Page 66 of To Seduce a Stranger

“M-mama?”

Her soft blue eye fixed him in return. “And to think,” she murmured, “I worried all this time that I might not know you when you came home.”

Though he longed to wrap his arms around her, she looked so fragile that he contented himself with lifting the hand that rested on the bench and pressing it first to his trembling lips, then to his cheek. He had no words to describe the sensation of his mother’s touch—after so many years, when he had thought never to feel it again.

“Oh, Mama, Mama. I thought—I thought you were dead.”

“I feared you were, as well. Oh, my darling, where have you been all this time?”

He brushed aside the question. “It does not matter. I’m here with you now.”

“He has been in the West Indies, ma’am,” Mari said, stepping forward.

Surprise flared in his mother’s clear eye as she took in Mari’s appearance. “Oh.” Part exclamation, part question, the sound left her lips on a gasp.

“Are you the one they call Tessie?” Mari asked, undaunted. Mama nodded.

“You—you have—you are the one who has been living in the hermitage?” Edward sputtered. Markham had mentioned something about an old vagrant woman to him, but he had brushed the concern aside. At the time, other matters had seemed more pressing. My God. If he’d listened, he might have found his mother that much sooner. “Oh, Mama. That was no life for you. No life for anyone. Why didn’t you go to your sister, as you said you would?”

“As I said—?”

At last, he broke her gaze, embarrassed at the memory, at his childishness. “I was hiding—playing soldiers in your sitting room. Mrs. Henderson came. I overheard you tell her that you could leave Father when I went away to school. I was afraid of what might happen if you waited that long. So I . . . I ran away.”

“Neddy.”

The almost-forgotten gentleness of even her scold brought tears to his eyes, and he dropped his head to her lap to hide them from her. Leaning her walking stick against the edge of the bench, she laid her other hand on his head and began to smooth his hair with gnarled fingers.

“Oh, Mama,” he whispered into her skirts. “Why did you stay?”

“I did not have a choice.”

It took all the strength he possessed, but he raised his head once more and forced himself to see the truth: her faded brown hair with its streak of white, how thin she was, the scars she bore. Suffering had made her old before her time. “What did he do to you?”

Her head darted a refusal, but he did not break his gaze.

“He convinced himself I knew where you had gone,” she said at last, sounding resigned. “Even if I really had known, though, nothing he said or did could have made me tell him. One day, after you had been gone about a fortnight, he—” She broke off, steeled herself, began again. “He sent for a physician from Stroud. I caught bits and pieces of their conversation. He told the man to say I had the smallpox. But I was never examined. I daresay money exchanged hands. Afterward, your father locked me in my room and dismissed the staff—for their safety, he told them. He wanted no witnesses to his cruelty. Word of the supposed infection spread like wildfire, and people fled. A few days later, I watched some men carry out a coffin. Full of rocks, I imagine. But who would dare to investigate and risk spreading the contagion? Or worse, risk angering your father? Mr. Henderson was gone, having taken his dear wife to safety, and poor Mr. Cummings must have been harried near to death by the chaos in the village.”

“There is a gravestone in the churchyard,” Edward said, his voice as rough as the slab of granite that loomed in his mind.

“I know. I have seen it.” She spoke the words softly, but firmly. “Your father left Ravenswood that afternoon. I was . . . badly injured. Very weak. Why he left me alive, I cannot say. I’m sure he meant for me to die in that room. But I suppose he did not like to think of himself as a murderer. Or perhaps he felt that putting me out of my misery would have been too great a kindness.”

Edward, on the other hand, felt certain if his father were still alive he could have dispatched him with his bare hands, and without a twinge of conscience—and he was no longer sure whether that made him a monster, or a hero.

“Eventually, I made it out of my prison, as you see, although I feared for a time that I might never find the strength. By the time I escaped, everything was . . . well, much as you see it. People had scattered. The house had been abandoned. I did not know if he would return. But I hoped with all my heart that you might,” she said, stroking his cheek with cool fingertips. “So I stayed. I made my way, somehow, to the old hermitage. And I have been living there ever since. The mad old woman everyone knew only as Tessie.”

“Did no one help you?”

She nodded. “Oh, certainly, now and again. On occasion, a man on the tramp happened by and chopped firewood in exchange for a meal or shelter. Mostly, though, I helped myself. I took food and whatever else I could manage from this house, and I had been putting by bits of my pin money for years, just in case. Pennies here and there; never so much that your father would notice. In time, I grew bold enough to venture into the village to buy more supplies, but by then most of the familiar faces were gone. And if those who remained ever suspected who I was,” she added with an uncertain glance toward Garrick, “they never said a word.”

“You should have gone to the magistrate, Mama,” he said. “You should have denounced what my father did.”

Her expression shifted. For the first time, he could hear a note of anger in her voice. “Wives have no recourse under the law, Edward. That would have brought down his wrath, nothing more.”

With a creak of boot leather, he rose and sat beside his mother on the bench, one arm around her stooped shoulders. “I should’ve been here to help you.”

“You were a child, Edward.”

“I have not been a child for many years, Mama.”