“How very … Scottish of you.” A keen understanding lit within her. A commiserative appreciation. “Your strength is commendable, extraordinary even, but it’s impossible to be…” She paused a moment, her eyes shifting, as she searched her vocabulary. “Unaffected by your past. It’s intolerable to see someone you love broken and to not suffer a few wounds of your own.”
“What do ye know of it?” he scowled.
“Plenty,” she whispered.
It was his turn to contemplate her. “How many men have ye broken, Cecelia Teague?”
“None,” she answered honestly.
“That’s very hard to believe.” He gestured to the loft. “What about Phoebe’s father?”
Cecelia bit her lip. She’d almost forgotten he’d assumed Phoebe was her daughter. Should she tell him the truth? What would it accomplish? Better that he think her a whore and a mother, than a bumbling virgin who was terribly lost and utterly alone.
“Ah.” He made a bitter noise. “I forget. Ye donna remember who he is.”
“Why does that bother you so?” she asked.
His lips pressed into a thin line, his jaw working over thick emotion before he gritted out, “I canna say.”
Cecelia broke contact with his gaze once more under the guise of investigating their quaint surroundings. “It’s difficult to picture the previous Duchess of Redmayne as the mistress of this house. How did she come to know the duke?”
“They met at a gala in Edinburgh when I was about four. She was hired as a housemaid for the event and set about finding a lover. A keeper, I think, to make herself a mistress. That she became a duchess was nothing less than a miracle.”
“Where was your father?” Cecelia wondered aloud.
“He worked on merchant vessels and was at sea the entire time it took for her to seduce the duke into financing a divorce. So ye see, when people look at me, they doona see the son of a duchess. They find the unwanted get of a devious social climber and Scottish nobody.”
She studied him for the emotion this evoked and found nothing. He was utterly calm, closed, and collected. He recited the story as if it belonged to someone else.
“Surely your father was not a nobody,” she argued. “Just because he wasn’t someone extraordinary in the eyes of the ton. He lived in this house. He loved here, even though that love was a tragic one.”
An ancient disgust spread a hard mask across his brutal features, turning them stony yet brittle. As though someone would have to take a chisel to his skin in order for him to move again. “The duke paid my father three thousand pounds for my mother. And he took it, readily. She was naught but an expensive whore until the day she died. And he was a greedy drunk with no sense of integrity.”
“Three thousand pounds.” Cecelia gaped. Holy God, that was a staggering amount.
If Ramsay’s features were stone, then his eyes were now frosted with ice. “It only took him a handful of years to eat, drink, whore, and gamble it away. Did Redmayne or Alexandra ever tell ye how my father died?”
His expression indicated that the tale was heartbreaking, but Cecelia couldn’t stop herself from asking. Ramsay had begun to paint the portrait of his origins, and she desperately needed him to finish it. “How?”
“He was found facedown in a gutter where he’d choked to death on his own sick, not to mention the other filth that flows to the sewers.”
Unable to contemplate the indignity of it, to process the sorrow she felt for Ramsay, Cecelia stood to pace around the room a bit, taking a chocolate with her. “You and your father lived here alone, until you were nine?”
“Aye.”
A memory of a previous conversation with him puzzled her. “But you mentioned you didn’t attend school with Redmayne until you were fifteen?”
“Aye.”
“So … Where were you between nine and fifteen?”
“Here.”
“Here?” She stopped pacing to look at him. “Here with whom?”
He didn’t answer. Didn’t look up from where he contemplated his own hands spread on the cloth like the scarred relics of another time.
Cecelia had always felt as though those hands belonged to a different man. One with an altogether more difficult life.
She looked around, absorbed the sparseness of the place. The one bed, the lone couch. The single set of dishes.
His bow and arrow.
A place no one will look for ye.
His father had died, and no one had looked for him. He’d raised himself on this property from a lad of nine years old to one of fifteen. Alone.
The duchess had left her firstborn here to rot for years.
“My God,” Cecelia whispered, a hollow pain lancing her breast. “You were here all by yourself, all but forgotten. And you survived on your own?”
“Doona be impressed.” He swatted at the air in front of him, waving her veneration away. “The well is good, the river full of fish, and a herd of deer live in the vicinity.”
Cecelia shook her head, seeing her surroundings as if for the first time. To her, this cottage was a refuge. To him, it’d been a place of exile. Her heart swelled with emotion for him. “I never realized what it must have cost you to bring us here. What horrible memories it must hold for you.”
He snorted, searching the beams as if they might collapse at any time. “It’s no great feat, I return here from time to time.”
“To escape the city?” she guessed.
His eyes speared through her, alight with a vibrant fire. “To remind myself how far I’ve come. To remember what I once was.”
Cecelia nodded, envying his fortitude. She’d never allowed herself to return to the Vicar Teague’s. Not even to the city from whence she came. “It’s difficult not to cling to memories,” she murmured. “I suppose our recollections define us all in some way.”
He shook his head with enough vehemence to expel a demon. “I’m proof they do not.”
She was taken aback. “You’re proof they do. This place, it means something to you. It holds the ghosts of a different life. Of a lonely past and a future that could have been.”
“There was never any future for me here.”
“I don’t know.” She tried to picture a peasant couple here, young and happy. “You might have had parents that loved each other. Who shared this home, this life, in poverty, but happiness. This might have been land you worked and a simple legacy you could have been proud of. Instead you were abandoned here. And that has quite obviously made an impression upon you. I daresay it painted every relationship you’ve ever had.”
He made a disgusted sound in his throat and drank before wagging the neck of the bottle at her like a gavel. “Doona look at me and see some lonely child to be pitied. I am so far from that. From him. I lifted myself from nothing, into a situation where I want for nothing, and for that I am proud. I am wealthy, educated, respected, and feared. I am powerful in every conceivable way—”
“Yes, but are you happy?”
He looked at her askance. “What does happiness have to do with anything?”
She shook her head, truly pitying him for the first time. “It has to do with everything.”