Authors: Gaelen Foley
He let out a huge sigh and leaned against the bulkhead. “Where to begin… ?”
Eden
leaned across from him in the narrow passageway, intrigued. Around them, the ship creaked rhythmically in the belowdecks gloom.
Jack stared at her for a long moment. “My mother’s name was Georgiana Knight, the Duchess of Hawkscliffe. As a young wife and mother of one son—Robert, named for his father—she discovered that her husband had a mistress hidden away in a quaint little love nest just outside London, and she was…
incensed
. Well, Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and so Georgiana set out to teach her duke a lesson he would never forget.”
Eden
listened, wide-eyed.
“She decided to cuckold him, quite publicly. She deliberately opted for a man below her station. If she had chosen another peer of the realm, a duel would have been necessary to preserve honor. I don’t know how much you know about dueling, but men don’t duel against those who are their obvious social inferiors. Mother didn’t want her duke to be killed, obviously. She wanted my brother Robert to have his father alive as he grew up. Another problem she faced was finding a man with the courage to bed the wife of a man as powerful as the Duke of Hawkscliffe. She was beautiful, but her husband was a bosom friend of the King. Well, she found her perfect specimen in the boxing champion, Sam O’Shay. The Killarney Crusher,” he said wryly. “My dear old dad.”
Eden
’s lips formed an “oh” but no sound came out.
“
I
was not supposed to happen,” he explained. “I was… an accident. A terrible accident. A living, breathing, squalling mistake, nine pounds, four ounces.”
“Goodness.”
“Hawkscliffe acknowledged me as his own to try to save face. The gossips knew the truth. The amusing part, you see, is that I was not Mother’s final mistake.”
Her eyes widened.
“Rather than teaching her husband a lesson, her adultery simply destroyed the marriage. Their polite coexistence turned to hatred, and hatred eventually turned to apathy. At that point, Mother reunited with the man she ought to have married in the first place, Lord Carnarthen. By this time, there was no danger of a duel because Hawkscliffe no longer cared a whit what she did or with whom, as long as she was reasonably discreet. At least this time she chose a man that no one could be ashamed of. Lord Carnarthen fathered the twins, Damien and Lucien.”
Eden
’s jaw dropped. “Oh, my!”
“Personally, I think she
wanted
to have a child with him, for love’s sake. She ended up with two at one go. He was ecstatic, I hear, when the twins were born, both strong and healthy. He never married, you know. He loved her that much. He let his title go extinct, dying without legitimate issue, rather than marry another woman. To protect his sons, Carnarthen persuaded Hawkscliffe to acknowledge the twins as he had acknowledged me. One big, happy family,” he said with a twinge of bitterness in his deep voice.
He paused, brooding, his dark eyebrows knitted together, his arms folded across his chest. “At least Carnarthen’s high rank helped to ensure the twins’ acceptance. Unlike me, they also made an effort to please Hawkscliffe. At this point, we all still thought the duke was our father and for reasons unknown, simply disliked us. It was clear that he wanted nothing to do with us. Robert was everything to him. At least the twins had each other.”
“You have another brother. Alec?”
“Ah, yes. Mother and Lord Carnarthen got into a spat.”
Eden
winced.
“The man let his line die out for her, but she couldn’t even be faithful to him, in the end. He had something to do with the Admiralty, I think, and was often away on different missions, sometimes up to a year at a time. She wanted him to quit, but he refused. Well, he sailed off again. I don’t know if she was sulking or genuinely lonely, but she decided to amuse herself with Sir Phillip Preston-Lawrence, a rising actor who caught her eye treading the boards at
“I think I need a drink,”
Eden
said.
Jack flashed a lazy grin. “Rum for the lady pirate?”
She just looked at him. “What about Jacinda?”
“Would you believe she, too, belongs to the duke?”
Eden
absorbed this in fascination. “They… made up?”
He nodded. “Hawkscliffe’s health began to deteriorate. Some affliction of the heart had weakened him. Well, he was sent down to Hawkscliffe Hall in the country to recuperate, and Georgiana rushed to his side like a true, devoted wife to take care of him. They finally achieved a true marriage—just in time for him to die. Jacinda was his parting gift to my mother: the only girl. So, she, like Robert, is of the true blood, but after all of Mother’s escapades, you can imagine the expectations Society had about her.”
“Hmm. So, all of this was the reason Lady Maura wasn’t allowed to marry you?”
“Yes. Her parents would have embraced Robert, but the boxer’s whelp was out of the question.” He paused reflectively. “It isn’t an easy world for the illegitimate, you know. Even Shakespeare casts bastards as villains in a few of his plays.”
She smiled gently. “If Lady Maura grew up on the neighboring estate, then you must have known each other since childhood.”
He nodded. “Yes. Her elder brother, Ian, was constantly at our house. He and Robert have always been the best of friends. Those two were more like brothers than Hawk and I ever were. Still are, I understand. Political allies, too. Of course, they’ve both got their titles now. Robert is the Duke of Hawkscliffe and Ian’s the Marquess of Griffith. At one point, they considered finally uniting the clans by having Jacinda marry Ian, but it was not in the stars.”
“I see,”
Eden
murmured, recalling Lady Jacinda’s doting rhapsodies in her letters about her beloved “Billy.” After a thoughtful silence, she forced out bravely: “Did you love her?”
“I thought I did,” he said with a wan smile. “In hindsight, I was just grateful somebody noticed I was alive.”
She gazed at him in tender sympathy. “Did she love you?”
