He brushed Victoria’s hair back from her inquiring face. He bent his head and kissed the small frown between her delicately arched, black eyebrows. “My father was one of those men who fell hard. When my mother died in childbirth, he blamed himself, and me.”
Victoria nodded wisely. “It was the same for my father. He went to pieces when Mother had the accident. He blamed himself so much, he drank to ease the pain and let everything fall to ruin around him.”
Simon pondered. That might almost have been preferable to his father’s total withdrawal into his work. Some emotion might have been better than none at all. “Things changed when he met Miranda. She was twenty-three and he was in his fifties. He seemed younger and happier than I ever remembered. He was not a warm man, but she definitely thawed him.”
He grimaced. “It made little difference to my life. My father had never spent much time with me and nothing changed after his marriage. At least not for the first year or so.”
She wrinkled her nose, her face revealing her mind at work. He anticipated her next question with interest, hoping she wouldn’t delve too deep.
“She was twenty-three when she married your father?”
Safe. “Yes.”
“And you were what age?”
A fair question. “Twelve.”
“I see.”
Now what the hell did she mean?
“Miranda came to stay at St. John’s Hall later?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“What happened then?”
For a brief moment, Simon considered taking her in his arms and diverting her with passion. But she wouldn’t forget what Ogden had said, and Simon would have to answer sooner or later. Better to get it over with while she was happy in his arms.
“My father sent her home to St. John’s Hall when I was about fourteen. To be frank, though he would never have admitted it, I think he couldn’t keep up the pace of a much younger wife.”
Liar. In retrospect, he believed his father had started to guess about Miranda’s illness and wouldn’t face it.
“How did she feel about that, if she hated the country so much?”
The bitter crux of the matter. Trust Victoria to see it straight away. Miranda had been furious. She’d stormed around the house, screaming at the servants, complaining about the weather, writing letters to her husband, demanding he come and fetch her back to Town. His father’s tactic had been to avoid the issue, sending flowers and jewels. Anything, except sending for Miranda to come to London.
“She wasn’t happy about it,” he said.
“And you?”
Simon sighed and stared at the low, discolored ceiling. After all these years, it was hard to remember how he had felt when Miranda first arrived. He’d been far too young and far too innocent for someone as worldly as Miranda.
“I was fascinated. I had never met a woman like her. She wore gowns that skimmed her magnificent bosom, had a face which would have put Helen of Troy to shame and, when she wanted to be, she was devastatingly charming.”
“Like her brother, Ogden,” Victoria said in a small voice. She drew a line down his chest with one small finger. It felt delicious. He took a deep breath, stilling his desire.
Likely Ogden would have the same effect on women. Simon curbed a sudden rush of jealousy. Ogden was older now and balding and Miranda, by everyone’s account, had been a diamond of the first water in her prime. “Perhaps. Anyway, after a few weeks, she started to fear my father had no intention of ever sending for her. Since I was her only source of entertainment and I had more or less avoided her while she was angry, she set out to win me over.”
Victoria got up on her elbow and leaned over him. Deep purple eyes with amethyst glints of sharp intelligence searched his face. He kept his expression bland. The pain belonged in the past. He didn’t let it touch him anymore and wouldn’t trouble Victoria with old hurts. He captured her chin and coaxed her sweet mouth to his lips. Her instant response inflamed his lust, but she broke away and snuggled back into the crook of his arm. Forcing restraint, he brushed away the dark strands of hair tickling his face.
“Go on,” she demanded.
He ran a hand over her creamy shoulder. “You made me forget where I was.”
She ignored his hint. “You said Miranda set out to charm you.”
“It wasn’t particularly difficult.”
How could it have been? To a boy starved for companionship, Miranda could be such fun. “At first we just talked and sometimes, after dinner, we would read aloud to each other. Then we started taking exercise together, walking or riding. She complained of boredom and I tried to think of things to amuse her. I neglected my studies to keep her entertained. She loved to gamble and on rainy days we played silver-loo.”
