Martha Schroeder (24 page)

Chapter Eighteen

It looked like a scene from a bad melodrama, Amelia thought some ten minutes later. The marquess was standing facing Richard across the expanse of the drawing room fireplace. She and Jane were seated unobtrusively on a settee while Lady Mountjoy sat looking up at Gideon, her face still wreathed in that beatific smile.

And Gideon stood alone in the center of the room. Amelia longed to go and stand beside him to face down this unknown family with him. But for the first time she was unsure of her welcome. He had thrown Sir Richard’s claim back in his teeth proudly insisting on his gypsy heritage. She feared he would do the same with her friendship, simply because he felt he had to stand alone. But how did he really feel? No matter who they were, he had to want to know his kin. He had to be curious about where—and who—he came from.

Sir Richard was finishing his brief narrative of how he had come to believe Gideon Falconer was Francis Sinclair. The marquess stood, as he had since his son had begun speaking, silent and frowning down into his brandy glass.

“And the silver ball was the final link in the chain,” Si: Richard was saying. “According to Lady Amelia, Gideon has had that token since she has known him.”

The marquess looked up at last. He ignored his son and looked squarely at Gideon. When he spoke, his question took Gideon by surprise. “How do you feel about this. Captain Falconer?”

The words sounded merely curious, not accusatory, and Gideon felt his shoulders relax a bit. “I do not know, sir,” he replied as honestly as he knew how. “I am used to thinking of myself as a foundling, probably a gypsy. I gave up wondering about my real family—if I ever had one—a long time ago. The Duke of Doncaster and Lady Amelia have been my family, and as long as I had them, I never felt the need for more.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Amelia smile. She must have known how he felt, but he could not remember telling her as clearly as this how much she and her father had meant to him. He was a little ashamed to note that she looked surprised, as if she had expected him to reject her as he had Sir Richard. Could Amy really doubt his feelings for her and her father after all this time? The marquess’s voice pulled him back from this uncomfortable thought.

“You never wished to know where you came from? Who your people were?” The marquess appeared to find this remarkable. His voice held surprise and a hint of disbelief.

It was all Gideon needed to set the spark to his temper. “I know who I am. That is all I have ever had, and it has been enough.”

To Gideon’s surprise, the marquess smiled. “That sounds remarkably like Lionel speaking.” To Gideon, he added, “Your—Francis’s father.”

The words hit him broadside.
Your father.
He had remembered the dark-haired woman, and despite his words to Sir Richard, he had always thought of her as his mother. But a father—

“I do not have a father,” he said in a voice like flint. A father! Someone strong and brave, someone who would fight for you, defend you, protect you. Gideon almost laughed. Where had his father been when he was lying under the gypsy wagon, sick and afraid? Or sent scampering up into the tight, filthy confines of a London chimney, with a fire at his back if he balked?

“I do not need a father. It is too late for that, my lord.” He could hear the accusation in his own voice.

The sadness Gideon had noticed before in the marquess’s eyes seemed to grow deeper. “I am very sorry, my son. Lionel died not long after Francis disappeared. But, of course, you could not know that.”

I
am not your son, not your grandson,
Gideon bit back the words. He did not want to add to the old man’s distress. They gazed at each other, and Gideon had the odd thought that they saw and understood the depth of each other’s pain in those few charged moments.

“I did not know the secret of the iron ball,” he said, apparently at random. He threw the words out defiantly. “Sir Richard had to show me.”

“The ball is silver, Gideon. I had it polished before we left the Abbey.” Amelia sounded almost apologetic.

“You see!” Gideon said triumphantly. “I did not know. All these years I have thought it was iron.”

“You had it in the gypsy camp?” the marquess asked.

For a moment Gideon was tempted to He, to claim he had found it on the street in London. But then he looked at Lady Mountjoy and changed his mind. He could not lie to her. “Yes. I remember holding it while I was under the wagon. Someone tried to take it from me, but I wouldn’t let go, and for some reason they let me keep it.”

“You do not remember who you were? They took your name from you?” Lady Mountjoy’s voice trembled. She rose and moved toward him.

