“And?”
“You were right; she does indeed worry that Captain Wyeth might not be as amiable or openhearted as he takes pains to appear. She also tells me that Anne and her captain quarreled halfway through Lady Farningham’s musical evening, at which point Anne pled a sick headache and went home. Before ten.”
She looked up then to find him frowning. He said, “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“No; I didn’t think you would.”
He nodded to the book in her hands. “What does James II’s natural daughter have to do with anything?”
“She doesn’t. But Miss Austen was intrigued by my necklace. She said it reminded her of a piece she’d once seen in a portrait of a woman reputed to be the daughter of James Stuart by one of his mistresses. Which is fascinating because on the back of this necklace are two sets of entwined initials—”
“A.C. and J.S.”
Hero stared at him. “How did you know?”
He turned away and went to where the brandy stood warming by the fire. She could see the rigid set to his shoulders, hear the tension in his voice. “The necklace once belonged to my mother,” he said, easing the stopper from the decanter. “She was wearing it when she was lost at sea the summer I was eleven.”
Hero felt a yawing ache open up inside her, the ache she always felt when she thought of the losses suffered by the boy he’d once been. In one hot, unforgettable summer, he had lost both his older brother Cecil and his mother.
There was a portrait of Sophia, the Countess of Hendon, that hung over the fireplace in the drawing room, and Hero often found herself studying it. The Countess had been a beautiful woman, her hair the color of gold guineas, her features exquisitely molded, her eyes clear and sparkling with intelligence and humor and a wild kind of thirst, as if she yearned for something missing in her life. And then one sunny August day, she’d sailed away from Brighton on a friend’s yacht for what was supposed to be a few hours’ pleasure cruise, and she’d never returned.
Lost at sea, they told the world—told Sebastian, even though he refused to believe it. Day after day he stood on the cliffs, looking out to sea, waiting for her to return, convinced that she couldn’t be dead. Convinced that if she were dead, he’d know it—feel it. In time, he had come to accept that they told the truth, only to learn as a man grown that it was all lies. She had simply left the Earl—the man he had falsely believed to be his father.
Left him.
Sebastian had shared with Hero many of his darkest, most painful secrets. But the truth about his mother—that she still lived—Hero had learned only from Jarvis. And she had never told Devlin what she knew.
Now she watched him splash brandy into his glass and said softly, “Except that she wasn’t really lost at sea, was she, Devlin?”
He looked at her over his shoulder, the decanter held forgotten in his hand, his face a mask of control. “Jarvis told you?”
“Yes.”
“Did he also tell you that she ran off to Venice with her latest lover—a handsome young poet a good ten years her junior?”
“No.” Hero set aside the book and stepped off the ladder, her gaze never leaving his face. “How did my father come to have the necklace?”
“It reappeared two years ago, around the neck of Guinevere Anglessey’s dead body.”
“But . . .” She shook her head, not understanding. He’d solved Guinevere’s murder, as he had solved so many. But that had been before Hero’s life became inextricably merged with his. “Where did she get it?”
“It seems my mother gave it to her years ago, when they met briefly in the South of France after the Peace of Amiens. Guinevere was still a child at the time, while my mother . . .” He replaced the stopper in the decanter and set it aside. “My mother was the mistress of a French general.”
Hero studied his tightly held face. “Do you know where she is now? Lady Hendon, I mean.”
He shook his head. “I’ve hired men to look for her, but the war does rather complicate things.”
Why? Hero wanted to ask. Why are you so desperate to find the mother who sailed off and left you when you were so young? Left you with a man she knew was not your father?
But she realized she knew the answer: He searched for the beautiful, laughing Countess because he still loved her, despite the hurt and anger and sting of betrayal. And because he wanted to ask her which of her many unnamed lovers had fathered the man now known to the world as Viscount Devlin.
“I still don’t understand how Jarvis came to have the necklace,” said Hero.
“I gave it to him. I had no desire to see it again.”
Reaching up, she loosed the necklace’s clasp and held it out to him. “I’m sorry I wore it. I didn’t know.”
He made no move to take it from her. “The portrait Jane Austen told you about; did she mention where she’d seen it?”
“A place called Northcott Abbey, near Ludlow.”