Clara stopped when she reached the marble fireplace, closing her eyes for a moment and breathing deeply. She had been so sure of what had to be done when she’d left the duchess’s room earlier that morning. And since then she’d fed the fire burning inside her to see this over and done with. It had kept her going as she’d written out notes to everyone she needed present, as she searched for Quincy, as she’d stood waiting for him in the stable yard while all around her the grooms and stable hands went about their busy day. For no mere note would do for Quincy.
Now that the moment of reckoning was before her, however, she didn’t know how to begin.
Behind her she could hear faint shuffling, quiet whispers quickly hushed. They all knew something was wrong. She had seen it in their eyes when she’d entered the room with Quincy, a worried expectation.
All save for the duchess, who had sat apart from the others and considered her with narrowed eyes, suspicion clear on her cold face.
As if that woman heard Clara’s thoughts, she suddenly spoke.
“Goodness, Lady Clara, you keep us in such suspense,” she drawled. “I’m certain we would all like to leave this room this century. If you would be so kind as to tell us why you’ve dragged us in here when we should be with the rest of the guests belowstairs?”
Clara turned to face them as a low growl issued from Peter. “My cousin can take as long as she needs, Duchess,” he said with a dark glare.
“Well, she’s certainly doing that,” the woman muttered.
Another growl from Peter, this one contained as Lenora spoke into the tense atmosphere. “I’m sure Clara is merely searching for the right words. And my husband is quite correct,” she continued, her voice firm and brooking no argument, “Clara may take as long as she needs.” She turned to her and gave her an encouraging nod that didn’t hide the anxiety under the surface. “Whenever you’re ready, dearest.”
Clara took one final moment to drink in the faces of these people who loved her so well. The fear that had held her back for so many years rose up again, stronger than ever. She couldn’t do this. It was a mistake; she would not be able to survive this if they all turned from her.
Her anxious gaze found Quincy’s.
He sat poised at the edge of his chair, as if he feared what would be said and was ready to bolt from the room at the least provocation. Yet there was a steadiness to his gaze that grounded her. Just then he smiled. It was a small thing, barely even lifting the corners of his lips. But it gave her the encouragement she needed to do what had to be done. Didn’t he deserve the truth? Didn’t they all deserve the truth?
And, most important of all, didn’t she deserve to be true to herself?
“I’ve brought you all here,” she began, her voice a weak thing but quickly gaining strength, “because there is something I need to say to you, something that I’ve been keeping from you these fifteen years. The reason I’m telling you now,” she continued, “is because the duchess’s recent actions have made me realize that I will never be fully free until the truth is out. And I would rather reveal it to you myself than have someone else do so.”
Here she looked at the duchess full in the face. “I want to thank you, Your Grace,” she said with a grim smile, “for making me realize that truthfulness with those I love is paramount to my happiness.”
The woman merely stared back at her, the mutiny twisting her features not able to completely hide the undertone of fear there.
Dragging in a steadying breath, Clara turned to face her family. There would be no more cowering, no more hiding.
“When I was fifteen,” she began, “there was a young man visiting the Isle who courted me in secret. He claimed he loved me, vowed to marry me. He told me he merely had to wait another few months, until he reached his majority, and we would be wed posthaste.”
Phoebe, Oswin, Margery, and Lady Tesh sat in silence, their expressions confused. Peter and Lenora clasped hands, worry plain on their faces. They knew some of what was to come. The duchess looked angry enough to smite Clara on the spot.
And Quincy. His gaze was shuttered but unflinching. She looked away from him, knowing she wouldn’t be able to continue if she witnessed his reaction, more frightened of it than of anyone else’s.
“I took him at his word. It was foolish of me; I can see that now. But I was so eager to grow up and start a life of my own. I think I had become a bit resentful of how much I had missed out on after my mother’s death, how much of my childhood I had left behind. I wanted to live for me. Which is no one’s fault but my own,” she hastily explained when Phoebe covered her mouth with a trembling hand. “I wanted you and our brother to have a mother-figure. And I will never regret helping to care for you both, will never regret the close relationship we’ve shared because of it.
“At the time, however, I was maturing into a woman and unsure of my place in the world. And that man exploited that fact. He made me believe I should live for nothing but myself, that my family had been selfish to take so much from me. Which, in my vanity, I allowed him to convince me of, though it was the farthest thing from the truth.”
She paused, curling her hands into fists, her gaze dropping to the floor as she dug deep for strength. “He seduced me, and once he’d gotten what he wanted from me he left. I never heard from him again, though I wrote to him with increasing desperation. Especially after…” She swallowed hard, tried again. “Especially when I learned I was with child.”
