did not touch her again. Six weeks later she informed me she was pregnant. Of course, the child was Parker’s.”
Shannon crossed the room to Brandon. She took the stool at his feet and sat on it, placing her hand on his thigh. “Did she tell you so?”
“Yes, then took pleasure in reminding me that Clara was not mine either. I had learned to love Clara, she said. Why then not love Parker’s child equally?” He shook his head as if to clear it. “The irony is that until Aurora actually became pregnant, I had no knowledge of her affair with Parker. It was conducted very discreetly. That was one of the conditions of our unsatisfactory arrangement. I still do not know precisely when it began, but I do know that as long as I had no knowledge of it, Parker could not have been happy. He would have only considered himself avenged once he had foisted his bastard child on me.”
Brandon took Shannon’s hand in his, rubbing his thumb across her palm in an absent gesture. “He could have had his way if Aurora had not miscarried. After that their affair was conducted more openly, not so others would suspect, but only that I would know. When he realized that I was not suitably humiliated, he convinced her to make a public declaration in front of neighbors and friends who had been invited here for a picnic. She left with him the next day. He found my weakness—my pride.”
Shannon knew better than to offer pity. It was what others had offered and precisely the thing he could not tolerate. Parker would have known that. “Where are they now? At Belletraine?”
“If they are, I should know it soon enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“This morning I gave a letter to one of the grooms to be delivered there. In it I informed Aurora of my intention to divorce her.”
Shannon could not sleep.She thumped her pillow and kicked restlessly at the covers, arranging and rearranging them. There would be no peace for her, she thought irritably, as long as she could not stop going over her argument with Brandon.
