Page 48 of A Taste of Miss Honey

“Ecstatic,” he retorted, still unreasonably unsettled by the sinful visions his mind had stirred up. The temptation to drive her into the nearest stand of trees and ruffle her exquisite ensemble beyond mending was nigh on irresistible.

“Well, go on, then.” She waved her hands at him once more.

“Stop doing that,” he told her, taking her hands and placing them firmly in her lap. A mistake. She blushed as their fingers tangled, and so prettily he found it hard to look away. Still, he removed his hand, returned his attention to the horses, and tried to focus his ill-behaved mind.

The scent of damp earth and rotting leaves and the fresh bite of the icy air filled his nose, and he experienced a sudden longing for the fresh salt tang of the sea. Having spent most of his childhood in Paris, it had surprised him to discover how much he loved the sea, and now how much he missed it. For now, he shoved any notions of what he might want or hope for aside as he considered where to begin.

“What do you know of my family?”

“I only know the gossip. That your father…”

She hesitated, and he laughed bitterly.

“Oh, don’t hold back now, Miss Honeywell. My father is a thoroughgoing villain, and yet far worse than anyone realises.”

She cleared her throat nervously but carried on. “He abducted a young woman, an heiress, but her father would not pay the dowry, whether or not he married her. But he took her to France and married her anyway, hoping the man would relent. He did not.”

“Precisely so, and I pray you will not overtax your imagination wondering what kind of marriage they enjoyed, or what manner of father he made. It was not pretty.”

There followed a taut silence and Ben dared to entertain the forlorn hope she would not wish to know any more. Idiot. He started as her hand reached out and covered his.

“I’m so sorry. I lost my mother when I was very young, but I know she and Papa were very happy, and after she had passed, my sisters doted on me. Clementine is as much my mother as my sister. My life has been one of security and love. I cannot pretend to know how it was for you, but I would be glad if you would tell me.”

To Ben’s profound horror, emotion welled in his chest, an odd tightness in his throat that he fought down with every iota of willpower he possessed.

When he finally spoke, the words were brisk and impassive. The facts only. “My father was a brute. He abandoned us mostly, only coming back when he wanted something. My mother was frail, he bullied her until she gave up even trying to stand up to him. She died when I was thirteen, a few weeks after the Treaty of Amiens broke down. She had desperately wished to return to England, and I had promised to get the funds, but then war broke out again and with it she lost hope.”

He shrugged. Well, that was it in a nutshell.

He felt her eyes on him, could feel her desire to comfort him radiating from her, as if he stood before a warming fire on a frosty night, but he kept his attention on the horses.

“She killed herself.”

Ben had never said that out loud to anyone before. A part of him wondered why on earth he had done so now, except perhaps he wanted to shock her, to make her realise how dark and grubby his life was so she would see sense and leave him be before he dragged her into the murk with him.

“That… That must have been terribly hard for you. Did you have friends, anyone else who—”

Anger rose in his chest as he heard the sorrow behind her words, an unnamed fury that sought to recoil from the kindness she offered him so freely, despite the way he’d treated her.

“For the love of God, don’t pity me. It was a long time ago. I’m not a motherless little boy and was hardly what you’d call innocent, even then. My mother taught me what it was to be a gentleman, but my father taught me how to be a bastard, how to survive no matter what, and I put his teaching to good use.”

They drove on in silence for a while as Ben composed himself. He was behaving like an ill-mannered brute. His father’s son, apparently.

“Very well. No sympathy. So what did you do?” she asked, her tone brisk and cool, for which he was grateful.

“I left Paris. I’d been making ends meet by translating documents for English émigrés, those trying to persuade the authorities to let them return home, but I’d started getting work from—let’s say less respectable sources,” he said with a curl of his lip. “One of them mentioned my father, and that he was living in Calais. Reading between the lines, I discovered he was doing a brisk trade in smuggled goods from England.”

“A profitable trade, as Napoleon had placed an embargo on British goods,” she observed.

Ben nodded. “I decided to find out exactly what he was up to. I was… angry with him.” Possibly the understatement of the century, but he left it at that. “The idea of getting him thrown in gaol was one I embraced with enthusiasm.”

The Serpentine appeared before them, the water rippling in the icy breeze, sparkling even in the dim light that pierced the veil of sombre cloud overhead.

“Did you succeed?”

He snorted. “No. My father is nothing if not sly and remarkably resourceful. I poked around the edges of his world, making friends with the French smugglers. As a child I’d run tame on the streets of Paris and could pass for a lowborn thug as easily as a blue-blooded Englishman. I began working with them, going out on runs, and gradually I pieced it together.”

He drew the horses to a halt within the shelter of a small stand of trees, a little out of the wind and with The Serpentine coiling across the park beside them. Ray ran to the horses' heads and stood waiting.