To Beguile a Beast (Legend of the Four Soldiers #3)(66)

“What about your family?”

She opened her eyes at Alistair’s rasp. “What?”

He was frowning at her from across the carriage. “I’m trying to think of possible allies we can recruit to help fight Lister. What about your family?”

“I don’t think so.” He simply sat staring at her, so she reluctantly explained, “I haven’t spoken to them in years.”

“If you haven’t spoken to them in years, how can you know they won’t help?”

“They made it quite plain when I went to the duke that I was no longer a part of the Carter family.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Carter?”

She felt her face heat a little. “That’s my real name—Helen Abigail Carter—but I couldn’t use Carter when I became Lister’s mistress. I took the name Fitzwilliam.”

He continued to stare at her.

Finally she asked, “What is it?”

He shook his head. “I was just thinking that even your name—Mrs. Halifax—was a lie.”

“I’m sorry. I was trying to hide from Lister, you see, and—”

“I know.” He waved away her apology. “I even understand. But that doesn’t stop me from wondering if anything I know about you is true.”

She blinked, feeling oddly hurt. “But I—”

“What about your mother?”

She sighed. Obviously he didn’t want to talk about what was between the two of them. “The last time I spoke to my mother, she said she was ashamed of me and that I’d tainted the family. I can’t blame her. I have three sisters, all of whom were unmarried when I went to the duke.”

“And your father?”

She looked down at her hands in her lap.

There was silence a moment before he spoke again, and now his voice had gentled. “You went with him on his visits to patients. Surely you were close?”

She smiled a little then. “He never asked the others to go with him, only me. Margaret was the eldest, but she said visiting patients was boring and sometimes disgusting, and I think my other sisters felt much the same. Timothy was the only boy, but he was also the youngest and still in the nursery.”

“Was that the sole reason he took you?” he asked softly. “Because you were the only child interested?”

“No, that wasn’t the sole reason.”

They were passing through a small village now, the stone cottages worn and ancient-looking. It may have stood thus for millennia—unchanging, uncaring of the outer world.

Helen watched the village go by and said, “He loved me. He loved all of us, but I was special somehow. He’d take me on his rounds and tell me about each patient—their symptoms, his diagnosis, the treatment and if it was progressing well or not. And sometimes if we were coming home late in the day, he would tell me stories. I never heard him tell them to the others, but when the sun was beginning to glow with sunset, he’d tell me stories of gods and goddesses and fairies.”

The carriage came to the last cottage in the village, and she could see a woman cutting flowers in her garden.

She said softly, “His favorite was Helen of Troy, though I didn’t like it much because the ending was so sad. He’d tease me about my name, Helen, and say that someday I’d be as beautiful as Helen of Troy but that I should watch myself because beauty wasn’t always a gift. Sometimes it brought grief. I never thought about it before, but he was right.”

“Why don’t you ask for his help?” Alistair asked.

She looked at him, remembering her father in his gray bobbed wig, his blue eyes laughing as he teased her about Helen of Troy, and then she remembered the last time she saw him. “Because when I last spoke to my mother, when she called me a common trollop and said I was no longer a part of the family, my father was in the room as well. And he didn’t say anything at all. He just turned his face away from me.”

IT WAS HER fault, Abigail thought as she watched Mr. Wiggins snoring in a corner of the duke’s carriage. She should’ve told Mama that Mr. Wiggins knew that they were the duke’s children, that Jamie had shouted their secret at the nasty man one day. You couldn’t blame Jamie. He was too little to realize why they shouldn’t tell. He lay curled against her side now, his hair sweaty and stuck to his forehead from crying. The duke said he couldn’t stand Jamie’s bawling anymore and had mounted a horse at the last inn to ride beside the carriage.

Abigail stroked Jamie’s hair, and he made a funny little noise and burrowed closer to her in his sleep. You couldn’t blame him for crying, either. He was only five, and he missed Mama terribly. He didn’t say it, but Abigail knew he wondered if they’d ever see their mama again. Mr. Wiggins had shouted at Jamie to shut up after the duke had left. She had worried that he might leap across the carriage and hit her brother, but fortunately Jamie had been very tired by then and had suddenly fallen asleep.

She looked out the window now. Outside, green hills rolled by with white sheep dotted here and there as if dropped by a giant hand. Maybe they wouldn’t see Mama again. The duke hadn’t said much to them, besides telling Jamie to stop crying. But she’d heard him tell Mr. Wiggins and the coachman that they were on their way back to London. Would he take them to live with him in his house there?

Abigail wrinkled her nose. No, they were bastards. Bastards were to be hidden away, not taken to live with their fathers. So he’d hide them away somewhere. It would make it very difficult for Mama to find them. But perhaps Sir Alistair would help. Even though she’d not minded Puddles and he’d ruined Sir Alistair’s bag, he’d still help Mama find them, wouldn’t he? Sir Alistair was tall and strong, and she thought he would be very good at finding things, even hidden children.