And always the stakes had been something intimate: a touch, a kiss, a smile, a glance under her skirts at her calf. Simon had become her shadow and willing slave.
It wasn’t just her companionship he wanted. Her flirting, teasing ways had him dreaming of her at night, imagining her in his arms, touching her, and his body had become a confused bundle of heated lust. If the old wives’ tale had been true, he should have gone blind in a week. He’d obsessed about her and her luscious body.
“She must have had things of her own to do?”
“Like?”
“I don’t know. Don’t ladies of great houses visit the sick, or their friends, and receive guests?”
“My father didn’t allow it. He was very protective of Miranda.” He’d probably decided his best course was to keep her out of temptation’s way. A dreadful mistake for all of them.
“I see.”
The familiar snake of shame slithered in his gut. Simon hesitated. Still, she’d heard most of it already. “One day she kissed me. She’d kissed me before, on the cheek. I’d kissed her hand. I thought she was a goddess. I had her up on a pedestal. Things progressed. More intimate kisses. One day, she pushed me up against the library wall. Scared the hell out of me.”
He chuckled wryly, remembering his red-faced embarrassment at the way his cock had hardened so obviously beneath his tight breeches.
Victoria stroked his arm. A gentle, comforting touch.
“I stammered and stuttered and blushed. She wasn’t impressed. She called me a stupid, little boy as I ran away. Mortified, the next day I swore to her I could do better, but she just laughed at me.”
“Did you ever do better?”
“No. To my humiliation, from then on she ignored me. She started riding out on her own or with her brother, Ogden, who was visiting his family for the summer. The Du Plessys’ house is not far from the Hall, and Ogden became a regular visitor at St. John Hall. Up in the schoolroom, jealous as sin, I watched them ride away each day. She never invited me along and laughed when I begged to join them.”
He’d practically cried when he’d realized Miranda now scorned his company retreating into hurt silence at her unmerciful teasing. If she deigned to speak to him at all.
“Later that summer, my father came to visit. Miranda threw herself into his arms declaring she had missed him and begged him to take her to London. He couldn’t resist her pleading and they left the day after he arrived.”
“Did he even talk to you, Simon?”
Dear God. How had she guessed that his father’s total oblivion to Simon’s adoration had cut him to the quick?
“Her weeks of absence from his side seemed to have driven him to new heights of besottedness. I knew how he felt. I missed her when she turned a cold shoulder, even though we were living in the same house. I had lost all her friendly glances, her secretive smiles, everything I had come to rely on for my happiness. And when they left, I felt abandoned. Such an idiot.”
Simon pulled the sheet over Victoria’s shoulder, smoothing it flat, the feel of her beneath his fingers blunting the edge of ancient pain. “The next time he sent her to the Hall, she was six months’ pregnant. She was to await the birth in the country. No more parties in case she los
t the child the way my mother had done. Since Ogden had gone back to university, I was, once again, in favor and in heaven. She taught me how to kiss her, properly. She showed me how to give her pleasure without actually, well, I suppose you’d say, without consummation.”
He could see her confusion. Why the hell well-bred young women never learned anything about their sexuality, he never understood. Or perhaps he did. If they learned what he had at the tender age of fourteen, there would likely never be such a thing as a virgin bride among the nobility.
“Our bodies never actually joined together,” he explained.
“Oh.”
He wasn’t sure she understood, but he would teach her about that some other time. Perhaps. “My father arrived for the birth of his second son, stayed a week and left again.”
“You have a brother?”
Simon steeled himself to answer calmly. “No. He died.”
“How sad. Miranda must have been heartbroken. And your poor father, too.”
“He was devastated, especially when Miranda told my father, I had bedded her against her will. She blamed him for leaving her alone with me.” The other accusations were far worse, and those he could not bear to repeat. They were the source of his nightmares.
