Page 87 of One Night with a Prince
“Do you love him?” Mrs. Byrne asked, her raspy tone substantially softer than before. Christabel’s throat felt tight and raw. “If I do, I’m a fool. Because he will never love me back.”
“Nonsense.” She coughed a moment. “He fell in love with that idiot Anna, so how could he help falling in love with a sweet girl like you?”
She blinked. “But only a few minutes ago you implied—”
“I wanted to be sure of you, that’s all. I trust Gavin not to choose a fool, but he is still a man and susceptible to pretty women.”
“Not as susceptible as pretty women are to him,” Christabel muttered. His mother laughed. “True, true. The man has a way with women, I’ll grant you. But none has ever touched his heart. If you mean to do it, then you should know some things about him.” She gestured toward the fireplace. “There’s a candle over there, dear. Light it and bring it here.”
Sucking in a breath, Christabel did as Mrs. Byrne asked. As she approached the bed, the light from the candle fell full on the woman.
Though she’d half expected to find such a thing, Mrs. Byrne’s face was so hideously disfigured that Christabel couldn’t keep a gasp from escaping her lips, though she then tried to mask it with a cough.
“Stop that silly coughing, girl,” the woman snapped. “I have a mirror—I know what I look like.”
“I’m sorry—” Christabel began.
“Don’t be. These burns are my badge of honor for saving my son. I wear them with pride.” Her scarred lips twisted into a half smile. “Most of the time, anyway.”
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.htmlNow that she could see the woman better, Christabel was horrified at the pain Mrs. Byrne must have suffered to have such scars. Her ears were half-gone, and no hair grew on her scalp, which was simply a misshapen mass of healed flesh. “I heard that you were in a fire, but I cannot imagine how you managed to…”
“Live through it? That was hard, I’ll grant you, but I was determined not to die. I couldn’t leave Gavin with no one in the world.”
“Then why did you let everyone believe you dead?”
“It’s a long story.” The woman beckoned her to sit on the bed. Taking the candle from her, Mrs. Byrne set it on the bedside table. “You see, right after the fire, there was a great deal of confusion. After I carried Gavin out, I collapsed. He didn’t rouse for a few minutes, and by then I’d been taken off to St. Bartholomew’s with others from the fire. They told him I was dead—most of those who survived the fire did die later, and we were unrecognizable when they carried us to the hospital. Indeed, it took weeks for me to recover enough to be able to speak my name and ask about him.”
Mrs. Byrne took her hand, and now Christabel could see that it wasn’t gnarled with age but twisted from the fire. “By the time I could find out about him,” the woman continued, “he was living with a blackleg who’d taken him under his wing, and he was doing all right. I thought he’d be better off without a crippled and disfigured mother to support. So I ordered the people at the hospital not to say anything to him about me.”
“Then how—”
She gave a rueful smile. “The boy is too clever for his own good, that’s how. It was nearly a year before I could even leave St. Bartholomew’s. Then a widowed nurse there offered me a place to stay in her cottage in the country. She had a chance at a lucrative position as nurse to a fine lady, but she couldn’t bring her babe with her, so I agreed to be the child’s nursemaid.”
Her hand squeezed Christabel’s painfully. “But I couldn’t leave London without seeing my own dear boy. I didn’t mean for him to see me, too, truly I didn’t.” She coughed a moment. “I went to the races in a hooded cloak, and I stayed well out of his way to watch him work, my fine strong lad, running an E-O
table as if he’d been born to it, coaxing the country bumpkins into betting.”
She shook her head. “Unfortunately, the races are a rough place for any woman, much less one like me, hobbling with a cane and dressed oddly. Some fool pulled down my hood to see what I looked like. You can imagine the reaction of those around me—a lot of silly screaming and such.” Tears welled in her eyes. “But my boy…he just came up and pulled the hood back in place. ‘There you go, miss,’ he said.
‘Don’t you pay attention to that lot of fools.’”
Christabel was crying by then, too, the tears falling heedlessly down her cheeks.
“I only said ‘Thank you, my boy.’ But it was enough for him to realize who I was, to put everything together. You should have seen the two of us then, hugging and laughing and carrying on. People thought we were mad.” She let go of Christabel’s hand to wipe at her eyes with the sheet. “Look at me—it’s been years, and it still turns me into a sniffling fool to remember it.”
“That’s all right,” Christabel whispered. “Who wouldn’t cry over a story like that?” Drawing out her handkerchief, she dabbed at her own tears, then handed the square of linen to Mrs. Byrne.Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.htmlMrs. Byrne blew her nose. “Gavin would laugh at us for crying, you know.”
“Probably. Men don’t understand.” She waited until the woman had composed herself, then added, “So what happened then?”
“That’s when I made him swear not to tell anyone I was alive. I told him I would disappear, and he’d see me no more if he didn’t swear it. So he swore, the poor dear boy, and I went out to the country to live in Ada’s cottage—she was the nurse, you see. And Gavin stayed in town.”
“But why? You could have lived in town with him. You could have worn a wig and veil and gloves if people’s reaction to your appearance bothered you.”
She coughed into the handkerchief. “That’s not why I wanted us to live apart. It was hard enough for Gavin before the fire, hearing people call me ‘the Irish whore.’ I told him it didn’t matter as long as we both knew I wasn’t one, but it mattered to him as soon as he was old enough to understand it. He got into fights over it, constantly in trouble for defending my honor to shopkeepers and idiots in taverns who bloodied his nose for his trouble.”
Christabel gave the woman a half smile. “He is still rather…er…sensitive about the term.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. Only think how much worse it would have been if he’d had to hear people talk their nonsense about his mother being punished by fire for her sins. They said such things after they thought me dead, but once a person’s gone, gossip fades.” A cough wracked her. “If they’d known I was alive, he’d have had to hear it daily, to witness how people took my disfigurement, to endure the silly jokes about the ‘burned Mrs. Byrne.’”
