Well, she had carried on as if she’d lost nothing.
Looking back, however, she’d become even more reckless. Her affairs more public. The occasional, inexplicable reconciliation with his father—the last of which had resulted in Emily—ever more volatile.
The behavior of both his parents had mortified him.
“You don’t know what I know about my parents,” he said.
“You’d be surprised what I know,” Bessie answered evenly.
He narrowed his eyes. Bessie always thought she knew everything. Well, she did not.
“She let him kill her child.” He unburdened himself for the first time in his life. “Her baby, but not his.”
Bessie did not look shocked. “Did she?”
He hit the back of the chair with the base of his palm. “I held the babe.”
“I know,” she answered.
On impulse, he repeatedly clicked his signet ring against the wood. “What do you mean?”
“I was there.”
He frowned. “Were you the midwife?”
She shook her head. “No. But I knew the midwife. Your mother had arranged for me to take the child to his father, in the event she bore a male. Your father had told her what he intended. She didn’t want to take any chances.”
Click. Click. Click.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Adrian, read the letters. These are secrets that are not mine to reveal.”
“What could be worse than a dead child?”
“Nothing,” she whispered. “But, as you now know, the child did not die.”
She stood up, rounded the desk and placed a hand on his shoulder. Her heavy hand was warm, centering, but he couldn’t trust her. He couldn’t trust anything.
Not even his own memory.
He turned away.
She withdrew to the far side of the room and opened a cabinet. Metal sounded against metal as she worked her way through the multiple iron plates and straps securing the safe setting on an inside shelf.
When she returned, she placed a small box on the table in front of him. She removed a key—one of many—from her chatelaine.
“Take the box upstairs, Adrian. And read the letters.”
Several hours later,Adrian leaned back against the headboard, his mother’s letters spread out across the bed in stacks. He wasn’t exactly sure how long he’d been reading, but he’d been pouring over the script he remembered so well long enough for his eyes to burn.
Or perhaps the dry sting was only threatened tears.
Adrian’s mother had written him twice a month, every month, from the year she’d settled abroad—1804—until the month before she died three years ago. Taken together, they served as both a diary of her exile and as an account of her reemergence into another life, another world.
The letters were written, not from a mother to an adolescent son—he’d been fourteen when she’d disappeared from his life—but from a mother to her adult son, one old enough to understand the difficult decisions she’d been forced to make.
Not contacting him prior to his majority had been her way of protecting him from his father’s wrath and Society’s censure.
