She gave her head a violent shake. Lost. Everything is lost now, she thought miserably.
Stephen Byrne had discovered her shame. And now he would force her to return to that fateful night.
Had anyone else found out, she might have borne it. But this was a man she’d come to respect, if only for his dedication to her family and stubborn insistence on the truth.
She closed her eyes on a wave of vertigo that nearly sent her plummeting to the stone terrace at his feet. “It’s the past,” she whispered, clutching his lapels to keep from falling. “For god’s sake, leave it be. Please, don’t make me revisit—”
“Listen to me,” he said between gritted teeth. “If you are ever to find happiness, woman, you must confront the truth. Don’t let it defeat you.”
Why had she let this man into her world? What insanity had gripped her to make her believe she could trust him?
She rallied the little pride still left to her and looked him in the eyes. “Sir, I order you to release me. I absolve you of all commitments to me.” She struggled to pull out of his grip, but he held firm. “I insist you allow me to return to—”
“You killed it, didn’t you?” Any warmth his voice had held a moment earlier dispersed like vapors into the night.
Her eyes widened. She thought she might swoon, except he was holding her up by both arms now, fixing those mesmerizing black eyes on hers, demanding she confess all. Torturing her by ordering her to relive the worst days of her life.
“Louise.” He gave her a shake.
Her throat burned with the salt of unshed tears. “I—didn’t—kill—anyone,” she whimpered. Her tongue felt so heavy in her mouth she could barely form the words.
He released a strained breath. “If you can’t say it, I will.”
Her eyes widened with dread. “Please. No! Don’t.”
He ignored her and continued in a low voice. “This is how I believe it happened, Princess. A few months after you started a love affair with the young artist Donovan Heath, your mother suspected you were sleeping with him. She decided she must find out for certain if she’d guessed right and put an end to the affair. She ordered her gynecologist, Doctor Charles Locock, to examine you. He not only found you were no longer a virgin, a blow to Victoria, who had hoped for a royal match such as she’d already arranged for your older sisters, but you were pregnant. This news may have been as much a shock to you as it was to your mother.”
Byrne watched her face, waiting for a response. Louise could only stare at him, feeling the world slipping away beneath her feet. Her body went mercifully numb.
He continued. “The queen must have been desperate. She had to work fast to avoid scandal. She commanded Locock to get rid of the illegitimate fetus. Is that much right?”
Before she could stop herself, she’d given him a tiny nod.
“Right,” Byrne growled. “The rest is conjecture on my part, but let’s see how close I can come.” She shrank from his condemning glare. “You begged your mother to spare your baby. Whether you wished to give it up for adoption or keep it, I don’t know. But neither option would have satisfied Victoria. So long as you refused the procedure to end the pregnancy, the scandal threatened to tear holes in the royal family. To the queen’s way of seeing things, permanently disposing of the problem was still the only solution.”
His voice gentled at seeing the agony reflected in her eyes. “Louise, I’m not saying you wanted your baby to die. Victoria is a powerful, determined woman. She probably talked you into going off to the family home on the Isle of Wight for your confinement, letting you think it would be only to deliver the baby away from prying eyes.”
Louise wept openly now, no more able to stop her tears than she could have willed away a monsoon. Her breast heaved, wracking her entire body. “How can you be so cruel? I hate you, you monster!” She sobbed. “To speak of such things—”
Inconceivably, Stephen Byrne pulled her into his arms. He cradled her head against his deep chest, the coolness of his military medals soothing her flaming cheek. “I’m sorry. Truly I am, Louise. But you need to face what happened and leave the guilt behind.”
“Oh Lord!” she cried.
He was ruthless. Why wouldn’t he just shut up? But she let him hold her, feeling so much safer in his arms than standing apart from him on the balcony, in the chill wind.
He kept on talking, more to himself than to her now. Fitting pieces of the puzzle together in his mind, a man obsessed with the desire to understand. “You gave birth to your baby. Sir Charles Locock, father to Amanda’s husband, attended. You probably weren’t even allowed to see the child. Maybe Locock told you it was stillborn. Maybe you didn’t believe him. Therefore your resentment of your mother and the closeness you’ve developed with your best friend’s child. Ironically, Edward Locock, the doctor’s grandson, has become a surrogate son to you.”
Louise tearfully shook her head, rejecting his words. What she had done had been wrong. Loving Donovan. Deceiving her family. Keeping her pregnancy from the world. But she couldn’t let Stephen Byrne think her sins were as black as he painted them.
She sucked down a deep, shuddering breath and seized fragile control of her thoughts. The truth. There was nowhere to go now but to the truth.
“It—wasn’t—like—that.” She gulped down air between convulsing sobs.
“No? Then tell me how it was,” he murmured into her hair.
Louise closed her eyes, pressing her feverish cheek against Byrne’s chest. She listened to his heart, strong and steady and reassuring against her ear. She breathed in the scent of him, and he wrapped his arms even tighter around her. Only in his embrace did she find the strength to remember how it had been, and say the words out loud.
“You’re right,” she whispered, drifting back in time, “but only about some of it.”
And then she was in that horrid room again. The old doctor and his wife standing over her bed. The crashing sounds of the ocean pounding the rocks outside her window, and the unbearable pain tearing apart her body as she struggled to bring her baby into the world.
She remembered every detail as if it were yesterday . . .
Thirty-two
Osborne House, Isle of Wight, 1866
Louise threw her head back against the sweat-soaked pillows and screamed as the contraction climaxed. The pain pressed up through her belly, hardening the muscle in a wave that rounded into her lower back. When she opened her eyes as the discomfort lessened, she saw the doctor, holding a cloth in one hand and an amber bottle of ether in the other.
“No!” she gasped. “Take it away.” She pushed herself halfway up from where she lay on the mattress, bracing herself on her elbows.
“But, Princess,” his wife coaxed, “it will ease the pain.”
“Your mother ordered it for you,” Dr. Charles Locock said. “She asked for ether when her last two children were born. She swears by it.”
“No. You’ll make me lose consciousness.”
“Would that be so bad?” cooed the woman. “When you wake up, it will all be over. Just like a bad dream.” The doctor took a step forward; the ether cloth came at her again.
Louise kicked with both feet, sending the couple stumbling back out of range. “Stay away from me!” she cried. “Stay away from my baby.”
The doctor and his wife exchanged looks. She knew what they were thinking, knew what they intended to do.
“We just want to help you,” Locock said. “You can’t give birth on your own like a squaw.”
“After the baby is born, if it is healthy . . . if it survives the birth, it’s better if you don’t see it,” his wife said, her voice softly coaxing. “You know you can’t possibly keep it. I will carry it to a couple in the village who are waiting for it. It will have a loving family to care for it.”