Heavens, it would hurt her.
Just before she relinquished hope of anything further, he spoke. “It happened when I was ten. At Eton.”
Her arms tightened. She verged so near this ultimate mystery. If he denied her now, she couldn’t bear it.
“Some older boys took exception to the baseborn mongrel in their midst and expressed their opinion with their fists.”
Horror jammed her throat. “They deliberately tortured you?”
“Boys are little barbarians, amore mio.”
“You didn’t deserve this.” Despite her best efforts to remain calm, her voice cracked with emotion.
He turned and twined his arms around her. She no longer provided comfort; he did. He dashed away the tear that trickled down her cheek. “Don’t cry, tesoro. It was a long time ago.”
And every day he relived it as if it happened anew. She knew enough about him to dismiss his stoic reassurance as a lie. “That’s not the point. It was wrong.”
A strange expression crossed his face, a wryness she couldn’t interpret. “It proved a salutary experience. A lesson in not getting above myself. A bastard shouldn’t put on airs appropriate to his legitimate brethren.”
His cutting words sounded eerily familiar. Suddenly like a fist smashing into her belly, Sidonie understood everything. And wished to heaven she didn’t. Probably nobody else would recognize that clipped, dismissive intonation. But she’d lived with William six years. She’d heard him rage against Jonas. Bemoaning his cousin’s success, he’d used those exact words.
“William cut you.” It wasn’t a question.
The silvery eyes were guarded. “That’s a wild guess.”
“But accurate.”
Expecting Jonas to pull away, she raised one hand to his scarred cheek. He remained unmoving, then with a low sound of ac
ceptance, pressed his face into her palm. “How clever of you to realize.”
“I should have realized earlier.” Her voice shook. Curse her blindness. The clues were there in Jonas’s pursuit of revenge against a man unworthy of his time. The words telling him he was Viscount Hillbrook surged up but she bit them back. She already knew that in his vendetta against William, Roberta and her children were of little importance to him. Better she settled Roberta somewhere safe, then sent Jonas the marriage lines.
“William rallied half a dozen bully boys and they waylaid me behind the chapel.”
“That’s unfair. You aren’t responsible for your parents’ sins.”
His smile was unamused. “Perhaps not. But that’s the cruelty of children, isn’t it?”
Blind indeed. Before coming to Castle Craven, she’d been so hopelessly shallow to imagine Jonas’s bastardy wouldn’t affect him. Whereas the more she discovered about him, the more she realized his disinheritance was his life’s besetting tragedy. “I’m so sorry, Jonas.”
“I didn’t guess they intended more than the usual beating until William pulled out a carving knife. He said the world needed to know I was beyond the pale.”
Sidonie shuddered and choked down rising nausea. The whole incident reeked of William. The braggadocio, the cruelty, the cowardice of attacking his enemy after mustering superior forces. Jonas would have fought like a demon. But one small boy, no matter how valiant, had no chance against a gang of older thugs. Her hand curled around his neck. “You’re lucky he didn’t kill you.”
Jonas’s grunt wasn’t exactly a laugh. “He damned near did. Thank God, two of my schoolfellows rescued me.”
“Only two?”
“They made so much noise, William and his cohorts fled. The masters might despise a bastard, but they couldn’t countenance murder on school grounds.
“The duke was one of the boys.” So much of that prickly conversation in the library with His Grace, the Duke of Sedgemoor, became clear.
“Richard Harmsworth and Camden Rothermere. Bonny fighters, although Richard looked like he’d blow away in a slight breeze and Cam always toed the straight and narrow. A brawl wasn’t his style at all.”
She discerned an unlikely trace of affection in his voice. She was so glad Jonas hadn’t always been a lone wolf. It seemed sad that the friendship had faded over the years, although she knew better than to say so. From what the duke had said, Jonas had deliberately distanced himself from his rescuers. “I’m glad you had friends.”
“I’m not sure you’d call us friends. More like orphans in the storm, sticking together for protection. Eton wasn’t kind to boys of questionable birth.”