She didn’t recognize him either. Not immediately. Nor after a good long, dazed look. He realized to his disgust that she’d overimbibed as much as the woman in scarlet, only her reaction was torpor instead of lasciviousness.
Suddenly she leapt off the bench and lurched at him, tripping over one of the bottles on the floor. He barely caught her.
“Stu! My God, it’s you.” She clutched him so hard he thought she would break his left humerus. “It’s my son, everyone. My son!”
Stuart coldly endured the awkward introduction to her friends. The men were no more lecturers and artists than he was a Druid priest. And if the two women supposedly married to them didn’t belong to a brothel—and if the hookah-smoking hag wasn’t their madam—then the trip south must have wreaked havoc with his powers of perception indeed.
He’d always thought his mother a lady, despite her poverty. He’d remembered a gentleness to her, and she’d spoken with more refinement than everyone else. But now he heard her hopeless accent, saw the coarse way she waved her spoon in the air when tea had been brought in, heard her laughter, as loud and shrill as that of any of her guests.
All he could think was how right his father had been to insist on a complete severing between mother and son. She was not a lady. She wasn’t even half so respectable as Fairleigh Park’s housekeeper.
He rose to go, citing a tight schedule that did not permit him more time for visiting. She ran after him out of the house.
“What’s the matter, Stuart? Why are you leaving?”
“I already told you, I have to go.”
“But you’ve only just come. Stay for dinner at least.”
“I don’t think I will.”
Tears rolled down her face. “I was afraid this would happen. You’ve changed. And I’m not good enough to be related to you anymore.”
“I’ve changed?” he exclaimed, aghast. “What about you? Who are those people?”
“They are my friends.”
“Friends? They are confidence men and prostitutes.”
“My friends have always been confidence men and prostitutes. Tom Fiddle was a confidence man. Don’t you remember Tom Fiddle? He taught you how to read from the Manchester Guardian. And Polly and Midge, you used to play cards with them—what do you suppose they did for a living?”
“That was different.”
By the time Stuart knew him, Tom Fiddle’s career in chicanery had long ended and he owned the pub down the street. He didn’t remember Midge so well, but Polly had been a quiet, tidy woman who prayed a great deal, nothing like the slatterns in the parlor.
His mother shook her head. “No, the only thing that’s changed is you, Stu. You think you are so grand now. You look down on us, all of us.”
Stuart’s temper slipped away from his control. What happened to his industrious mother? Who was this indolent woman with no moral compass? “I wouldn’t look down on you if you weren’t drunk in the middle of the day!”
When Nelda Lamb died that winter of influenza, Stuart insisted that her remains be interred in Manchester, so he could pretend that the events of Torquay had never happened.
A pretense he’d upheld assiduously in the years since.
“I didn’t like her when I found her,” he said to Verity. “I never went back to see her again. When she died, when the people who cleared out the house sent her paintings to me, I had them put away. I didn’t want to look at them. And then, after we talked about Bertie, I thought of her too. It was because of me that she’d had such a hard life, but she never once blamed me.”
Verity came and put her arms about him. “I’m glad you forgave her.”
“I can only hope she forgave me too.”
“I know she did.” She hugged him tight. “I’m a mother too. And we forgive everything.”
Something in him unclenched. He kissed the top of her head. “I’ll take you to see her grave sometime.”
She laid her cheek against his. “Yes, we’ll do that.”
Later that evening, as they lay in bed, warm and snug under the covers, they talked of their future.
“All this white is lovely. But we shall need to be much more practical in our own place,” she said.
With a pang he realized that she wasn’t talking about his house, since she could not live here openly with him. No one would take him to task for keeping a mistress, but when that mistress was Verity Durant, everything must be done with the utmost discretion.
He watched her carefully for signs of unhappiness, but her eyes were bright as she spoke of her plans. She would now finally have the time to write her magnum opus, a book of recipes and methods for professed cooks. Perhaps she’d poach a few of the kitchen staff from Fairleigh Park, train them some more, and open a tea shop that served authentic French and Viennese pastry. And later, when she had enough money, a school of cookery.
“You’ll have a carte blanche from me, you know,” he reminded her.
She smiled, a little ruefully. “I’m no longer used to spending anyone’s money except my own. And besides, I like the security of an income.”