what does it matter to you what I think of you? If you won’t marry me and insist on bastardising our maybe child, then I’ll certainly think far worse of you than you currently do of yourself, I can safely promise you that much at least.’
‘How comforting,’ she managed to say almost lightly and decided he might as well know the worst about her, if only so he’d agree to walk away and forget her.
‘Tell me, it can’t be worse than a secret I can’t bring myself to tell you in return,’ he soothed ruefully, but she couldn’t imagine anything worse than her own dark misdeeds.
‘It was back in the years before I became a lady,’ she warned him.
‘Before you were born, you mean? I can’t say I approve of the axiom that the sins of the fathers are to be visited on the sons, or in this case the daughters, so I know that you were always a lady, my dear.’
‘My father certainly had a full hand of misdeeds to hand on, even if that was all he left us.’
‘So I have heard, but as I say, I can’t see why that ought to blight you, any more than it has your brother and sister.’
‘Only me,’ she said so low he had to bow his head to catch it and she felt him so close to her again that her heart seemed to ache over that last inch of space between them.
‘No, you’re an Alstone just as surely as they are. Your parentage is stamped all over the three of you for anyone to see.’
‘Oh, my mother was ever faithful to him—despite his rages and his false promises and the hundreds of ways in which he didn’t deserve her devotion. But once upon a time there were four of us children, and it’s my fault that there aren’t four of us any more.’
‘How can it be? You must have been a child yourself when you lost your brother or sister, for I never heard of another little Alstone going to live with your aunt and uncle after your parents’ deaths.’
‘I was thirteen years old when Maria and I went to our uncle’s house to be turned from little savages into proper ladies, at least according to him. Maria was sixteen and eager to please, as well as good and dutiful, so she found it far easier to be “civilised” than I did and settled to it without complaint.’
‘Which you most certainly did not, Louisa, if I know anything about you at all,’ he said with a smile in his voice that made her knees weak. Again she longed to breach that small gap and lean into the comfort he was offering, but somehow forced herself not to. ‘You were a child and no wonder if you were rebellious,’ he continued, her unexpected advocate. ‘You’re an Alstone when all’s said and done, are you not? I never came across one yet who wasn’t as proud as the devil and impatient of the rules—apart from your sister, of course. Even I can see that Mrs Heathcote is almost as good as she is lovely and perhaps provides the exception to prove the rule.’
Another man who had evidently fallen very willingly under her lovely blonde sister’s gentle spell, Louisa decided with unaccustomed bitterness and hated herself all over again. ‘Aye, Maria is the best of us wicked Alstones,’ she said, ‘and I am the worst—I carry my father’s loathsome stamp right through me.’
‘Don’t talk such damnable nonsense, woman, you have the Alstone looks and believe me, they are quite spectacular enough for the rest of us mere mortals to cope with. There’s a glorious portrait of the Lucinda Alstone rumour insists enchanted Charles the Second even more than usual in the Royal Collection and you can believe me, because I’ve seen it, that you’re even lovelier than she was. It’s lucky I found you before Prinny did, really,’ he added and she almost smiled at the absurdity of his cocky reassurance.
‘Oh, really—lucky for whom exactly?’
‘Me, of course, since you’re going to marry me. For him as well, I suppose, since I won’t have to threaten him with laissez-majesty when I go after him with my horse pistols for leering at my wife, so long as he never has the chance to leer at you in the first place.’
‘How do you know he hasn’t done so already?’
‘Has he, then?’
‘Just a little, but he called me a pretty child and tickled me under the chin before Lady Hertford became restless and dragged him away.’
‘Sensible female,’ he approved smugly and she felt the comfort of normality he was trying to create for her and also a lurch of feeling she hadn’t armed herself against. Dangerous, she decided with a shiver, and sat a little straighter, almost next to him as she was.
‘They say he was once handsome and quite dashing,’ she mused so that he’d hopefully forget he’d been trying to plumb her deepest, darkest secrets.
‘According to my mother, he was as pretty a prince as you’d find in any fairy tale, until he became so fat and petulant you can’t help but wonder if he’d have been better finding something to do, besides feel sorry for himself.’
‘You know a lot about him,’ she said suspiciously.
‘Any Londoner in town when he was still Prince Florizel, and not fat as an alderman, could tell you that much.’
‘But your mama wasn’t just a London bystander, was she, Captain?’
‘Never mind my mother, we were discussing yours.’
She sighed deeply and felt the shadow of the past loom until even the deep darkness of this windowless cavern seemed to be touched by it.
‘She was far more beautiful than I am in her youth, but stubborn as any mule and somehow saw some quality in my father nobody else ever did. Mama never raged about her reduced circumstances or let us children think we were in any way less because we didn’t have servants and fine clothes, or aught but a few second-hand books she managed to squirrel away from my father somehow or another. I deplore her blindness towards my father, for there was never a more selfish or ruthlessly vain man put on this earth than Bevis Alstone, but I can’t bring myself to blame her for it, because she genuinely loved him. In the end I think she thought of him as a particularly naughty child.’
‘How humiliating for him,’ he said gently and she suddenly supposed it had been, so perhaps it was an unfortunate marriage on both sides and her mother would have been far better loving a better man and he a worse woman.
‘He didn’t kill her, though, I did that,’ she finally said bleakly. ‘And Peter,’ she added as if purging her soul of all her bitter crimes at once.
‘Of course you didn’t,’ he told her before she could add another word.
‘How do you know?’ she asked indignantly, almost as if she had to defend her right to the worst crime a human could commit against another of her kind.
‘You haven’t got it in you to harm a newborn kitten, let alone a woman you obviously loved and any kind of brother, even if he took after your sire in every vice available to him, which I doubt, since the rest of you certainly do not.’
‘Well, he didn’t, anyway. Peter was a dear, good boy; if he was a little slower than the rest of us, he loved more to make up for it. You never came across a more endearing soul than him and even the thieves and thugs in our near neighbourhood wouldn’t have hurt him, although we only lived on the edges of a rookery and Kit and I would never have taken him inside for fear of
