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Benjamin had not expected the Duke to answer him with any honesty. He suspected, in fact, that the confession spilled from him out of necessity, that it had been suppressed for so long it took only the mention of her name for him to fall deep into memory.
He was dizzy from the admission, and each new revelation drew him one inch closer to the bottles by the Duke’s perch. Mercifully, he spoke again.
“Is that why you befriended Lady Charlotte? To infiltrate our lives and spite me?” He turned to look at Benjamin, and his face was twisted in miserable repentance. “Was she a pawn in your games?”
Benjamin’s body sagged. “I would never have hurt her,” he said in echo. “It’s mere coincidence.”
“I do not believe in coincidence,” Gamston admonished. “How long have you orchestrated this?”
“If I sought scarlet vengeance, I would have killed you when your man saw me through the doors, do not doubt it. I have orchestrated nothing.”
He pinched his nose. “Then you are who you say you are, Mr. Fletcher—returned to us from war, a soldier turned poet?”
“Mostly, I am, in all the ways that matter.” He looked down at the letter in his hands before folding it back up. While the moment was upon him, he needed to glean all he could from the man. “What of my father? If you were so acquainted with my mother, you must know of him. Is what she told me true? Did he die at sea, or was that too a fabrication?”
“Your father… did not deserve to know you. That is all I can say.”
“I deserve to know him.”
“Milena would turn in her grave if I…” He swallowed. “If this is not a coincidence, it must be fate. She brought you to me—Milena. She watches, and she knows.” The Duke was shifting before his eyes. His grace, his composure, dissolved like sugar in water. “Tell me how to make amends,” he said, but Benjamin didn’t know who he was asking.
“You cannot be redeemed for what you did to her. She is gone too long for her to grant you any pardon, now.” He circled around the twin armchairs before the fire and slumped in the one nearest to him. Gamston occupied the other. Neither of them had the fire to fight, not if his mother was watching as he intimated. “If you will not tell me of my father, then I would ask only one thing more. If you loved my mother, why did you send her away? Why not keep her in your employ?”
In the time they had been fighting, the sun had almost set, and the room turned dark and small as Benjamin sat beside his mother’s former lover. It was as if the both of them had hollowed out, had exhausted all their fury. Curiouser still, he did not fear him.
Blankly, the Duke licked his lips. He looked at Benjamin, his eyes glowing from the light of the fire, altogether lighter. They softened entirely as he confessed breathlessly, “Let me grant you both—the Duchess sent her away because Milena fell pregnant with my son.”
In the years that would come, Benjamin would swear that the earth stopped turning for just that moment. The rain froze in the sky. The fire stilled in the hearth. His heart didn’t skip a beat but stopped, as did the rest of time.
He gazed at the man who he had long named as his enemy, and he tried, in that interim before the world took another breath, to see in him a father.
And he was there. He was there in his hands, in his nose, in his hairline, in his jaw. He found him in his deep, grumbling voice, in the mole above his eye. He was there so evidently that Benjamin could not believe he had missed it.
But it was inconceivable.
“Now you are lying.”
“Fletcher…”
He was pinned to the spot and could not lift an arm even to strike the man for his cruel games. “You would never risk admitting such a thing…” His jaw and ears itched in anticipation. “You would not— I cannot be.”
With great control, Gamston nodded.
“Impossible. My father was a soldier, dead before I was born.”
“Your father was a story.”
“If you had known, you would have… you could have…”
“I tried,” the man whispered. “I did all a coward could do to try to keep you from harm.”
“No,” Benjamin hummed. “No, this isn’t right.”
Twenty-seven years he had suffered a life without a father and so a life without direction. He had thought himself the product of grief. It was not grief that had colored his birth but deception—a fitting beginning to a life of lies. He wracked his head from some recollection that might corroborate Gamston’s admission, lunacy that it was. There was nothing his mother had said, nothing he could see within himself that could make of him the son of aduke. He was dirt, he was laboring, he was the very converse of all the things for which Gamston stood.
And yet the man had no reason to lie.
“She refused to give me your name, and I had to respect it. I provided you both with as much as I could. The rest she would not take.”
