surname, but those Irish ancestors had intermarried with folk who knew neither freckles nor red hair. She was perhaps a quarter American Indian, maybe an eighth, but plenty to mark her as an odd choice for the heir to one of the oldest dukedoms in England.
She was also extraordinarily beautiful.
She shook her short hair loose of the helmet’s marks and shot us a grin of pure high spirits, a grin I recognised instantly from a blurred photograph of overall-clad drivers in France. “You two ladies looking to learn to fly?” she asked. “Or you just wanting a quick pass over town? I’m happy to take you, but I hope you’ll want to try it for yourselves. There’s nothing in the world like it.”
“I can see that,” I told her, speaking only the truth. “But actually, we’ve come to talk about another matter.”
“I’m happy to teach your husbands. I’m good with men.”
“It concerns a young soldier you once knew, by the name of Gabriel Hughenfort.”
It was as if I’d kicked her in the stomach. All her high spirits vanished into instant wariness; she even took a step back. In a moment, I thought, she’d break into a run—or reach for a weapon.
“Damn,” she said. “Damnation. Well, I knew you’d come eventually.”
The man in the chair, wondering perhaps where we had got to, had rolled outside again and now called out, “Are you ladies going to stand there and freeze to death, or can I shut this door?”
Raising her head, but not taking her eyes off us, the pilot shouted, “We’ll be right there, Ben.” She waited until the door closed, then she leant forward and spoke in a low, forceful voice. “If you hurt him, if you so much as make him uncomfortable, I swear to God you’ll never lay eyes on him again.”
Then she stalked off to the office. Iris stared after her, with an expression that asked about the pilot’s sanity, and said, “But why on earth would we want to hurt that poor man?”
I shook my head, but not, as she thought, from an equal incomprehension. Instead, I was asking Iris to wait, as I propelled her forward by the elbow, trying to keep down my excitement. I could be wrong—those small hints, the odd coincidences; the ring she didn’t wear, her willingness to leave France during the last, victorious weeks of the War. I could be mistaken. But the green-eyed woman’s attitude made no sense, unless—
I could be wrong.
But I was not.
Iris saw him a split second after I did, standing at the side of the pilot. It took her a moment longer to understand what she was seeing.
A child, about five years of age, with his mother’s green eyes.
Everything else about him was pure Hughenfort, from the lift of his chin and his stocky grace to Marsh’s raised eyebrow.
Gabriel’s son.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Iris swayed, when her mind finally comprehended what her eyes were telling her, and I seized a beat-up wooden chair and jammed it behind her knees.
“Oh my God,” she breathed. “Oh my God.”
This reaction quite clearly was not what the boy’s mother had anticipated. The child had retreated from the peculiar behaviour of these two strangers, and now stood half hidden behind his mother, her hand resting on his shoulder by way of protection.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
Her brother took it further. “What the hell is going on here?”
“My name—,” Iris began, but I cut in on her.
“Before we get into the details, may I suggest that the boy be excused? That way you can choose how best to talk to him about what we are going to tell you.”
The green eyes thought about it for a while, then flickered over to Ben. “Would you and Gabe mind going up to the house and starting lunch? The boys will be here before long and they’ll be hungry. This may take a while.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m not sure of anything, but I think it’d be a good idea. You go with Ben, okay, Gabe? You can start the sandwiches.”
Iris’s rapt gaze followed the boy until the door had shut behind him. Immediately the door closed, the still angry but now confused pilot dragged up another chair and dropped into it.
“Lady, you better start talking.”
“May I ask one question first, Mrs—” I stopped, then apologised. “I’m sorry, I’m not sure of your name.”
“Hewetson,” she said, then corrected herself. “I call myself Hewetson.”
“Mrs Hewetson, I don’t know how to put this so it isn’t offensive, so I won’t even try. Before we go any further, we have to know: Were you and Gabriel Hughenfort, who was known at the time as Hewetson, legally married?”
She eyed me, thinking about the question’s implications—but not, going by her expression, just those that were offensive.
“Why don’t you know that already? And if you don’t know that, how did you find me?”
By way of answer, Iris reached into her handbag and pulled out the worn red journal. She laid it with care onto the desk between her and Helene, who had obviously never seen it before. It was equally obvious, blindingly so, that when she opened it, she knew the handwriting as well as she knew her own. She reached out and ran a tentative pair of fingers down one page, as if to touch the hand of the man holding the pen. She then turned to the last page of writing, read for perhaps five seconds, and closed the book.
“How—” she started, but her voice failed her.
“It’s a very long story,” Iris answered. “One that I’ve come from England to tell you. But first, please, would you answer my friend’s question?”
On the one hand, it mattered not in the least if they had somehow managed to wed on the field of battle. The boy was Gabriel’s, and happy; neither of those facts, I thought, would change. On the other, everything depended on it: An illegitimate child could not inherit, no more than a female child could. Marsh’s freedom lay in a piece of paper.
Philippa Hewetson raised her head, and I could see the answer before she said it.
“Yes,” she said. Iris covered her mouth with both her gloved hands and made a sound like laughter, with tears in her eyes. I closed my own eyes and found myself saying under my breath, in something remarkably like prayer,
When I opened my eyes again, the hard, protective look was back on her face, and I made haste to explain our rather extreme reaction. I was not certain just where she perceived a threat, but I knew this was one of those situations where honesty, while not necessarily the best policy, might be the only one possible.
“A legal marriage certificate means that your son is heir to a very large estate and a very important title in England. Gabriel was the only son of the sixth Duke of Beauville. He didn’t tell you this?”
“He said his family took its inheritances very seriously. Those were his words. He told me that when I said we didn’t need to marry, that I would—Anyway, he wouldn’t hear of it, so I asked this priest in one of the villages, an old man I’d gotten to know pretty well. I’m a Catholic, by the way. I thought it was a joke—about the inheritances, that is. Gabriel laughed, that’s for sure. I figured his father was the kind of self-made man out to found a dynasty, who’d throw a fit if his son brought home a brown-skinned Canadian Catholic like me.”
“And yet they’d want the boy, eventually,” I concluded. This was the source of her animosity.
“And here you are,” she pointed out.
“It’s not quite the same,” Iris objected.
“Isn’t it?”
I thought this a good time to throw a couple of facts into the burgeoning argument. “Iris is Gabriel’s mother,”