Gideon restrained himself from backing away. He was afraid of her emotion, afraid of being loved. Teaching himself from an early age to do without ties to a mother, he had unknowingly taught himself not to want them. Now he was faced with a woman who apparently thought she had borne him, and he did not know how to react—except to back away, fearing to accept what he knew he could lose in an instant. Some hint of the pain he had felt as a lost child swept over him as he looked in those soft, caring eyes. Resolutely he shut his heart. It was the only way to survive.

“I was injured, I believe. I don’t remember much of what happened right after I—came to the gypsies.”

“How did you come to be Gideon?” she asked, laying a soft hand on his arm. “How did you get your name? You did not remember being Fran—having any other name?”

“I don’t know. The sweep called me Gideon. I don’t remember if he named me or the gypsies told him that was my name when they sold me to him.” He frowned, trying to remember.

“They sold you?” It was a whisper. “Oh, my dear.” All the sorrow in the world was in her words.

“It happens.” Gideon hoped he sounded matter-of-fact. He did not feel that way. “The duke managed to rescue a number of boys who had been sold and send them to school. He said I gave him the idea.” It was the only good that had ever come of that time, and it sometimes redeemed the pain and shame that were its legacy.

“But you do not remember another name?”

“My lady, I believe I gave up trying to remember anything that bound me to another life.” If he was being cruel, it was necessary. He could not take much more of this kind of gentle probing. “It was too painful to remember what I could not have ever again.”

The marquess had been standing by the fireplace, tense and unmoving while his daughter-in-law questioned the young man standing alone and proud before all of them. Now he spoke again.

“What is it that you want from us, Captain Falconer? Richard brought you here, obviously believing that you are Francis. Yet it seems you do not wish to believe it. What is it that you do want?”

He seemed genuinely curious, Gideon thought, and there was a kindly look in his eye. As if it really mattered what some unknown cavalry captain wanted.

“I have known for many years that miracles do not happen routinely, my lord. I have had my miracle, and it changed my life.” He smiled at Amelia. Her answering smile was full of wonder and love. For a moment Gideon allowed himself to look at her and believe that he could accept her love and give her his. He knew that if that were true, he would not need anything else to make his life complete.

“You refer to the duke and Lady Amelia taking you in?” the marquess asked.

“Yes. All that Sir Richard believes to have been proved is simply too great a coincidence to be possible. When I was a little boy, I allowed myself to dream that I had a family and that someday they would find me and recognize me. Well, they never did. But I found a family nonetheless, and I would not trade them for any other in the world.” Where had these words come from, he wondered. He had never spoken so openly about his feelings even to Amelia. Now to reveal them to strangers—

Where had he found the courage? He looked over at Amelia. From her, of course. She had always been his inspiration, her love and faith in him had always been the key to his success. He knew he could succeed because Amelia believed it so strongly, and he had to succeed for the same reason. Now he had to explore the issue of his birth and possible link to this wounded group of aristocrats.

“So it is the fear that Richard is wrong that makes you think he cannot be right?” Was the marquess actually smiling? Gideon could not believe it.

“You may put it that way if you wish, sir.” Gideon drew himself up to his full six feet. He had never liked being laughed at. “I would say rather that I have a normal sense of the way life operates. It does not bestow marquessates on chimney sweeps, or make uncles of chance-met fellow officers.”

The marquess shrugged, then turned away from Gideon to Amelia. “What kind of a boy did you find Gideon Falconer to be, Lady Amelia? Was he a little cockney thief? Whining on your doorstep? Begging a crust from you? Playing on your sympathies?”

Amelia stood in one fluid motion and rounded on the older man. “Lord Southbridge, Gideon was the bravest boy I ever saw. He asked for nothing. He was starving, and he would not beg. I found him cold and beaten and hungry, yet he did not ask for anything except not to be taken back to the man that made him fight other boys.” Her chin stuck out, and her eyes flashed, but she still looked like a Christmas angel. Gideon grinned at her. She would defend her friends with her last breath.

“How did he speak?” It was Lady Mountjoy’s quiet voice that spoke, cutting through the tension with her soft words.

“I beg your pardon?” Amelia was barely polite.

