"It's late," Lady Catherine said. "You must have had a... fatiguing night. I didn't sleep well myself."
Tiny flames seemed to ignite in Lucy's cheeks as she remembered the cries and groans, whimpers and wild urgings that had driven her passion and Valcour's. Was it possible Lady Catherine had heard them?
Lucy swallowed hard. "I slept very soundly."
"I'm glad. I have been hoping for an opportunity to speak with you. Get to—to know my... new daughter. There are some things that I need to say to you."
Lucy wondered what they could possibly be. An apology of sorts for the reception she'd given Lucy the first night? More likely it would be something far worse. A recounting of the myriad reasons she was not fit to be a countess. Lucy shrugged and said, "I have always felt it better to get such things into the open at once."
Lady Catherine gestured to the room at her right. Lucy walked into a lovely chamber of pale blue and white. Dried flowers stood in a vase, fragrances of summers long past drifting from the fragile petals. The portraits in this room were worlds away from the neglected ones at the Valcour castle. Miniatures of all different shapes and sizes were tucked on tables and candle stands, the whimsically carved mantle and the curio shelf beside the blue satin-covered settee.
It was as if Lady Catherine had gathered up pieces of her life here, making it into her own special world. Lucy reached out to touch a portrait of a fresh-faced girl, obviously the young Catherine herself, in a flower-draped pony cart, led by a sandy-haired man who looked as if he had yet to face his first shaving razor.
"My brother, Robert. He died at sea off the coast of the West Indies."
There was a wistful quality in Lady Catherine's voice that made Lucy's own throat tighten with sympathy. "I'm sorry."
"So was I. You see, from the time we were children, we had been inseparable. But we were estranged at the time he died. Had been for a very long time. From the moment I married Dominic's father."
Lucy had never been one to pry into people's private lives. She had too many hidden places in her own. She said nothing, but Lady Catherine went on.
"Robert was certain that I would be unhappy as Lionel St. Cyr's countess. He said he couldn't bear to see me miserable. But I wouldn't listen. I was so certain I could change Lionel, soften him, gentle him. Why is it we women are always so confident in our powers?"
Lucy nibbled at her lower lip, uncomfortable as Lady Catherine's words echoed her own thoughts of earlier that morning—that Lucy herself would be able to probe past Valcour's steely facade, reach the man buried beneath. She didn't want to change what was there. She only wanted to have him open himself, let her see beyond those intense eyes, that closed smile. "My father—adopted father—in Virginia was the most notorious rakehell in the colonies until he fell in love with my mother," she said. "Everyone said the change in him was a miracle."
For some reason, the mention of Lucy's mother made Lady Catherine wince and turn away. "There were no miracles for me. Robert was right. Lionel was wild and reckless, so handsome the demimondaines all but shed blood to get him in their clutches. He had the notorious Valcour thirsts for danger and women and gambling. I was a dreamy child, the cherished baby sister that delighted my older, doting brother. Nothing in my life had prepared me for what it would mean to be Lionel St. Cyr's wife."
"If he was so dangerous, why did you marry him?"
"Lionel was a magnificent match for me, titled and wealthy, handsome and much sought after by matchmaking mamas. His attention to me was like a first sip of champagne: It turned my head, made me dizzy with excitement. My own parents were loving but stolid, Robert serious and responsible. Lionel was the antithesis of everything I'd ever known, something almost exotic and intoxicating. I'm still not certain why he fancied himself in love with me. But he was not the type of husband I needed. And once his passion for my beauty faded, I know Lionel was disappointed in his choice of wife."
Lucy squirmed inwardly at Lady Catherine's revelations. Half of Williamsburg trucked themselves off to Emily Blackheath's door, confiding everything from their husband's latest drunken binge to financial woes to broken hearts to the compassionate mistress of Blackheath plantation. But such heart-rending confessions had always made Lucy run the other way.
Even if she hadn't already had that tendency, Lucy was having enough trouble sorting out her own relationship with Valcour at the moment. She didn't know if she could endure delving into heartaches that had happened so many years before to the earl's mother.
