Hendon hesitated, then came away from the stairs. “Very well.” He walked into the room and tossed his crop on the desk as Sebastian closed the door. “Now, what is it?”
“When were you planning to tell me the truth about my mother?”
Hendon swung around, his expression guarded and wary. “Which truth is that?”
“Bloody hell.” Sebastian let out his breath in a sharp, humorless laugh. “Are there so many lies? I mean the truth about what happened seventeen years ago in Brighton. Or should I say, what
Hendon held himself very still, as if carefully considering his answer. “Who told you?”
“Does it matter? You should have told me yourself—long before I asked you about the necklace.”
Hendon blew out a long, slow breath. “I was afraid.”
“Of what?”
The Earl drew his pipe from a drawer, his movements slow and deliberate as he filled the bowl with tobacco and tamped it down with his thumb. “She’s still alive,” he said after a moment. “Or at least she was as of last August. Every year she delivers to my banker a letter briefly detailing the major political and military events of the previous twelve months. Once we have proof she still lives, I send her annual stipend.”
Sebastian was aware of a fine trembling going on inside him. He couldn’t have said if the discovery Sophie still lived, after seventeen years of his thinking her dead, brought him relief or only fueled his rage. “You pay her? Why? To stay away?”
“It’s not such an unusual arrangement. Couples who can no longer live together frequently agree to live apart. Look at the Duke and Duchess of York.”
“The Duchess of York didn’t fake her own death.”
Hendon went to kindle a taper and hold it to his pipe. “Your mother…she was involved with another man. For her to have lived with him openly here in England would have ruined my standing in the government. She agreed to go abroad in return for my granting her an annual stipend.”
Sebastian was silent for a moment. Had there been a man that summer—a special man? Impossible to remember. There were always men around Sophie Hendon. “Why didn’t you simply divorce her?” he said aloud, searching his father’s heavily featured face. “What does she have on you?”
Hendon met his gaze and held it. “Nothing I intend to tell you.”
“My God. And the necklace?”
“I honestly don’t know how Guinevere Anglessey came to be wearing that necklace. I suppose it’s possible your mother gave it to someone over the years.”
Sebastian doubted it. Sophie Hendon had never been a particularly superstitious woman, but she had believed in that necklace and in its power. “Where is she now?”
Hendon sucked on his pipe, kindling the tobacco. “Venice. Or at any rate, that’s where I send the money. The acquaintances she went out with that day—the ones who helped coordinate the accident—they were Venetians.”
The air filled with the sweet smell of burning tobacco. Sebastian stood at one of the long windows overlooking the square. “All those years,” he said, half to himself, “all those years of missing her, of mourning her…and it was all a lie.” He was aware of his father coming to stand behind him, although he didn’t turn his head.
“If she could have taken you with her,” said Hendon, his voice gruff, “I think she would have. Of all her children, I always thought her love for you was the most intense.”
Sebastian shook his head, his gaze on the scene outside the window. A boy and a girl of ten or twelve were running with a hoop, their laughing voices carrying lightly on the morning breeze. He’d had that sense himself, growing up. Sophie Hendon had loved all her children, but until today Sebastian would have said he’d held a special place in her heart. Yet she had left him.
He was aware of a yawning inner ache that twisted his guts and brought a bitter taste to his mouth. A heavy silence stretched between them, a silence Sebastian ended by slamming one hand down on the sill and swinging away from the window to face his father again. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me the truth? You let me think she was dead. Every day, I went up on those cliffs looking for her. Hoping it was all a mistake and I’d see her come sailing home. But in the end I gave up. I believed what you had told me. And it was all a bloody lie!”
Sebastian stared at his father. The Earl’s jaw worked back and forth, but he said nothing.
“I thought it for the best.”
“For whom? You, me, or her?”
“For all of us.”
Sebastian brushed past his father and headed for the door. “Well, you were wrong.”
The Dowager Duchess of Claiborne awoke with a start, one hand groping up to catch her nightcap before it slid over her eyes. A tall, shadowy figure moved across the floor of her artificially darkened bedchamber. She gave a faint gasp, then sat up in bed, her cheeks flushing with the heat of indignation when she recognized her only surviving nephew.
“Good heavens, Devlin. You nearly gave me an apoplectic fit. What are you doing here at this ungodly hour? And why are you glaring at me in such a fashion?”
He came to stand beside the carved footboard of her massive Tudor bedstead, his lean figure held taut.
