“Mr. Gaines-” Her voice was so faint she had to clear her throat and start again. “Mr. Gaines told me about Susan Gregory and her child,” she said. “Why did you not tell me, Miles?” She looked up from their entwined hands to his face. He had turned chalk pale beneath his tan. “Why did you not tell me?” she said again. Her heart was breaking. “Why did you not tell me about your mistress and your child?”

“SHE WASN’T MY MISTRESS. Clara isn’t my child.”

Even as he spoke Miles knew, with a feeling of utter desperation, that there was absolutely no way in which he could prove to Alice that he was telling the truth. If she chose not to believe him-and his failure to confide in her, his failure to open up and trust her, condemned him louder than any words-then there was nothing he could do except, perhaps, to break his word and force his father’s former mistress out of her retirement and into the light. The damage that such a course of action would cause would surely expose all the secrets that he had striven to hide for the past eleven years.

Alice was watching him and he could read nothing in her face other than blankness and pain. She had not really heard him. She was hurting too much. His love for her stole his breath. From the very beginning he had been afraid to lose Alice and he had told himself it was because of the money, but now he knew the thing that he could not bear would be to lose Alice herself. The money was nothing in comparison. It was Alice’s warmth and generosity of spirit and love that he craved. He was terrified of being left in the cold again.

The thing that he feared the most was about to come true.

“I should have told you,” he said. “I should have told you about my father and our quarrel and why I have been estranged from my family for so long. Susan was my father’s mistress. Clara is his child.”

Some shade of expression came back into Alice’s eyes and a little color into her face. “Your father’s mistress,” she repeated.

“I cannot prove it,” Miles said rapidly. “I cannot prove to you that I am telling the truth, Alice. My name is on all the documents.” He felt wretched. His future hung on the slenderest thread, that of Alice’s trust, and what was so appalling to him was that he knew he did not deserve to keep her because he had not trusted her with the truth. He had never even told her that he loved her. He had meant to do it. Each day he had tried out his feelings a little further, testing his love for her and his ability to feel it, letting go of the dark past. But now the past had caught up with him and it had happened too soon because he had not told Alice the one thing that she needed to know.

“Tell me,” she said, and he could not judge from her voice whether he had a chance or not.

“I was almost eighteen,” Miles said. “I had finished at Eton and there was talk of me going to Oxford in the autumn to study theology.” He grimaced. “Not a natural choice for me, but my papa wished me to follow him into the church.” He shrugged. “Truth to tell, I was enjoying London too much to care much either way. I was young and I had a little money, and…” He looked at Alice and shook his head. “Well, even then I was no saint.”

He had not been. There had been women and drinking and gambling, all the temptations of town so new and so exciting for a youth who thought that he knew everything and in truth was young and naive and knew nothing at all.

“I arrived home early after a long night at the gaming tables,” Miles said. “I had not lost too heavily. I hadn’t even tumbled a lightskirt that night. Life was good-simple, easy. I wanted my bed, but as I walked in I heard a sound in my father’s study and I thought someone might have broken into the house, so I went over to investigate. I wish…I had not.” He looked up and met her eyes. “I had to break the door open,” he said. “The noise roused half the household.”

“Who was in there?” Alice said. “Your father?”

“My father,” Miles said. His tone was harsh. “His sanctimonious Lordship, the Bishop Vickery. The man I had admired and respected, the man who preached against sin, was fornicating with a maidservant on the study desk. You can imagine what I thought when I saw him. For all my supposed sophistication I was an eighteen-year-old boy and I could scarce believe my eyes.” He stopped. “It was a disaster,” he said, after a moment. “People were coming running, alerted by the noise I had made breaking the door down. My mother, my sister…” He swallowed hard. “My father assessed the situation very quickly for a man in the throes of passion. He reacted far more quickly than I. He saw that we had an audience and promptly denounced me for my debauchery. He claimed to have been roused from his bed by the sounds of my fornication and to have come down to put a stop to his son’s wanton licentiousness.”

“But the girl,” Alice whispered. “The servant girl. Did she say nothing?”