She did not raise her eyes to witness their reactions. She didn’t need to. There were indrawn breaths, gasps, cries of disbelief. And then the duchess’s strident voice above the others.
“I knew it!” she crowed. “Reigate, you cannot marry this woman. Think of the scandal. I will not see a loose strumpet as the next duchess—”
“Silence!” Quincy bellowed. He surged to his feet, glaring at his mother. Peter was at his side in an instant, his expression equally furious. Clara rather thought that if she were the duchess, she would keel over on the spot with two such massive, commanding men glowering at her. As it was, her heart beat out a pathetically hopeful rhythm that he did not hate her.
“If you say one thing further against Clara,” Quincy said, his voice dropping to a deadly quiet that did not disguise the danger in it, “you will rue the day.”
The woman stared at him in shock before, her lips pinching tight, she gave a sharp nod.
He turned back to Clara, nodding before he sat once more. Peter, too, nodded her way before taking his place at Lenora’s side. Clara, for all she tried, could not discern a single emotion in their faces save for grim determination.
Her sister’s agonized voice rose up, shattering the heavy silence. “Clara, is it true?”
At the sight of Phoebe, hand to her heart, eyes wide with shock, Clara nearly broke down.
But it was too late to stop now. Keeping her gaze steadily on her sister, she nodded. She expected Phoebe to sob, to break down in tears. Instead her sister lowered her hand to her lap and nodded once, as if to show she was well and Clara should continue.
And she did, letting the rest spill out in a rush, eager to have done with it. “When my father and I told everyone that I was traveling to visit with my old nurse up north, in reality she came here to stay with me, in a cottage close to Swallowhill. I hid away from the world, hid the truth from you all, to give birth to that child.”
Not a one of them spoke, shock and grief and devastation all filling their faces, seeming to register them mute. The only face she refused to look at was Quincy’s. She could not bear it if he were disgusted by her.
The seconds ticked by, the silence stretching. She bit her lip, her nerves beginning to fray.
Finally Aunt Olivia spoke—of course it would be Aunt Olivia. Though it was not with her usual brusqueness. No, her tone was gentler than Clara had ever heard it.
“What happened to the child, my dear?”
That one question did more to undermine the careful control she’d spent so long building up than anything thus far. “He did not make it,” she managed through a throat tight with tears. “Not even long enough to take his first breath.”
The last thing she saw before tears blurred her vision was Quincy’s face, stark with shock.
* * *
Quincy had expected something painful in Clara’s past, but he had never imagined something so devastating. To be a young, unmarried woman, seduced and abandoned, and then to find out she was with child…she must have been terrified. Worse, to have to hide away, to spend nine months growing a life inside you, only to lose that precious life in an instant. No wonder she had become so upset when he’d first suggested they marry. She must have thought him just like that coward who had used her, offering her false promises to get her to his bed.
Which brought him to the stark realization of just how much she wanted him, how much she must care for him, in order to ignore her fears and come to his bed.
At the sight of the tears welling up in Clara’s eyes, however, at the sound of a sob quickly stifled, he forgot about everything else but comforting her.
Before he could so much as rise, however, Phoebe leapt to her feet, rushing to Clara and enveloping her in her arms. The rest of them hurried forward, until a veritable sea of Ashfords crowded her.
“My poor, dear sister,” she crooned. “Why did you hide such a thing from us?”
Clara’s voice rose up, muffled against her sister’s neck. “Because I knew you would all despise me for it. I’ve threatened our family with a devastating scandal. It could ruin us all if it got out.”
“Ruin us?” Lady Tesh scoffed. “My girl, none of us will speak a word of it, I assure you. And if a certain someone does”—she gave the duchess a furious warning glance—“they will regret it. Besides,” she continued, turning a tender smile on her great-niece, “if you don’t think we haven’t weathered worse storms, you are a greater innocent than I thought. There are scandals aplenty in our history, and we’ve come through each one. Mayhap not unscathed, but stronger for it.”
“She’s right,” Margery said with a soft smile, running a gentle hand over Clara’s back. “And we could never despise you, dearest. You shall always be our darling Clara, who we all love so very much.”
A sob broke free from Clara’s lips. As she buried her face in her sister’s neck and the rest of them consoled her, Quincy ached to go to her.
