The Sherbrooke Series Novels 1-5 (141 page)

Alice began to sob, ugly soul-deep sobs. Jack leaned down and gathered her into her arms. “It’s all right. It was a very long time ago.” And even as she spoke, hope was withering inside her. Her father had raped this woman? Oh God, she couldn’t imagine it. Not her father, not the man she’d adored. She remembered so clearly sitting in front of him astride his great stallion, his strong arms around her, humming. Yet now she felt the angry, helpless tears of her mother-in-law hot against her neck. She closed her eyes, but there was no hope for it. She simply had no doubt that it had happened just as Alice had said. “It’s all right,” she whispered again against Alice’s hair. “What happened then? Can you tell me?”

“Lev told me he would call on my father the next day. They would arrange a marriage contract. Everything would be all right.”

“Didn’t you tell your father what he’d done to you?”

Alice shook her head. “It wouldn’t have mattered. He would have blustered about, then he would have done exactly what Lev knew he’d do. He would force me to wed him. I can even see my father blaming me, accusing me of seducing Lev, forcing him to marry me, not the other way around.”

“What happened?”

“I had met Farley. I loved him. I ran away, to him. He lived in London, in rooms on Jermym Street. He took me in. I knew my father was looking for me, but he’d never imagine that I would come to Farley. I stayed with Farley, and then we married. Gray was born just over nine months later.”

Jack stumbled back. She folded in on herself. Everything was over now. No more hope. Nothing that was good, that
was joyful, remained. She knew she was crying, but there was no noise. Everything had burst inside her, and she was left with nothing at all, except this emptiness that would be with her forever, until she died, and she would die alone. She would never know Gray as her husband, as the man she would share her life with. It was over before it even began. She simply couldn’t stand it. She rose slowly, raised her face to the sky, and shouted, “No!”

“What’s wrong?”

It was Alice. Suddenly she sounded perfectly normal, as if they’d been speaking of the spring daffodils.

“I am married to Gray and I love him and he is my half brother and that is what is wrong.”

She wanted to kill the woman, simply take her white neck between her hands and squeeze until this damnable pain that was eating her lessened.

But it wouldn’t lessen, ever.

“You are Lev’s daughter,” Alice said. “My son told me this afternoon that he had married you.”

“Yes, I am Lev’s daughter.”

“You have the look of him. It frightened me how much you look like him.”

“Yes, I know. I also have something of the look of your son, Gray, who also has the look of you and of his father, Lev. Haven’t you noticed? We are both fair. My eyes are blue and his are green, not much difference there.”

“What are you talking about? You make no sense, girl.”

“Lev is my father. Lev is also Gray’s father. That’s what you just said.”

“You believe Lev is Gray’s father?”

Jack just stared at her stupidly, wondering how much madness was within herself and how much in her mother-in-law.

Alice waved her white hand in Jack’s face. “Oh, no, you
silly girl, you don’t understand. When Farley took care of me, I meant that he saved me. I miscarried Lev’s child four weeks later, just before we married, and I nearly died because the bleeding wouldn’t stop. He nursed me, saved me. Oh, I remember he was so desperately pleased that I wouldn’t bear another man’s child. I remember that he got drunk, he was so relieved. But to my beloved Farley, it didn’t matter that I wasn’t a virgin, that Lev had taken me first. It didn’t matter until later, because I was so very slow to learn, to admit my guilt in the matter. Farley was always trying to get me to understand my guilt, to admit what I had done, to pray to God every night that I owed Farley more than I would ever owe another human being. And it was true.”

Jack said slowly, “Evidently Lev always believed that Gray was his son. He told Lord Burleigh that Gray was his son, made him believe it.”

For the first time, Alice smiled, a beautiful wide smile. “Yes, I know. It pleased Farley to let him believe it. Then he would punish me. All of it pleased him.”

“Lev named me Graciella, wanting me to be close in name at least to Gray.”

“Lev was a fool. I wish he had died when he went to the Colonies. He haunted me, the bastard. He came here to Needle House after Gray murdered Farley. He wanted me yet again, I know it. I know he wanted me to admit that Gray was his son. I refused to see him. Jeffrey told him of my dreadful illness. He had no choice but to leave. He finally died, did he not?”

