Page 63 of Dare to Love a Duke
Old hurts flared back to life, sharp and cutting like dozens of knives. It didn’t matter that fifteen years had passed since then, she still bled from their wounds. Tersely, she said, “There’s no point in this line of questioning.”
“I mean to decipher you,” he said pensively.
Anger was easier to feel than sadness, and she welcomed its icy simplicity. “I’m not a puzzle, Your Grace.” She wadded up a torn pair of stockings and cast them into the discard pile. “Not something to be solved to help you while away the time.”
“You misunderstand me.” He leaned against the wall. “I crave knowing everything about you, not because I’m bored or in search of a plaything.”
“Then why?” she snapped.
“Because you fascinate me.” He spoke plainly, and his gaze held hers.
Heat stole through her and made a task as simple as breathing into a challenge. Her irritation shifted quickly into something much more dangerous—desire.
To distract herself, she picked through a mound of discarded fans, shawls, and ribbons. Lightly, she said, “My tale isn’t so unique.”
“Indulge me, then.”
Very well. She could talk about this without falling into the trap of feeling.Just speak of it as though it happened to someone else.“You know Thompson Ironworks?”
He straightened. “Can’t find a bridge built within the past thirty years that hasn’t made use of their iron. Stephen Thompson’s richer than half the nobility.”
“My father was Thompson’s son,” she said flatly. “He wanted a Grand Tour just like the aristos. After Paris and Berlin and Zurich, he settled for a time in Napoli, the way all fine gentlemen did to hear our opera and visit the ruins in Pompeii. My mother, she was his housekeeper.”
“Ah.”
“Yes—ah.” She swallowed down the choking that always rose up when she thought of the scoundrel that was her sire. “When she told him she was pregnant, he swore he’d marry her and take her back to England.”
“She believed him?”
Lucia’s mouth twisted as her hands knotted around an Indian shawl. “She’d come to Napoli from her poor village,” she said defensively. “Her heart was open and trusting. To her, there was no reason not to have faith in him.”
There was never any sorrow when she spoke of her father’s death, only the painful absence of feeling, if it was possible to hurt from a lack of emotion rather than a surplus.
“Before any arrangements were made for a return to England,” she said, her words cutting, “he died in an accident. Fell to his death when scaling Vesuvius. My mother mourned him like a widow. She never took another man to her bed after his death. But she couldn’t go back home to her village, not with a bastard in her belly, and an existence even more meager than the one she knew in Napoli. So she remained, and took in washing, or mended, just to make sure I didn’t go hungry.”
She blinked hard, but tears always came whenever Mamma haunted her.
Tom regarded her steadily. But there was no condemnation in his gaze. Instead, she saw him piecing together the fragments of her existence—and what he discovered pained him. “What of you, while your mother worked?”
“Did my share.” She pushed on, determined for him to know everything. If he learned who she truly was, in every way, he might turn from her. Such a repudiation would hurt, but she had to face it, just as she’d faced it before. It hurt less when one jammed the knife in oneself rather than suffer a wound at someone else’s hand.
“The streets of Napoli are full of children,” she continued in a hard voice. “Urchins, you might call them. I was one of them, running errands, making exchanges, always staying a step ahead.” She smiled wryly. “Bartered my way into literacy. My mother kept a few of my father’s English books—sentimentality, you know. There was a poor English painter who lived near us, and I’d steal bread for him in exchange for him teaching me to read.”
“Ingenious,” Tom said, and there was no mistaking the admiration in his voice.
She hadn’t expected that. “Just the will to survive.”
It wasn’t an easy or quiet existence, and too well she recalled the panic and confusion when political factions fought in the street. She shuddered, remembering the twitching bodies at the end of the hangman’s noose when the Parthenopean martyrs were executed in the Largo del Castello.
She’d gone to the execution in hopes of earning some coin from the spectators as she fetched them cooling ices or something to eat. Yet she’d been frozen in terror as men and women met their deaths before a roaring crowd.
All life is precarious. A hero one day, an enemy the next.
“You left that behind to come to England,” he said, bringing her back to the present.
Despite her desire to speak without sentiment, more tears threatened to spill. “My mother died—malaria. I was thirteen.” Thedottorehad been muzzy with wine, and no help at all, as Mamma sweated and gasped and shuddered. Lucia had laid her body atop her mother’s, trying to hold her still, and feeling the fever burning her flesh. “Before she breathed her last, she urged me to go to England, to find my father’s people. They’d take me in. He was an important man’s son, surely they’d raise his daughter in luxury. So—” She forced her shoulders into an attempt at a shrug, feigning nonchalance, then gathered up the pile of clothing that was salvageable and easily washed. “I went.”
“You were aught but a child.” Tom frowned, following her as she headed downstairs to the laundry. “Naples to England isn’t an easy voyage. Or inexpensive.”
