Page 48 of The Cornish Widow

He shook his head. “No. Not at all. My father visited us at Rosudgeon every week when I was a child, and I thought that quite normal for a father. I had no way of measuring how a father should behave, and my mother told me his business kept him away from us the rest of the time.” He paused, turning over how to put this. “But servants talk, and children’s ears are always open. I found that he and my mother were not married and that I was his by-blow—a bastard.”

She was watching him now, her attention held by the tale of someone else’s childhood.

“I had to ask what that meant, of course, and the person I asked was my nurse. Instinct told me, guided by the way I’d heard it said, that my mother would not be the one to question. And so I learned that not only was my father not really my father in the eyes of the law, but he was married to someone else. And I had sisters.”

“How old were you when you discovered this?” The hunted look had vanished again, to be replaced with what might have been compassion, which he didn’t want. He wasn’t being honest with her to gain her pity, but to invite her to open up with her own story. Finding out why she was so nervous and wary seemed the most important thing in the world right now. Finding out what Theo had only guessed at.

He ploughed on with his own confession. “I was nine. And I was curious. My nurse had told me that my father resided at Trengrouse Castle, and you must know how close that lies to Rosudgeon.”

She nodded. “The castle just to the west. I’ve seen it in the distance. Very splendid with its towers and crenellations.”

“The very one. Well, I decided I should go there myself and visit my father. Not, as it turned out, one of my best ideas.”

“What happened?”

“My father was not at home. The lies I’d been told about him being often away on business turned out to have been true. But his wife was.” He paused, the scene on the castle lawns replaying in his minds eye. The sunshine, the laughter of a little girl running with a small white dog after a ball, the woman seated at an iron-work table in the shade of a spreading cedar, the nurse cradling the shawl-wrapped baby in her arms.

“I walked over. If I’d taken my pony, I’d have had to take the long way round by the Penzance road, so instead, I walked over the fields. My way brought me to the gardens rather than the front of the house, and the sound of a child playing drew me. My father’s wife was in the garden… with her children. Children who were not bastards like I was.”

Was he playing for her compassion even though he’d told himself he didn’t want it? His words were beginning to sound as though he was.

“Don’t tell me if it upsets you too much.”

Was he upset, still, at the way the haughty Lady Charlotte had treated him that day? The way she’d shouted at him and called his mother a whore as the nurse hurried the children away. His sisters.

He grinned. “Let’s just say she knew exactly who I was, and she wasn’t pleased to see me. She made that blatantly obvious when she had a footman throw me off her property.”

“Oh dear.”

He pulled a rueful face. “And of course, she told my father what had happened, and he told my mother, who was furious that not only had the gossip of our servants revealed my bastardy to me in the worst possible way, but also that I’d sneaked off to try and see where my father lived. And met my father’s wife. The other woman in his life. The one who won him from her.”

“Did your father say anything to you about it?”

He nodded. “The next time he visited, which wasn’t for over a month, he took me into his study and gave me a talking-to about my duties to my mother, and that I was to keep away from his house.” He grinned again. “That was the moment I decided to become a smuggler.”

She smiled. “An act of rebellion?”

“You could say that. He’d made me angry, and I wanted to show him I didn’t care. That I’d make a life for myself, and he could be damned.”

“But you were only nine.”

He grinned. “But I knew what I wanted.”

Would she now feel she could reveal her own secrets to him? After all, he’d bared his soul to her, so to speak. And it had been harder than he’d expected. Even after all these years reliving those moments came hard. They weren’t incidents he often revisited. He’d done it for her.

She was saved by the bell. “Land ho!” Uncle Billy shouted.

Theo stirred on his sail bed and sat up. “Are we nearly there?”