It felt as if something loathsome lived inside him and he didn’t think he was going to be anywhere near as good at overcoming their dark heritage as Magnus had proved himself to be. Wulf couldn’t get his mother to talk about it either, apart from a sad shake of the head and an assertion she had always known exactly who he was. She gave birth to him, so of course she knew that, but why hadn’t she challenged the Earl? Wulf FitzDevelin was an illusion, the only certainty he’d had as a child was that his parents must have loved each other for his mother to risk so much making him. Even that certainty had gone and he felt like a chair with a leg missing and bound for the bonfire. If he loved a woman as unique as Isabella Alstone, wouldn’t an unsuitable, unsavoury character like him do better to stay away from her and not risk letting her down? To marry him she would have to take so many reckless risks it seemed impossible to ask her for them when he looked at how little he had to offer in return.
‘Now Gresley is finally here, will you at least tell me why you let the Earl disown me at birth before he wheedles it out of you?’ he murmured to his mother when the others had returned to the least cavernous reception room available and were waiting to see what Gresley would do next.
‘He was closer to his father than the rest of you, so he might know Frederick’s reasons for what he did better than I do, but I will tell you some of mine,’ she said as if choosing her words so they couldn’t trip her up later. She gestured towards the old estate office he had inflicted on Isabella after she returned from the country. More secrets to hide; more lies to tell—she was quite right about him, wasn’t she?
‘Anything that would help me make sense of who I really am would do,’ he said rather desperately and hoped he could concentrate on what might be a very important conversation for him in spite of the memories of Isabella here, so vividly beautiful and alive against the shabby hopelessness of this used-up room. He was beyond being angry with his mother anyway. She’d paid such a heavy price for not arguing against her husband’s lies. Wulf always thought he was the outward proof love was more important than anything else in his mother’s life, even him. As a boy, that made the bond between them seem more special than the one between her and the others and now he felt as if he didn’t know her at all.
‘Your father did it to control me, and as having him as their father did his other sons so much harm, I thought at least one of you could be your own man if he stuck to his lie and disowned you.’
At first it sounded like a flimsy excuse for being so spineless, but Gresley and Magnus really had been pushed into a mould the Earl thought would make perfect Haile men of them. Magnus’s determination not to be the arrogant and thankless man his father wanted saved him from being made in the Earl’s image. Would he have had the strength of mind and heart to do as Gus did? Or would he have been even more wild and defiant to prove he was his own man and maybe even downright dangerous, considering the bad blood in his veins? Standing here thinking about how hard he’d tried not to love Isabella in this very room, he wondered if his mother wasn’t almost right to have stopped him being the Dishonourable Wulfric Haile at birth.
‘I had to be my own boy first,’ he reminded her all the same. ‘The world didn’t even wait for me to turn my back before it sneered at Lady Carrowe’s Shame.’
‘I was wrong to stay silent then and later when he beat and bullied you to show me I couldn’t stop him treating you exactly as he chose. He had already told his silly story by then and I doubt anyone would have believed me if I’d argued with him when you were old enough to be hurt by his lies and it was already too late.’
‘So your lover was a fantasy of his as well?’
‘No, he was very real. I loved him so deeply and desperately, but I had children and already knew what a devil your father could be. I couldn’t leave them in his hands to run away with the man I longed to be with so deeply it almost broke me.’
She watched him with a challenge in the cool blue eyes he was the only one of her children to inherit, as if she thought he’d say she was wrong to look at another man when she was married to the Earl of Carrowe as well as all the other things she might have been wrong about after her lover accepted his marching orders.
‘You mean you didn’t...?’
‘Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. I wished I had when your father denounced me and called you a bastard anyway. I could have offered you a truly noble parent if I’d only taken my true love as my lover, Wulf. I regret not being able to do that for you, although I expect the Earl would have tried to throw another man’s son on the parish. I would have stopped him, of course, but he would still have tried and thought he could get away with it.’