“Yes, Lev finally died. Will you tell Gray that Farley is indeed his father?”

“You promised I would never have to see him again.”

“That’s right.”

Alice rubbed her chin with her white hand. “I would
never have to see that murdering boy again. I could forget that he even existed. But I would have to see him to tell him that Lev isn’t his father.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You could write it all on paper for him to read. Will you write down that Lev isn’t his father, that I am not his half sister?”

Alice squared her shoulders and jumped to her feet with all the grace of a young girl. She looked into Jack’s face and said, “I have thought about it. My answer is no. He killed his father. He killed my Farley. If there is suffering, then he will suffer. He deserves to suffer. There’s no reason he should be happy after what he did. It is ridiculous that he should be happy with a wife. No, let him believe that his wife is in reality his sister. That will bring him more misery than he can stomach, and he deserves it. He is the monster, not his poor father. He murdered my only love.”

The dowager baroness Cliffe turned away and walked to the far windows. She pulled back the thick green satin draperies and stared out into the black night. She said nothing more.

Jack stood there, mute, unable to think of a single word that might change the woman’s mind.

What was she to do now?

29

J
ACK HURRIED
back to their bedchamber, flung open the door, and ran into the darkness. There was a fire in the fireplace, no other light. Gray hadn’t been here. She pulled up short. She realized it wouldn’t matter if he were here or not. He wouldn’t believe her. He would have to have proof.

Where was he? Probably hidden away somewhere in this house, pondering how he would gain an annulment, wondering what he would do with her, a wife he cared about who soon wouldn’t be his wife if he could help it.

Slowly, she sank to the floor in front of the fireplace. She looked at the one stump of wood that was just beginning to burn. She lowered her face into her hands.

She didn’t move when she felt his hand on her shoulder, gripping her tightly.

“Jack, don’t cry, damn you, not now, not just yet. We’re not beaten. Come along. I just remembered that there’s a large portrait of my father painted when he was not too much older than I am now. Just after I killed him, I pulled
that portrait down and dragged it to the closet beneath the stairs on the first floor. Come, let’s go see it.”

He wasn’t making annulment plans. He sounded excited. He sounded hopeful. She looked up at him and swallowed the damnable tears.

“Gray,” she said, “a portrait of your father?”

“Yes, I never wanted to see the miserable bastard again as long as I lived. I wanted to erase him. Come along, Jack. It’s nearly one o’clock in the morning. I was down in the library searching for anything my father wrote that could concern me, Thomas Bascombe, or my paternity. I didn’t find anything as of yet, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something, somewhere, I will contact his steward tomorrow. Don’t worry, Jack. Don’t give up. What’s wrong with you? Come, let’s go find that portrait.”

He hadn’t given up. She jumped to her feet, smoothed her skirts, then took his face between her hands. “I’m sorry I collapsed on you. It wasn’t well done of me. Let’s go.”

Ten minutes later, Gray and Jack together dragged out a four-foot-tall, two-and-a-half-foot-wide portrait that had to weigh more than the boy who’d dragged it in here all those years ago. It was wrapped in a thick white Holland cover. Jack was spitting out spiderwebs from her mouth as they emerged from the deep under-stairs closet.

“Let’s bring it into the study,” Gray said. Once they had it clear of the closet, he hefted it up onto his back, saying over his shoulder, “Bring the candle branch, Jack. Yes, close the door first. That place was black as night and dirty as well. I’ll tell Nella about it.”

She followed him silently, her eyes on that huge covered portrait. She was praying as hard as she could. There had to be something in that portrait, she thought, just a simple something, some sign, a small proof.

She watched Gray prop the painting up against his desk. Slowly he pulled off the cover. He wiped the cloth over the painting. She knew he wasn’t yet looking at it. He rubbed for a few more minutes, tossed the cloth away, then looked at her. “Come here, Jack. We’ll face this together. Why are you hanging back? No, don’t be frightened.” He walked to her and gently took the branch of candles out of her hand and set it on a side table near a settee. “What’s wrong?” He gently pulled her against him. “You were so certain that everything would be all right. You made me ashamed that I’d believed it all without a single question. Then I remembered the painting. Come, let’s face it together.” Gray lightly touched his fingers to her white cheek. There was a small veil of spiderweb. He wiped it away.

