Page 47 of Every Rogue Has His Charm

“Maxim…” she breathed.

That earned her a brusque laugh. “He hated even my name, did you know? Because Maximilien was my other grandfather’s name, my grand-père’s name. My maman chose it to honor him, you see, but my grandfather did not think it suitable for a future duke.”

“The name of emperors? Of kings?”

“Not English ones. He hated her for being French, and worse, Breton. Hated my father for the unforgivable sin of loving her, marrying her. He cut them off—no acknowledgment, no allowance. They would have been in desperate straits, if not for my late grandmother, the last Duchess of Hartwell, whose marriage settlements had provided a modest income for her only child after her death. I grew up in a cottage, with no more help for my mother than a maid of all work—that’s why I was the one chosen to go out into the storm to fetch the doctor when my father was taken ill.”

“Do you—do you remember the accident?”

“No. Nor the month or so afterward. My maman nursed me back from the brink of death more than once, and I have often thought—”

“Don’t say it. Please.”

He drew a ragged breath. “My grandfather said it, often, when he showed up later that summer. He mocked me for my looks, my invalidism, my accent. I had grown up speaking only French or Breton at home, you see, because my maman spoke almost no English.” She could hear his affection for his mother in his voice, the faint echoes of her speech in his. “But he was a powerful man, and she had nothing. He took me away, locked me away—he hadn’t the courage, I gather, simply to kill me. Or her. Afterward he sent her far away, to Quebec—or tried. She dr—”

“I know.” She cut across him, trying once more to spare him from having to speak the words. She hadn’t wanted to be right in her conjectures about the ship that had foundered and the—good God, the insurance money the late duke had gained by his daughter-in-law’s death. “But he sent you to school?”

“Once I’d taught myself to walk again, taught myself to fight back against the heartless couple he’d hired to pretend to be my caretakers, yes. I think he could no longer deny that I might survive and so, as his heir, I must be brought up accordingly. I was packed off to Eton, where I learned…oh, many things. Chief among them that my classmates ventured fewer cruelties against me, the ugly crippled boy, when I was cruel to them first.”

Briefly, she closed her eyes—against the sun, against his words, against the mental image of the tortures he had endured, the evidence of which she had seen on his naked body. Now she knew for certain just how deeply those wounds had also been carved on his heart. “And when you finished school?”

He hesitated only a moment, but his answer was glib, hiding more than it revealed. “I traveled the world. As young English gentlemen do. And when I came home, I married you.”

Why? she wanted to ask. He might have abandoned her to her father’s anger that night in Lord Earnshaw’s library and thought nothing more on the matter. But he hadn’t, and it had been that fact, more than any other, that she had clung to for reassurance over the years. Whatever he was, however he had been mistreated, there was still a spark of goodness in him.

“I know you wrote to tell your grandfather of our marriage. But why?”

This time, he didn’t answer at all. “The contents of that crate revealed all this, did they? Old account books, mortgage papers, and the like?”

“There are letters too,” she told him, gnawing at her lower lip. “From your father to his. One from your mother, about the accident. They made parts of the story perfectly clear.” His expression darkened. “And your grandfather’s secretary kept a detailed letter book, to log every bit of correspondence he received, including your letter. But I confess I did have to speculate a bit, puzzle out some connections. I couldn’t make heads nor tails of the ledgers, but Mrs. Drummond helped—”

“Ah, yes. Mrs. Drummond.” Her stomach knotted as he pulled his arm free from hers and took a few steps away. She could see nothing of his face now. Just his broad shoulders, taut beneath his coat, and his dark brown hair, tangled and tousled by the wind. “If you’d asked, I would have told you that you were welcome to waste your morning poring over decades of my grandfather’s musty old account books. But when I think of that woman—”

“Remember, you are speaking of a lady,” she cautioned. She wished she understood the source of the animosity that had sprung up between them.

He whirled on her. His scar leaped into prominence as his jaw clenched. “Mrs. Drummond is a—”

“A friend,” she snapped, forestalling whatever epithet he had been about to offer. “She’s shown me nothing but kindness and understanding since—”

“Since the day General Scott ordered her into your life?” Maxim supplied with something very close to a sneer.

Her breath left her in a rush, and she was sorely tempted to sink onto a nearby tuft of grasses. “I beg your pardon?”

“Mrs. Horn told me she was introduced to you by Mrs. Scott,” he explained. “And I’ll wager the value of everything in that wretched crate that Mrs. Scott was acting at her husband’s behest. Mrs. Drummond, and her supposed manservant, work for the leader of British intelligence.”

That sweet old man she’d beaten at whist? Fanny? Impossible. Maxim was lying to her—hadn’t he just confessed how he’d learned to defend himself by attacking first?

Still, Fanny had introduced herself with a letter from the general’s wife. “H-how do you—?”

“How do I know?” He turned back toward the water, his voice now alarmingly quiet, almost lost to the sounds of the wind and waves. “Because, my dear, so do I.”

She did sink down then, the stiff grasses crunching beneath her, offering little in the way of cushion. He must have heard, because he glanced over his shoulder and then turned back and knelt beside her, his movements swift, though stiffer than they had been years ago in Lord Earnshaw’s library. “I shouldn’t have told you the truth so abruptly.”

“But it is the truth?”

“Yes.”

Her head spun as flashes of memory came and went, much like the documents in the crate: not a complete picture, but enough. “That—that’s why the general was at our wedding. That’s why you know how to pick locks.” She could barely push the words past her suddenly parched lips.