His father had turned to stone while Miranda played out her revenge for the loss of her child.
Indignation filled Victoria’s face and she sat straight up, pulling her knees under her chin beneath the quilt. “How could she say such a thing? I remember Michael at fourteen. He was impossible. He followed the upstairs maid around like a moon-eyed calf. You were a child and she was a woman of twenty-three. Surely, your father didn’t believe her?”
Simon took her hand and kissed it. Tenderness, an emotion long forgotten, swamped him with such force it clogged his throat. He wanted to squeeze her tight for her understanding, for her defense of the confused and frightened boy he’d been. He longed to tell her everything. He swallowed. She’d despise him if she knew the full story. While there may not have been truth, there had been no injustice. His real crime had been far worse.
He knew the reason behind her lies. She’d been afraid of what Simon would reveal to his father.
He’d heard baby John in Miranda’s room howling with distress one afternoon and gone to investigate, worried something was wrong. When he’d entered the room, the baby had been lying in a cradle, his nurse nowhere to be seen, so Simon had picked him up. Looking around, he realized the curtains around the bed were closed and there were sounds of moaning and heavy breathing. He hadn’t understood. He’d thought she was ill.
“Miranda,” he called out.
Her head, her hair tumbled in disarray around her shoulder, had poked out between the bed curtains. Her skin was flushed. He’d been such a child, he had no idea what it meant.
“What are you doing in here,” she hissed. “You little sneak.”
“The baby—”
“Get out!” she had screamed. “How dare you spy on me?.”
Terrified of her anger, he’d run with John in his arms. He’d gone up to the nursery where he’d found one of the nurses. He’d fled outside. Ran and ran, until he was exhausted then flung himself down on the grass, still not understanding her anger. What had he done?
When he finally calmed down, he had decided to seek her out, to apologize for whatever had upset her. On his way back to the house, he saw someone riding away from the stables. The rider was too far distant to be sure, but he had thought it was Ogden’s horse.
Miranda had come to him, before he had a chance to find her, threatening him with a fate worse than death if he spoke of what he had seen. He kept telling her he had seen nothing except her, but she wouldn’t listen.
Only much later, when he was older and it was all too late to make a difference, did he realize the import of those sounds. The horrid suspicion about exactly who she had been entertaining in her bed that afternoon made him feel ill even now.
At the time, events had unfolded too swiftly for him to fully comprehend. Baby John’s death, the accusations, Miranda’s lies, being packed off to Yorkshire to school. None of it relevant. And not something he would tell another living soul.
“My father loved Miranda. He believed everything she said. He sent me away to school and I didn’t see her again until after his death. I don’t love her, Victoria. I hate her.”
She frowned at him. “It’s not good to hate her so much you dream about her.”
Simon forced himself not to shudder at the ghost crossing his grave. He didn’t dream about Miranda. He didn’t care about her. It was the dead child who haunted him, a life cut short because of him.
He struggled to remain relaxed. “You’re right. It is not at all healthy.” There was nothing he could do about it.
“You must have been glad to leave Miranda and go away to school.”
Christ. The ridicule he’d suffered year in, year out at Blackhurst for his supposed crimes against nature. How Miranda must have laughed about the lies she’d told. He’d buried the aching, bitter memories of cold and hunger a long time ago and had no wish to see them resurrected. Father had given the headmaster carte blanche over his discipline, no doubt at Miranda’s suggestion, and Simon had never been able to do anything to please the sadistic bastard.
“No, I didn’t particularly like it.”
“You had company of your own age, at least.”
“I didn’t make many friends there,” he said in the matter-of-fact tones he’d practiced for years. “There was one boy I got to know quite well, Arthur Prentice. He disliked Blackhurst as much as I did.” He’d defended poor Arthur with his fists on more than one occasion.
