The Courtship - Catherine Coulter [96]
“But now that I have had time to look back on those two years we were together, I don’t believe he did love me. He desired me, but he didn’t care if I ever felt anything for him.”
“He never gave you a woman’s pleasure.”
“You already know that he did not. But he wanted a child, desperately.”
“But you said he was the younger son of Sir John Yorke, not the heir.”
“That’s right.”
“Then why the immense drive to produce a boy child? There was no title or estate in the balance.”
“I don’t know. There is a lot of wealth in the Yorke family, but no title.”
Lord Beecham sighed. “This is as puzzling as that bloody lamp and where King Edward stashed it six hundred years ago and why he stashed it at all if the damned thing was so powerful. And why didn’t Burnell ever write about it being in that iron cask with the leather scroll that was itself ancient six hundred years ago?”
“He obviously never discovered its power. As to the other, goodness, I don’t know.”
He sank his chin onto his hands and stared down at the floor, at the way the planks seamed together, a habit of long standing, when he was thinking hard. “If Gerard Yorke is alive, why would he write to you now? So many years have passed with everyone believing him dead. You can’t give him his precious child, he already knows that. Why does he care? What does the bounder want?”
“I don’t know.”
“Another thing. Why did he select you, Helen? No, don’t try to convince me that you were the most beautiful girl available, that you were obviously the pinnacle of young, nubile womanhood, because that didn’t really matter—at least I don’t think it did.”
“Perhaps he believed because I am so big and sturdy that I would birth boy children right and left, fill England with all my offspring. He really was very keen on children.”
He sighed and kissed the tip of her nose. “I suppose that makes about as much sense as anything else, maybe. How wealthy is your father?”
“Not immensely. He is comfortable, nothing more.”
“It has been eight years since you last saw Gerard Yorke. Is that right?”
“Yes. Right after the Treaty of Amiens was signed in 1803, he left. Some sort of secret mission. I remember him whispering to me of this special mission in the dark of the night, and he sounded very excited about it. But then he was on a ship and it sank. What is so exciting about that?”
“Unless he was just aboard the ship until he left it somewhere to proceed with this secret mission of his. Was he a liar?”
“I don’t really know. During our two years before his death, he didn’t spend more than five, perhaps six, months with me, total. It wasn’t much of a marriage. Surely it couldn’t have been to him, either. We didn’t know each other, not really. Why did he write me, Spenser? Why, blast his eyes?”
“We will discover that when he tracks us down in London before we have the chance to marry.”
She tucked her head against his neck. “I don’t want him to.”
“Sometimes there is just no choice in life, my sweet. You simply have to clean up the mess before you can go on.”
“There is something else we must discover.”
He kissed her lightly on the mouth and said,“What?”
“We must find out who murdered Reverend Mathers.”
“Yes,” he said slowly, his eyes hard, “we must.”
“I dreamed I saw the man who did it, but I only saw his back. He’s evil, Spenser.”
“We will find him,” Spenser said and kissed her again, hard this time. And then he kissed her again.
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