“I suppose he did, if you believe the dead can look down upon you.” She sounded almost bored by the entire discussion. “What is all this sudden fuss about your birth, John? You never expressed much interest in your parentage before, at least not to me.”
“I never realized you knew so damn much. Now I want the truth.”
“Do you?” She had an odd glint in her eyes, her smile mocking. “As tough as you think you are I wonder if you can take it.”
“Try me,” he snarled. “You might as well come out with all of it. You’ve as good as told me that Stephen Markham was my father. That makes you my aunt.”
To his astonishment, she laughed. He couldn’t recall ever hearing her do so before. The sound left him feeling cold.
“Not your aunt, John,” she said with one of those smiles he was coming to dread. “Your mother.”
She had to be lying, or else she was crazy. She didn’t know what she was saying. He hadn’t heard her right. Zeke sought every form of denial, but there was no escaping the truth reflected to him in the depths of those taunting eyes.
“My...” He couldn’t bring himself to say the word, not in connection with her. “What the hell are you talking about? You mean that you and your own brother?—”
He stopped, moistening his lips, feeling as though he would be sick.
“No.” Her voice held a faint trace of amusement. “Stephen always took his pleasures elsewhere.”
Zeke heaved a deep breath of relief. That made it better, but not much.
She continued, “Your father was one of the Irish grooms in our stables.”
His incredulity must have shown, for she went on quickly, “Everyone commits some indiscretion, and this was mine. That one hot July afternoon, I needed to know what it would be like to lie beneath a man glistening with sweat, calluses on his hands, passions as wild and primitive as the studs my father bought to breed his mares.”
For a brief moment, a shudder tore through her, her features transformed by a look of ecstasy she quickly repressed. “Theexperience was every bit as loathsome as I imagined. Yet I made a fool of myself over that man. There’s no saying where it would have ended before I came to my senses. Fortunately, one day Sean broke his neck, jumping one of the horses.”
“How obliging of him.” Zeke tried to summon some feeling of sorrow for the father he had never known, tried but couldn’t. He couldn’t help believing that the young groom was better off even descending into hell rather than within Mrs. Van Hallsburg’s poisonous grasp.
Undaunted by his sarcastic remark, she said, “Yes, Sean was always a most accommodating man. I might even have mourned his passing but for the legacy he left me.”
Her gaze swept toward Zeke, her eyes icy splinters of accusation. “You were already growing inside me, feeding upon my life’s blood like some parasite. I would have aborted you, but I was too far gone before I realized. I was rather naive about some facts of life in those days.”
Zeke couldn’t credit it. Cynthia Van Hallsburg might have been many things in her youth—spoiled, selfish, fatally attractive—but never naive.
“So then what?” Zeke prompted when she fell silent, uncertain if he could stand to listen to any more of this, but unable to turn away from her either, until he had heard every last wretched detail.
She sighed. “I had to pretend to leave for an extended visit to a friend’s summer house, while actually I went to live in this miserable boarding house with only my maid Emma to attend me. You came into the world after midnight one April morning, not stillborn as I had hoped, but lusty and screaming.”
Mrs. Van Hallsburg pressed her hands briefly to her brow as though after all these years, she was yet trying to shut out the sound of those cries. “It was your constant screaming that did it, drove me to abandon you on that refuse heap. If I hadbeen thinking more clearly, I would have suffocated you, but the ordeal of childbirth had disordered my wits.”
Zeke’s mouth went dry, but he was too stunned to say or do anything other than regard her with loathing. She was so calm. That was the true horror of it—so calm as she explained why she hadn’t managed to murder him at birth.
“You needn’t look at me that way,” she said. “As though I were some sort of villainess. When I heard later you had been found, and taken to the orphanage, when I was far away from your cries, I didn’t mind at all that you had lived.”
“Thank you,” Zeke said bitterly.
“No one would have known a thing about you, except that my maid betrayed me. She told my father, who insisted that something more had to be done. Such a stupid man. He paid the orphanage a large sum of money for your care, and to keep silent about who your benefactor was. And what good did that do? You never saw a penny of that money and it only put my reputation at risk. Luckily everyone believed you were just another one of Stephen’s indiscretions.”
Zeke wished he could have continued believing that himself.
“And that’s what you told Sadie when she came to see you?” he asked.
“I started to, but it was so strange. Somehow I found myself confiding the truth to her. I knew she would never betray me. She was too terrified I might want you back. But I never found you the least interesting until you were fully grown.”
The nature of her interest showed all too clearly in her eyes, that unholy light there again. Zeke took an involuntary step back, his gut wrenching. Now he understood full well why Sadie had never told him any of this, the painful knowledge she had tried to shield him from, why she had been so terrified when Mrs. Van Hallsburg had come back into his life.
As Mrs. Van Hallsburg approached him, he tensed, afraid of what he might do if she tried to touch him. He glanced down at that once-lovely face that suddenly seemed to be showing the lines of age, not a graceful aging, but one of decadence, a twisted soul too long kept hidden behind that timeless mask.
