Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [146]
“How—” she started, but her voice failed her.
“It’s a very long story,” Iris answered. “One that I’ve come from England to tell you. But first, please, would you answer my friend’s question?”
On the one hand, it mattered not in the least if they had somehow managed to wed on the field of battle. The boy was Gabriel’s, and happy; neither of those facts, I thought, would change. On the other, everything depended on it: An illegitimate child could not inherit, no more than a female child could. Marsh’s freedom lay in a piece of paper.
Philippa Hewetson raised her head, and I could see the answer before she said it.
“Yes,” she said. Iris covered her mouth with both her gloved hands and made a sound like laughter, with tears in her eyes. I closed my own eyes and found myself saying under my breath, in something remarkably like prayer, Thank you, God, oh thank you, thank you.
When I opened my eyes again, the hard, protective look was back on her face, and I made haste to explain our rather extreme reaction. I was not certain just where she perceived a threat, but I knew this was one of those situations where honesty, while not necessarily the best policy, might be the only one possible.
“A legal marriage certificate means that your son is heir to a very large estate and a very important title in England. Gabriel was the only son of the sixth Duke of Beauville. He didn’t tell you this?”
“He said his family took its inheritances very seriously. Those were his words. He told me that when I said we didn’t need to marry, that I would—Anyway, he wouldn’t hear of it, so I asked this priest in one of the villages, an old man I’d gotten to know pretty well. I’m a Catholic, by the way. I thought it was a joke—about the inheritances, that is. Gabriel laughed, that’s for sure. I figured his father was the kind of self-made man out to found a dynasty, who’d throw a fit if his son brought home a brown-skinned Canadian Catholic like me.”
“And yet they’d want the boy, eventually,” I concluded. This was the source of her animosity.
“And here you are,” she pointed out.
“It’s not quite the same,” Iris objected.
“Isn’t it?”
I thought this a good time to throw a couple of facts into the burgeoning argument. “Iris is Gabriel’s mother,” I told her. “And the reason we—”
The woman’s face closed to us as if shutters had been thrown across it. “No she isn’t. She’s the aunt Gabriel went to see in Paris. I remember the name. Look here, I don’t know what kind of scheme you’re trying to pull on me, but it’s not going to work. I want you to leave. Now.”
“I am his mother,” Iris told her. “He didn’t know it himself; only six or eight people ever did. And now you. That’s part of the long story.”
The green eyes flickered down to the war journal, then back to me. “You were saying something.”
“I was about to say, the reason we got involved with the string of events that led us here is that someone we both . . . care about needs to know that the succession is secure before he can free himself.”
She was unmoved. “What if he doesn’t? What if I ‘lose’ the marriage certificate, say that Gabe’s illegitimate, say we want nothing to do with you?”
“Then your son would be robbed of a heritage that has been a part of England for eight hundred years,” Iris told her. “You’ve really never heard of the name Hughenfort?”
The green-eyed pilot shrugged. Shrugged! I pictured the reaction of the Darlings to that shrug, and stifled a laugh.
“I’ve heard of York and Windsor, too, but that doesn’t make Jack York down at the garage into a prince. I don’t know. We’re happy here. Gabe’s got a good life. Why would I want to spoil him by