“What kind of fool do you take me for? Do you think to force me into a private conversation with you?” And more, no doubt. Had he never given up wanting her? She couldn’t doubt that this was a ruse to take her somewhere private yet again.
“You are much mistaken, Mr. Hayes. I’m not such a gullible idiot. You had your chance, and you failed so miserably that I should have listened to my heart when I saw you at Ranelagh. I wish I’d walked the other way. Now you tell me some ridiculous rumor?”
If not for the gossip she’d inevitably cause if she walked away from him, she’d do so. But the rumors about them made clear that people would watch them closely. Any offence, or on the opposite side, any particular warmth, would only fuel the fire. A cordiality engendered by their previous acquaintances seemed to be the safest path to take. But she hated it. She would have far rather had nothing to do with him.
He shook his head. “It’s true. When I saw the evidence, I had to believe it.”
“Until I see absolute proof I won’t believe it. I will reject it. What’s more, I’ll ensure people know it’s a lie. Rumors are stupid and not worth listening to.” This rumor was another, probably put about by people jealous of her success. Or jealous that she’d snared Max. He was a catch, she knew that, but as far as she was concerned, they could have him back and keep him. “So who is your employer?” She might as well know the name of the man who was helping to spread malicious rumors about her.
“His Grace the Duke of Northwich.”
The man Max had warned her about. Everything came back to him. She refused to listen to any more. “Don’t try to speak to me again.”
Sophia turned her back on John. She’d had enough of John Hayes and his schemes. She needed to know more, but not from him. Perhaps he’d stumbled on a germ of truth. After her early morning stroll she discovered she was quite hungry and decided to go home for breakfast.
* * * *
After a breakfast in which the atmosphere was silent and frozen, Sophia ordered the carriage brought around. She had no idea if her husband stayed at home or was out, nor did she care. Anyone who used such bullying tactics as to order her to do something without explaining himself wasn’t worth thinking about, much less crying over. Not that she’d done that last night. Oh no, not one bit.
In the carriage she sat perfectly still, watching the fashionable squares as they gave way to the familiar, narrower streets of the City. She still loved the square mile. More than anywhere else in the world, it was her home.
The streets teemed with life. From children dodging between people—some pickpockets, some merely mischievous—to street sellers shouting their wares to City businessmen, dapper and serious for the most part. They passed her favorite print shop, which had a slew of new caricatures in the windows. She wanted to stop and stare, but she was afraid that now she had joined the great and the not-so-good, she might feature there.
Someone would recognize her and she’d never get to see her father. He was the person who would give her the confidence to deny the stupid rumors.
If he wasn’t in his office at home, she’d order some tea and send a footman to find him. He’d be in one of the coffee houses, probably Lloyd’s, or the Exchange, or at his own office. Easy to find him.
Not so easy to find her husband. He disappeared, and she never asked where he went. Did he have a mistress? Was she pretty?
To her chagrin, Sophia still cared about that. Even when he’d treated her with disdain, she yearned for his approval. What kind of idiot did that make her?
Her mood eased when she saw the house, with the black paint on the front door that had dulled with time. Her father should have it redone.
The windows were set lower, closer to the street, so living there was to share life with the people outside, not stare loftily down on it. Her new home was beautiful, but she’d put no mark on it.
She would. That was her first decision of the day. She’d change her bedroom with that lovely, though inappropriate, cream upholstery and drapes. That would be a good place to start.
And give her something to do, instead of worrying about the state of her marriage. It would either come right or it would not. Her resolve firm in her mind, she felt better as she stepped down from the carriage and went to the front door.
The footman informed her that her father was at home, working in his study. As she often did during the day, she had tea brought to the back parlor to give him a break from his work. And some of those little cakes he liked. She was glad to note that the cook was still looking after him properly, and Nina the cat, lounging in a spot of sunlight in the hall, was still plump and happy.
She served her father a large dish of the dark brown brew, He took it and leaned back with a sigh.
He straightened his back, which was no doubt aching from hours of bending over columns of figures. “I can’t deny I’m glad to see you, daughter, but is this an impulsive call? You should have sent a note.”
She stared at him over the rim of her tea-dish. “I needed to come to you, Papa. Something’s happened that I need to discuss with you.”
He lifted his eyes and met her gaze. His were blue, so unlike her own, but she looked more like her mother, he’d always told her.
“It’s too soon to declare your marriage a failure, child.”
Startled she blinked at him, not sure what to say. “What do you mean?” Was it that obvious that she and Max weren’t getting along? Who else knew?
“Or is this advice on business?” He studied her a moment longer. “No, I don’t think so. This is personal. You’re distressed. You are holding your jaw too rigidly, and you have those little creases by your eyes.” He grinned. “What, you think I don’t know, that I haven’t studied my child over the years?” He took a long draught of tea before he spoke next. “If it’s a matter between you and your husband, it is for you to sort out your problems. If it is business, I don’t want to hear anything that is confidential.”