"I'm sure you didn't invite me here to spin out a story for me." Lucy tried to set the conversation on a different course. "You said you had something to discuss."
"I want to discuss my son with you, Lucinda. Tell you... some things you need to know." Lady Catherine took Lucy's hand and led her to the settee. She sank down on it. "I saw Dominic this morning when he left his chambers. There was something changed about him. A shadow of the Dominic I once knew was in his face. I don't know what passed between you. But I can't help but hope..." Her voice trailed off, as if that hope were too fragile even to voice aloud. "My son was not always as you see him now. He is what... pain and disappointment, loss and betrayal have made him."
"Everyone has pain and disappointment. We all have scars," Lucy said softly, remembering her own.
"Not like my Dominic's. The world sees him as the invincible earl of Valcour, cold and ruthless, fierce and strong. A man with no heart. They don't know that his heart was crushed a long time ago. I am the one who destroyed it."
Lucy climbed to her feet, restless. She wanted so much to know Valcour, understand the enigmatic man who was her husband. But she was feeling so raw right now, fragile in ways she hadn't felt since a child. "My lady--”
"Please. I know that there is no love between you and my son as yet. But what I have seen today, on his face and, yes, child, in your own, makes me hope." Lady Catherine's voice fell, hushed. "I was in love once. I've not forgotten how it felt, how it made me new and frightened and..."
"With Dominic's father?"
"No. Would to God I had been able to love him. But our infatuation with each other burned away. When it did, only Dominic was left to join us together. He was the single good thing in my life, Lucinda. Brave and sensitive, kind and caring. He was brilliant at his studies. And with his music..." She stopped and looked away.
"For a time it seemed as if Dominic would succeed where I had not—save Lionel from the excesses that had blackened the Valcour title for three hundred years. Lionel cared enough about his estates to keep them in decent repair for his heir. He wanted to bring the Valcour name back to some semblance of respectability, so he became a favorite of the king, went on diplomatic missions for him, staying away a year or more at a time. I was lonely, child, though not for my husband. Dominic was sent away to school, my parents were long since dead, and my brother Robert... though I'd written letter after letter, had never forgiven me."
There was such sadness in Lady Catherine's voice that Lucy found herself returning to the settee and taking up the older woman's hand. "But I don't understand. If you both loved Dominic, even though you did not love each other..."
"It was not our lack of marital bliss that changed Dominic. It was... something far more damaging. Lionel had just sailed for the Netherlands when an epidemic broke out at Dominic's school. He was ill, and they did not send me word until it was almost too late. I... cannot tell you what it was like to come so near to losing him."
Lucinda imagined the boy she had seen in the portrait, the eyes that twinkled so brightly dulled with fever, his mouth parched. The thought of that child so ill made her wince inwardly, want to reach out and comfort.
"I brought Dominic home to nurse him," Lady Catherine said. "It took him time to gain back his strength. And then I was selfish, Lucinda. I decided not to send him back to school at all until Lionel returned. I told myself it was because their negligence had almost cost Dominic his life. That Lionel would find some safer place to send him.
But the truth was that I couldn't bear to give him up."
Lucy caught her lower lip between her teeth, remembering the desolation in Ian Blackheath's face as her ship had sailed from the harbor in Virginia. He had followed along the shore, limping as fast as he could, waving to her with his plumed tricorn. But nothing had hidden the desolation in every line of his body at the thought of surrendering his Lucy, even for a little while.
How had Dominic St. Cyr and his mother lost each other in the years that came after? How had that little boy, obviously adored and cherished, turned into the implacable, wary man who battled so hard to wall everyone out of his heart?
"Did Dominic resent being kept from school?"
Lady Catherine laughed, a gentle, musical sound. "He was a boy, my dear. He delighted in his holiday. He rode his pony, swam in the pond, built a wooden fortress out in the glen near the castle. He played his pianoforte and practiced dancing the minuet with me. I knew that he would soon be grown and gone. Twelve years old and already so tall and... and handsome a lad. It was the happiest time of my life. I had my Dominic. And I had... someone else as well."
