Her brows drew together sharply. “Don’t want it?”
“Why did your father saddle me with Willowbrook? Some late blooming guilt?” The question had festered since his meeting with Spangler.
The elegant woman startled him with an unladylike snort. “You think that man had a scintilla of guilt?” she exclaimed, bitterness thick in her voice.
“Why did he do it, then?”
“To spite David, of course.”
“I don’t understand. I suppose the new earl expected to inherit Willowbrook with all the rest, but how is it spite?”
“After David learned—” She sat back, thoughtful. The truth of their relationship lay thick between them. “When did you know?” She asked, studying him closely.
Trust Maddy to cut to the quick. “Know what?”
She ignored his question as unworthy of acknowledgment, waiting serenely for him to gather his words to answer her.
Rob stared at his hands, clasped in front of him, and spoke without looking up. “The day you found out. The day before I left Ashmead. I came to the hall to talk to you. I saw you at my mother’s funeral, but we couldn’t talk, and I needed—That is, I just needed a friend’s sympathetic ear.”
“You heard her,” Maddy whispered.
He looked at her then. “Yes. I snuck through the kitchen door as I used to and heard your voice in the breakfast parlor. I came to the door, hoping to slip in unseen, and stopped when I heard your mother haranguing you. She warned you away from… I don’t remember everything she called me. Bastard was the least of it.”
“She would never be so uncouth. I believe she said by-blow. I didn’t understand the word. She had to spell it out.”
“In crude detail. That I’m your brother, and we must never—ever—come near each other. She made it quite explicit.”The girl I craved, who set my heart pounding—my sister. A faint echo of the old, sick feeling throbbed.
“Yes.” A faint blush colored her cheeks. She nodded thoughtfully. “I always suspected it was why you left so abruptly. Others blamed your mother’s death.”
“You said ‘after David learned…’ Did she confront him as well?” Rob couldn’t imagine how his boyhood nemesis would have reacted.
“Goodness no. Servants hear. It went through Ashmead like a shot. Any number of people were happy to tell my brother about our father’s misdeeds. He—”
“Must have been horrified by the relationship.”
“To you? No. He envied you in those days. You must know that. I rather think the relationship pleased him. He had just begun to notice girls himself, however, and our father’s behavior embarrassed him. I’m afraid it drove him to an excess of pious self-righteousness.”
“David? Pious?” Rob sputtered. He couldn’t imagine the boy he knew in that way.
“There’s more. Two years later, he found out that Alice Wilcox, the tailor’s daughter, had a baby who was our half-sister as well, and his humiliation boiled over. He roared into our father’s study to demand he do something for her—and you. He called the earl an immoral rakehell.”
“Did your father beat him?”
“Worse. He laughed, called him a prig, and told him to grow up. Then he sold both of David’s favorite horses and his hound and used the proceeds to buy your colors.”
Rob grimaced, remembering about how angry he had been over what he thought was the earl’s belated, back-handed acknowledgment. He ought to have known better. “But Willowbrook?” he asked.
“The horse was just a start. He called David a weak-livered excuse for a man. He changed his will, using his rage to humiliate David. He might have come to his senses eventually, but David married young, against his wishes, and moved his family to Willowbrook. They quarreled constantly. Father changed the will again. He stripped the estate of every asset that wasn’t entailed and died a few months after that, before he came to his senses.”
“Willowbrook was David’s.” It wasn’t a question.
“He let David think so. None of us knew otherwise until the will was read.”
“Giving it to the bastard son instead of the heir who lived there.”
“He wanted to hurt our brother and didn’t care who else got hurt—me, the tenants, our mother.”
“How did that hurt your mother? Worry about her precious son?” he asked bitterly.