But now was not the time. Let her family show her that she was loved, that she had not lost their respect. There would be time for him to tell her his own feelings on the matter, and to renew his offer for her hand. There was no doubt in his mind that this was the reason she had refused him, some heroic attempt to protect him from this tragedy. When in reality it just proved to him that she was even stronger than he had believed her to be, and made him love her more.
To live with such a thing for so long would destroy anyone. Yet she had funneled that grief into a positive, throwing herself into loving her family in every way she could. He would be blessed indeed if she accepted him.
And then he would spend the rest of his life making her happy.
A sudden movement at the corner of his eye caught his attention. When he turned to find his mother slinking from the room, fury welled up in him. How this woman must have terrorized Clara into revealing this painful truth about herself.
He hurried after her. “Mother,” he growled when he reached the hall.
“Not now, Reigate,” she said over her shoulder, no doubt desperate to escape the unintended consequences of her actions.
“Yes, now, Mother,” he spat. His long legs had him quickly overtaking her. He spun to face her, halting her in her tracks. “I told you to leave her alone. Yet you could not, could you?”
She threw her hands up in the air. “How could I? Does it surprise you that I would allow a woman such as that—”
“I warned you, madam,” he snarled, “that I will not look kindly on any insult to Clara.”
Her mouth closed with a snap. Though uncertainty flared in her eyes, she glared at him with a righteous fury. “I had a bride picked out for you. A young woman of good family who would provide us the means to recoup all we’ve lost.”
“You mean you groomed a lonely girl, someone you knew would be easily manipulated. You tried to fob her off on my brother. And when I arrived, you saw a way to control me, the one son you had no hold over, by transferring her to me. Though I wonder,” he said with a curl of his lip, “that you had any control over your older sons. Didn’t they utterly destroy the dukedom, after all?”
“I don’t have to listen to this,” she hissed.
“No, you’re right in that,” he replied. Sudden exhaustion dragged at him. He’d known all along that this woman, who should have loved him as unconditionally as Clara’s family loved her, would never be capable of giving him what he’d needed from her. But as he was faced with the proof of her unswerving bitterness he realized that he didn’t despise her for it. Rather, there was a deep grief for what they might have had. He felt the loss of it, of that thing she had stolen from not just him, but herself as well, down to his soul.
Had he returned to her house to truly say goodbye for good? Or had there been a part of himself that had hoped she might have changed? If that hope had ever been in him, however, it was dead now.
“After today I will not want anything further to do with you. But,” he said when she made to go around him, “know one thing: you will not speak a word of Clara’s past to anyone. If word gets out, I will know who caused it. And you will regret it.”
Her eyes shot outraged fire at him. “You think to frighten me?”
“Yes,” he said, the word blunt and hard. “And don’t forget, I will not be alone in my revenge. The Duke of Dane will be behind me, as will Viscountess Tesh. I think it safe to say the punishment would be dire indeed.”
Finally common sense seemed to make an appearance in the form of fear, quickly stifled under a blanket of pride. “Very well,” she bit out. “I vow I shall not say a word.”
With that she went to go around him again. This time he let her, painfully aware of just what she had stolen from him: a happy childhood, with wonderful memories that he should have been able to look back on with fondness as he grew older.
Impotent anger welled up in him, so unexpected he demanded, quite without thinking, “Why do you despise me? You’re my mother; you should have loved me and supported me.”
She froze, then turned slowly to face him. And he was stunned mute at the hatred twisting her beautiful features.
“If I act as if I despise you it is because I do. With everything in me I despise you.”
He gaped at her. “You’re a cruel woman.”
“Cruel? Your father was the cruel one, foisting his bastard on me to raise as my own.”
“It’s a lie,” he managed, shaking his head in desperate denial, his mind racing. His father had known how miserable Quincy had been, how horrible the duchess had made his life. Surely he would have told him if it was true.
“And what reason would I have to lie to you?” she demanded. “Revealing the truth now gives me no benefit. I cannot see you made illegitimate, for your father made sure everything was drawn up nice and tight. And I risk being kicked from my home and cut off.”
Still he could not process what she had just revealed. Surely this was just some attempt to hurt him. The duchess had always gone out of her way to do that.
Yet he could not deny that, beyond that, there was no benefit for her in this. And the woman never did anything without making certain she benefited from it.
He felt sick down to his soul. As he stood staring at her in shock, she smirked and started off down the hall.
But he could not leave it at this. “If you are not my mother,” he demanded of her retreating form, “then who is?”
She didn’t bother to even look over her shoulder. “Who do you think? That dubious honor belongs to Miss Willa Brandon, of course. Your father’s whore.”