“It was a special disciplinary school. They taught unruly boys obedience, weak ones strength and bad boys how to reform. Arthur was counted with the weak, and I was definitely counted with the bad. A veritable son of Sin.”
“Your nickname,” Victoria said softly. “I thought it was because of your last name. The way it is pronounced, Sinjin instead of Saint John.”
“A bit of both, I think.” That and his subsequent behavior. Sinful to the extreme.
He’d been proud of it. Played on it. He grew taller and stronger than all the other boys through his long hours of physical toil. The gardener, Alexander McIver, a man who’d traveled to the east as a soldier and embraced its mysteries, had taken him under his wing. Simon grew to respect and ultimately love the strangely patient old man as much as he could love anyone. Then McIver died and left him alone again. But McIver had taught him the meaning of real control, the ancient art of discipline of body and spirit.
In the end, they’d all feared Simon’s fists and feet and his razor-sharp tongue, the tutors as well as the boys. While he had been afraid nothing. He had nothing to fear. He’d already been hurt as much as was humanly possible.
He hadn’t merely trained his body. McIver hadn’t allowed it. He insisted Simon went to as many lessons as he could between his bouts of punishment. Fortunately, he had intelligence and had worked hard to keep up with his classmates. Always his shining hope, the beacon in the dark surrounding him, was that, somehow, his dedication would impress his father and make things right.
“Do you still see Arthur?” she asked.
Arthur. Poor sod. “No. He died at Waterloo. His father wanted him to be a soldier. Arthur was just a gentle, scholarly boy who liked to read. He didn’t stand a chance in the army, but his father insisted on buying him a commission to prove his son’s masculinity.”
Simon stroked his fingers through her hair, trying not to remember Arthur’s pale face the day he set out to help make war on the French.
“It was not a very nice school, Victoria. The boys were taught through fear and ridicule.”
It had brutalized him.
“And you spent four years at that awful place?”
He shrugged. “I learned a lot.”
When his body had been tested to its limits, he had learned to focus his mind, a valuable lesso
n taught by McIver. It had served him well. Until Victoria had disturbed the careful ordering of his life.
“So then you went home again to your father and Miranda?”
“My father died when I was seventeen, then I went home.”
His father had discovered Miranda tupping a groom in the stables one afternoon, became apoplectic and died hours later. Simon hadn’t even known of his father’s death until weeks after the will was settled and one of his trustees came to take him away from Blackhurst. He never did have the opportunity to prove his worth to his father.
“How sad. And Miranda?”
It hadn’t taken long for Simon and his guardians to discover the full extent of Miranda’s illness. The freedom she gained after his father’s death seemed to tip her over the edge. She wandered the streets at night, sometimes barely clothed, in search of men. But worst of all, she stabbed her maid when she tried to prevent her from going out in her nightgown one evening. The girl had nigh on bled to death before she was found. Miranda had been a danger to herself as well as others. She had been lucky the maid accepted a handsome settlement rather than insisting she be tried and punished.
“Miranda is unwell.” Later they’d discovered that Lady Northdown, Miranda’s mother, suffered from a similar disorder. Simon hurried on with his story, hoping to forestall more questions. “My mother’s brother and an old friend of my father’s were my guardians. They arranged for Miranda to be nursed on my Yorkshire estate where she can rest and be at peace. They sent me off to university.” He grinned. “Cambridge was the best time of my life. I met Deveril there and ran into Garforth again.”
“I’m glad.”
He was glad she believed in his happy ending. He flicked the tip of her nose. She seemed satisfied and not disgusted or dismayed. He breathed a sigh of relief. She did not need to know the full extent of his crime or his humiliations. It was no one’s business but his own. “And now, Mrs. Yelverton,” he said, throwing her a cheeky grin, “I’d be very much obliged if you wouldn’t mind fetching me some breakfast, or perhaps it is now lunch.”
“My goodness,” she cried, looking at the sky through the window. She started to rise and the sheet shifted, exposing his shoulders.
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