Behind the Courtesan - By Bronwyn Stuart Page 0,78
an act—Father’s tears, his panic, the search parties. All the time we searched high and low for her body, he knew she was at the estate with Blakiston. The deal had been signed and done.”
“He actually delivered her there?”
“Yes, and then walked away without wondering what would happen to her.”
“Oh, God. There’s more then, isn’t there?” He didn’t want to know. He was sure he wouldn’t be any better off with the information burned into his brain.
Daemon took over the story from there. “For three days she was locked in the lowest levels of the house where he beat and raped her. Maybe worse. Only he and she will ever know.”
Emotions battered his already fragile thoughts. All this time he’d blamed her for leaving. Blamed her for overreacting, for never saying a word to him, for taking so long to write to Matthew and let him know she was alive. All that time, she would have been terrified the duke would find her and bring her back.
“Why?”
Blake’s question was rhetorical, but Daemon replied. “Before I was born, when my father paid no attention to his new bride, Blakiston fell in love with her. The fact that I stand here proves their affair. Blakiston fell in love and begged Mother to marry him, to be with him and live the kind of life she deserved but she said no. Mind, that’s only Blakiston’s side of the story. He kept journals in those days. All the dukes of Blakiston did. Instead of farming figures and weather facts, his were full of entries of despair about the child he would never get to claim, of the happiness he would never feel again. I think the fact that she rejected him cracked him in a way. Next came your mother and she reminded him of mine. The journal entries are sporadic for a time, sometimes ranting, sometimes coherent but all lead back to my mother.”
“Did he love her? My mother?”
“I don’t think he didn’t love her. He always had a temper difficult to leash and drinking fueled the fury. By the time he took Sophia, he was more often drunk than not. It is the only explanation for what he did.”
Blake groaned again. “Do you think he took her to get back at me? Did he know how much I loved her?”
Daemon didn’t react for a few moments. “I suppose that could have had something to do with it, but as far as I can tell, things only went so far wrong when she refused to say ‘I do.’”
Blake’s intake of breath echoed in the room. “He wanted to marry her?”
Daemon nodded again. “He looked for a bride who would make him happier than he thought my mother ever could. This was a way to get back at her.”
“Did he write all of this down?” Blake asked. Did he need to burn that damned mansion to the ground to be rid of yet more evidence of depravity and betrayal?
“Like I said earlier, he thought I was the vicar come to take his deathbed confession.”
Sophie had already been a duchess. His mother had been the first, but by the time he did the same with Sophie, his mother was dead. Sophie was the dowager duchess of Blakiston. Now he almost wished he had the title.
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” Blake asked his brother.
“I did offer to tell you.”
“Only yesterday.”
“I guess sometimes the ugliness of the truth can hurt so many more people, you keep it to yourself and spin a pretty tale instead. She wouldn’t be the first and she won’t be the last.”
What would life have been like for her? His own mother had fled the old duke after he’d wrapped his hands around her throat in a fit of rage. Would Sophie have been better off living on the streets in London than as the child bride of an angry drunkard? They would never know. He did know one thing. He would have been forced to watch from the sidelines as his childhood love swelled with another man’s child. His father’s child. If the man hadn’t killed her first.
Suddenly her reactions made sense. When he touched her to remove the straw in her hair and she tensed as if he was going to throw her down on the floor then and there. It all made perfect sense. Why didn’t she despise him more for being the spawn of that man? How could she lie with him when she had been