Page 36 of One Perfect Dance
The look Mouth shot her was heavy with loathing, but his response was polite enough. “Very uncomfortable, Mrs. Paddimore. I trust that his assailant has been properly punished for his unprovoked attack.”
Regina stiffened beside Ash, and the hand that was still tucked into his arm gripped hard enough to pinch, but her voice remained steady as she said, “Unprovoked, Mr. Deffew? An overreaction on Paddimore’s part, certainly, and so I have told him. But no gentleman could ignore an insult to the lady who raised him as a mother.”
Dilly turned on Mouth. “What has that limb of Satan done now? Mrs. Paddimore, I apologize for my nephew’s disgraceful behavior.”
Mouth’s frown deepened. “Richard has a broken jaw, thanks to young Paddimore.”
Regina was quick to reply, “And Geoffrey has a broken hand. They will both heal, and one hopes they will learn from the experience.”
“Not done to insult a man’s mother,” Dilly insisted.
Mouth glared at him, then spurred his horse into a fast trot. Dilly stared after him for a moment, then lifted his hat to Regina. “Your servant, Mrs. Paddimore.” He nodded to Ash. “Ashby.”
Ash watched him chase after his brother then gave Regina a wry smile. “Your son broke his hand on Richard Deffew’s jaw?”
“He did, and do not say he did the right thing. He has already heard that from William, which is not at all helpful.”
“Would it be intrusive to ask about the insult?”
“Young Deffew told Geoffrey I was his birth mother and William his father. He used rather crude terms, I gather, which my son would not repeat.” Or not to her, at least.
Ash whistled. “That would do it. No wonder your son punched the other lad.”
“It is, I hardly need say, completely ridiculous, as well as disgusting.”
“Yes.” Ash allowed the horses to drop to a slow walk and pulled them to the side of the road so another party could pass. Once they were well ahead, he added. “That kind of filthy accusation comes from a depraved mind. Mouth’s, probably. Quite apart from the fact that you are brother and sister, Geoffrey is what, eighteen or nineteen? You and William were both still children when he was conceived.”
Regina frowned. “It is because he has my coloring and William’s build,” she admitted.
It is because Mouth is a nasty man. But what Regina said was true, as far as it went. “He looks quite a lot like William, apart from the coloring, and his eyes. He has his mother’s eyes. Mouth should know that. He and Lord Kingsley came to blows when she refused Mouth’s advances and he attempted to force the issue.”
That startled Regina. “Deffew assaulted Geoffrey’s mother? When? Wait! You know who she was?”
“You don’t?”
“Gideon would never say. He said she was dead, so there was no point in telling me.”
Ash didn’t think much of that reasoning. As far as he could see, there was no point in not telling her. A mistress had a son. Nothing scandalous about that. The shocking thing was who fathered the boy. But perhaps she did not know that, though surely, she must have guessed by now.
“She was a widow in the village, one of your father’s tenants,” he told her. “Officially.” He pulled the horses to a stop so that he could give her all her attention. “Most of us knew he was her protector. You did know that Lord Kingsley was Geoffrey’s father?”
Regina nodded, completely unabashed. “Gideon told me before we married, and even if he hadn’t, I would have guessed once Geoffrey grew old enough for the resemblance to be startling. For I know William was not old enough. When did my father and Deffew fight over the widow, Elijah? Before Geoffrey was born?”
“Yes. I was still living in the village, and the Deffews were boarding with my mother, so that would make it… seventeen ninety-five, Regina.”
Regina shook her head, but in wonder rather than disbelief. “Some five years before Geoffrey was born, that would have been. My Papa had a mistress in the village all that time! And I never knew. He must have been fond of her too, for they sent for him when she lay dying, and he visited Geoffrey, Gideon said, until he died.”
“He was not a profligate, as I understand it,” Ash assured her. “He had one long-term mistress and—” he paused again, to choose his words, in case he was breaking open another secret—“…a close relationship with another person.”
Regina nodded. “Gideon. I have often wondered how he felt sharing my Papa with my mother and with Geoffrey’s mother. He also, Gideon told me, occasionally had short-term affairs with ladies of the ton. He craved variety, Gideon said. Poor Gideon. Poor Mama!”
She said nothing further for at least a minute. Ash busied himself setting the horses to walking again and turning on to a road that would take them back into the carriageway that led to the gate nearest to Regina’s townhouse.
“What does your mother think of it all?” he asked.
Regina expelled breath in an impatient noise. “I have no idea, Elijah. I have not spoken to my mother since she conspired with David Deffew to have me abducted to Scotland and married perforce, after he had compromised me.”
Ash’s hands clenched on the reins, and he had to calm his surge of anger in order to get the horses back under control. By the time he had succeeded, she was telling him the whole story. The fake message. The forced kiss. The avid gossipers. Her father’s heart attack and death. Dilly’s arrival with a coach and four and her mother’s insistence that they must marry.
