he knew they came from Mary Carmichael, who fell in love with the Spanish navy’s future royal quartermaster, then a mere lieutenant.
Able handed back the miniature. “How did you know she was brilliant?” he asked, hoping she was at least treated better than he was in the Dumfries workhouse. “Did you happen to find out? I doubt she told you.”
Meri had told him about ladies being advised to hide their lights under bushels, so as not to embarrass gentlemen. “Mama said a lady mustn’t ever show her feelings, especially to men, who are superior in every way,” she had told him once, after a child’s simple card game in which she thrashed him. “I am so bad at that.”
“It happened in odd fashion,” the count said. He sat beside Able his arm around his son. “I swear I was in love at once, but I was young. Who knew? Not I. I was invited to the harbormaster’s office to get my first instruction in Royal Navy accounts and bookkeeping and was sent into the office library. When I opened the door, I saw Mary hunched over a book. She was completely engrossed and did not hear me. I watched in amazement as she turned the pages at what couldn’t have been more than one-second intervals. Swish, swish!”
“I read like that,” Able said. “My wife says it makes her dizzy to watch.”
“You have a wife?” the count asked almost pathetically, like someone hoping against hope for good news and expecting none.
“I do, a wonderful woman, and a wee son.” And you will meet them, he thought, humbled to the dust at the idea. “You sir, I assume you have a wife and children? It’s been many years since my mother…”
The count shook his head. “Neither. I never met anyone else I liked even half so well.”
You poor man, Able thought. Poor man. He shivered inside, thinking how cruel life would be without Meri and Ben, and realized that as harsh as his birth and childhood, his life was vastly richer than his wealthy, titled father’s.
“I am sorry for you,” he said, and meant it with all his heart. “What did my mother say? Did she know you had been watching her?”
“Quite a self-possessed young lady, your mother was. She gave me an arch look and declared that was how she read. She said she remembered everything. I could quiz her if I doubted it. She folded her hands in her lap and gave me a level look – ah, the one I see right now from you – as if to ask, ‘What are you going to do about it, simpleton?’”
They laughed together, then touched foreheads. The count looked away. When he spoke, Able knew he could live to be ninety and never hear anything so wistful. “We couldn’t stay away from each other. I sneaked into her house every night after midnight.”
Able could imagine that. It had taken supreme will to keep out of Meri’s bedchamber during that remarkable four weeks they were under the same roof in rural Devonshire, while he taught her nephews and they mooned about, thinking no one was noticing. For a genius, he sometimes wasn’t so bright.
“It came as no surprise when Mary told me she was with child,” the count said. He looked away again. “This is hard to tell!”
“You must.”
“I went immediately to her father, told him, and begged permission to marry her. He refused.” The count’s voice hardened, and rose with anger, then changed into that exquisite anguish beyond anger. “I pleaded. I begged on my knees. He said his daughter would never marry a Papist and a Spaniard. He went to the embassy in London and I was gone within two weeks.” He bowed his head.
What could Able say? There was only one small thing he could do, and he felt like doing it now, he who had been prepared to hate his father all his life, the genius who whored with and deserted his prostitute-mother and left her. How could he have been so completely wrong? “Tu eres mi padre,” he said simply, using that intimate word. “Tu.”
His father looked into his eyes. “I never thought to see you, not ever. I have spent my life knowing I would never hear “tu” from my child – he or she – who surely must hate me forever. O dios, I wish I knew how my querida Mary Carmichael ended up in… in Scotland, you say?”