‘He was mad enough to have killed us both and said it was your fault.’
‘Oh, my love, don’t condemn yourself to a lifetime of waiting to go insane. Your father wasn’t mad. He was appallingly spoilt from the day he was born as his parents’ only child and heir. They were very much to blame for making him weak and querulous and quite unable to control his temper, but he was as sane as the next lord. No, that’s a bad example; he was a lot more sane than one or two of them.’
‘True,’ he agreed, realising Isabella had been right, his mother really was the strong one of the pair, despite the Earl’s physical strength and self-righteous anger and all the bluster that went with it.
‘I wouldn’t turn real love away if I had my life to live again,’ she told him. ‘Living without it cost us both too much.’
Chapter Sixteen
‘Why did Isabella jilt you, Gus?’ Wulf asked his brother as casually as he could manage when they were strolling in unfashionable Green Park to try to build Magnus’s strength back up a little at a time.
‘Why would I tell you that?’ his brother said after such a long time Wulf was wondering if he’d heard.
‘I need to know,’ he replied, fighting the instinct to say it didn’t matter.
‘Why?’
‘Is that all you’re going to say?’
‘Until you give me a better reason, yes.’
‘She told me to ask you,’ Wulf admitted gruffly.
‘Really? You did a lot of lurking in corners before she called a halt, didn’t you?’
‘I don’t think there’s a law against it,’ Wulf said defensively.
‘You remind me of yourself as a sulky boy, Little Brother,’ Magnus said and leaned against a tree with some of the careless ease and confidence he used to exude.
‘You remind me of yourself as a not-much-older insufferable know-it-all.’
Wulf had to know why his brother’s betrothal ended abruptly. Secretly he had rejoiced to hear it was all over between Magnus and Isabella, of course, but he realised he would have had to sail away and not come back again if the wedding had gone ahead. Funny, his heart had never told his head how much it didn’t want the wedding to happen while he had sat in a cramped cabin week after endless week willing the ship to return to England faster than wind and sail could get it there.
‘Ah, but I’m not the one with the burning desire to root through my brother’s private affairs,’ Magnus said with some of the old steel back under his cool society manners.
Wulf would normally have rejoiced that his brother was acting more himself, but right now he needed answers more than confirmation his brother’s spirits were beginning to revive. ‘I haven’t got any for you to find,’ he replied gruffly.
‘Isabella has my sympathy; I never realised you were a slow top.’
‘You were in the way. How could I barge past you and pounce on her like the wolf the Earl named me for?’ There, now he’d admitted he wanted Isabella and Gus smiled as if that was exactly what he’d been waiting to hear.
‘I didn’t even know you’d met Isabella until you galloped off to Cravenhill Park to confront her on my behalf, you blundering great idiot.’
‘We met on the night of your betro
thal ball.’
‘You were there after all, then? Despite saying you weren’t going all the way to Haile Carr to be thrown out.’ Magnus raised his eyebrows in that infuriating fashionable habit he had before he fell to earth.
‘You’re my brother,’ Wulf said tersely.
‘I looked for you, Wulf, and made a point of telling Gres and the Earl if they tried to humiliate you I’d call off the wedding. I needed your support more than you’ll ever know and you stayed away and before I knew it you’d left for the New World. I felt more alone standing on that quayside watching you sail away than I’ve ever felt in my life.’
‘I’m sorry, Gus. I let you down as well.’
‘As well as who?’
‘Whom, Big Brother, whom.’
‘Do you want to live to get much older, Wulf?’
‘Tell me why you asked the most beautiful female I have ever laid eyes on to marry you when you don’t appear to love her and she doesn’t love you.’
‘Ah, now that sounds like a very personal interest indeed. Why does she want you to know?’
Wulf paced the just-about-green grass because he couldn’t stand still. He hadn’t managed to say it to Isabella yet, so how could he admit it to Gus? ‘You’re right, it’s very personal,’ he said tersely.
‘How personal?’
