‘I have no idea where you reside, and it’s none of my affair. But I live in St James’s Square, and I have a notion we are not neighbours. There’s no need to find a pretext to follow me – I would have told you my direction if you’d asked. And it seems to me you could find out easily enough, anyway, given what you’ve said of your connections.’
He could tell that the old man was smiling. ‘It was your father’s house?’
‘My adoptive father, yes. I have no idea who my real father was. I’m a bastard.’
‘Like me, you are too polite to say. For my part, I knew my father. I lived on his estate when I was young, as his bound serf, and saw it pass to my legitimate half-brother when he died. It was no great privilege to know them – I might have wished I didn’t. Despite their noble standing, they wererealbastards, both of them, and their women were wicked, cruel creatures too. I hope they’re all burning in hell, assuming there is one. Have you ever tried to find your father?’
‘I have no reason to believe he’s ever set foot in England, or even left Martinique. Where would I start? He could have been dead these twenty years for all I know.’
‘I’ll take that as a yes. And your mother?’
Steadynow,Max. ‘She abandoned me when I was a baby. Look at me – I was her shame. I know nothing of her and care less.’
‘That’s the first outright lie you’ve told me. But it is, as you say, none of my affair, since you are not going to marry my granddaughter. That is your loss, you realise.’
‘Please believe that I know it. I wish it could be otherwise… but talking pays no toll.’
They were almost at St James’s now, and with a brief word of farewell Schiavi turned to leave him, setting his face in the direction of the park. Perhaps he was going to Buckingham House, to have an early dish of chocolate with Queen Charlotte. Max could believe him capable of almost anything. ‘How will I know what you have found out?’ Max asked the old man before he passed out of earshot.
‘I shall get word to you,’ was the insouciant reply over one dusty velvet shoulder. Mr Severin shook his head, and made his weary way up the steps to his own door. It had been a long night.
34
Allegra lay in bed, knowing she would have to get up for breakfast soon and wishing there was some way she could avoid it, avoid her mother, avoid everybody. She knew that her countenance was not formed in such a way that deception came easily to her; she’d somehow managed to conceal her own guilty secret over these past weeks, hugging it to herself with surprising effectiveness, but the things she now knew and must not tell were so much bigger. If she and her mother started exchanging furtive, conspiratorial glances over the teacups and toast, Cecilia or Bea would be bound to notice. She wriggled lower down in her bed and groaned aloud.
She could only be grateful that Mr Severin had accompanied her home last night, even if it had been excruciatingly embarrassing to be caught out so comprehensively with him. If she’d been alone, she’d still have been pressurised to reveal where she’d been at such an hour, and would have had to do so eventually. But more than once during that extraordinary conversation in the dark little kitchen, she had been aware of him shieldingher – jumping in and laying himself open to stinging criticism in order to give her a moment to think, or to deflect her mother’s anger onto himself instead of her. She must be aware that the confrontation would have gone much harder if he had not been there. More than that, he’d forced her mama into an open admission of guilt when her daughter, battling at a disadvantage as a daughter always must, probably could not have done so. And because of this, Leontina had even appeared to accept that if Allegra deserved censure for her careless recent actions, she too could not hope to escape criticism for a larger-scale deception that stretched back more than twenty years. So, they were at stalemate now, she and her mama. And since they were obliged to live together and keep all these disreputable secrets from everyone else in the household, including her little sisters, inquisitive as a barrel of monkeys, perhaps this was just as well.
She did not know how she was supposed to feel about any number of things. In the forefront of her mind was this: he’d told her, more than once, that he wished he could marry her. That he longed to. Maybe it was foolish to believe him, maybe they were just empty words as her mother had said, but she found she did. If she could trust herself to any degree at all, he was a man in distress, and had been before he’d ever met her. His bold words about pleasure and freedom might have been true as far as they went, but they concealed a disillusionment with life that ran deep and had causes she couldn’t begin to guess at. And despite all this, and much unlike her other proposals – not that this was a proposal, but rather the opposite, an anti-proposal – his declaration gave her a warm feeling. He cared for her. Even without his words, his selfless actions last night had shown as much. Though to be comforted by this was folly too, even if every word he spoke was indeed genuine, because he had made it horribly clear thathecouldnotmarry her, there was not the least possibility of that whatever else happened, so they were no further on.
Did shewantto marry him? At some level, obviously, yes – more than Sir Harry, more than Lord Milton, whose suit she’d almost forgotten about till now. But that was not to say very much, after all. She was not drawn to either of them; they both came with grave disadvantages. It could hardly be surprising if Mr Severin, with whom she shared a dangerous spark of attraction, and whom she knew to be a considerate and exciting lover, appealed to her more. He was… attuned to her somehow; they talked. They fitted together, and it was not, she thought, a purely physical connection. He told her painful truths if she asked him to. Hesawher. Even though in some ways she knew very little about him, it was possible to imagine a life with him, time spent together, experiences and feelings, passion but laughter too, a hopeful, happy future, which with her other suitors seemed an impossibility.
Best to stop there, perhaps. Best to leave her deeper feelings for him unexamined. Somewhere in the stuffy little bedchamber, she thought, was a girl who could easily turn over, bury her face in her warm pillow and weep inconsolably at the thought that she had nearly found a deep connection, nearly found love, so precious and so rare, only to lose it for reasons she didn’t fully understand. She, Allegra Constantine, did not want to be that girl. Not this morning. She had no leisure to break down.
