Chapter 20
“Isn’t your daughter by blood?” Olivia asked, her voice little more than a stunned whisper. “How is that possible?”
“I’d just reached my twenty-first year when I saw Clemence on the trading island of Dejima. Her father was Dr. Oelrichs, the island’s resident doctor. I fell for her instantly in the way only a young man can fall in love with a woman.”
“Yes, well,” Olivia said, “young women aren’t immune to the feeling, either.”
A wry smile of acknowledgement crossed Jake’s lips. “I found a dozen reasons a day to pass her house. Sometimes I could make her smile, even laugh, but she was an utterly serious girl. I did little more than muddle through the entire courtship process.”
Olivia’s brow lifted in surprise. The polished Right Honourable Jakob Radclyffe, Fifth Viscount St. Alban, wasn’t the sort of man she associated with smiles and jokes and muddling through. He was a man who most would characterize as utterly serious himself, a man who shouldered the weight of his responsibilities, dutifully and honorably.
It was a quality she found most attractive. So many men in the ton took nothing seriously and frittered their lives away. Like Percy. At least, the Percy she’d known and married in London. She hadn’t the faintest idea of the sort of man he was now.
“I asked for her hand in marriage before the month was out,” Jake continued. “I wouldn’t return for another six months, as only two ships a year were allowed on the island, and I wanted to ensure that she would still be mine when I did.” The shake of his head was near imperceptible, but Olivia caught it. “Dr. Oelrichs nearly laughed me out of his house before shoving a tumbler of whiskey into my hand and asking me what I thought I knew about his daughter. ‘Maybe it will turn her head straight again.’ Those were his words, and that was it. Clemence came home to find herself an engaged woman.” He paused as if weighing his next words. “Later, I realized Dr. Oelrichs must have caught wind of Clemence’s activities.”
“What activities?”
“Clemence was in love, but not with me.”
“Then with whom?” Olivia asked impatient to know. She’d never been able to stop herself from racing to the end of a story.
“I sailed the next day,” he said, making it clear that he would tell his story in his own time, “confident and arrogant in my belief that Clemence may as well become accustomed to my long haul trips sooner rather than later. I made such a hash of it.” His mouth twisted in bitterness. “I’d been raised by a mother and aunts who bore the long absences of husbands as a natural part of life. I couldn’t imagine Clemence would be any different. Brash, young men can have surprisingly small imaginations.”
“I am well acquainted with the worldview of brash, young men,” Olivia inserted.
“When I returned, we took a moonlit stroll to the bridge where I’d first seen her. Very romantic until she told me that she’d fallen in love with another man while I was away and was now increasing.”
“Increasing? With another man’s child? How—”
“Devastating?”
Olivia nodded. She detected a shadow of that devastation in his voice fifteen years later.
“Mostly it was my pride that was devastated. And like any young man whose pride has taken a slicing, I lashed out. I demanded the man’s name, determined to exact satisfaction. Clemence laughed humorlessly and told me there would be no satisfaction for either of us.” He paused a beat. “A better man would have softened in that moment.”
Regret soaked into the air and weighed it down. The past could do that to a person. Yet Olivia detected another emotion, too. In his refusal to meet her eyes, she sensed shame. A shame he’d carried these last fifteen years.
“I pressed her for the name,” he continued, “until she told me that her lover was the younger son of a noble Japanese family, Kimura of Nagasaki. He was too powerful to touch. Then she asked for my help getting off the island before she started showing signs of the pregnancy. She knew I’d have no problem smuggling her onto my family’s ship.” He inhaled deeply. “I told her she could go to the devil and live with the consequences.”
Olivia gasped. “Oh, no.”
“My fiancée was with child, and not just any child, but a Japanese child.” His gaze, bitter, raw, shamed, met Olivia’s. “It was unbearable to me that the instant the child was born, the world, my world, would know that I couldn’t be the father, that I was a cuckold. I won’t relate back to you the entirety of my words, but they were cruel. My overriding thought was that the world mustn’t know I was betrayed by her. I fled the night our cargo was offloaded and didn’t look back.”
“Then how did Mina become yours?”
“By the grace of whichever god you worship.” He swung his legs off the reclining chair and stood, tension coming off him in waves. “Six months later, one of my uncles fell ill with a malarial outbreak in Singapore. The company needed me to captain the ship the rest of the way to Dejima to offload the cargo. It was my first opportunity to captain a long-haul ship, and I couldn’t refuse. My first night back on the island, a note slipped under my door. Clemence wanted to see me. I would have ignored it but for a line that caught my eye, There isn’t much time.”
He strode to the edge of the roof, placed a hand on a low parapet, and peered down at the street below. He was half a world away and completely alone in his memories.
“I rushed to Dr. Oelrichs’ house, and still I was nearly too late. Clemence had contracted a childbirth fever.” He faced Olivia, his back propped against the low wall, catching her gaze with his tormented one. “I don’t remember ever having been afraid of anything in my life until that day, not the way Clemence brought the fear of God home to me. Fading before my eyes was a Clemence quite unlike the one I’d known. Or, I should say, the Clemence I thought I’d known. I hadn’t taken the time to truly know her, or to truly love her. Not the real her.”
Olivia wanted nothing more than to go to him. To lay some part of her body on his. To comfort him. Her feet, however, possessed more sense than her heart and refused to move.
“She begged me to take the child as my own. Neither her father nor the Kimura family would agree to take the babe.”
“Who wouldn’t make that promise to a dying woman?” Olivia interjected, unable to help herself. “Even if it was a lie?”
“Maybe they had. I don’t know. But Clemence understood the truth of the matter.”