Rays of sunlight caressed Lady Catherine's face, her cheeks still smooth, only the faintest signs of age touching her features, like a fine layer of dust covering an exquisite living statue.
Lucy stiffened, certain she knew where Lady Catherine's confidences were taking her. "My lady, I don't think... I mean, your affairs—" Lucy winced at her ill choice of words. "Your affairs aren't my concern."
"Do you want to understand my son, child? To be able to reach past his wall of ice and warm him?"
"I don't know," Lucy confessed.
Lady Catherine smiled and took Lucy's hand. "Let me only tell you this: The man I fell in love with was sensitive and kind, struggling with his own unhappiness. We... comforted each other but never acted on our love for each other. We didn't want to hurt anyone. We only wanted to spend time with each other. Talk and dream and..." She stopped as if she had said too much. "We might have been safe, except that Dominic idolized this man as well. Idolized him second only to his father."
A knot of dread formed in Lucy's gut, a premonition of what was to come. She closed her eyes, imagining Dominic's pain. "He discovered the two of you, didn't he?"
"We had battled so hard to keep our feelings from him. But then I received word that Robert's ship had been lost. There was a letter he had left at his solicitors to be delivered to me if he should die. In it he begged forgiveness for his pride and pleaded with me to find some happiness despite the mistake I had made in my marriage. The agony was so terrible I thought I would die of it. Dominic had always been mad about horses, and our groom had taken him to a fair to buy a new team for the carriage. My... lover came to comfort me, Lucinda, and we... we couldn't fight our feelings anymore."
Lucy's eyes stung and she ached, for the boy, reveling in horses while his life fell apart. For the woman, needing love so badly she had risked everything to take it. Even for the lover, who had fought so hard, yet had been there to ease Lady Catherine's pain.
"I'm glad that he was there for you, my lady," she said with heartfelt sincerity. She was stunned as tears welled up in the noblewoman's eyes and trailed down her cheeks.
Lady Catherine clutched the handkerchief in white-knuckled fingers, as if she were trying to crush all the pain inside her. "You are good to say so." She sucked in a steadying breath. "My lover and I couldn't stop... once we had been together. We knew it was wrong, were both in agonies of guilt and dread, and yet I loved him, Lucinda. Dominic suspected, but I know he couldn't believe his instincts were right. He trusted us both, you see. Then I started to swell with my lover's child."
"Aubrey," Lucy gasped. Of course. That explained the differences between the two brothers, the bitterness, the anger. "No wonder they loathe each other."
"No. Aubrey doesn't know the truth. And Dominic has tried to—to do his duty by his brother."
"I don't think Aubrey wants him to do his duty. I think Aubrey wants Valcour to love him."
Lady Catherine nodded. "Exactly. For years I have watched them and wished things could have been different. Perhaps they would have been if..." She shrugged. "What is done is done. I suppose that a woman with any sense of self-preservation would have rid herself of the baby in my place. But how could I kill the child I wanted so desperately? The child of the man I loved? I kept my baby, Lucinda. And as time passed, I watched my other son change from a happy, loving boy to a withdrawn youth whose eyes were hot with betrayal and fear and distrust. He blamed himself, you see, for adoring this man so much he'd not... protected me."
"It must have been hideous."
"It was. My husband returned to England a month before I was to deliver. He was crazed with fury. The honor he had worked so hard to regain for Dominic was shattered by my bearing some other man's bastard. Valcour would be a laughingstock again, scandal laden and disgraced. He wanted to know the name of my baby's father—was willing to beat the information from me with his riding crop if he had to. Dominic leapt between us. The crop slashed his face when it fell."
"My God." No wonder Valcour flinched whenever she touched the faint white line. It was the pale legacy from wounds that had cut far deeper.
"Dominic's screams shook Lionel from his mad fury. Lionel loved Dominic as much as the boy loved him. Lionel cared for Dominic so tenderly, I thought... prayed that the worst was over. But once Dominic was well, Lionel again demanded to know who had been about the castle, to know who had defiled me. Dominic refused to tell him. That betrayal drove Lionel more savagely than anything I could have done. Raging that he had no son, he left for London and hurled himself into an orgy of drunkenness and gaming, whoring and excess."
