Page 66 of The Governess and the Brooding Duke
‘What?’
She looked shocked. The child was fractious in her arms, and he gritted his teeth. ‘He is not my son. I am not so cold-hearted that I would deny my own flesh and blood a name or affection because his mother died in childbirth.’
She looked as if she was trying to do a complicated mathematical equation in her head.
‘But cold enough to deny the blood of another man,’ she said, slowly.
‘Yes.’
It was not so simple. These were the consequences of Jane’s actions and, dammit all, he would have rather the child had died.
The thought sliced him open.
But then... Then Jane could have been contrite. She could have decided to be different, or he could have decided to structure their lives differently. He could have returned to the brothels if she’d wanted to have other men.
Or maybe they could have spoken frankly about their desires.
But she had died.
And they had never spoken about it. Not about any of it.
It had been nothing but her, lovelorn and mooning over a man who did not wish to cause scandal by claiming her, by leaving his wife, by stealing the wife of the Duke. A man who would not claim his child.
And it had been West marinating in the humiliation of it, even though no one else would ever know the child wasn’t his.
He did. Because he knew exactly when he had last been in his wife’s bed. And there was no chance she had conceived the boy with him.
Once she had given him an heir, once Michael had been born, their encounters had grown fewer and fewer.
He had wanted a spare, but she had not attacked the task with any sort of vigour. Conception was not the easiest thing for his wife. She’d had many losses between Elizabeth and Michael.
It was the one thing that made him certain that whatever affair she’d been carrying on with another man had been going on for some time in order to conceive and have a pregnancy that she actually carried to term.
‘You are certain...’
‘I had not lain with my wife for a year. The child is not mine. And my wife is dead. And what am I to do? She died in childbirth. Everyone knows this. To expose the fact that the infant is not mine is to expose her to censure after her death. The mother of my children. What am I to do? If she were a man, we could simply put her bastard in a school somewhere, and deal with it that way. But she was not a man. She was a woman. And the shame would be endless. For all of us. Her parents are good people, they are good grandparents to my children, and she was a good mother. I have no wish to destroy their memory of her. Nor can I find it in me to care for the evidence of her betrayal, and the child that caused her death.’
‘The child didn’t...’
‘I know that,’ he said. ‘But how am I to feel?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know. Your Grace...’
‘Mary,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you should call me West. You are the only living person who knows the truth about this child. And I need your silence.’
‘I won’t tell anyone. I promise. I promise you I won’t.’
‘Thank you.’
‘West,’ she said. ‘That is not your Christian name.’
‘No. But it is what everyone calls me. My friends. If I had any.’
He tried to say it with humour, but it was true enough.
‘I... I didn’t know. And I am sorry that I stood in judgement of you.’
With the infant in her arms she checked the stove, which seemed to have a low flame in it already.
