Page 53 of His Forgotten Bride
That woman. The excoriating tone of his father’s voice left little doubt of his opinion of Claire. Gabriel found himself torn between two minds—the one that agreed wholeheartedly and the one that resented the clear condemnation.
He knew his father’s objection centered around the lavish furnishings he’d supplied for Matthew, the boy he had known only as his housekeeper’s son. That he had been moved to such generosity to a child he’d believed to be of the lower class was something his father simply could not countenance.
“He is my son, Father.” The words were bland, toneless.
“Even so,” the duke said. “One would think you might have shown a little circumspection. Such unwarranted consideration given to a woman ofherstamp.” With a rueful shake of his head, the duke removed his spectacles and withdrew a snowy white handkerchief from his pocket to wipe the lenses clean. “You didn’t knowthe boy was yours. Doubtlessthat womanwas all too willing to get what she could from you.”
“Claire. Her name is Claire.” And she hadn’t been willing. She’d protested every purchase. Whatever else she might be, an opportunist she was not.
With a scornful sound in his throat, the duke replaced his spectacles on the bridge of his nose. “A common name,” he said. “AndMatthew. It won’t do at all. No, a family name is called for, I think—Arthur, perhaps, or Charles.”
Gabriel reared back, horrified. “Father. I amnotchanging my son’s name. He’s lived with it all his life.”
The duke waved an indifferent hand. “The boy is young. The young are malleable.” He glanced at Gabriel and heaved a sigh as if resigned. “If you are determined to pollute the family line with common blood, you must send the boy off to school as soon as possible. Eton took a boy of only eight years last year. I shall make some inquiries—”
“No.” It felt good to say, something firm and decisive in a world that felt neither. “No, Father. Matthew will stay here, with me.”
Now the duke was horrified. He blustered a bit, as was his fashion, searching for the appropriate words. At last he found them. “He iscommon. Helookscommon, hesoundscommon—if you fail to crush it out of him now, while he is young and changeable, he will grow uptobecommon.”
“Then he will be common.” Whatever he was, someday Matthew would make a mostuncommonduke. Though, hopefully, not for a very long time yet. Gabriel’s son, who had been an earl from the moment of his birth and had grown up in Spitalfields, the child of a housekeeper, would have a unique upbringing indeed. Much as it might horrify his father and scandalize theTon, Matthew was already precisely the child that Gabriel had wanted, exactly as he was.
He had gotten everything he wanted.
Well. Almost everything. He had wanted Claire. And now that he had her—hiswife,hislivingwife—he no longer knewwhathe wanted.
The duke brushed at an imaginary speck of lint on his coat and said, “There’s no need to come to a decision now. Better to wait, I think, to see if the boy can be trained up to become worthy of the family name. If he should fail to meet expectations, well, then, he can be set aside. There is no proof, after all. No one could possibly know the exact circumstances of his birth, whether or not he is legitimate issue.”
Gabriel knew. There might be no proof, but he knew in his heart. Even if the memory escaped him, he knew. “How can you suggest such a thing?” he asked. “He is myson, yourgrandson—”
And his father said, brusquely, “Now, now. Let’s not be hasty.”
Gabriel closed his eyes. “Leave, Father.”
The duke waved the terse command away, as if it were insignificant. “Son, I understand your affection for the boy—”
Did he? Gabriel doubted it. He could not recall a time when his father had ever expressed even the barest of affection for him. His approval, such as it was, had never been for Gabriel, but for the boy that was the scion of the Newsom family, and only when his behavior conformed to the strictures set forth for him. Gabriel himself had never mattered.
“—but a better heir could be had, a child of proper breeding and bloodlines, raised to understand his place in the world. This need not be the end of our aspirations.”
Our aspirations. The duke viewed Matthew not as a child of his family but as an impediment to his grander plan, an obstacle to the heights he hoped to achieve.
“Father,youcame tome,” he said. “Youplaced this knowledge in my hands, in my head. What had you hoped to accomplish?”
It was his father’s turn to be surprised, and he blinked as if he could not deduce how Gabriel had not understood his intentions. “That your future marriage should not be tainted by the possibility of bigamy,” he said. “That your future children should not bear the stain of illegitimacy wrought by an ill-advised first marriage.” He blotted his forehead with his handkerchief. “That woman can be paid off, perhaps, and her son—should you wish to maintain a relationship with the child—can be sent away to school. A bastard child is a bit of a blemish on your reputation, I’ll allow, but given the prestige of the Newsom family, he will be disregarded.”
Of course. It had never been about the truth, about filling in the missing pieces, about making his son whole again. It had always been about thefamilyname, keeping control.
“Matthew is myson,” Gabriel reiterated. “He is my heir—yourheir. He will be raised as such.” And there wasn’t a damn thing that would sway him.
“But—butthat woman,” the duke said, his hands fluttering ineffectually in the wake of Gabriel’s resolution, as if this was a turn he had not expected. “What will you do withher?”
And that was the crux of the matter, for Gabriel did not know. His wife, his marchioness—his damnedhousekeeper. Claire presented a problem he did not know how to solve, and every time his thoughts drifted toward her a violent rage swept through him. She had held in her hands the missing pieces of his life and cruelly withheld them. She had seen his grief, his guilt, his shame—and she had done nothing.Saidnothing. Kept her silence and her secrets and allowed him to suffer.
“What I do with her,” he forced himself to say through gritted teeth, “is my concern and none of yours.”
A moment later the door to the bathing room swept open, and the nanny shepherded Matthew back into the room. He had been dressed in a nightshirt, and his damp hair curled softly about his flushed cheeks. Matthew’s curious gaze—green eyes, the very same as his father’s—swept over Gabriel and the duke, his brows knitting with confusion.
“Father,” Gabriel ground out. “Leave.” He would not give the duke the opportunity to measure Matthew against his expectations and find the boy wanting.
