One Night With A Prince (31 page)

“Don’t be impertinent, boy,” the woman declared, though her affection came through in every syllable.

“You’re not too big that I can’t still rap your knuckles.”

That brought a reluctant smile to his lips. He turned to Christabel. “That was Mother’s favorite punishment—knuckle-rapping. It’s a miracle I can even hold a deck of cards.”

“Indeed it is, since I had to rap them often enough, you rapscallion,” his mother retorted. “Now go on, get that water.” She coughed. “I’m growing more parched by the moment. And I could use some of that good brown bread I had at supper, too. Fetch it for me from the kitchen, will you?”

Byrne eyed her askance, but released Christabel’s arm and headed for the door. Just as he reached it, however, his mother called out, “Don’t you dare stand outside listening. I want a full jug of water and a nice slab of bread and butter. If you don’t produce it in fifteen minutes, I’ll know you’ve been eavesdropping.”

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Byrne cast Christabel a wry smile. “She knows me well.”

As soon as he was gone, his mother said, “Sit down, Lady Haversham.”

Her commanding tone with its faint hint of an Irish burr reminded Christabel so much of Byrne that she couldn’t help smiling as she took a seat in the chair nearest the bed.

“Now tell me,” Mrs. Byrne went on, “why is a woman of your station with my son?”

That wiped the smile off Christabel’s face. What was she to say? How much would Byrne want her to say?

She went on the offensive. “Why shouldn’t I be with him? He’s a charming man and a hard worker—”

“Not something most marchionesses admire.”

“I was a general’s daughter long before I was a marchioness. So Ido happen to admire a man willing to work hard.”

Mrs. Byrne digested that a moment, coughing behind her hand. “But that doesn’t explain why you’re here with him when you could be moving in the highest levels of society.”

Oh, if the woman only knew. Christabel tried for the most innocuous answer. “Your son has been helping me regain something my late husband…er…lost through gambling.”

“So the marquess lost money at the Blue Swan, did he?”

“Yes, but that’s not—”

“And you mean to pay off the debt by sharing my son’s bed.”

“No!” Christabel jumped to her feet. “I wouldnever share a man’s bed for money. And you insult your son by even implying that he would take advantage of a widow in such a scurrilous fashion.”

“True.” Those sharp eyes assessed her from the shadows. “So you aren’t sharing his bed.”

Christabel blushed, unsure how to tell a man’s mother that she was his mistress. “I…well…it’s just that…”

“You don’t have to answer. I can guess that much.” When Christabel groaned, she added in a dry rasp of a voice, “I’m not a fool, you know. I’ve heard about my son’s mistresses. Not from him, mind you—a man doesn’t tell his mother such things, after all. But there’s always the scandal rags, and Ada goes into Bath often to hear the gossip.”

Mrs. Byrne paused to cough. “The thing is, Gavin has never brought one of his women to meet me, never even asked to introduce one to me. Never, do you hear?”

Christabel wanted badly to take heart at that, but she didn’t dare. “I hate to disappoint you, but his bringing me here means nothing. He had no choice. He was forced into it.”

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Mrs. Byrne surprised her by laughing. “Forced? Gavin? Have you ever known my son to be forced into anything?”

That gave Christabel pause. “No.”

“He brought you here because he wanted to, whether he admits it or not. So now I want to know why. What exactly do you mean to him?”

“I wish I knew,” Christabel answered woefully. “But I really have no idea.”

“Then tell me whathe means toyou .”

That brought Christabel up short. What did Byrne mean to her? Merely a way of getting invited to Lord Stokely’s party? Clearly not, since she’d started sharing his bed long after the invitation had arrived. He was her lover, yes, but he meant more than that, more than she wanted. More than she feared he could ever reciprocate.

“I can’t answer that…either.” She couldn’t keep her voice from cracking.

“Do you love him?” Mrs. Byrne asked, her raspy tone substantially softer than before. Christabel’s throat felt tight and raw. “If I do, I’m a fool. Because he will never love me back.”

“Nonsense.” She coughed a moment. “He fell in love with that idiot Anna, so how could he help falling in love with a sweet girl like you?”