Olivia’s hand found its way to her mouth as the horror of the dangerous and bleak future that had stretched before a motherless and fatherless Mina unfolded in her mind.
“Clemence died in the small hours of morning. I found a wet nurse willing to travel to Singapore, and we left Dejima within two days’ time. I let everyone believe Mina was my by-blow from a relationship with a Japanese servant, and, in the blink of an eye, I was the father of a beautiful, squawking baby girl.”
Olivia saw that the fact bewildered him to this day, but that it also enlivened him. Pride sounded in his voice, powerful and fierce.
“And that was the end of it until recently.”
Olivia’s head cocked to the side. “Until recently?”
Jake startled as if her query had drawn him out of a trance. “It is none of your concern.”
Curiosity bade her probe the point, but good sense had her hold her tongue. His tone brooked no rebuttal. Instead, she pivoted and asked, “Does Mina know?”
“She always knew the basics, but I told her the full story two years ago.”
Olivia thought her heart might burst with unnamed emotion. There was something he needed to hear, and she would say it. “You should feel proud, not only of Mina, but of yourself.”
His eyes shifted, as did his feet. Her words didn’t sit right with him. His was the bearing of the guilty. “Pride isn’t the first word that comes to mind.”
“You took Mina when no one else would,” Olivia persisted. “She is yours as surely as if she was your flesh and blood. You did what no one else would do.”
She paused to slow down the conversational pace, to consider carefully her next words. To consider whether or not they should be her next words. “I am quite in awe of you.”
His mouth twisted. “The threat of public humiliation is a powerful motivator. Never underestimate its ability to reveal the true measure of a man.”
“You were a young man. None of us can account for our twenty-one-year-old selves. We move beyond who we were then, if we’re lucky.”
Again, she paused. Again, she considered. Again, she spoke. “You aren’t the sort of man who lets a woman fall.”
“Aren’t I? Haven’t I?”
“I’m not speaking of the man you were then. I’m speaking of the man you became. You did right by Clemence. Your true measure was revealed. Adopting a child is an uncommon step in our society. It was brave of you.”
“Hardly brave,” he said. “Some years ago, one of my uncles took in a boy named Nylander. He and I were near an age, and we came up together. I knew from early on there was nothing to the nonsense that blood will out, but to the world, Nylander carries the stigma of illegitimacy.” His arctic blue eyes went hard and cold, impenetrable ice. “No such stigma will ever attach itself to Mina’s name.”
Fierce. Protective. Olivia now understood the reason behind that ferocity and protectiveness. An emotion that she refused to name, or even acknowledge, slithered through her body and wrapped its tentacles around her heart.
“This is the real reason you need a wife of impeccable reputation. A Society marriage would be the deflective shield Mina needs to protect her. Yet I’m curious,” she continued, a thought just occurring to her. “Why is it you never married? Surely it would have been easier to raise Mina with a wife all these years.”
An ugly chortle escaped Jake, one directed at himself, not at her. “No woman would saddle herself to the likes of me, not if she knew the truth. I’ll take a Society marriage and have the stepmother Mina needs.”
“Every woman in London would leap at the chance of being saddled with the likes of you,” she shot at him.
“Every woman in London?” he shot back.
On a different night, his question would fluster her and send her running for safety, but not tonight. She’d intuited something vital to this man, and she wouldn’t let it go. “You seek to punish yourself. That is the reason you won’t allow yourself to marry for love. It’s the reason you allow yourself to be beaten to a pulp.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s the only reason.” His translucent blue gaze pierced straight through her. “Or even the primary reason.”
Her body went hot, but she wouldn’t be unsettled or distracted. “You’re afraid.”
“Aren’t we all?” he threw back at her.
“Of yourself,” she returned. He flinched as if she’d physically struck him. “You don’t trust yourself when it comes to love. You think love will turn you into a monster. But look at Mina. You will never let her down.”
“It’s different when it’s your child, but Clemence . . . I discarded her like a worthless piece of lint.”
“She betrayed you. One doesn’t easily forgive that sort of betrayal, or forget it. You must find someone worthy of your heart.”
His inward gaze suddenly reflected out and struck her with a penetrating acuity. “Such idealistic words from a woman who has sworn off love and marriage.”
Her heart thundered in her chest. “My circumstances aren’t the same.”
“Are they so different?”
The intimacy of yesterday and tonight’s confessions hung between them. The truth of her marriage. The truth about Mina. He should understand those confessions revealed the past, but changed naught in the present. He needed the sort of wife that she could never be for him.
She’d found her house, and Mina had found her school. They were done. Utterly done. Nothing bound them together. Except for one thing: they remained stranded on this roof together.
As if he’d arrived at the same conclusion, he said, “We may be here all night.”
“Oh, dear,” Olivia began, her voice cracking at the feeble attempt at a rejoining lightness, “the Duke and Lucy think me at a supper party”—It became easier to affect lightness with each word she spoke—“My first act as owner of this house will be to have that lock repaired.”
“My man Payne knows I’m here, so rescue will arrive at some point. We shan’t starve.” He took his seat beside hers. “We could start shouting. That might yield quicker results.”
“I would rather starve than pay that particular price.” Even as the words left her mouth, she was uncertain they were as true now as they’d been a few days ago. Very little from a few days ago seemed as true now.
His eyes searched hers. “Would you?”
Her insides tumbled over themselves, and her body gave an involuntary shiver.
“Are you cold?”
She nodded. Exhausted by the revelations and near revelations of this night, she lay back and snuggled deep inside his voluminous wool overcoat. “Silly on an April night.”
Before she had a chance to review the import of her words, he’d already begun a course of action.
Namely, he slid off his chair and knelt beside her. “As you already have my overcoat for warmth, all I can offer you is the rest of me.”