She pulled away from him, grabbed up the candle branch, and set it atop the desk. It cast bright light over the painting. She took several steps back to stand beside Gray. Together they looked at the painting.

She stared at a tall, very lean man who was standing outside a stable. He held a bridle in a black-gloved hand. His other hand—not gloved—lay negligently on his hip. One leg was bent slightly, but still, he stood tall and proud. He was handsome, beautifully dressed in riding clothes, his head thrown back as if he’d just laughed at something someone had said just beyond him.

Gray breathed out slowly. “I’d forgotten what he looked like. I suppose I didn’t ever want to remember.”

He was as dark as Lucifer. One simply knew that beneath his white-powered wig his own hair was black and thick, opaque, without a single swatch of lighter color in it. His skin was swarthy, his eyes as dark as a bottomless pit, probably as black as his hair. His eyebrows were thick and arched, black slashes scoring his brow. Those eyes stared
back at them, soulless, without light, filled with nothing that meant anything to Gray.

“I hated him,” he said quietly. “I hated him more than anything or anyone in my entire life. He looks like Satan, doesn’t he? No humanity in him, just endless cruelty, endless delight in dominating, endless belief in his own power—and he wallowed in his power, Jack, I do remember that. No one went against him. I remember now that he enjoyed simply looking at my mother, touching her beautiful hair, lightly stroking his fingers over her face, her shoulders. An angel and the devil. That’s how they looked together. Her fairness fascinated him.”

His voice sounded faded, as if he were seeing himself in the past, seeing everything through a child’s eyes.

“Yes, he must have been something,” she said in a very adult, very matter-of-fact voice. “A splendid fellow, don’t you think? He beat his wife, beat his son, showed no mercy until his son, only a boy, was brave enough to stop him. Now, on the surface of things, he doesn’t seem to have a single feature that he passed on to you. Let’s study it more closely.”

She took his hand and pulled him forward.

“Look at the black hairs on the back of his hand,” Gray said, pointing to the ungloved hand that posed on his father’s hip. He held up his own hand, letting the candlelight flow over it. “His hand is square, mine isn’t.”

“He has long legs. So do you.”

“Many men have long legs,” Gray said, staring now at the boots he was wearing. “His feet are long and narrow. So are mine. Many men have long, narrow feet. There’s nothing to any of it, Jack.”

“He has a very heavy beard. You can see it, and given the angle of the sun the artist has painted in, it can’t be later than noon.”

“Yes, he was quite dark. I’m not. I fear I’m most like my mother, Jack.”

But Jack wasn’t listening. She was staring at Farley St. Cyre’s wig, powdered stark white, tied in a black ribbon at the nape of his neck. Very slowly, she touched her fingertips to his forehead. “Look closely, Gray.”

“What is it? He’s wearing a wig. It was the style then.”

“No, see how the wig doesn’t completely conform to the line of his hair? Don’t you see it? He has a widow’s peak, Gray. You can see the arrow of black hair that the wig doesn’t cover.” She turned to smile up at him and touch his forehead. “Just as you have a widow’s peak, a small one, but it’s there.”

He stared down at her, mesmerized. “I never knew there was even a name for it. Widow’s peak? Isn’t it common?”

“Oh, no, not at all common. Yours isn’t all that visible because your hair falls over it, to the side, but look at his, straight and right in the center, a sharp arrow. Yours isn’t nearly so dramatic, but it’s still there.”

“A thing called a widow’s peak,” he said slowly, stepping away from both her and the large portrait. “To accept this monster as my father because we share this same uncommon hair growth?”

“Well, there is something else as well,” Jack said, and she told him how she had gone to his mother’s room, and what his mother had told her.

“Do you remember Thomas Levering Bascombe coming here after your father’s funeral?”

“No, I have no memory of him at all, ever.”

“She said she refused to see him. She knew he wanted her again, wanted to marry her.”

