The Forest Lord (3 page)

"My gay, beautiful
Eden," he said. His voice was reduced to a husky rasp. "How it must appall you to be trapped here with me."

"No, Spencer." She struggled for words. Their marriage had never included much conversation and far less sympathy. "I only wish—"

"That I'd gone sooner? All these… dreadful weeks of nursing me—" He tried to sit up and coughed, a deep, racking sound followed by a wheeze as he fought to breathe. Dr. Jones placed a gentle hand on his shoulder and eased him back down.

I wish that we might have made a real peace before this
,
Eden thought. There was still time.
One last chance.

"I wish that I had been a better wife to you," she said. "I wish that I could have made you happy."

He laughed. "Oh, you did… for a while, lovely
Eden.
As long as the money lasted."
His breath rattled, but he summoned up his strength and continued. "Unfortunately, your father did me the great discourtesy of losing his wealth and most of his land. After all I sacrificed to marry such—" He closed his eyes and shuddered. "But that would be most indelicate of me, would it not?"

Eden
well knew what he'd been about to say. With the bribe of a steady and generous income, her father had arranged her expeditious marriage, five years ago, to an impoverished but well-placed viscount's son. Spencer Winstowe, practiced rake and gamester, had known she was not a virgin.

He had not known about the child who had died. Papa had taken great pains to hide that scandal from both Society and the local folk of Hartsmere. But he could not silence the rumors of an elopement, and Spencer had never let
Eden forget that he had been "forced" to marry her.

Even when he began to be ill after the first year of their marriage, he would not accept her concern or solicitude. He openly preferred his bits of muslin and gaming hells to her company. His increasing ill health did not slow him but drove him to even greater extremes in a mad quest for every sort of dissipation available to a man with connections, money, and no restraint.

He and Eden went their separate ways, like so many couples of the
ton
. Aunt Claudia's instruction in the ways of Society had saved
Eden. She had learned how to pretend that nothing was wrong, that sorrow could not touch her.

Even when the money stopped coming, and Spencer cursed her to hell.

But nothing had taught her to look upon death as she had come to view all the other exigencies of life with her husband. This was no joke to be laughed away with a mask of cynical indifference.

"However," Spencer said, cutting into her thoughts, "we have no more leisure for delicacy." He turned his head on the pillow to catch the doctor's eye. "What I have to say to my wife is not for your ears. Get out."

The doctor and clergyman exchanged wary glances. "Mr. Winstowe," the physician said. "I strongly feel that—"

"Get out, I tell you—if you want your fees paid!" Spencer began to cough again, and both men reluctantly sidled out the door.

"I suggest you… make certain that the door is closed," Spencer said hoarsely. "You will not wish what I have to tell you to become fodder for the gossip mill… at least… not yet. It may be too much even for your band of aristocratic wantons."

Eden
checked the door and returned to stand by the chair, gripping it for support. Spencer would not go to such elaborate lengths unless what he had to tell her was bad indeed. And he had nothing to lose.

"You should not upset yourself, Spencer," she said. "Can we not make peace—
"

"Peace? I shall be quite at peace soon enough, provided there are whores and card games aplenty in hell." He wheezed a laugh. "But you, my dear, shall have your reckoning here in this world." His thin, pale hands moved restlessly over his sunken chest. "Blast it, where is that letter? No matter. You…
sit,
my loving wife. I would not have you swoon."

Eden
's fingers pushed deep into the padding of the chair. "Please, Spencer."

"Very well."
He turned his head slowly, until he could look into her eyes. "A most interesting piece of information came my way not long ago. I debated for some time whether or not to tell you… but it would be cruel to take it with me to my grave." He smiled. "You had a son, Eden. One you and your father failed to mention."

Eden
had mastered the tonnish art of hiding her true feelings. Denial was pointless. "You knew when you married me that I was not untouched."

"Oh, yes. You were no weeping virgin, more's the pity. But I did not know of the child."

"The child—"
My son
.
"It would have made no difference. The child did not survive."

"Oh, but he did. Your son is very much alive."

All at once the rejected chair seemed essential if she wished to remain upright. "Alive?"

"Indeed. It seems that he has been—" He sucked in air, as if it were becoming harder and harder to fill his lungs. "He's been living all these years with peasants in some… filthy hovel."

"But how—" She closed her mouth and struggled for control.
How can that be
?

"You're
an
… excellent actress, Eden, but I can see through you. How can a… a child's own mother not know he is alive?"

Because Papa told me.
And I believed.

"Lies… and… deceptions—" Spencer broke into a fit of coughing that became dry, barking heaves, though he could not have anything left in his stomach to bring up. She hadn't been able to make him eat in days. She knelt by his side and held him until the fit passed, but it seemed to have torn something inside, letting all the force of his life leak out of his body.

"How… tender you are," he said. "You want more. But I… have no more to give."

"Spencer," she said, leaning close. "I beg you. Where is my son?"

His laugh became a rattle.
Eden sprang to her feet and stumbled to the door.

"Doctor," she cried. "Mr. Reynolds. My husband—"

The two men, who had been waiting at the end of the landing, hurried to join her. The doctor swept past her into the room, but the clergyman paused to take her hand.

