Remember Love (Ravenswood #1)(36)

“What is this?” he asked. “Am I the one on trial here?”

The dowager countess, his grandmother, his father’s mother, answered him. “I never thought to hear any grandson of mine so disgrace me and his mother and his father. And his whole family.”

What?

“Disgrace my mother?” he said. “It was in defense of her that I spoke out. It is my father who has disgraced and dishonored her and, in the process, his children. And you, Grandmama, and all his family and Mama’s by association. Was I to turn my face away and pretend I had not noticed when I caught him in that pavilion in a thoroughly compromising position with that woman? Ought I to have pretended I did not know what he was doing, what he had done? Was I to smile and dance afterward as he brought her back to share a roof with Mama? And with Pippa? And with you and Grandmama Greenfield?”

“In a word, yes,” she said, her voice flat and very distinct.

“I do not believe what I am hearing,” he said, his eyes seeking out Nicholas and Philippa and Ben in the shadows. None of them were looking at him now. “Was I to condone adultery? By my father? Against my mother?”

His father turned at last to face him. Devlin hardly recognized him. Gone was all the good humor and geniality. His face looked pale and drawn, his eyes dull, his mouth a thin line. He looked every one of his forty-eight years.

“It is time, Devlin,” he said, “that you grew up. There is a real world out there, my son, which I ought to have forced you to discover when I had the chance last year after you came down from Oxford, waving your diploma as though book learning alone had made a man of you. I was derelict in my duty then. Tonight you have exposed your mother to shame and pity and untold suffering. I do not know quite what I am to do with you.”

Shame? His mother was to feel shame? Had the world turned upside down? Devlin gazed at his father in shock and disbelief. But there was more to come. His mother spoke for the first time.

“You must go from here, Devlin,” she said.

He swung about to gaze at her. She had not moved except, perhaps, to lift her chin a little higher. She was not looking at him. Or at anyone else, it seemed. And the revelation hit him like a giant fist to his stomach.

“You knew,” he said.

She knew about his father’s infidelities when he went to London each spring. Perhaps she had known too about Mrs. Shaw, if not before today then at some time during the day. Perhaps everyone had known. Perhaps the whole world did. Except him. For him there had been only unease and niggling suspicions, which he had determinedly ignored—and then the truth bursting upon him like an erupting volcano tonight. Was he a total idiot?

It is time, Devlin, that you grew up.

What, for the love of God, did growing up mean? Accepting corruption as a normal part of everyday life? Recognizing that morality meant nothing at all except as something to be preached from a pulpit or taught in a classroom?

“You must go away, Devlin,” his mother said again.

And no one spoke up to protest how illogical it was that it was her son she chose to send away, not her husband, who had probably slept with countless other women during the years of their marriage, until now he had gone one step further and brought his latest mistress to the village beyond their gates and even right into their own home. He would have . . . rutted with that woman up in the pavilion if he had not been interrupted.

Devlin looked at his mother, who was not looking at him, and at his father, who was, before turning on his heel and leaving the room.



* * *



—

Devlin had no idea what time it was when the door of his bedchamber opened behind him. It was not morning yet, though. He was standing at his window, looking out onto blackness. Even the moon and the stars seemed to have run away to hide. There was no sign of dawn yet on the eastern horizon. His bags were ready—he had packed them himself without summoning his valet. He had been tempted to leave during the night, but there were people to whom he must say goodbye. The children. Owen and Stephanie. He could not leave without a word to them. He turned his head to look over his shoulder.

Ben and Nicholas and George, his uncle.

He turned back to the window without either greeting them or telling them to get out.

“The woman will be gone in the morning, Devlin,” his uncle told him. “I have made the arrangements, and I will go to see her on her way. She does indeed have a place to go to in London.”

“Perhaps she should move in here instead,” Devlin said. “My room will be vacant. Perhaps my mother would welcome her here in a three-way relationship. One big, happy family.”

“I can understand your bitterness,” his uncle said.

“Can you?” Devlin turned to look at the three of them. “Even though I appear to have broken a cardinal rule of polite behavior never to notice or refer to or expose the underbelly of . . . Of what? Evil? Corruption? Never to disturb whatever-it-is and thus upset people.”

His uncle sighed. “What has breaking that rule accomplished?” he asked, coming farther into the room and sitting, uninvited, on the end of the bed. “What has it accomplished for my sister, Devlin? And for my niece? And for those poor children who are fast asleep in their beds and do not know yet what will be facing them in the morning and the coming days?”

“Does the truth count for nothing, then?” Devlin asked. “She knew, did she not? My mother? She has probably known for years. I suppose everyone else has too. Except me, and even I have been suppressing vague suspicions for longer than a year lest they become less vague and force me to do something about them. We have all been living a cheerful, genial, laughter-filled lie. Because it is not the thing to tell truth and upset the status quo. It is not genteel. It is not good manners.”