Her head was whirling, and she was dealing with shocking new information whichever way she turned. She had met her grandfather now, heard his story. To be told that everything she’d thought she knew about her mother’s past was a lie was almost the least part of it – something that she would also have to consider when she had more space to do so. It seemed as thoughthe only chance of escaping this mess they all found themselves in lay with him, the man whom she had supposed dead all her life. Her mother had been meeting him in secret all these years and plainly trusted him utterly; Allegra could understand how that might be so, because even on the evidence of a brief encounter he seemed solid, reassuring, with the wisdom of age and yet also the physical and mental strength of a much younger man. He was also fiercely committed to his family’s welfare – even to the protection of those members who didn’t so much as suspect his existence. But he was still a stranger on whom she was placing all her dependence, and if he could not help them, it seemed they were lost.
One decision had crystallised firmly in her mind, at least, as she’d lain here – she could not marry Lord Milton. Even if her family secrets could somehow be kept hidden now, and disaster avoided, there was no guarantee at all that exposure might not suddenly rip them open to the world at some point in the unknowable future. It was a sword of Damocles hanging over her head, waiting to fall and tear her life to pieces. Lady Milton’s horrified reaction if it ever did was all too easy to imagine, and her son’s – despite his own secrets that should by rights make him more tolerant – would surely be little better. They might have a child by then, or children, and he would, she could tell, look on his innocent offspring with disgust, seeing their blood as irrevocably tainted and blaming her for it. She in turn would upbraid him for hypocrisy, and he would respond that at least he had not deceived her as she had him. An uglier scene could hardly be pictured, with things said on both sides that could never be forgiven. She wanted no part of such an ill-fated union, setting her own feelings aside entirely for a moment.
If she felt she knew little else for certain, Allegra was sure thatthis decision was the right one, and this made her feel a little better, even if she was clutching at straws and to an outsider would appear pitiful. She rose wearily, and set about washing and dressing herself, and preparing to meet the world, in the form of her boisterous, annoying, but ultimately loveable family.
35
Max heard nothing from his extraordinary new acquaintance all through that long day, and though he tried to carry on as normal – riding in the park, sparring with Tom and then Gil at Jackson’s saloon – he was aware that he was distracted, answering them almost at hazard, not fully aware of the world around him. After a while of this, and when Gil had popped a sly hit or two over his guard when normally he could by no means manage to do so, Jackson called a halt. ‘It’s dangerous to go into the ring – even in a friendly sort of way – when your mind’s not on the sport,’ he told Mr Severin with his usual calm authority, a hint of reproof shading his genial voice. ‘If Mr Glasscock knocked you down and by ill luck you sustained some lasting damage, he’d be sorrier than you would, and yet the fault would not be his. This isn’t the place for you today, sir.’
Max might normally have come back with some quick riposte, to the effect that if Gil put him on the canvas it really would be by luck and not skill, but today he could only smile a trifle bleakly and murmur in agreement and apology. Usually, too, he could have expected his friends to rib him for his unprecedentedabsent-mindedness, and ask if a lady or a lightskirt was the cause of it, but today, after one look at his face, they let him be. God knows what was written there, but they could see it and it made them wary.
When they had rubbed themselves down and attired themselves in their fashionable street attire once more, Tom asked him if he wanted to accompany them to Brooks’s, the gentlemen’s club of which they were all members. He couldn’t imagine anything worse, in his current state of mind, and declined the offer with unflattering promptness, saying that he had urgent estate business waiting for him at home. Gil clapped him on the shoulder – the masculine equivalent of a woman’s comforting embrace of a friend, he supposed – and they went on their way, their normally cheerful faces infected with a little of his own sombreness. They knew that all was not well with him, and equally they knew that he had not the faintest intention of telling them anything about what ailed him.
He stayed at home for the rest of the day, increasingly impatient and anxious not to miss a communication, supposing the damn thing ever came. He thought that Allegra must be in the same pitiful case, and wished in a futile fashion that they might be together and lighten the burden of waiting. But that was ridiculous, of course. When all this was over, they should no longer see each other. Certainly there must be no more illicit meetings, however tempting the thought was. It would be safer, and less painful, never to see her again, even though all he had to do was close his eyes and she was there in his mind, naked and magnificent, holding his gaze, and likely always would be. What of it? Probably she would soon be married to Milton, once this threat was lifted. Then she would be secure, and he would be… exactly where he had been before. If the prospect seemed lonelier, that was nonsense. Nothing had changed.
Everythinghad changed, though. He had thought, ever since he’d learned the truth about his mother, that the worst thing that could possibly happen to him was exposure, with all its manifold consequences, up to and including his own painful and humiliating death. But he’d been fifty kinds of fool, he now realised. Because the worst thing that could happen to him was simultaneously the best. The most exquisite and unexpected of torments, and the cruellest. He, Max Severin, notorious care-for-nobody, had fallen in love.
The letter came at last, brought by an impudent young street boy who gravely offended George Wicken’s dignity but would not be denied. It was unsigned, and it said in confident black ink:
It is done. Read the papers tomorrow. AS.
36
Beatrice, Cecilia and Bianca were confined, grumbling, in their schoolroom with their governess, Miss Macintyre. Their previous tutor, Miss Naismith, had been young, soft-hearted and pretty, and now lived with their sister Viola as her friend and companion; this lady was older, with the driest of dry wits and no interest whatsoever in being their confidante. She’d been away for a couple of weeks, visiting a niece who’d just had her first child, but now she was back, and academic discipline reigned once more in the place of holiday liberty, much to the girls’ disgust.