“She’s quite mad, Jack.”

“Perhaps, but there was no madness in the story she told me, Gray. My father raped her in order to force her to wed
him. But it wasn’t his child that grew in her, it was your father’s, her new husband’s. There was no reason for her to lie about the miscarriage, about how your father nursed her, ultimately blamed her for not coming to him a virgin, and beat her, but evidently cared for her nonetheless.”

“A very strange sort of caring. I daresay she could have been a saint and he still would have beaten her.”

She shuddered at the truth of what he said. “Strange indeed. She wasn’t making it up, Gray.”

“You said she refused to tell me of this? You said she refused to write it down? That makes no sense to me. Why wouldn’t she want to tell me?”

It was hard. She didn’t want to say it, but now there was no choice. “She won’t write it down because she wants you to suffer.”

He said nothing for a very long time. He simply seemed to stare into his father’s black eyes. “He never hit her face, I remember that now. He worshiped her face, touched her face whenever he passed her. But her back, my God, Jack, she must have been scarred endlessly from the beatings of his belt on her back.”

“Yes, more than likely. But it was a long time ago, Gray. Unfortunately, your mother still lives in that time, still sees him as the man who, when he wasn’t pounding her, worshiped her. She can’t seem to bring herself to forgive you.”

“You mean she’s always spoken so little to me when I visited because she hates me?”

“Probably. I think now that seeing me so unexpectedly, seeing my father in my face, she let down her guard. She had to speak. I suppose I was the catalyst.” Jack knew what she’d just said was true. She also realized that whatever madness gripped his mother, her feelings of hatred for her son were deep and abiding. She thought of Gray as that
twelve-year-old boy, saving his mother the only way he knew, and she’d hated him for it. She wanted to weep for the pain he’d endured from these two people who were his parents and should have loved him and nurtured him, but hadn’t.

Gray said, “All these years and I simply didn’t realize it. Jesus, that bespeaks a fine sensitivity on my part, doesn’t it?”

He was wallowing in guilt, and she was appalled. She said matter-of-factly, no hint of emotion or pity in her voice, “What it bespeaks is the demented spirit of a woman who could never accept the truth of things, who didn’t have the strength to stand up to a man who hurt her, who turned herself into a victim and sought his cruelty as a drunkard would seek drink.

“I plan to speak to her again tomorrow. You will listen, hidden, perhaps, and she will tell it all to me again.

“Now, my question to you is, Gray, will you believe the proof of your father’s widow’s peak combined with the words from your mother’s own mouth?”

“But why was Lord Burleigh so convinced?”

“Because my father believed it so deeply. My father was a very serious man, a proud man, a very intelligent man. I also believed him honorable and loyal and infinitely honest. I was wrong. He committed a grave crime against your mother. He is dead, so there is no retribution for him.

“I must also believe that my father wanted to recognize you as his son because he failed to sire a son by my mother. He had me and that was it. Gray and Graciella.” Jack shook her head. “Such tragedy, Gray. But it’s not our tragedy. Let it remain in the past where it belongs. We’re free of it. You are not my bloody brother. You’re my bloody husband, thank God.”

Still he held back. “I want to hear my mother speak of it. I must.”

“Yes,” she said, and she even managed to smile up at him, “I know you must.”

Jack held Georgie’s small hand, saying even as they walked into the dowager baroness’s sitting room, “She is a very lovely lady, Georgie. She rarely leaves her room, but that’s all right. That just means that we always know where she is.” And, Jack prayed,
I hope she will not scare you witless.

Georgie just hummed, staring around her. “P-P-Pretty room,” she said, broke away from Jack, and dashed to the brilliantly colored silk shawl that lay in shimmering folds over the back of a chair near to the windows.

“Who are you?”

Jack walked quickly to Alice’s chair. “That is my little sister, ma’am. Her name is Georgina. She loves bright colors and soft materials.” Jack called out, “Georgie, love, do come here and meet her ladyship.”

The dowager baroness sucked in her breath. “Her eyes, goodness, how very strange she looks. One gold eye and one blue eye. How very odd. And delightful.”