“I wouldn’t do that, Papa.” Although Max’s business interlinked with her father’s, both men had interests outside their joint concerns.
“No, I don’t believe you would. First, you must tell me if you’re well and content with the bargain you made.”
Although from his lips it sounded like a business matter, Sophia knew better. The words well and content didn’t mean solely a business agreement. “Yes, Papa, I am.”
Because he was right. What was happening in her marriage was for nobody’s ears but hers and her husband’s. But her father deserved some kind of warning. “It’s very early days as yet, and we do not know each other very well, but we get along happily enough.”
Or had, until he’d closed down the other night.
“I’m glad to hear it. I can’t deny the arrangement was extremely advantageous for me, but I would not have my only child unhappy.”
All the time he drank, he was watching her, clear eyes fixed on her face. She could hide nothing.
“I heard a rumor,” she said. “I wish to deny it absolutely, so I came to warn you. It may become known or it may not. I have no idea where the person who told me received his information, or if it’s true. It’s not something I’ve ever heard before.” Aware she was prevaricating, she allowed herself a sip of the reviving brew before she placed her dish carefully on its saucer. She turned the pattern so it showed to its best advantage. She’d always like the twining vines. As a child she’d imagined letters in the intricate decoration.
“There are always rumors.”
But he was interested, she could see that. She’d piqued his interest.
“Are these financial?”
“No, Papa, they are about me.” As calmly as possible, even knowing that her father could read her face as well as he could an account-book, she still tried to keep her demeanor steady. “Someone informed me that you were not my real father. Not the man who fathered me.” She added the last because in every way the man before her had been her fat
her, and would continue in that regard.
Shock ringed his eyes, set his hands to claws around his tea-dish. He never took his gaze from her while he put his dish down. It rattled in the saucer. “Who told you that?”
Not wanting to tell him, she yet bowed to the inevitable. “John Hayes.”
“I thought so.” He closed his eyes and sighed heavily. “That man must have discovered more than he should have in this house. I fear I trusted him with far too much.”
Opening his eyes again, he gazed at her soulfully. Not an expression she was used to in her surviving parent. “I blame myself for allowing him into my life. But he had a quick mind and was amenable to learning about my business. Too amenable, I fear. And he must have helped himself to information he was not entitled to.”
“What information?”
He paused. “Daughter, I had hoped never to tell you this.”
For the first time since she’d asked him, he looked away, down at the well-worn surface of his desk. She’d sat on his knee while he taught her how to add columns of figures, practiced her handwriting here. That desk was part of her life.
“Let me tell this as a story. As it happened. Perhaps then you’ll understand.”
Cold fingers clutched her heart. It was true, then. What would this mean to her husband? Would Max understand? Probably not, but he couldn’t divorce her because of this, though he might wish to separate from her. He needed his heir, he said. She’d find it unbearable to perform her duties as coldly as she had on their one night together. Thoughts rattled around her head, all of them centering on Max.
Why did everything always come back to him?
Her father took a few moments to collect his thoughts, as he always did when about to embark on something important. Then he looked up again, and hurt lay in his eyes. “Years ago I was starting my business. My parents had been hard-working tradespeople. Artisans.” Mercers, they’d had a business close by this very house.
“I know that, Papa.”
“Don’t interrupt,” he snapped.
She nodded and kept her mouth closed.
“When they died, taken by fever within a month of each other, I was working on my first insurance contract. A safe cargo with a relatively safe passage. But the ship didn’t return. Others that limped back to port made it clear that an unexpected storm had taken many unsuspecting vessels on their way to the Spice Islands. Add to that my first, tentative investments in the stock market. You remember what happened in 1728?”
She shook her head.
“Not as bad as the collapse of the South Sea company, but the market dipped. Lack of confidence. People began to panic, but I had no choice. I could not sell out. At that time, a man approached me. Lord Morningside, a Scottish peer who had lost most of his fortune in the ’15. The first Jacobite rebellion.”
She knew about the dip in her father’s fortunes and his meeting with the Earl of Morningside, her maternal grandfather.
“He wished his daughter safe from the troubles and from scandal,” her father said. “Because of their association with the Stuarts, she would be unlikely to find a husband in London society. He offered me a great sum of money to care for his child. All he had left. He told me that if he didn’t, the Pretender would probably have it off him, and if there was one person he loved more than his king, it was his daughter. A foolish man.” He shook his head. “No king is worth that much.”
Sophia glanced at her tea-dish, and then decided against it. She didn’t trust the steadiness of her hands. Instead, she gripped them hard together in her lap. Her knuckles turned white while her stomach churned.
“My stipulations included cutting relations with her father. I didn’t think she would do it, but she agreed. I couldn’t afford any links with the Stuarts, you see. That would have been disastrous.” He reached out and covered her hand.
She looked up, into a face wreathed with sorrow.
“She brought a baby with her. You.”