Lucy could imagine Dominic watching the father he adored riding neck or nothing down the road to hell. The helplessness, the guilt, the crushing sense of responsibility the boy must have felt. Lucy knew from her own personal anguish that when children observed cruelty or pain, faced rejection or betrayal from the adults they adored, the children always examined their own fragile souls for ugliness, for fault. Always they believed that if they had behaved better, worked harder, demanded less, the ills of the world could be cured.
"Lionel told no one Aubrey was not his son. There were some whispers, but I pretended we had visited earlier that year. For some reason, Lionel allowed my lies to stand. He let the estates he had tended for Dominic fall to ruin. Then, two years later, he sent for Dominic to join him in London."
Lucy began to have some small hope. "Did they reconcile? Did they—"
"Lionel asked Dominic one final time who had fathered my child. When Dominic didn't answer, Lionel put a pistol to his head and took his own life before Dominic's eyes."
"Sweet God, no." Lucy felt sick, her trembling hand pressed to her mouth. "How could he do such a thing to a child he loved?"
"I don't know. I only know that since the first moment Dominic discovered I was carrying my lover's child, he began to take pieces of himself and hide them where no one could reach. When Lionel killed himself, he destroyed what little of my bright, loving Dominic remained. The boy who became earl in his father's place battled just to survive the destruction left in the wake of my love affair and his father's suicide."
Lucy knew how much strength it must have taken for the boy to wade through the morass of pain, fight the mockery, the hate, when he was broken inside, everyone he loved torn away from him by death and betrayal. She pictured the earl of Valcour as he was now. Strong, fierce, protecting those weaker than himself. But never allowing anyone to reach out to him, heal the scars that still seethed with poison twenty years later.
"He all but drove himself insane attempting to rebuild the Valcour estates," Lady Catherine said. "And his honor was the life-blood that kept him fighting, trying, breathing."
"That was why he insisted on marrying me," Lucy said softly. "Because of his honor." But honor had seemed only some cold, empty catchword then, clung to by an arroga
nt English aristocrat, reeking of wealth and power and tyranny. Now Valcour's words changed in Lucy's mind, a desperate vow coming from a battered, soul-weary knight errant. Her heart squeezed at the image.
"It was strange," Lady Catherine continued. "Where Lionel had failed, Dominic seemed determined to triumph. It was as if his success were the final gift he could give his father—since he had been unable to give Lionel the truth he really wanted. Dominic dueled countless men who insulted me or dared to mock Lionel. Men far older and more skilled with a sword. Dominic's hatred and pain drove him like demons. And his demons always brought him victory."
The vulnerable place in Lucy's breast was aching, pulsing with empathy such as she'd never known. Images of a little girl pouring her pain out through her music mingled with those of a desolate boy, driving back dragons of betrayal with the point of a sword. Valcour, she thought with a kind of tender wistfulness, we are more alike than you could ever imagine.
"Do you know what I have missed the most as the years have passed? What I have longed for more than anything else?" Lady Catherine hesitated. "The day Lionel came to carry him off to London was the last time my son ever called me 'Mama.'"
Lucy reached out and squeezed the older woman's hands in both her own. Tears burned in Lucy's throat, but Valcour's grief was one too wrenching for something so commonplace as weeping.
"Lucinda." Lady Catherine's eyes were huge and pleading. "Do not let Dominic suffer the fate Lionel and I did—a loveless marriage, a cold bed, emptiness, so much emptiness."
"I don't know what I can do, my lady. When you and Valcour's father began, you had infatuation. Valcour and I haven't even got that."
"Don't you? I saw my son this morning, rushing from his bedchamber." Lady Catherine's lips tipped in a tender smile. "His neckcloth was tied as awkwardly as a ten-year-old's, his hair was unruly. And his eyes were filled with confusion and there is no other word to say it—fear. I have not seen that expression on my son's face since the day Lionel St. Cyr was laid in the Valcour crypt. Child, I think he is falling in love with you."
The Raider’s Daughter Page 26
