“Utter humiliation. He listed his illegitimate children and their mothers by name, leaving each a piece of the unentailed assets. Shops in Ashmead. Bits of cash. Your birth was not unique. It was a long list. Most came to collect.”
Not unique. The blow hardly registered, hitting as one of many. “He must have lost his mind.”
“I suspect you’re correct. He may have had little affection for us, but, in his right mind, he would have protected the estate. His drinking and excesses had rotted his mind to the point of madness. It’s the only explanation.”
Her story bounced through Rob’s head, old hurts colliding with disgust and new anger.
When the silence became unbearable, he stood. “I shouldn’t have come here,” he said. “My life is elsewhere.”
“What about Willowbrook.”
“It can go to the devil. He already has your father for company.”
She rose when he did. “It isn’t a pleasant story, I know, but Lucy—” she began.
“Is the earl’s concern, not mine. I’m grateful for your bluntness. It is more than I’ve had from anyone else. I’ll bid you good day, Your Grace, and leave you to your flowers.”
She obviously wanted to say more, but he didn’t want to hear it. He was halfway to Ashmead before it occurred to him that he had just fled Maddy the way he did the day he had discovered she was his sister. He never even asked her about Lucy Whitaker. His curses echoed downhill toward the river.
Chapter Seven
Drink never helps.Yesterday’s problems still stare you in the face, only now you have to look at them through blurry eyes and a pounding head. You learned that before you saw twenty, you blasted fool.Rob put a pillow over his face to block the sunbeam that had attacked him from the window and forced him awake. It must be close to noon.
Faces had danced in his dreams all night, Spangler sneering, Lucy Whitaker glaring, the old earl cackling in hellfire, David, as he remembered him at fourteen, lusting after the Whitaker woman, and Maddy sad and disapproving, each worse than the next in an endless cycle.Sleep, he thought,offered less solace than facing the day.
He rose with a groan, still dressed from the night before, and sluiced his hair and face with water from the pitcher left on his washstand next to two empty bottles of rum. He rubbed a hand along his jaw. He needed a shave, but he needed coffee more.
Staggering down the stairs to the empty taproom, he hoped to duck into the kitchen unseen. Perhaps Annie would feed him so he could slip back upstairs.I need time to think.
He didn’t get it.
“Up, are you?”
He squeezed his eyes to focus. Robert Benson, innkeeper, stood behind the bar holding out a glass of noxious looking liquid. “You’ll be needing this,” the old man said. He’d been lying in wait.
Rob didn’t question it. Da knew his drunks. He gagged it down. “Achh, are you trying to poison me? I came for coffee.” He rubbed his tongue against his teeth. “What did you put in that?”
“Trade secret. You look like hell.”
“Good. It’s how I feel.”
“I gather things went poorly with Spangler.”
“Slimy toad, that one,” Rob muttered.
“I always thought so. Did he try to cheat you out of Willowbrook?”
Rob’s brain sprang to life. “Does all of Ashmead know about the will?”
The old man chuckled. “How could they not? The old earl’s bastards, genuine and false, turned up in crowds to collect.”
Genuine and false… Lucy Whitaker has dealt with imposters. It explained the musket.
“Why didn’t you warn me?” Rob demanded.
“Are you speaking with me now, then? I figured Spangler wrote, and if you meant to answer, you would. I told Emma to leave you be, but that girl has a mind of her own.”
“She does that.” A mug of coffee appeared on the bar with a Chelsea bun next to it, and a blushing Clara darted back through the kitchen door. He leaned an elbow on the bar and sipped the hot back liquid cautiously, and, when his stomach didn’t rebel, nibbled the bun.
