To Stuart’s surprise, Michael Robbins was also at home—he’d been given a special dispensation to attend his sponsor’s funeral. His parents presented him to Stuart with much pomp and pride: a young man of sixteen, tall, dark, and handsome, with undeniable intelligence in his eyes and a remarkable presence for an adolescent.
Stuart stayed a quarter hour. He drank tea, ate Mrs. Robbins’s lumpy seed cake, and engaged in small talk about the weather and the goings-on in the village. From time to time he addressed a question directly to Michael Robbins. The boy had acquired from his time at Rugby a startlingly pure upper-class accent. When he spoke, his parents listened in rapture, as if sonatas cascaded from his lips.
But it was more than his accent. It was his posture, his well-made clothes, his way of handling a teaspoon—it had taken Stuart many raps to the knuckles from Fr?ulein Eisenmueller to achieve a similarly elegant grip. The boy looked entirely incongruous in the low-ceilinged, cramped parlor, a row of shotguns on the smoke-darkened wall behind him, a rusted snare under his chair.
As Stuart rose to take his leave, he sought a reasonable-sounding excuse to speak to the boy alone. But he needed not have taxed his brain. Michael Robbins shrugged into his own overcoat.
“I’ll accompany Mr. Somerset back to the house,” he said to his parents.
They left the gamekeeper’s cottage together and spoke companionably about their Rugby experiences. They both belonged to School House and both played the eponymous sport—Michael did Stuart one better; he was the captain of the Running Eight.
Then a small silence took over. Stuart debated whether it was advisable to ask the boy outright about his true parentage and his possible connection to Bertie.
“Sir, please forgive me,” said Michael. “But you wouldn’t happen to be related to me in any way, would you?”
Stuart had been struggling with an artful turn of phrase that would allow him to pose his question without shocking the boy. The boy, apparently, was beyond his powers to shock.
“You mean, as via my late brother?”
“No, sir. I mean, as in direct descent.”
The question stopped Stuart in his tracks. Had Michael been six or seven years younger, he’d have wondered. But the boy was too old to be the result of his night with Cinderella.
“I do not believe so,” he said.
Michael did not seem overly disappointed. He shrugged. “The odds were against it. But I thought I’d ask anyway.”
“Does this mean that you are not related to my brother either?”
“I asked Mr. Bertram once, shortly after he told my parents he would pay my school fees,” said Michael calmly. “He said no, that he’d made certain he did not sire any children out of wedlock.”
Stuart was both relieved and strangely disappointed. But above all, he was astonished. Bertie had been paying for Michael’s school fees since the latter was eleven. He himself at eleven would never have had the audacity to ask such a question.
“I hope you don’t think that I’m not grateful to my adoptive parents, sir,” said Robbins. “I love them dearly. But a man can’t know who he is until he knows where he came from. And I’ve only half of the picture.”
Half of the picture. Stuart resumed walking. “You know the identity of your natural mother?”
“I believe so, sir.”
“Then why not ask her?”
“She denies it. But I know it’s her.” Michael kicked a pebble out of his way. “I hope I do not sound too deranged when I say this, but I remember my life as an infant—fragments of it, at least. I remember her face. The moment she came to Fairleigh Park, I knew she had come back for me.”
And Stuart knew too. “Madame Durant.”
Robbins’s school fees were part of her recompense. Perhaps she feared that the Robbinses wouldn’t accept such charity from her, so she routed it through Bertie instead, taking a cut in her in-hand wages.
Robbins did not deny it. “She always said you were a good example for me.”
Madame Durant thought Stuart was a good example for her child—Madame Durant who wouldn’t make him a sandwich?
“You are going to the house to call on her?” It was three o’clock in the afternoon, she wouldn’t be needed in the kitchen yet.
“She would expect a visit from me, since I’m home,” said Michael.
There was more obligation than anticipation in the boy’s voice. Madame Durant’s relationship with her child was not without complications.
“May I ask you a personal question?”
“Of course, sir.”
“Your adoption is not a secret in these parts. You are a promising young man and Madame Durant seems to have made an effort to stay close to you. Why do you suppose she denies that she is your mother?”
“I wish I knew. I ask myself the same question. All I can think is that she means to marry well someday, and it would not do to have a known bastard child about, adopted or not.”
Stuart raised a brow at the boy’s brutal cynicism.
“The world is an ugly place,” said Michael, almost placidly. “People like me realize it sooner.”