Page 33 of The Lady Makes Her Mark

Chapter 11

“People do not always get what they deserve,”

Constantia reminded him quietly. “But I will tell you what I can.”

Because once she had, Ryland would know what she was, as well as who, and then he would not try to keep her here or insist on introducing her to his sisters. In fact, he would be only too glad to help her get away.

But for the moment, he was looking at her expectantly. Almost eagerly. She pulled her mantle more snugly around her throat, as if mere wool could shield her from the intensity of his dark gaze. Difficult to believe that moments before she had found the nerve to kiss him. That she now knew the feel of his mouth against hers.

Knowledge changed a person, changed the relationship between people.

Everything had changed in the last few moments.

And it was about to change again.

“My mother was the middle daughter of a marquess,” she began, dropping her eyes to lap. “He’s still alive. But he disowned her long ago. Don’t ask his name.” She paused, expecting Ryland to protest. But she was hardly foolish enough to give the name of one peer to another. She understood where loyalty lay. When he did not push for it, she let a shaky breath escape her lungs, part relief, part resignation. She had no excuse not to go on. “At seventeen, she went to London for her first Season and met a man. Not at all the sort of man her father had in mind for her—though,” she added with a humorless chuckle, “he did claim to be nobility, in exile from some obscure European principality.”

A lie, she was sure, but if such a place had ever existed, no doubt Napoleon had since wiped it from the map.

“He was an artist. She let him make her portrait. Like a fool, she posed without—without any—” She had to pause and swallow past the next word.

“In the nude,” Ryland offered quietly.

She jerked up her chin. “You’ve seen it.”

A nod, the faintest movement imaginable. “That first night. You were unconscious, and at first, I didn’t recognize you. I went through your things, searching for something that would tell me who you were.”

His voice was remarkably free of judgment. She steeled herself against it all the same. “Well, you found it, didn’t you? I’m the daughter of the sort of woman who would let a man paint a picture of her naked as the day she was born. Although perhaps that was fitting—he must have made her promises of the sort that only a baby, or a naïve nobleman’s daughter, would expect to be kept. She ran away with him. I arrived in due course. And before I had turned three years old, he had abandoned us both.”

“Oh, my dear Miss—”

It amused her, somehow, his determination to be proper, to follow the rules of etiquette, to maintain a respectful distance between them.

“Constantia,” she corrected. “It’s a town on the Black Sea, you know. He claimed to have summered there in his youth, and regaled my mother with tales of its beauty. That’s why she chose such an outlandish name. Too distinctive—too recognizable. I hadn’t used it for years. And then, in a moment of weakness, I thought I should like to hear it again, so I told it to Lady Stalbridge and the others at the magazine . . .”

That had been almost as grave a mistake as giving it to him.

“But you did not reveal your surname?” he asked. “She seemed convinced the one you gave her was false.”

“Have I a real one? I’m—” A bastard, she had been going to say. But he would recoil at that, and recoil again when she laughed at him. “I’m the illegitimate daughter of a liar and a fraud. And what claim has my mother’s family on me?”

He nodded, though rather absently. She wondered whether he was considering what he might do if one of his sisters found herself in a similarly unfortunate situation. “And after? When your mother had . . . gone?”

“She did not die of a broken heart,” Constantia explained stubbornly. No matter what she said. “Just an ordinary fever. We lived then in London, in one of those neighborhoods where my mother’s family, and yours I’m sure, would never set foot. The woman who attended her at the end was kind enough not to drop me at an orphanage but instead sent me to her sister in Essex, who had sons but wanted a girl around the house. I rubbed along all right with the family, in spite of this.” She gestured with her left hand, its dominance a supposedly sinister sign, and then wound a red curl around her first finger. “And this.” Her hair had always been the bane of her existence, a mark of her difference, almost impossible to hide. “I was just six years old when I went to them, young enough that my memories began to fade and I forgot . . . forgot those dingy rooms and my mother’s stories, my mother’s face. Then one day, I was doing my chores—I was nine or so then, at an age when I was eager to please. I stood on a chair to clean the top of the enormous old wardrobe in my foster mother’s room—and I found—I found . . .”

“The portrait.”

It was her turn to flinch. He understood too much, the Earl of Ryland. She was right to put distance between them.

“Yes,” she confessed after a moment. “It was wrapped up in paper and tied with string. My name—my Christian name—was written on the outside, in what I later learned was my mother’s hand. At first, I didn’t even realize it was in reference to me. In that house, I had only ever been known as Connie, you see. But it stirred something in some corner of my memory. I had to know, so naturally, I unwrapped the package. There was a letter, too, from my mother—perhaps you read the part of it I kept?” His answering nod was sharp, chagrined. “A bit maudlin, but I suppose she wrote it on her deathbed. I was still trying to make sense of it when my foster-mother came in and caught me, my hands full, still standing on that rickety chair. It’s a wonder I didn’t fall,” she recalled with a wry laugh. “I can’t believe she didn’t have her suspicions about my origins before that day. But the picture was too much for her. Proof of my degenerate nature far more damning than left-handedness and unruly red hair. She sent me packing that very hour.”

A sound escaped him them. Pity, or very near it. It plucked at something deep inside her and made an ache in her chest. But of course, children endured worse all the time. She had endured worse.

“She kindly gave me half a crown,” she reassured him. “I walked to Cambridge and, from there, posted myself to Sheffield.”

“So far! Why Sheffield?”

“I’d read a story where the heroine was said to have ‘a spine of Sheffield steel.’ I didn’t understand it was a metaphor, and I’m quite sure now that it wasn’t intended as a compliment, but I was determined to get myself one. Figured it would help me survive.”