PortraitofPassion (21 page)

“I don’t know who you mean,” Simon said. He kept his voice
soft. He was vaguely afraid of the unfocused look in her eyes, the pallor of
her skin. He worried she might faint right off the sofa, headfirst into the low
table that separated them.

“Mary Haverty,” she answered, still staring at nothing.
“Your uncle’s whore.”

Simon’s breath left him in a soft whoosh, the hairs at the
back of his neck stood up, and a shiver raced down his spine. He shot his gaze
to the painting.

Lady Mary Haverty of Cambridgeshire.
Her mother.
Beatrice’s mother was,
is
Mary Haverty, the Earl of Dunston’s daughter.

“Your uncle’s whore
.”

Simon’s mind whirled, gathering together all the missing
pieces of the puzzle that was Beatrice.

“My mother was raised to be a proper lady.”

“Until she fell in love with your father who was already
married.”

“Bea’s parents loved one another, passionately, devotedly
until the day her father died.”

Simon dragged his eyes from the painting.

“That crumbling old fountain purchased my bread and
butter for years.”

He forced himself to look at his aunt to find her silently
watching him. Her eyes no longer appeared unfocused. She regarded him with what
could only be disgust.

“You had to have her, just like your uncle. Just like your
father,” she hissed. “Better you than Henry.”

Simon’s entire body jerked at her words. His nerveless
fingers released the snifter he held. As if in slow motion, he watched it fall
to the ground, its contents spilling across the pale rug before it rolled under
his chair.

Simon fell back against the chair, his arms hanging limp at
his sides. He concentrated on breathing, on drawing air into his lungs and
letting it out again. Slowly. Calm, he must remain calm.

“That was her intention,” his aunt said, her voice low and
raspy, her breathing choppy. Simon watched in fascination as her eyes darted
about. She looked dazed, as if she was not quite certain where she was. “She
set out to seduce Henry in Paris. Would have succeeded had I not called him
home. Did she think I did not know people in Paris? That I would not hear of
her attempts to lure my son into her scheming arms? Her filthy, perverted
arms?”

Simon thought he might be sick, thought he might vomit onto
his feet. He tried to will his body to move, to get up, to walk from the room.
He did not want to hear any more. He did not want to hear the truth in her
words.

“She is a degenerate whore like her mother before her.” His
aunt’s snarl dragged him from his dark thoughts. “Mary Haverty seduced her way
through half the gentlemen of London, including your uncle and your father. The
whore’s bastard attempted to seduce my son, my Henry, her own brother.”

Simon heard her words as if through a long tunnel, his gaze
fastened on to her pale face with such force that he no longer seemed to have
any peripheral vision at all. All he could see was her face, her thin lips
moving, spewing filth and venom. All he could hear was her rasping voice, low
and harsh.

“That whore seduced my fiancé, tried to prevent him from
marrying me. When she failed she tried to keep him shackled to her with her
lust and perversion, to keep him from getting an heir on me. She made sure she
bore him a child, hoped it would be a boy, thought in her delusional mind that
somehow her bastard would be his heir. But God thwarted her and gave her that
girl. And I thwarted her. I took him to my bed every night without fail,
allowing him to paw and prod and grunt over me, producing one stillborn baby
and that useless girl until finally I gave him an heir.”

Simon wanted to protest, to tell her that Olivia was not
useless, that the earl had loved her. But had he? Simon realized he had not
known his uncle Hastings at all. He had thought him a good man, a devoted
family man, like his father.

“My father,” he gasped.

His aunt’s gray eyes narrowed, focusing all her attention,
all her fury on him.

“My sister’s choice of husband was no better than my own.
Your father and Hastings were friends since childhood. They were cut from the
same cloth. They shared her,” she said. Simon saw a smile come to her lips,
watched as she laughed softly at the shocked jerk of his body. “They shared
each other. She cast a spell upon them, or maybe she simply saw how they loved
one another, how they lived in each other’s pockets, saw what was lurking in the
deepest recesses of their hearts and drew it out into the light.”

