The Devil's Match (The Devil DeVere #4)(25)

“Will you walk with me?” he asked.

“Why can’t we speak here?”

“Because this matter of the wager is between us alone.” He sensed her hesitation to be alone with him but offered his arm all the same.

“All right.” She sighed.

He took her down a long hallway to the north wing, toward his private apartments. He felt her tense, as if she remembered what lie in their direction. He then diverted them through a door into the family portrait gallery.

“I have not seen this room,” she said.

“It is a private place where we shall not be disturbed. I never come here myself. I only use the room to store portraits I’d otherwise be obligated to look upon.”

Diana strolled the periphery of the room, studying the faces of Ludovic’s multifarious ancestors with an ever-changing mein. “I recognize the styles of Sir Godfrey Kneller and Allan Ramsay,” she remarked. “Is this last one by Sir Joshua Reynolds?”

DeVere nodded with appreciation. “You know your English painters.”

“Is this your mother and father?” She halted before the aforementioned Reynolds. It was of a beautiful, young woman holding a child on her lap, both of whom shared cobalt-blue eyes that stared blankly out of the canvas. An elderly gentleman with dissipated features stood behind the pair, one hand possessively placed upon the lady’s shoulder.

“It is, indeed, my mother, Hermione, and her husband Richard, Fifth Viscount DeVere.”

“And the child is you?”

“Yes, and judging by the gown, I suppose I must have been about three years old.”

Diana turned to him with a puzzled expression. “I don’t understand. This is a family portrait. If she is your mother and he is the viscount, how can you not refer to him as your father?”

Ludovic laughed a long and bitter sound. “Of course, you know nothing of my family. Few people do, as I have taken great care, and much greater expense, to keep it so.”

“I am puzzled,” she said, a frown wrinkling her brow. “These portraits are your history, and some must be very valuable. I wish to understand why you keep all this”—she made a sweeping gesture—”hidden away.”

“Painters and poets have leave to lie, you know. Perhaps the subjects were not worthy of the artists’ efforts.”

“And what would these artists have lied about?” she continued to press.

“You wish me to air the dirty laundry?”

“I don’t seek diversion, but comprehension,” she said.

Ludovic’s first impulse was to wave away the subject and move on to his purpose, but something in her gaze compelled him to say more, to voice the things he had paid dearly to keep secret.

“Very well, Diana.” He sauntered across the room to stand beneath a portrait of a haughty, young man in the full-bottomed wig favored half a century earlier. The painting was done in the classical Italianate style favored by those on their Grand Tour. “Behold Lord Richard DeVere before his complete corruption by dissolution and vice.”

Diana cocked her head and narrowed her eyes, seeming to study the arrogant features of Lord Richard. “I daresay you do favor your mother. But tell me of him.”

“Lord Richard was born into a great fortune, traveled widely, and wed late in life, when fear of his own mortality struck with a certain scurrilous disease that his physician said no amount of mercury would cure. Desperate that his seed should not die out, what does the poxy bastard do but take a wife! Ironically, I later learned that his disease was already so advanced by that time as to make it impossible for him to sire any progeny.”

Ludovic advanced to a second portrait of the same beautiful woman sitting alone and posed under a flowering tree. “Behold my mother. She was twenty-five years his junior, and the marriage was, as to be expected, an utter travesty. Lord DeVere was the biggest whoremonger in all Christendom, and my mother complemented him well as the greatest whore. Together, they were the most notoriously faithless couple in England. I was raised with all the privilege of my noble station to include a personal servant to wipe my arse for as long as I can remember, yet to this day, I cannot say with any certainty if that same servant might have been my true father.”

Diana’s jaw dropped.

He laughed again. “I’m not sure Lady DeVere would have known either, for she exercised no discretion. She may have consorted with a footman, a gardener, or even my father’s valet, but of a certainty, I am not the spawn of Lord DeVere. Nor do I believe Hew and I are more than half siblings, though I would never tell him so. Our mother showed only enough maternal feeling to remain with us until Hew was out of leading strings and then eloped with her lover.”

“You never heard from her again?”

“On the contrary,” he smirked, “I heard from her immediately upon coming into my title. Her lover had long ago abandoned her, and she claimed to be in dire need of funds.”

“Surely you refused her?”

“I did not. I have provided her a generous allowance these past dozen years, though I learned in my recent travels that she really had little need of it, for she has managed to provide a lucrative living for herself.”

“With another lover?”

“With many, you might say. She is the keeper of a high-end Parisian brothel.”