He tried to breathe deeply without alerting her, but the hollow look his mother had worn in her final days haunted him still.
His suspicions had been correct.
She’d been using her body to settle the debts.
Lord Harland had forced both women into impossible predicaments.
Now all three were dead.
Had the Moseley brothers killed him?
Or was there another player in this damned game?
Perhaps he should hire an enquiry agent, but he wouldn’t drag his mother’s memory through the dirt.
“Why did your mother struggle to conceive?” he asked, though he couldn’t tell her why the answer mattered.
“My—” She shook her head as if dazed. “My father had a riding accident years ago. His physician seemed certain that was the cause.”
Cold crept through Dominic’s chest.
Then who the hell had fathered his mother’s unborn child? He needed that physician’s report.
“Did you ever see strange tinctures at home?” His tone was too sharp, like some overeager Bow Street runner. But he needed to fill the gaps in his mother’s story. “Pennyroyal? Savine? Anything meant to bring on her courses?”
“I—I don’t know. I was young. Naive to such things. Why are you asking?”
He gathered her hand. “My mother would take a tincture when things got desperate. Pennyroyal, a splash of rue, mixed in gin. She claimed it was for her nerves, but she always took it after my father came home drunk. She’d not have another child suffer for his addictions.”
She looked down at their clasped hands, firming her grip, and he clung to it like a lifeline. “You think the story about the riding accident is a lie? That my mother took a tincture for the same reason?”
He watched her closely. “I don’t know what to think. But the answer is buried in the past. We’ll keep digging until we find it.”
He needed to know why Harland was in debt to the Moseley brothers, how long he’d been gambling, and whether his own father had owed money to the same men.
She nodded, tugging her hand free. “We both deserve peace. A chance at happiness. To leave this bitterness behind and start anew elsewhere.”
Was there no end to her romantic notions?
Could she not see that life was cruel?
“I’ll never leave Shadowmere.”
It was a vow, not a choice.
He wondered how she imagined her future. Perhaps walking hand in hand through a meadow with a devoted beau, picnicking beneath the summer sun, making love on the grass. A dream far removed from the world he knew.
“You mean to host wild parties forever?” She looked at him as one might a shoeless urchin.
“Not forever.” He folded the note and handed it to her.
“Good.” She slipped it into her pocket. “You deserve a better life. One that doesn’t chip away at your soul.”
It was too late for him.
The die had been cast long ago.
They settled back in their seats, watching the countryside roll by. His thoughts were fixed firmly in the past, and he suspected hers were too.
