“Yes. Mina. You’re going to come and live with me in a big house in the country.”
The thumb came out. “Mama?”
Henry looked up at the nurse. She bobbed another curtsy and said, “The girl has been told her mother and father are dead, my lord.”
The earl approved. Unadorned truth was best, but a little one such as Mina would not understand the permanence of death. She would still expect her mother to be waiting for her around the next corner.
Henry searched his mind for what to say. Finally, like many a hapless man before him, he resorted to bribery.
“You like sweeties.”
Mina nodded.
“I will take you to get some sweeties.” He stood, ignoring the groan of his joints, and addressed the nurse. “Gather the child’s things so that I might take them away with her.”
“Things?” The startled nurse gave yet another curtsy. “She has only this dress and her shoes, my lord.”
No one had thought to fetch the girl’s belongings. Even he—the most neglectful, the most remote, the coldest father who had ever lived, according to his late wife—knew his sons had been attached to their playthings. Hal had slept for years with his little wooden horse. Charles had nearly worn out the bindings on his favorite books. Mina surely had some beloved dollies that would have comforted her since her mother never would again.
And she had been in the same clothes since the carriage accident. That rusty stain on her frock might be his son’s blood.
Mina wrenched her hand away from the nurse and stepped up to Henry and pulled on the tassel of his boot. The thumb popped out.
“Sweeties,” she said. “Cakes.”
“Yes, sweeties,” he agreed. “And cakes. As many as you like.”
She reached up to him, and he bent over and picked her up.
He now had an armful of warm, unwashed child. Her arm hooked around his neck. The pale, wrinkled thumb went back into her mouth. Her head bobbled about loosely for a few seconds before it fell against his shoulder.
He turned his face into his granddaughter’s curls and took in a great lungful of her scent. She smelled of porridge and tears and skinned knees and scalded milk.
She stank of redemption.
One
“He fears you,” the concubine said to the king.
Her soft fingers glided over his flesh, lingered on the muscle in his sword arm. The king sank back into the perfumed water of his bath and closed his eyes. She knew nothing of sons and fathers.
“He fears himself,” he said. “As he should.”
—The Concubine and Her King.Unpublished MS.
Henry dipped his pen into the ink and wroteCharlesat the top of a piece of foolscap.
In the three years since Mina had come to live at Bledsoe Park, Henry had written over a hundred letters to his son and heir. In return, the earl had received eleven letters from Charles’ solicitor, the same one Charles’ late brother had once retained. Shortly before quarter day, like clockwork, Mr. Crompton would send a request for money, and Henry would, without delay, write to his own banker in London and arrange a transfer of funds.
Of course, he had thought of withholding the money as a means to force Charles to return from the Continent, to come and speak to his father. But he hadn’t. Henry might be the villain in his own son’s life, but he was determined to be a just villain. Ashthorpe’s coffers were full only because of Diana, and she would have wanted her money to go to her son.
Besides, extortion would never lead to affection.
So Henry made no demands in his letters to Charles. Instead, he penned dry accounts of estate affairs. The new drainage ditches. The increase in rents. The thatching of a cottage here, a stile repaired there.
It was his feeble attempt to give his son lessons in how to be Ashthorpe. Like Charles, Henry had been a second son, and, despite his time in the army as a leader of men, he had very much felt his lack of preparation when he had become earl after catarrhal fever had swept through the countryside, killing his older brother and his brother’s infant son in the same week.
Henry did not want Charles ever to feel as adrift as he had in his first months as earl. He had made so many terrible decisions back then, not the least of which was marrying Charles’ mother.