Simon’s mind seemed to shutter, to release him from his
stupor. He jumped to his feet, stumbled, and knocked his knee into the low
table. He stood there glaring down at her, his heart thumping painfully in his
chest, his hands fisted.

“No,” he moaned.

“I wondered if perhaps her bastard was Easton’s rather than
his. All these years I wondered, and prayed.”

“No,” he shouted at her, spittle flying from his lips.

“No,” she agreed with a sad shake of her head. “I had only
to see her, had only to look at her blonde curls, her brown eyes and that
dimple when she smiles to know my prayers went unanswered.”

“Why?” he demanded, leaning over her.

“Come, Easton,” she whispered and Simon shivered in revulsion
as her tongue darted out to lick her thin lips. Up close he could see that her
lips were dry and cracked, her skin was pasty with a green sheen to it. And her
eyes, her gray eyes were so pale as to be almost transparent, the whites red.
He straightened and took a quick step back, his eyes never leaving her face.

“You’re an intelligent man, for all that you are ruled by
the monster in your trousers like the rest of them. Surely you have figured it
out. Do you really require me to spell it out for you?”

Simon realized he did not need her to spell it out. It was
so obvious he wondered that he did not see it from the first moment his aunt
began to speak.

“It is a common story. The house was not ours. It was
entailed. It went to the next male in the line, a man, a boy really, whom I had
never met, whom I did not even know existed until then.”

“I have a family in Rome. I want to bring them home.”

“What need have I for a husband?”

“I have come for my home.”

Simon staggered away from her, walked as if in a trance to
stand looking up at the painting, at the small scrawled signature in the
corner.
B. Morgan.

“Bea,” he whispered, pain rushing in to mingle with the
horror and rage in his mind, in his heart, in his soul. He blocked it out,
pushed the pain back. He would not allow it. It was all he could do to remain
on his feet with the fury and revulsion coursing through his veins.

He reached up and tore the painting from the wall, beating
it against the brick mantel, tearing it, ripping it, shredding it until the ruined
canvas hung in long strips, clinging to the gold frame. With a shouted curse he
threw the painting away from him and spun to face his aunt once more.

Lady Hastings sat where he had left her, her head turned on
her impossibly thin neck to watch him. Her lips were moving, silently laughing.
He saw the merry light in her eyes and realized it pleased her to see his
distress, to see him lose his control.

“The house,” he whispered. His lips felt stiff, unmovable.
He worked to get the words out, to be done with this tale of horror and lust
and greed.

“So you have worked it all out.” He watched in fascinated
disgust as she brought her hands, her pale, cracked hands, up and together. She
clapped them together, once, twice, three times, giggling like a young girl.

“It was the house, always and ever, it was about that
derelict old estate.” She said the words around her laughter. “She seduced you
for a rundown cottage and some acreage. She would have seduced her own brother.
But my Henry wasn’t enticed by her wanton ways so she turned her lust on you.
All for Idyllwild.”

“Idyllwild,” Simon whispered.

“Idyllwild.” Lady Hastings nearly spit the words from her
trembling lips. “The estate where he had hidden them away for nearly twenty
years. Idyllwild, where that whore lured them with her wicked ways. My husband
and your father.”

“Your father was a second father to me.”

“My God, you are so like him.”

“My father came to you,” Simon said as he slowly walked back
to stand before his aunt.

“Yes, your father came to me after his whore begged him with
hands and lips and body to help her. His whore spun a tale of a promise, an
agreement to allow her bastard to live her life at Idyllwild. Of course I
refused. There had never been any such agreement. It was all his whore’s lies.
And when I refused, the whore’s git went to him thinking her young, nubile body
would prompt him to try harder to convince me. She seduced him right there in
your mother’s house.”

“No,” Simon breathed, the word so soft he barely heard his
own voice.

His aunt must have read the word upon his stiff lips. She
giggled again before replying, “Your mother walked in to find his whore’s girl
on her knees between your father’s legs using all the skills her mother had
taught her.”

