Page 27 of If You Were the Only Girl in the World
“Really? How predictable. What was their problem?”
“Too many others in their beds,” he said with dismay.
“Sad.”
“The lovely woman I did marry years later had not a penny to her name. She was the sweetest woman. A teacher in the local school for girls. She was quiet and unassuming, loved books and dancing in the parlor.”
“Who cares for your son while you are in London?”
“I have a nanny, a good girl from the village. Twenty, loves children. But my Aunt Lily is also his mother in the same ways that she was once mine. There is a special place in heaven for my aunt and Uncle Julian. For my cousins too who are their children and who accepted me as their own, as well. I dare say I might have become Dracula had they not saved me and taught me the value of responsible loving relationships.”
She would not pry to ask him about why he felt that way.
“I know you won’t ask. So I will tell you a few details. My parents married under duress. Or I should say, my mother did. Because my maternal grandfather, the previous duke of Seton had not paid much attention to his estate, he had debts which meant he had little to give my mother as her dowry. In that day, a young woman needed money to add to her appeal. As for my father, he should have married an heiress whose money could have paid his own loans. Instead, he decided he must have my mother. She was much younger than my father. He’d been married before and was a widower, and without an heir. And heirs were much needed to inherit the land-locked estates. But my father wanted my mother, no matter the deprivation he had to endure as a result. My mother had been brought up in excess and too much splendor. She knew not how to do without her comforts, nor did she understand that she had to marry an older man who was not terribly handsome or gay or charming.
“They married. Yet she rebelled. Often and with great notoriety. What’s more, she attracted other gentlemen who had no compunctions about cuckolding my father. The result was they fought bitterly and took their fights to the streets and to their friends. I have heard the whispers over the years that they became a laughing stock. Pitiful. Pariahs.
“Then one night, in a fit when my father barged in to see her, they argued bitterly. He fell down the main staircase and died. She fled. The scandal was rife evidently. The rumor went out that she had pushed him. Scotland Yard investigated but there was no line of evidence to prove any wrong doing. Still my mother did not return home and as she went from one county to another, and one country to another, she took lovers. None were as discreet about it as she might have preferred. And so the story went on.”
“A terrible thing to endure. For them. But for you as a child most especially.”
“One wonders if she hears of rumors or if she cares what’s said. Or even if she’s changed or has regrets.”
“Is she still alive?”
“I’ve no idea. She used to write to Uncle Julian but he’s has no word since one letter that was post-marked from Canada many years ago. I don’t expect her to communicate. She’d be nearly sixty and because the bloom of her youth is gone and she was very vain, I doubt she would write now.”
“How much of this did you know as a child?”
“None of the facts. But my uncle and aunt did a superb job of ensuring that whatever seeped through to me by way of innuendo or schoolboy taunts were irrelevant to my well-being. Only after I took the reins of my estate from Uncle Julian did he tell me all. He wanted me to know because he feared my mother might return or write and lay out her views to persuade me one way or another.”
“It must have been all a great shock to learn the facts.”
“Of course, it was. But he had an ulterior motive.” Nate fastened his eyes on hers.
“What?”
“He wanted me to understand that marriages in this new era should be based on affection and shared views of the world.”
She sighed. “Status and wealth were never the means to happiness.”
“Which of course you and I both knew that night when we met on that terrace.” He grinned and this time, he picked up her hand and placed a kiss in her palm.
“I’m very glad we did. I would not have survived well.”
“Nor I.”
* * *
On the steps of the station, Nate raised his arm to hail a black taxi circling the ring road. Inside the cab, he sat beside her, then wound their hands together.
“You do not need to see me home,” she told him.
“I would be less the gentleman my uncle taught me to be if I let you go home alone.”
She sighed, accepted the sweetness of his gesture and tipped her head to rest on his shoulder.
In the quiet of the night with the sound of the old auto engine whirring and a few old horses neighing, she snuggled against him.
