Page 44 of Lady Diana's Lost Lord
Perhaps a part of her admired Grace, just a little. How much courage did it take to defy one’s family like that? Diana had only managed to scrape together the nerve to do so just recently. And only her brothers at that. Her father had had her utterly cowed for years; she would not have so dared.
“I haven’t a natural affinity for languages,” Ben said. “My French is rather clumsy—but Grace was fluent in both French and English, and it could be said that she took me beneath her wing. Introduced me to people she thought I should know. Taught me how to speak with the confidence I lacked. If not for her guidance, I should have been quite lost.”
“You were grateful for her friendship, then.” She could only imagine how vital Grace’s assistance must have been to him, then—she could remember well enough the awkward, shy boy he had once been.
“I suppose I thought of her as something as an older sister,” he said. “Since I hadn’t…much in the way of family otherwise. There was only my father and I, after my mother died, and he—he was never the same thereafter. Never much of a father.” A short, sharp breath. “We became quite close, Grace and I, those months I was in Paris. But eventually I was meant to move on to Rome, and we had to part ways.” Some old sadness lingered there in the coffee-brown depths of his eyes. “Naturally, we had agreed to write to one another,” he said. “And it was through her letters than I learned that she was with child.” He sucked in a breath through his teeth. “She wasn’t alarmed,” he said. “She was certain she could convince her lover to marry her, to give their child a name.”
Diana felt a terrible sense of dread sweep over her, along with a wave of pity. Clearly, she thought, that had not happened.
“We kept in contact as I moved about the continent on my tour, though her letters grew less frequent,” he said. “Until finally they ceased altogether. And then, one day, there was a knock at my door. It was a woman,” he said. “A wet nurse. She carried with her a baby girl, less than a month old. And a letter.”
Hannah. Diana swiped at her eyes, which had become oddly moist.
“The…details are unclear,” Ben said. “The wet nurse was French and spoke only broken English, though to her credit her imperfect English was still far better than my French. As best as I could understand, Grace’s lover had left her. He was entirely uninterested in fatherhood, and even less so in a daughter, and Grace—Grace had become afflicted with childbed fever. She knew she was dying days before she finally did. I could only surmise that in the throes of fever, she sent her child to the only person she trusted to care for her. Her handwriting was barely legible and the letter, if it could so be called, was comprised of only a single word: Please.”
A hoarse little sound erupted from Diana’s lips, quickly stifled with the tips of her fingers.Please, she thought.Please care for my child, for I cannot take her where I am going.How much strength did it require to make such an impossible choice? How muchlove?
“The baby didn’t even have a name,” he said. “And I—I had only recently turned two and twenty. What was I meant to do with a baby? So I did the only thing I could think to do,” he said. “I took the wet nurse and the baby both back to France. To find Grace’s family. Because surely—surely they would not turn away their grandchild. Whatever the sins of the mother, surely they could not be visited upon an innocent child.”
How idealistic, she thought. In a perfect world, perhaps he would be correct. But a perfect world would not have seen Grace’s lover abandon her and their child both. A perfect world would not have taken a mother from her child so soon, so cruelly.
“We had to travel quite slowly,” he said. “The journey took weeks. And through most of it, Hannah screamed—colic, I think. I hardly slept.Hannahhardly slept for the first half. But somewhere along the journey, she had grown accustomed to me. She slept when I held her.” Something that approximated a laugh rumbled in his chest. “Eventually that was the only way either of us managed any sleep at all. When I held her on my chest, she slept. We both slept.”
“And…when you arrived?” Diana prodded gently.
Ben shook his head, his mouth firming. “I called upon her family,” hesaid. “I brought Hannah with me, naturally. And Grace’s mother—Hannah’s grandmother—looked upon her with such disgust. This tiny little baby, and she wasloathed. They looked at her like something they had scraped off of their boots.” His fingers curled into a fist. “And I couldn’t understand how. She was so beautiful, so precious—nothing but massive blue eyes and darling golden curls.” He made a rough, scathing sound in his throat. “They wouldn’t hold her, could hardly bear to look upon her. They wanted to send her off to a foundling home. And I—I don’t know,” he said, and his brows drew together, as if perplexed. “I looked down at her in my arms, and she looked up at me with those huge eyes,trustingme to care for her, and—when we began our journey to Paris, she wasn’t mine. But right then, right there, shewas. She was mine. She hadbecomemine. My daughter.”
