Page 18 of The Bastard's Iberian Bride
Bink had been around death, both the stuttering kind and the mercifully quick, and this was all wrong. This sickroom smelled of tobacco and boot polish, like the Earl had paused for a smoke between coughing spells while his valet buffed his slippers.
Not this valet, though. Kincaid was no more of a valet than he himself had been to Hackwell.
The old man lay in the center of the big bed, only his shoulders, neck and head visible.
If he was faking, he’d starved himself for this role. The eyes and cheeks had sunken in, and the counterpane draped a lean body.
But then again, Bink had never truly seen the Earl undisguised. Perhaps in his natural state he was a tall, broad-shouldered whippet.
“Leave us,” Shaldon said.
Bink twitched again and squashed the compulsion to obey.
That command hadn’t been addressed to him. And anyway, he’d been summoned to this midnight meeting and he bloody well wasn’t going to be dismissed before it even started.
The manservant headed for the door.
“Hold there, Kincaid,” Bink said.
The man kept going.
Bink jumped to his feet. “I said hold. You’re not leaving me alone with a sick man.”
“You’ll have things to discuss with—”
“Aye. And I imagine you know all about them already. Or, if you don’t, who’s to worry? He wouldn’t have you by his deathbed if he didn’t trust you.”
When Kincaid went to stand at the foot of the bed, Bink’s breath eased. He’d stood by dying men, friends and strangers too, but none so strange as this man who, if his mother’s deathbed confession to a child of eight could be believed, was his flesh and blood.
“I loved your mother,” Shaldon said without preamble, his voice firm.
Bink’s heart pounded, the words landing like a nine-pounder filled with case shot. He took a steadying breath and said, “Yet you couldn’t marry her.”
“No.”
The tone was matter-of-fact. Not pandering, not filled with pathos or regret, just brutally honest.
A man could take brutal honesty and deal with it—it was the lying that took the world down around you.
Bink knew snippets of Shaldon and Addy’s story, told after her death through the scratched and twisted lens of his mother’s husband, Zebediah Gibson.
The man he’d believed was his father, until Zebediah had thrashed Addy to a lingering death. Love had never been a theme of Gibson’s stories.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there to save her.”
Shaldon’s words were firm and filled with an anger that rang true and echoed his own.
He beat back the memories. Zebediah, the little weasel, had spoken out against the violence of war, but when his mercantile travels brought him home, he’d never spared the rod on any man, woman or child under his fist. To Bink’s everlasting shame, he hadn’t been able to save his mother. He’d barely been able to save himself.
At least, not until he’d started growing a man’s height and muscle, and Zebediah released him to Lady Shaldon’s custody.
“Paulette needs help.”
Shaldon’s words tore him out of the past, rattling him again.
This was but more managing. At her husband’s behest, Lady Shaldon had removed Bink from an evangelical tyrant and put him in the care of a headmaster with an even bigger stick, trying to make a gentleman of him. He’d run away from that mess, and he’d see himself out of this one.
“Heardwyn had something. Held by the trust. Don’t know,” he rasped out. “Evidence. Money. Don’t know. You can save her,” Shaldon said.
