My Dearest Enemy (27 page)

"Why?"

"I don't know," she replied. There was so much she didn't know. Too much she did. "My mother wouldn't say other than she could not live with him. If you knew my mother, her strength, her commitment and principles, you would accept that her reasons for leaving must have been good."

He nodded. He did not know the mother, but he knew her child. If Lily had inherited her character, her mother had been a woman of courage.

"Where are your half-siblings?" he asked. "Why haven't you ever seen them?"

"I don't know where they are." The emptiness with which she spoke those simple words bespoke a void of long standing. "After she left, Mr. Benton found her and took the children. He swore she would never see them again. He didn't lie."

He could not conceive of a mother allowing her children to be taken from her. "Why didn't she care enough to fight for them?"

"Care enough?" she echoed. "She broke her heart with caring. She stood outside the door to his home each day for weeks and each day the police came and took her away and each day she came back. She kept coming back until Mr. Benton found a magistrate and had her committed to an asylum."

She placed her folded hands on the desk, too carefully. "My father was among the directors overseeing the asylum. He met her there and immediately realized she was not insane, or perhaps insane, but only with grief and he made it his
cause celebre
to have her released. But by the time she'd been freed, Mr. Benton had immigrated to Australia with the children."

It was inconceivable, barbaric. "They can't have put her in asylum simply for wanting to see her children."

Lily's sad, answering smile was much wiser than her years should have allowed.

"Laws have changed," Avery protested. "Today a woman has the right to sue for divorce, she can enter contracts, she can own property—"

"But not her children," Lily broke in. Seeing his uncertainty she continued. "Legitimate children
are
property, property a man owns. Should a man decide his wife is unfit he can remove her children from her and the law stands behind that decision."

Yes, he thought numbly. How could he have forgotten? The long school months, the even longer weeks of vacation when he and other aristocratic orphans haunted Harrow's empty yards. He'd been property, all right, paltry property. Dross goods.

Lily's gaze was fastened on her hands. They were clasped tightly now, with the white-knuckled fervency of a religious zealot at prayer.

"There has to be something she could have done," he insisted.

"No. A woman can't even seek redress. She has no recourse except—" She broke off abruptly, flushing.

He understood then, as clearly as if Lily had explained. He recognized in Lily's confused abashment the legacy of sadness and bitterness left by her mother, a woman falsely imprisoned in an insane asylum, her children stolen from her. He looked at Lily and knew as certainly as if she'd told him her mother's mode of revenge. She had made sure that Mr. Benton never had a legal relationship with a woman again.

Outside the rain fell softly. Inside the candle lights studded the night-dark room with stars. "They were never divorced."

She shook her head. Didn't Lily understand what had been done to her? The selfishness of it appalled him.

"Why not?" he asked. "She could have easily rid herself of him on the grounds of abandonment. Why didn't she marry your father?" He had no right to ask these questions, no right to demand answers.

"Can't you understand?" Lily lifted her gaze. Her eyes caught the candlelight, reflected back the golden flame like a cat's. "An unwed mother retains sole custody for her child. My mother had already lost two children. She'd never risk losing another."

"But your father, surely he must have wanted—"

"My father was an extraordinary man. He accepted her decision." Her words cut coldly through his passionate renunciation of her father's consent to such an intolerable situation. "
He
understood."

Understood
? Understanding shouldn't have meant condoning. The wrong of it affronted Avery, hurt him. He would never have made Lily's father's choice. And Lily knew it.

He paced restlessly about the room, the candles guttering silently with his passage. "She tried to find her children?" he asked.

Lily's combative posture eased, leaving evidence of weariness in the bow of her head. He wanted to reach across and smooth the lines from her brow, but he couldn't. She was marked too deeply and the distance was far greater than a span of mahogany.

"She did what she could," Lily said. "My father sent out agents looking for the children. But my father was never wealthy and he was only a younger son, and his inquiries met with no success."

"He must have loved your mother very much."

"Yes."

He studied her bowed head, the deep shadows beneath her jaw and cheeks, her black, glossy hair rippling like silk, and he wanted more than anything in the world to protect her. The need overwhelmed him, confounding him and filling him with rage that no man had done so before, that her own father had failed in this most basic of principles. He did not doubt for a minute that Lily's father had loved her mother and that her mother had never ceased grieving for her two children but where had Lily fit into this quagmire of pain and loss? Who'd loved
her
best?

"He should have loved you more," he muttered roughly.

"Don't judge him. Don't judge either of them." The warning was harsh.

He ignored it. "He should have made certain that you were afforded all the rights and privileges, the property and the respect, that his name alone could have guaranteed. Instead, he allowed you to be an outsider, without legal recourse for your birthright.
He should have married your mother
."

"As you would have done?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Don't you understand?" Her words, beginning angrily, became entreating. "She couldn't risk having her heart broken again. She wouldn't have survived it. She

couldn't
marry." Her voice trembled, dropped to no more than a whisper. "Any more than I could."

Why should he care? Why should it feel as though she'd just reached into his soul and torn out its center? It wasn't as though he'd entertained the slightest hope… he hadn't imagined any sort of future…

"You will never marry, Lily?"

"No." Her voice had dropped to a whisper. "Not until the laws are changed. Not until a woman's safety and health and future are deemed as important as a man's. Not until she has the same rights regarding her children that her husband has."

"And if you should fall in love, couldn't you trust your future to your husband's care?" he asked. "Isn't that love?"

"Would you entrust your future to a wife?" she answered bitterly.

"It's not the same thing."

