understand that anything else was impossible. I even thought I’d succeeded. But then, several months before the child was to be born, she disappeared. I searched for her, but to no avail. Sometime later I received a note from Ireland. It said simply, ‘You have a daughter. She is well. Do not attempt to find us.’”
Hendon pushed away from the mantel and swung to face Sebastian. “This morning, Emma Stone paid a visit to Kat Boleyn. It seems the woman is Kat’s aunt. She brought her these.” Reaching into his pocket, he drew forth two miniatures that he laid on the desk beside Sebastian. “They’re portraits of her parents.”
The woman in the first painting was a stranger, although it was easy enough to trace the likeness to Kat in the beguiling juxtaposition of that childish nose and the full, sensuous lips. The second portrait was of the Earl of Hendon as he had been twenty-five years ago. Sebastian stared down at the twin porcelain ovals framed in filigree and felt an explosive welling of denial and fury and fear.
He slammed away from the desk. “
“No,” said Hendon in rare honesty. “But even I could not have invented this.”
“I don’t believe any of it. Do you hear me?
Hendon’s jaw worked back and forth. “Talk to Miss Boleyn. Talk to Mrs. Emma Stone—”
“Have no fear that I shall!”
“They’ll tell you the same tale.”
Sebastian swept his arm across the desktop, sending the miniatures flying. “Goddamn you. Goddamn you all to hell.”
Hendon’s eyes—those vivid blue St. Cyr eyes that were so inescapably like Kat’s—twitched with pain. “You can’t blame me for the fact that you fell in love with that woman.”
“Then who the hell do I blame?” raged Sebastian.
“God.”
“I don’t believe in God,” said Sebastian, and he slammed out of the house.
Sebastian went first to Harwich Street.
“Where is she?” he said when the maid Elspeth opened the door.
Elspeth stared at him with wide, frightened eyes. “Miss Boleyn isn’t here.”
Sebastian pushed past her. “Kat?” he called, and heard his voice echo through the empty house.
He ran up the stairs to the drawing room, then took the stairs to the second floor two at a time. “Kat!”
A minute later, he was back downstairs. “Where is she, damn it?” he demanded, coming upon Elspeth in the entrance hall.
The maid looked up from the oil lamp she’d been trimming. “I don’t know. She went out.”
“You know something you’re not telling. What is it?”
“I don’t know anything! Something strange is going on, but I don’t know what it is. I swear I don’t.”
“Did she say when she’d be back?”
“Tomorrow. She said she probably wouldn’t be back until tomorrow.”
“Probably?”
“All I know is what she said.”
Sebastian slammed his open palm against the paneled wall and left.
He went next to Emma Stone’s small house in Camden.
The woman was famous for writing wildly popular ‘’improving” tracts with titles such as “Christian Piety” and “Moral Sketches for the Next Generation.” Had Hendon named anyone else, Sebastian could have dismissed his wild claims without hesitation. But Sebastian found it impossible to imagine Mrs. Emma Stone lending herself to one of the Earl’s schemes.
Pausing on the footpath, Sebastian stared up at the proper brick facade before him. He knew only the faintest outlines of Kat’s earlier history, but what he knew fit uncomfortably well with Hendon’s tale. She’d told him once that her father was an English lord, but her mother had left London before Kat was born to take refuge in her native Ireland. Sebastian knew what the soldiers had done to Kat’s mother and stepfather. He knew too that after their deaths Kat had been taken in by her mother’s sister. Sebastian had formed a hazy image of a self-righteous, ostentatiously religious woman who’d punished her niece’s accusations of her husband’s misconduct with the whip.
Sebastian studied the silent rows of neatly curtained windows. Had it been from this house that Kat had fled as a child into a life on the streets? She had never named her aunt as Mrs. Emma Stone. But then, there was much that Kat had never told him.
He became aware of the sensation of being watched. As he climbed the short flight of steps to the front door, he saw the lace curtain at one of the upstairs windows shift slightly, then settle back into place.
He half expected his knock to go unanswered. Instead, the door was opened almost immediately by a thin slip of a maid with jade green eyes and a scattering of freckles across her nose who looked at him with undisguised curiosity and asked breathlessly, “Are you Lord Devlin?”
“Yes,” said Sebastian in surprise.
The girl stepped back and opened the door wide. “Mrs. Stone said to bring you straight up.”
Sometimes our worst dreams don’t come when we’re asleep.
The nightmares that came to Sebastian in the bowels of the night were familiar things, disjointed memories of slashing sabers and exploding ordnance punctuated by the screams of dying men and maimed horses. He’d learned to live with those dreams, with those memories. But he wasn’t sure how he was going to learn to live with this.
He wandered the darkened streets of London, down narrow lanes of shuttered shops and quiet houses. A mist had settled over the city, painting the pavement with a wet sheen that reflected the light from the streetlamps and an occasional passing carriage. He kept trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, how a love once so beautiful and life-sustaining could have suddenly been transformed into something unclean and vile. Of all the taboos with which Englishmen and women fortified themselves against the horrors of savagery and bestiality, only two were so unforgivably loathsome as to be spoken of in frightened whispers: the prohibition against the eating of human flesh, and the sexual union of those bound by the closest of family ties. Father and daughter. Sister and brother.
He knew he should recoil in horror. A part of him did recoil in horror. But a part of him still ached for the future that had been snatched from him, for the woman he would have made his wife.
He wanted to get on his horse and gallop out beyond the last straggling hamlets. He wanted to ride through woods lashed by a wild wind, with none but the cold and distant stars for companions. He wanted to ride until he reached the crashing waves of the sea and felt the salty spray rise up to meet him as he spurred ever on, to oblivion.
A burst of laughter from an open door brought his head around. He paused for a moment, shuddering, recognizing the danger of being alone and far too sober.
Wiping a hand across his face, he turned his steps toward Pickering Place, unaware of the slight figure watching him anxiously from the shadows.
Paul Gibson pushed past the billiard tables toward the more select rooms filled with scattered faro and whist tables that lay beyond. The air he breathed smelled strongly of brandy and tobacco and the unmistakable sweet tang of hashish.
He was in one of the most expensive—and decadent—of the gaming hells off Pickering Place, and he had to keep reminding himself to clench his jaw shut for fear of staring around like some gape-mouthed lout just up from the country. Gibson had been in his share of hells and brothels before—and opium dens, too, for that matter. But he’d never been in a place quite like this one. The walls were hung with watered silk, the mirrors large and framed in ornate gilt wood, the cloths on the supper tables of starched linen. From somewhere in the distance came the lilting strains of a string quartet, the music forming an odd counterpoint to the high-pitched laughter of women and