Diana drew in a ragged breath. She had never believed in anything so foolish as love at first sight. It was an overly romantic notion, a myth at best and self-delusion at worst. But itwaspossible, she now knew, to fall completely and overwhelmingly in love in a single moment. Because somehow she had done it. For the man who hadchosento be a father to a little girl in desperate need of someone to love her, and who had made that same choice every day since, without regret.
No doubt there were some that, had they been privy to this tale, would have pronounced Hannah to be quite a lucky little girl. And yet, somehow she suspected that Ben counted himself luckier still.
∞∞∞
Once the words had started coming, it had become impossible to stop them. Still more wanted to come—the whole wretched jumble of it that had plagued him for years and years. Perhaps it was because he had never trulyspokenof it before, or perhaps because he had never known anyone who would have understood them, the choices he had made, the things that he had done.
But Diana did. Somehow, some way, Dianadidunderstand. He could see it there on her face, the sympathy for the both of them, him and Hannah. She swiped futilely at the tears that kept coming, sliding down her cheeks one after another, unceasing.
In a fragile little voice, she asked, “What did you do?”
“I left.” He hadn’t truly understood it at the time, what it had meant forhim. What it would mean for both of them. “I left, and nobody stopped me. I think they were glad only to have the problem, as it were, taken from their hands.” He’d been just two and twenty, on what was meant to have been his Grand Tour. That had changed the very moment he had walked out of that grand house in Paris, with a wet nurse at his side and a baby in his arms. He’d suddenly become a father, and he hadn’t fully understood what that would entail. “I did not resume my tour. I didn’t want to undergo such a long journey again with so young a child. So I found us lodgings in Paris.” The money that had been intended to see him through the entertainments and experiences he’d been meant to have in Florence, Milan, Venice—that had instead gone to the care and keeping of an infant. It hadn’t been glamorous, and he’d endured more than his fair share of sleepless nights. “I named her Hannah Grace,” he said, “For my mother and her own.”
“That was kind of you,” Diana said on a hiccough, “to give her her mother’s name.”
“She was my friend.” A good one, who had left the world too soon. “She was never my lover, but she was a good and kind friend to me. She deserved that.” Her daughter had deserved that. To carry some small part of the mother she had never had the pleasure of knowing around with her.
“‘She gave me Hannah,’ you said once,” Diana murmured. “I never thought you had meant it quite so literally.” She tilted her head to the right, inquisitive. “Does Hannah know?”
“Yes, in a way.” He had never much liked the idea of lying to her about her origins. Better, he had thought, that she knew as much of the truth as was necessary. For it to come from him in kindness and love rather than from anyone else, who might have sought to hurt her with it. “She knows I did not…plant her seed,” he said, using the same euphemistic expression he’d given Hannah. “But I watered it. I tended to her as only a little sapling. And I have watched her grow and bloom.”
“Why did you stay in France?” she asked. “You might have come home—claimed you had been married overseas. Nobody would have doubted your word.”
She was right, in a way, if only because the truth would have been beyond comprehension. Gentlemen did not simply take in children not of their own flesh and blood and call them their own—the lie would have been so much more believable than that. “I might have,” he allowed, “except that I made the monumental mistake of writing to my father.”
In retrospect, with time and distance, he didn’t know why he’d everthought he might find support from that quarter. There had been a time his father had been a good and decent man, truly a father to him. But that had died along with Mother, in his early childhood. Still, he had thought, somehow, that whatever love his father had once had for him might have allowed some measure of understanding between them. He’d been wrong—so very, dreadfully wrong.
“Father wrote back,” he said, “and he demanded I turn Hannah over to a foundling home at once. I had no natural right to her, he said, and her very existence could ruin the both of us. I could not expect to bring Hannah home with me to raise as my own and preserve my engagement to you. It had put him in a difficult decision, you see, since he’d already spent your dowry. If a court determined that the betrothal contract had been violated, then he could have been forced to return it. He didn’t have that sort of capital—likely he didn’t have enough even to defend himself against a suit, had your family chosen to mount one against him. He wouldn’t shoulder that risk. He couldn’t.” He let his shoulders rise and fall in a shrug. “I was relieved when you arrived intending to break our engagement,” he admitted.
“Oh,” she said, her eyes widening. “Oh—because ifIbroke it—”
