him, for there was no history of such gifts in either his mother’s family or his father’s.
“Darling,” he said softly, reaching for her. She went into his arms, a smile on her lips when she bent her head to taste his kiss. She loved it when he called her darling.
He tightened his arms around her, rubbed his cheek against her hair. And she pushed aside all her doubts and fears and impossible dreams, and gave herself wholly to the man and the moment.
FOR AS LONG AS SEBASTIAN COULD REMEMBER, the Earl of Hendon had begun each day he was in London with an early-morning ride in Hyde Park.
That Monday morning dawned cool and damp, with a heavy mist that drifted through the trees and showed no sign of lifting. But Sebastian knew his father: by seven o’clock the Earl would be in the park, trotting his big gray gelding up and down the Row. And so that morning Sebastian mounted the dainty black Arabian mare he kept in London and turned her head toward the park.
“Don’t usually see you abroad until midafternoon,” groused Hendon when Sebastian brought his mare, Leila, into line beside the Earl’s big gray. “Or haven’t you made it to your bed yet?”
Sebastian smiled softly to himself, because the truth was that as much as Hendon grumbled, he was actually secretly proud of what he called his son’s wildness, just as he was proud of Sebastian’s skill with sword and pistol, and as a horseman. Drinking, womanizing, and even gambling were just the sort of manly activities a gentleman expected of his son, excesses of youth to be indulged—as long as they weren’t carried to an extreme. It was Sebastian’s love of books and music, his interest in the radical philosophies of the French and Germans, that Hendon had never been able to abide or understand.
“I wanted to hear your opinion on something,” said Sebastian. He trotted beside his father in silence a moment, then asked bluntly, “How much sympathy do you think there would be in this country for a restoration of the Stuarts?”
Hendon’s answer was so long in coming that Sebastian began to wonder if his father had even heard the question. But Hendon, like Kat, was given to thoughtful silences before he spoke.
“A year ago I’d have said none whatsoever.” He squinted off across the Park to where a flock of ducks could be seen rising up, dark wings outstretched as they took flight into the mist and filled the morning with their plaintive calls. “The Stuarts have always had a certain nostalgic appeal to the likes of Walter Scott and the Highland Tories. But that’s the stuff of romance. Beyond the romance lies the reality of a very foolish king who lost his throne because he insisted on trying to thwart the will of a nation.”
“And now?”
He threw Sebastian a quick sideways glance. “Now we have a mad king, a licentious, debt-ridden regent who spends more time with his tailors than with his ministers, and a hey-go-mad, fifteen-year-old princess whose own father calls her mother a whore. The other day, I heard someone—I think it was Brougham himself—say that what went on under the Stuarts was nothing compared to what is happening today.”
“But there is no Stuart heir. James the Second had two grandsons, Bonnie Prince Charlie and his brother, Henry. Prince Charlie left no legitimate children, while Henry became a Catholic priest who died—when? Four years ago?”
Hendon nodded. “Henry the Ninth, he called himself. The Stuart claim has now passed to the descendants of Charles the First’s daughter, Henrietta. Strictly speaking, the throne should have gone to them after the death of James the Second’s daughter, Ann, in 1714, rather than to the Hanoverian George the First. But they were Catholics.”
“So who is the current pretender?”
“Victor Emmanuel of Savoy.”
“A king without a kingdom,” said Sebastian thoughtfully. Once the Kings of Sardinia and Piedmont, the men of the House of Savoy had been forced by the armies of the French Revolution to abdicate all their territories on the Italian mainland.
Hendon pressed his lips into a thin smile. “Exactly.”
“But Savoy is a Catholic—which is what got James the Second into trouble over a hundred years ago. England won’t even allow a Catholic to sit in Parliament. They’re hardly likely to accept one on the throne.”
“True. But Savoy wouldn’t be the first man willing to change his religion for the sake of a throne, now, would he?”
“Is he willing?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been hearing things lately that disturb me. All this talk about a curse, for instance—people saying the House of Hanover is cursed, and that England will be cursed, too, as long as a usurper sits upon her throne. Where do you suppose that came from?”
“You think the Jacobites started it?”
“Who knows how these things start? But it seems to have fallen on very receptive ground. If there is still an organized conspiracy to replace the Hanovers, now would be the time for them to make a move.”
Hendon rode in silence for a moment, his gaze fixed on some point beyond his horses’ ears. The silence filled with the creak of saddle leather and the rhythmic pattern of their horses’ hooves on the soft earth. “I was born the year after the ’Forty-five,” he said in a tight voice. “I grew up with the tales of what those times were like. I wouldn’t want to see some fool visit such horrors upon us again.”
Sebastian studied his father’s closed face. It was the stuff of legends, the Highland Rising of 1745 in support of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Sebastian had heard the stories, too, from his grandmother, Hendon’s mother, who had been a Grant from Glenmoriston. Stories of unarmed clansmen dragged out of crofts and slaughtered before their screaming children. Of women and children burned alive, or turned out of their villages to die in the snow. What was done to the Highlanders after Culloden would forever be a dark stain on the English soul. Everything from the pipes to the plaids to the Gaelic language itself had been forbidden, obliterating an entire culture.
“Who would support a restoration now?” Sebastian asked. “The Scots?”
Hendon shook his head. “The chiefs who supported the Stuarts were all killed or exiled years ago, while their clansmen lie in forgotten graves—or were transported to America. Besides, the Risings were always more about Scotland than about the Stuarts. What interest have the Scots in some Italian princeling whose great-great- grandmother happens to have been the daughter of Charles the First, rather than of James the First?”
