The thought that Alinor had never spoken of him in all these years struck him like a physical blow in the chest; knocking him back in his hard chair. If she had died in his arms twenty-one years ago, she could not have haunted him more persistently than she had done. He had thought of her every day, named her in his prayers every night, he had dreamed of her, he had longed for her. It was not possible she had not thought of him.

“If you have no interest in me at all, then you can have no curiosity in why I have come now?” he challenged her.

She did not rise to the bait. “Yes,” she confirmed. “You’re right. None.”

He felt that he was at a disadvantage sitting down so he rose up and went past her to the window, pulled back the edge of the blind to look out. He was trying to contain his temper and, at the same time, overcome the sensation that her will against him was as remorseless as the incoming tide. He could hear the rub of the fenders of the barge as the water lifted it off the ramp, and the clicking of the sheets against the wooden masts. These sounds had always been for him the echoes of exile, the music of his life as a spy, a stranger in his own country; he could not bear to feel that sense of being lonely and in danger once again. He turned back to the room. “To be brief, I came to speak to your mother, not to you. I prefer not to talk to you. And I should like to see the child: my child.”

She shook her head. “She cannot see you, and neither will the child.”

“You cannot speak for either of them. She is your mother, and the child—my child—has come of age.”

She said nothing but merely turned her head away from his determined face, to gaze down at the empty grate again. He controlled his temper with an effort but could not stop himself seeing that she had matured into a strong, square-faced beauty. She looked like a woman of authority who cared nothing for how she appeared and everything for what she did.

“The child is twenty-one years old now, and can choose for himself,” he insisted.

Again, she said nothing.

“It is a boy?” he asked tentatively. “It is a boy? I have a son?”

“Twenty-one gold coins, at the rate of one a year, does not buy you a son,” she said. “Nor does it buy you a moment of her time. I suppose that you are a wealthy man now? You have regained your great house and your lands, your king is restored and you are famous as one of those who brought him back to England and to his fortune? And you are rewarded? He has remembered you, though he forgets so many others? You managed to elbow yourself to the front of the queue when he was handing out his favors, you made sure that you were not forgotten?”

He bowed his head so that she should not see the bitterness in his face that his sacrifice and the danger he had faced had done nothing more than bring a lecher to the throne of a fool. “I am fully restored to my family estates and fortune,” he confirmed quietly. “I did not ever stoop to curry favor. What you suggest is… beneath me. I received my due. My family were ruined in his service. We have been repaid. No more and no less.”

“Then twenty-one pistoles is nothing to you,” she triumphed. “You will hardly have noticed it. But if you insist, I can repay you. Shall I send it to your land agent at your great house in Yorkshire? I don’t have it in coin right now. We don’t keep that sort of money in the house, we don’t earn that sort of money in a month; but I will borrow and reimburse you by next week.”

“I don’t want your coins. I want…”

Once again her cold gaze froze him into silence.

“Mrs. Stoney.” He cautiously used her married name and she did not contradict him. “Mrs. Stoney, I have my lands, but I have no son. My title will die with me. I am bringing this boy—you force me to speak bluntly to you, not to his mother, and not to my son, as would be my choice—I am bringing him a miracle, I will make him into a gentleman, I will make him wealthy, he is my heir. And it will be her restoration too. I said once that she would be a lady of a great house. I repeat that now. I insist that I repeat it to her in person, so that I can be sure that she knows, so that she knows exactly, the great offer I am making her. I insist that I repeat it to him, so that he knows the opportunity that lies before him. I am ready to give her my name and title. He will have a father and ancestral lands. I will acknowledge him…” He caught his breath at the enormity of the offer. “I will give him my name, my honorable name. I am proposing that I should marry her.”

He was panting as he finished speaking but there was no response, just another void of silence. He thought she must be astounded by the wealth and good fortune that had descended on them like a thunderclap. He thought she was struck dumb. But then Alys Stoney spoke:

“Oh no, she won’t see you,” she answered him casually, as if she were turning away a pedlar from the door. “And there’s no child in this house that carries your name. Nor one that has even heard of you.”

“There is a boy. I know there is a boy. Don’t lie to me. I know…”

“My son,” she said levelly. “Not yours.”

“I have a daughter?”

This threw everything into confusion. He had thought so long of his boy, growing up on the wharf, a boy who would be raised in the rough-and-tumble of the streets but who would—he was certain—have been given an education, been carefully raised. The woman he had loved could not have a boy without making a man of him. He had known her boy, Rob, she could not help but raise a good young man and teach him curiosity and hopefulness and a sense of joy. But anyway—his thoughts whirled—a girl could inherit his lands just as well, he could adopt her and give her his name, he could see that she married well and then he would have a grandson at Northside Manor. He could entail the land on her son, he could insist the new family took his name. In the next generation there would be a boy who could keep the Avery name alive, he would not be the last, he would have a posterity.

“My daughter,” she corrected him again. “Not yours.”

She had stunned him. He looked at her imploringly, so pale, she thought he might faint. But she did not offer him so much as a drop of water, though his lips were gray and he put up a hand to his neck and loosened his collar. “Should you go outside for air?” she asked him, uncaring. “Or just go?”

“You have taken my child as your own?” he whispered.

She inclined her head; but did not answer.

“You took my child? A kidnap?”

She nearly smiled. “Hardly. You were not there to steal from. You were far away. I don’t think we could even see the dust behind your grand coach.”

“Was it a boy? Or a girl?”

“Both the girl and the boy are mine.”

“But which was mine?” He was agonized.

She shrugged. “Neither of them now.”

“Alys, for pity’s sake. You will give my child back to me. To his great estate? To inherit my fortune?”

“No,” she said.

“What?”

“No, thank you,” she said insolently.

There was a long silence in the room, though outside they could hear the shouts of the men as the last grain sack was hauled off the barge, and they started to load it with goods for the return trip. They heard barrels of French wine and sugar roll along the quayside. Still he said nothing, but his hand tugged at the rich lace collar at his throat. Still she said nothing, but kept her head turned away from him, as if she had no interest in his pain.