She blinked. “But only a few minutes ago you implied—”

“I wanted to be sure of you, that’s all. I trust Gavin not to choose a fool, but he is still a man and susceptible to pretty women.”

“Not as susceptible as pretty women are to him,” Christabel muttered. His mother laughed. “True, true. The man has a way with women, I’ll grant you. But none has ever touched his heart. If you mean to do it, then you should know some things about him.” She gestured toward the fireplace. “There’s a candle over there, dear. Light it and bring it here.”

Sucking in a breath, Christabel did as Mrs. Byrne asked. As she approached the bed, the light from the candle fell full on the woman.

Though she’d half expected to find such a thing, Mrs. Byrne’s face was so hideously disfigured that Christabel couldn’t keep a gasp from escaping her lips, though she then tried to mask it with a cough.

“Stop that silly coughing, girl,” the woman snapped. “I have a mirror—I know what I look like.”

“I’m sorry—” Christabel began.

“Don’t be. These burns are my badge of honor for saving my son. I wear them with pride.” Her scarred lips twisted into a half smile. “Most of the time, anyway.”

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Now that she could see the woman better, Christabel was horrified at the pain Mrs. Byrne must have suffered to have such scars. Her ears were half-gone, and no hair grew on her scalp, which was simply a misshapen mass of healed flesh. “I heard that you were in a fire, but I cannot imagine how you managed to…”

“Live through it? That was hard, I’ll grant you, but I was determined not to die. I couldn’t leave Gavin with no one in the world.”

“Then why did you let everyone believe you dead?”

“It’s a long story.” The woman beckoned her to sit on the bed. Taking the candle from her, Mrs. Byrne set it on the bedside table. “You see, right after the fire, there was a great deal of confusion. After I carried Gavin out, I collapsed. He didn’t rouse for a few minutes, and by then I’d been taken off to St. Bartholomew’s with others from the fire. They told him I was dead—most of those who survived the fire did die later, and we were unrecognizable when they carried us to the hospital. Indeed, it took weeks for me to recover enough to be able to speak my name and ask about him.”

Mrs. Byrne took her hand, and now Christabel could see that it wasn’t gnarled with age but twisted from the fire. “By the time I could find out about him,” the woman continued, “he was living with a blackleg who’d taken him under his wing, and he was doing all right. I thought he’d be better off without a crippled and disfigured mother to support. So I ordered the people at the hospital not to say anything to him about me.”

“Then how—”

She gave a rueful smile. “The boy is too clever for his own good, that’s how. It was nearly a year before I could even leave St. Bartholomew’s. Then a widowed nurse there offered me a place to stay in her cottage in the country. She had a chance at a lucrative position as nurse to a fine lady, but she couldn’t bring her babe with her, so I agreed to be the child’s nursemaid.”

Her hand squeezed Christabel’s painfully. “But I couldn’t leave London without seeing my own dear boy. I didn’t mean for him to see me, too, truly I didn’t.” She coughed a moment. “I went to the races in a hooded cloak, and I stayed well out of his way to watch him work, my fine strong lad, running an E-O

table as if he’d been born to it, coaxing the country bumpkins into betting.”

She shook her head. “Unfortunately, the races are a rough place for any woman, much less one like me, hobbling with a cane and dressed oddly. Some fool pulled down my hood to see what I looked like. You can imagine the reaction of those around me—a lot of silly screaming and such.” Tears welled in her eyes. “But my boy…he just came up and pulled the hood back in place. ‘There you go, miss,’ he said.

‘Don’t you pay attention to that lot of fools.’”

Christabel was crying by then, too, the tears falling heedlessly down her cheeks.

“I only said ‘Thank you, my boy.’ But it was enough for him to realize who I was, to put everything together. You should have seen the two of us then, hugging and laughing and carrying on. People thought we were mad.” She let go of Christabel’s hand to wipe at her eyes with the sheet. “Look at me—it’s been years, and it still turns me into a sniffling fool to remember it.”

“That’s all right,” Christabel whispered. “Who wouldn’t cry over a story like that?” Drawing out her handkerchief, she dabbed at her own tears, then handed the square of linen to Mrs. Byrne.
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Mrs. Byrne blew her nose. “Gavin would laugh at us for crying, you know.”

“Probably. Men don’t understand.” She waited until the woman had composed herself, then added, “So what happened then?”

