Mask of Duplicity (The Jacobite Chronicles Book 1) Read Online Free Page A

mother. How long was it before he noticed I’d actually left?”
    “Of course he took notice of you!” she said. “He loved you. You were his son.”
    “I might have been his son, but he never loved me. Not after the lovely Ann came into his life. All he could see after that was her. You weren’t there, you don’t know what it was like. And after you were born, the only time he spoke to me at all was to tell me why he was about to beat me!” The venom and distress in his voice shocked Beth out of her temper. Was that really the way he’d seen their father?
    “I was nine when you left, Richard,” she replied quietly. “I remember a lot of things. I remember Mother always tried to be nice to you. You wouldn’t let her love you.”
    “She wasn’t my mother. My mother loved me. And until she died, I thought he loved me too. But I was wrong. He never loved me, he hated me, just like he hated Mama.” Richard’s voice was harsh and petulant, and she was reminded again of the saturnine young boy who had skulked in corners with a permanent frown on his face. She had caught him by the pond once, when she was no more than five years old, pulling the legs off a frog, smiling cruelly as it struggled feebly in his grip. She had crept away quietly before he had seen her. After that she had been a little afraid of him and had kept out of his way as much as possible. Father had seemed to beat him a lot, that was true, but never without good cause. He was always naughty. Beth had been relieved when he left.
    She looked across at the man sitting opposite her. Pain was etched on his face, and his eyes were deep pools of despair. Clearly he was also reliving some distressing event from the past. She had never realised how rejected he had felt. In her memory it had been him doing the rejecting. Richard had never accepted his father’s second wife, Beth’s mother, in spite of all her attempts to reconcile him to the marriage.
    Richard saw the sympathy in Beth’s face and froze. His face closed, his mouth became a thin hard line, and he looked at her with open dislike. God, she looked exactly like that beautiful slut who had stolen his father’s love. How could he not have recognised her in the yard earlier?
    “Anyway, that’s all in the past, and over,” he said, his tone telling her that it wasn’t over at all. “But the house is in need of some work before we can accept visitors.”
    “We never have any visitors,” Beth replied practically, welcoming the change of subject; the previous one had been far too deep for a first meeting after thirteen years.
    “You mean you are never invited to call at any of the local houses?” Richard sounded incredulous. Clearly his memory of the past was not perfect, then.
    “No, Richard. You must remember that after Father married Mot...my mother, the family rejected him.” The well-to-do Cunninghams had been appalled that a member of their noble family should stoop so low as to marry a penniless Scottish seamstress, and had virtually cut him off from their society. Initially upset, he had soon resigned himself to his eldest brother Lord William’s rejection, and had retired to the country to live happily with the woman he loved.
    “Yes, but she died years ago,” Richard countered. “Do you mean to say that they still aren’t speaking to you?” He was worried. He was banking on using his family connections, coupled with his inheritance, to achieve promotion and launch himself into society. If they still held a grudge, it would be a serious blow to his ambitions.
     Beth sighed. This conversation was a far cry from the joyous reunion she had envisaged, where they caught up with events, brought together by their shared loss of a father, regaling each other with tales of the lost years. Instead of which they had not yet exchanged two truly civil words.
    “It’s true that after Mother died some of them did contact him. I remember going with father to see Cousin Edward once, about