Katherine O’Neal (28 page)

“You don’t want to know.”

“I want to help you.”

“Help me? There
is
no help for
me.”

His lips were at her hair. “Whatever it is, I
shall understand.”

“Understand?” She pushed away. “
I
don’t even understand!”

He could see she was growing hysterical. In
her eyes was the wild look of a trapped animal willing to risk even
death to be free. He shook her so that her silver hair flew about
her head.

“
Tell me.”

She wrenched away from him and screamed, “I
killed my own child!”

He was so shocked, he didn’t even bother to
reach for her. He stood frozen, looking at her as if he couldn’t
believe what he was hearing. In the back of her brain, she realized
he wasn’t looking at her as she’d expected. There was something
more personal in the stunned expression. But she wasn’t thinking
rationally, and it slipped from her before it could register.

“I might as well tell you,” she said in a
small, defeated voice.

He didn’t move. He didn’t alter his
expression. He merely waited, numbly, for her to explain.

She put a hand to her eyes, covering them as
she recalled the twisted memory.

“I—had a child at fourteen. A boy. I named
him—well, that doesn’t matter, does it? He wasn’t wanted. I was
raped, and he was the result. The whole time I was pregnant, I
hated this growing intrusion. I couldn’t think about the child
without remembering the circumstances—why I was having him. My
parents were dead. I had no one to turn to. I was so shocked, I
think, over the way my parents died, that I couldn’t seem to think.
It was as if all the training I’d had died with them. I didn’t know
what to do.”

She looked up at him. He hadn’t moved. He
looked as haunted as it was possible for a man to be.
He hates
me now
, she thought. And why not? Hadn’t she spent these many
years secretly hating herself?

“I had the child by myself in a dingy room
I’d managed to scrape enough shillings together to let. A horrible
place. He was
all
I had. Before his birth, I’d been able to
get enough money together to keep a roof over my head. But
afterward—well, a baby’s rather a hindrance to a bluff artist. No
man wants to take on the burden of another man’s child. Certainly
not the sort of men I was doing business with. I used to think of
the irony of it all. My father had groomed me to be a bride of the
aristocracy. And there I was, begging for food to keep alive a
child I’d never wanted and—and—”

She couldn’t say it.

“And couldn’t love,” he supplied.

She glanced at him. In his eyes was a pity
she hadn’t expected. It hurt her more than the accusation she’d
thought to see. She’d seen that look in the eyes of so many people
on the streets of London. Everyone pitied, and no one helped.

She sighed. She might as well confess as much
as she dared.

“I wanted to love him. God knows, he was so
lovely, with his curly black—” She put her hand to her mouth.
Spare him what you can. Isn’t it bad enough?
“I did
everything I could to care for him. But he’d look up at me with
those blue eyes, and all I could see was—the man who’d raped me. He
was so like him. Yet he wasn’t, because he was small and helpless,
and needed a mother’s love. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t give
him what he needed.”

She began to cry again. She went to rest her
cheek against the tent pole.

“I kept him for over three years. Every day
I’d wake up and think,
Today is the day I shall find a way to
make this work. Today I shall open my heart to him without
remembering my hatred of his father.
But I never could.
Eventually, it became too difficult to support him. We were dressed
in rags, half-starving. I wasn’t eating enough to keep my milk
flowing. The baby cried all night from hunger. I felt like such a
failure. Any cow in the fields could give birth, could care for its
young in a way I couldn’t. I’ve never felt so inadequate in all my
life. I began to think if only I were free to operate, I could pull
a con that was worthy of my heritage—build a stake for us, and get
us out of the punishing poverty we’d been living in for nearly four
years. So that’s what I decided to—”

“Did my brother harm your child?” Mace asked
with a piercing glare.

“Mace, please—”

In the act of turning away, she was grabbed
by a hand of granite and whirled around to face a pair of
uncompromising deep blue eyes.

“Tell me, dammit. Did Lance hurt your
child?”

