I should not have spoken to Miss Pemberton.’ Her eyes widened at the admission, but he pressed on. ‘I should have talked to you instead.’
‘I did not trust you with everything I need to tell you. And you do not trust me and I cannot blame you for that.’
Avery turned away sharply, one hand fisted in the silk window curtain, his back turned, unable to meet the honest pain in her face. If he touched her now he would kiss her, lose this chance of honesty in the flare of passion that overcame him whenever he felt the softness of her under his hands, caught the scent of her in his nostrils.
‘I would happily die if that would make Alice happier or safer,’ Laura said. ‘I do not know how to make you understand what I did and allow me to be a proper mother to her. I want us to be a family, a happy one,’ she added, her voice a whisper he had to strain to hear.
Avery unclenched his hand from the curtain, leaving it criss-crossed with creases like scars. ‘Tell me what happened when you knew Piers was dead.’
Behind him there was the rustle of silk as Laura crossed to the chair and sat down. ‘I told my parents I was with child. They were...aghast. Will you forgive me not repeating what they said? It is very painful.’
‘Of course.’ His voice sounded rusty.
‘We agreed that I would pretend to be ill and go to one of our country estates to recover. Luckily there were all sorts of fevers going around that year. I coughed and moped for two weeks, then apparently succumbed to the infection.
‘It was a healthy pregnancy.’ Her voice trailed away, then she said, almost angrily, ‘You want to know why I waited six years to find her, don’t you? That is what you cannot understand or forgive.’
‘I can forgive if I understand,’ he offered and turned. This was the sticking point, the thing that Laura found most difficult to tell, he realised. He took the chair opposite her and sat down, leaning forward, his forearms on his knees, just out of touching distance.
‘My parents told me she was dead,’ Laura said abruptly. ‘When my baby was born my mother took her, wrapped her. I heard her cry, once. I thought Mama would give her back to me to hold, but she gave her to the nurse and they went out of the room. Then Mama came back and said she was dead.’ She stopped and drew a deep, shuddering breath.
‘I watched her from the park the day before you found me there. That was the first time I had heard her voice from that day. They told Mab her name in the village. A shopkeeper knew my daughter’s name and I did not.’
Avery found he was on one knee in front of her chair, both her cold hands clasped in his. ‘How did you find her?’
‘I was going through papers, months after they died, because I was moving into the Dower House and I needed to make sure I was taking the personal documents and leaving all the estate papers for Cousin James. There were letters from the Brownes in a locked box. I thought she was alive and I could find her. And then they wrote to say she was dead.’
‘Oh, God. I told them to do that.’
‘I went there anyway. I wanted to see the grave. They told me everything, gave me your card.’
‘How could your parents do that?’ Avery demanded.
‘I suppose they thought it was best for me. I tell myself that. Why, after all this time, the hurt should be so sharp, I do not know. They did it for the best,’ Laura repeated on a sob, then caught herself, her hands over her mouth.
‘Oh, my darling.’ Avery reached for her. ‘My poor darling.’ By all that was merciful she stayed in his arms and her own went around him, her forehead resting on his shoulder.
‘When I found you had taken Alice it was bad,’ she said, her voice muffled. ‘Then when you told me about Piers I thought I hated you. I will never know how I managed to say nothing to you that day under his portrait. I saw myself in my mind’s eye with Piers’s sword in my hand, running you through.’
The vision was so vivid he almost felt the blade of the sword, the sickening pain. ‘I understand.’
‘You do?’ Laura released him and sat back, her eyes enormous and dark as she stared at him. ‘You might understand now why I let Alice go in the first place, but still, I deceived you and then entrapped you.’ Laura forced a smile that caught at his heart. ‘You are only human, after all.’
‘I am only human,’ Avery agreed. ‘I understand why you had to pretend to be Mrs Jordan, why you mistrusted the man who had taken your daughter. I understand why you could not bring yourself to suggest marriage directly.’ But now she had told him the truth and he could be honest with her in his turn, he realised. Tell her things he had never told another soul.
* * *
‘My father adored my mother,’ Avery said, his tone conversational, as he sat back on his heels. ‘We were such a happy family, I thought.’
‘You thought?’ Laura was still shaken from her own confidences. He could see her struggle to comprehend what he was telling her.
‘She’d had lovers for years. She’d lied and deceived, she had wound my father around her little finger. I thought she was perfect, too. And then he found a letter and it all came out. I saw her change—it was like something from a medieval myth. One moment there was Mama, beautiful, loving, sweet. The next there was a bitter, mocking creature hurling contempt with her back against the wall, confronted with evidence she couldn’t twist or hide. She had been acting for years.
‘She left without saying a word to me—I was eight. She went to her lover and my father died in an accident with his gun a few weeks later.’
‘An accident?’ she ventured, her voice appalled.
‘Everyone agreed it was best if it was. I found him,’ Avery said. He looked so small huddled there in the bracken and the blood.
‘Avery!’
‘She died a few years later. It seems it has left me finding it difficult to trust,’ he said with a wry twist of the lips. ‘I suppose somehow I see myself in Alice, fear for her if her love is betrayed, just as I fear for my own heart.’
‘Oh, my love. Oh, Avery.’ Laura found herself on her knees, reaching for him without conscious volition, before her words or his came together in her mind. ‘You fear for your own heart?’
‘You called me your love?’ Avery’s voice clashed with hers. ‘You love me?’
She could lie, but then she had lied to him so often. She could pretend, but she had done that, too, and it was hollow. Summoning all her courage, Laura held his gaze and said, ‘I love you, Avery. Whatever happens, whatever you feel for me, I will always love you.’
‘Thank God. I lost my heart to you, my love,’ Avery said. The tautness had gone from his face and there was nothing in his smile but genuine, wondering, happiness. He gathered her in to him, his cheek against her hair. ‘I had a glimmering of it. That night we first made love I was going to ask you to marry me. I was going to wait until the morning and do it properly with the ring. And then, what happened, happened, and I closed off all those new feelings for you, sank back into suspicion. How could I let old history teach me so wrongly about trust and truth?’
He