‘Too much—I have nothing to offer her. My name stinks even more since the Earl made things worse by making a show out of hating Mama so much he disowned his own son to punish her for looking at another man. No wonder the King wants to forget he ever had a friend whose marriage was an even bigger mess than his own turned out to be.’
‘I don’t think that’s possible, but Isabella won’t care about what the world thinks if she loves you.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because I know her better than you do from the sound of things. I also know you’d like to hit me, despite the fact I’m not up to brawling with you right now.’
‘Ah well, we always knew I wasn’t a gentleman.’
‘No, you believed what our father told you; the rest of us knew he was wrong,’ Magnus said and turned away to pace in his turn. ‘I don’t want you to despise me,’ he admitted at last.
‘You let me out of cupboards the Earl locked me in when we were boys and fed me when he forbade it. You even took his blows when you could and taught me to ride and drive up and down the local mews and got me to swim in the Serpentine because he wouldn’t take me to the country with the rest of you because I liked it and that would never do. If we live to be a hundred and quarrel like fishwives for the rest of our days, I couldn’t turn my back on you, Gus.’
‘I felt guilty because when the Earl took his anger out on you he didn’t have so much of it left for me.’
‘Gresley probably felt guilty about that as well, but he didn’t help me. You could always tell me what I want to know now and we’ll call it even.’
‘Clever, but I suppose I owe it to Isabella to tell you the truth, even if I do lose your esteem,’ Magnus said as if truly he believed he could.
Wulf would turn a blind eye even if his brother confessed to murdering the Earl, but Isabella was right, he needed to know the secret haunting his brother. ‘Just tell me and we’ll deal with it,’ he urged.
‘We can’t, nobody can,’ Magnus said with a sigh that sounded as if it came from his boots. ‘But you still need to know, so I suppose I should tell you. It really began when Sir Edgar Drace died.’
‘I knew Lady Delphine was at the bottom of it somehow,’ Wulf said, remembering that night at Carrowe House when tension felt so tight between Magnus and Lady Delphine he almost expected to hear something snap.
‘Don’t interrupt if you want to hear more. I’d rather not tell this tale at all, so it’s up to you.’
‘Consider me silent as the grave.’
‘Don’t, you have no idea how often I wished Drace in one.’
‘He wasn’t much of an asset to the human race,’ Wulf said. ‘I had to report his fury at the poor for the sin of being poor too often to mistake him for one of those.’
‘Ah, but it wasn’t for the sake of suffering humanity I wanted him dead, Wulf. Drace made Delphi give up riding and she must not dance or drive or do any of the things I know she loved to do before he married her. He wouldn’t even allow her to visit Mama and the girls when he took her to stay with her parents for a few days. I hardly saw her, but when I called one day, she was wearing long sleeves and even they couldn’t quite cover up the bruises. When I challenged her about them, she told me the law allows a man to chastise his wife as long as he doesn’t kill her. He was a Member of Parliament and the magistrates might have looked the other way even if he killed her in a rage, so I did what she wanted and stayed away, but I hated him for being such a bully.’
‘As well you weren’t anywhere near when he broke his neck, then.’
‘I rode all night to find her as soon as I heard he was dead,’ Magnus admitted, ‘and I didn’t even stop to wonder why until I got there. She was so thin I could nearly count her bones through her skin, Wulf. She was nothing like the harum-scarum Delphi I used to run wild with all summer and missed when I was back at school. The plain truth is I love her, Wulf. All those years the real reason I hated Drace was because he got to her before I could.’
‘He and the Earl will be company for one another in hell,’ Wulf said and couldn’t find a single spark of outrage in his heart for his brother’s guilty secret so far.
‘Don’t make light of it. I should have found a way to make him stop beating and humiliating Delphi. I should have stopped the Earl doing the same to you as well, so don’t ever call me a good man again,’ Magnus said bitterly.
Wulf could see him shaking with the effort of sharing his dark truth and even for Isabella’s sake he couldn’t put his brother through more pain. ‘Never mind, Gus, Isabella and I will find a way past it,’ he said.