“No. I did that myself.”

“What then?” He took hold of her other arm
and shook her. “What did he do to you?”

She saw in his eyes that he’d already guessed
the truth. What difference did it make anymore?

She gave up and said the awful words.

“He was the baby’s father. Lance raped me
after he set fire to my parents’ house. As they were screaming
their agony, he pinned me down and raped me, laughing all the
while.”

His hands dropped from her.

“The son of a
bitch!
” he raged.
Looking around, he took her reading table in his hands, raised it
high above his head, and flung it to the ground, smashing it to
slivers. He was looking around as if for someone to strangle when
he met her startled gaze. Wide-eyed, bewildered, frightened by the
intensity of his unleashed emotions, she backed away.

He rushed to her and caught her arms in his
punishing grip. “Don’t look at me like that!” he commanded. “I’m
not Lance. I’m not like him, I tell you!”

She swallowed hard, because in this light,
with the madness in his eyes, he looked very much like the brother
who’d willfully destroyed her.

“Jesus. You really think I am.”

“I don’t know what to think. I only know it
was a Blackwood who found out where we were living. Who put an
advertisement in the
Times
stating the date of our
destruction. Who came at night and set fire to our house. Who
grabbed me—like you’re doing now—and flung me to the ground and
took me against my will as my parents burned to death, screaming,
before my eyes.”

He took his hands from her and looked at them
as if he’d never seen them before.

“My brother wasn’t—responsible for
himself.”

“Your
brother
was a bloody maniac. I
was thirteen years old. I’d never so much as
kissed
a man.
He didn’t care that he was hurting me, or that he was killing me
inside by keeping me from saving my parents. He just kept laughing
and laughing and
laughing—
”

She lashed out at him, beating at his chest,
slapping his face with the same wild, ineffective swings she’d used
on Lance that fateful night.

He fought her. Taking her wrists in his
hands, he shoved her back against the tent pole, then brought her
wrists high above her head to press them against the wooden beam.
With his body, he pinned her there, lowering his forehead to rest
on the top of her head. “Christ, I’m sorry,” he murmured, almost
incoherent himself. “Jesus, God—if only I could—”

“Take it away? No one can ever take it away.
Your brother was the crudest man I ever came across in a lifetime
of consorting with criminals. It’s your fault, dammit! You and your
ruddy family—protecting him, pretending he wasn’t the lunatic he
was. That’s the reason our family turned him in after he killed
that American boy. We knew if someone didn’t stop him, he’d— They
had him in custody. He was going to hang along with your parents.
But you had to break him out. So he could return and wreak his
revenge.”

“He was my
brother
. He was young, and
ambitious, but he could never live up to the family’s expectations.
He worshiped me, wanted to be like me. But every time he was
involved, something went wrong. I kept trying to help him. If we
suspected there was something wrong with him, we kept thinking time
would take care of it. He begged for a chance to prove himself. So
we gave him the flam. He was to kidnap the American, take his place
on the ship, get what jewels he could, then return the American to
his family. But, through Lance’s carelessness, the American saw me.
Lance killed him thinking he was doing me a favor. A
favor!
I nearly killed him when I found out.”

“I wish to God you had.”

His hands tightened on her wrists. “I’m not a
killer. I told you.”

“You’re a Blackwood, aren’t you?”

Like a deflated balloon, the air seemed to
leave him. He sagged against her, then let her go and moved away.
Her body felt cold and strangely bereft without his crushing
warmth. She brought her hands down and clenched them together to
keep them from shaking.

“So you had the baby. My—”

“Nephew. Yes.”

“Then what happened?”

“When B—when the baby was almost four, I
heard Lance had been killed. They said the ship he was escaping on
sank at sea. Did you know he was alive?”

“I was the one who pulled him from the
ship.”

She was sorry she’d asked. If only he’d let
well enough alone...