Shock held her rigid, stopped her breath. “How can this be?”
“Her season was brief, but not brief enough. I never knew who the father was, but she swore it had only happened once, and you were the result. You were a girl. At the time, I thought I would have other children, but as matters turned out, you were the only child I would ever have.” He reached out at the same time she did.
His hand, warm over hers, felt as it always had. His face looked the same. But they were not the features of the man who fathered her.
“I took you anyway.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “How could I turn such an innocent away? I persuaded myself it was my Christian duty, but the truth is that I took one look at you and fell in love.”
“H-How did you manage?” How could they cover up such a thing?
He smiled gently. “I went away for a while. Abroad, I said, to attend to business. Indeed, I did so. But I returned after a year with a wife and a child. You know that part, that your mother and I married on the continent, that I met her during a business trip.”
With a sudden movement, he withdrew his hand, dropped his head, and groaned. His neat bob-wig drooped forward, forcing him to lift his head or lose it. He twitched the wig into place with a movement that spoke of long habit.
“We put back the date of the wedding. In those days, marriages were more irregular, so nobody suspected. Nobody cared enough about us to check. After all, what did it matter to anyone?”
He shook his head mournfully. “I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but I ask for it now.”
“No!” How could anyone turn her taciturn, cool father into this unhappy man? She hated John and his machinations, hated to hear a secret nobody need have known. What difference did it make?
She was the result of the mechanical act. That made nobody a father, not in truth. It meant nothing. “You are my father. You know that, Papa. I am your daughter.”
“It heartens me to hear you say so,” he said, getting to his feet. “The secret has been here all along. That tea set, for instance. Your mother brought it with her when she came here. Did you know it has the initials of the Old Pretender twined into the pattern? I didn’t until a few years ago, and then we kept using the set because you liked them. It was you who pointed it out to me when you were a child. Do you remember?”
She recalled him telling her not to be so fanciful. A sharp reprimand to keep her attention on her work, adding up figures instead of tracing patterns on her tea-dish.
Once, he’d told her she could make out the letters more clearly than before. JFES for James Francis Edward Stuart. “A Jacobite.” Strange how that lost cause had reared up in her life so much recently.
“I remember. Was my mother happy to renounce the cause?”
“It wasn’t her cause,” he said. “She was born into it, that was all. Did you never wonder why we had no more children?”
Strangely, she had not, although her parents had shared a bed until her mother took ill. She had accepted the situation as normal, thought her mother had perhaps suffered an injury at her birth. But neither had repined.
Once her mother had said although she would have preferred more children, at least they didn’t have a houseful to provide for and she could devote her time to her one child and her husband. Come to think of it, she never referred to him as “Your father.”
“And nobody suspected?”
“Why should they? Your mother was the daughter of a peer and brought a fortune with her. That was all most of my colleagues needed to know. They would have done the same.”
He rose and took a step toward her. “Knowing you, I would not have had matters any different. You are my daughter and will always be so in my heart.”
Tears sprang to her eyes. Her father had never been so demonstrative before. He’d always held himself apart, so she was used to the lack of emotion in her life. She despised the kind of person who wept at a moment’s notice. Now she was in danger of turning into a watering-pot.
“Papa, you are the best of fathers.” Even in arranging her marriage to someone when he feared she’d been compromised. Now she understood his harshness. The prospect of his daughter suffering the same fate as his wife must have galled him. Appalled him.
“At least I found you the right husband. I will never ask, but finding you with that man was a shock. I thought history was repeating itself.”
She shook her head. That was why he had reacted so violently, forced her to marry Max.
“It was not.” She had gone to her marriage bed a virgin. A sad smile wreathed her lips. “Perhaps, but it turned out for the best. I have a husband you can approve of, sir. A man to be proud of.” Whatever his coldness in private, Max was a man of the utmost integrity in business, and she was a daughter of the City. Such virtues were to be celebrated.
A carriage went past outside, rattling the windows.
He grimaced. “The worst of it was that my reversal of fortune was temporary. My ship returned with a healthy profit, and the market regained its nerve within six months.”
“But by then I was born.”
“I can’t be sorry for that.” His voice softened in a way she hadn’t heard for years. “I will always be proud of you.”
“That’s why I don’t look like you.” Now he’d told her, she wanted to know everything, absorb this truth. Only one portrait of her mother existed, the one at her father’s house.
“You have your mother’s coloring.” He paused. “I fear you must tell your husband. Will he accept it?”
So much information made Sophia dizzy. She badly needed time to process this, to accept it and let it settle in her mind. Telling Max was imperative. “I will, but not immediately.” Pausing, she thought of an excuse. “Business is keeping him occupied at the moment. I want his mind fully on the subject when I broach it with him.”
He could easily repudiate her. While divorce would be difficult and expensive, almost impossible, separation was achievable. How would Max take the information that his wife could be the daughter of his enemy? The country’s enemy?
Temptation Has Green Eyes Page 11
