Marguerite Kaye - Regency Surrender - Notorious Secrets - The Soldier's Dark Secret / The Soldier's Rebel Lover

‘Good, then that is our starting premise.’ Jack pulled out another sheet of paper. ‘So, what else do we know? First, your mother was English. Second, she gave birth to you in France in 1790, so she must have gone there at some point before. I don’t suppose you know your place of birth?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Or your mother’s maiden name? Is there a certificate of her marriage to Henri Marmion?’

She shook her head again. ‘The number of things I don’t know are considerably greater than the number that I do. I don’t even know where they were married, so church records aren’t available as a source of information.’

‘Then you won’t know if she was married previously?’

‘You need not spare my blushes. I have already said I must assume that I am illegitimate,’ Celeste said brusquely. ‘That is the only explanation for my mother’s insistence that she had no family—everyone has family, hers obviously disowned her, and since she was a woman—’ She broke off, struck by a sudden flash of memory. ‘My mother once said to me that a woman’s reputation was all she had. In her letter she wrote that the love she had for the man who sired me was the source of her downfall. The implications are clear enough.’

‘Sired? You speak of your father as if he means nothing to you?’

‘I obviously meant nothing to him. I am merely reciprocating his indifference.’

Jack picked up the letter again. ‘“Your father would have loved you, of that I am sure,”’ he read. “‘He too would have been proud of you.”’

Celeste crossed her arms. ‘That is the kind of soft soap a mother would write to console a bastard child, don’t you think?’

Jack made no reply.

‘You think that I am callous.’

‘I think,’ he said carefully, ‘that perhaps your father never knew of your existence. “Your father would have loved you” is what your mother writes. Would have , implying he was for some reason prevented from having the opportunity to do so.’

It had not occurred to her to interpret her mother’s words thus. A veteran of parental rejection, she had assumed that this was yet another case in point. Would her father have loved her? It didn’t bear thinking about. ‘It is hardly relevant,’ Celeste said, steeling herself, ‘since he is in all likelihood dead.’

Jack consulted the letter again. ‘Your mother mentions “tragic consequences” resulting from the “impossible choice” she had to make?’

‘Tragic can only mean a death. I think we must assume it refers to my natural father.’ Saying it aloud brought a lump to Celeste’s throat.

‘Talking of fathers, tell me what you know of Henri Marmion.’

‘I don’t see what Henri has to do with anything.’

Jack sighed. ‘Then it’s as well you asked me to read this letter, because it’s perfectly plain to me that he must have loved your mother a great deal. Think about the circumstances for a moment, Celeste. Your mother is in dire straits of some sort. She’s alone, with an infant child and no family, in a strange country. By 1794, simply the fact that she was English would have put her on a list of suspicious characters, and it would have been impossible for her to escape France. To marry her was to take an enormous personal risk, and Marmion not only married her, but it sounds as though he cut himself off from his own friends and family in order to keep you both safe. A man doesn’t do that unless he’s deep in love or perhaps deep in debt.’

‘He was a schoolteacher. He was a very educated man, but he taught at the village school. He could read and write Greek and Latin, he could quote so many of the Classics, but he—he hid his erudition. I could never understand it. One of the many things I could never fathom.’

‘Did he ever mention his family?’

‘Not that I remember, but then Henri rarely talked to me. I think he came from Cahors, in the south-west. I don’t know how I remember that. His accent, perhaps.’ Celeste shook her head, as if doing so would clear the tangled web that her past seemed to have become. ‘He was so distant. I can’t imagine that he was capable of love. I never saw any sign of affection between them. Besides, my mother claims to have loved my natural father. She made her choice for love, according to her letter.’

‘Celeste, do you not think that makes Henri Marmion’s behaviour more understandable rather than less so? To love, and never to have that love returned, would that not make a man distant? To see the evidence of his wife’s true love in the form of her child—her only child—would that not eventually turn a loving husband into an embittered one?’

Celeste dropped her head on to her hands. ‘Stop it! You are turning everything upside down. I don’t know! Dammit, I am not going to cry again. ’

She jumped to her feet, thumping her fist into her open palm, and paced over to the window. ‘You know, I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I cried before I came to England. Even before boarding school, I learnt that tears were futile, and at school—well, you learn very quickly that it is better not to show weakness. And now I seem to be weeping constantly. Eight months since my mother died, and only now am I beginning to appreciate that she really is gone. It doesn’t make sense.

‘You can never understand, you with your idyllic childhood here, growing up knowing how much you were loved, you can have no idea what it was like for me. Those miserable days at school, those cold little notes Maman wrote to me there about the weather, and the fishing, and—and nothing about her. Nothing about missing me. She didn’t love me, I have known that for a long time.’

‘I think she did.’

She jerked her head round to look at him. ‘How can you possibly say that?’

‘The locket. Worn round her neck every day of her life. Her only possession treasured enough to leave to you. Containing portraits of you and her, so close they are almost touching when the clasp is closed. A mother and her only daughter. Just because she never demonstrated her love doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. That locket tells me it was very real.’

Celeste dropped her head on to the cool of the window glass. When Jack put his arms around her waist, she resisted the urge to lean back into the comfort of his arms. She did not deserve comfort. This time the urge to confess outweighed the shame of what she must say. ‘I had not seen her for a year before she died. The last time—the last time...’

She kept her eyes on the garden through the window glass which was misting over with her breath. ‘Yesterday, when I said that she didn’t give me a chance, it was a lie. Just after Henri died, Maman came to Paris. She told me that now she had done her duty by Henri, she wanted to heal the rift between us. I—I—I was angry with her. I told her that she had made her choice when she sent me off to boarding school at his behest. She did not protest very much. I presumed that the offer was more of a token than— No, I won’t make excuses.’

Celeste turned around, facing Jack unflinchingly. ‘I sent her packing. I could not forgive her for choosing Henri over me. When I was ten years old, I begged Maman not to send me away, but she chose to do what Henri wanted. Because she owed him our lives, she did as he asked, the letter says. Perhaps if I’d given her a chance that day in Paris, she would have explained it to me, but I did not. We were estranged for a long time but that last year, our estrangement was my fault alone. I feel such guilt. You would not understand such guilt. There is a part of me, you know, that thinks I deserve to suffer now. A part of me that thinks I do not deserve answers. Jack, I don’t want you to be under the misapprehension that I’m an innocent victim.’