Page 37 of Gentleman Jim

“And your mother?”

“A lady of northern Italian extraction. My father married her abroad, and she died bringing me into this world.”

Maggie’s lips compressed. She didn’t believe him. She couldn’t. It would mean disbelieving the evidence of her own eyes—her own heart. “What was her given name?”

“Giovanna.”

“Not Jenny Seaton, then.”

He smiled. “Not remotely.”

“And your father was Viscount St. Clare before you? The gentleman who fled London after killing a man in a duel?”

St. Clare’s expression sobered. “You’ve heard the tales, I take it.”

“Whispers,” she said. “Is it true, what they say?”

“True enough.” He was silent a moment. “My father shot the youngest son of the Duke of Penworthy. The boy was feebleminded, barely twenty at the time. He had a reputation for being hotheaded. Most everyone had learned to ignore his insults. But my father…”

“You said he was a rather famous shot.”

“He was. Too famous by half. Every young pup with something to prove wanted to duel with him. It was something of a rite of passage.”

“But he didn’t duel with everyone who challenged him, surely?”

“I don’t know.” St. Clare frowned. “According to my grandfather, my father was a bit hotheaded himself. He didn’t always exercise the best judgment. When Penworthy’s son died from his wounds, my father was obliged to escape to the continent. He died there some years later.”

“You never knew him?”

He shook his head. “My grandfather had the raising of me.”

For the first time, Maggie felt a flicker of doubt. She tried to ignore it. It wasn’t possible that his story was true. That he really was Lord St. Clare, heir to the Earl of Allendale.

He was Nicholas Seaton. He looked like him. He wrote like him. Smiled like him and smelled like him. Even the way he’d held her—the way he’d said her name. Maggie.

There were differences, it was true. Marked differences. He no longer carried himself as Nicholas had. And he no longer sounded like him, either. He spoke in the cultured tones of a gentleman, conversing with ease about art and music and history.

Nicholas had been neither well-read nor well-traveled. But he hadn’t been cold. He’d been warm and affectionate. Passionate in his anger, but always ready with a teasing, lopsided grin. Indeed, despite the hardships of his young life, he’d laughed with her easily and often.

She wondered what he’d suffered to turn himself into the Viscount St. Clare. What he’d sacrificed to become the gentleman he was today.

But she feared she already knew the answer.

He’d sacrificed his past. Blotted it out entirely, and her along with it.

“We traveled a great deal,” St. Clare said. “My schooling was haphazard at best. But the adventures I had. No man could wish for a better education.”

“Tell me,” she encouraged him.

And he did.

He told her about his youth. About the Grecian Count with whom he’d raced yachts in the Mediterranean. The dangerous little Italian who had taught him swordplay in Venice. And the perpetually foxed scholar his grandfather had employed to tutor him, a man who had doggedly followed them from Italy to Egypt and back again before, at long last, expiring of drink outside a disreputable tavern in Rome.

“I met Lord Mattingly and Lord Vickers not long after Napoleon was exiled to St. Helena,” St. Clare said. “We traveled together for over a year before I was obliged to rejoin my grandfather.”

“And then…?”

He shrugged. “And then I came home to England.”