“Oh, of course not. I believed at the time that she did, but I soon learned that she merely enjoyed the attention and was more or less just practicing her coquetry on me before her coming-out. When her parents revealed their aspirations for her to marry a title, and ordered her to stop seeing me, I vowed they would not separate us—true love and all that—and began planning our elopement so that we could be together.”
“Elopement?”
Eden
exclaimed.
“Please bear in mind that I was seventeen and an idiot.” He took out a cheroot but did not light it. “We were too young for a legal marriage in
England
, but
Scotland
was only a few miles over the border.” He shrugged. “I got everything ready and went to collect her, but she refused to come. I can’t say I blame her now but I wanted to kill both of us when her protests revealed her true feelings about me. Elopement would have meant scandal, and she had no intention of being banished from the ton for my sake.”
“Poor Jack,” she murmured softly.
He let out a snort of a laugh. “I swore I would protect her with my life, and provide for her to the best of my ability, but she was having none of it. She wanted the rank of a fine title and the security of a fortune, ready-made. And these she soon acquired,” he added. “Three months after she jilted me, she was wed to a noble marquess more than twice her age.”
“Egads.”
“Yes. That was the last straw for me. I kicked the dust of
England
off my shoes and left, swearing never to return. But now the rebels’ need outweighs the angry oath of a little lovelorn Romeo,” he said sardonically. “Practicality, my dear.”
Eden
was silent for a long moment, mulling over all that he had told her. “I suppose it will be awkward if we see Lady Maura when we get to
London
.”
“Not for me.”
“Do you think she ever regretted her choice?”
“I doubt it. She got what she wanted. She is Lady Avonworth now, a marchioness—though she has no children, which I find rather odd. Still, she became a leading hostess in the ton. On the other hand, I’ve got deeper pockets than her noble marquess now, and there is a certain satisfaction in that, I will admit.”
“I imagine that’s no accident.”
“No, it’s not,” he admitted softly, pausing. “I swore to myself that I’d show her. I’d show them all.” He lowered his lashes, veiling the deeply buried anger in his eyes. “They all said I’d never amount to anything.”
“What did you mean when you spoke of becoming the villain of the family? How did that play itself out?”
Jack sighed.
One of his men hurried down the passageway on some errand. Eden and Jack squeezed against their respective walls to let the sailor go hurrying through, excusing himself as he passed.
Eden
looked at her betrothed again with a questioning gaze.
“Jacinda wasn’t born yet, so, apart from Robert, all of us were… illegitimate,” he said in a low voice once the crewman had disappeared around the corner. “We didn’t know that until we got to school and learned it from our classmates.”
“Oh, Jack,” she whispered.
He cleared his throat uneasily. “While we were younger, still at home, I eventually took it into my head that I should make the duke start treating the others like a proper father. I was used to him despising me and knew there was little hope in that vein, but I became very angry about the way he treated the younger ones. I had long since concluded that I somehow deserved the treatment I received, but there was no way Damien deserved it. Damien tried so hard to please our supposed father, all to no avail. Any other man would have gone down on his knees and t
hank
ed God for a son like Damien, but for all his striving, he was completely ignored. Lucien seemed to know better, somehow. Alec was just a three-year-old and stuck to our mother like a nettle—he was her favorite. He’s been a favorite with the ladies ever since,” he added wryly, “but one day, I just got fed up with the duke making us feel unwelcome in our own home. So we had a bit of a battle.”
“Really?”
“Aye.” He snorted. “Here I thought I was standing up for my brothers, but Damien screamed at me, telling me to stop making trouble. That I was only making everything worse for everyone. Somehow, as usual, it was all my fault.”
She murmured wordless sympathy.
“But my efforts actually worked to some degree, because in contrast to me, yelling in the duke’s face and standing up to him that way, the others looked like angels. Finally, Hawkscliffe noticed that he had all these young boys under his roof who believed he was their father. Well, he would’ve had to have been made of stone not to ease up a bit in his behavior, especially on Damien. He finally realized this lad was a born hero, just waiting for any sign of acknowledgment to point him in the right direction.”
“It sounds like you really admire your brother.”
“He’s a bloody war-hero,
Eden
. The whole country admires him. Carnarthen, before he died, rallied his friends in the House of Lords to have Damien awarded a title, since truly he was Carnarthen’s firstborn son, and his own title would be going extinct. They made Damien the Earl of Winterley, ostensibly as a reward for his valor in the war.”
“What about Lucien?”
“Carnarthen left him a huge estate. They both did quite well by their real father,” he drawled. “All I got was an old boxing trophy.”
“I saw that,” she murmured, shaking her head in response to his cynical smile. “Did you ever get to meet your real father?”
“Aye. After Maura ripped my poor young heart out, I went storming off to
Ireland
to track him down. I thought I might at least find acceptance with him. But that just goes to show you how naive a lad can be.” He let out a weary sigh. “Sam O’Shay had retired from the ring by the time I was seventeen. As I said, he had returned to his native
Ireland
. Turned out he had gotten married to a local lass famous for her temper and her sharp tongue. The Killarney Crusher had settled down, sired a brood of children, and turned into a more or less respectable henpecked husband. When I showed up on his doorstep, the bastard son he’d fathered in a tryst with a notorious English duchess, he asked me to take a walk with him, and then explained to me that I must go away. His wife, you see, didn’t know about his indiscretion, and it would have caused his
real
sons and daughters, as he put it, considerable distress and embarrassment, as well.”
“Oh, God, Jack.”
“He invited me to stay for supper as long as I kept my mouth shut about who I really was. So, after the meal and a polite glass of port, along with a great many lies to explain my visit, I t
hank
ed the O’Shays for supper and bid them adieu. Then I went down to a wharfside tavern and got absolutely sotted.”