“That’s when I made him swear not to tell anyone I was alive. I told him I would disappear, and he’d see me no more if he didn’t swear it. So he swore, the poor dear boy, and I went out to the country to live in Ada’s cottage—she was the nurse, you see. And Gavin stayed in town.”

“But why? You could have lived in town with him. You could have worn a wig and veil and gloves if people’s reaction to your appearance bothered you.”

She coughed into the handkerchief. “That’s not why I wanted us to live apart. It was hard enough for Gavin before the fire, hearing people call me ‘the Irish whore.’ I told him it didn’t matter as long as we both knew I wasn’t one, but it mattered to him as soon as he was old enough to understand it. He got into fights over it, constantly in trouble for defending my honor to shopkeepers and idiots in taverns who bloodied his nose for his trouble.”

Christabel gave the woman a half smile. “He is still rather…er…sensitive about the term.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. Only think how much worse it would have been if he’d had to hear people talk their nonsense about his mother being punished by fire for her sins. They said such things after they thought me dead, but once a person’s gone, gossip fades.” A cough wracked her. “If they’d known I was alive, he’d have had to hear it daily, to witness how people took my disfigurement, to endure the silly jokes about the ‘burned Mrs. Byrne.’”

At Christabel’s groan, she added, “You’ve heard it, too, haven’t you? People are cruel sometimes. And I knew he’d need every ounce of his strength and will to survive in London. If he were a man alone, rootless, free, he might do it, but if he had me to take care of—”

“But he was only a boy,” Christabel protested. “Twelve is so very young.”

“Not for Gavin. He’d already spent months taking care of himself, already found a way to support himself. I couldn’t help him in London—I could only be a burden to him. As it was, I was lucky I could care for myself at Ada’s cottage.”

“You could have taken him with you to the country.”

“To do what? Labor in the fields? Serve as apprentice to a blacksmith? He was too clever for that, too ambitious. And while Ada could earn enough as a nurse for me and her babe, she couldn’t support him, too.”

Her lips tightened into a grim line. “Do you think I liked being apart from my son? Living from monthly visit to monthly visit? Not knowing whether he was hungry or hurt or—” She broke off with a raspy cough. “But look at him now. Would he have come so far if I hadn’t left? I don’t think so.”

Christabel wasn’t so sure, but she’d never been in a situation where she had to make such a hard choice. What would she have done?

Mrs. Byrne’s voice filled with pride. “He grew up to be a fine, strapping man, a true son of a prince.”

She patted Christabel’s hand. “You know about his father, don’t you?”

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“Yes. Byrne, however, doesn’t seem so pleased by the connection.”

She sighed. “I know. He blames Prinny for everything.”

“He has good reason.”

“Perhaps. But he doesn’t see that his suffering and mine made him what he is—strong, fierce. Who would he have been if Prinnyhad kept up the annuity? An actress’s bastard son, that’s all, living off the fruits of his birth. But now he owns his own club, and he’s done so well that he bought this place so I could—”

“—banish yourself to the outskirts of Bath,” Byrne said from the doorway. Entering with the jug of water and a plate, he glanced from the candle fully illuminating his mother’s face to Christabel’s damp cheeks, then added gruffly, “Have you been telling her the whole sad tale, Mother?”

“She had to,” Christabel retorted. “Younever would.”

“I couldn’t.” He strode over to the bed. “I made a vow.”

“You see?” Mrs. Byrne remarked. “Isn’t he a good son?”

“A very good son,” Christabel answered, her heart full as she watched him set the plate on the bedside table, then fill the cup with water.

He sat down in the chair Christabel had left and flashed both a rakish smile. “Keep that under your hat, or you’ll destroy my reputation for ruthlessness. Then I’ll have gentlemen refusing to pay their debts right and left.” He winked at Christabel. “Or sending their wives out to shoot me.”

“Byrne,” Christabel warned him, “don’t you dare—”

“That’s how we met,” he said, pure mischief shining in his eyes. “Lady Haversham shot at me when I came to collect on her late husband’s debt.”

“Did she really?” Mrs. Byrne chuckled. “That explains why you went after her. Your philosophy has always been if you can’t beat them, bed them.”