For the second time in as many days, Nicholas told someone the full story of what had happened to him that terrible summer of 1756. Surprisingly, it was more difficult to tell his father what Lyda had done to him than it had been to tell Bethie. Perhaps it took a man to understand exactly how Lyda had humiliated him. She had forced his body to respond, controlled him, used him.
After he finished, neither of them spoke for some time.
Then finally his father broke the silence, his voice strained. “I don’t know what to say. We knew you had been brutalized. We knew from your scars that it had been terrible, beyond imagination. But the rest of it... what she did to you... the baby... we had no idea. My God!”
“How could you have known? I was unable to speak of it.”
“I am so sorry, Nicholas. So sorry.” Then the tone of his father’s voice changed. “But I need to know why you left. I need to understand why you turned your back on your mother and left her weeping. Do you have any idea how much she has suffered these past six years?”
Nicholas felt his own temper rise. “I left because I no longer felt fit to live among you.”
“That’s absurd! No matter what you were going through, we would have faced it with you, as a family, but you chose to leave.”
“I nearly killed Elizabeth! I nearly killed my own sister!”
“And for six long years, she has blamed herself for your decision to leave!”
Nicholas turned away, strode across the room, his guilt pressing heavier upon him. “I never intended that.”
“I’m sure you didn’t, but that’s what she’s had to live with since she was sixteen. She’s a married woman now, you know—a mother with a child of her own.”
Nicholas tried to picture his sister as an adult woman, a mother, and realized how much had changed these past years. Emma Rose had been little more than a baby. She’d be nine now. And William, Alec, and Matthew...
But his father wasn’t finished. “We have lived every day these six years wondering if we’d ever see you again, wondering if you were alive or if perhaps you’d been killed by illness or accident or violence and lay unburied and unmourned, a nameless pile of bones in some forest bog. My God, Nicholas, can you imagine wondering that about your child? Your mother doesn’t even know that I came here looking for you. She believes I’m here on business. She’s already lost you twice. I was afraid the heartbreak would kill her if we failed to find you.”
Nicholas turned, faced his father’s wrath. “I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do to take back the pain these past years have caused you all. At the time, I truly believed that leaving was the best course of action for everyone. I don’t expect you to understand. Hell, I’d still be out there, headed back west, if it hadn’t been for Bethie. I meant what I said that morning. Iwasdead.”
His father took a deep breath. “She loves you very much.”
“I know.”
“She loves you so much that she thinks you’d be better off with a woman of your own class and believes I should intervene to prevent this marriage.”
Nicholas felt his temper build again. “And will you?”
His father shook his head. “You have my blessing, Nicholas. She is a wonderful girl with a pure heart. Your mother will cherish her and little Isabelle.”
“Bethie’s had a rough life. It will be good for her to have family. I hope in time you and Mother can be for her what her own parents were not.”
“We will, I’m certain, if she’ll let us. When I think of what that bastard did to her—”
“How do you know about that?” Then it dawned on him. “And how in God’s name did you know I was on my way to Philadelphia?”
His father retrieved a letter and a document signed by Nicholas’s own hand from a nearby sideboard. His will and testament. He’d entrusted it in confidence to the captain.
Nicholas looked at the signature on the letter, gave a snort of disgust. “Écuyer! The bastard!”
“We can talk about that later. In the meantime, for what it’s worth, Nicholas, I’m proud of the man you’ve become. I know what you did for Bethie. I know what you did at Fort Pitt. No father has ever been more proud of his son and heir than I.” His father’s voice was strained at these last words, and his eyes seemed oddly bright.
Nicholas might have said something in response—if the strange lump in his throat hadn’t stopped him.
“Now fetch your bride. I’d say a celebration is in order. And I must get a letter off to your mother with the next post.”
Chapter 30
Bethie held Belle securely in her lap, adjusted the baby’s lace collar. She scarce recognized the two of them, dressed as they were in the first of their new gowns. Bethie’s was a soft blue silk with ivory lace flowing from the bodice and elbows. Belle’s was of simple white linen and lace. A tiny white bow had been fastened to her downy hair, while Bethie’s hair had been coiled regally atop her head. They looked like princesses, for certain, but would they fool anyone?
Outside the carriage window, the streets of Philadelphia rolled by. Inside the carriage, Jamie and Nicholas continued to jest with each other, while Nicholas’s father looked on, clearly amused. The affection the two younger men felt for each other—and Alec’s fatherly love for them both—touched her deeply, perhaps because she’d never seen such closeness in a family before.
