our parish, and he would take me along. One summer, the lord of the manor had a houseguest. William. He was one-and-twenty, and the second son of a viscount.”
“A nobleman,” Sebastian said softly.
“Yes. He was dashing. Cultured voice. Green velvet coat, and a front lock like Byron.”
Sebastian scoffed.
“Indeed. He charmed me on the spot,” she said. “He asked me to dance, and I was enamored with his urbane sophistication and his front lock at the end of the second reel.”
“He seduced you,” Sebastian said grimly.
“I made it shockingly easy for him,” she said. “He was unlike any of the young men I had ever encountered. He dazzled. He asked my opinion on literature and politics, which made me feel terribly important. You see, the village was a very small place, and after Mama’s passing, my father never went to a town again, but I hadn’t grasped how restless that had made me until I met William. Something in me just . . . burst.”
“A London lothario with his eye on debauching a vicar’s daughter? You stood little chance at seventeen, sweeting.”
“But I knew it was wrong,” she said. “Every girl knows it’s wrong.”
“And he knew it was wrong,” he replied. “Did he offer for you?”
She gave a hollow laugh. “He certainly said everything that made it sound like it. Asked me to elope to America with him, where he wanted to make his own fortune, away from his father. Well, he did go to America when autumn came. He didn’t even leave me a letter.”
There was a small, terse pause.
“You loved him,” he said, and his voice was cold enough to make her shiver.
“I thought I did,” she said. “He had wooed me wonderfully.”
He had said that he loved her. It had thrilled her so to hear it, but she’d waited to say it back and when she finally had, it had felt sacred, an oath whispered into his ear as he lay on her, damp and panting. A week and a few couplings later, he had walked out of her life.
She cringed. It had taken days for it to dawn on her that it hadn’t been a mistake, that he had left Kent, had left her, without as much as a good-bye. She had been nothing but a pleasant footnote in a rich man’s summer.
“What happened then?” Sebastian sounded suspicious.
She closed her eyes. “The worst.”
“Word got out?”
She looked at him bleakly. “I found I was increasing.”
He turned ghostly pale. “Where,” he asked, “where is the child?”
She shook her head. “It never came to be. I lost it soon after my father sent me to Yorkshire, to his aunt. Aunt May.” And Aunt May had implied she ought to be glad to have lost the babe. She should have. Instead, she had already come to love the little one. But her body had failed them . . . she had failed everyone.
Sebastian’s lips moved against her hair, and she realized she was clinging to him, trembling uncontrollably, unable to stop the words from pouring out.
“My father first dragged me all the way to London after I finally confessed. He was convinced the viscount would force William to do right by me. Of course, his lordship said that I was a strumpet who had tried and failed to hook a rich lordling, and that he had no use for a peasant grandchild.”
There was a pause. When Sebastian spoke again, his voice was dangerously soft. “Will you tell me his name?”
By Hades, no. “He said what most men in his position would have said.”
“Not most—” Sebastian began, and then he fell abruptly silent. “Damn,” he said, “I believe I accused you of something along those lines when we first met at Claremont.”
“You did.”
He exhaled sharply. “That explains it. You know, I had the impression you wanted to slap me. I thought you must be utterly mad.”
“Oh, I was mad. I felt as though I stood in his lordship’s study all over again.”
He sat up and stared down at her. “Tell me his name.”
“I’d rather not. He was horrid, but he was not the one who destroyed my life. I did.”
“Destroyed?” He frowned. “You are anything but. I’ve never known a woman as valiant as you.”
She blinked rapidly at the velvet canopy. “I wasn’t the only one affected. My father . . . the look in his eyes when I told him—”
It was as though she had switched off the light in him, whatever had remained after her mother’s death anyway.