“She was afraid of him,” Miles said. “I could see her fear. She did not say a word.”

He saw Alice close her eyes for a moment as though to ward off the image, and he knew she was imagining Susan Gregory’s terror and misery because it could have been her.

“What did you do?” she said. “What did you say?”

“I said nothing to contradict him,” Miles said. “At first it was because I could not quite believe what my father was doing. I thought I had misunderstood him, that it was all some terrible mistake. I waited for him to tell the truth, but instead he railed at me for my depravity and shameless lust. It was quite a sermon.”

Alice was staring at him and he was afraid that it was disbelief he could read in her eyes. “But surely,” she said. “He was your father. Why would he do such a thing?”

Miles’s lips twisted bitterly. “He was a bishop. He had his position to consider. Think of the scandal. There was my mother to think of, as well. Her family were most influential in the church.” He looked down at their joined hands and suddenly he realized that he had been gripping Alice so tightly that it must have hurt her. He tried to ease his hold but as soon as he let go of her he felt bereft.

“I am sorry,” he said, “I hurt you.” And the words fell between them awkwardly.

He hurried on, wanting to end it now so that Alice could go if she wished.

“He sent the girl away,” he said. “Later I heard that she was pregnant and had borne a child. My father made a great show of providing for them both, to atone for my sins, so he said, whilst broadcasting those apparent sins as loudly as he could. But by then we had quarreled and I had gone abroad. I never saw him again.”

He stopped. He waited for Alice to say that it was the most unconvincing excuse that she had ever heard, that he had never once been honest in his life, that she did not believe a word of it. He waited for her to leave him. The silence seemed to last forever.

“You did it for your mother, didn’t you?” Alice said softly. “You did it for her because you love her and you could not bear to see her hurt and you wanted to protect her. You were eighteen years old and you were betrayed by your father, yet you kept your silence for your mother’s sake, and that is why you have never spoken of it since and why you push away the love she has for you-”

Miles looked up and she was watching him with understanding and compassion in her eyes and something split apart inside him and he grabbed her and held her in his arms and felt her hot tears soaking his coat and he buried his face in her neck and would not let her go.

“I wondered,” Alice said breathlessly. “I wondered why you kept pushing them all away-Celia and Philip and your mother most of all. I wondered why it hurt you so much to speak of it and why you rejected me, too, when I asked you.”

“She adored him,” Miles said roughly. “She still does. I could not take that from her. Not then. Not ever.” He closed his eyes and unfurled his fingers against the curve of Alice’s cheek. “He is dead now. The injustice of it should not matter to me anymore.”

“But it does matter,” Alice said. “You have kept the secret for all these years and taken the blame for a man whose duty it was to protect you. You were a child-his child! He forced you to take the responsibility and then he forced you to carry the secret forever.”

“I could not live with the hypocrisy,” Miles said. “That was why we quarreled. He argued that it mattered nothing because it could have been me, and he was right.” He sighed. “As I said, I was no angel, even at eighteen years of age. I could have seduced a maidservant and made her pregnant and been as careless and as callous as you once accused me.”

“But it wasn’t you,” Alice argued. She leaned forward and kissed him. “Miles,” she said, “look at me. Listen to me.” She cupped his face in her hands. “It was never your fault,” she said. “Your father was the one who was weak. He was the one who failed you. You might have been wild but you were never cruel like he was.”

Miles looked at her. “I should have told you,” he said again. “I should have trusted you with the secret, but the truth was that I was afraid, Alice. I was afraid of loving and trusting ever again because I had taken my family’s love for granted and suddenly it was smashed and gone and I could not bear for that to happen to me ever again.”

“It will not,” Alice said fiercely. She drew him back into her arms. “And the rest-all the things that followed,” she said. “Your army career…”

“I joined the army because I had to get away,” Miles said. “I was angry and disillusioned, even more so when my father died and I realized how appallingly extravagant he had been as well as hypocritical. I suppose in some strange way I became the person he had branded me. I swore not to care anymore and so I took on the role I told you about, and with each step I became more hardened and cynical.”