Page 95 of The Governess and the Brooding Duke
‘Mary...’
‘And that is why it was so difficult for me to hold the bairn.’ Even without her brogue, these familiar words were often easier when her heart was sore. ‘You told me why you struggled, and I needed to tell you. I needed you to know. It was not a lack of care. Never. It’s only that I never held my own son.’ She put her hand over her mouth. ‘My son. I have never spoken those words out loud.’
‘What became of the child?’
She took a breath, as if it could fortify her. As if it could hold back her tears.
‘Never has a girl who endured so many terrible things been given such a great gift. The leader of my clan is raising him as his own. As his heir. My son is going to be the leader of our clan. He has been given everything.’ She looked down. ‘I did not name him. I do not know his name now.’
Both of them had nameless babies in their lives. For wholly different reasons and yet the pain felt similarly impossible.
‘They do not write to you?’
‘I asked them not to. I wanted him to have a new life, and I wanted one as well. I did not want either of us to be tied to the other. We are, of course.’ She tried to smile. ‘The idea that we wouldn’t be was the desperate hope of a thirteen-year-old girl who wanted to forget. But you cannot forget. Not something like that.’
‘Do you think you might write and learn of him some day?’
‘He is not mine. His life is his own. Whatever he wishes, that is what I want. Who knows what they will tell him? Some day... I would like to see him some day. But only when I can be sure I am not robbing him of anything. His birthright, his status in the clan. His security. It is all complicated, you see.’
He nodded. ‘I am familiar with such complications.’
‘Yes, indeed. If Jane’s baby is discovered to be a bastard, what becomes of him? They know the Laird’s wife didn’t give birth to my bairn, but the circumstances behind his birth aren’t known widely. I was no one and nothing. It might harm him to know the truth.’
Part of her did wish, now, to know.
But never at his expense.
‘How did you then come to be under the care of the Duke of Kendal?’
‘The Duke of Kendal was engaged to Lady Penelope Hastings. Lady Penelope was taken, as payment for a debt owed by her father. She was taken by Lachlan Bain, the McKenzie. She and Lachlan married and... Even though it created a scandal when Kendal’s engagement was broken...’
‘I remember that,’ he said. ‘Only vaguely.’
‘Yes. The engagement was broken, and then he married his ward.’
‘Of course.’
‘And because of that, because the broken engagement led him to his beloved wife, when Penny wrote to him and asked if they could speak well of me, offer me their sponsorship, he agreed. I declined to have a season because...’
‘You did not wish to marry.’
She shook her head. ‘No. For very clear reasons, I did not wish to marry. But they helped see me through school, and they helped me get my first position as governess.’
‘How did you find the fortitude within yourself to do these things? I was handed an education. Money. Power. You had none of it, and yet you stood up from that mud, and you never looked back towards it.’
‘I look back plenty enough. There were reasons I knew how to use a knife.’
‘And God damn the men that make it necessary for you to do so. They prove you correct. Men like my father.’ His voice had gone very rough. ‘Do you see, I had struggles. I could not overcome them, not with a fraction of the grace that you have shown here. You are a miracle, Mary Smith. Mary McLaren.’
And for the first time that name did not feel haunted.
It did not feel like it was reaching out to try and strangle her. Because it didn’t carry a dark secret. He knew. He knew and, just like in his study with Pelham, he did not blame her.
‘My mother said that I was a whore. In my soul. And that he was a man who could sense that. That I had brought it on myself. I did sometimes wonder if that was true. When Pelham singled me out. And then when... When I came to work for you and I desired you so... I thought only a harlot could want such things.’
He was silent for a moment, his hands tracing shapes along her bare hips. And then he spoke.
‘Do you know that in wolf packs there is a hierarchy. And the leader hunts, for the protection of the pack. For food. They have no interest in people, because there is any number of better game for their consumption. When you hear of wolves attacking men, it is because one is weak. Sick. Because it has been cast out of the pack. And if a wolf ever attacks a human, it is not about the human, but about what is sick inside the wolf. He was nothing more than a sick wolf. With something irretrievably damaged within him that makes it impossible for him to behave in a way that is right or intended.’
