‘Yes, the way you are,’ she retorted. ‘Smiling like that as though...as though...well, it’s a mask, isn’t it? And don’t bother arguing, I can see when someone is hiding behind smiles and attitudes, because I’ve done it myself, practically all my life. And because I’ve seen you without it—the mask. The fever tore it away. So stop talking all that rot about not being good enough and having nothing to offer. It’s an excuse. You don’t want to let anyone close. That’s all there is to it.’
‘Be careful, Lady Sarah,’ he growled. ‘Or I might start to think you’d changed your mind about staying single.’
‘Don’t change the subject,’ she snapped. ‘I can tell when someone is trying to distract me from answering the question. If you don’t want to tell me, then don’t. If it is some deep, dark terrible family secret, then just say so.’
He winced. ‘Secret? It’s no secret. My family has caused so much scandal there is no hushing it up.’
She knew exactly how that felt.
‘And you have to live with it,’ she said. ‘Find a way to hold your head up in public, when you know full well people are whispering about the scandal behind their fans.’
‘Yes, I have to live with it,’ he breathed. ‘I have to live with the fact my father hanged himself. After gambling away everything he’d ever owned.’
‘Oh, my goodness!’ Sarah clapped her hand to her mouth in horror. ‘I thought my father was an utter disgrace, but even he never forgot what he owed to his name. Not entirely.’
‘Exactly,’ he said with a bitter smile. ‘Most men, if they should get to the point where they feel there is only one way out, would make it look like a hunting accident. So that their children could still inherit. Well, actually, there were only debts left to inherit. My grandfather had already lost the title.’
‘Lost the title?’ Tom came from a noble family? ‘How on earth did he manage to do that?’
‘Spoke out in support of Charles Stuart’s claim to the throne,’ he said grimly. ‘Then threw in his lot with the Jacobites. So there you have it, Lady Sarah. My grandfather was a traitor. My father, well, the best you could say of him was that he was unhinged. But after two generations of scandal, nobody has any doubt that I have tainted blood.’
‘You really did lose everything,’ she said in a hollow whisper. ‘It makes what I’ve lived through, what I’ve thought I’ve had to endure...’ She shook her head in shame.
‘None of that,’ he said sharply. ‘What happened to me when I was a child doesn’t make your own woes any less significant to you.’
‘My woes are petty, though, aren’t they? I’ve always had a secure home. And family. Even though I always thought that out of them all, only Gideon ever actually liked me.’
‘From what you’ve told me so far, your father blighted your childhood in his own way.’
‘Yes, but he was just a lecherous old goat who couldn’t keep his hands off any pretty woman unfortunate enough to cross his path. And rather than having no sense of obligation to the title, he made absolutely sure,’ she said with a bitter twist to her lips, ‘that every single child my mother bore was his. He only left her alone when he was certain she was pregnant. By him.’
‘My father’s problem was the opposite of yours, then. He was totally infatuated with my mother. When she died—bringing me into the world, as it happens—he lost interest in everything else. Hanging himself was probably his way of ensuring I knew how much he disapproved of me surviving at the cost of the only woman he’d ever loved.’
‘Our fathers were both as bad as each other,’ she said, her lips tightening. ‘How could yours abandon his child the way he abandoned you? Leaving you with nothing? Worse than nothing! He burdened you with the belief that somehow his failings were your fault. Ooh—’ she clenched her fists ‘—I thought my father was a bad man, but to act the way yours did is downright unnatural.’
Tom had never really talked about this with anyone before. It was something everyone who knew him knew, anyway. He’d been taunted about it, frequently, but nobody had ever asked him how he felt about it. Let alone taken his part, the way Lady Sarah had just done.
She had such a generous heart, to get all indignant on behalf of a little orphaned boy, rather than react to the disgrace she’d just learned was his inheritance. In that, she was unique. Society ladies, in his experience, had always fallen into one of two camps. There were the ones who turned their noses up at him. Who even twitched their skirts aside to avoid getting accidentally contaminated.
And those who got sexually aroused by the aura of disrepute surrounding him.
Not one of them had appeared to understand exactly how he felt about it, or had even been that interested, come to that.
‘What happened to you next? You were only six, you say?’ Sarah curled up in the chair next to the bed and rested her cheek on her hand. ‘Did you have to go into a foundling home?’
‘No. Worse. My father’s sister took me in.’
‘How could that possibly have been worse?’
‘Well, her husband looked upon me as the spawn of a weak, degenerate man, who was in his turn the spawn of a traitor. And felt it was his Christian duty to ensure I didn’t follow in their footsteps. Which was his excuse for taking every chance he could to beat the evil out of me.’
‘Did not your aunt try to stop him? After all, your bad blood ran in her veins, too.’
‘Ah. Well, looking back, I can see she was too afraid of him to stand up to him. He was a vicious bully. But as a child, I didn’t understand. I just thought she believed what he said and didn’t think it worth the bother of looking for some evidence of good in me. Of course,’ he said, his smile turning a little wicked, ‘their attitude had a predictable effect. Since I soon learned that trying to be good didn’t ameliorate their treatment, there didn’t seem much point in trying. In fact, rather the opposite. If I was going to get a beating, I decided I may as well have done something worth getting the beating for.’
‘Good for you.’ She gave a determined nod. ‘I hope you made their lives as miserable as they made yours.’
He gave a bark of laughter. ‘Well, do you know, I rather think I did. I became a regular little hellion. They couldn’t keep me in school. I much preferred being out of doors with the other village lads, of whom I was pretty soon the ringleader. Before long, if there was any trouble within fifteen miles of our village, they laid it at my door,’ he finished with a glimmer of pride.