“I thought he was dead. I thought at last I
could be free of his vile memory. All I needed was some time to
gather my resources, to plan a con big enough that I could support
the baby. So I turned him over to an orphanage.”

He shuddered at the agony in her eyes.

“It was meant to be temporary. I told them
I’d be back to retrieve him. I asked them to take good care of him
till I returned. But I had no money to give. I suppose they didn’t
believe me. When I returned, with money in my pocket at last, they
told me he’d died. Pneumonia, they said. But I know what really
killed him. It was my neglect.”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what? Don’t face the truth? I’ve spent
my life running away from the truth. But the fact is, I killed that
child. I wasn’t capable of giving him what he needed. A tiny,
innocent boy, and I couldn’t find it in me to love him, or to care
for him, as he deserved. I’ve paid for it a thousand times over.
But what of him? When I think of him, dying alone, without comfort
or—” She broke into sobs. “In the end, I’m as much of a monster as
your brother.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Not saying it doesn’t make it less the
truth.”

“You were a child. Growing up the way you
did, what did you know of love?”

“Don’t. I don’t want to hear this. I can’t
justify what I did.”

“Why not? Because you might find it in your
heart to forgive?”

“I shall never forgive him. Do you hear me?
Never!
”

He was silent for a moment. Then, very
softly, he said, “I meant that you might forgive yourself.”

The thought of it terrified her more than the
threat of punishment for her crimes. “I can’t forgive anyone,” she
told him. “After I learned to live with the baby’s death, all I
could think of was revenge. I decided to embrace the traditions of
my family. To be the best confidence woman this world had ever
seen. I spent a few years in Europe, honing my skills and keeping
track of your whereabouts. When you came to America, I followed,
determined to destroy you in whatever way I could. If I couldn’t
have Lance, I’d have the last living Blackwood’s head on a plate. I
didn’t realize until I saw him again how much I hate him
still.”

He said nothing. There was a great sadness in
his eyes.

“I’ve been toying with you as a form of
revenge. Every time I came near you, it was thrilling. Because it
was like having Lance Blackwood under my thumb. No longer was he
attacking me against my will. This time,
I
was controlling
the game.”

She’d never seen him flinch, not from danger,
not from a challenge, not from pain. But he flinched now, and her
heart shattered at the futility of it all.

“What is it you’re not saying?” he croaked,
with a con man’s instincts.

“Now that you know, I’m not certain I can
look at you again without thinking of Lance.”

The next few weeks passed in a fog.
Confessions that might have brought them closer together instead
built a wall between them that neither could surmount. The
confrontation had unsettled Mace in a way Saranda couldn’t fathom.
She had the feeling she’d never seen him when he wasn’t playing a
role. Yet in those weeks following their face-off, he became moody
and remote. Saranda could only guess at the depth of his despair at
learning the truth about the brother he’d loved and protected most
of his life. But it puzzled her that he’d given up so completely.
He seemed strangely defeated, as if beaten by some force she
couldn’t comprehend. She’d spent her life hating his family. She’d
openly sought revenge. Looking at his ravaged face, she knew that
in some measure, she’d won it. The surprise was how deeply hurt she
was by his defeat. His illusions crushed, he seemed stripped of the
pride, the confidence, that had made him the man he was. He was a
con man without a con, the saddest circumstance of all.

He seemed to her like a man who’d looked
inside and found nothing there. In spite of her own deep pain, she
wanted desperately to help him. But what could she do? It was the
travesty of her life that she’d learned an ugly truth at a tender
age: She was a woman incapable of love. Those in pain were better
off without her insufficient care.

* * *

She went to the wagon one night to find him
sitting on the bunk, his elbows resting on his knees, a bottle
dangling in his hand. He looked up when she entered and closed his
eyes, as if the light was too sharp. “Saranda, go away.”

She closed the door behind her. “I was just
wondering how long it would take you to stop feeling sorry for
yourself.”

He took a liberal sip from the bottle. “How
long did it take you?” he sneered.