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Sam sat back and stared at her. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“You see, I never forgot you, Sam. You carried a piece of my heart, whether you knew it or not, and I always liked to know where it was.”
His own heart swelled a little and flooded him with warmth. “You never cease to surprise me, Willie. With your full life-the salons, the gaiety, the luxury-I never imagined you spared a thought for me.”
“You have never been far from my thoughts, Sam. Just as you said earlier this afternoon, one never forgets one’s first love.”
Her words moved Sam more than she could possibly imagine, and the fact that she had followed his career so closely must mean that she still cared for him, even a little, despite all that had happened between them. But it was the way she looked at him when she said it, the melting heat in her eyes, that was almost his undoing.
He looked around at the other occupants of the room. A group of four men sat at one end of a long table, laughing and talking loudly, clanking their tankards together as they proceeded to get drunk. A quieter pair at the opposite end played a game of backgammon, and two elderly chaps had pulled chairs close to the hearth, where they sat and dozed. A middle-aged couple of matching stout proportions in one of the other alcoves silently shared a large currant pudding.
Sam and Willie had been private enough in their own alcove, but there were some things he wanted to say, and do, without the possibility of an audience. He could not in good conscience ask to go to her bedchamber, though God knew he wanted nothing more. Since his own room was little more than a garret with a narrow bed and a thin pallet, the best he could do was to take her outside, into the moonlight.
She accepted his invitation, and within a few minutes, under the bright full moon, they were seated on an old tomb in the churchyard where they had walked earlier. He wanted to kiss her again, but kept thinking of tomorrow and Miss Fullbrook and her family’s expectations. But that was tomorrow. For tonight, he was with Willie. And she looked so beautiful in the moonlight that he was not sure he would be able to keep his hands off her.
Every time he’d seen her, even that first time when he was so furious and heartsick at how she had degraded herself, he’d still wanted her. He’d wanted to possess her, body and soul, just as he had at eighteen. But too many others had possessed her, and his pride-and pain-would not allow him even to consider it.
Until ten years ago, when he’d been prepared to toss aside all his fine scruples for her.
And here he was now, wanting her again, on fire for her again, and a whole new set of scruples niggled at the edges of his conscience. Those scruples kept him talking. Talking was safer than kissing. And so their conversation, which had continued with few interruptions since shortly after noon, the conversation that had been more than twenty years in the making, continued as they sat side by side on the tomb of some poor unknown soul.
“Tell me about Tom,” she said.
He smiled, and was sure his pride gleamed bright in his eyes. “He’s a wonderful boy. A young man, I should say. He’s nineteen, and already a lieutenant making a name for himself in the lists. He was active in the blockades, and is now in the East Indies, the Java Sea.”
“Do you see him often?”
“Not often enough. The problem with a naval career is that one is never in one place for very long. I missed so much of his childhood. After his mother died, he went to live with her sister’s family in Somerset. But he was sea-mad even then, and bristled at being away from the shore. He wrote plaintive letters begging to be taken aboard ship, to train for a midshipman’s berth. I finally capitulated when he was twelve. Within two years he was wearing a midshipman’s jacket. And passed the lieutenant’s exam when he was seventeen. His will be a more traditional career than my own. He will no doubt achieve admiral before he’s forty.”
She smiled wistfully. “You should see your face when you speak of him. You are such a proud papa.”
He laughed. “I am indeed. He’s a good son. A good-looking boy. As tall as me, though still too thin. All elbows and knees, long-legged and lanky.”
“Just like his father was at that age.”
Sam smiled and nodded. “He even has my coloring. Not a trace of poor Sarah in him, except now and then about the mouth. I wish we’d had more children, perhaps a daughter with Sarah’s fair coloring. But it was not meant to be, I suppose. And what of you, Willie? Any children tucked away somewhere?”
Her face paled slightly, save for two bright splashes of color high on her cheeks, and he felt her stiffen beside him. A frown marked her brow, and Sam knew he had said the wrong thing. They had once talked, in the way young lovers do, of having a brood of perfect children, pretty little girls and mischievous boys. Willie had wanted children. But perhaps she had discovered she was barren. Or had lost a child. Or, because a child would have been an inconvenience in her style of life, she might have had children and given them away to be raised by others. Whatever the reason, he had certainly trod on unwelcome ground. Damnation. He would have bitten off his tongue if he could, for he might have just ruined a near-perfect evening with his clumsy inquiry.
“I’m sorry, Willie. I should not have asked. It is none of my business. Let us talk of other things. Tell me about this charity you’re so involved with.”
Uneasiness showed in the tightening of her jaw and the nervous fidgeting of her hands. She held her mouth in a grim line for a long, uncomfortably silent moment, and then, in a voice barely above a whisper, said, “I had a child, once.”
Ah, Willie. Had?
“But she was born early and did not live even an hour.”
“I’m so sorry, Willie.”
“I named her Samantha.”
He suddenly felt the blood drain from his face, and his throat went dry. “Samantha?” he choked.
“After her father.”
He buckled, as though punched in the stomach, and a sound like a wail poured out of him. “Noooooo. Oh no, Willie, my love. It was our child?”
She nodded.
“Oh God.” He wrapped his arms around his waist as though to hold in the pain. “That’s why you left Porthruan, isn’t it? That’s why your mother chucked you out of her house? Because you were pregnant with my child.”
She nodded again.
He grabbed her roughly into his arms, buried his face against her neck, and held her tight. For several long moments, they each gave in to pain and grief-silent, sorrowful, heartbreaking grief for a child whose death they ought to have mourned together twenty-four years ago.
And Sam grieved for more than the loss of a child. Against the smooth skin of her neck, he muttered, “It pains me that you went through all that alone, Willie. I wish more than anything that I had been with you, that I could have shared the burden of grief with you.”
“I wanted that baby so much,” she whispered, “for it was all I would ever have of you. To lose her so soon after losing you was almost more than I could bear.”
“And because you had lain with me, because I made you with child, you were thrown out into the world without resources. Ah, Willie. No wonder you took the course you did.”
She lifted her head from his shoulder and backed away slightly so that he had to loosen his arms. But he did not let go. He wasn’t ready to let her go.
“Do not blame yourself for my scandalous career, Sam. It was my choice to become a demirep. When I recovered-it was a difficult, premature birth that might have killed me if I hadn’t been so young and healthy-I clung to James as the only friend I had in the world. He had been kind to me, extraordinarily kind, and I repaid him by becoming his mistress. There was no turning back after that.”
“But you would never have been forced to make that choice if I hadn’t seduced you in that damned hayloft.”