“Did he sound like you?”

Amelia frowned for a moment. Then her brow cleared, and she looked both surprised and excited. “Yes, yes he did. I never thought of it before, but he spoke like an educated child, not a street sparrow.”

“So he spoke like a child who had been gently reared?” The marquess took up the questioning.

“Yes. And his grammar was quite good—except for some swearing. And that was hardly to be wondered at,” Amelia finished in a defensive tone.

Gideon hid a smile. She would admit no flaw in a friend.

“True. It was not to be wondered at if he were not, in fact, a gypsy child but an aristocrat’s son taken by mistake,” Sir Richard said and looked around triumphantly, as if he had been vindicated. But his father still gazed at Gideon as if the secret of his grandson’s identity could only be solved if Gideon himself unraveled the mystery.

“You still do not believe,” the marquess said. “Why not?”

Gideon looked at the old man. He saw hope flare in his tired eyes. He searched his mind and came up with what told him that he was not, in fact, Francis Sinclair. “My name,” he said. “When Sir Richard said ‘Francis’ it meant nothing. I always thought that somehow if I saw my home, heard my name, saw my family that I would know. But although the castle could be familiar and Lady Mountjoy’s voice is—somehow—like one I seem to remember, my own name does not tell me anything. I am not Francis.”

He looked at Amy then, trying to find his lifeline, the one person there who had known him first as Gideon, a ragged, dirty child of the streets and loved him anyway. He found what he sought in her eyes—encouragement, strength, love, everything that she could offer was there, and he drank it all in. He had denied himself, denied her love, but now he needed it with the same all-consuming desperation he had felt so long ago when he had first looked up and seen her face. And as she had then, she gave now without counting the cost or asking for return.

“Drake?” said a familiar voice behind him.

“Yes, Mama?” he said without thinking.

It was the silence that finally broke through his preoccupation with Amy. Total, breathless silence. He looked around, and then it hit him. He felt disoriented and breathless, as if his horse had just been shot out from under him.

“What?” He looked around him, somehow both terrified and excited, the way he felt just as the charge began and he could feel all the others at his back and beside him riding toward the enemy with him. “What is wrong? What did I say?”

Serena Sinclair, Lady Mountjoy, spoke to her son. “You always hated the name Francis. One of the village girls was named Frances, and you detested having what you called a girl’s name. From the time you were three, you refused to answer to it.” She gave him a tremulous smile, as if inviting him to share the memory. Gideon felt himself smile in response.
Drake. Yes. That was his name. It fit.

“Lionel told you that you were named for a famous sailor, Sir Francis Drake. You liked that. You thought about it for a minute, and then announced that your name was Drake. And from then on you refused to answer to anything else.”

He looked at the marquess, who smiled at him. Welcomed him.

“Just as you answered now.” Sir Richard finished the thought.

“Does the name seem familiar?” the marquess asked.

Gideon didn’t answer. He couldn’t.
Drake. He was Drake.
He looked at Serena, Lady Mountjoy, and for the first time allowed himself to remember his mother, the dark-haired woman who sang. Her voice, the warmth of her arms.
Serena, Yes. She fit.

“There were white curtains at the nursery windows,” he said. It was not a question.

“Yes,” Serena replied. “I used to sit with you in a chair that looked out of the window. I would leave it open because you liked to see the curtains blow in the breeze.”

Gideon looked around. Everyone was looking at him, waiting to see what he would do. It was up to him. He could still deny what he knew in his heart. He could refuse to acknowledge this family that was ready to claim him. It was a temptation. He had made a life, an identity for himself, and part of that had been an acceptance of the fact that he had no claim on anyone. Now he realized that it had also meant that no one had a claim on him. Not even Amy, unless he chose to allow one. But there were no blood ties, no one who could demand a part of his loyalty.

He hardly knew these people, yet he could already feel tentacles of love and demand closing around him, binding him. The idea took him back to the days he had lain in the gypsy wagon, feverish and frightened and had wept for his mother. The sweep had beaten that out of him, and from then on he had never looked back. Now all those memories were about to be resurrected, and all he could think of was the pain of suppressing them.