"No. It's not," she agreed with cold deliberation. "You'd only need to demonstrate your 'trust' until a time it's proven unjustified. Then the law grants you the means to rid yourself of your wife while keeping that part of the union you still value, your heirs. Of course, whether those children are better left in their mother's care than in yours is a matter never considered, much less addressed."

"And you think it better for them to live with the stigma of illegitimacy?" he asked incredulously. "To have doors shut in their faces? Their futures left to uncertainty? To be deemed unworthy because of their birth?"

"Is…" She lifted her chin. "Is that how you see me?"

"Damn it to hell, Lily," he said harshly. "It doesn't matter how
I
see you. It matters how society sees your children. I would never allow my child to suffer like that."

"I assure you I have not suffered. I have enjoyed a liberal, interesting, no, a
fascinating
upbringing," she said. "I had loving parents to shelter me from bigotry. I have had an education most men would envy and enjoy a position of respect amongst my sister—"

"You don't have any sisters, Lily. You have an organization," Avery cut in, "your causes, your education, but as for family, you have no more of a family than I. Less." He saw her flinch and felt as if he'd slapped her. Yet, he went on, desperately seeking to force her to reexamine her beliefs.

"Even your presence here," he said, "in this house, is conditional. As little as I have, I can legitimately claim Mill House. In spite of what Horatio did, in spite of his will, I can claim it with a right that you will never be able to claim because your father never gave you his name."

She was breathing heavily, and for a minute he thought she would raise her hand and strike him. He would have welcomed it, seen it as a sign that on some level she agreed with him and must do him violence as a denial.

"It's a house," she said, tasting the betrayal in the words. "A thing. A possession. I don't need stone walls and wood floors to know who and what I am."

"The hell you say," he ground out. "It's not just a house. It is a bell jar keeping a family's history, their lives and stories."

"It's a house, not a cathedral," she insisted but her cheeks were ruddied in the dim light. "Do you think if you have Mill House you'll somehow acquire the family you never owned? Well, a family doesn't come with the deed, Avery."

Her words cut with the fine incisive pain of truth, but then, she knew they would. She'd counted on it stopping his tongue. Not so easily done.

"Family, Lil?" He leaned far over the desk, his lips curling in derision. "You wish to speak about families? Why not? We'll be rather like the blind men describing an elephant, won't we?"

He frightened her. "No, I—"

"Yes," he insisted. "Perhaps between the two of us, we might be able to piece together something of a notion. You, after all, had the adoring parents—or were they? Never matter, parents nonetheless. I, lacking the parents, had the trappings, the name, the house, the auxiliary relatives—"

"I don't want to speak about this," she said, panic touching her voice.

"Damn it, Lily. Can't you see what you're doing here?" he asked. "You've adopted my family,
mine
, as well as these suffragists, these servants, all these peo-pie who want something from you, whose fealty you secure with jobs and sanctuary and bribes. Fealty isn't love, Lily. These people aren't your family."

"They are."

"No." He shook his head and at that moment she hated him. He looked big and hard and commanding and what little nature had not equipped him with the ability to take, English law did.

But most of all she hated him for making her question her parents. How much had her father's family's refusal to have anything to do with them been their choice and how much her father's? She would have suffered much to belong somewhere, anywhere, in some capacity.

Hostility snaked within her, anger that her mother's life had so unalterably affected—no,
damaged
her. With anger came guilt. She
knew
the torment her mother's choice had caused her. She
knew
her decision not to marry had not been made lightly and still she could not help her anger.

"You have no right to stand above me and tell me what my father should have done and what my mother should have been willing to sacrifice," she said in a fierce, low voice. "You've never had a child taken from you, as good as murdered—no,
worse
than murdered! My mother died not even knowing if her children were still alive. I saw what it did to her. I heard her at night, torturing herself with questions she could never answer."

He remained silent.

"Can you imagine? She fretted over wounds she should have been there to prevent, the comforting hugs she could not give. Each morning and every night she pantomimed the kisses she could not bestow. She imagined them asking for her and wondered what their father answered, if he told them she was dead or simply hadn't cared enough one day to come back."

His mouth was set with resolve, shadows hid his eyes. "And what about you, Lily?"

"Me?" She carefully unwove her fingers. "I wonder if they even know I exist."

"Lily—" He reached out and touched the back of his fingers to her cheek. She didn't even notice. She simply gazed up at him with stark and empty eyes.

"If the laws had been different…" she mused. "If she had had the right to her own children… but they aren't. Nothing protected her." Her voice hardened.

He could think of nothing to say. Bitterness pulsed through him, for Mr. Benton and Lily's cowardly mother and spineless father and yet he could not hate them.

"You have to admit, Avery, I have every reason to distrust marriage. Any woman does. Only a fool would enter into it when the laws that govern that union see a woman's children as 'products' of her body which her husband owns."

"But if there were love on both sides. If a couple respected and trusted—"

"Ephemeral feelings," she said. "Hardly worth risk-ing one's children for. It's a matter of logic, Avery. I thought men appreciated logic. A woman cannot afford labile emotions."

She was tearing him apart and like any wounded animal he reacted savagely, instinctively striking back.

"Logic? Labile emotions?" His laughter was mocking. "You're a coldhearted creature, Lily Bede. You would have made a successful general with willingness to sacrifice all for your 'principles.' I salute you. I'm just damn glad I don't have to bed you lest I get chilblains."

"Yes"—her head jerked up and her gaze was like polished ebony—"count yourself fortunate."

She would not be provoked and he needed—God how he needed—to find some answering heat to match the fire raging within him.

The sound of running footsteps sounded above the pelting rain. The library door crashed open.

"Mother of God! Help!" Merry shrieked.