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.
But she had not grown quite impervious enough. She was still capable of feeling betrayed.
“You knew?” she asked in a whisper.
“No. I only suspected.” Claudia gazed down at her hands as if reluctant to speak. “I know you do not remember much of what happened during the child’s birth. You were delirious, and it was not going well. My brother—your father—insisted upon employing the services of a local midwife rather than a physician. The woman sent me from the room when the child was born, despite all my pleas to stay by your side.” She looked up, allowing sorrow to shadow her eyes. “Afterward your father came to tell me that he had spoken to the woman, and that the child… had not survived.” She reached for Eden’s hand. “I could not bring myself to doubt him, though deception… had occurred to me. I never saw the child—or the midwife—again.”
Eden’s profile was bleak. “My father?”
“If he deceived you, my sweet child, it was for the best. You were… very ill before and after the child’s birth. You wanted nothing to do with its father. And Lord Bradwell himself was… not well.”
She saw that point strike home. Eden never showed that she missed her father. He had been half mad ever since that night at the inn on the way to Gretna Green.
In the year after Eden’s marriage to Winstowe, Lord Bradwell had gambled and caroused his way through his fortune and all his unentailed lands. Claudia remembered how he’d deteriorated, driven by guilt and shame, only to disappear from sight and cut off all contact with his only child. He was rumored to be dead, or living in exile on the continent. Even Lord Bradwell’s solicitor had no news of him. Eden had stopped inquiring years ago.
“He gave my son away,” Eden said. “That changes nothing. I must find him.”
“Find your son?” Or your father? Thank God that either will be nearly impossible. “Did Spencer tell you where to look for him?”
“No. It does not matter. I shall find him.”
“But why, Eden?” Claudia leaned close, filling her voice with sympathetic persuasion. “Think of the child. Surely he is better off wherever he is, among those who raised him. Whatever his reasons, your father would have seen to it that he went to a good and decent family, with means enough to raise him properly. He does not know you—”
“I am his mother.”
“And who was his father?”
Stricken, Eden closed her eyes. “You think I could not love him because—” She shook her head. “You are wrong.” She opened her eyes again and held Claudia’s gaze, her elegantly curved brows drawn in an expression that was almost savage. “Can you think that I am the same naive girl who came to London five years ago? After all you have taught me?”
Claudia could not mistake the edge of mockery in her voice. The cynicism of lost innocence underlay everything Lady Eden did, everything she was.
Except in the matter of her resurrected child.
“You know nothing of children,” Claudia said with deliberate coldness. “You never behaved as if you wanted any.”
“There are still things you do not know about me, Aunt.”
But I know that in five years of marriage, Spencer never gave you a child. I believe I know why. Yet none of the lovers did, either.
God knew that she had taught Eden to be careful.
“A woman alone,” she said, “left as Spencer has left you—”