Simon shook his head slowly from side to side, trying
without success to rid his mind of the image of a young Beatrice kneeling
before his father, her lips and her mouth upon his flesh, and the shocked look
that must have been upon his mother’s face.

Lady Hastings rose to her feet, carefully skirted around the
low table and walked silently toward the door. She turned around then to look
across the room at her nephew.

“I have stopped her from getting her hands on Idyllwild.
While you were wallowing in her polluted flesh, I have kept Henry’s inheritance
safe. She thought to blackmail me, threatened to tell all to Henry. Well, I
have thwarted her devious scheme. I have told Henry the truth. All will be well
again.”

She smiled at him as if waiting for his praise. Simon simply
stood staring at her until, with a shrug, she turned and walked from the room.
He stood rooted to the ground, unable to move, unable to calm the racing of his
heart, the rasp of his breath, the rage and horror thundering through his
blood.

As if from far away he heard the front door close. He threw
back his head and howled. He reached out and knocked candlesticks and vases off
the mantel. He spun around and kicked over a chair, reached down and upended
the table, sending it flying across the room to crash into the wall.

He bent over, grasping his knees with his trembling hands,
his head hanging down. He dragged air into his starving lungs, willed his
heartbeat to cease racing, willed his mind to clear.

He lurched over to the sideboard, grabbed the bottle of
brandy and stumbled down the hall into his study. He fell into the chair behind
his desk, raised the bottle to his lips and poured the warm liquid down his
throat.

Simon sat alone in his study, drinking from the brandy
bottle, thoughts and images of the last weeks reeling around in his
increasingly inebriated mind.

In his drunken state, he finally fixed upon the cold, hard
truth. Beatrice had befriended Henry in order to force him to gift her with her
precious Idyllwild, whether by seduction, coercion or blackmail.

Beatrice had recognized Simon’s suspicions and seduced him
into complacency. She had traded her body, her luscious, ripe body for a house
in the country.

Simon barked out a laugh. He had the deed to just such a
house sitting on the desk in his room. He looked up at the clock on the wall,
squinted until it came into focus. Just after midnight, he saw with some
surprise. It seemed that his aunt had been here for hours, when in fact it
could not have been more than twenty minutes.

She would be asleep. Too bad, he thought viciously.

“Jacobs!” he yelled as he ran, stumbling up the stairs,
banging his shins, gripping the railing to hold himself up. “Jacobs, have a
horse saddled!” He heard his butler’s faint agreement from the back of the
house.

In less than ten minutes he was riding through the crowded
streets of London, dodging carriages carrying ladies and gentleman to and from
the night’s events. A cool wind whipped around him, carried by the dark storm
clouds gathering in the night, blowing away a measure of his drunken rage,
leaving behind a cold, hard clarity.

Beatrice would answer for her lies, he thought savagely.

He stopped outside Moorehead’s stables, hoping that Gerald
would come to take the reins of his horse. He would like nothing better than to
satisfy his anger by pummeling the man to a pulp. Sleeping in the stables! What
a fool he had been. What a deluded lust-crazed fool he had been. A lovesick
fool, his heart whispered. Simon pushed the soft thought away. He was a fool no
longer, lust-crazed or lovesick.

An older groom came shuffling from the dark stables,
snapping his suspenders up over his wrinkled shirt.

“My lord.” The man made to tip his hat before realizing he
had forgotten to don one. He turned the motion into a small salute.

“Keep my horse ready.” Simon shoved the reins into his hands
and took off at a run toward the back door of the house. He knew it would be
unlocked. It was the very same door through which he had stealthily entered
nearly every night for the past two weeks. He laughed softly, bitterly,
remembering his careful consideration of Beatrice’s reputation.

Christ, he thought as he slowed his steps upon reaching the
long, quiet hall inside. Her reputation. He had been the only one to believe
she might still have a reputation to protect. He had thought he was so much
smarter than everyone else. He had thought that he knew the real Beatrice. All
along she had been the whore the ladies had whispered of behind their fans, the
whore the men had openly ogled wherever she went.