‘You both deserve the truth.’
‘I doubt I do.’
‘Then you need to hear my story, so you don’t hurt her like Delphi hurt me.’
Wulf was shocked by the idea he could turn bright and vibrant Miss Alstone into a pale shadow of herself. The thought horrified him.
‘What on earth did Lady Delphine do to you, then?’
‘She took me as her lover for every stolen moment we could snatch together in a summerhouse on a neighbouring estate unlived in for years, accepted my rampant adoration and all the pent-up love I’d only just admitted to myself, and enjoyed it as if that was what she was born for. She embraced her own sensuality and threw herself into being adored and I thought I’d found heaven on earth for six whole glorious weeks of bliss. I stayed at an inn a few miles away, but my horse could have found his way there blindfolded by the end of them.’
‘What happened?’
‘She told me it was over. It had been a pleasure to find out what the sins of the flesh really felt like and she thanked me politely, as if I’d given her a pretty fan or a lace handkerchief. And, oh, no, of course she didn’t love me and never had. I was a convenient lover when she needed to feel warm and wicked after all those years of cold and propriety with Drace. Now I’d taught her all I knew she had her eye on her next lover who, by the way, had far more money and power than I’d ever have.’
‘Bitch,’ Wulf gritted out and meant it.
‘No,’ Magnus argued. ‘Count, Wulf. Count backwards and use your brains.’
Wulf shook his head to clear it and saw what Magnus meant. ‘Her daughter?’
‘She’s mine,’ Magnus agreed as if more words would undo him.
‘Delphine’s passed her off as Drace’s and I doubt that’s much of a favour in the long-term,’ Wulf said with the snicker of his own supposedly illegitimate birth in the back of his mind.
‘She’s the image of me, poor little mite. Nobody co
uld look at her and me side by side and mistake her for Drace’s get. That’s why Delphine brought her child to London when she came to visit us, then made her maid stay nearby with the baby instead of openly bringing my daughter to Carrowe House, where we Hailes couldn’t fail to recognise one of our own.’
‘So why haven’t you married her and claimed the baby as yours anyway?’
‘Delphi won’t say yes. Delphi’s woman sent me a letter begging me to visit her mistress a couple of months after Delphi gave me my marching orders. I delayed because I knew it would hurt to see her decked out in the spoils of her next love affair. By then she was visibly with child and had to admit it was mine because there was no chance the baby was Drace’s, never much chance he was capable of siring one at all actually.’
‘A boy would have taken his title and estates, though.’
‘She promised to admit the child wasn’t her husband’s if she birthed a boy because she couldn’t live with the imposture if her child took so much from the true heir. Thanks to her parents’ insistence their private fortune was settled on her and any children when she married that apology for a gentleman, she didn’t need his money, but my little girl saved her the trouble of confessing what she sees as her sins.’
‘You’ve seen the child?’
‘Yes, and loved her the moment I laid eyes on her, Wulf. I can’t claim her because her mother won’t let me. I’ve tried everything to convince Delphi to marry me, but she refuses to even consider it.’
‘She’s a fool, Gus,’ Wulf told him.
‘No, I’m the fool. If only I’d stayed away for a few months after Drace’s death, she would have had to marry me when I got her with child as there would be no question of it being his in law. Delphi’s rejection was bad enough, then Father found out and she still wouldn’t marry me. That would be to admit what we did when her husband’s body was hardly cold in his grave and she couldn’t brave the censure of the polite world for being so wicked and actually enjoying herself for once in her life. She thinks she can pretend we didn’t do anything of the kind, that her daughter will grow to look more like her as she gets older. According to Delphi, a baby’s brown eyes can turn green or blue and her hair will pale into something less like mine. She will grow up a baronet’s posthumous daughter unless we put doubts in people’s heads by marrying each other.’
A Wedding for the Scandalous Heiress Page 19
