Page 104 of The Boxing Baroness

“Good. Because Cecile needs a few days to recuperate. I wish she’d gone home; this is wearing on her.”

“But not on you?”

“I’m tired, but I’ve spent the last few years training. Physically, at least, this is far easier for me. Besides, I have a reason to want to keep going.”

They rode for a while in silence, the moon still low in the sky.

“Will you try to meet your mother if Dominic knows who she is?” he asked.

“I don’t know. At first I was angry—furious—that she’d handed me off to strangers as if I were no more than a cast-off piece of clothing.” She sighed. “But at least she tried to take care of me. Five hundred pounds is a great deal of money.” She glanced at him. “She must have cared about me a little.”

An uncomfortable look flickered across his face.

“I’m sorry,” she said sharply. “Here I am burdening you with a sordid tale that you probably don’t want to hear.”

“I would not have asked if I had not wanted to know. Besides, you know the aristocracy specializes in sordid.”

“Surely not Lord Flawless’s family?”

He gave her a level look.

She bit her lip. “I apologize—that was uncalled for.”

“My elder brother, Robert, was not my father’s son.”

Marianne blinked at his unprecedented offering of personal information. “That seems . . . unusual for an eldest child.”

“Unusual. That is a good word for both of my parents.”

“Did your father know—about your brother, I mean?”

“Oh yes. My mother told him. Theirs was not a love match,” he said, staring straight ahead. “The dukedom was depleted, and my mother brought a great deal of money to the union. My father married her, but he was in love with someone else, and he never let my mother forget it. Her first few pregnancies ended in miscarriages. My aunt said my mother felt trapped and miserable and that my parents could scarcely stand to be in the same house together. As for my father, well, he had other consolations.” He turned to look at her. “He kept his mistress right up until his death. I have eight half-siblings.”

Good Lord. “Did your mother know?”

“Not at first. She found out about both the woman and the four children she’d already borne my father not long after her own third miscarriage.”

Marianne could not imagine the humiliation. It was a dozen times worse than what Dominic had done to her.

“My aunt said she was deranged with anger when she found out,” the duke continued. “She took a lover—my father never learned who—and waited until Robert was born to tell my father the truth. Of course, he was furious, but there wasn’t a thing he could do about it except punish her. So he packed her off to the country. He dismissed her personal servants—maid, footmen, and her old nurse—and hired new ones. They were more like gaolers. She went nowhere and had no visitors. Well, except for my father. He would come home only long enough to breed her. I was born after two failed attempts, my sisters came one after the other, three of them in almost three years. My mother was grievously ill after my youngest sister’s birth, but my father still came to her. He did it because he hated her, not because he wanted more children from her; I doubt if he even knew his daughters’ names.” He inhaled deeply, and then sighed. “A year after her illness, Benjamin was born.”

They rode in silence. Just when she’d believed it couldn’t get worse, he said, “My mother tried to kill herself right after Ben’s birth. Suicide by horse. The horse died but she—well, she is alive, barely. She needs constant care and will do for the rest of her life.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said, not knowing what else a person could say to such a story.

“It all happened a long time ago, much of it before I was born. My aunt always lived with us, and she loved us when my mother and father could not. My childhood was not an unhappy one in that regard.”

“Was your father unkind to your elder brother?”

“He never spoke to Robert directly—not that I ever heard.”

Marianne winced, unable to even think about such cruelty.

“It was fortunate that Robert had a relentlessly sunny temperament—completely out of place in our home, where tempers were always frayed. He obviously inherited that characteristic from his natural father.”

“Your temper never frays.”

“It does; I’ve just learned how to hide it.” He gave her a sideways look. “Although you certainly have tested me at times.”