Aldridge looked puzzled. Neither of those words held any meaning for a man of science in the early nineteenth century. “Admirable occupations, I am certain.”
“Oh, yes.” Kendra laughed, but it sounded hollow. “They’re the best at what they do. They married with the intention of having a child who would be the best, the brightest, because that child would be a combination of both of their genes. It was a deliberate decision on their part—carefully weighed and measured, I’m sure, before they acted.”
Her gaze fell to her hands, and she realized her fingers were twisting the material on her skirt. She forced herself to stop, aware of her companions’ gazes on her. “I was an experiment. To prove that if two individuals of superior intelligence had offspring, the offspring would have equal or greater intelligence.”
The Duke smiled. “It would seem that they achieved their ambition. You are the best and the brightest, Miss Donovan.”
Kendra shook her head. “If you knew my parents, you’d realize that it didn’t work. Or, at least, not the way that they’d wanted. They expected me to follow them into their professions, or at least something equally prestigious.”
“And you wanted to join the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Alec said.
“Yes. Although not immediately. That came later.”
“I don’t understand.” Alec frowned. “Isn’t the Federal Bureau of Investigation prestigious?”
“For many, it would be. But not for my parents.” Her throat felt tight, and she forced herself to swallow. “Our estrangement came long before that, though, when I told them that I wanted to decide for myself what I wanted to do with my life.”
The Duke asked gently, “What happened, my dear?”
Kendra licked her dry lips and looked out the window of the carriage, not seeing the squalid buildings they rolled past as they entered into London. She didn’t know why it mattered, really. It had happened so long ago. “They left. I never saw them again.”
“Your parents abandoned you?” Aldridge looked shocked. Something seemed to shift in his eyes. Kendra realized that he was probably thinking about his own daughter, lost at sea.
“They had other priorities. I saw my father once after that . . .” She shook her head. They didn’t need to know about her time in the hospital, recovering from a deadly mission. “Let’s just say that the word scientist doesn’t bring back pleasant memories.”
“No, of course not. They left you.” The Duke still appeared to have trouble absorbing that revelation.
“It’s not just that.” Christ, why didn’t she just drop the subject? It was as if she’d opened her own personal Pandora’s box, and all her troubles were spilling out. “It was before . . . I was a product of their crazy experiment into positive eugenics.”
They stared at her.
“Now you know,” she concluded very softly, feeling vaguely ill. “I’ve always been a freak.”
She saw Alec exchange a look with the Duke and felt even sicker. Damn it, why couldn’t she keep her mouth shut? She was already considered strange here.
“In the twenty-first century, this is not normal,” Alec said slowly.
“It’s not normal at all.”
“No, you misunderstand. Your background is not normal in the twenty-first century.”
Kendra frowned.
“I believe what my nephew is trying to say is that what you are describing is actually quite normal here.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Miss Donovan, what do you think the Ton does?” Alec said, sounding exasperated. “Bloody hell, they scrutinize potential mates like they were prized horseflesh at Tattersall’s! ’Tis why we have assemblies and routs and house parties, to match those mates—but only the appropriate mates for the desirable bloodline.”
“Poets may write about love, but the Beau Monde has never attached much confidence to such fanciful notions,” agreed the Duke. “Marriage and bloodlines are serious business. They call it good breeding, Miss Donovan, for a reason.”
“Or coming from good stock. There are no shortage of cattle terms,” said Alec, his lips twisting in wry humor. “The Quality does not want to dilute their blood with their social inferiors. There are times when a lord runs off with an actress, of course, but he is ostracized by society for it. Or sometimes money forces us to marry outside our social sphere. God help those children, because society’s matrons shall watch them like hawks when they come of age. If they deviate from what society considers acceptable, they’re bad Ton—never mind that those with the purest, bluest blood also drink too much, gamble too much, and behave in an atrocious manner. The Prince Regent could be counted among them.”
The Duke smiled wryly. “Alec is correct. What your parents did, it’s not uncommon here, my dear. We call it having the right blood, whereas you call it genes. But it’s the same concept.”
Kendra didn’t know what to say. She’d spent her entire life ashamed of her odd background. It had set her apart, made her different. What her parents had done wasn’t quite the same as marrying for status or prestige, but perhaps they—she, Alec, the Duke—had all been experiments, in their own way.
Alec settled back on the seat. He seemed to recognize the tumult in her emotions. His mouth curled into a satisfied smile. “You dwell on our differences, Miss Donovan. Perhaps it is time that you consider our similarities.”
It was disconcerting for Kendra to have her entire viewpoint shifted in a matter of minutes. The circumstances surrounding her birth had always been a source of deep embarrassment. It made her different, when she’d only ever wanted to fit in. To realize that she was actually normal in this timeline, more than two hundred years before her own birth, was strange, to say the least.
Well, calling herself normal in this era might be going a bit too far. Everything was upside down. Her background made her different in the twenty-first century, but was a fairly accepted practice here. Meanwhile, no one in 2015 would blink an eye at an independent woman working in law enforcement, but that was viewed as a peculiarity here.
Maybe I’ll never really fit in.
She should’ve been too old to still have that desire, but she knew that the need to conform, the longing to fit into a larger group, was genetically coded into mankind. Biologically, humans were social animals, like wolves and their packs or whales and their pods. It was why peer pressure could compel people to do stupid things. It was why a college student might express his individualism with a tattoo or a radical haircut or his wardrobe, but still subject himself to hazing to fit into a fraternity.