"Be not troubled, my lady," he said. "He is in God's hands."

She murmured the appropriate response and stood aside to let him follow the doctor. Spencer's breathing was too labored to permit speech. The drone of Mr. Reynolds's voice drifted through the door, extolling the joys of life everlasting.

Eden
composed herself and went to her husband for the last time. She knelt and tried to pray—for Spencer, for herself, and for the son she had never known.
Most of all for her son.
But the prayers were ashes in her mouth, with nothing behind them but convention and the lost faith of childhood.

"My lady."

She looked up at the brush of Mr. Reynolds's hand on her shoulder. "It is over. Your husband is at rest. His pain is ended."

Convention saved her. "Thank you, Mr. Reynolds. I am grateful for the comfort you have given to us." She accepted the clergyman's arm and rose, staring blindly across the landing. Yes, Spencer's pain was ended. She was glad for that measure of mercy.

But my son.
Oh, Spencer, where is my son?

The child she had borne but never knew.
Never held in her arms.
Never rocked to sleep.
The son who had left her womb an aching void.

She started downstairs in a daze. Bailey and several of the maids and footmen stood at the bottom, pale and anxious.

Eden
did not begrudge them their concerns. They had not only lost a master this day but likely their positions as well. As long as Winstowe lived, they had all been able to maintain the fiction that wealth and plenty were endless, money a concern unbefitting such well-placed members of the
ton
.

That fable had reached its inevitable conclusion.

The front door opened before Bailey could perform the service. Aunt Claudia stood on the threshold, rain dripping from her pelisse. She removed it and handed it to the footman, fingers already busy with the ties of her bonnet.

"I came as quickly as I could," she said. "The messenger—" She broke off as she met
Eden's eyes.
"Oh, my dear."
She opened her arms, and
Eden walked into them as she had done so many times for as long as she could remember.

Claudia drew her into the morning room and pressed her into the chaise longue.
"When?"

It was so like her aunt to drive to the heart of the matter. There was something deeply comforting in such practicality. "Only moments ago,"
Eden said. "I was with him."

"I am sorry," Claudia said. But
Eden knew that all her pity was for the living, not the dead.

"Whatever he may have done—whatever you may have thought of him—he did not deserve any of this.
Nor did you.
You cared for him with no thought for yourself during this past month, and you are worn to a nub. There is nothing more you could have done."

"No thought for myself?"
Eden rose and moved with aimless steps toward the marble mantelpiece. "When did I ever do anything with no thought for myself?" She stopped before the ornate mirror hung over the mantel, hardly recognizing the sunken-eyed, brittle creature in the reflection. "We all pay for our follies, do we not?"

"You have paid for your husband's. Now you are free of him."

Claudia's merciless judgment left
Eden cold to the bone. Had this not been her beloved aunt, the woman who was dearer than a mother to her…

The woman whose unsentimental pragmatism was so very reassuring.
Who spoke aloud what
Eden thought and despised
herself
for thinking.

She took a careful breath. "There is at least one folly that is
mine
alone. One that Spencer had no part of." She turned to face her aunt. "He had a farewell gift for me, a final declaration.

"He gave me back my son."

Claudia did not allow her face to show
so
much as a
flicker of astonishment. She had been the one to teach
Eden how to confront the world as if nothing mattered, as if every little trouble could be cast aside with a casual wave of a well-gloved hand and a satirical laugh.

But this she had not expected. The young woman who stood before her was more than merely exhausted and distressed by the long weeks of Spencer's illness and her own preposterous sense of guilt. The drastic changes in the niece Claudia knew—the niece who had most of the
ton
wrapped around her smallest finger—should not have lasted long beyond Spencer's death. Claudia had counted on
Eden's natural resilience.

Now she knew that Spencer had found a way to poison
Eden's life even from beyond the grave. For
Eden's eyes were filled not with returning sanity but with tears of hope.

Ruinous hope.

"Your son?"
Claudia said, rising quickly. She hurried to
Eden's side and took her hand. It felt terribly thin and fragile, as if it might snap with the slightest of pressure. "I do not understand. How could Spencer claim to know such a thing? How could even he be so cruel?"

Eden
shook her head. "I do not care why he told me or how he discovered it. He said that my son is alive, in the countryside, living with some family—" Her desolate gaze took on the first real brilliance it had shown since Spencer's illness.
"My son, dear Aunt.
You and Papa told me he had died."

There was as yet no accusation in her voice. No suspicion, only bewilderment and hesitant joy.

Curse Spencer Winstowe to hell. He'd had the last laugh, it seemed. But he was dead, and Claudia was very much in control.
As she had always been, and always would be.

Denying Spencer's claim would be most unwise.
Eden was confused at the moment, but she had never been dull.

"Sit down, my dear," she said, guiding
Eden back to the chaise. "I see that I must explain what I had hoped to spare you."

Eden
had not been an innocent for many years. All of Society saw her as sophisticated and up to every rig and row. She had survived disappointment and the destruction of each callow, youthful dream, and replaced them with more immediate pleasures.